Warhammer The Old World – Tomb King of Khemri High Priest on Necrolith Bone Dragon

We covered the unboxing of the already out of stock core sets on the day of the pre-order and will look into the new models, which means in case of the Tomb Kings of Khemri the High Priest or Tomb King on Necrolith Bone Dragon.

This model is currently only available as part of the starter set and will be released on January 20th.

The Necrolith Bone Dragon is spread across two large sprues, including the parts for the monster itself, along with the palanquin for the High Priest and Tomb King. In addition, you will find a large 100 by 150 mm large rectangular base for this model. It doesn't come with decals.

We do not have an RRP of the individual kit, due to its size it could be somewhere between the Vampire on Zombie Dragon (55 EUR) and Black Coach (110 EUR), as both have two large sprues to create a similar sized model.

Casting of the new sprue is pretty good. Yet, a lot of small and delicate pieces, so you better have sharp tools and use caution while removing them from the sprue. Minor mould lines, yet these can be difficult to remove due to its organic design.

For comparison, the 100 x 150 mm base of the Bone Dragon is this large, but the same size the Zombie Dragon came with before being repacked for Age of Sigmar. On the right you can see the rather small 50 x 50mm base of the Royal Pegasus.

The instructions are part of the combined booklet, including the 1.250 points army list and give you a proper introduction on how to assemble this kit, with some minor steps that could have benefited from an additional angle / point of view.

The bone dragon has four legs, with arm rings and small armour plating on the front legs. The fibula of one of the legs was so under tension while on the sprue that it broke, while I clipped it. That's rather odd, as I didn't have that happen in a long time.

Next up the wings. These are pretty easy build as they come as large pieces. This makes from more stable compared to gluing individual "fingers" to the hand.

We put the bone wings to the side and continue with the chest. This is something I find a bit tricky on undead models, as you build a semi-closed sphere and painting the inside without something like an airbrush won't be easy. So, keep that mind, in case you want to keep it in build groups for easier painting.

The spine was tricky to remove the mould lines from, as the bone structure is quite detailed. Take your time. In addition, we add the neck bones as well.

To this bone torso we now add the legs and have a standing bone structure, that could be the base for other monstrous mounts, maybe adding the head from the zombie dragon or other undead beasts.

The head has a broad bone crest and a three-part tail with spikes to its end. The lower jaw of the bone dragon can be slightly adjusted. For the sake of stability, I kept it nearly closed.

Now we put the body on top of the large rock base decoration. In case you want to convert the model (as some already said, they preferred the look of the giant skeleton crocodile) you could with some minor work leave the wings off. You would just need to close the rock formation on the base. The model itself reaches over the bases frame on the front and back. But beyond that, we have the Bone Dragon complete and are off to the palanquin and heroes.

The parts on this sprue give you the option to build two different heroes, a High Priest and a Tomb King. The High Priest is sitting on his throne, and is built from a lot of individual parts. To be honest, I think they went a bit over the top, the lower legs are individual parts. The model has to be build in this way and make sure that the lower legs align properly, as he will be wonky on the throne if you don't.

If you're wondering where his left hand is. That is part of a casted spell we will see further down in this review. There are no options for his staff or head.

The Tomb King can either be built as the character on the Bone Dragon or on foot. We build the base of his body and will decide what we're going to do further below. To give you a side by side of the oldest (with the exception of the skeleton horse) model from this range and the newest. It is a bit wild, that there are 22 years between these two and the proportions are far from another, with the 7/8th edition WHFB releases be somewhere in the middle. Beside the proportion the scale is a topic, the Tomb King isn't even on a base and still quite taller than the skeleton.

He has no head options. Make sure the lower legs are properly aligned, as they gluing surface below the knee is rather open (no proper guides) and he could stand wonky if you don't pay attention to this.

We're trying to build this model in a way, that we can swap the heroes, depending on what we want to play. The Tomb King has four different weapons to choose from, with the flail being the option for the variant on foot, just like with the shield, which is actually intended to not be used on the mounted variant. Anyhow - rule of cool - we went with the halberd and shield, and due to the shield, we had to use the smaller cloak for the arm position to be there.

The palanquin is a stable build, with two different designs for the front. It has a throne, on which the High Priest sits on, or the Tomb king stands in front of. We build the variant of the High Priest, to have room for the sitting character.

As you can see, both can be placed on the palanquin. If you would use a small magnet, you could probably add those to the platform and feet of the model and keep them swappable, or use a small pin.

By using the shield for the Tomb King, we went around having his open hand hover over the front plate of the palanquin. Still makes a proper posture on there.

There are a few details to be added. For example, a shading for the palanquin, which could easily be magnetised if you wanted to. There's a small mummified cat, which you can add and small side plates, which we added to raise the front armour. In addition, there's a small altar, this does not need to be glued, you could keep modular if you want to swap between the two heroes.

Add the palanqiun to the back of the Bone Dragon, and as you can see it works quite well for the Tomb King. As for the High Priest, we replaced the casted spell (which was over the top and created a bit of noise very close to the character) with the spare hand we had from the Tomb King and gave the Priest a "raise the dead" gesture. This way we can swap between both characters, according to our needs.

And to give you an idea of the size next to the other models from this boxed set. He is quite tall.

With the properly painted miniatures from the product pictures, we didn't take our usual "show case" and just show you the painted one from the 'Eavy Metal team.

Conclusion

This is an impressive kit and actually built quite fast for its size. I don't have a price for this here, so I can't talk about value. I would prefer it being close to the pricing of the Vampire on Zombie Dragon but I have my doubts. Maybe it will be priced around the range of the Mortarch boxed set.

It is very detailed kit, and due to its lean proportions and complex design, nothing I would suggest for a starting hobbyist. But with the model being part of the Old World range, and that not being an introductory product, I don't see that as much of an issue. I am quite happy with the aspect, that you have two heroes / character choices, and the Tomb King has some weapons, for further modularity. My biggest issue with this kit, or the newer type of kits is, they don't offer that much room for modularity / individuality. Back in the 90s, a metal model came as it is, every Nagash looked the same, with the only alteration due to its paint job. With plastic, converting is easier, but I think it would be so much better, if I had some options, like having the crest of the crocodile in a way, that I could leave it off or alternate head or something, so that not every Bone Dragon that is built from this box looks the same.

Same with the heroes. They all look the same, and due to the way, they are cut, converting them takes work, as you can't just change the angle of the head. Yet, of course with plastic this is far easier than with metal miniatures.  And of course, a design like this wouldn't be possible in metal and would cost triple the price in Forge World resin.

Beyond that, impressive sculpt. If you have some spare parts from other undead plastic kits, and there are quite a few similar sized, you can probably do quite a bit with this. For example, do a head or tail swap with the Necrosphinx, leave the palanquin off completely and have a huge bone dragon. Add the wings from the Zombie Dragon and have them spread out. Lots of options and with plastic more manageable.

Warhammer The Old World is a brand by Games Workshop.

The reviewed product item was provided by the manufacturer.