The Nighthaunt

Hey everybody!
For a few weeks now, I’ve been thinking about getting back into Age of Sigmar, and trying out some of the fantasy stuff that I’ve been studiously ignoring for a number of years, no matter how amazing the miniatures might be. It’s been tough, particularly this year as a number of awesome armies have been re-released for the system – I’m thinking of you, Daughters of Khaine! I had been selling off all of my fantasy stuff in order to focus more directly on 40k, but I’ve finally made the leap back into the system, and have been looking first at Beastmen, and now more properly at the beautiful models that comprise the Nighthaunt release!

I keep saying “getting back into it”, though I have only played the game twice, back when it first came out, with the Stormcast Eternals army that I had been building up for the latter half of 2015. I’m still very pleased with a lot of those models, and while I currently have no interest in adding to that force, I do think they’re a nice collection that I plan on keeping for the time being. At any rate, AoS has since been released in a second edition since I last visited the Mortal Realms, and I do feel a little bit of a fish out of water trying to keep up with the whole thing. Aside from the core rules growing in size from that 4-page pamphlet, there’s all these Allegiance Abilities and whatnot going on now, and it’s making me both excited and a bit confused…

Confused, because I haven’t yet bought the core rule book. But I have been watching the really useful series of videos on the Warhammer TV youtube channel that explains the basic premise of the game – which luckily doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since I was last involved!

The Soul Wars box that came out this summer follows the Dark Imperium release of last year for 40k, and includes a hardback copy of the main rulebook, which is a wonderful idea, but has made it so that I don’t want to buy it separately, as I plan to get that box for all of the Nighthaunt goodness within! So I’m currently having to wait to save up for the big box, and therefore don’t know how all of these new tricks work (except for what I’ve managed to glean from the internet, but moving on!)

The Nighthaunt had grabbed my attention a couple of times since the reveals started happening for Soul Wars. I love the ancient Greek vibe that Daughters of Khaine have, and the Idoneth Deepkin are such an incredible idea that I also want to get in on that action, but pretty much the entire Nighthaunt range has got me so fascinated that I’ve found them just too irresistible! I’m sure I’ll at some point get a force of allied elves going on, but for now, my focus is entirely on these spooky ghosts!

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve been involved with Nighthaunt miniatures, as I had built and painted the Spirit Hosts when they first came out during the End Times in 2014. While they were an interesting experiment with painting entirely with washes, I think I’ll be changing up my colour scheme from the purple and blue…

So far, I’ve treated myself to a couple of the new kits, which I’ve been steadily building up over the last few days to great success – success, in as much that I still love the models and can’t wait to get them properly painted up! Before I move onto painting, though, I think I should probably mention the building aspect of things, because these chaps are difficult to put together…

The easy-to-build stuff, fair enough, is easy enough to put together. Just two or three pieces that do push-fit together, but they’re better with a bit of glue to really seal those joins. The Dreadscythe Harridans are also quite straightforward to assemble, and are constructed so that, by and large, the joins are hidden by the spectral flowing “hair” of these creatures. The most complicated of all these models has got to be the Mortarch herself, Lady Olynder. I suppose it’s only natural for a character model to be a complex build, but my goodness, there were a couple of times where I almost came unstuck!! It’s my own fault, as I wasn’t entirely paying attention to the instructions, but I did make it unnecessarily complex to build her up, so could have done without that! I have built her in one piece, also, but this is because I want the whole thing to appear as sleek as I can get it, so I feel that I have to paint her while she’s fully-assembled. I’ll let you all know how that has turned out in a couple of weeks when, hopefully, she’s finished!

For paint scheme, I’ve decided to follow along largely with The War Gamer’s tutorial for the Briar Queen mini from the Nightvault set. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, then now is the time to change that! It’s a really nice looking scheme that (I’m hoping) shouldn’t take too long to follow, but still yield some really good results! There are a couple of things I want to change up though, so will be putting my own little twist on things anyway…

As an aside, the Nightvault set does look really awesome, and I’m reliably informed is a really good game, so I’m glad I picked that up the other day! So far, I’ve assembled all of the Thorns of the Briar Queen warband in a couple of hours, and they look fantastic. Much like with previous releases for Shadespire, GW has released warscrolls for the miniatures so that they can be used in the regular AoS game, so I’m pleased about that!!

The game does look really interesting, and while I’m not a competitive player by any means, that aspect does seem to have attracted more people to it than perhaps would otherwise have given it a go, meaning there are a lot of folks around who seem to be playing right now. Which can only be a good thing, right?

Hopefully they do warbands for Beastmen or Deepkin or Daughters of Khaine (or all three!) so I can have the perfect excuse to start on those armies with the same gusto I’ve launched myself into the Nighthaunt!!

While I’m not really into all of this Halloween nonsense, I am planning to get as much of this force painted up in time for the end of the month, as it would be really thematic to come here and show off some spectral paint jobs! So stay tuned for that!!