Who will lead the eclectic, furious warband of World Eaters that I’ve inherited? Well, we’ve got a few contenders that I’ve earmarked as our footslogging “characters”, with one of them taking a little bit of imagination. First, and requiring a little extra TLC and kitbashing, I decided to play the classics and have a Chaos Lord with his Plasma Pistol as my Warlord, and he’s been equipped with a Power Fist. The original pewter axe was absent, and I had a nice pewter power sword to replace it with but I may have accidentally lost it to the St. John’s winds while trying to spray-prime. Not my finest moment. An old Rhino door made an awesome little piece of elevated scenery to mount him on with some other bits and bobs, and I’m very happy with how the plasma and helmet greens turned out.

In the box that I received from my friend, there was a wealth of Obliterators. Like, more Obliterators than you could shake a stick at. There was a problem, however, in that the Obliterators were all mounted on 25mm bases, and regrettably, size creep has hit the game like a truck over the last couple of decades. Instead of just placing a singular Obliterator onto a 50mm base, which might have looked a little silly, I decided that – in the words of the immortal Bob Ross – everybody needs a friend. Even Chaos Marines. And so, I took two of the Obliterator models and an old resin base, and with a little trial and error mounted them both up onto it. They’re going to serve as the army’s big guns for the moment, until I get around to an old Helbrute or something I can either find time to repaint or rework.

Last, but certainly not least, we have the pewter nightmare-fuel unit, one that I’m not even 100% sure of the contemporary name of, who’s going to serve as the sergeant or leader (I’m still figuring out the lore nuances of World Eaters!) I love this sculpt, and this was one of the models that when I saw it I knew this was the army from the tote box that I wanted to lean hard into. Somehow despite how grisly and visceral a lot of the newer models look, there’s a horrid simplicity in this one that I think is just extremely effective in articulating this dude’s pyrrhic bargain with Khorne. The way the helmet has morphed into bone and flesh I think is a really nice touch.

So we’ve got the party bus down, and we’ve got the leaders down – now we can get into the really fun stuff.