TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 42: Final Prep for Rise

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last Week I talked about getting in some more hobby time with my son and attending the local GW’s Tanksgiving event. This week it’s back to standard hobby progress as I prep for my teams event this weekend.

I’d sworn six weeks ago when I was looking at my painting queue that this was all totally doable; I’d finished my Night Lords but would start on the Death Guard following the Grand Narrative. Of course, Games Workshop would throw a wrench into those plans – the Grotmas Detachments Advent calendar has basically put a full Detachment Focus article and a video on our calendar every day, and this particular week is the worst, since it has all of the days with multiple releases. An event like this is basically all-hands-on-deck behind the scenes; the process generally involves me calling for our 40k NDA team to split up the Detachments, writing those articles, usually in groups of two or three, and with at least one player who plays the army. While that happens I have to coordinate on the videos for those articles, and that will mean talking to our painter team about model turnarounds and staged B-roll footage for the videos. Once a draft of the Detachment focus is done, that gets handed off to Campbell, who turns it around for a video that I can proof and send back notes on before we get everything scheduled in WordPress and ready to go. It’s a pretty involved process.

I don’t think I’ll be trying the Flyblown Host Detachment any time soon for my Death Guard; it’s not quite good enough and it gives up too much compared to the Plague Company but who knows how the Codex will change things? At the moment by big concern is prep for the Rise of the Empire event this weekend and I need to get some painting done for that. To recap, here’s the list I’m running:

My list - Click to Expand

It’s the vehicle-heavy list I was running with a few weeks ago. It has some pretty solid shooting output, which can be buffed by the Lord of Virulence, and the Defilers can get around traffic jams by being able to walk over other models and terrain that’s 4″ high or less, which should be a lot of features. It doesn’t actually give up that many points on Bring it Down – 16 if you kill everything – and it has some solid melee chops from the Deathshrouds and Defilers. The big downside here is the lack of solid action doing and objective holding but the plan is to use sticky objectives and the smaller vehicles to take care of that as needed.

I’ve gotten a couple of test games in with it and it’s pretty straightforward but I’m prepared to eat shit over a lack of proper preparation with it this weekend. There’s some fun firepower in there and some interesting tricks and while I usually don’t like playing in lame duck metas I’m not super sad I won’t have to worry about any of the new bullshit in this event. The Defilers have been an absolute blast (haha) to play with, putting out solid offensive output when working together and being surprisingly durable and nasty when they get into melee. The Lord of Virulence is a big help here, but not wildly crucial to the army. The biggest problem with this list is the PBCs – in an ideal world I’d swap all three out for Predator Destructors and save 150 points in the process, but I just don’t have those assembled and painted. PBCs can be great – they’re more durable and there are times they just win you games by being able to kill something like a unit of Flayed Ones with indirect fire – but they aren’t 50 extra points each great. If I was running Predators I could spend those saved points on another unit or two and get a lot more utility when it comes to doing actions.

Hobby

On that note, I’ve had quite a bit to paint. Coming out of Tanksgiving, my paint queue looked like this:

• 3x Defiler
• 6x Deathshroud Terminator

That’s a hell of a lot to get painted in a single week, even with my Death Guard scheme. The good news is that the Defilers were all assembled, though I spent longer than I’d have liked searching for the last two missing legs on one of them. For the Deathshroud I enlisted a friend to help apply the base coats before I’d finish them off with the final details. As I mash this out Wednesday night, here’s where things stand.

First, the Defilers are done:

These weren’t as bad as I expected and I’m happy with how they turned out. A lot of the work on these was solved by using leadbelcher spray on their bottom halves, then shading that with Agrax and covering huge parts with Typhus Corrosion and a drybrush of Ryza Rust. The conversion part I’m happy with on these is the scourges – having assembled many Forgefiends means I have lots of Maulerfiend bits, so I just used some greenstuff to attach those to a havoc launcher plate and then put a magnet on there to stick it to the Defiler body. It looks way better than the stupid standard defiler and construction-wise, it was just a blob green stuff smeared over and painted fleshy:

With the Defilers out of the way, it’s on to Deathshroud:

These guys are more or less playable right now, but my plan is to fill in a number of details such as adding Nihilakh Oxide to the brass, new Ogryn Camo highlights, and drybrushing the bases. It’s not an insane amount, but there are a lot of little details on these models and so finishing them takes a long time. Mostly I’m trying to match them to the originals:

It’ll get there with another hour or so of work. At which point I’ll be one step closer to complete coverage for the Death Guard army. I think a Death Guard Helbrute is next on my list, and I should get around to painting some predators for the army at some point, but I’m likely going to wait on big adjustments like that until the Codex comes around, whenever that is (fingers crossed for the first half of next year). This army only happened because I had three defilers sitting around in my bits/unpainted pile for a long time, acquired in a liquidation of someone else’s collection a decade ago. And while I have a lot of predators sitting around that I could paint, I’m not in any hurry to dedicate them to a particular army at this point. so I can wait and see there.

Next Time: Rise

That wraps up this week but I’ll be back next week with a recap on the Rise event. I don’t expect my team to win – we’re scrappy and they’re good guys but I don’t think we’re good enough to even podium this thing – but I think we have a solid shot at like, 3-3. It’s a larger event than I expected and at an hour away, straining the limits for how far I want to drive without carpooling for two days. After Rise we’ll be on to my final update of the year, looking back at the year that was. See you then.

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