"Total War: Warhammer 3" seems to have turned things around and gotten back in players' good graces with the excellent "Thrones of Decay" DLC, which has got flying ships, booze-addled dwarves, and world-conquering maggots. The Creative Assembly is still working on a follow-up piece focusing on the Khorne, Greenskins, and Ogre Kingdoms factions, but in the meantime we all get a freebie. His name is Karanak, and he's a good kid. You can add him to your army now.

A hound of vengeance, Karanak is the demonic pooch who guards the throne of Khorne, the God of Blood. When he is not having his belly rubbed, he hunts the foolish who invade Khorne's domain and gleefully slays them with his very large teeth. With three heads, he will get three times that amount of petting. This is because he reminds me of my infernal hound, Cosmo. Behold this ferocious beast. Terrifying!

To add Karanak to your army, you will need a CA account. Once you register or connect to your Steam account, simply wait until you reach rank 16 as one of the following Chaos Lords: Skarbrand, Archaon, Kholek, Belakor, Daemon Prince, or Valkia. Then you will be given a mission to unlock a loyal poochie.

Karanak is a legendary hero who moves quickly and hits hard; Creative Assembly recommends using him to attack defenseless soft targets such as cannons, missile units, and spellcasters. He also has four unique abilities and one new item.

Karanak joins Total War: Warhammer 3 as part of a larger patch that also introduces a new multiplayer mode: the Conquest mode. According to Creative Assembly, it is "essentially a land battle, but with one important twist! While the player's main objective remains to annihilate the opponent's army, there is also a capture point in the center of the map that is unlocked one minute into the game. The game will be released on 42 repurposed maps. The studio has also tweaked another multiplayer mode, Domination mode, which allows players to test their builds against the AI. Players in this mode can compete on five new maps, each designed by Modder; Creative Assembly has also added four more maps, for a total of nine new maps.

The 5.1.0 update adds Daemons of Chaos to Quick Battles, allows AI play in free-for-all mode, updates the battle UI, introduces sandbox difficulty for custom battles, and adds a number of other improvements ranging from stability and performance improvements to bug fixes, and numerous other tweaks. Check out the patch notes for a huge list of changes.

Now it's time to play fetch with the daemonic dog.