Some projects we undertake for their challenge, some for the beauty, some for the passion. Some, we undertake because it's number N on a list, ticking towards completion. So it was that I decided that my army needed a pack of flesh hounds. The internet seems to love them, so should I? I'm also in on the FTGT hobby budget challenge, which is pushing me in that illogical way like Xbox achievements do. February done, $40.
The first hurdle was cost. I didn't want to pay $200 for official GW hounds. I looked at BoK's guide to alternate flesh hounds and was about to buy dire wolves and chaos hounds and - you guessed it - kitbash them, when the gods of ebay smiled on me.
23 metal Chaos hounds, sub $30, many still in their original 3rd edition fantasy blister packs. Immediate love. Twenty bike bases set me back an additional $10. Can't be square in the far future. I liked these because I wouldn't have to do much to make them unique - nobody is going to know where these models are from. So the two boxes would have been ~$70 + $10 for bases. Half the price, and I have extra hounds to make a chaos lord on juggernaut and a khorne herald on juggernaut. Awesome.
Always try to get uneven numbers on lots, you'll find that your HQs will end up making themselves out of spare parts. I also got a lot of mileage out of a box of 30 models from Dark Sun Miniatures, because now I have torsos and legs to work with as a base. You can never go wrong having extra bodies around.
One of the difficulties of working with metal is it's nearly impossible to make any real structural changes. Thankfully, these boys got to be the full beneficiaries of two armies worth of bits. Roughly half of the dogs got tyranid nutsacks, and the other half have plague bearer buttholes and hellblade wangs. Every dog has a different head except for two that couldn't have heads removed and two that have chaos spawn khorne heads. I used the other chaos spawn heads, a terminator head, two 'zerker helmets, some skaven left over from the hellpit abomination.
The moral of the story is, when you're going to be lazy about making models, it doesn't hurt to have a wide variety of bits. Chaos shines in the custom arena because almost everything can be bashed onto them. It's insidious! If your friends aren't big on customizing, be sure to pillage their bits. It can make a project like this fun and different. One of the key design elements of my daemons has been our Tyranid player's total lack of desire to have fun with his models. So claws, bone spurs, whatever, my army has a lot of nuts thanks to those bugs.
I went even lazier with the painting for these guys, though it still took me about eight hours total. I primed them dark grey, then gave them a light dusting of white primer. This makes a bit of a two-tone effect. Then I painted their bones bone, their eyes yellow, their plague heads green, their metal brass, and their nuts pink. Everything else is wash. The two-tone primer gives a deeper shadow, and because they're mostly fur and skin-and-bones, the effect really worked to shadow them. Fur was black wash, skin and metal was red wash, bone was brown wash. Easy, quick, good.
For bases, I free-handed a chaos star on each base, filled in some of the negative space with red, painted the raised rim bronze, then washed it red. I have an aversion to Khorne, and just couldn't bring myself to paint that sigil. Also, I can run them as seekers if said ever become not crap. The new red is really purple, BTW. Boom! Dipped. A full-strength squad is born!
Four games in with these bad boys, I can say I really like them. Replacing a squad of screamers like them. They provide a pile of in-their-face wounds that have amazing board presence, and can't really be killed in the first turn. 38 T4 4++ wounds are just too much to shift! This gives my screamers a chance to move up and the factory to turn out some new children. Psychologically, I think my opponents will be more likely to kill the hounds, which I prefer to the screamers. They haven't been shining in CC, despite their Khorne gravitas. They are an excellent tarpit unit, and can pull off a gunline crippling multicharge. Very surprised how much I like them.