Treatises on the Empyrean: ChainsawDaemonEngines, Part I - Decay

Recently, when strolling through my favourite blogs on the Blogosphere, I came to realize something important. I had started my blog not only to present my conversions and paintjobs, but also to write about some of the topics in our hobby that I find particularly interesting. But up until now, I had not done any of that.

So time to change that, I guess.

I wanted to kick this off with some sort of "designer's notes" on my current army, the ChainsawDaemonEngines. As I am aware of the repelling effect of the "wall of text" syndrome, especially on the internet, I decided to break this topic up into several parts.

About two years ago, I had finally decided to return to 40k after a hiatus of several years, and I was deliberating over which army I was going to collect. I wanted something rather different, with a strong narrative and a very individual, personal touch. I wanted to turn the army into an ambitious converting/modelling/painting project, as these are the things in the hobby that I find most interesting and fulfilling nowadays. Performance on the battlefield was deemed unimportant, even undesirable. I have found with many games (both tabletop and computer) that battles are more interesting and challenging if armies only contain a small number of very powerful (read: overpowered) units and many more regular or basic units. So any considerations about effectiveness or tournament-abilities quickly went out of the window.

I wanted an army that I found inspiring, where I could find a theme and then stick to it, play with it, alter it. After a longer process of elimination, I ended up with Chaos Daemons, more specifically Nurgle Daemons. As I have already mentioned in previous posts, a big influence on this decision was a) the Nurgle Daemon Prince model and b) my idea to combine the Soul Grinder with the Skaven Hell Pit Abomination. This gave me the first ingredient:

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