I tend to have a bunch of ideas for unique teams at the back of my head and one of those was a Lahmia vampire team themed around a baroque masked ball. Sadly there is rather a lack of female models from GW, but I did dutifully buy any from 40K, WHFB and AoS models I thought might be useful over the years. I finally got to a position where I had both enough bits to make them and the time to work on them. I had completed the thralls and was nearly done with the vamps when GW decided to bring out their own team and shake up the roster with new positionals and a big guy!

This would require some adjustments and waiting for the new plastic and resin models to arrive. In the meantime my local GW was holding a painting competition, with multiple categories. I hadn’t painted anything non-BB in a while, so decided to enter the AoS and 40K with new models and the open category with the Madcapp Miggz conversion I had done a few years back.



For AoS I used the Warhammer Quest Darkoath Chieftain, I had initially bought him to be used in either a norse or khorne team. This was a great opportunity to try and improve on some techniques I’d been working on. I wasn’t intending to convert him either, so needed to choose colours that would look good on him. Red is always a popular colour for chaos models, so this was used for his clothing. I was really happy with how the gold and silver metal parts turned for him, I’d bought a lot of new brown, yellow and grey paints to mix in with my gold and silver ones. The bronze on his shoulder pad was less successful, I tried shading it with green and experimented with washes and glazes, but it never quite looked right.




The 40K model I used was a sister of Silence, I’d bought them as potential thralls due to the corset, but they were too heavily armoured and the cloak got in the way. Painting a model that is mostly metallic armour is tricky, I gave her a black corset to break it up and painted her cloak blue with white fur as contrast. The gold armour and sword blade didn’t turn out how I wanted. The highlights and shading went ok, but the gold in particular ended up looking a bit muddy. I think it needed to have drastic shading and more yellow added.




In the end the Chieftain won best AoS and Miggz got best Open and won the overall competition, so a pretty good success.



By the time I’d finished these models the new vampires had arrived, and I could get back to converting them.

The first models I completed were the thralls. It was important that they fit the team, but wouldn’t ever outshine the vampires. I wanted them to resemble handmaidens and gave them all masks. These models used torsos and heads from daemonettes, legs and masks from harlequins, legs and arms from Escher gangers, arms from Blood Bowl elves and a bunch of other bits from my collection. I tried to give them some cool and interesting poses, with the 4 uses the masque of slannesh’s masks being my fave; misery, acceptance, disgust and humour.





When I started the team, all the vampires had been the same, in the new rules we now have blitzers, throwers and runners. For the throwers I chose the 2 most static models and went for the lazy option of giving them a ball. One of the vampires was an old finecast vamp that I had removed the weapons from extended her dress with greenstuff and swapped in a hand from the wood elf thrower, the hand was given long claws to match the other holding a skull. The other thrower used the legs from LADY ANNIKA the torso from the banshee (the lower half was from the Gretchen conversion I did ages ago) and the head from a coven throne vampire. She was given a hand holding the ball from a Valkyrie from the norse team.





The runners were more like dancers for this team, I chose the 2 players with the most dynamic poses. The first was made from the masque of slannesh, with legs from witch elves and head from a metal vampire from the Avatars of War range I bought ages ago.The other uses legs from the Warhammer Quest mistweaver saih and torso from the Necromunda character Lady Credo along with arms from the slanneshi Infernal Enrapturess.





The last 2 models ended up being blitzers, mostly by default. They both uses the torsos of vampires from the coven throne, which was the model that first gave me the idea for this team. The first of these uses the skirt from the Infernal Enrapturess and with legs from witch elves, she is closest to how I saw all the vampires looking. The other took legs from Lady Credo I also gave her a mask with a handle as I saw her as the most recently promoted thrall since her hair was styled in a more youthful look as fitting a handmaid.





I really struggled with how to make a Vargheist for the team as the Forgeworld model really didn’t fit in with the rest of them. It was a tricky task to find something that would be a horrific monster that craved only blood and death and an elegant attendee to a sophisticated ball. Luckily the slannesh range came to my rescue again and I used the Slaangor Fiendbloods for most of the model. Arms, feet and wings came from the plastic Vargeheist with the head from the forgeworld model. The front skirt was from the Myrmourn banshees and the back from the Tenebrael Shard.