40K Friday - Chaos Daemons Evolution

I've been slowly building a daemon force for years, sort of inadvertently. Mainly because they used to be a part of a normal Chaos Marine army and because I was building some for fantasy to ally with my Chaos Warriors, where they were also all part of one big army years ago. Since GW split all the mortals and daemons (and beastmen in fantasy!) up into their own separate forces, I've had several groups of figures but not enough to really make a decent force for any of the armies in either game. I decided last year to punch out of fantasy, keeping only my painted Chaos Warrior army for potential future use, selling off the greenskins and humans, and converting the daemons to 40K. The beastmen went into the D&D mini bins where they have given excellent service as everything from mongrelmen to certain animal-headed demons.

It actually started a few years ago - I found myself with a fair number of the old metal models laying around when the 5th Edition Daemon codex came out and not much interest in using them for fantasy any more. Time to change them from square pegs to round! That was one of the first obstacles, in fact - I didn't have enough of the round slotted bases to convert all of them. If it's not one thing ...

Bases acquired, I started converting them over and planning out my force - HQ, two troops, etc. Some people focus on one of the chaos gods but I had around 15 each of the basic daemons for all four of them so I'm going for some diversity in this army. I want to see how it plays with the 6th Edition codex and then look at specializing more.

There is a slight difference in scale between old and new, but the old one makes a fine Daemon Prince 

HQ
This was a little tricky at first. I didn't have any of the newer greater daemons, nor any of the heralds, but I did have Galrauch, the two-headed dragon of chaos from Fantasy. He's a big nasty metal model, so I decided to use him as a Lord of Change. I figured I would use some of my old greater daemon models, the smaller ones, as heralds or daemon princes. Then a friend of mine brought me a box of garage sale mini's and it happened to include a fully-painted new style Bloodthirster - thanks Jeremy! So now I have my "custom" Lord of Change and a Bloodthirster with some other options as well - I'm perfectly fine with those as a starting point.

"Lord of Change" under construction

Troops
Like I mentioned above I am somewhere in the teens with the old metal Bloodletters, Plaguebearers, Horrors, and Daemonettes so I have options here. Once I get them all based anyway.

The mostly-painted troops and fast attack

Elites 
I was a little thin here. I have one old metal Beast of Nurgle, but I have quite a few of the old Flamers so I figured I would focus on that. Fiends of Slaanesh look interesting so I thought I could build my own using some old starship Troopers Warrior Bugs that I never built, combined with some chaos and tyranid parts. It should be fun and I will end up with about 20 of them.

Dragon ogres being rebuilt into Blood Crushers

My final conversion was taking my old fantasy Dragon Ogres and using them for Bloodcrushers. I always liked these guys in fantasy and they never did a !$%#$#%^@% thing for me in any battle! Most of the time they ran off the table after taking minimal casualties, and this is over several years in 5th/6th/7th edition. This will be their chance to redeem themselves. Sometimes a pro athlete needs a "change of scenery" to become good again. How about a change of universes?

Fast Attack
I've had Fleshounds painted up for years for use with my Chaos Warriors, but now they're going into  SPAAAACE! I also have a unit of Furies, adapted from some old dark elf harpies. I have a few Seekers I need to rebuild and rebase as well. I also picked up some Screamers because they seem to be pretty darn potent too.

Yes I managed to find Screamers that need to be re-based too. Winning!

Heavy Support
Honestly, I have nothing here. Never picked up a Soul Grinder, the other stuff is relatively new and I'm not sure I care for chariots all that much anyway. Back when Daemon Princes were heavy support (old codex) I planned on using them, but they are HQ's now - oh well! I do have one of the old Mage Knight big war machines I may use as a Grinder for now but if I play them much I'll probably pick up a pair of the official models to use too.

Last Word

So I am using the miniatures I have, supplemented with the occasional killer deal I come across online or in a local shop. I am perfectly fine using non-GW mini's as well, or "other" GW mini's, especially on this army as it's a bunch of entities from the warp - who says it always has the same form? I like most of the standard figures for these but when I have a unit of Dragon Ogres sitting in a box for the last 5 years I'm going to find a way to use them. I think they fit just fine here, as do the rest of my oddballs. As it comes together I will do another post with an update, round bases on everything  and hopefully more paint! 

