Dark Eldar Showcase: Scary Monsters
The new Dark Eldar are out with some shiny new plastic kits, a new codex and a lot of new unit options, many of which don’t have models. I’ve always loved the conversion aspect of the hobby and have been cooking up fiendish ideas to fill in the gaps in the codex and customise my models.
Here are some of my Haemonculi troops:
Haemonculus
The new Rakarth miniature looks great, but I wanted a regular Haemonculus to go with him. This guy was converted from parts from the WFB vampire counts ghoul and corpse cart kits plus Fabius Bile’s Chirurogen and a green stuff mask (the mask was easy to sculpt and surprisingly important to get that creepy Dark Eldar look).
I’m painting all my army in the style of the new mandrakes (i.e. black skin, glowy green bits and white hair (although all my haemonculi forces are bald). I’m also using wraithbone instead of any metallics.
Wracks
The wracks are basically a third troops choice in the new dark eldar book, requiring only a haemonculus (or ancient) to move them into the troops category and provide a bit of extra toughness when compared to the fragile other choices.
They’re mostly made from ghouls and skaven plague monks (empire flagellants also probably work better, but I already had some of the skaven bodies kicking around) with a scattering of other parts from my bits box. Again, the green stuff masks really help their look.
Obviously there are more models to add, including liquifier guns, which I’m still working on. I’m also tempted to do a squad with some Tau/Kroot parts to reflect the story in the codex.
Grotesques
The new Island of Blood rat ogres make great grotesques (other obvious choice is chaos spawn). The only conversion here was to snip off the tails and add ghoul heads with a bit of green stuff to blend at the neck. Using smaller heads helps emphasise their misshapen form. I was too lazy to trim off the fur so just painted it as creepy green fire.
Wrack Raider
This raider is a fairly elaborate conversion for transporting my wracks around. I’m not a huge fan of the standard boat design so I shifted the sails to the side of the raider (the aethersail cells are one of the few bits where I used metallics). I also added a smoking power core and a grotesque gunner with bits from the screaming bell kit. Finally, I used the corpse cart’s collection of dead bodies to bulk out the interior so that it looks like a Dark Eldar garbage truck collecting parts/unfortunate survivors for the haemonculi’s experiments.
The new flying stand ball joint doesn’t react that well to changes in the model’s centre of gravity so I also used the screaming bell chain to stop it rolling forward when nudged on the battlefield. Such a shame it’s likely to be wasted by the end of the first turn.
Cronos Parasite Engine
The Cronos is one of my favourite new units in the codex and is a great way to generate and distribute pain tokens as well as bring the ‘pain’ to MEQ forces with its AP3 template weaponry.
I wanted to sort of follow the look of the FW brass scorpion. Main parts for this are reaver jet bike bits, mawloc legs and a few other bits from the eldar and ork ranges. The head is from the apocalypse command frame (I’ve been looking for a suitable project for this nifty little part for a while).
So there you have it, the first members of my fledgling dark eldar force “Brides of Frankenstein” (I need some more wyches for that to make sense).
