Herald of Khorne – Daemons of Chaos Hero

One of the most capable hero class characters for Daemons of Chaos is the Herald of Khorne. There are a lot of good reasons to it and especially when you're fielding the herald with Bloodletters, the effectiveness of the unit. Here's a list of reasons why I would say that the Herald is a good character for your Daemons of Chaos army.

Herald of Khorne

 

Good Basic Stats

The herald comes with very good basic stats. High weapon skill, high strength, high initiative. These three stats are what is wanted for you to kill off your opponents effectively. High initiative means that a lot of times, you get to hit your opponent first. That means less chance for your opponents to hit you back especially in a challenge where you kill your challenger straight off. High weapon skill will enable you to make sure that you have a 66% chance of hitting your target. Don't forget, the herald also have the hatred rule, this enables you to re-roll the 33% that you missed! High strength does what it does best, wound you opponent easily. Don't forget the Killing Blow ability which could outright kill off a character and gives your victims no armour saves.

Abilities

• Hatred. The ability to re-roll missed to-hit rolls in close combat. You would want to maximize the number of hits by this guy. This is one of the big plus why you have to have him in your army.
• Locus of Khorne. Join the Herald of Khorne into a unit of Bloodletters or Bloodcrushers. The whole unit will now have the Hatred rule. Now the whole unit is really boosted up with the presence of the herald.
• Killing Blow. One of the most feared skills by characters and cavalry. It allows no armour saves and kills off the target regardless of how many wounds left. Unless your opponent is immune to killing blow, they would have this in mind when they face the herald.
• Magic Resistance (1). Although it doesn't seem much but if your herald is running alone, you'll need every single protection from shooting and magic missiles. This won't help you with shooting but it would increase your defence against magic by increasing your ward saves.

Chaos Gifts

• Armour of Khorne. Daemons normally do not have any armour saves but being under Khorne, the herald gets to equip himself with Armour of Khorne. This armour gives you 3+ armour saves which would enhance your survivability.
• Daemonic Robes. This gift is hardly used as it does not give any armour saves but gives your herald a better surviving chance against high strength opponents and against warmachines.
• Etherblade. This gift of a weapon ignores the target's armour saves but why need to spend additional points when you already have a killing blow that ignores armour saves? I would rather spend the points on other gifts or points for the army.
• Firestorm Blade. This is a fairly common gift that is given to the herald but it is also double edged as if your opponent is very sure that you would equip your herald with this gift, they could equip their characters against flaming attacks. This would render your herald ineffective against them. On the other side, you can negate regeneration and with strength seven, you could even slay monsters (only easier).
• Obsidian Armour. An expensive armour that negates magical weapons against him but also gives a good 3+ armour saves. I wouldn't recommend it due to the high costing value.
• Soul Hunger. The Herald of Khorne have only 3 attacks. So with high weapon skill, Hatred, strength six, Killing Blow, I think Soul Hunger would be overkill to ensure that all 3 attacks would wound.

Herald of Khorne

Battle Standard Bearer

The Khorne Herald can also be the army battle standard bearer. The reason is simple because it allows you to re-roll a sudden bad roll on a instability test and of course of the magical icons that you could carry with it. As the herald usually joins a unit of Bloodletters or Bloodcrushers, it is very useful to be able to re-roll bad rolls on instability tests. Especially when you lose combat, re-rolling those high rolls or even rolling doubles 1s would save the unit. The icons that the herald could carry are only five:

• Banner of Hellfire. It contains a bound spell of power 5 that deals D6 strenghth six hits to all nearby enemies. Sounds pretty awesome but at the cost of another herald! Apart from that, it would require you to use up 2 power dice to cast it (effectively unless you wish to try a single 33% dice roll). Too expensive to carry and eats up power dice which is important for your other wizards. This banner is meant for 7^th edition and before.
• Banner of Unholy Victory. In the days where you can now always attack in 2 or 3 ranks (horde), static combat resolution has not been very important. It would make a difference only if your opponent would be as destructive as your unit in close combat.
• Great Icon of Despair. My favourite icon. This icon has given a lot of opponents a lot of headache when they have to take fear tests at -2 to their leadership. Very useful against opponents with leadership value of 8 and below. Look at your opponent's face when they have to take their leadership at -2.
• Great Standard of Sundering. Another banner that is really good against opponents that would concentrate much on magic. Especially after deployment has been done, only that you reveal you have this ability. Reduces their ability to cast spells and oh... remember not to have your own wizards to have spell of light.
• Standard of Chaos Glory. A great banner if you wish to tarpit your opponent's unit. It costs a bomb but sometimes could help out with you have to slowly grind away your opponent. Otherwise if you would win in most close combat situations, this banner would be a waste.