Overreaction Thursday - 40K 7th Edition

If you thought D&D's new edition had shaken things up, allow Games Workshop to be this year's one-up guy:

Yes, coming a mere 2 years after 6th Edition, we're being treated to ... 7th Edition! How awesome is that! What other game company can provide its customers with the opportunity for an edition upgrade after a mere two short years? Nobody! With 6th's big bulletproof rulebook priced at a low low $75 I'm sure we'll be treated to a pricing upgrade as well!

It's an odd move. The previous three editions came nice and steady every four years. Now suddenly they're changing that, and it's not the predicted-by-some light refresh of 6th edition with a new printing of the rulebook. Nope, there are multiple and significant rule changes and a new starter set, supposedly Blood Angels and Orks. Known rule changes include:

• A new Psychic Phase, pushing the turn sequence back to the 4 phases we had in 2nd Edition. This might solve a lot of annoyances with the psyker stuff so I am OK with making a change here
• A revised ally chart. Anything that makes Battle Brothers less awesome is fine by me. For the dark, paranoid universe they keep pushing it's amazing how many different xenophobes and religious fanatics get along so well in a combat situation.
• Force Org changes, well, making it one of two options instead of the only option. I'd almost rather see some alternative structures for the force org (raiding force, defensive force, etc) or some scenario-specific options  than a completely free-form option but I suppose this is the ultimate trickling-down of Apocalypse's "take whatever you have" philosophy. This has probably caused the most uproar on the net - see this for examples - but I'm willing to wait and see the details before proclaiming the end times. 
• New scenarios and victory conditions - there are a lot of ways to do this and I think it has the most potential to change up the game in interesting ways. Cards with specific victory conditions dealt out at random were a thing in 2nd Edition and they were fun back then. If we end up wit ha mix of open conditions (like kill points or objectives) and secret conditions (assassinate the enemy leader, hold a particular building, get units off of a particular board edge) it would liven things up considerably. I am looking forward to this part quite a bit. 

If you're concerned about the source of this information, well, it's White Dwarf! See here for pics of the article. There are two images, so be sure to read the second page for the details.

As for the starter set I am perfectly fine with Blood Angels and Orks. I've had an Ork army since second edition and I started putting together a space vampires army last year, so this will give me an excuse to get some work done on both of those in the near future.

Anyway, this probably takes the prize for largest disturbance in the gaming Force for this month. I'm sure there will be more. It's going to be an interesting year.

Little too busy ...

It's like an alien invasion around here ...

This month is a busy one:

• Apprentice Red graduates at the end of the month so we have all of the preparations that go along with the end of the senior year, from banquets to prom(s) to the ceremony, the family stuff, and the party. There's quite a bit going on just with him.
• Apprentice Twilight is in the middle of Driver's Ed and will be fully licensed and legal (and minimally experienced) in a few months. She also started her first job so there's that whole learning curve as well. This also means we're car shopping, which is fairly time-consuming as well. She has end of year celebrations too, but fortunately I'm not in charge of helping the daughter choose a wardrobe. Whew.
• Apprentice Blaster has some year-end stuff too and is already asking when he gets to go to Driver's Ed. There are a lot of possible answers to that question, but I'm guessing "later" is the best one for now. He is old enough now, but I want to space it out for our sanity.
• Apprentice Who, thankfully, is not in this tier of activity yet. His end of year activities don't involve banquets or wardrobe expansion right now so he's at least not adding to the problem.

On top of all that some work changes (good ones) have taken up more time than usual and upset the work from home schedule which means even less time for "extras".

It's been impossible to find a free weekend where all of my players (and me) are available to do a "season finale"for the 4E campaign and I don't think May is going to be any better. I've managed to keep the Pathfinder game on an almost regular schedule, mainly because of the two-core-players thing, but even it may suffer in May. Other than that, painting the 40K armies in the rare quiet hours (and usually at odd times) is the only other game type thing going on here right now.

All that means that posting may be erratic this month. Less free time means that "playing" takes priority over "writing about playing" enough to cut into my almost-regular posting schedule. Mondays and Fridays will probably stay on track but everything else is a "maybe" for May. Hopefully things will calm down some in June. 

Motivational Monday