It’s this last – the forces of Chaos – that I consider to be my spiritual home. Codex Chaos for second edition 40K was the big release when I started out in the hobby; Codex Cityfight for third was, in a quiet sort of way, one of the best things to ever happen to the game. Both featured a heavily converted Night Lords army and that Night Lords army has been living rent free in my head for decades.
At secondary school I had a modest collection in which plastic Berzerkers did most of the heavy lifting – but the handful of support-fire bolter-bois and associated Predator were all Night Lords. Later, when I had my first beer money job, I was temporarily distracted by Word Bearers and ended up doing my formative 40K-playing with those. When 30K came along, inspired by those Aaron Dembski-Bowden books that have done a lot for the reputation of the Eighth Legion, I decided to go back to my roots.
I’d originally planned to do a 30K army and a 40K army that mirrored it – the same brigade of traitors, shown ten thousand years down the line. Then things got… complicated. Due to life circumstances, I had to drop the Horus Heresy end of the project altogether, and the grimdark-future-future part took a long time to get going. My “eighth for eighth” project would only lurch toward done in the middle of ninth edition, and I’d end up looking backwards to fourth edition to inform the overall shape of things, spurred on by a combination of bargains from the closed-down Abergavenny Model Shop, skill trades with my buddy Jess (I proofread most of her BA degree work and in return, got her Chaos Space Marines she’d not touched in ten years), and eBay wrangling.
The first two line infantry squads. When I inherited Jess' models, they were quite badly broken up, in a state somewhere between "primed black" and "lavishly basecoated with orange craft paint". However, I did have a bunch of resin bits I'd acquired with the intent of using them on 30K models, and those found a new purpose here, supplemented by an Iron Hands upgrade pack and a few other odds and sods from the depths of the bit box. I'm still most pleased with these: I put a lot of effort into these ten figures who were, originally, just going to be a Kill Team project in their own right.
Then things escalated. The prospect of actually playing 40K again loomed large on the horizon, and I wanted an additional Troops choice; effectively a big squad with two plasma guns and a small squad with close combat weapons, using the last of Jess' models. These didn't need many extra bits, but did need a paint stripping that they did not, dear reader, actually receive. They'll do. They're fine, as long as you don't look too closely at their actual bodies.
Jess' haul also contained some plastic Possessed. Now, as a kit in their own right, I despise these leering cartoon blobs, but as a source of bits for more controlled mutative aesthetics on characters, icon bearers and so on, they're flippin' marvellous. Their bodies, if painted in suitably muted colours, were well placed to receive these resin arms, helmets and shoulder pads, creating a hefty but not overcooked unit of elite daemon-touched hard cases. They are the least photogenic models in the collection, but they do look okay up close.
Finally, there was this Chaos Lord. He was originally built as a Sorcerer, but I never liked the paint job on him - he'd come out much too dark and boring, over straight black primer - and while I was stripping him for another go, I managed to lose both of his arms. Opportunity knocked and I rebuilt him as a Chaos Lord with the rather cool and good twin lightning claws option, swapping his trophy racks around and adding the cloak and generally having another go, but properly. I don't think I'm missing much as psychic powers aren't particularly interesting in Classichammer, with the glaring exception of Lash of Submission anyway. And if I do want psychic powers, I have another vehicle for delivering them...
One Daemon Prince. The army was originally half-heartedly aimed at seventh edition 40K, in which your Chaos Lord had the opportunity to transform into one of these things; as such, I built the Prince to reflect the look and wargear options on my sixth edition Dark Vengeance Chaos Lord, who was originally going to be in charge of this whole farrago. The result is a Prince without the "why are these even an option you will always take them" wings, and a definitely Nurgly aesthetic that's come with using the two straight-up horns.
These joined the crew at the same time. Plaguebearers are not a consistent feature of the Night Lords repertoire: at times, the Eighth Legion has been locked into strict and prescriptive ideas of canonicity or it's just been a colourscheme for stealthy scary Spiky Space Marines. This is definitely my favourite of the two approaches. Anyway, in seventh there was a rule called "Shrouded" on Nurgle Daemons, and another called "Stealth" and those stacked with "Night Fighting" and that was all stuff the Night Lords could play around with, and so they seemed like a natural fit. I had the option of adding Bloodletters too but I passed on those at the time. Nowadays I generally favour the purity of the One Core Chaos Space Marine list, leavened into a particular Legion's vibe by choice instead of straitjacketed into it by the will of Pete Haines and the dead weight of Index Astartes articles, and so having some Lesser Daemons around is on the whole a good thing.
I added these Chaos Terminators when the current (ninth) edition Codex Chaos Space Marines was looming on the horizon and the prospect of sunsetting Classichammer kits loomed large. I've often found Terminators a bit silly, with the horribly distorted anatomies implied by their armour's stance and proportions and all, but these were a total delight to put together and paint. I've drabbed them down a bit with an ink wash since then as they were incongrously shiny among my other Marines, but I'm still very pleased with them.
By contrast, these horrible things gave me the worst time I've had painting models all year. Bikes are just large enough for all the pitfalls of painting vehicles with a brush and just small enough that you think you can get away with it and you totally won't need an airbrush (which is good, because I'm not getting one - airbrushes, 'proper' photography and 3D printing are time and money traps, second hobbies that come at you like jumping spiders, and I can't afford that sort of thing). They have a pre-2000s level of drip and trim on them - just enough to be annoying, not enough to look good. I ran out of base paints while I was doing them. Four will just have to do. I only had these because Jess gave me ONE Biker and ONE Biker is good for nothing except a Doomrider conversion. I wish I'd just built a Doomrider conversion.
I coveted these Obliterators when they were originally released, but large metal models were outside the remit of my beer money weekend job as a sixth former, so I had to make do with kitbashing plastic Terminators and passing the spares on to loyalist players to defer my expenses further. Earlier this year I scored a job lot of three resin and five metal Obliterators - these are the resin ones. Their previous owner had done cruel and careless things to them in the name of "personalisation", and I had to spend more time snapping off extra components and resculpting thighs than I'd have liked. Fortunately, thanks to having done those previous conversions, freaky stretchy Chaos skin is one of the few things I actually know how to sculpt, and now I have three decent looking Obliterators and one decent looking pretence of Heavy Support.
The army has seen one battle deployment already, with a night raid on Aquae Sulis IV (that's Bath, to those of you who care about real places in the UK). They were due to join me at the Gothic War narrative weekender in Daventry, first weekend of 2023, but warp storms clouded my path out of the Eye (rail strikes meant there were literally no trains running from Wales to England for three days).
For now, the Sixty-Fourth Company of the Eighth Legion lurk in my fancy new display cabinet. Waiting on the sunset. Watching for the night.
Ave Dominus Nox, an' that.
