Yo dawg, I heard you like daemons,…

…so we put some daemons in your engine…

Alright, alright, not funny. But still, let’s talk about daemon engines, shall we.

When the defiler kit was first released, it was probably the biggest vehicle kit GW had ever done in plastics. It was also a hell of a unit choice, or so I’m told. And daemon engines have been a staple of Khorne armies ever since the days of Epic 40k, so it was clear that I would have to add some kind of daemon engine/defiler to my army for heavy fire support and some flavour.

But the defiler looks kind of goofy in my opinion. amaximus from KMB makes an excellent case for this here, and fortunately he also had an idea how to use the defiler kit to create something awesome that was much more in line visually with the kind of daemon engines associated with Khorne. So I took a deep breath, readied my trusty exacto knife and tried to recreate his fantastic conversion for my own army. Here’s what I ended up with:

My version is different in a couple of ways. Some of this was deliberate, for example the inclusion of the face mask. It just screams daemon engine to me, so I simply had to use it. Other differences occured because I couldn’t hope to reproduce the original’s flawless conversion and had to downgrade a bit. As a result, my version is somewhat less awesome than the model that inspired it. But I’m still quite proud of it. The conversion really tweaks the silhouette of the model, and I can’t say I miss the gorilla arms…

All in all, it’s a rather simple conversion really, just a bit of cutting and repositioning, and you’re done. I was still pretty terrified when I started because I feared that I would make a mistake and screw up a fairly expensive model.

Oh, and one thing: This really was a chore to paint! At the beginning, one leg would take me as long as a normal infantry model. And the thing has got so many detail on its underside. Nobody’s ever going to see that, but it just felt wrong to leave it unpainted. Also, when building and painting this kit you’ll have to think carefully about which order you paint and glue things together in. That was kind of hard for me, because I like to do everything at once and really hate sub-assemblies.
I have at least three ideas for further defiler conversions, and none of them would look remotely the same, but there’s no way I’m putting myself through painting that lower body again 😉

A funny story to wrap up this post: I really forced myself to finish this, so I could use it in a campaign at my FLGS. When I put it on the table, people really liked the model and commented on it. Then the game started, and my opponent had the first turn. With the first shot of the game, my awesome new toy was instantly destroyed. And the worst thing of all: He hadn’t even aimed at it, but the shot miraculously strayed in its direction. Nuts!

Anyway, thanks for looking! Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

Of blood knights and madmen

So, why start a World Eaters Army?

I have always loved the various incarnations of chaos in the worlds of Warhammer Fantasy and 40k. And I’ve always been drawn to Khorne and his followers in particular. When it comes to the World Eaters, I guess it’s simply the colour scheme that does it for me, the snazzy combination of blood red and brass. I also like the design, even the so-called “bunny helmets” that so many World Eaters players seem to abhor. And I have to admit that I am still able to enjoy the Khorne Berserker plastics as a basis for conversions and kitbashes, dated as they may look.

What I don’t like is most of the recent fluff for the World Eaters. While former editions of the background had Khorne down as the god of warfare and brutality, they also stressed that he was the patron of martial pride and honour, and that if you took too much pride in your strength and fighting prowess, you were in real danger to fall to the worship od Khorne. The World Eaters, then, weren’t just the crazed madmen they are now, but also fierce and sometimes honourable warriors whose pride had become their undoing.

One of the coolest snippets of background in the 2nd edition Codex Ultramarines had an Ultramarines officer (it may have been Marneus Calgar himself, I can’t recall) fight so valiantly that he earned a salute from a World Eaters champion in the midst of battle. To me, that’s the essence of the legion right there: They have committed to a life of eternal battle and slaughter. But they take fierce pride in their abilities and are ready to acknowledge strength in others.

There’s little of this in the recent fluff, though: The World Eaters have become a collection of crazed madmen who are always screaming for blood and killing indiscrimiately. This doesn’t really sit well with me, not so much because it’s kind of an unsympathetic thing to do, but rather because the slaughter of defenseless planetary populations doesn’t feel like something that would make the god of war very proud of his followers.

I also think that this recent one-dimensionality is a reason for the lack of great fluff for the World Eaters. From a narrative standpoint, at least if you play it straight, it’s really not very compelling to have someone be always angry, all the time. It’s no wonder that there are lots of BL books on other traitor legions, but none for the World Eaters (supposedly, there’s one on the way. I have to say I’m equally thrilled and horrified at the prospect): In their current incarnation, they really can’t be too much fun to write about.

So, what to do? My answer was to slightly readjust the fluff for my World Eaters so that it still fit the established guidelines but also harkened back to the older incarnations of the legion. My army is called “Khorne’s Eternal Hunt”, because that’s what it is: a hunting party, eternally hunting for worthy prey. It is only by bringing down the most powerful enemies that they can prove themselves worthy in the eyes of Khorne – at least, that’s what they think.

Khorne’s Eternal Hunt is also made up of the remains of the World Eaters’ 4th assault company. Contrary to most of the legion, they have managed to stay together as a fairly coherent fighting force. They regard the madness that has gripped the legion with disgust and fear and are fighting a losing battle to keep it at bay. In battle, they are as ruthless as all World Eaters. But after the battle has ended, they feel only emptiness. An emptiness they try to fill with an endless number of campaigns. They tell themselves that they still have their honour. But it was honour that damned them to begin with. They know that they are lost, but where the Imperium of Man cast them out, Khorne will always accept their loyalty.

