The destruction of an entire Kabal in one battle. How?

Hey there,

I'm currently writing on my own Kabals fluff and it includes the near destruction of it (minus Wych Cult) in one single battle against a detachment of the Iron Warriors.
My question is, is this even 'realistic' (as far as 40k goes)? How many members does a fairly standard-sized Kabal have? Do they use a fleet or only the Webway? What chances would an isolated force of Dark Eldar have against a strike force of the Iron Warriors in a longer fight?

Connected with this: Can an open Webway portal be moved?

Any help would be appreciated. The fluff to my Kabal is soon to follow!

Considering how extremely well-armoured the IW:s are, I don't think it is that unrealistic - perhaps the Archon of then overestimated the Kabals power and had the fleet shot to pieces?

Well, the size of a Kabal really depends. The smallest are simply the criminal gangs of Low Commoragh, numbering a few hundred at absolute best, including their "vassal" population, who would basically be the occupants of a few blocks of buildings, rarely including infrastructure like factories, or at least not multiple (think of them as exactly like a modern 'gang', and you wouldn't be far off). Then you have the largest, which are the size of a small Craftworld, so numbering in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, with incredibly extensive vassal networks, massive fleets, numerous allied Covens and Cults, etc.

A small to medium Kabal could be wiped out fairly believably in a single battle/war, although the largest are simply too massive in scale, they wouldn't have their entire force there.

As for the Iron Warriors, I'd actually say they wouldn't perform too well against the Dark Eldar. Their strengths are their artillery and their offensive breaching teams. Artillery is too easy to outmanouvre, and their assault forces aren't the best of the best. A DE force should be able to flank the artillery/siege-works, leaving the assault forces stranded.
Of course, if an Iron Warrior sorceror had forseen exactly when/where a portal was going to open, and the Iron Warriors prepared a kill-zone all around the eventual opening, then the Kabal is going to be completely mauled. That's the thing about the Iron Warriors, if you fight where they want you to, you are utterly, utterly dead, but they aren't manouverable enough to quickly change where their killzone is.

So yeah, I can fully see a small/medium Kabal being exterminated if they arrived in a pre-prepared IW killzone. Speed doesn't mean much when everything around you for hundreds of metres is exploding with hundreds of tonnes of ordnance.

@Aroshamash
Spot on, sir.

In case of portal....i dont think it can be moved after opening or if it can be its rly hard to do.

I think a small to medium sized Kabal could be nearly destroyed by a well planed Iron Warrior trap.
For example by a prepared killzone around a WWP, or by shooting through an opened portal and destroying the waiting reserves. (I know there are no rules for objects passing through a portal in this direction, but it should work fluffwise)

For moving an open portal; there are nor rules, but if we assume that a WWP stays at the same location for a whole game and a warhammer planet moves around it's sun approximately the same speed the earth does (circa 100.000km/h [66,000mph]) and rotates approximately as fast (200-1.500km/h [180-1,000mph]) it has to move, to stay at the same place.

I'd say it is projected onto an anchor surface, normaly solid ground, but this could be a big vehicle, like a starship, and this anchor could move, taking the portal with it.

Well, Epic 40k did feature Eldar aircraft that had a webway portal in the back, rather than a passenger hold. Going by this, open portals are indeed capable of moving beyond the standard planetary drift.

Taxi to Background.

As others have said, it depends entirely on how big and important your Kabal is.

Remember that in the Codex it describes a situation where the Kabal was outmaneuvered by an Inquisitor. Their reaction was to cut and run(and assassinate said Inquisitor) within minutes. The Dark Eldar are predators and act as such. If they meet more force than they are expecting, they leave. The shame of a failed raid is bad, but a prolonged battle is worse by far. Any Kabal of significant size would turn around as soon as a raid went bad, so I would suggest a massive ambush by the Iron Warriors against a small and/or desperate Kabal would fit. A larger Kabal or a less surprising attack would have the Kabal dissolving in internecine struggle back at the Dark City instead of on the battlefield.

Thanks for the many replies, guys.

So, let's say my Kabal is of moderate size, nothing special, but led by an incredibly arrogant Archon with a stronger-than-usual conviction of superiority and being a god (think Xerxes of 300). On a yet to be named planet - for a yet to be found reason - said Archon leads a relatively small raid to get the usual slaves and a special object for his collection. That object, whatever it may turn out to be, is also interesting for the Iron Warriors. They don't like it at all that dirty Xenos scum tries to get their object and launch an assault - with a medium sized army greater than the small raiding band, but no match for the entire Kabal. The Archon feels insulted and orders the rest of his Kabal in, mostly because of arrogance and the need to prove his superiority to everyone, partly because he really needs that object.

So the rest of his Kabal comes in through the Webway Portal, but the Iron Warriors Sorcerer had foreseen their arrival point and helped to arrange a death zone of ordnance fire around it. The moment the Kabal has streamed out of the portal, the concentrated might of Iron Warriors artillery hammers into the area around it, bringing the Kabal in disarray. It soon (too late) becomes obvious even to the 'divine' Archon that the Dark Eldar stand no chance and a retreat is ordered. Shortly after, a lucky ordnance barrage gets through the portal and destroys the mechanism holding it open. Trapped on the planet, the remaining Kabal stands no chance of survival. The Archon, together with his court, council, bodyguard and those warriors that happened to stand in his vicinity, escapes through his personal portal.

So in the end, only those who had time to escape through the main portal (and survived the ordnance blast through it), and the group of the Archon would have survived that massacre; maybe between one and two hundred warriors plus vehicles?

All the implications of the personality of that stupid Archon, the future of the Kabal, the battle itself and the exact workings of what happened will be fleshed out, no worries. I have written this in ten minutes, so don't expect a completely coherent piece of fluff. Just juggling around some ideas.

Feel free to point out any absurdity!

Sounds like it could work. In Mistress Baeda's Gift a whole kabal gets destroyed by a surprise Necron attack, I don't see how it's not possible that a Kabal gets blown to smithereens when they weren't prepared for it.

Kinnay wrote:

What chances would an isolated force of Dark Eldar have against a strike force of the Iron Warriors in a longer fight?

None. The Dark Eldar just don't fight that way, and if caught like that, would be annhilated fairly swiftly. The bigger kabals have numbers in the millions, so I guess an average one would still have quite a few.


The stuff you've written looks really good, although I'd be wary about an 'Iron Warriors Sorcerer'. As far as I'm aware they don't like using chaos energy directly, preferring to utilize it in technology etc., but I don't remember anything saying that they don't have sorcerers, just he wouldn't be dedicated to a chaos god, just using the power of the warp like any psyker would, so overall, it sounds great.