Today the rest of the Emperor’s Children model range goes up for preorders, meaning that players can finally get their hands on Fulgrim, Lucius the Eternal, Flawless Blades, the Lord Kakophonist, and the standalone Lord Exultant model. These kits round out the lovely – but limited – range of new kits for the Emperor’s Children, giving us the missing elites and character options from the Slaanesh’s Chosen boxed set we reviewed a few weeks ago.
In this review we’ll be talking about the new models, how they are to assemble and paint, and what you need to know before you start cutting and gluing.
We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with preview copies of these models for review purposes.
Fulgrim
TheChirurgeon: Fulgrim comes packed pretty neatly into two sprues and from a construction standpoint isn’t nearly as complicated as he looks, though the tail is definitely the hardest part and that’s where you start. He comes on a 130mm round base, same as the Great Unclean One and the other Primarchs.
keewa: I suppose it’s thematically appropriate that putting Fulgrim together should be quite painful, his snake body alone is composed of a million different pieces (ok, it’s like 17 but it still feels like a million pieces). In terms of options the only ones you get are which face you’d like, these are: Angry/confused vampire, angry shouting vampire, smiling vampire, laughing vampire who looks like a cross between the Joker and Jim Carrey in The Mask, and a helmeted option that I assume no-one is actually going to use – which is a shame because it’s quite a cool looking helmet.
TheChirurgeon: It’s a cool helmet but yeah, it feels really weird to put a helmet on him. I went with the big smile – that felt like the best option to me. Assembling Fulgrim was fine after the initial tail part – that’s definitely the biggest challenge here, and you’ll want to dry-fit everything before you glue it in place just to make sure you’re in the right spot.
Keewa: He has four arms, one carries a big barbed whip, one carries a nasty looking curvy blade, one has a normal straight sword, and the final hand is bare with a sort of… gem set into the palm? His tail also ends in some kind of crab claw which is fun (I know very little about the lore of this gentleman, but does this further prove that all life is destined to evolve into crabs?) One design element that makes me a little squeamish is his tummy, which is split open and the flaps of skin sort of folded back and pinned to his abdomen. Nestled within what I presume/hope is muscle is a giant icon of Slaanesh. Perhaps I’m just a wussy but flayed things give me the ick, looking at you House Bolton. I’m quite weak when it comes to gross things, though (don’t get me started on Nurgle, I will never paint Nurgle things, no thank you), so if you think that sort of gnarly S&M stuff is sick, more power to your elbow my friend.
TheChirurgeon: Fulgrim’s top half assembles completely separately, and you’ll do his whole torso during construction before gluing it onto his snake body. From there the wings go on his back, and his head on top of that. That makes magnetizing the wings more or less impossible unless you’re also magnetizing the head.
OK at this point I have to point out something I noticed while building Fulgrim – my man is caked up. For some reason they modeled a full-on pair of butt cheeks on his snakelike backside.
Keewa: As with every model with big bat wings, leave them off for painting otherwise you are going to suffer (appropriate) when it comes time to do anything towards his back, which you’re definitely going to want to because Fulgrim is caked, this lizard boy has a big ol’ bum.
TheChirurgeon: I went with a four-part subassembly for Fulgrim:
- The body and snake tail
- The head/horns/hair
- The wings + backpack
- The golden aquila wing on his chest
The head and wings just kind of make sense and leaving them off makes the model easier to assemble, while the chest wing covers enough of the body and can be primed gold so it made sense to just paint that separately.
I’m not done with this guy by any means, but the model was actually among the easiest to assemble for a Primarch. I don’t love how it’s impossible to magnetize his wings without keeping his head off but so far only Magnus has mangetizeable wings so I suppose it’s just par for the course.
Lucius the Eternal
TheChirurgeon: One of only two models from the set I had time to fully paint (the other being the Lord Exultant, who I already had painted), Lucius is a beast – he comes on on a 50mm base and uses every inch of it and then some for his big whip. The biggest thing to know about that whip is that it connects to a piece of rebar on the base, giving you a single, albeit small, contact point for the whip to keep it a bit more sturdy. That said, I don’t trust it at all and transporting this guy is going to suck.
