Welcome to part 2, and the completion of the Host of Hazurbanipal IV! In part 1, I focused on the earlier part of the dynasty. The monarchs of that time are identifiable by their winged helmets and long robes. Over time, these would fall out of fashion - chainmail would be replaced with round scale mail, and pointed or stalked helmets would become the norm. Let's look at the later dynasty, which contains mostly new models...
The Later Dynasty
The new Barrow Guard models really are great - I had real fun putting them together. They're a big step up from the Vampire Counts era Grave Guard, and even easier to assemble than the relatively new Deathrattle Skeletons (I see Games Workshop has already remastered that kit to be a little more forgiving when assembling). But you only get five sculpts in the box, with arms intended to go with each. These bodies pull double duty as musicians, champions (who gets a different front half) and standard bearers, so that removes three duplicates, but you will notice repeats in a bigger unit. Unless you trim the arm fittings flat and swap arms around (I did this of course). Here's who they're bodyguarding:
Hazurbanipal III
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| A new shield for Hazurbanipal III |
You might recognise this Wight Monarch - I built him ages ago from a Stormcast body. As with all of the older models he got some TLC. I fully replaced both hands with skeleton ones (keeping the armoured Stormcast hands felt like a cop-out). To fully skeletonise him, I cut out any signs of the Stormcast's fabric clothing worn under the armour (visible at places like the back of the knee join). His mace was a little flimsy so I drilled and replaced the haft with some brass rod.
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| Bones visible through gaps in the armour |
Finally, I replaced his shield. On the original shield, I had wanted to suggest a TLV mirror, but without the details or sculpting confidence to make that work I'd instead used putty to make it look like beaten metal. Thanks to the release of the Old World Cathay kits, I sourced as octagonal infantry shield that had a good geometric pattern, and cut out a hole in a round Space Wolves Wulfen shield to fit the smaller shield inside. I also added micro-beads around the rim. It's much closer to what I wanted now.
Haz III also gets a Barrow Guard retinue, and this is the first of the new Deathrattle kits to show off. This retinue is armed with swords and shields, to match with Hazurbanipal III's prominent mace and shield. Combined with his massive height, he has a martial aspect among the army's Wight Monarchs.
To customise the Barrow Guard, I cut away the bat wings on the helmet (they're so "early dynasty"), and trimmed the central spike down to just above the point where it has a small ring of spurs. I added micro-beads to all the helmets. I'm not a fan of the runes on the shields (they feel like a world-building element that's competing with my army's own style of world-building), so I filled these in with putty.
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| The champion's helmet has a cool shape when the wings and plume are cut away. |
I also gave them a bird standard to match the army's running theme of bronze animal effigies as unit standards. For this one, I had a spare crow from the Mega Gargant kit. However its pose was too natural, to the point that it looked like a real crow hunched on a perch. I carefully cut away its feet and head to reposition them so that it's in an upright position like the Deathrattle Skeletons' banner poles.
Avrashadru
A distinctive returning model, Avrashadru is the army's Necromancer (i.e. a skeleton wizard). He got the requisite paint refresh, and a little smoothing of some joins.
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| ABRACADABRA |
Most importantly, I repainted his cloak. All of the fabric in the army is shifting towards a bleached yellow-white, so his formerly black cloak became parchment-yellow. Since he's a key player in the army's lore, and his magic is associated with geometry and numerology, I gave him a magical-looking pattern on his cloak. It's inspired by the traditional Warhammer checker pattern, but narrower and irregular, with triangles. The pattern picks out a large equilateral triangle right in the middle, and also might suggest some sort of ancient writing form like cuneiform.
Avrashadru's Barrow Guard retinue got the kit's second weapon option - double-handed glaives. The default champion pose is standing with a great mace in one hand and pointing with the other. I converted it to be raising the mace in both hands.
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| Avrashadru's retinue's command group |
When it came to the banner, by this point my bits box was running out of birds! Instead I found a coatl (a winged serpent) from among some plastic Seraphon bits I had, and decided that it was an appropriately magical symbol to mark out this sorceror's retinue. The long feathered tail also matches the style of Hazurbanipal II's crane standard.
The Lich Hand
I wasn't too hot on the Endless Spells kit, and hadn't intended to include any manifestations in this army. Then I really thought about it and realised a giant skeleton hand would be cool as hell. Thinking of High Lord Wolnir from Dark Souls 3, a giant hand is a good way to get a "big skeleton" into the army without having to kitbash something like a "counts-as" giant monster. Crucially, I could also give it a ton of bronze jewellery to show off some different types of bronze artefacts you don't get to see on the smaller models.
