Warmaster – Tomb Kings of Khemri

What is a perfect way to motivate yourself beside deadlines? Having somebody else join your project / play the same games. So I managed to fire up Florian / Celebration Parallax about Warmaster and he chose the Tomb Kings of Khemri.

Not a bad fit, as that would create the Bretonnia vs. Khemri setup from the Old World Release, we could do a bit of crusading and it would certainly not feel like a mirror match.

Beside that, due to their design, painting them in 10mm shouldn't be the hardest thing, as you could probably easily do a lot already with a coloured primer, midtone wash and a bit of dry-brushing. For those of you, who don't know the Tomg Kings of Khemri, they are egyptian themed undead within the Warhammer World, using a lot of elements of the era, like Sphinxes or Chariots.

As buying the OOP miniatures for Warmaster second hand is an incredibly expensive idea and to be frank, the range didn't age that well, especially in comparison with what you can get our hands on as of today. With 3d printing around, this is a much more flexible solution and usually my go-to for Warmaster armies is ForestDragon, and while he covers 10 different armies for the game, he doesn't do Tomb Kings. Yet this is something that you can find at Green Skins Miniatures, who did a good job with the design and options for the models. The whole army pack with everything you need sets you back 60 USD, which is totally fine.

While I'm not into the meta of the game, I used the army selector tool for Warmaster, and Rob Hawkins Army of Baltizzar Necropolis for an orientation, and went out for around 3,000 points of Warmaster,

• 8 Units of Skeletons (per 3 bases)
• 8 Units Skeleton Bowmen (per 3 bases)
• 2 Skeleton Cavalry (per 3 bases)
• 3 Skeleton Chariots (per 3 bases)
• 2 Carrion (per 3 bases)
• 2 Bone Giant
• 2 Sphinx
• 2 Skull Chukka
• 2 Bone Thrower (2 Bases per Unit)
• 1 Tomb King on Zombie Dragon
• 1 Tomb King on Chariot
• 1 Tomb King on Foot
• 1 Liche Priest on Chariot
• 2 Liche Priest on Foot

I am printing on a Mono 4K by Anycubic and usually fit around 3 to 4 regiments on a single plate. GSM has quite a lot of different poses, which is nice, especially with the infantry, they have multiple leader strips, along with 5-6 different designs per regular strip and with the skeletons you get them with hand weapons or spears, which mixes them up even more. And similar variety with other units, like chariots and at least A/B with the larger models.

Using the regular standard resin by Anycubic, the printing itself isn't an issue. I manage to print the whole army within a week, with between one or two plates a day. Had no problems so far. The main issue with Warmaster is the clean up. In bigger scales, you have supported models, dip them in hot water and peal away the supports. In this scale the models are supported on the bases themself, and as you can see, I marked the removeable supports on a strip of cavalry, that is lot of manual labor. And now do that for 12 strips of cavalry, 48 skeleton infantry and 120 (!) archers. That is time consuming.

Anyhow, after a week of printing and around 750 ml of resin, I ended up with this batch and prepared them to be handed of to Florian. I really like the many different poses that you get with STLs, as this is far more flexible than metal casting in that scale (where you usually have less different poses).

This is the whole set of around 3,000 points packed in bags for storage until he picks them up. The only thing missing are the bases, you could print them with FDM or just spend a bit of money with Renedra, as they have the 40 by 20mm bases ready to order.

Once again, I am very happy with the decision I made two and a half years ago. Yes, with a larger print bed, it would go faster and I probably could cut down print time in half, but I still find it amazing that I can print these at home, for reasonable costs. The STLs cost about the same as a few blisters, and the biggest invest actually the labor cleaning up the prints.

That saying, I have to get start painting my Bretonnians.