Conclusion

The Herald of Khorne is always a good addition to your Daemons of Chaos army. Always put him either in a unit of Bloodletters or Bloodcrushers and he will not only help increase the effectiveness of the unit but also being able to survive and perform. He is not the most toughest character in Warhammer Fantasy Battles but he is certainly one of the most cost effective character.

Herald of Khorne Conversion

I have always liked to personalize my own army to make it unique and easily recognized to be of my own. For Daemons of Chaos, there are limitless possibilities that you can do with Daemons. Daemons afterall, don't really have to follow the usual humanoid shapes. You can many armed monstrocities, extremely large heads or limbs, oversized weapons, multiple heads and the list could go on and on. As for your characters of course you would like to make them very outstanding and easily distinguished when you place them among your troops.

As for my first conversion for my Herald of Khorne, I opted not to go overboard but to use mostly from the Bloodletter box and minimally only used three separate bits from Empire bits. So here is the list of items that I have used for this conversion

1. PVA glue + water mixture
2. Tissue paper
3. Khorne icon from bloodletter standard bearer
4. Banner from bloodletter standard bearer
5. Bloodletter body and leg
6. Bloodletter army (left and right)
7. Bloodletter champion head
8. Empire shields x 2
9. Empire flagellant head
10. Small pin
11. Super glue
12. Plastic glue
13. Hair dryer with paper nozzle
14. Pen knife

To start off, I make the base of the herald with the PVA glue + water mixture + tissue. As this is the theme of my entire army, they would all have the lava based base. Mould the base up to look like a rock. Before setting it up to dry, take the Khorne icon from the bloodletter standard bearer set and cut it out from it's stand. Stick the icon to the base where it would be the front of your herald. Make sure that most of the tissue and glue has contact over the icon so that it would stick when it's dried. After this is completed, you can set it out to dry.

Once the base is completely dry, glue the herald's body (of course!) to the base. I used superglue excessively for this to crystalize some of the base with the herald's foot. As the tissue hardens, you may not have a full contact on the foot of the herald. The crystalization of the superglue would support how well the herald stick to the base. At this point, you do not have to worry if the herald would be facing too high up or too low, the next part will handle this. Wait till the superglue is dried, you may wish to reposition the herald body. Use the hair dryer with a custom made paper nozzle to bend the legs of the herald that it would be facing in your intended position.

Icon, body and tissue + PVA glue + water mix all glued

Next glue both army to the body with plastic glue. Wait for it to dry and then by using the same method and the legs, use the hair dryer with custom made paper nozzle to bend the arms. I even bend some of the fingers of the left arm to the shape I wanted. It's going to hold a severed head by the end of the conversion. The arm holding the hellblade, I bent it face forward and raised the sword slightly higher. I can't bend it too much as I have to leave some space for the shoulder pads and also the big head.

Arms bent and glued to body

Next up are both shoulder pads. Get two Empire shields, file off the details and then use the hair dryer with the custom paper nozzle to bend it slightly. It's pretty simple and fast to do but be careful as they are small and easily get over bent.

Shoulder pads made from Empire shields

Just as I'm finished with the shoulder pads, why not I continue wit the cloak for the herald. Cut off the banner from the standard bearer stand. Same method as the shoulder pads, I slowly bend the cloak. I had made sure that I could place two more bloodletters behind my herald with this cloak bent in this way.

Cloak for the Herald

For the severed head, I simply make cuts at the neck area till it looked like it was a severed neck. Then I glued two very small pins to the cut area. This would make the neck to look like it was torn out with two remaining veins tagging along.

