This article was originally posted in August, 2019. It has been updated to reflect my ongoing progress with the army over the last few years.
Hello, Dear Reader – I’m Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones, CEO of Goonhammer. The story of my Night Lords is more or less the story of my journey with Warhammer, the story of Goonhammer, and the story I’ve been telling over the last four years in my “Road Through” series. Given my recent work on updating the army and the fact that next year I’ll have been doing this for 30 years, I thought that now would be a good time to go back and revisit my progress over those three decades.
My Warhammer journey actually starts well before I actually learned about Warhammer. If you want to get technical about it, my Warhammer journey actually started here, some time around 1993:
Specifically, it started with this guy, the classic Chaos Warrior:
(Note: The original HeroQuest released in 1989 was a joint production between Milton Bradley and Games Workshop. As such its models draw heavily on Warhammer Fantasy imagery).
I was maybe 8 years old when HeroQuest came out and it was absolutely the coolest shit ever. I loved the models (especially the Chaos Knight), I loved the game’s art, and I loved the setup. In fact, that GM-vs-the-players style that would later be the hook that got me into Dungeons and Dragons. My friend Ryan had the game and I fell in love with it. I don’t think I played a single game of it until I was well into college, but I begged my dad to buy me the box anyways.
My dad does not play games but he can be persuaded to paint models, and had painted model planes and cars on many occasions before. My childhood room growing up was decorated with model airplanes hanging from the ceiling he’d assembled and painted. So we bought some Testors paints and some brushes and he showed me how to paint the little models in my HeroQuest box. We painted the entire set over the next couple of weeks.
In retrospect, this was a huge mistake on his part – painting HeroQuest minis was the tipping point for me, pushing my video game-playing and comic book-reading ass fully off the deep end into nerd-dom.
About two years later, my family moved to Italy. We lived there for about two years, in the Emilia Romagna region, and because I was into comic books and playing Magic: the Gathering, when my parents were choosing a place to live, they picked an apartment down the street from a local comic/hobby shop called Quinta Dimensione. It’s still there, by the way – though these days they focus more on comic book sales. It never had much table space for more than a few games of Magic, anyways. But for me, this was an amazing deal – I spent most of my first summer in Ferrara learning Italian by spending all of my free time hanging out and playing Magic down at the friendly local game store. By the end of the summer, I was fluent in the language.
Most of my Magic playing friends there also played Warhammer. And as fate would have it, in the summer of 1996, this bad boy came out:
Codex: Chaos. I fell in love immediately with the Chaos Space Marines and bought the Codex. My first Warhammer 40,000 model was a metal Berserker on Juggernaught that weighed like a pound and a half. For Christmas that year, I got the 2nd edition starter kit, and then Dark Millennium shortly after. I made countless lists, built an army, started drawing Chaos Space Marines, and spent entirely too much time thinking and talking about Warhammer. I got most of my friends into it.
Although I owned Abaddon and Berzerkers, the legion that drew me in the most was the Night Lords. Something about their aesthetic – like the cover of a Spawn comic – just really appealed to me and I liked their lore as bitter, atheistic Chaos Space Marines who saw the devotees of the Dark Gods as being just as foolish as the loyalists praying to the Emperor. Plus, the lightning bolts were neat.
I believe I have exactly one model left now from my original army these days – the rest were either lost or stripped and repainted years ago. But if you want to see one of the first paint jobs from 13 year-old Rob in 1997, feast your eyes on this:
Yeah, it’s pretty bad. The paint is slathered on, there’s no shading to speak of, and there’s a thick layer of gloss varnish applied so poorly you can see where it pooled on the base. I had a whole army of metal models painted to about that standard, and every week I’d take my models down to the local game store where the guys I played with – most of them older and in college – would make fun of them and give me tips on painting.
I’ve always been someone much more motivated by spite, so I can’t say this wasn’t effective. I kept working at improving with my painting, and eventually started on a White Panthers army that I was a little more proud of.
I went back and forth on whether to put these models here or under the section when they were painted, but I think this is a more interesting article if I put them here. These are many of the models I was playing with back in those 2nd edition days, only repainted back in about 2013-2014 when I was getting back into the game. So their aesthetic and paint jobs are more modern, in that regard.
I had a single Night Lords Rhino at the time as well, and a few of the really old 2nd edition Chaos Space Marine bikes; the kind that were basically a few metal upgrades on the Space Marine bikes. And I had a Predator Annihilator. But most of my Night Lords army was bolstered by Plague Marines, Noise Marines, and Khorne Berzerkers, who were important parts of the Chaos Space Marine army at the time.
