Frank's Great Task, Building a Daemonic Legion of Slaanesh - February (Leader)

This month I worked on my leader model, which was already destined to be a Keeper of Secrets. In a daemonic legion battle, greater daemons are free of cost to the legion. However, a chaos power can only field up to it’s sacred number of greater daemons in the same place. Players are asked to agree on the number of greater daemons, but, if the players prefer, Slaves to Darkness has a chart to randomly generate the number. This chart can generate five greater daemons at most. Five is quite a lot, even with the amount of combinations available to the old Keeper sculpts. So, I tried to make each of my Keeper of Secrets models visually distinct from each other through the use of colors and conversions. 

This last Keeper was given the theme of ‘brawler’. I wanted him to look brutal and more mutated than his brothers. To this end, I gave him multiples of the one armored claw on the downward hanging upper arm bit. I wanted four of that claw to maximize the amount of armor on the model and because that claw looks 'stronger' than the others too me. It took a while, but I acquired three more of that upper arm piece. I then did a bit of snipping and affixed those claws to create a quartet of heavy armored claws with no human hands at all. I then took a spare tail/body piece from one of the many fiends I rejected after assembling this year's batch. I used this to give him a convincing scorpion tail mutation. I also used a very special eyepatch head. As Keeper of Secrets heads go, this is not one of my favorites, but this head is all that remains of the very first keeper my teenaged self managed to acquire and paint. I did not strip the original badly painted blue but rather used it as a primer coat and pressed on. I think it works well here, making a vicious model look even more brutal.

When I sat down to paint him, I had a couple basic considerations to keep in mind. First off, he was not going to be the same skin color as any of his brethren. That ruled out orange, pink, green, and yellow. Second, most if not all of his cloth would be yellow to tie him into the rest of the legion's models. I considered jet black for a skin tone, but in the end, I went with a deep purple. Mostly because I liked the effect that scheme had on a Fiend, I did a couple years ago. I went ahead and painted right over the original head. I like that this ties the model, and the legion back to the same effort I began so many many years ago.

This Keeper constitutes my effort for Leader month. Although greater daemons are free in a daemonic legion, they are valued at 900 points in the Realm of Chaos Slaves to Darkness army list. Finally, here he is posing with his brethren in the legion’s command group.

Astute readers may have noted that the sacred number of Slaanesh is six, and while I have maxed out the greater daemons the legion chart could require, I yet have only five here. The sixth slot is reserved for a special final model. I speak of the long lost unreleased Keeper of secrets model. It is pictured in Slaves to Darkness and can be known for the distinctive unarmored rounded crab claws, hanging downward, as well as the open hand not balled into a fist. If anyone reading this has such as treasure, please contact me, I would pay handsomely to acquire it.

[Pic courtesy of 'Stuff of Legends']