Kabal of the Snarling Wolf

May 2012
Okay, after much deliberation I have finally chosen my new army. I toyed with a few races but a combination of beautiful models and a codex that I can make varied and interesting lists with has tipped the balance towards the soul-stealing Dark Eldar.

I’m looking for a hybrid force with a nice mix of shooting and assault capability but not necessarily one that is going to tear up the tournament scene, as I rarely play in tournament games. The group I play with is a small bunch of friends so there’s no real need to go ultra competitive.

So, to get the ball rolling, I bought a box of Kabalite Warriors and got to work on a test model to come up with a colour scheme. Due to GW releasing their new paint range and, more importantly, getting rid of the old paints, I decided that I can’t risk running out of old paints on this new army as I can’t easily replace them and they are nowhere near an exact match for the new ones. Hence I took the decision to paint the Dark Eldar almost exclusively with the new paint range. This obviously involves more expense but at least I can be reasonably sure I won’t run out of a colour halfway through the project!

Here’s the test model.


My painting skills are nowhere near the level of some of you guys on here but I was reasonably happy with this and decided to go ahead with the rest of the unit. When painting the second warrior I realised that I forgot what paints I used on some parts of the test model so this time I made sure to make a note of them (brain like a sieve, me). I’ll add pictures of the completed squad once they’re done.

My next purchases were a Battleforce, 2 Venoms, 2 Ravagers, an Archon and Lelith Hesperax (because she’s a beautiful model even if her cost puts me off using her in a game – she can always be a Succubus or Hekatrix). My preliminary army list is designed around these purchases plus a few extra bits and pieces that I hope to add shortly.

HQ
Duke Sliscus - 150
Haemonculi - 235
Shattershard, 2 x Liquifier Gun, Scissorhand, Webway Portal

Elites
Kabalite Trueborn - 158
4 Trueborn, 3 Blasters, Venom with 2 x Splinter Cannon
Kabalite Trueborn - 158
4 Trueborn, 3 Blasters, Venom with 2 x Splinter Cannon

Troops
Kabalite Warriors - 171
9 Warriors, Raider with Shock Prow, Enhanced Aethersails, Splinter Racks and Flickerfield
Wyches - 170
10 Wyches, Haywire Grenades, 2 x Shardnet & Impaler, Hekatrix with Agoniser
Wracks – 30
3 Wracks

Fast Attack
Beastmasters – 120
2 Beastmasters, 8 Khymerae

Reavers – 78
3 Reavers, Heat Lance

Heavy Support
Ravager – 115
Flickerfield
Ravager – 115
Flickerfield

Points Total - 1500

The plan here would be for the Ravagers to stay in the back to take out vehicles. The Duke deploys with the Warriors in their raider to give them the 3+ poisoned shooting. The Haemonculi would each go with a Trueborn unit and these would all advance into midfield to deploy the webway portals asap and allow the rest of the army to come in from either the WWP or the table edge as required. The Wyches, Beasts and Reavers ideally want to arrive via the WWP asap so as to get into combat quickly. The Duke would then hopefully leave the warriors and join the Wyches for the assault. The beasts provide a bubblewrap for my shooting units as the 4++ save will hopefully give them some decent survivability. The Wracks are a cheap scoring unit to hang back in cover (or preferably out of LOS completely) and hold an objective. The sails and shock prow on the Raider are purely for laughs in the event that it suffers a Weapon Destroyed. It should be able to get an almighty ram attack in on something

As the army expands I will add another Battleforce to add more Reavers, Warriors and Wyches and then maybe some Harlequins and a Cronos. I know these are not necessarily considered competitive but I love the Harlequin models and the Cronos will hopefully be able to dish out a few pain tokens, both coming out of the Webway Portal.

To be continued...

Like the test model, the red and green spot colours really give it a kick that allows you to use the more subtle armour edge highlights. My only thought would be to perhaps tone down the green on the gun, when I looked at the photo my focus was more on the large expanse of green there than on the eye lenses of the helmet, perhaps just doing the gems on the gun green would help. Otherwise, superbly awesome and looking forward to seeing some more!

Thanks for your comments. I see what you mean about the green on the gun in that photo although it's not quite as startling in real life. Might try a wash of a slightly darker green to tone down the highlights a bit. Hoping to get the squad finished by the weekend and will put up some more shots then.

Your first Kabalite looks really good. I really like the muted purple highlights. I will agree with the green on the gun, I've tried that combination myself and found myself being rather dissatisfied with it. Usually I go with metalics only when painting weapons (they're my weak spot, really).

Really love the warrior but also have to be lame and agree with The_Burning_Eye that the green is too much as it draws away from the other parts. Still looks very good though and really your painting skills are fine. It looks really tidy(no smudges and such).

