Let’s get to know the armies participating in our 10mm Kings of War (KoW) challenge! Today, Clement presents his Undeads list: The Skeletal Legions of Sahkdoss the Conqueror.
Check out our intro article if you want to know what this is all about.
The Concept: Skeletons. Lots of them.
The skeletal horde of Sahkdoss the conqueror is the vast army led by the famous conqueror Sahkdoss. He oversees his legions (technically hordes, but come on) from the height of his terrifying dragon: Baalrakoth. I imagine Sahkdoss as a maniac leader with a fragile ego: he does not let anyone in his army have any sort of mount. He sure does have one… but no one else is allowed one! I hope to create a striking contrast between the big dude on a badass dragon, and countless hordes of skeletons.
I went for an almost pure infantry list! It is not necessarily super optimized, but it’ll look good and hopefully be fun to play with and against. You can read more about the list itself in our “meet the armies” article.
The List & the Secret Battle Plan
So, what is my army list like?
First, of course, is Sahkdoss. I chose a Vampire Lord on Dragon, aka a big scary flyer, serving as “general”, and overall source of mayhem and terror. I gave him an item to make him extra murderous in combat, but it’s not entirely clear how useful he actually will be in terms of gaming. Sahkdoss is accompanied by two other heroes: a sort of punchy hero, who is also a source of inspiring (the Pharaoh) and a third, basic source of inspiring (the Revenant King).
Then comes the core of the army: three big hordes of skeletons, hopefully hard enough to chew through to occupy space long enough to win scenarios. If these are the anvil, the soul reaver infantry are the hammers. In theory, they should murder anything they touch.
To fly around and protect the core of my army, I have three troops of quite strong (defence 6!) Wraiths. These should be able to shield and protect the rest of the army long enough for my units to be where I want them. The deathpacks are pretty cheap, which is greate because they are nonetheless always useful: for scoring, as sacrifical/decoy units…
Overall this is not what I would call a super optimized competitive list, but it is not a terribly bad list either. It has all it needs to hopefully do reasonably well on the table… and, of course, it should look quite good once it’s fully built and painted.
How I Plan to Build and Paint the Army
I really appreciate the style of the Forest Dragon 10mm STL sculpts. I ended up supporting them on Patreon, and buying the full army packs for basically everything they ever created! My choice of Undeads as my first 10mm Kings of War army is directly linked to how much I enjoy the Forest Dragon Sculpts. Of couse, these models were initially designed for Warmaster, and that has some sort of an impact on list building, according to what models are available.
I have 3D printed enough of these with my Elegoo Mars 2 to make a nice little army. It is simply incredible how much this technology has progressed in the recent years. With well designed files (and Forest Dragon stuff is absolutely well designed indeed), I can more or less click and print without any particular issues: all default settings give a great success rate, and amazing result quality. Nowadays, there are also several options to purchase these models pre-printed. One such example with amazing range and quality is Excellent Miniatures.
For the bases, I will use 2mm lasercut MDF. I don’t have a multi-basing theme and instead want to pack the bases as much as possible to really give an overwhelming impression of numbers. So, my skeleton hordes end up being not Full Model Count, but Above Model Count! In fact, there are 75 skeletons per horde in my army instead of the standard 40! I find the overall impression of skeletal legions really satisfying, so mission accomplished here.
For painting, I plan to use white over black zenithal and contrast paints on most/all of these models, to go through all the infantry fast. I am a firm believer of “better finished than perfect”, which when you aim to create a large army for a rank and file gaming system is a good survival strategy.
Famous last words
I thought I would certainly start hating myself at some point between skeleton #100 and #120. There are more than 200 models in that list… but it actually went pretty well and pretty fast. Well, at least for some models, it was extremely fast! The wraiths are just one contrast paint over zenithal, you can’t be easier to paint than that. Yet they look quite good!
The soul reaver infantry have been the most painful to paint, since I was not too sure about how to paint them, nor super happy with how they looked as work in progress… They stayed in that state for quite some time… Also, the sharp eyes among you might see some wrong scale skeletons on the side of that last picture… it might be that I ended up a bit too enthusiastic about the Sahkdoss legions, and went on to also buy models to create it in 28mm.
The whole army is now almost finished, and I even used it already for one of our Kings of War gaming days. That’s a story for another time, as well as how to make actual terrain to play at this smaller scale. Suffice to say: it was even better than I expected, and I am already thinking about my next 10mm Kings of War army…
Now I guess all I have left to do is gather enough willpower to finalize the paintjob on these soulreavers!
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