Total War: Warhammer 3's new random locations can cause a game-ending plague, plant nukes under your settlements, or even buff you in all future campaigns thanks to the power of Tzeentchian time-warpery

I've always loved me a unique landmark. There's nothing better than capturing a settlement in Total War: Warhammer 3 and realising, after the dust settles, that there's a special building you can construct for a factionwide bonus. While most provide a nice little buff and a tasty tidbit of lore, others can enable entirely different playstyles, as with the Temple of Elemental Winds in Cathay letting Gelt run a wizard doomstack.

Playing with settlements and their landmarks has been an ongoing experiment for Creative Assembly ever since Total War: Warhammer 2. We've had Skaven Undercities and hidden Pirate Coves, allied outposts, and even settlements within settlements, like the Dwarf Deeps, Elspeth Von Draken's Gardens of Morr, or Oxyotl's Silent Sanctums. It's a whole heap of layers, but it culminated in Creative Assembly introducing one of the coolest settlement mechanics ever: Unusual Locations.

These randomly appearing landmarks will sometimes pop up in one of your settlements, granting a variety of bonuses or detriments. While a lot of these are only beneficial, many act as a kind of devil's bargain—you tolerate the negative aspects of their presence for the possibility of unique items, traits for your lord, or even events. Well, Creative Assembly has taken things one step further in patch 6.3 (currently in beta), introducing new Unusual Locations that can affect your entire campaign, and potentially all future campaigns at that.

The upcoming patch adds 20 new Unusual Locations that can potentially spawn in one of your settlements, though you can turn off the four most game-balance altering ones in campaign settings:

• Carnival of Chaos
• Warpstone Meteor Impact
• Dwarf Construction Company
• Abandoned Forge of Hashut
• Ogre Mercenary Camp
• Unearthed Tomb
• Primordial Spawning Pools
• Covenant of the Crimson Plague
• Sartosan Vault
• Cathayan Merchants
• Peg Street Pawnbroker
• Purple Hand Cult
• Underworld Sea Entrance
• Faulty Doomsphere
• A Dark Gift
• Unstable Chaos Portal
• Cult of the Crimson Skull
• Cult of Pleasure
• The Cabal
• Elven Enclave

Many of these really focus-in on that whole devil's bargain concept. During my time with the beta, I experienced this with the Purple Hand Cult, who offered up riches if I let them corrupt my province and spread across the world to nine new locations. It was a good deal until I realised that their spreading cults could potentially appear in my other settlements, where they were all but impossible to remove until I'd fulfilled certain criteria.

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Another tricky one to handle is the Faulty Doomsphere, which installs one of Ikit Claw's famed Skaven nukes under a settlement and leaves you to deal with it. Effectively turning these locations into monkey paws is very much in-keeping with the Warhammer universe and lore.

Out of all these twenty locations, though, there are two in-particular I wanted to highlight as being absolutely cracked: The Covenant of the Crimson Plague and The Cabal. The former is Nurgle Cult which provides bonuses, but can potentially unleash what is effectively a game-ending plague on the entire world. The Cabal, on the other hand, is a Tzeentch cult which provides powerful benefits IN ALL FUTURE CAMPAIGNS if you complete the task they set out.

I had to know how these worked, so I reached out to Creative Assembly, and Principal Live Designer, Mitchell Heastie, kindly obliged me with some explanations.

Causing a pandemic with The Covenant of the Crimson Plague

Our first Unusual Location is a Nurgle laboratory brewing up potent plagues and pestilences. The Covenant of the Crimson Plague offers you a few different benefits if it sets up shop in your backyard, including:

• Immunity to all non-plague attrition for all of your armies
• Reduced Winds of Magic costs for all spells for your armies
• Increased replenish rate for your armies, as well as allowing all your forces to replenish even inside foreign territory

As Heastie himself comments, that last buff is "really powerful", but there are a few disadvantages to the cult's presence. First off, the lab will corrupt the land with +20 Nurgle corruption, but there are also three different plagues that can potentially break containment into the wider world each turn:

1. The Crimson Fever (5% chance): This plague will infect the region the lab is located in, causing attrition, reducing unit stats, as well as region income and growth.
2. The Crimson Pox (1% chance): This plague will infect your entire faction with the same debuffs as above.
3. The Crimson Plague (0.01% chance): Now this is the world-ender. The Crimson Plague is worldwide, disabling replenishment for all armies infected with it, as well as a 50% chance each turn to destroy a unit in said armies. Massive corruption strikes infected regions and there is a 30% chance per turn for a building to be destroyed. Settlements with no remaining buildings will, themselves, be destroyed.
   

"If the Crimson Plague does ever seep out from the lab into the world then your campaign changes completely, changing from one of expansion into simply trying to be the last to survive," says Heastie. Since the plague's transmission is via armies, he suggests that you "defend your borders like your life depends on it, because it likely does."

Time traveling with The Cabal

Those already aware of The Cabal will know them as the most powerful Tzeentchian Chaos cult and the faction of Egrimm Van Horstmann, though he's sadly never appeared in the series itself (though people still speculate that's him in the Total War: Warhammer announcement trailer). If the all-powerful Tower of the Cabal sets up shop on your doorstep, you'll be given a task to complete in order to strengthen The Cabal and earn powerful buffs that stretch beyond the span of just this campaign (it is Tzeentchian faction after all).

"The Cabal is one of the most unique features we’ve ever done in Warhammer 3," says Heastie. "A Chaos Cult that empowers itself is not unique, but this one does it across the span of multiple campaigns. Essentially, they will remember you." If you complete The Cabal's task (such as acquiring 20 legendary lord traits for example), their cult will disappear, but the next time you encounter them in a campaign, they'll be stronger and you may have unlocked one of their benefits. These include:

• At 30% power level the Cult provides the “Expedited Schemes” effect: Each time you destroy an enemy faction you gain an effect, lasting one turn, that provides near-instance recruitment and construction
• At 50% power level the Cult provides the “Flawless Machinations” ability: After losing a settlement to an enemy there is a chance the invading force will be destroyed and the settlement returned to you
• At 70% power level the Cult provides the “Inevitable Consequences” ability: After conquering a region there is a chance you will automatically occupy the entire province
• Finally, at 90% power level the Cult provides the “Impossible Outcomes” ability: There is a (very) small chance that each turn that one of your enemies will have their faction be utterly destroyed

It would take multiple playthroughs to power up The Cabal, but as you can see, their effects are potentially game-breaking in balance terms, which I guess is why there's a warning on enabling it in campaign settings. And Heastie warns that there may be unintended consequences along with the benefits: "This is a Tzeentch Cult after all, so while on the surface this may look like a deal too good to ever refuse, do remember these master schemers have grand plans for world domination, and through you with enough power they may just gain exactly that." Potentially there's more to The Cabal than meets the eye, but it's going to take a few campaigns to find out.

Patch 6.3 is currently in Steam beta due to an AMD compatibility issue, but if you'd like to check out the new Unusual Locations yourself it's expected to go live properly this week.

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