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| Note that the bracelets are the only part touching the ground - the fingers don't |
The kit turned out to be truly massive. I left off the gigantic swirling energy portal, and instead lifted the hand by its dangling bracelets (pinned to the hand and the base multiple times from multiple angles). I reposed the fingers to a relaxed position. The many rings and bangles were made from pieces from the Empire Hurricanum and some armour pieces from the Chaos Legionnaries, as well as plasticard, microbeads and green stuff. The really big octagonal rings on its index finger are cross-sections cut from the pillar used as a hammer-head by King Brodd the Mega Gargant.
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| It's a very, very big hand |
I painted it using the usual recipe. Because my recipe for painting bone looks colder at that size, I also glazed over it in Leather Brown to bring it towards a warmer yellow colour. The magical fire is painted to match that on Avrashadru's staff.
Hazurbanipal IV
The erstwhile leader of the army, this new Haz IV is the new Barrow King model built in its Barrow Lord configuration, a model which I adore. The Barrow Lord version has an incredible horse helm with round eye armour, and nice matching plumes on horse and rider. I love it. As a brand new kit, it has all the stylistic markings of a member of the later dynasty, so this one gets promoted to be the most recent monarch (IV), replacing the older mounted Wight King model (who is now Hazurbanipal II). This kit is so nice I didn't do any conversion, other than leaving off a few extraneous detail parts. I considered swapping out his shield, but finally decided to leave him with his same hexagonal rune-marked shield as Idemshepesh II. Perhaps they are a special sort of curse-shield.
A quick note while I'm on the subject of Kings and Queens and regnal numbers: The models are officially called Wight Kings and Lords, but in real life skeletons are notoriously difficult for archaeologists to correctly gender without further identifying information like an accompanying historical record. And that's dead skeletons that aren't actively trying to kill you. I wanted to explicitly include a Wight Queen (Idemshepesh II) but really all of these ancient Wight Monarch characters are just as likely to be queens as kings. In the ancient language of this dynasty, they didn't gender the term "Monarch", and the revenant skeletons are old enough that they can't bother to remember (their life as a non-skeleton was merely a prologue to their very long undead skeleton experience).
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| King? Queen? II or IV? Archaeologists aren't sure |
As for ordinals, the Monarch that was Hazurbanipal IV has been revised to Hazurbanipal II in order to accommodate the style difference between the earlier and later dynasties, and a new Hazurbanipal IV has been recognised. In real life archaeology, ancient regnal chronologies are sometimes ambiguous! Why am I so set on the 4th being the most recent? Well I liked the lore I came up with about the entire host being interred for 4,444 years (four fours), and the chief monarch behind this being the 4th. I think it fits Avrashadru's numero-magical stylings.
Back to the monarch that might be King Hazurbanipal IV: he of course has a retinue of the new Barrow Knights. These models are fantastic too. The older sculpts suffered from pulling double duty as ghostly Hexwraiths. The new sculpts are free to go all-in on the new Deathrattle aesthetic. The only changes I made to these involved removing some details like the helmet wings and horns (so that the simpler helmets match the stalked helm design of the infantry) on both the rider and the horse; and also using micro-beads to add detailing.
I added a grid of micro-beads to the leader's horse armour, and the trumpet's bell is surrounded by micro-beads. The musician is also supposed to be built with a bare head, but I replaced this with a helmeted one (harder than it sounds, considering how the kit is constructed). Finally, I replaced their spiky shields with kite shields from the Barrow Guard.
Their banner is an attempt to construct something bronze-age-looking from many spare parts. The majority of the parts are cut from larger pieces in the Hurricanum/Luminark kit, and there's a few small weapon pommels and things connecting the pieces.
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I'll close out with a warning I forgot to post about when I mentioned basing in the previous post: When I originally based the models, I used bicarbonate of soda to add some fine texture, because it was something I had on hand and I'd seen other modelmakers use it. When I returned to the models after four years, the bicarb had performed a weird chemical reaction, and had seeped through the base paint and turned into a white, fluffy, even finer powder. This is something I'd seen the excellent David Soper post about before, and I had been hoping he'd experienced a rare one-off chemical reaction that my models would escape - of course they didn't. So: don't use bicarbonate of soda for texture!
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OK, with that PSA out of the way, that wraps up my Deathrattle Gravelords for now. I have a few more ideas to add to this force in future, inspired by the Chinese ritual bronzeware that first inspired this project, and also thinking about the potential of even earlier eras of the dynasty. There's even a possibility of bringing it up to a full 2000 points.
Thanks for reading!
Hek
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