I think it’s far more interesting to have the World Eaters alternate between periods of frenzy and dark, fatalistic brooding, than to have them be super-angry all day. At least, I wanted to have my World Eaters be somewhat multidimensional, since it’s much easier to imagine them as characters that way. In case you’re interested, TVtropes has an awesome writeup for a character archetype the call a “Blood Knight”. It makes for excellent further reading and has lots of examples of how this archetype is handled in fiction.

Anyhow, that’s the rationale behind my army’s fluff and background. For those of you who are still reading, I’ll probably be showcasing some fluff somewhere along the way that further illustrates my point on this.

Geez, what a wall of text! Next up, some pretty pictures 😉

First steps

Finally, something to look at 😉

Pretty much the first thing I did when getting back into 40k was to paint up a couple of conversions I had done almost a decade ago.
First came a number of models I had originally intended to be Possessed (back when Possessed were a bit more predictable). Take a look:

I used parts from the old chaos mutation sprue and some ork boy arms in order to make my possessed look tougher. Obviously, the newer plastic possessed by GW look *much* more twisted, so my models tend to be used as normal berserkers as often as not. But then, these models were great as test pieces in order to find the right formula for my updated World Eaters colour scheme. Nothing fancy, since my paintjobs tend to be serviceable more than anything else, but they look alright on the tabletop.

At some point, though, I’ll have to redo the bases. They’re far too basic, and I’ve since stumbled upon a fairly easy way to do easy and effective cityfight bases. Until then, these guys will have to do.

Back on plastic: How everything started.

On December 24th 2010, cousin Andy gave me a box of Chaos Space Marines for Christmas. It all went downhill from there…

…actually, no. That’s not true. The true start of everything was another Christmas in the early 90s (I forgot the exact year), when I received my copy of Hero Quest. Much has been written about the formative nature this game’s had for many-a-nerd, so I need not elaborate. Suffice to say that the miniatures included with the game simply blew my mind at the time. It was the same with Space Crusade (released as “StarQuest” in my little part of the world) and with the first Warhammer and Warhammer 40k models I ever saw. Fast forward a few years, to the mid- to late-90s, when I had begun to dabble in Warhammer Fantasy and 40k alike and had a small but completely painted force of Chaos Warriors and a considerably larger (and considerably better painted) force of Dark Eldar under my belt – along with the unpainted detritus that every wargamer tends to accumulate along the way.

Still, all was not well: The Dark Eldar I had so painstakingly converted and painted (back then, you basically had to convert the hell out of the available plastics if you wanted your army to look at least halfway presentable) proved to be GW’s unloved bastard child. So I jumped ship and began to collect a small force of Chaos Space Marines. I had always loved chaos in general and the Blood God Khorne in particular, and so I was drawn to the World Eaters legion pretty fast. The availability of then fairly recent Khorne Berserker plastics helped as well, so I began to amass a small but potent force of crazed madmen.

But then I hit a wall again: Back in those days, a lot of the range was still metal and thus fairly expensive. And there was no way I was shelling out all of my pocket money for a box of chaos terminators, raptors or what have you. So my interest in the world of tabletop gaming slowly began to dwindle as other, less obstinate activities (music, videogames and parties) began to take over. I kept my White Dwarf subscription, however, and frequently felt the pull of new releases – but never enough to jump back in.

What I didn’t know, though, was that while I wasn’t looking, my cousin Andy had gotten into 40k big time: He learned pretty much all the rules by heart, bought a metric ton of different GW-models and became somewhat of a lower case celebrity in his FLGS for sticking to the criminally undersupported Dark Eldar and winning his fair share of games with them to boot.

During all that time, he tried to get me back on board with 40k and it was the release of the new Dark Eldar in late 2010 that did it. I bought my first box of plastics in a decade and suffered what was for all intents and purposes, a relapse.

Cue cousin Andy and his Christmas present: While the new Dark Eldar were fantastic models in their own right, they weren’t quite as much fun to convert as my old World Eaters had been. So the box of Chaos Space marines was cracked open on the same night I got it, and I haven’t looked back since.

Now it’s early 2012 and I have accumulated a World Eaters force of about 3500-4000 points along with a rather large collection of DIY terrain and a couple of side projects. And while I loathe the fact that getting back into tabletop wargaming has proved to be a continued strain on my wallet (as well as on my nearly inexistent self-control), it has also been, and continues to be, a fantastic creative outlet.

And what better way to share this creativity with others than to create another blog that no one is ever going to read?

But seriously: If you have found this and are interested, I promise that I’ll try to showcase my work here for the world to appreciate (or hate). Some of it might prove interesting. Feel free to steal any idea you like for your own projects – I do it all the time 😉  And don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned. There’ll be more shortly…

Hello internet!

Welcome to Eternal Hunt! This blog will chronicle my exploits in the wonderful and addictive world of miniature wargaming. I’ll focus on my hobby projects for Warhammer 40k and Inquisitor 28 for now, although I can’t promise that I won’t be throwing in the odd post about basically everything that interests me.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: My main focus will be the 4th assault company of the World Eaters traitor legion, also known as “Khorne’s Eternal Hunt”.

And let’s get one more thing out of the way: You probably won’t find any cutting edge tactics and undefeatable army lists on this blog. I like winning as much as the next guy, but my hobby focus is first and foremost on converting and kitbashing stuff that I think looks cool and then using it on the tabletop (and dreaming up corresponding little stories in the back of my head). That’s how I roll 😉

Stay tuned for more, I’ll be sure to keep the posts coming.