Nicolas' Daemon Legion of Khorne - Month 3 - Mulligan

 March - Chasing my tail like a dog

Sadly I have to mulligan my month of March... Too much overtime and home improvements... so when I realized I was cooked, I decided to go all in to finish the infamous Chaos Hounds of Slaanesh unit that got me out on OWAC 6.  It feels nice to finaly get a sence of closure on this project! The original idea was to have hounds that would both match my Slaanesh and Tzeentch army, I belive I'm spot on!

I only had to touch up highlights and do the basing. But the effort needed to get variety out of the 3 Dark Eldar Warp Hounds was pretty intense back than and I'm really glad I went trought it.

Special love to my "demogorgon" from Stranger Things made out of a tyranid spore mine.

And just for the record, the original material I worked from...

Jaakko and Slargash - Wild card month

Slargash's forces had returned victorious from the battle and spirits were high in the sad little camp they called home. Slargash and the twins managed to pry a few dwarves form the hands of hungry minotaurs to be offered to the Gods of Chaos on their fancy travel sanctuary. The Mad Spell twins chanted ancient incantations, drawing upon forbidden magic to sustain their arduous endeavor. Determination burned in Slargash's eyes, the emptiness that had plagued him had been replaced by a fiery resolve. "We need more Blood for the Blood God", he commanded.

Days had turned into weeks, and weeks into months as they immersed themselves in the grueling ritual. Slargash's warband, despite their fragmented state, had rallied behind their leader, embracing the hope that their fierce presence would finally be immortalised in colour.

Wild card month arrived, a pivotal moment in their quest. It was a time for experimentation, a daring leap into the unknown. Slargash, fueled by his newfound determination, urged the Mad Spell twins to push the boundaries of their magic. The land trembled with unpredictable energies as chaos intertwined with whirls of colour, creating a spectacle unlike anything witnessed before.

With each passing day, their efforts bore fruit. The once-monochrome army began to transform, as vivid pigments materialized upon their fractured bodies. From the seducing pinks and comfortable black to the eerie verdigris and rust of decaying metal, The Great Painter's touch breathed life into their chaotic essence.

Through exhaustion and doubt, Slargash and the Mad Spell twins pressed on. They found solace in the collective spirit of their endeavor, forging bonds that transcended mere war and conquest. Their perseverance became a testament to the indomitable nature of their quest and the power of unyielding determination.

And then, on the eve of the sixth month, as the final stroke of the ritual approached, they stood before The Great Painter. The majestic being, draped in robes of swirling colours, cast a discerning gaze upon the transformed army. A smile crept across its enigmatic face, and it nodded in approval.

 

And with the passing of another month we meet again!

I had promised earlier that I will paint a war altar and a host for the wild card month. For the host my initial plan was to have hounds and a hydra. I also wanted to surprise you with three giants and a jabberwock. The plans changed a bit on the way as I decided to add a handler to the hounds, I couldn't resist adding one of the giants already into an earlier post and as I fell in love with the old trolls I decided to acquire a couple more.

The dwarves are painted to match my own dwarf army (which quite closely resembles the scheme of  the legendary Wayne Englands army)

I was hunting for the same hydra that is featured in the chaos army in Warhammer Armies but settled with the realm of chaos hydra that is not quite as cool IMO but is delightingly fighting with itself. As added bonus and maybe more wild cardesque elements I painted two blood-greed tokens (aka dead dwarves) for the minotaurs to feed on and a single test model from a group of lesser demons that is to be summoned in the heat of battle (only 17 more to aqcuire and paint to please the 3d6).

This month in points:

- War altar and 3 altar guards: 90 points

- 6 chaos hounds and a handler: 153 points

- 2 giants: 500 points

- Hydra: 200 points

- Jabberwock: 200 points

- 2 trolls: 130 points

- Demon: no points

- Blood-greed tokens: no points

Total so far 4410 points, 92 models

 

 

A cheeky demon from the Valley of the Four Winds range

 

Hobol Firebreath and Rattlebones Bowlegs are more and less excited to join their kin

I had a lot of fun and enjoyed painting this month and I hope it shows. Until the end of June! It seems that I can't dodge Slargash any further.

