Slaves to Darkness & Stormcast reinforcements

It's been a somewhat quiet couple of weeks, in terms of blogging - mainly because it took me quite a while to write up the last battle report!

However, that does mean that I've made quite a bit of progress painting up a number of models for both Chaos & the Stormcast Eternals.

First up are the Slaves to Darkness:

I actually started painting some of these chaos warriors a few years ago, partially inspired by the old 3rd edition Realm of Chaos era books, and partly by the bright coloured enemies in the similarly(ish) aged (1992, I think) computer game Legend (The Four Crystals of Trazere in some places), an isometric dungeon crawler RPG. In particular, Legend is one of the games I remember most from my youth, as it was one of the few we had when I was a kid, and I spent a long time playing it (alongside other brilliant games like D/Generation and Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders). 

My introduction into GW (after Heroquest & Space Crusade) was via Warhammer 40,000, which we got at Christmas 1994 - right in the middle of what some people refer to as the Red Period - bright colours everywhere - and that has also influenced how I paint things. While I don't object to grittier colour schemes which later came to the fore (and did some things like this myself), bright & vibrant colour is definitely my nostalgic happy place, and I've always felt chaos is somewhere you can get away with this (and Orcs...more on them at some other time).

I received the newer Slaves to Darkness start collecting box at Christmas, just after they came out, and combined with our slow journey through the Realmgate Wars campaign, it was a perfect opportunity to go back to the few models I'd painted up and expand a bit. After all, we do need some Tzeentch forces soon and a terrifying mishmash of colours seems fairly appropriate there.

Ultimately, the idea was that these would be unaligned - Chaos Undivided, or sworn to the Everchosen, or however you like, so they will see use across multiple armies as we continue our journey into the Mortal Realms.

While the older Chaos Warriors are a bit less dynamic, they still mix together well enough, so the whole lot can be used as one unit without looking too jarring.

One of the other things I've manged to finish off is a unit of Prosecutors for the Celestial Vindicators Stormhost. I have to say I don't particularly enjoy painting Prosecutors, or any Stormcasts with the wings, so these have dragged on a bit longer than I'd intended (indeed, they were supposed to be done with the majority of the previous batch).

You might notice that they're on slightly larger bases than usual as well. This was mainly so we could get the models in coherency a bit easier. Not an issue when AoS first came out, with its model-to-model rules, but it was starting to get a bit annoying using them on the board - those wings stick out quite a lot. Ideally, they've have some height differences, which I'd probably do if I was starting from scratch, rather than painting up things we've had for a while.

Not that the 50 mm bases completely solve the issue, but it helps a bit. And they fall over less.