Lucius has a pretty open pose so I went ahead and assembled his full body before painting. I only had one issue and that was with his right/whip arm placement – the nub here isn’t big enough or pronounced enough, making the cabling join under his armpit harder than it needed to be. I eventually got there but it was more of a pain than I’d have liked.
Lucius painted up pretty quick, and I can see why they opted to paint his armor black – it works a bit better for the faces emerging, which don’t have quite enough detail to look good in lighter colors. I’m still happy with how they turned out though, and I like my pink scheme more than the GW one. The colors I chose were based off the art from the cover of the Lucius: the Flawless Blade Black Library novel.
There’s a lot of detail on Lucius and that made finishing him a lot more of a challenge than I originally expected. Still, once I had the vials done it was a pretty easy march to the finish line and I’m happy with how the model turned out. His face in particular has some great detail and was fun to paint.
Lord Kakophonist
TheChirurgeon: Another character who was pretty straightforward to assemble and paint. He doesn’t have a lot of options; comes with a sword and a pair of pistols. If you’re assembling him for Noise Marines, go double pistol. If he’s going with Terminators, Pistol + sword.
keewa: A cool guy, has his own portable sound system on his back in the form of some kind of twisted pipe-organ PA system. Apart from that big defining feature on his back he’s relatively straightforward, a fancier version of a regular chaos marine with some distinctly Emperor’s Children touches, like boots that look like cloven hooves for some reason, and the kind of drippy bling you’d expect from Fulgrim’s best guys. He can be modelled with a very nasty looking serrated sword and what I can only describe as some kind of sound pistol, or you can have him dual wield two of the ghetto blaster guns, presumably for some extra punchy hair metal. There’re helmeted and helmetless heads too, though I don’t think they look vastly different from one another.
TheChirurgeon: The downside is that this guy has only one pose and it’s pretty boring. He’s got a weird, hunched-over look that isn’t amazing, especially if you’re going to run three. Like the Noise Marines and Terminators, the Lord Kakophonist is on a 40mm base.
Condit: The upside of the simple pose is that he’ll be much easier to paint without sub-assemblies than the Lord Exultant, even though he’s got a few more embellishments than your other character option. But despite the ease of painting, Rob’s right: he looks kind of like an evil turtle, especially with the dual-pistol loadout. The sword-and-pistol loadout looks slightly more dynamic to my eye, but not so much more so I’d say it’s worth building him that way just for looks.
Flawless Blades
keewa: These lads have a lot of camp to them, with their armoured crop-tops and high heeled boots, there’s definitely a through-line to the flamboyance of Sigvald in AoS, although these guys are definitely not beautiful in the face – they’ve got that horrible mutated kind of cenobite look that some people seem to really get a kick out of. Each can be modelled with one big sword or two short swords, which lets you give them a little variety. One guy can even be modelled licking his sword in a really gross pervy way with a very long Gene Simmons-esque tongue.
Keewa: As cool and flavourful as they are, assembling them did prove to be a bit of a pain, I know nothing about sculpting miniatures and how it works, but I question the necessity of making the front and back of the leg two different parts? It’s not like you can change which shinpad goes on which guy, so you’re left with unnecessary extra building where each leg is two pieces, you put those two pieces on the crotch, then there’s at least two pieces for the torsos (which is fine because the undercut of the crop top is obviously quite stark) two pieces for each arm, the head, the backpack has two pieces and then you need to put the phial of whatever it is on top and hook it up to the torso and and etc.
They look very cool but, man, I built all 3 of these things from the box and it took me several hours.
TheChirurgeon: I didn’t have that much trouble with them but they aren’t simple models to assemble by any stretch. I like the options you get with them, letting you pick between big sword (correct) and two little swords (decent, but wrong). There are a good number of alternate heads and shoulder pads here, though I really, really dislike the helmetless heads. They just look so dumb to me. In that regard, the heads are attached to a section of neck and chest, so you can’t really headswap these guys like you can with the Lord Exultant. Unlike Lucius, these guys come on 40mm bases.
