Deathrattle Gravelords on Parade: part 1

My Deathrattle-only Soulblight Gravelords army is the most complete "real army" in my collection. With the release of some new skeleton sculpts this year, I decided to revisit it and get it all painted up to finally enter the Armies on Parade competition. They're now complete, and I'll cover them over two posts (welcome to part 1)...

Amusingly, the new Deathrattle box set contains the same units as the previous box set that started this army off: 20 Grave Guard (now called Barrow Guard, which I like), 5 Black Knights (now Barrow Knights), and a mounted Wight King. This time they're brand new models, excellent sculpts, and I was eager to paint them up in my bronze colour scheme.

At the same time, I refreshed the models I'd already built. I can't believe it's been 4 years since I last touched this army (I showcased them in 2023, when I'd painted the Sons of Velmorn, who are an "unofficial" add-on). The spare parts from the new models were useful for tying the new style in with the older style models. And a mix of different eras of skeleton model presented an interesting dynamic for an "ancient civilization" undead army spanning multiple eras.

The Early Dynasty

The Vampire Counts era Grave Guard sculpts already looked outdated when the newer Deathrattle Skeletons arrived. At the time, I converted the Guard by giving them the lower halves of Empire Flagellant bodies - a kit that is an excellent source for ragged, long cloak-skirts in the style that used to feature on a lot of metal Warhammer models. This helped to push their pose more upright, and increased their height to match the new Deathrattle Skeletons.

I had previously replaced some of the Flagellant's feet poking out of the bottom of their skirts, but others I simply tried painting to look skeletal. Since I was re-basing them on to 28s, I took time to properly replace all remaining feet with either armoured feet or skeleton feet.

I also replaced their older Grave Guard weapons with the new glaives from the new Barrow Guard kit. These look cool and also help establish a continuity across the different styles.

Two standards in the same unit

Most importantly, each unit of Grave/Barrow Guard now serves as a personal retinue for a Wight Monarch character. I created a new Wight Queen model to accompany this unit, and matched her to their older style. This older Grave Guard style (winged helmets and long skirts) now represents the earlier era of the Dynasty that makes up my army.

Queen Idemshepesh 

The Wight Queen Idemshepesh is made from the spare torso that you get when you assemble the new mounted Wight King/Lord. Her lower half is one of the robed bodies from the Chaos Space Marines Dark Commune, which matches the Flagellant robes well. Her winged helmet is one I didn't use from the Grave Guard kit, with an extra embellishment cut from one of the new Barrow Guard banners (a mix of new and old bits helps establish continuity). She has a pointing hand, and an ornate shield from the Barrow Knights. I like the rare model with weapon in left hand and shield in right. Her obligatory Hero Rock is a fallen sculpture I've had left over from the Scinari Cathaller model that I was really wanting to use somewhere.

Barrow Guard champion

To match her crescent moon axe, her retinue's champion got a crescent halberd from one of the new Cathay kits. 

In the Barrow Guard's new rules, they have the keywords STANDARD BEARER 1/5 and MUSICIAN 1/5. This means that a unit of 10 can have two standards and two musicians. A must-take for a royal entourage, in my opinion.

Two musicians to herald the queen

I had already given the original musician a curved horn from the old goblins kit, but never really liked how this looked. I instead used one of the spare drums from the new Barrow Guard, and the second musician got a long trumpet converted from a Barrow Guard weapon with a bell from (I think) a new-ish Bretonnian kit. I was happy to find out later that Tutenkhamun was buried with trumpets that looked like this.

The second standard is a Barrow Guard banner pole with only the top pineapple-like ornament from the Barrow Knights. In combination with the first standard bearer carrying a hawk-in-flight, this gives the unit a great silhouette.

Hazurbanipal II 

Previously Hazurbanipal IV, and leader of the army, the older mounted Wight King is now undeniably in the style of the earlier dynasty, warranting a name change to Second Of His Name.

The new mounted Wight King profile uses a gigantic 80mm base size. I also replaced the bat wings on Haz's helmet. The previous conversion involved cutting off the original wings, adding a flat-topped helmet, then reattaching the wings. These tiny wing pieces never attached very well. A pair of wings from the new Barrow Knights are chunky enough to glue better.

Beyond this, I have Hazurbanipal a quick paint-over to refresh his scheme.

As a mounted character, Haz II's retinue is a unit of knights - in this case the older Vampire Counts era Black Knights that I had made before. They got a refresh, of course!

