Cold One Riders

Tonight's offering are some of my older characters. Now I have loads of characters on foot, and these are what tends to get used in most games (when I ever play them), and I have a whole host of Dragon and monster riders, but there are also the more mundane mounted Elves in the army.

The Malus Darkblade miniature is a nice miniature, even if a little awkwardly posed. As I'm not really a fan of using special characters, only really on special occasions, I tend to use him as a generic Dark Elf Hero.

This Sorceress is from last editions releases, and even though the miniature looks a little fat to be an elf, it's still pretty nice.

Now this is one of my really old models. I've mounted her on a last edition Cold One (I have loads spare) . Again all the Cold Ones are in the same scheme as the other editions in an attempt to tie them all together and make units match up.

Dragonlord - Kolath Soulreaver

So I managed to get this guy painted up for the big game, and really wanted him as the army general, as this is just one amazing sculpt.

I painted the Dragon up in a similar scheme to all of the other dragons in the army, and the Dreadlord up so that he would match the rest as well. I decided whilst painting that I needed something to make the special models stand out to the rest of the characters in the army. As I working on him I came up with the plan to give each of the 'leaders' of the army a flaming weapon to make them stand out from the rank and file.

The Big Game

So we finally got the big Game played this weekend, and what a game. It was a great day, and was good to get so many painted models onto the table, we're already talking about another game.
And I've got some more streamlining ideas for the next one. Things didn't go very quickly in our opponents turn, especially the magic phase, next game I'm thinking we should be using the normal magic rules i.e. 2D6 rather than the 4D6 for SoM, and should really limit the number of magic users. There were arguments and a fair bit of time wasting when it came to deciding what spells to cast. I think putting a time limit on the turns would also help, and possibly running the game over 2 days.

Anyways here's a few pictures from the day.

Old Guard

Ah the old Black Guard, these fellas have been through so many battles, the most memorable were against a friends Undead army. In about three games the Guard were charged by his Carrion (this was when you could have Vamps with Mummies/Carrion etc.) and ended up fleeing from them every time. They did start fairing a bit better with the later editions of Fantasy though.

When I painted the unit (oh so many years ago) I wanted to keep them looking black. I kept the colours simple only adding some real colour to the cloaks. I did paint up a unit of 30 of these, but for some reason GW saw fit to limit the unit size to 20 in the new book. I think I have some more unpainted in a box somewhere so will have to use the remaining painted minis to make a new unit.

Something a bit heavy

Dark Elves have some of the coolest cavalry in the game of Warhammer. Cold One Knights are a very hard hitting unit, although dulled slightly in the last book. They can hit very hard.

My force has three generations of Cold Ones in it, the lithe all metal Knights of 5th edition.

The Slow lumbering Cold Ones of 6th Ed

And the new all plastic raptors of 7th/8th Ed.

I've tried over the time to make the units, even though they have a different look, match up with each other. They all have the same shield as the rest of my Dark Elf army, and I've used the same colours on the riders and mounts.

During this big game next weekend I think the Cold One Knights are going to have to be part of the reserve force, entering the fray when a weakness is found in the enemy lines and exploiting it.

Harpies

Harpies. Yup today's update are some Harpies. Now these things have been sitting in a case for ages, I painted them years ago, but the paint job was so rushed they looked just terrible. (It was basically a flesh coloured wash over a white undercoat with bits painted up black, then based.) Now in the past I've never liked the GW Harpies, I thought they looked pretty awful. But since repainting these I've actually grown quite fond of them. (To the extent that I bought some more of ebay).

This first bunch is just a bog standard unit of 5 Harpies, I painted them the same way as I do my Elf flesh, and they've turned out pretty nice. But for the second lot, I wanted to do something a little different. Just for Storm of Magic.

The rules for SoM say that you can give Harpies a flaming attack, hmmm I thought, I suppose they should really have some flames about them then. So I came up with the idea of sculpting some flames onto the hands of them. I was a little tied when it came to painting the flames, do I go dark coloured magical flames or flamey colour (yes I know I did the flames back to from but I like them). I'm happy with the result, and once I get my ebay buys through I'll be adding another couple of units, one with flames and one without.