Shadespyre's April Post - Rank and File (IV) - (Name Pending!) Dark Elves Army (828 points)

OWAC VI - Rank and File (IV) - Both Rank and Vile

April

It's been an odd month. I'm well ahead of schedule on painting, so a lot of what I'm posting now was started or even finished back in March. Maybe three or four weeks of the intervening time has been spent on basing and adding heraldry to things that I've already painted - by ironic coincidence, none of that heraldry appears in this month's offerings. I've also lost my ability to take good photos, somehow, and then with the end of the project on the horizon, I dropped one of my more elaborate models and have had to extensively rebuild it. But that's a story for another month.

At the end of March's blog entry, I promised you "my favourite project in the army" and "the unit which almost broke me". Let's start with the latter one.

Waaaaaay back when I first discovered D&D and Citadel Miniatures, one of my favourite things was the Night Elf Patrol, one of the Speciality Set series. According to Stuff of Legends, it was released in October 1982 and replaced by a set of Chaos Warriors in August 1983, which might explain why I found it hard to recollect a full set of them.

Sadly, I also realised why they may have been withdrawn so quickly - many of them are easily broken, meanign that 40 years later I've had to repair a lot of them, but perhaps more significantly many of the castings are of poor quality, with blurry faces and textureless patches of chainmail. It makes me think that the original moulds may have declined quickly, giving an excuse to replace the set? or maybe it was just that these minis are tiny and wee and Citadel wanted the rebranded Dark Elves to be much bigger?

Whatever the reason, recollecting them was not the spark of nostalgic joy that I had hoped for. Painting them only proved worse! I wanted to use a different colour scheme from the rest of the army, both to distinguish them as scouts and a slighly different subrace, and because I was so fed up with purple. After a number of false starts - dark blue, dark green - I settled on a near-black grey just so I could get the damn things painted. A poor end to what I expected to be a highlight of the project.

But here we are, 20 scouts made up mostly of the SS3 Night Elves, with a number of repeats and many repairs. In my Dark-Elves-as-Drow canon, I think these are members of the lower castes of Drow society, a diminished people who live too close to the surface world to have proper influence, but retain some usefulness because of their knowledge of that wider world.  Who better to scout ahead of your majestic Noble raiding party?

You'll notice that the pictures have a wierd yellowish green background - this is actually cream coloured card which I tried after white just stopped working for me! It was fine while the bases were grey, but the white seems to have ruined it? I'll sort out something better when I can, but for now you'll have to suffer it in the name of being able to see any detail at all in these pictures.

Three other things of note are - the second mini in the top row is not a Night Elf or Dark Elf, but a slightly later C09 Elf Hero. Despite the slighter build, his equipment is very much in the style of this boxed set, so I hunted him down and added him to this unit. The middle mini in the middle row is another outsider - he's the Night Elf Lord from the Fantasy Tribes code FTE - Fantasy Evil Leaders. He was definitely designed alongside the others in this set, though. He may even be a resculpt of the mini seen second in the bottom row.

Finally, I was having such a bad time photographing this lot that I didn't even notice that the last member of the group has been hit by snowballs! Obviously a victim of my clumsiness during a big basing session, he's gone on the list of things to correct before the end of the project.

MOVING ALONG THEN...

On to more fun things. As you will have seen, I love to find excuses to expensively collect ancient miniatures and include them in my army projects. One of the cool things in the Warhammer Armies book is the proliferation of "Beast Master" options - in the Dark Elf army list these are called Whelp Masters and can be put in charge of ordinary warhounds or deadly Chaos hounds. But what miniatures could I find to use for those?

I scoured ebay to try to find enough of anything to make even a small unit. Oh boy, this got expensive! But I'm happy with the results. Again, I struggled to get good photos of the painted models, so I've included an unpainted picture of each mini so you can see what it looks like (thanks as ever to Stuff of Legends for these.) 

Here we go then, in reverse order of how cool I think they are:

Vicious Mastiffs (C22 Creatures)

Quite simply, a ruddy great dog. I put them on cavalry bases - the official base size in 3rd ed is 25 x 25 mm for warhounds and chaos hounds, so I could actually treat these as two per model. They are painted a very dark brown with squinty evil eyes and pointy teeth, not that the picture shows any of that.

