The Blood Kraken Reavers

It's been a while, but one of my hobby resolutions for 2023 is to get back into regular blogging, so here goes!

Catching up

Since I last updated this blog about 18 months ago, I've:

• finished my Sons of Behemat army
• finished my Ossiarch Bonereaper army
• painted a Slaves to Darkness army (see below for more details!)
• painted a decent chunk of a Kruleboyz army
• started a podcast. Check out the latest episode at https://tinyplasticpeople.com/podcast/three-and-two-episode-8-bbb/

I'm going to skip over most of this, and focus on the hobby I'm most excited about right now, which is my new Slaves to Darkness army, the Blood Kraken Reavers.

Concept

The idea behind my Slaves to Darkness force is that they used be on the side of Sigmar, fighting for the city of Anvilguard. They were away from the city when it fell to Morathi and became Har Kuron, but rather than accepting that they joined the forces of the resistance, hoping to take back the city.

They weren't strong enough to strike at Har Kuron itself, so instead they sought to weaken Morathi by taking on the Daughters of Khaine elsewhere whenever they saw an opportunity, and attacking any Dawnbringer crusades originating from Har Kuron, or the outpost cities they founded. Their desire for revenge was strong, and they showed no mercy in eradicating any Har Kuron aligned forces.

Gradually the dream of retaking Anvilguard faded, and vengeance for what they had lost became their focus. They felt abandoned by Sigmar when he and his forces did little to oppose Morathi, and their allegiance shifted to darker forces. Now the Blood Kraken Reavers pillage the outposts of Har Kuron in the name of the Blood God.

Building and painting the army

The symbol of my army is the blood kraken, which is a simplified version of the Anvilguard heraldry that I thought was within my freehand capabilities. It appears on all the shields and banners across the army, and is their main unifying symbol. One of the main challenges I faced with the army was having to shave off patterns from a lot of the shields to free up space for freehand: I started with a lengthy process for doing this that involved sanding them down and then using gloss varnish to get a smooth finish, but I've now decided that the best approach is shave off the pattern very carefully with a modelling knife and not worry too much if I don't get it completely flat.

I've added a few conversions to help sell the theme of the army: my chaos warshrine is based on a desecrated Cauldron of Blood, and my chaos sorcerer lord is converted from a Black Ark Fleetmaster. 

What next?

I've got a reasonable 2000 point army painted up, so now I want to start getting some games in with them and learning how to use them on the tabletop. I have a few bits I want to add to finish off the competitive opart of the army: some more small heroes to use as Galletian Champions for the new GHB season, Eternus, and a few more chaos warriors. I might also get some Untamed Beasts, as they're probably the most useful of the warcry warbands.

Then I want to do a few more narrative units: I'm going to try to kitbash some chaos marauders from some of the dark elf Cities of Sigmar models, and I want to chaosify a hydra so that I can run it as a mutalith vortex beast. 

I also need to polish up my army's lore to figure out exactly how Be'Lakor fits into it, so that he has a reason to be there beyond being a very nice model that I was very keen to paint!

I currently have one tournament and one narrative event lined up to take them to, so I'll see how those go (and hopefully blog about them if I can keep up the blogging momentum).