Thank you all so much for the very valuable advice. Two more things. Do I have to have a dreadclaw for each unit when they drop or can I drop the whole formation with one pod? They are awfully expensive models to have one for each unit. Also, do Chaos Space Marines get the They Know No Fear rule too, or just Space Marines. It seems like Fearless units are pretty much the same, but I just want to be sure as Chaos didn't exist at the time the rulebook was published.

One per formation, I believe. So a big formation takes one Dreadclaw, and a small formation takes another Dreadclaw.

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[quote=From BL Army List]Dreadclaws - Transport the entire formation in Dreadclaws. - 5 per unit[/quote] This means that a formation of 8 units costs 40pts to drop in Dreadclaws. A formation of 10 will cost 50pts. However you only need to represent model 1 per formation and it can be a counter if you desire as ot only marks the point of arrival.

All CSM don't benefit from They Shall Know No Fear.

Thank you very much. That clears all that up. Ok, so I have no knowledge of the lore behind all the different forces and honestly don't care so much. I hope I don't offend anyone. I love the game itself but have no interest in the story. With that said, I need to know enough to understand the armies. I was doing some research and I wanted some clarifications from the chaos players.

If I understand correctly, the Black Legion is an undivided legion who has no loyalty to any particular god but to all of them. Is that correct? So, when fielding a Black Legion army, each formation could be considered either undivided (no particular loyalty) or worshiping a particular god for perhaps a single game that I am playing. Do I have that right? Is that why you could have two different formations who hate each other within a 30cm range and not get the +1 to your initiative roll? If I am correct about these things, could you have a bunch of different formations worshipping different gods and summoning different types of daemons during a single game?

Also, what about the colors? Do I go with Black/Gold with the entire army? Or, do you paint each formation based on what god it will be worshipping? Thank you all so much for answering my questions. The closer I get to understanding all of this, the more excited I get to play the game. My son and I have been playing the Space Marine training quests. We printed out the marker sheets, glued them to poster board, and cut them out perfectly with an exacto knife. It worked out perfectly! Everytime we play a game, I go back and read the rules again and see what was missed during the game. I think we have all the basics down now. The assaults took the longest to get right.

Yes to all.

The Black Legion list can include chaos space marines from any of the chaos space marine legiions (or Space Marine chapters that have turned to chaos since the Heresy), so feel free to paint them metal for Iron Warriors, blue/green for Alpha Legion, dark red for Word Bearers, ect or however you fancy if you prefer this to the black and gold. The Black Legion list is titled that but is basically a generic chaos space marine list, like the Steel Legion list is a generic Imperial Guard list.

Personally I'm doing a Chaos Space Marine army with at least one formation painted up from each of the CSM legions (they put aside their differences and fight together under Abaddon during a 'Black Crusade'), but generally most people like to paint their army as from one or two legions, plus the units worshipping particular chaos gods e.g. emperors children, thosand sons.