Kaela Fain Shelwe

Okay, I finally have my eldar squad ready for my first game.

I'll just throw the pictures up now and talk about them later..

Guardians with Shuriken Catapults


Guardians with Clubs and Combat blades


Fighter Aspirants


Warlock & Wraithguard


Striking Scorpion Aspect Warrior & Striking Scorpion Exarch with Shuiken pistols and 'parrying blades' (swords)


The Squad Assembled



I'd be eager to hear what people think and particularly to hear about how others approached doing Eldar without armour.

I never really liked eldar but these are one of the few one's I do like.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who want's to know what parts you used to make them.

Great job

Pure bad assness

I love the warlock and wraithguard. Is that thing back from 2nd edition or something I have never seen that sculpt.

Great looking squad - really characterful - any WIP shots (some subtle conversions in this lot).

The Warlock s a Warmachine (or Hordes) mini isn't it? I have one in my bits box that I've never got round to using.

Cheers Laney

OK... it is no secret that I don't like Eldar. I'm with mudboy on this one... I refuse to give prise to the Eldar (spit!) I will call your models 'Winkies'.

Your models are THE best Winkies I have EVER seen. I would not mind playing a Winky Squad. Very inspirational! My favorite Winky? The Striking Scorpion Exarch with Shuiken pistols and 'parrying blades' (swords)... the one in the right. REALLY cool pose!

The conversions are superb... the concept of the club is PHENOMENAL! I have not seen your other work... but these Winkies are out of these world. One word?

MAGNIFICENT!

I hate Eldar. I love these. GOOD job!!

Awww.... thanks guys

Laney is correct, the Warlock is Lady Aiyana from the Warmachine line.

The Fighter Aspirants and the Aspect Warrior with the improbable mohawk are actual eldar figures (from the early 90's IIRC), the rest of them are pretty much thrown together from junk in my bits box (though the Exarch Mordheimer likes is heavily built around a new-style dark-eldar Incubus). Clearly, I had a few choice bits to choose from (though not necessarily the bits that turned out looking the best!) - I don't play Eldar, so I've been waiting for a project that would give me something to do with a few of those bits for a while. The Aspect Warrior (the one on the left) turns out to be my least favourite model by quite a lot, but I can deal with that as he's likely to be one of the first squad members to need a new model when he acquires armour (in that my Exarch will get the heavy armour, and the aspect warrior will be the only officer that can wear his old armour). The Exarch was the last squad member I did the detailing on, as I wanted to give him green gemstones as a nod to his aspect's traditional colour scheme, but was really worried that it would look terrible because the rest of the squad was mostly given blue gemstones. I'm glad he seems to have turned out okay.

Anyone who was around in the thread in which I was asking for help in building this squad may remember that I was initially quite against the idea of using clubs as they seemed like quite an un-eldar-like weapon, and after caving to the need to not have my squad brutally murdered the moment I come within charging range, I spent a long time trying to imagine what Eldar clubs would actually look like. I was very pleased to be able to end up with something that was identifiable as a club, but also looked like something the Eldar would make. If anyone's interested, the head of the club is the back half of a shuriken catapult from the newer guardians box with the handle and ammo-feed cut off and replaced with some spikey-bits from the old 3rd ed Dark Eldar plastics. The removed ammo-feed became the lower end of the handle (the rest of the handle is just plastic tube). After getting the clubs right it felt like a shame to give the squad members with swords weapons that weren't actually clearly swords, but I really wanted to use the pincer shape of the 'parrying blades' to reinforce the scorpion motif on my Aspect Warrior and Exarch.

The torso section of the Wraithguard is from the old War-cry/Banshee style Eldar dreadnought, and wanting to find a use for that bit is the main reason I insisted on having a Wraithguard in the squad in the first place. That being said, I spent a awful lot of time staring at just that torso, holding it over a 40mm base at various heights, trying to figure out what else could go with it. In the end, the head came from the back section of one of the heavy weapons in the guardians box (the Shuriken Cannon, I think), the upper arms and legs came from a Monsterpocalypse figure I probably couldn't identify again (but I ended up with a lot of dismembered arms and legs being scrapped before I ended up with limbs I was happy with [and would support the weight of the metal torso]), and the Wraithcannon is a shuriken catapult, a gauss flayer, a deathspinner and an eldar flamer kind-of jammed together. The blue sections on the arms and legs are clear plastic that looked quite cheap and tacky at first, but the matt varnish I use gave them a kind-of frosted look I'm actually pretty pleased with.