One of my first major conversions was this guy, Lord Apollyon (I’ve repainted him since his initial debut):
Apollyon was the Chaos Lord I was running and rather than just run him as Abaddon (the model he was built from), I ran him as a Chaos Lord in Terminator Armor with every single mark, psychic powers, and a retinue of badass terminators. He was incredibly imposing… right up until turn 2, when an Eldar Swooping Hawk Exarch would inevitably drop into the battlefifeld nearby and lob a vortex grenade his way, killing him and his entire retinue. He’s a relatively simple conversion – just Abaddon with a terminator champion headswap and lightning claw – but sawing off that metal lightning claw from its arm was a massive pain in the ass, let me tell you what.
My other favorite model in the army was the classic Chaos Space Marine Sorcerer #2, the one with the sword. This is just such a cool model and I also love that he’s used as the main villain in the Dawn of War PC game. It’s such a classic look and I wish they’d do a newer release.
We moved back to the United States in 1998 and I put Warhammer down for a time. My friends weren’t really into it, and we played a lot of tabletop RPGs instead. That changed in October of that year, when 40k’s third edition released. Third edition was a massive update and overhaul to the game, and would eventually bring new models for Chaos Space Marines. Well, kind of. What we got was a new kit for plastic Khorne Berzerkers. So I did what everyone else did, and made a bunch of conversions from those.
My Night Lords didn’t look like this at the time – I was doing a much lighter scheme, almost an ultramarines blue with lightning bolts. For some reason I thought it looked good. It did not.
That guy in the middle was an attempt to make a corrupted Emperor’s Champion – Codex: Armageddon had just come out that summer and I thought the model looked cool.
I got back into the game in a big way after that, spurred on by a friend who played and the time I was spending hanging out with the Warhammer crew over at The Days of Nights, the closest game store to me at the time. I’d often spend my Thursday nights over there hanging out and playing Warhammer, and occasionally joined in the tournaments they’d run. With the third edition Codex: Chaos Space Marines we finally got our first jump pack Chaos Marines – Raptors – but their jump packs left a lot to be desired, so I opted to convert my own using wings from the 2nd edition metal Tyranid Gargoyles kit.
Two major factors would end up shaping my hobby plans in high school. The first was living about an hour away from GW’s US Headquarters and Battle Bunker in Glen Burnie, MD. Having access to bits purchases in person was huge, and meant I could do a lot more conversion work than before. The second was the release of Index Astartes, which gave every legion cool new rules and made me want to run a Chaos Space Marines army of every legion. When the Night Lords rules finally saw a release in 2001, it was alongside a new upgrade kit and character, and I converted up a new Chaos Lord.
He’s all metal and was a huge pain in the ass. Shaving and cutting metal lightning claws is one aspect of the hobby I’m glad I’ll never have to do again.
CSM also got new bikes, and after Index Astartes and the second 3rd edition Codex: Chaos Space Marines established them as a hit-and-run army with lots of fast attack units, I spent my time making a large unit of bikes to field on the table:
I also converted up a sorcerer on bike for them. This remains one of my favorite conversions I’ve ever done – all the little elements of this one still tickle me, from the Night Lords champion backpack (unused thanks to giving my guy wings) to the spellbook on his bike, taken from an Inquisitor model.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t have vehicles – I had a pair of Rhinos I’d use occasionally, plus a Land Raider. Those got Chaos upgrade sprues during third edition as well, giving me a reason to finally ditch my ancient tiny rhinos for these new, massive upgrades.
If the front panel of that Land Raider looks rough it’s because it used to have a big green stuff chapter icon I sculpted on there. It looked absolutely terrible, so I scraped it off with the notion of doing a freehand replacement. But in the end I decided just to paint an entirely new Land Raider instead. Here’s the green stuff if you want to see it:
Just horrible. But while we’re talking about conversions, I’d like you to meet Raziel, my 2nd edition dreadnought. Raziel got a huge overhaul in third edition after the release of the Vehicle Design Rules, some of the wildest rules ever published by Games Workshop (and legal in tournaments at the time!). I wasn’t so interested in making completely busted vehicles as I was having a melee-focused dreadnought for Chaos Space Marines, finally. If you can believe it, CSM dreadnoughts couldn’t take two melee weapons for a long time.
Also yeah the name comes from the fact that I was playing a lot of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver at the time. That game ruled.
I drifted away from my Night Lords a bit in high school – with amazing rules for other legions I started painting Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children. two of the first legions to be featured in Index: Astartes. I eventually wanted to have an army for each legion to field, using some of the sick rules in that 3.5 edition codex. It’s a goal I’m still vaguely working on to this day.