The Lord Exultant
Last but not least, there’s the Lord Exultant. As a model in that Slaanesh’s Chosen boxed set, we’ve already written about him, but it’s worth revisiting the model here. The following section is pulled from our initial review, though some additional notes have been added.
TheChirurgeon: The Chaos Lord equivalent comes with his own small sprue in the box, and as a result he’ll almost certainly be sold separately at some future point, packaged by himself. There are several ways to build this guy and your game options are:
- base config: plasma pistol + power spear
- spear + fist or spear + whip
- plasma pistol + sword or plasma pistol + screamer pistol
You could probably make a case for double pistols but I think the spear is the most powerful option and as a power weapon it’s a better choice if you want to win best painted competitions than a fist (though the fist looks very cool). Spear + whip is going to be your go-to if you want a melee lord to join Infractors most of the time and that’s how you’ll want to use him. The use-case for the power sword is that it has [PRECISION], which neither the spear nor the fist have.
The Lord Exultant comes with two left shoulderpads, depending on which melee weapon you use – the spear one has a raised arm, so that uses a pad with a dangly bit at a different angle. He comes with two different heads as well, one helmeted and one without.
Regardless of how you build him, when you’re done you’ll have quite a few extra bits that will be very useful for converting other more “standard” Chaos Space Marines. The shoulder pad is especially good for that, though most of the joins on the model are flat, and the arms are easy to use on other kits.
The Lord Exultant is pretty straightforward to assemble but he’s got a number of bits that are a real pain in the ass to work around – specifically his combo cloak/tabard/toga doubles as his right shoulder pad, and glues together in two pieces at the top of his shoulder, with the draped cloak connecting on the left side at the bottom corner of his shoulder pad there. Because of this, when I painted him I decided to use a four-part sub-assembly:
The base model is relatively unexciting, though I mean that in a good way – it’s a very solid model with good details that never feels like it’s trying to do too much. The Emperor’s Children models in this box generally have a little less trim than the Thousand Sons and even standard Chaos Space Marines, and that’s delightful.
Speaking of that fur cloak, this was my first attempt at painting a fur cape. I’d see some painters do this online and wanted to try my hand at it, though having done it now I’ll say that it seems like it’s a lot easier to do this when you’re doing it with brown than with white. I started with the primer coat of Grey Seer, and then shaded using a 3/0 brush in small, short strokes with Apothecary white. I then came back and did lighter layers of those strokes as highlights, mixing Grey Seer and Reaper Pure White. the spots are painted in similar fashion with Black Legion Contrast, then I did a final pass doing small, thin hairs with Reaper Pure White. I’m very happy with the final result, though it looks a lot more impressive from a foot away. It’s an ambitious choice for the model and while I’m happy with it, I also think I only got like 90% of the way there in terms of selling the effect.
And if you’re wondering – the freehand is just Fulgrim Pink, thinned and painted over the base pink, which is a shade of Pink Horror to Emperor’s Children. I don’t have a set idea in mind when painting these; I just know they need to be organic, swirling shapes. A good reference point for these is looking at the etched designs on ornate suits of armor from the late Medieval and Rennaissance periods.
Having two of the Slaanesh’s Chosen boxes and this third model gave me three versions to work with. I ended up kitting them out different for visual variety, though my plan is to field them all as spear + whip on the table since that’s just the best loadout.
keewa: Yeah he’s pretty cool, ostentatious enough to set him apart from the other EC models but not so baroque that he’ll be awful to paint. I didn’t think of not attaching the cape before painting though, god damnit.
TheChirurgeon: On the other two models I went ahead and glued the front tabard on and just left off the backpack and cape, and I think this is the correct way to do them.
Final Thoughts
TheChirurgeon: The Emperor’s Children don’t have a big range, but they have some banger models. These kits all look great and were pretty easy to assemble. My personal favorite is the Lord Exultant, who just has a ton of options that make it easy to vary him up a bit, but Lucius was a decent second. I find myself more than a little intimidated by Fulgrim, and while I need to paint him to complete my Chaos Primarch set, it might be a bit before I finish him as he’s also not super necessary on the battlefield and unlikely to feature in my Grand Narrative list.
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