Paying Any Price: A Return to my Death Korps of Krieg!

So it has been a while since I’ve worked on my rendition of that most zealous and self-sacrificing Regiments, that of the Death Korps of Krieg.

I had a good scheme in mind, but it had a couple flaws. Namely, that the gas-mask conversion I was doing was extremely time consuming, and I had a lot of different colours on the model, adding considerably to the time each model took to paint.

It also lacked a little bit of that “edge”. I’ll be frank and honest with you, the Death Korps are quite possibly one of the most “edgy” regiments to play, and they are known for unfortunate implications concerning their looks. While I love to point out the numerous French inspirations, they do beat more then a passing resemblance to German WW1 troops as well. That wouldn’t be so bad…

If I didn’t quite literally paint them in SS Oak Leaf camouflage from WW2! This makes that implication far worse, and I tried to downplay it with a few less overtly, say, Nazi touches.

As you will see, I have strayed from that ideal quite a lot. But we’ll get to that later.

The gas-mask conversion I was doing was to make it look a bit better, but in my heart I truly just wanted that classic Forge World look. I didn’t want to give up the durability of GW plastic however.

Luckily, Tiny Legend had me covered. They put out a new set of replacement heads that did exactly what I wanted. This saved me a considerable amount of time fixing the masks too! I put 60 on my Mighty build plate, then went for it.

As I have a concussion at the moment, it’s very much a case of how much can I get done before the headache becomes too uncomfortable. So I focused on getting 3 models built as a test, then painting one. Simply enough! And it was!

I picked the figures kneeling with his bayonet fixed, as it just felt like a powerful pose. The headache had truly begun to arrive by then! So I kept it simple.

The new scheme uses black-grey much more prominently, and I was keen to get a black helmet on there. It’s a nasty, evil look. But as I like to remind people, the Imperium is literally the worst human regime imaginable, dystopian and rotten. While not everyone in it is necessarily a horrible human being, the Death Korps are not nice.

These are the guys that shelled a rebel city even after it surrendered until no life signs were detected. Noble, heroic Cadians these are not. Starched and stiff Praetorians would turn their nose up at them. The Death Korps are a ruthlessly pragmatic example of weaponized human waste. Fitting then, to have them dress a bit more Wolfenstein then normal.

The black-grey covering more also cut down on a couple paints. I did the trousers in deep navy blue, a homage to French troops. The turn-backs on the sleeves were done the same way. everything else was painted very similarly to before.

Weathered heavily, this still only took an hour. Even the camouflage pattern, thanks to copying a Sonic Sledgehammer painting tutorial, was easy. The camo was done in less then 10 minutes.

All in all, a worthwhile evening. Sometimes you just want to paint a bad guy. As long as I’m not painting on SS runes or anything else horrific, he’ll remain a 40k baddie. As it should.

This was a good test to see how much I can and cannot do on my concussion recovery. The new guidelines call for a far sooner return to work and basically encourage doing things until they feel uncomfortable and stopping. As I have a good boss and team, this will not be a problem.

I’m keen to get more of these guys built and painted. Maybe enough to do some 40k styled games of Spectre Operations? Oh yeah, that’s coming soon. Keep an eye out!

Happy wargaming wherever you are, and keep your bayonets fixed and your pace steady! Ave Imperator!