Severed head

Now that all the parts are completed, what's left are just painting and glueing them together. As I already have a theme of painting my whole army, they would stay the same for the base, herald's skin colours, hellblade, horns, fingernails, teeth and so on. I have not yet glue the shoulder pads, the head and the cloak. I prefer to have them painted first and then only glue them together. For the Khorne icon, I have it base coloured with Chainmail and then washed with Flesh Wash. The inner layer of blood covering the icon would be in Red Gore while the top most blood layer would be Blood Red. The skulls on the icon would be as how I would paint most of the skulls which is Bleached Bone and washed with watered down Flesh Wash. For the severed head, I had a mixture of Bleached Bone added with Dark Angels Green. Then washed thinly with Flesh Wash. The neck area are dry brushed with Red Gore. For the shoulder pads, I base painted Red Gore on it and added Khrone markings on both of them with Chainmail. Added with some Flesh Wash, it would have some golden rusty look on the Chainmail. Finally for the cloak, I had it fully based with Red Gore then outlined with Blood Red. The designs on the cloack was first painted with Blood Red and then painted again with Blazing Orange.

Now everything has been painted up, it's time to glue them together. Start off with something simple. I'll go with the shoulder pads. Pretty straight forward, I just glue them on both shoulders. Then while waiting for the glue to dry, I glued the severed head to the left arm. It gets a bit tricky with my clumsy fingers so it took me some time before I manage to glue it on the right position that I had wanted. Finally it's the cloak. I took a simple path and just glue the top ends of the cloak directly on the shoulder pads. The contact point is pretty small, so be sure to reinforce it with a little bit more glue. I used a little bit extra super glue to do this job. With that glued up, that completes my herald of Khorne.

Frontal look

From the sides

From the top

Herald of Tzeentch Conversion

Tzeentch creatures have always been perceived as being weak in close combat but strong in magical ability. Thus having the common weak physique as everyone would think they “should” have. For this Tzeentch herald, I wish to have a different look and change all that perception about Tzeentch characters having a weaker body. What I had in mind, that this character, fluff wise, would have been able to take over a chaos warrior's mind and manifested itself from the body of this warrior's body. This enabled the herald to possess the strong physique of a chaos warrior. I didn't want to make this into a major conversion project and opted for a simple way gluing a few part together. Here is a list of what I used for the herald:

1. Warrior of Chaos body and back (includes the cloak)
2. Icon from Horrors of Tzeentch standard bearer
3. Head from Horrors of Tzeentch champion
4. Arm from Horrors of Tzeentch sprue
5. Tongue from Horror's sprue (cut out from one of the model's body)
6. PVA glue + water + tissue
7. Book from Empire flagellant sprue
8. Modeling file (for filing off unwanted parts)
9. Superglue
10. Plastic glue
11. Putty
12. Cutting knife

Out from the sprue

First off, I would start off would the base as it would take time for it to dry. My usual PVA glue + water + tissue base would be used for my whole Daemon's army so it would not be any different for this model. So while I am waiting for it to dry, I could start working on the body. Glue the warriors of chaos body together and then file off the feathery part of the cloak. This is actually not really important but I didn't want it to have too many parts resembling it's previous form of a chaos warrior. Then by using putty, form up the neck area similar to how they are done with the Horror's body. Quickly before letting the putty to dry, stick the tongue to the neck area. I had made sure that later, the head part would fit nicely before leaving it to dry and harden.

Next, I scrapped off some parts of the right arm from the warrior's body. This would allow the Tzeentch icon and the arm to be positioned higher and at a position where I would want them. The Tzeentch icon has two arms connected to it but I would only want only one. So the other arm had to be cut off and the shoulder part was also cut off. There is already sufficient upper arm area and the shoulder from the warrior body for me. For the left arm, I would just cut off the upper arm area leaving just the lower arm part. Next, I would glue both the arms to the body and that would almost complete the whole conversion. 

Finally painting all the parts as how would want them. The base is done first and that would follow the theme of my whole Daemon's army. The skin, I had already decided upon a purplish colour and the armour to have a mixture of blue and chainmail. For the cloak would also be a darker shade of blue and flaming colours added to the icon. All the smaller details would follow simple common colouring and finally the book from the Empire flagellant sprue. The book is then glued to the left arm completing the whole model.

A close look on the herald

Another look on the herald

Close look on the icon

The whole model