I don't think I've ever actually seen the official Wraithguard model in real life, so I'm not sure how the scale of my Wraithguard compares. I imagine my Wraithguard is a bit bigger, but still enough smaller than a Wraithlord to be feasible. It looks to me about the right size for a figure that has to be mounted on a 40mm base anyway.

Your wraithguard is about 10 times better than the official...

Well the good news about feeling like your wraithguard is out of scale is that the actual wraithguard model is out of scale. They are supposed to tower over the troops so that leaves me picturing them having their wraithcannon above head height on a normal eldar.

I love the wraithcannon you made it looks better than the pos they have with the solid hunk of metal that is the current wraithguard.

There seems to be quite a lot of general Eldar-hate going around. What is it that people particularly dislike about them?

For me the Craftworld Eldar seem quite disengaged from the rest of the setting - in the background material (or the old background material at least) the majority of Eldar remaining after the fall are Mercenaries and Pirates; the Craftworld Eldar represent a very particular (and elite) sect of the surviving race and of all the surviving Eldar have the greatest vested interest in _not_ engaging the other races of the galaxy in warfare. Even as unpopular as they are, the Craftworld Eldar as a tabletop army in WH40k are not representative of the setting as described. GW seems unwilling to provide an option for playing Pirates or Mercenaries (until the Corsairs list in IA:XI, anyway) despite them being both more populous and more warlike - primarily because, I think, there would not be enough different types of units to fill a codex to the same level of variety as existing xenos codices, and because the list would seem too similar the the existing craftworld codex.

As a business decision, it's probably absolutely correct - Pirates and Mercenaries probably wouldn't be very popular - but the inconsistency between the background material and the game continue to annoy me, which is why I decided I wanted to play Eldar Mercenaries in Death Squads (albeit Mercenaries with a Craftworld Background). The premise is that the squad are the survivors of a lost craftworld that have rallied around an Exarch for survival. I wanted my Guardians to represent Eldar who were on the Lifepaths of Artisans and Poets, but whose worlds were shattered and were given weapons and told to fight by the Exarch, are who are still quite under-equipped (psychologically and literally) for the whole situation. The Fighter Aspirants are those artisans and poets who have adapted to their new lifestyle and embraced the Warrior Path (even if they don't understand it yet). I wanted to tap the inherent tragedy of the Exarchs - Upon the destruction of his Craftworld, the Exarch _could_ have led his wards to another surviving Craftworld where they would be taken in as refugees, but he was so lost to the Path of the Warrior that he was instead compelled to seek only battle after battle. Without the extreme battle-focus of the Exarch, the rest of the squad would never have survived to escape their lost Craftworld, but because of that same battle-focus, they are now doomed to eventually fall to the Path of the Warrior themselves (if they survive that long).

The other thing that bothers me about the Eldar as presented by GW are their gaudy colour schemes. The Eldar are portrayed as being much like humans, but being more psychicly aware, more sensual and engaging in everything they do much more intently. Each of the Eldar's senses is supposed to be honed to be many, many times more sensitive than a human's and their art is portrayed as possessing such subtlety as to be imperceptible to the human eye. If such is the case, then why on earth would they wear armour painted in such a way that a _human_ almost gets seizures looking at it? That would be _hellish_ to anyone with the enhanced senses the Eldar are supposed to have, and obviously lacks the grace of form that they are supposed to embody.

lakedaimonioi wrote:

There seems to be quite a lot of general Eldar-hate going around. What is it that people particularly dislike about them?

Me? Well, mainly to piss off Dysturbed. HA!

Seriously... for me the presentation of the Eldar is a mix bad. Hard to describe... I'm a purist at heart. If I get presented with a 'wacky' or implausible background, I don't mind. Like Highlander or Star Wars... very cool, until you try to explain certain things (aliens and midiclorians?!?) Orks are 'wacky'... and their tech works 'because'. The Eldar have a rich background... makes very good sense... then the models are presented like freaking clowns. Ahhh... taste the rainbow. It is exactly what happened to the Squats... nice fluff, presented stupidly on the models. Can have 'great engineers' and builders of 'great warmachines' in bikes (flipping you the bird) or being launched by a canon.

Like you mentioned... the Eldar fluff is VERY cool... but the game stuff presented in 40k is pathetic. I dislike Eldar because the powers that be are incapable of making their mind and present a cohesive force. Do we really have to make the colorful? At this point in their life (in 40k)... they have been to the Warp and back. What the hell they care about colors? Stupid. This is THE grim future... let them be grim and dark. The Dark Eldar are freaking sadistic slavers. The Edar do NOT need to be a 'good' counterpart.

