Frank's: The Great Work - A Daemonic Legion of Slaanesh, Slaves to Darkness Style, Rank & File, January 2023

Wanting to get off to a solid start, I began by working on the grunts of the Legion, the Daemonettes. I resolved to get at least ten finished and to simply keep grinding more out as time allowed. What I want from this project is to build a Slaaneshi Legion that feels like what was presented in Slaves to Darkness. This means a certain level of throwback style in my painting for this project. I wanted to be true to the feel of a Slaaneshi Legion as pictured on page 158 of Realm of Chaos Slaves to Darkness, therefore my Slaaneshi daemons have no unified color scheme. Certain models will inevitably share colors with some of their sisters, but the units will be a riot of softer pastel palettes. 

The madness of chaos doesn't mean that the Legion doesn't need to look cohesive though; so, in order to tie my Daemonettes into a (very loosely) coherent force, most of the stockings and some of the armor plates would be done in yellow. This yellow would only appear as a skin tone on a couple of the Daemonette sculpts, who have no cloth and little armor. The tie back to yellow will be repeated throughout the Legion although the Steeds and Fiends will have very little of it since they are, for the most part, 'nude'. 

Games Workshop released a total of 13 sculpts for the initial run of Daemonettes. My Legion, quite rightly, has far more of them running about than that. In fact, I expect to have 48 in this OWAC and maybe 50 of them when all is done. The original sculpts are pretty varied but still require a fair amount of repeats in order to field 36. I broke this up a bit by doing some simple reposing of claws (isn't lead wonderful?) and the addition of some topknots here and there. 

For basing I use a basic sand flock on a 25mm GW circular base. I know this is a bit showy by the standards of the late 1980s, but I think it just looks better than green grass flocking. Besides how many golf courses are being maintained in the Northern Wastes anyway? Some of the purists among you may ask, "But why circle bases and not the good squares that are expected?" I have a number of reasons for this change, but the most important is this one...Unit sizes in a Slaves to Darkness Legion battle are very small. Most being 6, 7, 8, or 9 models only. The auxiliary Undead and Minotaur units are the only units which can be larger. This makes WFB3 rules surprisingly awkward to run the game. Rogue Trader's core rules are actually much smoother. So, not only can the models be used wholescale in Warhammer 40,000, I think it plays better as well. That said, I don't intend to miss out on a game simply because they are on the 'wrong' bases. Clever use of movement trays will allow me to use them seamlessly in WFB games without issue. The creation of these trays will be done in my "wild card" month.

In a Legion, units always are fielded in their God's number. For Slaanesh this is six. The army list also allows for eight units of daemonettes, any units of which can be mounted. I have chosen to fill out this allotment, it is a Legion, not a ally contingent after all. So, I am building six units of six Daemonettes as infantry. Each infantry units runs 600 points. I also plan to run two units of Daemonettes riding Mounts of Slaanesh, which cost 720 points each. They will be along much later in the project dear readers. Saving the best for last as they say...

Although Daemonettes do not have character models or leaders per say in their units, I wanted to do at least one special one wearing chaos armor. The only instances where Daemonettes even show up alone in a Slaaneshi Legion are as spawn pack handlers, or if one pops out of a randomly generated daemon weapon. I converted my Daemonette character from the classic Kinky Chaosette model. I picked her because, first, she is in a lovely suit of chaos armor, and second, she has the lithe shape and crazy heels which seem 'right' for a Daemonette in full battle armor. Those human arms had to go though....

The arms were replaced by a pair of armored crab claws donated by a pair of Slaaneshi champions. An armoed razor edged rail was procured from a 'spare' Daemonette as well. A touch of green stuff at the joins and she was ready to rend and dance. Fear not gentle readers, Miss Candy Crush was responsibly sourced entirely from old lead of other Slaaneshi models.

And here she is in all her glory. I went for a decidedly Old School flair on her paint scheme. Deliberately leaning into the over-the-top nature of the model.

She is just too cute to be a randomly appearing personality trapped in a daemon weapon. Therefore, I decided she will be the pack leader of my Slaaneshi Spawn. These are technically auxiliaries and not part of the Legion proper, but they are led by a lesser daemon so I will allow it. For these spawn, I started with a seven Succubi and Incubi sculpts by Hasslefree miniatures. For profiles, I started with  dark elves and gave the unit extra limbs, brightly patterned skin, beweaponed extremities, horns, and tails. I also added some one off mutations to the unit for color such as a manikin head, a stalked thrid eye, a siamese twin, and some random tentacles and other bits, like the 'handler'. This pack is named the 'Unfettered" and are most definitely NSFW, and for the record were painted well before the OWAC began. They appear here now only to provide Candy Crush with some appropriate playthings.

This had been accomplished with more than a week left in January, so clearly more was required. I took my brush to the first unit of Fiends of Slaanesh. These beauties cost 40 points in the Slaaneshi Legion and come in units of six, of course. I plan to have two units in this project and four in the final completed legion. For these I stuck to odd clashing colors and tried to work in some yellow here and there to tie them back into the legion as a whole.

So, for January, I have completed 16 infantry models from the Slaves to Darkness Daemonic Legion of Slaanesh List, which includes the Spawn Pack handler, Candy, as well as 6 Fiends (do they count as infantry or cavalry? Who cares...) They are, all told worth 1,840 points. Now to do this all over again in February...