If you’d asked me a few months ago to come up with a wishlist of models I’d like to see in this release then theBlood Knights would have been second only to the Zombies (more on them below). The oldBlood Knights were nice enough models but, and I know this is just personal taste, I never really liked them that much – which is unfortunate because I loved the concept behind them and the artwork which often made them look brooding and terrible to behold.

The central villain of the ill-fated game Cursed City (surely a case of nominative predeterminism if ever I heard one!) was the vampire lord Radukar the Wolf.

STC Brush Range

Prior to this release I certainly wasn’t expecting the sheer number of vampires that have been revealed, nor the range of styles. Truly there is a vampire here for every occasion, from Kritza, who I feel might actually sparkle if you catch him in the right light, to the murderous Annika or the Lovecraftian strangeness of Lauka Vai. I must admit however that I certainly wasn’t expecting Radukar to bring his gran along.

While vampires often deign to fight on their own, at the head of a horde of skeletal minions, some come together to form dark knightly brotherhoods and take to the field mounted atop fearless undead steeds. These Blood Knights charge headlong into enemy formations with an arrogant disregard for danger, trampling their way across entire units of soldiers and skewering what few remain on the end of their lances. The new kit appears to contain a range of options, including lances, swords and a variety of heads, allowing you to personalise your own vampiric elite – or put together large numbers of them without having to include any duplicates. Certainly there will be those who build their army around a core of Blood Knights and create all-vampire armies, something that I think will be an impressive sight to behold.Steve: The Mortarch of Night can cast multiple spells, and a combination of the Heroic Recovery ability with The Hunger shared by all Vampires lets him heal up to 2D3 Wounds a turn, so he can stay alive and keep disrupting the enemy. If the enemy gets too close, he can disappear into the shadows using the Mortarch of Night ability to protect himself, then make the most of the Monster keyword by using Roar to stop enemies using command abilities in the following combat phase.

I’m not terribly keen on the rosary, or whatever it’s meant to be, that Lauka is holding, it seems like the kind of unnecessary detail that GW sculptors have a habit of including purely to avoid leaving a space, without actually adding anything to the narrative of the model. Apart from that however there’s a lot to like here. When you raise an army of the dead, you need plenty of skeletons to help your cause. These once dead warriors make up a large portion of the armies, so get out your best necromancy book and let’s learn about some lore! In the World

Warscroll Cards and Dice Set

Whilst the Rat Prince tends towards an appearance of civilised melancholy Lady Annika appears to be a much more vicious creature indeed. If you like your vampires to keep their murderous inclinations beneath the thinnest veneer of civilisation then this could well be the girl for you. Each group of 10 contains options to assemble one Standard Bearer and one Skeleton Champion armed with a mace or halberd One in every 10 models can become a Standard Bearer, carrying an ancient and tattered battle flag to the fray. This standard allows you to reroll 1’s of the roll for your Deathless Minions battle trait for the unit. Furthermore, the Deathrattle Skeletons are a Skeleton Legion. This ability allows you to roll a dice for every slain skeleton during their fight phase, on a 4+ it is reanimated and re-joins their comrades in their eternal war. Inside Battletome: Soulblight Gravelords, you’ll find all the warscrolls, battle traits, and more to field an army of vampires and their risen minions. Nagash himself is even making an appearance, so perhaps all that moaning about being broken was just some classic melodrama. The Grave Guard are elite warriors, heavily armoured in the best materials their nation can provide. They serve as the champions of Deathrattle forces and as the huscarls to Wight Monarchs. In life, they swore oaths to defend their rulers for eternity, and in those places touched by Shyishan magic such oaths hold firm. [3a]

Skeletal steeds can be hard to pull off but they haven’t put a foot wrong here. He’s a very detail heavy miniature but they’ve shown the sense not to add lots of extraneous flourishes so that every one of those details feels necessary and adds to the personality of the model overall. The result is a very conservative design, rather than one which is littered with unique “Games Workshop only” elements, the kind of thing which doesn’t quite work in practice but which no-one else is doing which they so often allow themselves to be tempted by. What’s particularly impressive is the way in which this model is an almost perfect copy of the old Wight King model (a theme which we’ll be revisiting time and again as we look through these releases). Many Wight Kings act as frontline champions for the Gravelord armies. Whilst the weakest of them can be dominated by Vampires, most retain a sense of pride and individuality giving them an imperious will that it is difficult for most to bind them into service. Thus, most Soulblight prefer to make alliances of mutual benefit with Wight Kings. [5a] [5b] In some cases Wight Kings may even bind vampires into their service and for vampires the threat of facing starvation in a bloodless kingdom is enough to offer their necromantic expertise to Wight Kings seeking to invade the lands of the living. [6a] Mounts I’m not going to lie to you, I think she’s really damn cool. She’s a truly weird and unsettling creature who has crawled forth from the same dark pits of the human imagination that HP Lovecraft once indulged. She speaks directly to the part of the human mind that recoils at death, and doubley so at undeath. As our civilisation has grown so the undead have been made safe, gathering around spooky clichés, fun-loving ghosts, Halloween parties, sparkling vampires. An age of reason, science and enlightenment has taught us that there is nothing to fear here. Lauka Vai reaches out and touches the inner medieval peasant lying alone in his hut, heart racing and ears straining to hear the creak and rustle of something lurking just beyond the door, the part of us that knows that reason is for daylight hours and lies awake when all the lights go out.Now I don’t actually own any of these new skeletons (of course – they’ve not even been released yet) but what I do have are the Cursed City skeletons which, to all intents and purposes, are basically the same models, so let’s line them up next to some of the older skeletons in the range and see how they compare. Forcing myself to be objective, and putting my personal prejudices aside, the old ones weren’t bad models, especially for their time – but they just don’t match up to the new breed at all. Cortek - Cold-Iron King - Dark Lord of Despair - Halgorax - Jade Skull Emperor - Oleksander Halgrim - Realmreaver Lord - Sarpa - Sepulchral Guard ( Prince of Dust - Champion - Harvester - Warden) - Yaros As an Undead fan who started the Warhammer hobby in the late 90’s, I already had the GW kits on hand. For the purposes of this article I bought one sprue of each kit from other manufacturers. It makes a lot of sense for wargamers to look at miniatures available outside Games Workshop when they’re looking for gaming pieces. Early on in my hobby days I often wondered how I could fill out an army without paying the GW tax for their ‘premium’ models. There weren’t many options at that time, and finding them could be difficult. Today however there are a variety of models available. Mantic recently released Ancient Egyptian styled skeletons in their Army of Dust, they look neat, but don’t really fit the flavor of this article. Games Workshop: 1988 Skeleton Warriors First plastic skeleton warriors with metal command. Source: Undead Army Book by Games Workshop