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

This month I was beset by work & life stuff but still the Great Work continued at a decent pace. I worked on bulking out the rank and file portion of the Daemonic Legion. First and foremost this meant more Daemonettes. There are a maximum of forty eight Daemonettes in a Slaaneshi Legion, and all are accounted for in my planning. As before, I wanted these to be wildly colorful but still (barely) coherent enough to look like an army. I finished ten new ladies, who joined their two sisters, who were already painted from before this project was undertaken. That pair got new bases to match their comrades, and wallah, two more packs for the Legion. 

After the eighteen Daemonettes I painted in January, there are only repeated poses to work with. For these I selected those I could convert in small ways, such as more fabulous hair, and some minor reposing. One was cut from two of her sisters and reassembled entirely. I think she worked pretty well. But conversions not withstanding, the devil-red succubus with the green hair is my favorite.

These represent the last of the 'ordinary' Daemonette infantry that I will be including. After this month, the rest of the Daemonettes will be specialized in some way, either with gifts and equipment, or steeds. 

My next undertaking of the month was a second pack of Fiends. The 1988 Fiends of Slaanesh are some of the most problematic models to assemble Games Workshop ever produced. The sculptor made well defined indentations for the leg bits to slot into parallel with the Fiend's body. Unfortunately, these grooves are in the wrong places, and if you were to assemble as indicated, the orientation of the legs makes our Fiends look like dead arachnids, if they can stand up at all. I think that perhaps Games Workshop intended the hobbyist to bend the Fiends legs outward so the grooves would be serviceable and the feet still oriented down. Honestly though, this is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off without tearing up the detail on the legs themselves, while playing about with one's pliers. How did I assemble these and the other dozen yet to come, you ask? 

Well, dear reader, here is the secret...I ignore the grooves almost entirely, and simply glue the legs into place, more or less above the groove, allowing the feet to orient down correctly. I then fill resulting gap with chunks from the slotta-tabs left over from the Fiends leg assemblies. I tend to paint the Fiends in darker palettes than their anthropomorphic allies, the Daemonettes. This is to provide some contrast between the model types in general and to give me a palette for some added detail on the, mostly, flat metal Fiend bodies.

Lastly this month, I began working on a unit of Slaaneshi Legionaries. The are an interesting troop type which never received dedicated models in the range. Slaves to Darkness describes Legionaries as a body of immortal but ultimately trapped and damned soldiers, who could be from any race. The army list entry for Legionaries gives them a human-ish profile and provides them with a standard chaos weapon and chaos armor. It is a lot of freedom, and I wanted to come up with something distinctive for the Legion. In Slaves to Darkness, the mortal Slaanesh army has several Dark Elf units. Although, Games Workshop stripped them out of the list in fourth edition WFB, I still like the idea as the presence of some fallen elves ties into Slaanesh's lore nicely. Therefore, I decided to model a couple units of Legionaries from elves. The standard dark elves of the era are decent models but they are very distinctively Warhammer 'dark elves'. I wanted something more chaotic, and looking less like a transplant from another army. I noted that a few of the old Wardancer models had studded leather body suits and crazy hair. This was just the sort of thing I was looking for. Then I remembered the Blood Bowl elves. Studded leather, crazy hear and the addition of elaborate masks made them perfect for this job. In order for mine to bring something to the legion, other than being cheaper expendable Daemonettes, I purchased them longbows and seeking arrows, which is a legal option in a Daemonic Legion. This way they can jog along with the rest of army while tossing arrows down range, which will never fail to hit, and can actually harm their likely daemonic foes. For these I used, what I think are High Elf charioteer bows, but they are hard to source and more will be required. What you see painted here is a half unit.

So that is my effort for March; ten Daemonettes, six Fiends, and three Legionaries with magic arrows. They value in at 1,354 points and add another 25 models (by the OWAC's valuing for bigger based models). This puts the total (adjusted) model count at 57, and the total points value at 4,904. The Great Work shall continue next month. I have a special treat in the works.