Blood And Pestilence

Ok, so it's official, I'm jumping back on the Warriors of Chaos Bandwagon... Well, I'm not really bandwagon jumping if I already have an army of them, right?? I'm just taking an opportune moment to restart it, I guess...

Nazrath the Defiled - Sorcerer of Nurgle

I say that I already have an army of Warriors of Chaos; that might be an exaggeration. In truth, I have Tamurkhan on his Toad Dragon, Bubebolos, which is held together with bolts, screws and some ingenious magnetism (I won't lie, I got a good friend of mine to help with it as he's the resident Big Mek), and a couple of units of Chaos Warriors, and a Sorcerer of Nurgle. The Sorcerer and one unit Champion are even painted!

How did this start and not get anything done? Well, it's a tale of epic war and the woe it brings... Ironically enough, without a single battle being fought.

Back in 2011, I was working as a humble Blue Shirt in GW Kingston, and I was tasked with creating and running a Warhammer Tournament that would culminate in a trip up to Warhammer World for a mini tournament. I even still have the campaign blog to prove it! The trouble was, I put all of this onto my own shoulders, ran all of the events and even purchased Tamurkhan himself in order to spearhead it all!

I succesfully painted the Sorcerer, unit champion and most of Tamurkhan, before me covering various other GW stores resulted in another staff member taking the campaign up to Warhammer World and running the event in my absence. I was not best pleased. I'd spent a lot of time and effort, didn't get to go, and didn't get to play a single game with the army. Ah well, such is the tide of fate. I got over it.

However, the army didn't recover quite so well. Beyond those three models, I never really got anywhere. I found myself drawn back to my beloved Beastmen for a while, and then the Vampire Counts book hit in January and I was hooked on my old Vampire Army again (now led properly by a Strigoi Ghoul King! Huzzah!) and poor old Nazrath the Defiled, Vazric the Ever-oozing and the rest of the Nurgle Chaos Army sat in the corner, locked in a case, slowly gathering dust, forgotten.

Vazric the Ever Oozing

In July, with the release of the book "Valkia the Bloody" by Sarah Cawkwell (Which I raved nigh endlessly about across Twitter and the real world - I still rate it the best damn Warhammer book I've read!) I set about converting my own Valkia model, which I showed a couple of nights ago in a blog entry, and for a few days, also painted up an Exalted Champion of Khorne before, once again, slipping into another project.

It's only recently that I've been looking back at my old models that I was driven to possibly start up this army again. The release of the new Skullcrushers of Khorne, the Chaos Warshrine and, of course, the astonishingly-similar-to-my-July-conversion Valkia the Bloody, I have seriously considered starting the army back up properly.

However, this leads me to a conundrum.

I've always really loved Valkia's backstory in the WoC Army Book, and when Sarah Cawkwell wrote "Valkia the Bloody" I practically exploded with glee - an act I was VERY happy to be justified on! This means I really want to do a Valkia themed army as she leads her warhost of Khorne across the Chaos Wastes on a grand slaughter. I picture the army on snowy bases, every unit being Khornate and probably having some daemons as allies or unit fillers. Loads of gore, skulls and viscera.

On the other hand, I really feel like Nazrath and Vazric deserve an army behind them too. I had such a lot of fun working on them and still view both of them as some of my best painting work to date. I like the idea of a Tamurkhan themed army (and hopefully I'd get to use the model!), with Nazrath being one of the warlords following his inexorable march into the Empire, but they're all on swampy bases to really display that disgusting, pestilent and feculant Nurgle theme.

This means the two army ideas clash utterly. Valkia and Tamurkhan are different eras; the armies are on different bases, and I really like the idea of single-god armies.

*sigh*

My converted Valkia the Bloody

It appears that both Valkia, and Nazrath and Vazric, are doomed to stand before only a handful of painted models... for the near future at least.

But maybe that's for the best. After all, I still need to finish painting my 2400 Beastmen list, and by only doing a handful of support models, I can really go to town on them.
Perhaps by only working on my Warriors of Chaos intermittently, I will continue to nurture that love for them, and can really lavish the attention I want on the models. Ultimately, with time, the Horde will amass, and perhaps one day, the grounds of the Old World will shake and tremble under the tread of Tamurkhan's noisome mount, or be darkened and cast into shadow beneath Valkia's terrible wings.

Until that day, I think I'll just really enjoy building and painting some awesome miniatures at my own pace.