To me, Eldars should be presented as their OWN race... alien. Not as a pathetic human-wanna-be. Give me Tyranids... we eat everything on site. Alien motivation. Give me Orks... we fight everything in sight. Alien motivation. Give me Chaos... we destroy everything on site. Alien (?) motivation. Give me IG... we die versus everything on site. Pathetic motivation. Give me Astartes... we are living gods and we kill everything on site. Irrational motivation. Eldar? Make up your mind.

So I don't like Eldar because nobody has the balls to fix them... just like you said, lakedaimonioi.

Well the good news is the pirates finally got conversion parts made by forgeworld a little while back when they put out IA11.


Not to mention finally conversion parts for Shuriken Cannon, Eldar Missile Launcher, Fusion Gun and a Flamer


That being said do I think they belong in not really.
The only fluff that exists for them mainly is the fluff in the old books so far.
And those are not what I would consider good fluff. Galv Thorpe who wrote a lot of the old 2nd ed eldar stuff is now writing a series of eldar books that finally brings more fluff to them but I don't think they will be getting to the corsairs anytime soon. By the sound of things they are doing dark eldar soon too this way.

It is also my extreme hope that with the next codex they tone down the colors on all the craftworld eldar stuff. It's clownish and it's the main focal reason I think most people don't like the eldar. The harlequins it's fine on because they are performers and clowns of sorts so they can be like that.

Also you should remember that most of the problems in the 40k universe are because of what the Eldar did. Their decadence is the reason Slaneesh was born into the world and the warp ripped into the real world. If that hadn't happened the humans would have caused it eventually but unfortunately the Eldar take the heat for it. They are why chaos is in the real world. If they had not been so foolish to cause all this in the first place they wouldn't be running around to try to prevent the taint of chaos from destroying their craftworlds now. Humans and other races see them as arrogant if not egotistical because they are looking out for only themselves and the survival of their craftworlds. Killing humans who in 3 generations would have found a artifact of chaos and lead a legion of fallen to destroy a craftworld is a bit of a overkill if you look at it. (yeah it happened in the first book).

As far as the eldar hate it's all because of Mord and his damn ork love. He can't help it his small ork brain doesn't understand the complexity and strength in superior speed and firepower.

Huh.

I'd think the fluff for pirates would be _perfect_ for , but that tactically (at least in the IA:XI list) they are defined primarily by their access to jump-packs - which is a problem because no-one else has access to jump packs at all in yet; and making them available to one list and not others introduces all kinds of balance issues.

Fantasy Flight should soon be releasing 'The Soul Reaver' a Dark Eldar sourcebook for the Rogue Trader RPG which will include rules for Dark Eldar Player Characters. Hopefully there'll be some useful stuff for Corsairs in there, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

The birth of Slaanesh being the source of most of the problems in the universe is a strong argument. One possible counter-argument is that while the Eye of Terror leaves the door open to the Materium from the Warp, it is only the psychic beacon of that Astronomicon that actually lures them through (as well as the luring the Hivefleets from galaxies away). No-one really knows for sure; nor should they IMHO. In any case, the Eldar _probably_ aren't responsible for the Maelstrom.

@lakedaimonioi

Nice work on your squad and great job on kitbashing.

Those FW models look VERY nice. They 'captured' that Eldar feel, without having the 'taste the rainbow' (LINK - NSFW)

lakedaimonioi wrote:

I'd think the fluff for pirates would be _perfect_ for , but that tactically (at least in the IA:XI list) they are defined primarily by their access to jump-packs - which is a problem because no-one else has access to jump packs at all in yet; and making them available to one list and not others introduces all kinds of balance issues.

Not necessarily true. That is why we have added Flight. As you can read, the rules have been placed there, so we have room to maneuver (HA! Get it? Flight? Maneuver? Ohhh... meh!)

Sure, the balancing IS an issue... but no more than everything else. We introduced Flight with the Kroot, in hopes to add it in other locations. Not all Squads can move by Flying... there won't be any DKoK Flyiers around. After we complete the work on this revision, we MAY see further adaptations on existing Squads to include Flight. Once Dysturbed is less disturbed (HA! Another pun!) by his classes, then the Eldar would get a huge sweep and revision. All in due time.

Thanks for the tips on the Fantasy Flight's source book 'The Soul Reaver'... it may prove valuable!

Dysturbed wrote:

As far as the eldar hate it's all because of Mord and his damn ork love. He can't help it his small ork brain doesn't understand the complexity and strength in superior speed and firepower.

Uhhh... Whatever! WAAAGH!!! heheheh...