UPDATE – 6th June

The first Kabalite Warrior unit is now complete





And here are some close-ups of some of the indivduals:







I’ve left the guns as they are for the moment as the effect is much nicer ‘in the flesh’ (so to speak) than on the pictures and I quite like it. If it gets too much I will darken it down with a green wash. I decided that all splinter weapons would have the green effect on them and that any darklight weapons would have a similar effect in blue. I therefore decided to include a Dark Lance in the unit to test out the colour but I also intend to paint up a Splinter Cannon guy to chop and change and see which works best.



The warriors need something to ride in so next I moved onto their transport, a Raider. My normal modus operandi for vehicles is to partially assemble them and then paint them in sub-assemblies before finally gluing them together. Never having put a Dark Eldar vehicle together before I took some time cleaning all the individual parts up and doing a dry run to see how they all fit together and which bits can be glued without hampering the painting.



Once this was done I primed them with Chaos Black and got to work. Progress shots to follow soon.

Looking good.

Oh, and not to put you off because you may have more luck than me, but the first (and only) Raider I ever assembled almost got crushed out of frustration. You wouldn't think it, but it was a hell of a challenge to assemble. I needed a third arm...
Where'd that Haemonculus go?

Anyway, your Warriors have a nice scheme and are well executed, and I like the bright colours on the weapons, even though the Dark Lance is a bit gharish, but in a 'I'm gonna blow you up' kind of way.

Great work, I look forward to seeing your Raider assembled and painted.

The models are really beautifully painted. I´m looking forward to seeing a completed army in this colors.

There is only a very little critique on the bases. I don´t think they fit the superb painting. They look a bit unfinished. But other than that, great job.

Michael

Thanks for your comments. Much appreciated. The bases are done that way simply because of the battlefield we usually play on. It's a grey, urban tabletop and I wanted the bases to fit in with that. I usually do green bases with flock etc but they look a bit wierd on the battlefield

Well, then bring the pain to town!

Michael

^ And paint it red, with the blood of the lesser races

Very nicely done, I have a similar color scheme with a more solid purple, I'm always interested in seeing how different people choose to paint DE armor. It's very different to paint than the rounded plates of the SM and CWE that I've painted before.

Super nice color scheme. The purple and bright green just work together too good.
A tip for the raider, magnetize it. Really helpful for transporting and avoiding the pressure points (like in the sails) to break off with time.

Allandrel wrote:

It's very different to paint than the rounded plates of the SM

Agree. I just finished my first warriors team and it was quite an odyssey. Plus i dont have the best hand in the business. haha.

Ghosttrain23 wrote:

A tip for the raider, magnetize it. Really helpful for transporting and avoiding the pressure points (like in the sails) to break off with time.

Thanks for the advice. I realised that the mast was a bit of a risk when I put it together on a dry run. Fortunately I don't need to move the army around very often as it will live in my mate's garage once it's done. I'll probably just leave the mast off and attach it when I get to his house.

Or just get a deeper box to keep it in so that you don't have to take the mast off?

Oh nice! This is the first time I've seen splinter weapons painted this way and I have to say I really like it! It makes the model 'pop' without distracting me from the rest of your great paint job.

That base is crying out for a black rim though!

Update – 10th June

Raider is now finished. Bit of a learning curve on this one but I think I found out what is (hopefully) the best way to do these in future. Not entirely happy with the purple highlights but I experimented with a final pink line highlight on the edge of the purple and I just didn’t like it. I also found it extremely hard to get a nice even line so I eventually decided just to stick with a single colour (genestealer purple) and just shade it with druchii violet. Overall I think that this looks better than a wobbly and uneven line along the edge.





















I’ve not put any decoration on the Raider yet. The background that I came up with for my Kabal is based on Michael Moorcock’s Hawkmoon novels and, specifically, the Dark Empire of Granbretan. For those not familiar with the novels, Granbretan is a warped and twisted version of the British Empire whose military might is made up of a number of legions, known as Orders, each taking an animal as its motif. The legion that interested me was the one controlled by the principal villain in the novels, Baron Meliadus, Grand Constable of the Order of the Wolf. With this in mind I decided that Baron Meliadus would live again as Archon of the Kabal of the Snarling Wolf. I’m not sure yet whether he will be a normal Archon or if I will use the rules for Duke Sliscus, who I really want to include in my army, and simply rename him to fit my background.

Anyhoo, back to the point of all this... Once I decided that I would use the Kabal of the Snarling Wolf for my background I thought to myself that I would probably also be able to put some Space Wolf transfers on my vehicles and that this would be a cunning way to get a nice look to the models without having to do any freehand work. It was only later that I realised that the transfer sheets that come with Space Marine vehicles do not include the bloody Space Wolves. Grrrrrrr! So I now have to buy the Forge World transfers which are £9.50 a sheet! Double Grrrrrrr! Oh well, hopefully one sheet will be enough for all my vehicles. Thankfully I’m not aiming for Raider or Venom spam! On the plus side, I took a look at the Fenrisian Wolf models and realised that I could use them, with a suitable paint job, instead of Khymerae for my beast packs, and they would be considerably cheaper (£15 for 5 wolves vs £8.70 for 1 Khymerae!) so that would hopefully help recover the extra money spent on transfers.

