Shadespyre's April Post - Rank and File (IV) - (Name Pending!) Dark Elves Army (828 points)

OWAC VI - Rank and File (IV) - Both Rank and Vile

April

It's been an odd month. I'm well ahead of schedule on painting, so a lot of what I'm posting now was started or even finished back in March. Maybe three or four weeks of the intervening time has been spent on basing and adding heraldry to things that I've already painted - by ironic coincidence, none of that heraldry appears in this month's offerings. I've also lost my ability to take good photos, somehow, and then with the end of the project on the horizon, I dropped one of my more elaborate models and have had to extensively rebuild it. But that's a story for another month.

At the end of March's blog entry, I promised you "my favourite project in the army" and "the unit which almost broke me". Let's start with the latter one.

Waaaaaay back when I first discovered D&D and Citadel Miniatures, one of my favourite things was the Night Elf Patrol, one of the Speciality Set series. According to Stuff of Legends, it was released in October 1982 and replaced by a set of Chaos Warriors in August 1983, which might explain why I found it hard to recollect a full set of them.

Sadly, I also realised why they may have been withdrawn so quickly - many of them are easily broken, meanign that 40 years later I've had to repair a lot of them, but perhaps more significantly many of the castings are of poor quality, with blurry faces and textureless patches of chainmail. It makes me think that the original moulds may have declined quickly, giving an excuse to replace the set? or maybe it was just that these minis are tiny and wee and Citadel wanted the rebranded Dark Elves to be much bigger?

Whatever the reason, recollecting them was not the spark of nostalgic joy that I had hoped for. Painting them only proved worse! I wanted to use a different colour scheme from the rest of the army, both to distinguish them as scouts and a slighly different subrace, and because I was so fed up with purple. After a number of false starts - dark blue, dark green - I settled on a near-black grey just so I could get the damn things painted. A poor end to what I expected to be a highlight of the project.

But here we are, 20 scouts made up mostly of the SS3 Night Elves, with a number of repeats and many repairs. In my Dark-Elves-as-Drow canon, I think these are members of the lower castes of Drow society, a diminished people who live too close to the surface world to have proper influence, but retain some usefulness because of their knowledge of that wider world.  Who better to scout ahead of your majestic Noble raiding party?

You'll notice that the pictures have a wierd yellowish green background - this is actually cream coloured card which I tried after white just stopped working for me! It was fine while the bases were grey, but the white seems to have ruined it? I'll sort out something better when I can, but for now you'll have to suffer it in the name of being able to see any detail at all in these pictures.

Three other things of note are - the second mini in the top row is not a Night Elf or Dark Elf, but a slightly later C09 Elf Hero. Despite the slighter build, his equipment is very much in the style of this boxed set, so I hunted him down and added him to this unit. The middle mini in the middle row is another outsider - he's the Night Elf Lord from the Fantasy Tribes code FTE - Fantasy Evil Leaders. He was definitely designed alongside the others in this set, though. He may even be a resculpt of the mini seen second in the bottom row.

Finally, I was having such a bad time photographing this lot that I didn't even notice that the last member of the group has been hit by snowballs! Obviously a victim of my clumsiness during a big basing session, he's gone on the list of things to correct before the end of the project.

MOVING ALONG THEN...

On to more fun things. As you will have seen, I love to find excuses to expensively collect ancient miniatures and include them in my army projects. One of the cool things in the Warhammer Armies book is the proliferation of "Beast Master" options - in the Dark Elf army list these are called Whelp Masters and can be put in charge of ordinary warhounds or deadly Chaos hounds. But what miniatures could I find to use for those?

I scoured ebay to try to find enough of anything to make even a small unit. Oh boy, this got expensive! But I'm happy with the results. Again, I struggled to get good photos of the painted models, so I've included an unpainted picture of each mini so you can see what it looks like (thanks as ever to Stuff of Legends for these.) 

Here we go then, in reverse order of how cool I think they are:

Vicious Mastiffs (C22 Creatures)

Quite simply, a ruddy great dog. I put them on cavalry bases - the official base size in 3rd ed is 25 x 25 mm for warhounds and chaos hounds, so I could actually treat these as two per model. They are painted a very dark brown with squinty evil eyes and pointy teeth, not that the picture shows any of that.

Devil Dogs (Fiend Factory FF10)

These were a necessity, given that I've already leaned into the AD&D Drow skin colour. Devil Dogs are vicious arctic predators originally described in an unofficial adventure I think. They totally fit the them of evil snowy hunting beasts, so I had to have some. Frankly they may be some of the worst miniatures that I've willingly spent money on! They went out of production in early 1982 with the publication of the AD&D Fiend Folio - a somewhat mixed follow up to the Monster Manual with all sorts of odd critters in it - which meant that Citadel lost the rights to use the designs.

Obviously I painted them as per the original description - white with blue eyes. Trust me.

Chaos Hounds  (C22 Creatures)

I know some of you will be very much aware of how hard it is to collect these. The later slotta based ones are much more common, and some of them look almost identical, but you know the rules for this army: all pre-slotta, all Citadel. There were actually four different poses produced, but for months I though I would never get any four of them together, long after giving up on getting one of each. Eventually I got three of the two headed beast, and the one with the scorpion tail - the latter was badly mashed and was patiently rebuilt with pins in every leg.

For a colour scheme, the scorpion tail cries out for the bright Chaos colours of 1990, but I wanted to keep this early 80s, and keep it Dark Elf, avoiding the colours of the four Chaos Gods (which didn't really exist in 1984 anyway). I decided midnight blue was a good colour for the hounds - again, you'll have to trust me that's what the pictures show. Turns out there are actually bloody great big blue scorpions in the real world, so I based the tail on those. 

Weretigers in Beast Form (Fiend Factory FF70)

It's just a tiger, but the front paws are quite hand-like... hang on, something odd has happened to mine!

I cannot explain to you how excited I was when this idea hit me! Displacer Beasts! An iconic AD&D monster! The classic evil pack predators! A pretty simple conversion! I promise you, the whole army project would have been worth it for me just to make these.

Now, some people will tell you that Displacer Beasts have six legs. Descriptions seem to vary - the 2nd Ed D&D Monstrous Compendium has the six-legged variant on the front cover art, but a four-legged one on the page for the monster! As it happens, the pose doesn't lend itself to adding extra legs, so I left them with an adequate four each.

The fathomless black in this picture is actually a dark purplish grey colour, the shade colour for my Dark Elf skin in fact. 

Let's add up those totals:

Army List Additions:

Scores for April:          828 points  40 models

20 x Shadows    (Light Armour, Shield, Repeating Crossbow)          400 points

4 x Whelp Masters (Light Armour)                                                          60 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points   

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

Running Total:              3013 points    155 models   

Coming Next Time:

There's only Leader Month and Wild Card Month to come, so one of those. I'm leaning towards Leaders as that leaves me more time to dream up things to add to Wild Card month. Whichever it is, there's still plenty of fun things to look forward to