Phase I: Ash Waste Daemonhunters

The first phase of painting up my Ash Waste Guard army is going to be painting them as the inducted guard units in a daemonhunters army. There are two reasons for this convolution:

(1) I have 2 boxes of Cadian Kasrkins that I won at two different tournaments (Adepticon and the WM Cities of Death). It's obviously kismet that I should have to use these guys, and they'd make awesome inquisitorial stormtroopers.

(2) The Warmongers are having a Cities of Death campaign "Galaxy of War!" in November and I want to play guard, but the majority of the guard models won't be ready by then.

So a daemonhunter list will let me field an 1850 list using some of my key guard models as inducted guard. So here's what's new this week.

HQ: Lord Inquisitor Tireseus and retinue
The configuration of this squad is based on Alex "Kyoto" McLaren's tactical doctrine of the Inquisition fire base. The unit pictured above consists of Inquisitor Lord Tireseus, one veteran guardsman with heavy bolter, one mystic, and three servo skulls. The unit is fairly minimal at this point, but I have plans to add two more gun servitors (one with plasma cannon) another mystic, one or two sages, and a couple of acolytes--all according to Kyoto doctrine.


Inquisitor Lord Tireseus is modeled 90% from a fantasy chaos warrior with the chaosy bits cut off. His psycannon is a boltgun modified with bitz of an IG missile launcher.


Tireseus's mystic is a fantasy empire flagellant (plastic) with bitz from the fantasy empire wizard sprues and a 40K auspex. The flagellant sprues are the ones that inspired me to finally fulfill my dream of modeling inquisitorial henchmen. See the idea is that this guy is blind, but he rings the bell when he sees deepstrikers coming through the warp...

A gun "servitor" in the form of a Catachan guardsman holding a chaos heavy bolter. The original plan was to use the Catachan models as the basis for converted servitors, and I may still go through with that, but this guy came out pretty mean-looking.

HQ2 and Elite 1: Grey Knight Terminators

The Daemonhunter list allows you to take a GK terminator unit either as the retinue to a hero, or as an elite unit. My plan is to take one of each--the foreground unit of 3 is an HQ brother-captain IC with a 2-terminator retinue, and the background unit is an Elite 3-terminator unit including a brother captain upgrade. Because of the wonkiness of the rules, even though these units are otherwise identical, the brother-captain in the HQ unit counts as an independent character. Go figure.

Anyway the rationale for taking such small units is that you can get 2 psycannons per unit (one as a squad option, one as bro-captain wargear) for just a shade under 200 points. Because they can always move and shoot 36", this allows them to stand off and use the shrouding to minimize return fire while still being able to lay down psycannon shots out to maximum range. This is a doctrine I gleaned off of Dakka--if anybody knows who deserves credit for coming up with this one, let me know.

Elite 2: Culexus Assassin


The least popular assassin suffers from the tactical problem that he can be shot at by anybody who can see him (and can pass the required leadership test). So he's challenging to use.

But he's cheap and he's annoying. He's most valuable, I think, as a distractor who hides in the back of the opponent's army and makes everybody leadership 7. So you have to send somebody to get him--and then he makes them leadership 7 and they fail their Ld test to shoot or assault him, and so forth. Also he has a very interesting bag of tricks to pull on harlequin squads...

Troop 1: Inducted IG Armored Fist Squad
It's really just 10 Dust Devils with a flamer guy and an autocannon all assembled in front of the only painted chimera, but it feels like an accomplishment to actually be able to put the unit together.

Next week, more painted guys.