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Chapter 1: Dark Elves in Space Greetings, fellow slavers. I'm Ancient Terror, resident... ancient terror. Nice to meet you. That... didn't flow as well as I'd hoped. I have wanted to complete a Dark Eldar army since their 5th edition revamp. But before I got so far as to paint more than a test model or two, a number of life circumstances led to me quitting the hobby, getting rid of all my hobby things in the process (why, past self, whyyyy?) and forgetting about 40k for a few years. I've been back at it since last summer, but since I just had a daughter last March and my financial situation hasn't been the best, I've been quite busy. Things are looking up now, so I'm dedicating more time (and money) to 40k again. This weekend I'm finally ready to restart my dream project. I've got a Start Collecting! Dark Eldar box arriving at my local store, and my fingers are already tingling with anticipation.* *Or dehydration The fluff for my army isn't that well sorted yet. I have some vague ideas, but I'm still working on them. Hence the thread title. What I do know to a fairly precise degree is how I want my army to look, and what sorts of units I want in it. I could also use some help with some list building, but more on that later. The Evil Space Fae Aesthetic The thing I love about the Eldar is the supremely otherworldly quality of their design. The elegant, segmented armour; the clean, vibrant colours; the eerie witchlight; the badass runes. The thing I love about the Dark Eldar is that it's all this, but dark, depraved and full of spikes. My working plan for a colour scheme, which may not survive contact with a test model: I'll paint the armour and hulls black, starting with something like P3 Coal Black or Citadel Dark Reaper, and working up to a bluish grey highlight tone. The main secondary colour will be dark green, used for things like cloth, sails and flags. Together, I want these two colours to look clean and sharp - getting at the crispy part of the Eldar aesthetic, as well as the sinister aspect of the Dark Eldar. Black and green are quite boring on their own, though. For spot colours, I'll use purple or violet for things like eye lenses, ammo canisters etc., to produce that eerie glow I was talking about earlier. This gets to the vibrancy and the creepy witchlight part of the Eldar; a sort of eerie-but-also-shiny feel. I'll also use crimson red as a secondary spot colour, but more sparingly. The intent is to use red to paint Drukhari runes on armour segments and vehicle hulls in freehand, and to draw the eye to small details here and there. I may also use it to trim or highlight some parts of the armour to break the monotony of the black a bit. This will do for the runes and whatnot. Finally, I'll use gold and gunmetal for bling, spikes and the like. I'll get around to posting a test model ASAP once I've gotten a few of my guys assembled. This may also turn out to take 3 months or something. List Building Plz help I don't know what I'm doing The sort of army theme I want to run can be best summarized as: lots of skimmers, lots of dakka, lots of flyers, very few non-Kabalites. I'm not exactly sure how to make this into an effective list, as being out of the hobby since 5th edition means I'm probably even more clueless than everyone else. My working concept for 2000 points is to spend a little over half the points on Raiders, Venoms, Ravagers and Flyers, with the rest taken up by Kabalites and Reavers, maybe with some mercenary units mixed in for fun. The main bulk of the army would thus look something like this (for example): 2 raiders w/dark lances... 220 pts 2 Venoms... 160 pts Ravager w/dark lances... 155 pts Ravager w/disintegrator cannons... 185 pts 2 Razorwing Jetfighters w/dark lances... 310 pts 1 Voidraven w/dark scythes and voidraven missiles 196 pts --- I'm planning to add some warriors and maybe some trueborn, though in which exact loadouts I haven't found out yet. Some Reavers will definitely feature, then I'm torn between Scourges and Mandrakes. Any suggestions for what to go with for infantry and support? Weaknesses aside from "needs bodies" to plug in this sort of list? I wouldn't be averse to taking a unit or two for close combat, but I want this list to be primarily dakka. I'm willing to be flexible on the distribution of transports and gunboats, though I do want to keep the total number quite high. Any and all help will be repaid in slaves and invitations to realspace raids later (or possibly with murderous backstabbing... such is life).

So like many people since 8th Edition dropped, I've decided to get going on a Death Guard army. Background: I got into the 14th Legion back somewhere around 2003, after reading a then-famous White Dwarf article featuring tactics on playing Plague Marines. The early 2000s was a bit of a Nurgle renaissance, as we'd wrapped up the awesome Eye of Terror campaign and Deathguard.org was still around. I painted up ~2000 points using the Jean Francoise tutorial (basically drybrushing + washes), and spent a few years bashing them into my brother's Ultramarines and Tyranids. Eventually I moved on to other armies, and at several points over the years I decided to dissassemble and repaint my army. All those attempts stalled after a few models, and eventually I was left with a pile of half-painted models that couldn't really be fielded effectively. This year I decided to get my together and actually paint my army. Drawing inspiration from a number of awesome DG army logs (especially the work of Squiggoth and Animerik) and using downtime from Hurricane Harvey this weekend, I finished up my test model. I figured the old dime-a-dozen monopose 2nd Edition Marine would be a good test model (though he's missing some common features of later sculpts, like weird growths and puss). Some notes: - I'm gonna use the right greave for squad markings. The first squad will be checkerboard. From there, I'm thinking maybe caution stripes and flames for some other markings? - I'm planning on doing freehand on any blank shoulderpads. This idea is shamelessly stolen from Squiggoth's army. Dunno how easy this will be, as I don't have a huge mental tank of Nurgle freehand iconography . . . - Blue accents are also kinda stolen from Squiggoth. I think they pop well. - I love a lot of the grimy, gritty DG armies out there, but that's not one of my strengths as a painter. I kept the weathering to a bit of a minimum here, with just a bit of blood and Typhus Corrosion. Some other guys might get a bit grimier, especially the 3rd edition models with more mutation and nasty stuff in their sculpts, but this is generally what I'd like to shoot for. - My other 40K armies have summer (Eldar) and winter (Blood Axes) bases. I figured fall would be a good addition to that. Now that that's out of the way, I'll start work on the rest of the squad this week.