Devil Dogs (Fiend Factory FF10)

These were a necessity, given that I've already leaned into the AD&D Drow skin colour. Devil Dogs are vicious arctic predators originally described in an unofficial adventure I think. They totally fit the them of evil snowy hunting beasts, so I had to have some. Frankly they may be some of the worst miniatures that I've willingly spent money on! They went out of production in early 1982 with the publication of the AD&D Fiend Folio - a somewhat mixed follow up to the Monster Manual with all sorts of odd critters in it - which meant that Citadel lost the rights to use the designs.

Obviously I painted them as per the original description - white with blue eyes. Trust me.

Chaos Hounds  (C22 Creatures)

I know some of you will be very much aware of how hard it is to collect these. The later slotta based ones are much more common, and some of them look almost identical, but you know the rules for this army: all pre-slotta, all Citadel. There were actually four different poses produced, but for months I though I would never get any four of them together, long after giving up on getting one of each. Eventually I got three of the two headed beast, and the one with the scorpion tail - the latter was badly mashed and was patiently rebuilt with pins in every leg.

For a colour scheme, the scorpion tail cries out for the bright Chaos colours of 1990, but I wanted to keep this early 80s, and keep it Dark Elf, avoiding the colours of the four Chaos Gods (which didn't really exist in 1984 anyway). I decided midnight blue was a good colour for the hounds - again, you'll have to trust me that's what the pictures show. Turns out there are actually bloody great big blue scorpions in the real world, so I based the tail on those. 

Weretigers in Beast Form (Fiend Factory FF70)

It's just a tiger, but the front paws are quite hand-like... hang on, something odd has happened to mine!

I cannot explain to you how excited I was when this idea hit me! Displacer Beasts! An iconic AD&D monster! The classic evil pack predators! A pretty simple conversion! I promise you, the whole army project would have been worth it for me just to make these.

Now, some people will tell you that Displacer Beasts have six legs. Descriptions seem to vary - the 2nd Ed D&D Monstrous Compendium has the six-legged variant on the front cover art, but a four-legged one on the page for the monster! As it happens, the pose doesn't lend itself to adding extra legs, so I left them with an adequate four each.

The fathomless black in this picture is actually a dark purplish grey colour, the shade colour for my Dark Elf skin in fact. 

Let's add up those totals:

Army List Additions:

Scores for April:          828 points  40 models

20 x Shadows    (Light Armour, Shield, Repeating Crossbow)          400 points

4 x Whelp Masters (Light Armour)                                                          60 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points   

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

Running Total:              3013 points    155 models   

Coming Next Time:

There's only Leader Month and Wild Card Month to come, so one of those. I'm leaning towards Leaders as that leaves me more time to dream up things to add to Wild Card month. Whichever it is, there's still plenty of fun things to look forward to

Jaakko and Slargash - January, Rank & File #1

"Thou shall be banished from this realm, foul spirit" Slargash declared in a commanding voice. He felt a bit bad calling the ghost foul as he was quite a delightful chap really, but so it stood in Ye Scroll of Summons and he was not taking any risks. Not when they were this close.

Slargash and the Mad Spell twins hade made preparations for weeks and tension had grown by the hour. The words still echoed in the darkness as it all started to happen. With a strike of lightning a portal appeared and the ghost was sucked through it. Sparks where still floating in wafts of air as they heard it. Loud thumps aproached them while water ripples grew larger in the paint water pot. A towering figure emerged over the pile of lead they wishfully called an army. "Look at the size of that thing", whispered the younger Quel'lequek and could only stare at it.

A continuous low and rumbling sound emanated form the being. Slowly they started to recognise words, "Hroom, hm, what have we here... chaos, I have always loved chaos... but so many of them... we must be hasty... it takes a long time to paint an army... we never paint anything if it's not worth a long time to paint though..."

"It's not quite the mighty, dark-winged, avenging lord of chaos I had imagined", Slargash thought. "Perhaps it'll do", he sighed and stepped towards the being.

A month has passed and I have tried to be busy. I was a bit nervous and so wanted to start with something relatively simple and straight forward to start the challenge. So I picked the hounds as the main unit for January and minotaurs for February.

 

 

I didn't paint any test models in advance and didn't have a clear idea for the paint scheme for this army. So while painting the group of chaos hounds I have painted some models from other units also and now submitted the ready ones. This led into scrapping my initial (and more colourful) plan for the hounds into one that I think fits better with the overall scheme of the army. I try to paint the army so that it's not obviously dedicated to a certain deity even though some of the models flirt with some of them (and I seem to like a slaaneshian colour palette).

