The Exiled Swordwind

We're embarking on a campaign

Campaigns are so much fun! So much opportunity for awesome stories, battles you remember for years, grudges and having a certain fear/respect for you opponents characters or units that may have nothing to do with whether they are meta units or not.

We've played a few campaigns in our group over the years, and found the biggest failing of them is keeping the momentum going. I've really enjoyed all we played, but most of them petered out. This comes down to a few factors:

• Times between games (we all live busy lives so organising regular games is difficult)

• Who can attack who (our early fantasy campaigns had amazing hand drawn maps, but this physical anchor limits who you can attack without abstract rules, 40k helps this a lot)

• Unbalanced armies (while I don't have a problem with unbalanced armies every now and then, it does get deflating when you see one force in a campaign run away with it. Especially if you can't gang up against them).

So with those three items recognised and discussed amongst the group, Jack has done an amazing amount of work to design a simple campaign that focuses more on the stories than the map. The addition of escalation adds a really nice element to it to encourage building armies, but also keeps the starting games small enough that hopefully we can get several in in the first few sessions. If we can really get stuck into the stories and armies early that will give us more push to keep it going. We've all pushed ourselves to develop a great amount of narrative to our forces and the reason they have ventured to this part of the galaxy. Jack has a few secrets up his sleeve to reveal later, but the interactions between each of us will be very interesting to watch.

Now, onto the important question, what army shall I take? And boy have I jumped around a lot in the last few months of planning....

I've always wanted to try out an Eldar army, despite their age the models are still quite nice, but I've never really liked the aesthetic of so many different coloured and styled units on the table. Its always been a goal of mine to build and paint a unified looking force of aspect warriors.

So what better opportunity than an escalation campaign? though I probably should have stuck with one of the armies I already had/had started like my scions... Or genestealer cults, or tau..... But in my defense, before planning this campaign, I wasn't overly happy with the prospect of playing a lot of games with cults - they don't have enough options to make playing them over and over fun. Scions didn't quite play like I hoped they would (Psychic Awakening fixed that!) and I just wasn't into tau at the time. I am now though thanks to the Psychic Awakening stories.

Anyway Eldar it is; but what and why?

I wanted a Craftworld with some interesting rules/background that was different from any of the Eldar armies around me. My 40k armies are mostly infantry based so I would enjoy some fast jetbikes, perhaps Saim Hann would work well? Anyway, I settled on Biel Tan, mostly because I don't have a green army. Can you see the way my mind works now?

Biel Tan specialise in shuriken, so how do I make the most of that? simple, Dire Avengers! While these kits are pretty old, they still look pretty reasonable (though a bit simple and static). These will be my core, and all shall be slightly inconvenienced by sharp disks flying around. With a solid couple of units of Dire Avengers and a pair warlocks I was looking to flesh out the list to 500pts, and preferably a battalion given I'm only a troops choice away. The units I've played around with a lot in the last few months are:

• Guardians with shuriken platform

• Scorpions

• Night Spinner

• Rangers

• Shining Spears

• Vibro Cannon

• Falcon Grav Tank

• Wave Serpent

• Autarch

All of these made it into various 500pt lists, with lots of swapping and changing and indecision (You will see the theme of indicision rear its head a lot amongst these pages). Complicating the decision were my two selection criteria; 1 - would these feature in a small scouting list, 2 - would they give me something fun to play with and still keep up with the other players in the group?

The scouting list question essentially ruled out the Vibro Cannon and Night Spinner - this is a cities of death after all, we want stealth and infiltration.

The fun question ruled out the rangers (they look great and fit the theme well, but just seem like a dead weight in small games). That made guardians my third troops choice to fill a battalion. That left some room either for a transport for my Dire Avengers or another small aspect warrior unit. I settled on the aspect warriors (namely scorpions and shining spears) as I thought this would give me more options and some varied units to play with. I had also bought some of the Artel W Shadow Hunters. These are absolutely stunning, and the casts were impeccable. That just left the shining spears to convert. For these I started with basic windriders and gave them Dark Elf Dark rider cloaks, Dire Avenger heads and random High Elf lances (which I have now run out of. Sam, got any spares?)

