Creative Assembly shows off hag lore, three-headed heroes, and other additions coming to Total War: Warhammer 3's DLC

Shadows of Change units
(Image credit: Sega)

We've already seen the new additions to Cathay's roster in the Shadows of Change DLC coming with patch 4.2, and now Creative Assembly has posted two more blogs lining up all the new stuff coming to the armies of Tzeentch and Kislev. It's a lot.

Worshippers of the Great Conspirator Tzeentch are already well-off when it comes to magical strength, but will be getting forces added to buff their melee strength as well. The Chaos Lord of Tzeentch and the Exalted Hero of Tzeentch are frontline characters who can go toe-to-toe with the enemy while your sorcerers hide behind the lines where they belong. The Exalted Hero is a particularly characterful character inspired by an old tabletop figure—he's a three-headed warrior in shiny Chaos armor. 

Tzeentch also gets a dedicated unit of Chaos-worshiping centaurs called the Centigors of Tzeentch and flying flamers called Changebringers, who have been sourced from tabletop Warhammer's Storm of Chaos campaign. They're apparently "one of the best flying missile units in the game."

The Kislevites, meanwhile, get more magic, with a whole new lore for Mother Ostankya called the Lore of Hags. My favorite spell from this batch is witchbrew, which summons a giant cauldron that pours "the Motherland's boundless wrath" down on her enemies. 

On the character side they get a legendary hero called Naryska Leysa, the Golden Knight, and a new lord type called the Druzhina. As is fitting for Warhammer, which has ever been a game about ordinary people as well as warriors in oversized shoulderplates, he's just a man with a fur hat and a large axe who runs one of Kislev's outer settlements. On the unit side Kislev gets Kislevite Warriors, who are also extremely ordinary dudes who happen to have halberds and fill the gap for a specialized tier-one melee unit. "We’ve taken inspiration in their design from older Mordheim miniatures", Creative assembly says.

Scaling things back up, Kislev also gets a monstrous unit in the Frost Wyrm, which is a real Monster Hunter-looking beast. Finally, while all of these additions will be part of the Shadows of Change DLC, the "FreeLC" released alongside them will give the Ice Queen Katarina an Ice Court Sled to ride when she'd like a break from charging into battle on a polar bear.

Patch 4.2 will be out on February 22, with the full patch notes arriving the day before.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

Read more
Kislev
Total War: Warhammer 3's next patch will overhaul its Kislev faction, which Creative Assembly has 'identified as the most in need of a deep review and rethink'
Total War: Warhammer 3 Grand Cathay faction
A not-so-subtle tease suggests Games Workshop is finally bringing Total War: Warhammer 3's Grand Cathay army to the tabletop wargame
Total War will ditch blood packs, early-adopter faction DLC, and its launcher
Ulrika Magdova, wielding two silver blades
Turns out the reason Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI sometimes played too defensively was a bug that made it overreact to the presence of even a single hero
Gotrek and Felix beneath a purple sky
Total War: Warhammer 3 hotfix makes a dwarf who longs for death slightly less likely to die
A dwarfish trollslayer hits a rat ogre with his axe
Vermintide 2's still getting free maps added to it, with the latest being an elven temple and a warpstone nuke factory
Latest in Action
Naoe looking at the wrist blade in Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft backflips, says Assassin's Creed Shadows will support Steam Deck at launch, but I doubt I'll actually want to play it there
Two rising ronin facing each other
Rise of the Ronin is another crappy PC port, performance patch coming 'soon'
GTA 5 characters
GTA 5 publisher takes legal aim at account-selling site for allegedly raking in 'millions in revenue', while recruiting hackers to keep its cogs turning
Monster Hunter Wilds palico
One of the biggest victories of Monster Hunter Wilds' streamlining is I don't have to deal with those awful gimmick fights anymore
A young witch watering a smiling mushroom in a magic garden
Here's a roguelite dungeon crawler Steam reviewers call 'a botanical Diablo' and 'like Cult of the Lamb' except you manage a mystical garden
Chatacabra from Monster Hunter Wilds
The latest Monster Hunter Wilds event quest gives piles of Armor Spheres for hunting a Chatacabra, making this a very bad week to be a frog in the Forbidden Lands
Latest in News
spectre divide
Spectre Divide and its studio are shutting down after just six months: 'The industry is in a tough spot right now'
Naoe looking at the wrist blade in Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft backflips, says Assassin's Creed Shadows will support Steam Deck at launch, but I doubt I'll actually want to play it there
Henry from KCD2 wearing nice outfits
'Diversify your fashion endgame' with this Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 mod that gives Henry fly new gambesons, pourpoints, and caftans
Masked Counter-Terrorist in helmet in forefront with sunglasses and beret-wearing CT in background touching headset
There's hope yet for Classic Offensive after its Steam rejection: The team behind the Counter-Strike 1.6 revival mod is in touch with Valve about its 'concerns'
Recently appointed Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Here comes Intel's new CEO: a semiconductor veteran that won the same prestigious award as Jensen Huang and Lisa Su
BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 15: Protestors attend the SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike Picket on August 15, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Lila Seeley/Getty Images)
8 months into their strike, videogame voice actors say the industry's latest proposal is 'filled with alarming loopholes that will leave our members vulnerable to AI abuse'