Showcase: Tomb Kings of Khemri Skeleton Warriors (inc. painting guide)

Warhammer Fantasy Battle isn’t back. If you wanted Warhammer Fantasy Battle like you remember it then this isn’t quite it. Warhammer The Old World is set a few centuries before the End Times and is located in (surprisingly) The Old World area. The Old World area isn’t the whole planet, it’s just Bretonnia, The Empire, Athel Loren, The Border Princes and the immediate surrounding area. With this focus on a smaller area, that means less factions. The Old World only has 9 supported factions and the rest of the factions are going into legacy. So Dark Elves, Lizardmen, Daemons etc get free downloadable legacy rules. The Tomb Kings, luckily are one of the factions that have returned and are being rereleased with some accompanying new models.

I was lucky enough to be sent the new Tomb Kings of Khemri army core set and the box is massive and rammed with models. It’s rare that you get a box set with over 90 models in it, so I welcome this (maybe not the price so much). Army in a box and the start of the new year can only mean one thing #newyearnewarmy. Unironically, GW included the ancient Skeleton Warrior sprues in the the army set, instead of updating them with new models. If the Specialist Games Studio has a limited number of creditable sprues to launch Warhammer The Old World then they chose to keep the existing models and add new units like the impressive Bone Dragon kit. I’m not sure how I feel about this, I like new models but then I’m really happy that existing Tomb Kings’ players old collections aren’t obsolete and out of date. It’s genuinely been great seeing people post their old models on social media recently.

Tackling my first unit, I opted the to dial down the colour scheme with a unit of Skeleton Spearmen with spears. Moldlines weren’t to bad, not as nice as modern miniatures that do an incredible job of hiding most of them but it’s workable, it’s just really time consuming. Assembling the models wasn’t too bad so long as you “conveyor belt” the process. Glue all the legs to the bases, by the time you get round to the first again you can glue on the torsos to all the legs. Once that’s dry you can do the arms then heads. If you try to glue one model together at a time it’s just a floppy mess as the contact areas for the glue are so small.

Painting the models was an exercise in trying to make them look nice with as few a steps as possible. There is little point applying details, layers and blending to models hidden in ranks. Save that stuff for the centre piece hero models. The majority of the models is a base colour and a thinned Contrast paint over the top. A further time saving measure I did was to use a sponge to paint the shields and I’m really happy with the effect.

Thanks for checking out my first post on The Old World, I’m excited to share more over the next few weeks.