I've still got a lot to do for this game, but I've decided to drop a few things from my planned scheme of things. I have a Lord on Chaos Dragon, a Sorceress of Pegasus and another couple of units of Crossbows, these will probably be put on hold till after the game, as they don't look good at all, with quite a few chips, and breaks that will require a fair bit of work to repair and get looking good and I still haven't got a Fulcrum painted yet.

Reapers of Men and Elves

Tonight I've got some photos of some more warmachines in the form of some Reaper Bolt Throwers.

Firstly there's a group of some of the older ones. These have been rebased to match up with the rest of the army. I have another 3 of these to do, but I'm waiting on some more 50mm bases to arrive so I can rebase them.

Next we have a couple of the newer Bolt Throwers, these I repainted the crew from my old black scheme into my new metallic one and rebased them.

It's getting really close to game time now, just over a week to go and still quite a few bits to get done. I think there may be a few late nights over the next few days to get everything done.

Sethvir

Back in 2008 I had a big game of Fantasy, in which I had two friends join me. John AKA Sethvir and Bradders AKA Deathblade. Now John had never played Fantasy at this point and the game was going to be his first stint into the world of Warhammer. We had both previously played on World of Warcraft together, and John had a character on there called Sethvir. I decided it would be fun to convert Sethvir over to the game. The character in WoW was a warlock, so I figured the best way to do this would be to have a Dark Elf Sorcerer, but just a sorcerer would be boring so I made him a dragon rider.

The model has had a little revamp for the new game, I've rebased it onto a chariot case, given it a little bit of a repaint, and added some flames to the end of the staff/spear.

I never really noticed until I put the model onto the shelf with the other dragons how much bigger it is than the new dragons.

Today's post takes us into the the start of the Dark Elf Warmachines, first up are the Chariots.

These were batch painted for the last big game we did, so nothing special in the scheme, just something fast and effective. I've rebased them onto chariot bases, and frostied them up.

The above chariot is actually missing the second Charioteer, this is because it was made up as a mount for a chariot riding master, a character to lead the unit of chariots. I have removed this guy, cause it's not a GW mini and won't be able to use him in the game. If I get time before I will probably bash up a character from bits and add him.

Tonight we have another of my Cauldrons ready for battle. There are currently three of these hanging around, the War Alter, this one and a one still waiting to be painted. I think once the big game is out of the way, I'm going to paint up a few more Khainite units, so more Witch Elves, the third Cauldron, and Hellebron to start with.

More in the core

So I'm needing to add a few more core units to the force to make sure it stays along the legal side of things (not that it really matters for this big game, but I want the army to be fully legal if it needs to be), with that here we have some more Spearmen.

These guys have had about 4 or 5 different colour schemes on them over there extensive battle history, and this unit also boasts to have the first ever Dark Elf models I bought, painted and played with. Back in those days I had started a Skaven army, and the Elves were just being re-released, I purchased as many as I could (about 10 miniatures I think) from GW mail order, this being the time when you could actually by stuff that was coming out a little earlier than rules and such. I used them as an ally to the Skaven and loved how they looked and played.

The Sea and the Slaughter

So it's been a few days since I got an update done, not been in the best of moods for painting ad such, but have done a few more photos for you all, and will be putting them up during this week.

Tonight's helping are three of my Corsair units. Now I'm not a fan of the new plastic Corsairs, they just don't do anything for me. And to be honest, I really love the look of the older ones.

I went into a bit more detail on this banner, converting a bearer to represent the Sea Serpent Standard.

Something a little Shadey

Today's installment of Dark Elfyness are two of my units of shades. One old and one new.

This unit was painted back during 5th Ed, and has seen many games since then.

And here's the new version of them, a lot more shadey if you ask me with the cloaks on them. I think the older ones are probably more suited to the background of them being from the mountains around the cities, and only being brought to fight when needed. Living in small warbands or tribes, living off the land.

I've also decided I'm going to leave the Chimera as is for now, and come back to it after the game. Anyhow I could try the schemes out on one of the other two and see from there, time allowing.

Chimera

Well here's a bit of a monster for you tonight. This one I'm not too sure about the scheme, I've painted it in a similar scheme to the Dragons, but to be honest I'm not entirely happy with it, so it could be getting a repaint soon.

I kind of like the way the black has turned out, I think it could be the other two heads and the belly that's bugging me. Any suggestions on a scheme?