The Bretonnians are a warlike and valiant people who willingly seek out battle as a way of securing personal honour and pride. Their armies are feared and respected throughout the Old World, marching to war in the name of the Lady of the Lake, and sweeping aside all opposition on the field of battle.
The Chaos Space Marines have been fighting a war of vengeance for ten thousand years, sallying forth from the Eye of Terror to wreak havoc on the Imperium that spurned them. This nightmare realm of warp-tainted space corrupts them in body and mind, but also grants them power. Combined with thousands of years of combat experience, they are some of the most deadly veterans of any fighting force.
Many Chaos Space Marines contingents favour aggressive, highly mobile tactics, rushing headlong to get to grips with the foe as quickly as possible. Their skill, armour, deadly weapons, genetic enhancements, and mobs of disposable cultists make these reckless charges highly effective.
Warbands of the Chaos Space Marines are more often than not motley assortments of Heretic Astartes, grisly mutants, their cultist thralls. The pitiless masters callously spend the lives of the mortal warriors to buy time for the more valuable Heretic Astartes while simultaneously offering those very same Chaos Space Marines to host the Daemons of the warp.
For ten thousand years, the Chaos Space Marines have waged near-constant war on the galaxy that cast them out. Once the defenders of humanity, the Heretic Astartes have pledged themselves to the Dark Gods. Led by maniacal leaders such as the fanatical Dark Apostle, bitter warbands of Chaos Space Marines roam the battlefield, armed with an array of vicious weapons. Barricades and defenders alike are torn asunder by the devastating heavy armaments wielded by Havocs – and the frenzied swipes of a lumbering Helbrute.
Vashtorr is the Soul Forge King, a daemonic demigod of unrestrained invention and abominable artifice. When the Arkifane takes physical form, it is as a horror of pallid flesh stretched over infernal mechanisms, soaring to battle amidst a cloud of lightning and smog. Vashtorr deals destruction with every whirring step, unleashing techno gheist curses upon his foes even as he fashions enhancements for his indentured daemon engines from the raw stuff of realspace.
Knights on Foot consist of minor nobles belonging to the extended family of a baron or duke. These warriors proudly display the colours and motifs of their lord’s heraldry, often further embellished with personal devices, identifying them as belonging to a single, extended family whilst declaring their individualism and their own stature as nobles.
Heldrakes are winged Daemon Engines that plummet out of the skies like living comets, hurtling towards enemy aircraft and crashing claws-first into them from above.
The Forgefiend is a Chaos Space Marine Daemon Engine that was originally devised to sow death amongst enemy forces from afar.
Men-at Arms are the lowborn regiments of Bretonnia, recruited as children into the household guard of their noble lords. Though humble, they are not to be underestimated – when these simple foot soldiers are gathered for war, they provide vital infantry support for the knights and nobles. Their tall shields emblazoned with the heraldry of their lord, they march forward in a wave of proud colours and carefully polished steel.
Peasant Bowmen are called up from the lowborn serfs of Bretonnia's dukedoms, expected to take up their own longbows and engage enemies unworthy of the attention of a knight's attention from afar. Most peasants have trained with the bow from a young age, but to make their numbers count on the battlefield, these archers congregate into massed units that direct volley after volley of arrows into the enemy.
A Lord Discordant is a machine-obsessed heretic who scuttles across the battlefield atop a Helstalker mount, all the while exuding a palpable aura of anarchy. His mere presence short-circuits machinery not already riddled with daemonic entities – actuators and servos whir erratically, and targeting augurs simply cease to function. The Lord Discordant siphons off the pained spirit of dying vehicles, using the harvested energy to reinvigorate other Daemon Engines or releasing it as a screaming beam to infect the systems of other enemy vehicles. The most famous among the Lords Discordant, Vex Machinator, brought anarchy to the hivesprawls of Vigilus during the War of Nightmares.