Some time ago I started to describe my Necron Army and started with a description of my Necron troops. Well, here’s the next installment featuring my Necron Lords or HQ choices. I started my HQ with the Necron lord that was issued at the time of the GW Apocalypse launch. The Apocalypse supplement allowed you to field huge armies and was the first real expansion pack for 40K for some time. Necrons were not given a great deal of coverage in Apocalypse and I feel that they are somewhat underrepresented but the new Lord was a nice figure and had a ressurection orb so he was chosen to be the leader of my growing army.
I painted him in the colour scheme that I had developed for my army with the standard terracotta basing scheme and as well as the crystals supplied with the model, I added a few of my own ‘emeralds‘ to the base.
The next Lord was the Classic Lord, first issued when the original Necron Raiders supplement was published for the 3rd edition rules.
Once again, I continued with the red, gold, silver, green, terracotta pallette so that he fits in nicely with the classic edition troops. For the sake of completeness, I then painted the original Necron Lord on foot, issued with the first full Necron Codex about 5 years ago. Yes, that’s the one that’s still in use now and well past needing an update…..rumour has it that it’s next year….we patiently wait, as all good necrons would!
I changed the arm on this figure as I thought that having the outstretched arm palm down made him look a bit like a magician sprinkling magic dust. The new pose makes him look a bit more sinister and he looks as though he is goading his opponent to come and get some! I also made the metal ants on the base. They were supposed to be a representation of the mini or micro creatures that are mentioned in the phylactery war gear rule in the Necron codex. I had intended to start including these on the bases of other Necrons but they are very fiddley to make. They are made from a metal bead, fuse wire and the tail is a small piece of guitar string. I lost count how many times I stuck the pieces to my fingers with super glue and the whole model nearly found a new home at the bottom of the garden at one point, so I have postponed any mass modelling of the metal ants for the time being!
I had to have one of the limited edition Lords that were issued with the army deals. I managed to get one as part of a job lot of bits on ebay for a very good price. I decided to change the colour scheme slightly. This was for two reasons. Firstly, I had just finished painting the Night Bringer and I wanted a Lord that looked as though he was one of his gang, so to speak. The second reason is that in the Apocalypse Supplement there is a very good article about the Necrons that seems to hint at a Hierarchical order within the Necron hordes. I thought that a Colour change could be used to signfy his seniority.
Having built all the lords on foot that are available it was time to build a lord with a destroyer body. However, I just couldn’t build the standard version, I had to have the one with Tomb Spyders legs. This is quite a common conversion and very straight forward to build. It really is as simple as cutting the Tomb spyders legs and superglueing them into the destroyer body. I also extended the warscythe by combining both types of staff supplied with the kit. A bit of a tricky operation but the result is a more imposing weapon, always a good thing ……
The other modification was to add the scarab swam on to the base. The swarm is based on the swarm that is supplied with the Night Bringer model and I was lucky enough to have a spare piece (again, all bought on ebay as part of the same job lot that included the limited ed. lord). To make the swarm even more impressive I added some extra scarabs and topped the swarm off with a scarab with his claws outstretched. I also used a very simple moulding technique to produce lots of extra Scarabs to add to the base itself. I’ll cover how you can make these two simple projects in a future article.
My final Necron Lord (so far….there will be more!) is a complete conversion based on a model that I had seen on a forum. It’s a necron wraith Lord that uses the parts left over from the Destroyer Lord Kit. I used Sculpy to make the body and added a few extras from my bits box and hey presto, a new Lord!
So that’s the HQ covered. In part three I’ll have a look at the elites that are in my collection, although I might just jump to Heavy support and show you how you can still use the Tomb Spyder body left over from the Lord conversion. I would n’t want you to think that I had just discarded it into the bits box!