Tzeentch army at the beginning

I suppose it was last year around this time when I first said to myself, "self, this chaos undivided army crap just will not stand. You must have an army devoted to a chaos power." And of course, when I said A chaos power, I really meant two, but I'll get to that later. The thing is, I don't like Slaanesh that much. I like the miniatures, or well....I like the Noise Marines, but I don't like the way they play. The Sonic Blasters just really aren't worth all that hype, and the rest of it...has anyone actually seen a miniature of Lucius the Eternal or do you have to convert that yourself? You can see what I'm saying.

I also am not a big fan of Khorne. They grow on you, but my problem is that they are essentially a hand to hand army and well...I've got a frickin' Tyranid army and a Harlequin army. I don't want to count Khorne out, but still.

Nurgle. Well, yes Nurgle is nice. My problem with Nurgle is directly related to the miniatures and it seemed logical at the time. Now, it doesn't. The logic was this...in order to play Death Guard, you have to have miniatures that look like Death Guard, and therefore, I decided to play Tzeentch.

No, that doesn't particularly make much sense. As of right now, any miniature I attempt to add to my Tzeentch army, I have to graft some weird head gear to. What's worse is that there really are only three official Tzeentch miniatures: guy with bolter, guy with power sword and bolt pistol, and Ahrimann. Guy with blasted standard? No. Guy with that staff thingee? No. Terminators? No. All of those miniatures must be added. Now, one could buy the heads as Bitz from Games Workshop at $2 a pop, but that's a lot of heads. 8 termies and 2 cool leader guys and you've spent $20! You could have bought a whole 'nother squad on ebay for that kind of money. I will go over this later.

Going back, I should have chosen Death Guard. They are a better army, and the conversions are much easier to do. A little putty, a jewlers drill, and the armor looks screwed up. There is no need to make fancy headgear and etc. Plus, the death guard are essentially Thousand Sons with cooler stuff, an extra point of toughness rather than the extra wound, and oh yeah...heavy weapons.

I'll tell you what I wasn't going for with my Tzeentch army. I didn't want a repeat of any configuration possible with my undivided army "The Pyre" and so, let me discuss them for a moment.

My Pyre army has a number of incarnations which revolve around the fact that I have a full squad of obliterators, terminators, raptors (12 or so, I think), bikes, a defiler, a predator, a dreadnought, a giant commander, a lesser sized commander, and Fabius Bile. Plus, with undivided you get eggroll which means that ultimately you can play any demon you want so there, plus I can put in noise marines, berzerkers, thousand sons, or death guard, if I want. It's a serious army. What they CAN'T do isn't immediately obvious.

So, here's what I have to work with the Tzeentch army. When I first decided I wanted to make a thousand sons army I bought four things, a box of Horrors of Tzeentch, two boxes of Thousand Sons marines, and the piece de' resistance, a Thousand Sons dreadnought from ForgeWorld (curse you ForgeWorld!)

By the way, has anyone seen the Greyknight dreadnought from Forge World? God that things beautiful. If only I ever planned to play a five thousand point battle with my grey knights, but I digress.

I already had at my disposal a Lord of Change, which I got on ebay along with a Great Unclean One for something like $20--old models. See? I really should have been thinking Death Guard. Oh well, too late now. Also, I have thirteen or so Terminators who are either chaos or easilly converted. I'm using VOID exo-armor guys just because they're cheaper and the five chaos termies I've got are circa 1990. So, they look like regular terminators with different markings. One has been converted to look like there's a skeleton inside the armor.

I have put together the tzeentch bad boys and here they are. I am sure that I will later give a blow by blow on how to paint them on my next squad, but for now, let me point out that the one thing you MUST do before putting together your army is decide on a base. I don't know how many of my armies have fifteen different base types. It's ludicrous. What I want to go for is to paint the whole thing black and then drizzle extra light sand over that. It creates a sort of alien pyrite thing. The sand by the way, I got at a dollar store. Perhaps it needn't have to be said that you should always avoid Games Workshop stores whenever possible, but also, avoid paying Trainset prices for shit like sand. It's sand! If you can't get it for free, $.50 a pound is a pretty good price.

Alright, that's the start of the army.