So I've settled on the list (I promise I have now)

It's:

• Warlock

• Warlock

• Dire Avengers

• Dire Avengers

• Guardians

• Scorpions

• Shining Spears

A nice little force with mobility, some volume of fire (provided I get the opportunity to use it), some psychic fun, and plenty of exarchs to follow and write about. This essentially puts all of my 'characters' in the first battle so hopefully I'll get a few good moments to write on and build a personality around - also, hopefully this isn't like the recent Mordheim campaign (@Rad_heim) where all my characters died super early.

Preparing the Host

For the force itself, I started painting these around the time the contrast paints came out. I set this army up as an exercise in speed painting. I wasn't going to spend hours on them, I just wanted to put the contrasts to the test and get an army battle ready. I'll save my painting time for other armies I'm keen to paint more than play with. So Biel Tan; generally green and white, that was easy, but how to make the rest of the army look cohesive? Green became my key colour, but I would use this in two different shades. the bright vibrant green on the Dire Avenger armour and the dark shade on the scorpions, vehicles and warlocks. To tie these together were white and black with some plum/burgundy and pale/dusty leathers. So while most of the army will look bright green given there will be a lot of Dire Avengers, the main scheme is white and dark green. I know that doesn't really make sense, but it works in my head.

My initial plans were to convert this force up to assign an animal element to each unit. Scorpions can stay as scorpions, but Dire Avengers I wanted a panther/jaguar element, Shining Spears I went with ravens/crows - a little bit basic and obvious, but the feathered cloaks worked so well, and I wanted them black to fit the colour palette. However starting this I realised there really aren't heaps of bits available to convert up Eldar. High elf bits don't quite tie into the round shapes of Eldar armour as well as I had hoped, and the Deepkin range is good, but again a bit angular. Add to that the High Elf kits being removed from the store means white lion pelts were a little too expensive and hard to find. So only the Exarchs get much. Looks like I'm working on a pretty standard Eldar aesthetic then. This slightly irritates me, because building and designing armies is where I get a large portion of my fun in this Hobby. But these are self imposed restrictions that I could have found a way around.

Where to next? We'll see how this force fares. Will I need to call in the artillery, or beef up some units? Will the Farseer join the force, or perhaps an autarch?

Naming the Host

I've always enjoyed the similarity between the Eldar's (and Warhammer High Elves) pantheon of Gods and the Ancient Greek Gods. There was a lot borrowing by GW, and it fits so well. The Greek gods were many and varied, and have values applied to all aspects of life, but also had 'human' vices and personalities. I've tried to follow in this path and name my space elves after aspects of the Greek Gods.

The core of my force is Dire Avengers, who are martial warriors. I've linked these to the Nymphai Hyperboreioi, the Nymphs who presided over archery. The Nymphs are Hekaerge, who represented distancing, Loxo, representing trajectory and Oupis, represented aim. These became the basis of the names of my three Dire Avenger Exarchs of the Boreas Shrine. I'm hoping to play them each slightly differently and take different Exarch powers with them.

My host is searching for a great warrior of the past. In this I have drawn on the story of the The Dactyls. Minor deities originally representing fingers of a hand. In my version a mighty farseer was being dragged into the warp by a daemon. He dug his hands into the wraithbone of the craftworld and 10 great warriors emerged and saved the farseer. The lost lord my host is searching for is named after Epimedes, one of the Greek Dactyls.

The Shining spears are a little boring. I've named their shrine the Zepherei after a Greek god of the wind. With their exarch Mavros Koroneius which is a bit of a bastardisation of the word black tying him to the raven theme as well. Again, boring I know, but it just worked well with the kits.

As for the rest, I've just butchered the names of seers for my warlocks and farseers, some sort of representative with Asbolus, my Warlock on jetbike named after and centaur seer, and the others just nice sounding names that I could Eldar up a bit.

Also, I came across the Cercopes, a pair of monkey-like thieves who plagued the land of Lydia in western Anatolia, this sounds like a suitable insult to hurl at the mon'keigh in this campaign

So for those that know their Greek Gods, my apologies for the horrible things I have done with their names.

Moving onto personalities, after diving deep down the Greek rabbithole I came across the Four Humours, or Four Temperaments, used in early Greco-Roman medicine. I like this concept, so will use it when looking at my characters and seeing how they play. Hopefully after playing with the units in a couple of games I can get a feel for where they would fit amongst the Four Temperaments (Choleric, Phlegmatic, Sanguine, Melancholic - or a mix).

I'm enjoying making Eldar very convoluted and intricate in their stories.