Dark Knights

 

If you've been following my blog for long enough, you may remember my post about the Shelf of Shame™ from way back in 2013. Lord Oren Koth is one of the last items on the shelf to be completed. He was initially envisioned as a mounted battle flag (or infernal standard), but since that's no longer an option in Legions of Nagash armies, I traded out the banner pole for a tomb blade.

 

 

These past few weeks have been spent painting Oren, and today I can finally put the lid on this character.

 

 

 

Here's Oren side-by-side with his original version. This also lets me tick the box on the wargame hobby bingo card for painting a new version of an old character model.

 

 

Oren joins the ranks of knights in my Path to Glory warband. The theme of the warband is that Lord Seth Von Koss is combing the lands, unearthing the knights that once served with him at Blood Keep during the reign of Walach Von Harkon. The warband began with the vampire lord atop his zombie dragon, the wight king, and three units of black knights.

 

My ultimate goal is to work my way toward a unit of blood knights. I've been hoarding vampire riders from the plastic zombie dragon kit for a couple years, and I finally collected enough to build a full unit– 4 vampires plus Mannfred from the Mortarch kit, who will be converted into the unit champion.

 

The real problem was what horses to use. The black knight skeleton steeds were just too small, and there weren't many sizable, sinister-looking steeds that weren't covered with Chaos iconography or just too monstrous for consideration. Then, in the Grand Alliance Death Facebook group, Mike Sowby hit the nail on the head when he posted a picture confirming that the black knights could be made to fit the dreadblade harrow horses!

 

These steeds are the perfect mount for blood knights, so I picked up some dreadblade harrows, some barding pieces from ebay, and we're on our way!

 

The conversion is only SLIGHTLY less expensive than purchasing actual blood knights, but the customization is half the fun, and it leaves me with extra parts that are still usable for other units. For example, I've got five spare harrow riders that can bulk up a unit of bladegheist revenants.

 

Some of the other projects I've been working on are the endless spells from the Malign Sorcery set. First up (and my first official 2nd edition Age of Sigmar model) is the malevolent maelstrom:

 

I spiced it up with some extra spirits from the lord executioner and spirit hosts. It's seen action in one game so far, and it worked out pretty well– I was able to keep it positioned to unbind enemy spells (I only got to make one attempt and it failed, however) without catching my necromancer in its radius. And it accumulated four souls from destroyed units (all mine of course!) before exploding and dishing out a bunch of damage to the nearby enemies, even finishing off one enemy hero.

 

 

 

Next will be the burning head. Fitting that there is an endless spell which is the embodiment of my army– a flaming skull! I've modeled some extra flame texture to more closely match the fire that I have on my models. On its base, I've added some skeletons rising and bursting into hellfire in the infernal skull's wake. He should paint up pretty quickly.

 

 

'Til next time!