Update – 20th June 2012

Slight delay here due to birth of our first child Had almost finished my next unit when the wife decided to go into labour. How inconvenient!! After a few days to get settled into a (vague) routine I was able to return to the Dark Eldar.

Next on the list is a unit of Trueborn. For my Blasterborn I initially intended to go for a slightly different paintjob. I realised however that I wanted to be able to use the models in both warrior and trueborn units without looking out of place so I decided that I’d paint them the same as the warriors, and just use the spiked helms to make them stand out a little bit. I also used the same blue for the blasters that I put on the warrior’s dark lance but I darkened it down a bit (it’s supposed to be darklight!).







For the extra blasters, I used shredders and blast pistols, converted as shown in this very helpful thread (thank you Dez!):

I also decided that Demagoge has a point about the bases and I’ve added a black wash to them, which I think does improve the appearance. Thank you Michael! I’ll be going back and doing the same to the warriors soon.

Congratulations on the baby.

I like the colours you are using, the highlights are great and I've always liked converted Blasters. Variety is wonderful!
It's nice to see the fangly bits on the top of the helmets done in a bone style in stead of a metallic. It's something that I don't think I've seen before.

Good job.

Update – 30th June

Painting has slowed to a crawl due to the baby changing our sleep patterns etc but have managed to finish a Venom for the Trueborn and some Haemonculi.






Not much to say about the Venom really as it is much the same as the Raider. Was quite quick to do overall.

For my Haemonculi I am using some Cryx Cephalyx Overlord figures from Warmachine as I think they look really nice and I prefer them to the GW models.






I wanted to make green the main colour on these guys to distinguish them from the Kabal units but I have kept some purple and red spot colours to keep the theme going across the whole army.

Next up I’m going to do my Archon, a Duke Sliscus conversion and possibly Lelith Hesperax, although 6e looks like it’s murdered Wyches in general so it might not even be worth it!!

I love the crisp highlights you're getting on your vehicles, and your haemonculi models are really cool, they look really 'surgical'.

Thanks. I saw the Cryx models a while ago and immediately thought they would be good as Haemonculi. They do come with mechanical grasping arms but they didn't look right and were incredibly fragile when attached so I decided to leave them off.

UPDATE – 6th July

Archon is now done. Pictures are not brilliant I’m afraid.




I painted him up pretty much the same as the warriors and trueborn, so as to fit in with the rest of his Kabal, who no doubt based their look on his in the first place. Armed him with the standard wargear that comes with the model although I will probably experiment a bit in game, as the new rules mean the old wargear combos might not be as effective.

Duke Sliscus and Lelith are on hold at the moment as I decided to do my Beastmaster unit instead, consisting of:

• 4 Beastmasters made from converted Hellions (just need to find some decent heads to use)
• 2 ground-based Razorwing Flocks made from the old metal Tyranid Ripper Swarm models
• 2 Clawed Fiends using (very, very) old Ambull models
• 5 Khymerae made from Fenrisian wolves

Might try a Baron conversion from the remaining Hellion in the box as I hear that he is very effective with Beasts now. I’m thinking the spear from the raider passengers, a spare cloak from (I think) some elf model and a mix of warrior, wych and hellion head and body.

UPDATE - 29th July

Beastmasters are finally here.












I'm happy with the beasts. I didn't want to convert my wolves as the background for my Kabal features wolves fairly heavily so I just wanted them to count as Khymerae but be unmistakably wolven. The old metal Rippers also do a fairly good job filling in for Razorwing flocks and I can well imagine them tearing their prey to shreds in the same way as the birds would.

My only issue is the Beastmasters themselves. Whilst I'm happy with the way they turned out, I'm only happy with them as Hellions rather than Beastmasters. I go a bit obsessed with making them look like they belong to a Wych Cult and ended up not really making them look like Beastmasters. I think I'm going to get some more and build a proper Hellion unit for them to join and I'm leaning towards Cold One Knights for replacement Beastmasters. That will have to wait a while though as my Ravagers are next on my list, to help get my army onto the table sooner rather than later.

UPDATE - 14th August

Next up is Baron Sathonyx, who will be accompanying my Beastmasters into battle. Added a few bits and bobs to his Skyboard and made it bright red to distinguish it from the boards of the Beastmasters.







The Baron himself is also mainly in red and I used the long spear from one of the Raider passengers and a spare Splinter Pistol arm from a warrior plus a cloak that I got from a Bitz site and which very handily fits pretty well onto the little protrusions on the back of the Dark Eldar torsos.











Nothing too fancy but enough to make him stand out from the other guys on skyboards.