Hello fellow adventurers! For my undead army, the LPL and a Warhammer tournament in my hometown I painted up five classic undead Death Riders. "Death Riders" being the name given to skeleton cavalry in the third edition of Warhammer.
These models were sculpted between 1985 and 1987, to be replaced (mostly) in 1989 by the plastic skeleton horsemen in the "Skeleton Army" boxed set. You can see some of those plastics here:
http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=25017.0 .
I don't know how the availability of the metal Death Riders was after the release of the plastics, but I suppose most gamers went for the cheap option as these babies can be more difficult to find than normal metal skeletons from the same period. However, I managed to get my hands on a handful of these (I still have more to paint though) so I set about painting some of the nicer models up as Blood Knights for my Vampire Counts army (the plastic skeleton horsemen were pressed into service as Black Knights).
Anyway, on to the models!
Let's start of with The Red Count. I really like the knightly look of this rider so I gave him a steed to match. The blood knights are basically vampires and I think this model carries a bit of that royal air. Of course the equipment is all wrong without a lance and shield but I didn't exactly feel like cutting up these hard to get and beautiful models.
Next up is this model. It's sold as a skeleton rider with a mace (and often painted as such). But the mace is in fact a head with the spine still attached. A very nice detail which I gladly took advantage of by bending the spine as if the head was used as a flail. Or as a music instrument, because I used him as a musician in my games. The rotting horse is one of the older steeds and shows a lot more 'damage' than most other horses. I quite like the pose of the horse but there is one (not depicted here) that looks really pathetic dragging it's rotten legs over the ground. It has a great "Black Beauty" (the animated film) feel about it.
This rider was originally (or unoriginally) called "No-skin". Well, we can see that. The horse doesn't look very rotten at all (no damage whatsoever) so I tried to simulate some rotting patches with Vallejo Black wash, which dried up way too opaque, as did the Vallejo Skin wash on the green barding. Still a nice pose for a horse though.
I really love the way this skeleton horse looks, with one eye, an old piece of barding and stumbling about. Just the clumsy look I like. I had more horses than riders so a normal skeleton with an axe was pressed into service as a rider. He performs well, and also carries a shield, which makes him slightly more WYSIWYG than the Red Count.
I tried to select as many skeletons as possible with the right equipment (heavy armour, shield), but hardly any of the old models have spears (let alone lances) and a lot of them don't carry shields either. Apart from that there is a wide range of riders mixed together including wraiths, zombies, liches and skeletons. All of them were skeleton cavalry so if I throw all my models together it looks a bit like a rag-tag bunch.
Fortunately, among the rag-tag models are some which work better as characters and "Bloodharvest" served as my Kastellan (Blood Knight champion):
Another beautiful and characterful sculpt on a good looking skeleton horse, a worthy champion!
I took some group pictures (like I said, they were painted for the LPL as well), and here they are:
In the end I put the group picture together with some face close-ups (of the horses for a change) and made it this entry which you may have spotted in round 4 of the LPL:
05 March 2012, 11:26:24 PM
