I'm not dead! Neither are my dark eldar

Sooo its been a while since I've published anything to this blog. Partly because I haven't really thought to and partly because I wasn't sure I even wanted to keep playing my dark eldar. I've not had very good luck with them as of late and 6th ed wasn't kind to me either. But this army is my first love in the world of 40K and by fire and brimstone I AM going to make them work.

However I am going to be adding some eldar allies to this army. I feel that specific units in the eldar codex will add quite a bit to my army. I have the parts needed on order so we will see if my prediction is accurate. I found a craftworld of eldar that I think would match up with my dark eldar fairly well. Their fluff has been butchered a bit by CS Goto but if your willing to over look the truly messed up parts of the fiction, he has created an interesting craftworld. I'm speaking of craftworld Kaelor. A craftworld that, while still following the path system are dangerously close to slipping into the same habits of excess that led to birth of "she who thirsts". What would be deemed a pleasure cult and destroyed on other craft worlds are common place on Kaelor and the house system is still very strong. While the current dark eldar have abandoned the house system in favor of the kabal it wasn't all that long ago that they followed a handful of houses.

So here are some WIP shots of the venom I've been working on over the last couple of days. The main body is basically done in these pics I just need to paint the gunner, the hangers on and add some basing to call it done. Alas painting the gunner is going to have to wait till we get a day where its not pissing down rain! (going on 2 weeks at this point)

~Zero~

Dem Bones Dem Bones Dem Drybrushed Bones

Well they might not be dark eldar but contrary to the title of this blog isn't sole about them either :). So as great as the powers of chaos are I haven't been having fun with my chaos warriors army. They were just to dry, to stale. There wasn't anything I could really add that felt like it gave the army any pop or pazzaz. So I've decided to shelve them for now (or at least not buy anything more for them) in exchange for some vampire counts, BLEIGH!! (Yes I'm a fan of magicka, if you haven't played it go do so!).

Now anyone who plays vampire counts can probably tell you Skellies might not be the best choice but honestly, I don't care. The ghouls from GW look stupid, and their fluff is just bad! If I was ever going to field a ghoul centric army I would have to use the ones from Mantic and I'm not sure how my FLGS would take that. Neither here no there because I have skellies! For me these guys are the exact opposite of ghouls. Their fluff is good (though really its hard to screw up fluff for skeletons). I think the models are fantastic, and while they might not be as powerful as ghouls are I think they'll do well enough.

So these are the first five skeletons I've painted for my new army. I personally think they look great and the technique was stupid easy. I picked it up from one of the tutorials at vampirecounts.net but it basically goes, Khemi brown base coat, a thick coat of devlan mud, bleached bone dry brush (I thought the bleached bone was a bit to dark for what I wanted so I did one dry brush of pure bleached bone and one of 50:50 bleached bone and skull white), Then use bleached bone to pick out the more predominant areas like the skull, arms, knee caps, ect. Then a very Very VERY light dry brush of pure skull white. Use a bit of devlan mud to darken up specific areas like the eye sockets and knees then paint up the armor and your done.


 So I hope you all enjoy these models, I know I had fun painting them!

Im not dead!

Wow its been a long time since I gave this blog anything resembling attention. Truth be told its in part because I haven't had anything to post since my raider went up. My hobby time has been short and even when I've had some free time its hasn't been spent on the hobby so much. But that has changed and here is a few shots of my first venom. Over all I like it, though I will reiterate my intense dislike for painting vehicles.

So the main thing that went wrong here was that I was a bit of a moron and didn't think of how the varnish I used would obscure the clear plastic canopy of the venom. So this brave dark eldar pilot gets to fly with frosted glass as I learn for my next venoms to leave the canopy off until after its been varnished, then glue it on.

Other then this Venom I haven't been up to much. Got a new dark eldar list that has been doing well so far but I haven't had enough games yet to be comfortable with the list. It still feels off to me, like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. I cant just look at the table and know exactly what I have to do with each unit like my old list. Overall though its a fun and powerful list that I don't foresee making any major changes to.

