Oh boy, this one’s a blast from the past. It predates this website, by a pretty considerable margin, and was one of my first Wraithlords and one of my first rescue projects. To make a good project even better, this gave me a use for an old Flaming Sphere miniature from Dungeons and Dragons that used to belong to a good friend of mine, from days of old when I was even more cringe than I am now (which is truly a feat unto itself.) It’s also a pretty deep-cut miniature in the sense that when I painted this the first time, my best friend and partner XenonMage made the design of the runic markings on a coloring page template that I tried to run with, so…there is a lot going on in this one.

The original had some stuff that I loved, and some stuff that I always really wanted to improve on. The runic markings were something that I was determined to keep, and I wanted to have some extra “spikes” too, also like the original, though this time I wanted to do something a little nicer-looking than green stuff. I also wanted a do-over on the tabard, which meant ordering in more bits from Age of Sigmar, of course – they definitely have the best flags. Last, because I am who I am, I wanted to integrate LEDs, and that’s where the flaming sphere miniature came in.

I couldn’t be happier with the result this time around. I added some “sideburns” in the form of an Autarch head bit that I broke up, added some extra cloth bits up to the shoulders, and…I think kind of nailed what I thought a Wraithlord “warrior-noble” should look like. I still love the pewter Wraithlord model of course, but I wanted to go for something a lot more elegant and “elven” this time around and I think I did an alright job of that.

This is one of my favorite builds to date and I’m really looking forward on making this part of my growing 10th edition army. Part of that is that I feel like Wraithlords have recently gotten the short end of the stick, as far as constructs go – Wraithguard are the meta, and Wraithknights are kind of the “poster child” Wraith construct, which has put Wraithlords in a weird middle-child place. I’d love to see them back to their former glory, and I’m gonna see what I can do in my own games to make that happen.