The Black Knights were the worst offender for flimsy weapons prone to "pinging off". The new Barrow Knights came with enough spare lances to give all of the Black Knights newer, chunkier lances, apart from the unit leader, whose lance is posed down in a charging position and is sturdy enough that way.

The unit leader got a new horse head - the spare from the new mounted Wight King kit. This involved some fiddly alignment to get the bridle into position. I transplanted the leader's previous horse head onto another Black Knight's horse, so that all but one in the unit now has an armoured head. I also finally carefully cut away the weird muscle that runs up the necks of some of the Black Knights' horses (my undead are very much of the dry and bony variety).

Deathrattle Skeletons

These two units are not strongly coded as of the earlier dynasty or the newer. As low-level henchmen, they really blend in with either. The champion of one unit has a bat-winged helm (from the old Black Knights), which would suggest early-dynasty, and the other has a pointed/stalked helm (from the new Barrow Knights) that would suggest later, but we can assume some things simply remained in style all dynasty long (bronze, for example, never went out of style).

When I first assembled these models, I didn't refer to the instructions. Big mistake! The legs are paired with specific torsos for stability. This time I bit the bullet and carefully separated the legs from the torsos and, referring to instructions online, paired them up correctly. I also reposed all of the arms to get as many contact points as possible between each part of the model (glued wherever they touch).

 

A few of the spears had "pinged off" too, naturally. I replaced some, and then when I didn't have suitable spares, I drilled and pinned the spears. This was some of the most precarious drilling I've done, and I've mentioned it here because I want to show off about it - it was truly very hard!

The spears champion also got some attention to his cloak. The original conversion used the torso from a Black Knight, and some leftover cloak bits to go underneath that. I replaced those leftovers with the appropriate bit from a new Barrow Guard - that kit is generous with spares.

All 20 of these models got a paint refresh too.

Paint refresh

I documented the original bronze paint scheme on Instagram. In short:

• Prime with dark brown
• Loosely stipple Vallejo pale blue (about 80-90% coverage)
• Loosely stipple Vallejo goblin green (about 80-90% coverage)
• Apply big splodges of Greenstuffworld verdegris liquid pigment (about 40% coverage)
• Filter layer of Vallejo dark green + matte medium (100% coverage)
• Then mix and apply brown metals 

When touching up the armour, I re-applied the filter layer of Vallejo dark green to strengthen the main colour in the colour scheme. I went stronger on applying brown metals on the raised areas, edges, and as scratches and wear. This brown metal is a mix of black, burnt umber, gold, and any other browns mixed by eye. You can vary the mixture across models.

I also improved the colour for cloth. Starting with a rough basecoat of Vallejo leather brown, I painted a few very thin coats of Army Painter skeleton bone (ironically, I didn't use this for the skeletons' bones). I applied the bone colour in short, horizontal textured strokes, to build up something like a worn cloth texture with the base colour slightly visible in places. And then edge highlights with the same bone colour.

The leather straps on the models were previously a non-commital mix of leather browns. This time I opted to over-paint them all in Vallejo refractive green, which is a strong green-brown colour. This helped shift the overall colour mood towards the primary green colour of the bronze.

I also hadn't found a good solution for the weapons previously. This time I painted all of the blades a flat black, representing the cursed metal of the Wight blades. And the weapon hafts and handles became a deep teal-green, whether they're sword hilts or spear shafts. This was an easy standard to stick to across the army.

Finally, I redid all of the bases. I sourced some real life sand from a nearby beach, and used this for the texture, painting over it in Vallejo olive green and leather brown, drybrushed with skeleton bone. 

This is where I'll leave off for now. The second post will deal with the Later Dynasty, where the newer models find their home. But before signing off, I'll mention something else:

A Battle 

I played a friendly 1000 points game of Age of Sigmar for the first time, using my Gravelords, around the time that I started this refresh (I had one additional new unit of Barrow Guard ready to go). My friend was playing Blades of Khorne, and neither of us is very familiar with playing Age of Sigmar so we were learning as we went along.

I think that the Gravelords' resurrection mechanics are undercosted at 1000 points, as I was able to tie up my opponent with nigh-on never-ending units, preventing him from getting enough Blood Tithe points to make the most of his army. It turned into a bit of a scrum, but overall we enjoyed it (I won).

My army list was as follows:

Wight Lord on Skeletal Steed (General)
10x Barrow Guard
10x Barrow Guard 

Necromancer
Wight King
5x Barrow Knights
10x Deathrattle Skeletons

My full collection is something around 1750 points, as you'll see in part 2...