On the fantasy side of the street I have been participating in a Warhammer escalation league game at my FLGS. Its been a lot of fun and two things have come out of it for me. 1)I'm soooooo burnt out on warhammer fantasy after all the games I've been playing. and 2)Warriors of chaos while powerful are very uninspiring as an army for me. Seriously, they have one tactic. Walk across the board, crush face. Sure you can get some magic in there or maybe some different units to try to change up the way you crush face but its still the same thing. And I get very jealous watching my opponents set up these grand plays employing bait units, allies of death, flank set ups and the like and I don't have enough units to try and do the same. So after this league is over the warriors are gonna be swapped out for some vampire counts who where my second choice when I first started warhammer. I'm not sure if the warriors are just gonna get shelved or will be sacrificed to the chaos god known as eBay to fund my vampire project.

See you round the webway

Wyches Raider Plus my WoC Lord on Disk

Wow what a week its been! Or has it been two? I dunno but I know the last while has not been kind to my hobbyist time. That being said I did manage to squeeze some time in to my otherwise full Schedule and the results are not bad at all if I do say so myself!







First up is my the "mostly finished" raider. The paint work is done on it at this point. I'm just looking to get some printable transfer sheets in to add some decals to the sail and possibly the hull (still undecided on that one). The biggest thing I can say I learned on this one? Get a <censored> air brush. Seriously this thing was the least fun thing I have ever taken my brush to. I think if I could speed up the base coating process a bit and get to focus more on the detailing work (and fun effects an airbrush makes possible) would have been a lot more enjoyable for me. But overall not a bad result if I do say so myself.

After the raider I felt I needed a small break from my dark eldar before I started work on the crew for my new raider. That meant a quick trip to my warriors of chaos for fantasy. I have been working on a new color scheme that may yet get made the main style of my army. Unlike my dark eldar I have yet to come up with a scheme I am 100% happy with. Once I get the test model done maybe I'll post some shots of my choices here and find out what the internet at large thinks.

But of far more interest is my latest conversion project. This here is my lord on a disk of tzeentch. Games workshop does make a very good looking model for this unit already however I always had one problem with it. The disk is far to static to be related to the god of change. When I picture demons from Tzeentchs realm I picture beings who never adopt the same form twice and never stay in the same form for more then moments at a time. Beings that in the material realm flicker from form to form with very little care for the laws of this world. The flamers are excellent examples of this theory. Also I found the model that mounted the disk far to... bulky to be a sorcerer. Maybe a lord? but a sorcerer should be casting a spell! And that's where the inspiration for this piece came from. What better source of energy for a spell then a being given life by the god of magic himself. And it is established in the army book that sorcerers often make pacts with demons to attain their magical power. So the true question remains, in this pairing is the demon, or the sorcerer the true master? Or maybe its something else entirely? Who knows what plans if any the changer of ways has for this mortal soul?

See you in the webway!

New dark eldar advanced orders!

I woke up this morning and was quite happy to see that the advance orders for the next wave of dark eldar had been posted on the games workshop site. The one I'm most excited about being the venom as I've been holding off doing a conversion to be able to field one (and good thing to as my conversion would have cost over $100 CAD while the actual venom only cost $36 CAD and looks better then mine would have). I'm also quite pleased with the fact that they have done a screaming bell/plague furnace idea with the chronos and the talos. They also gave us our scourges which is good because we needed something to field in our fast attack slot after the beast master beasts fiasco. They were always a unit I liked the sound of but could never think of a conversion I was happy with. Sorry coven players, better luck in wave 3 for your wracks and grotesques.

Interestingly enough they also released our battle force. Not a bad showing in it either. I've already got all the raiders and wyches I need (and far to many reavers) but its probably a good place for fledgling archon or succubus to start out as adding a good HQ to that box will probably bring you in close to 500 points or so.

So head on over to The advanced order page and check em out!

See you in the webway

Gold Wyches Raider WIP

Alright so right off the off I have had next to no time to work on much of anything lately. So while I was hoping to have a totally finished model to show off tonight, alas I am stuck with a WIP shot.





