Rules Focus: Fanatic

    The Fanatic special rule is one of more powerful tools available to W'adrhun as it opens up the potential power spike that is the tier 3 chant.  However, the rule itself is somewhat obtuse in how it interacts with chanting in general.  The goal of this article is to break down the three parts of the Fanatic rule and how the relate to chanting as well as provide some examples.

First let's review the requirements to chant each tier

• Tier 1 - 2 markers
• Tier 2 - 3 markers
• Tier 3 - 3 markers AND the Fanatic rule

Now let's look at the Fanatic rule-

Fanatic: When a regiment with this special rule chooses a Tier bonus due to Chant the Battle Cry, it always counts as having discarded from the Sequence one additional Chant Marker belonging to their* Cult (to a maximum of three), but may only choose their own Cult's bonus.

    There are three distinct important parts to the special rule as it relates to chanting.  The first is just having Fanatic.  In order to choose a Tier 3 bonus the regiment must have the special rule.  The second part is that you basically get a free bonus token when a fanatic regiment chants.  These two clauses are different.  Chanting tier 3 does not necessarily require your bonus token, however, your bonus token would count toward one of the three required tokens.  The third part of the rule is the limitation.  A unit with Fanatic may only ever get the bonus from its cult.  Effectively this means you trade some of the flexibility of chanting for a potential power spike.

Lets look at some examples.  We'll use Chosen of Conquest for these as they are currently the only released models to have this special rule natively (for a refresher on how conquest tokens and chanting the cult of conquest works check the link to the general chanting write up below):

• We have zero tokens in our pool.  We flip our Chosen of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  We really need that extra movement so we decide to chant the battle cry.  Because fanatic counts as having discarded and extra token we have 2 tokens and so are able to choose the Tier 1 benefit.
• We have a War token in our pool.  We flip our Chosen of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  We decide to Chant the Battle Cry.  The fanatic special rule makes us count as having discarded 3 tokens and we are a regiment with Fanatic so we are able to choose the Tier 3 bonus netting us that extra mobility, evasion, AND a third action
• We have zero tokens in our pool. We flip a Scion of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  With our Scion's action we decide to cast Crescendo using it to add a second conquest token to our pool and drawing our Chosen of Conquest.  We again decide to chant the battle cry immediately and because we have the fanatic rule we count as having discarded a third token and are allegeable for the Tier 3 bonus.
• We have 2 Death tokens in our pool.  We flip our Chosen of Conquest and add a conquest token to our pool.  We MUST chant as we have activated a regiment able to chant and have three tokens in our pool.  We Chant the Battle Cry, because the bonus from fanatic can never count as using more than 3 tokens to chant we don't add an extra token.  However, since we had three tokens when we chanted and are still a Fanatic regiment we again qualify for the Tier 3 bonus.

You'll notice in none of these scenarios do we ever take the Tier 2 bonus.  This is because the only difference in taking Tier 2 vs being able to take Tier 3 is the presence of the Fanatic special rule.  Functionally a Fanatic regiment will never chant Tier 2.  You could opt to take Tier 2 instead of Tier 3 but there is no benefit to doing so.

    Now that we've reviewed the rule and looked at some examples...Is the Fanatic Special rule good?

I think the answer to that is undoubtedly yes.  The loss of a little flexibility to pull a Tier 1 bonus from another cult is actually a pretty significant draw back as all four cults have very good Tier 1 buffs, however, not only do you get the often huge buff Tier 3 provides but fanatic is also offering you free tokens functionally increasing how often you can Chant.  

    Those Tier 3 buffs are also huge.  Tier 3 Conquest is a full third action (normal rules apply) allowing something like Chosen of Conquest to be shockingly mobile.  Tier 3 War provides Blessed which might be the best single rule in the game and Tier 3 of both Death and Famine offer large potential damage swings.

    So how do we get Fanatic?  All of the "Chosen of" options in the Scion's warband come with this rule base.  Of those four only Chosen of Conquest are currently available.  The Matriarch Queen's supremacy ability allows her to choose a single Infantry regiment to gain the fanatic rule.  This is now quite limited and while ok probably not the best available supremacy in W'adrhun, but that is another article.  Finally a character with the Mantle of the Devoted artifact grants the Fanatic rule to the regiment they join.  Importantly that does include a monster if you opt to give it to any of the Rider options.  The Mantle isn't cheap at 30 pts but it is good enough to almost always be worth it's points.

There is a link to my general write up of chanting HERE

Hopefully this helps answer questions about the Fanatic rule and actually getting to the Tier 3 bonus.  As always thanks for reading

-K

* When a cult of conquest regiment with fanatic chants the additional token they are considered to have discarded is a conquest token and will be replaced by a token from another cult during step 1 of "Chant the Battlecry"