 

 

 

 

 

You might notice that there are too many hounds. My initial list had only 8 and I have painted 12 (so far). Well, I stumbled into a good deal with a bunch of old marauder hounds. I also found that warrior from my lead pile and the lone old citadel thug was also a late addition to the force. So the force is still growing and I'll try to paint at least a host (the proper combination of more hounds and a hydra) and present it during the wild card month in addition to previously promised (slaaneshian) war altar.

 

This month in points:

- 2 beastmasters and 12 hounds: 306 points

- 7 thugs and a marauder leader: 91 points

- Chaos warrior: 74 points

= 471 total , 23 models

And yes, the ghost who left the Northern Wastes of the Old World to the vast miniature chambers of the Benevolent Overlord in the Northern Wastes of the New World (aka the fee to enter the challenge):

Graeme's Formidable Fimir - Wrap-up Post

Graeme's Formidable Fimir - July's Wrap-up

Like a few other challengers, I struggled with this edition of the OWAC. It's my own fault: I planned to do way too much, failed to do enough prep work, procrastinated mightily, and in the end only got round to half the things I wanted to do. On the one hand I'm a little disappointed I didn't manage to achieve my vision, but it's still been by far the most productive part of my hobby year. I managed to struggle across the finishing line and I'm happy with what I did manage to finish.

So here's the whole army as it stands:

The Formidable Fimir army

The Paul Bonner illustrations in WD102 have been the biggest inspiration for this challenge. Another unit or two of troops and a couple of banners, and I think I'll be a lot closer to emulating this one.

Some close-ups of the individual units:

Fianna Fimm with Meargh

Fimm warriors with Noble and Dirach

I initially found the Nick Bibby sculpts really challenging to paint, but it did push me to try some new techniques to bring out the subtle details.

Orc mercenaries

Another first for me this challenge: the first Orcs I've ever finished painted! I've got a load more still on the painting table, so this motley crew is definitely going to be expanded soon. The spearman unit will be beefed out, a unit of swordsmen added, and a unit or two of archers will be providing some much-needed missile troops for their Fimir paymasters soon.

Boar host

Chaos Hound Chaotic host

The Boars and Chaos Hounds were a nice little change of pace during the challenge, and gave me a chance to bulk the army out a bit. The Chaos Hounds especially have a load of character and were really fun to paint.

So, in total I managed to out together an army of just over 1200 points. Hitting the point goal was never really going to be the biggest problem for the expensive Fimir troops, but the 10-figures per month quota was a push at times. Still, I got there. The overview for each month is below:

Army total:         1228 pts

June:                 298 pts

May:                  388 pts

April:                 150 pts

March:              202 pts

January:            190 pts

The ubiquitous Bryan Ansell inspired pose

I've certainly learned a lot from this OWAC:

- Realistic targets are important. Too many ideas and side-project just distracted me on this one.

- The prep for older models can take a lot more effort than you expect, even for those that don't have a lot of detail. The poor surface quality of older models needed a lot more filing and filling than I had planned for.

- Prep is king. I wasted way too long prepping stuff during the challenge. I'll aim to have most prep done before I start next time.

- Any conversions should be done before the beginning of the challenge, so I can focus on the painting and details.

On the positive side, I built up a real appreciation of Nick Bibby sculpts in this challenge. So much so, I finished off my collection of his C28 Giants. I suspect at least one of them may end up in this little force...

I'm also glad I had Fimir, Orcs, Boars and Chaos Hounds to work on - the variety was refreshing, and really added a different flavour to the army.

I have to say, seeing the many other armies grow over the last 6 months has been inspiring - not only have people put together some huge armies, but the quality of painting has been awesome. One sure-fire way to find motivation is to see a well-painted army, with some original ideas, billowing banners, and real character, and there have been plenty of those in this year's challenge!

The addition of some 40k armies really cranked up the nostalgia and I'm looking forward to seeing more next year.

Great job, to all those that managed to cross the finishing line! And of course, many, many thanks to the glorious overlord, Iannick, for running the show!

Hope to see you back here in a few months for OWAC5! I've got plenty of options to choose from, but I'm leaning towards an old favourite of mine...