So this raider is going to be the ride for the squad I recently showed off. This is the first model of this size I have ever painted and I think it shows. There was a lot more that was different between painting this thing and my wyches then I thought there would be to be honest. So for a first attempt at not only the scale of painting but also some free hand work I did on the flag I don't think its to bad. But its one of those that has a serious chance of getting redone at some point in the future when my skills have improved.

So this is my first attempt at actually doing some free hand painting. I plan to have these flags on all my raiders and use them to denote what squad is in what raider. I think for any more I do I'll be removing the flag (this one was already glued in) and painting it separate as trying to paint it around the hull of the raider proved to be a giant PITA and effected then end quality I think. Also think maybe I should do the symbols smaller and inside the circle. Not sure on that yet though.




A good shot of the edging around the different plates of the raider. Keeping with my previously discussed white and gold scheme (black seems to have been unconsciously added to the scheme at some point as well). While the edging in a few places on the model could be a bit better overall I think its turned out well. I was working on trying to keep the lines as uniform in width as possible.




Here's a shot of the decking. A bit of a pain to paint without messing up the white underneath but I think the black grating will look quite good when the sail is finally attached.









So that's the extent of what I've been working on the last little while. Questions, comments, suggestions are always welcome of course.

See you in the webway

PS: Clive I do intend to try out your suggestion and get some picks up soon, but as I said earlier. Life

Combat drug roll of "Durrr!"

Alright I've putting off writing this post since last Thursday. I mean who likes to admit publicly to stupidity right? And the game I'm about to tell you about was lost for no other reason the sheer, unbridled stupidity. But before I do check out the picture on the left. That was a model fielded against me in this game, and while not a dark eldar, its still sweet!

So about this game. The list I was up against was horrible, especially when going against a list with plenty of darklight weapons (which I had). It was against Gray Knights fielding Draigo and about 20ish paladins split into two squads. The mission was annihilation with the deployment being dawn of war. I lost the deployment roll and was forced to go first. We both placed out entire army in reserve so the game didn't start until turn 2. Everything I owned save 1 unit of wyches came on that turn, but with nothing to shoot at it was mostly just setting myself up so I could respond no matter where he cropped up. On his turn one unit stays in reserve and one unit deep strikes onto the table. Now this is where things went to pot. I tried to use my regular tactics against this army, which generally amounts to overwhelm a flank until it collapses then move up on the rest of their forces from the side. Of course this army didn't have a flank, this army didn't have any tanks. All this army had was 21 dudes, and I got cocky. I basically tried to throw every wych I had against the one unit he had on the table. He was able to slaughter me before I even got a chance to attack thanks to that psychic power that makes them initiative 10. He only had 4 kill points in his army. The game was called as soon as he scored 5 against me which didn't take long.

Now most of you reading this are going to be able to point out exactly where my screw up was and what I should have done. But for the sake of my own recollection and any newer players reading this let me lay it out. My first mistake was not deploying anything on turn 1. A relatively minor mistake and one that didn't really effect this game at all but one I shouldn't have made regardless. The biggest mistake I made was throwing my wyches at them such as I did. Paladins are powerful but slow as all get out and after their deep strike they had almost 0 maneuverability. I should have used my speed to keep my raiders, ravagers, and jet-fighter out of arms reach of the paladins and blasted away with my darklight weapons? why? Paladins might have 2 wounds a piece but they are toughness 4. A Paladin takes a wound from a strength 8 or higher gun (IE: Darklances) then its insta-death, game over, good night Mr. paladin. Now its true he had Draigo a toughness 5 model with a 3+ ward save as well as a nemesis staff which is another ward save. However Draigo can be killed and once he is your home free as the nemesis stave only works in close combat (don't let your opponent tell you otherwise, like mine did). After that happened the rest of the squad would have gone up like kindling in a fire storm. And all this without him able to retaliate in any meaningful way.

So hopefully my foolishness in this game will serve as a good lesson for any other commanders out there (especially other dark eldar commanders) about the proper way to deal with this list and a list like it.

See you in the webway