Chaos Warriors | Dragons of Lancasm

My second set of five Chaos Warriors. These are all Citadel / Warhammer single piece plastic figures. I think these came from a friend who’d bought extra figures. If I’d bought them they should have been packs of four or six the same. Two distinct sculpts, but not too different from each other or the original Hero Quest figures.

The chaos warriors got gun-metal armour like the previous sets. Axe wielders (0737 Citadel, 1997) then got their armour lightened with silver, and silver highlights. The halberd wielders got green ink on their armour and gold highlights. I wanted to do something different with the shields, and went with a two colour diagonal pattern. That was still a bit plain so I thought about putting an image or something over the top. Digging through my bits and pieces turned up a sheet of decals marked “Dark Elf Shields” – and these three white symbols (and only three) were just the right size.

I’m very happy with the final result. This now gives me an assortment of nine chaos warriors, who will also do as general evil/undead warriors, or even magically animated suits of armour since there’s no visible flesh (assuming you excuse boots and gloves). After taking photo’s I (of course) realised that I’d missed something – the silver on the chainmail of the halberd warriors! That got remedied before I took them out for a spray of clear acyclic.

Next off the tray: Probably the Hero Quest “Gargoyle”. I’m thinking of doing him as a statue, with a little bit of modification so that he’s not so balrog-like.

I’ve just completed five figures from Hero Quest as my first project for 2021: four Chaos Warriors and the Chaos Sorcerer. I’ve got five more Chaos Warriors started, and I think this is only the beginning of a lengthy run of Warhammer figure painting.

These five figures were fun to paint. The main reasons I’ve enjoyed doing them, and will continue are exactly why I got just past halfway through my Space Marines last year and haven’t gone back to finish them. These are all one part plastic figures with simple poses, nothing complicated but they do have interesting armour design and quite a bit of detail. While I’m going to have similar painting themes with the three different sculpts of chaos warriors, I’m still enjoying this and thinking of ways of making each have a distinctive look. (The marines, while being three chapters, were essentially fifteen identical, very simple and boring, sculpts. Maybe I can pick at them in between my warhammer fantasy painting.)

I particularly like the Chaos Sorcerer. I started out with a darker flesh/grey skin colour, that I thought was too dark, and lightened it to the very pale grey it is now. (It looks a bit whiter in pictures than it really is.) His hands are a little too big… a lot of the painted versions online have these painted as gloves, but there’s a lot of texture on both sides that I wouldn’t expect if you wore gloves. This figure is a perfect figure for any undead caster in my D&D games. The base decoration was fun too – I’d cut some skulls off the helmets of some of my other chaos warriors and one remained in good condition. I thought it would be fun to use. It sits of a pile of small broken sea-shells.

The chaos warriors got mostly gun-metal armour, with a bit of red ink to tint it, then silver edge highlights. The armour can look fairly dark, or lighter and shiny, depending on the amount of lighting.

Background: Hero Quest (Milton Bradley & Games Workshop) came out in 1989. I had both this and Warhammer Quest (1995), while a friend had both of these, and Advanced Hero Quest, and most of the expansions for the games. A group of us played through the initial games, and spend years on and off with Warhammer Quest. Over the years I collected a lot of figures – frequently to have them for these games and be able to use them for D&D.