I went to college in 2001 and, despite being closer than ever to the Battle Bunker – a mere 15 minute drive from my school – I fell out of playing Warhammer 40k. Why, you ask? Well, fourth edition happened and brought along the worst Codex: Chaos Space Marines ever written, doing away with all of the cool legion-specific rules in favor of a flavorless book which suddenly didn’t even have daemons from different chaos gods – only generic “lesser” and “greater” daemons to use. I was being pulled in other directions at the time and did not have the space or time to paint very often. I was doing a lot more digital art, learning to play guitar, and getting into game development when I wasn’t working on my degree or trying to meet women.
Which isn’t to say I wasn’t invested in the game at all – I still kept up on it and played once or twice. I helped a roommate start a Necron army, and even did a brief stint working for Games Workshop out of their Annapolis mall store. But I didn’t really get back into the game until 2013, when I dropped into the SomethingAwful traditional games thread on Warhammer 40k. Sixth edition had just come out with some sick new Chaos models and I was interested to see what the game was like. As luck would have it, one of the goons posting in the thread, BuffaloChicken, was also a New York resident, and up for hosting a game of 40k with him and his brother up at their place. So I grabbed my mini cases and made the 45-minute subway ride up to hang out for the day.
I don’t have any photos of that exact game, sadly, but I do have one of the next time I played them up at their place, about nine months later. The vibes are similar – Peter lived in an apartment with his parents, and to play had a 4’x6′ piece of plywood with a mat taped to hit he’d hide behind his bed, which could be put out on a table in his room to play on. Pete’s a terrain maniac, and had put together a ton of awesome terrain using the old Cities of Death terrain Games Workshop had released a year or two prior.
6th edition was terrible but I didn’t care. I was back in. I immediately put together a plan to rope Greg back in, along with our friend Bidwell. Greg had always liked Warhammer but hadn’t played much. He’d played Dark Angels a bit and collected T’au but it didn’t take much to nudge him into playing. I made the trip back down to Maryland and we got some games in down in his basement. His space was a far cry from peters – playing on green felt with some scant terrain he’d accumulated over the last few years, but it was a good start and Greg started to get on building his own table and play space pretty quick.
Most of these were played with my Iron Warriors but during that time I started slowly working on my Night Lords again.
One of the big changes in my life was that I suddenly had a lot more money to spend on dumb bullshit. The wife and I were doing well with our careers and, not having a child at the time, were free to just spend money on whatever the hell we wanted. New York rent wasn’t cheap, but at the time we were living in Battery Park City, where rents were considerably cheaper given the new World Trade Center hadn’t been finished yet.
There were new Chaos Space Marines to paint, and new units to field. Tragically however, none of those were new Chaos Space Marines legionaries. The best we had was Dark Vengeance Chosen, and those were still coming on 25mm bases. So I made my own Chosen using the Night Lords upgrade kit. This was around the time I started repainting my older Night Lords models, updating them with a new, darker color scheme. You can kind of tell when I make the transition by their elbow pads – back in 2nd edition I was giving them gold elbow pads, and when I started going for a new scheme I switched to dark blue, trying to use a little less gold overall. My high school/college scheme had been PRETTY LAZY, typically leaving the feet black and the bases untouched. After some scolding from BuffaloChicken, I started finally fixing that, basing my minis again with GW white texture paint and painting their feet blue.
I also took the time to paint up a unit of regular Night Lords Chaos Space Marines, using the third edition kits I’d been using for Iron Warriors and Black Legion, but hadn’t yet for Night Lords.
And I finally got around to converting a unit of metal raptors using the second third edition kit released. To this day, those remain my favorite raptor models ever released by Games Workshop. I just really love the sleek look and the taloned feet, and while the current and upcoming models are cool, these remain goated to me.
Having more money meant I could finally afford stuff from Forge World, so I bought a Decimator and a Sevatar to convert into a Chaos Lord for my army, to give me a winged Chaos Lord who wasn’t quite so tiny. These more closely represent where I was going with my paint style at the time, as they never had to be repainted.
This was also when the Heldrake released, and of course I absolutely had to have one of those.
That first one turned out pretty great and it actually turned out I needed to have two of them to field a proper sixth edition/seventh edition 40k army, so I painted a second one.
Those things are a massive pain in the ass to paint, magnetize, and transport, and somehow I’ve been stupid enough to end up painting six of the goddamn things across various Chaos Space Marine armies.
This is more or less where things stood the last time I wrote this article, with my Night Lords sitting comfortably at “somewhere around 4,000 points”, built mostly for third edition Warhammer 40k, and looking like an army I’d mostly painted before 8th edition.
I’ve tried to keep the whole thing in a second edition style, with brighter colors and red bolters and green cabling, because that looks great. And it’s something I had planned to continue. Some time in 2020, right before the Pandemic, I painted these Warp Talons:
The purple on the lightning claws was a snap decision I really liked. I’d end up coming back to this scheme years later when I really picked the army back up.
I wasn’t planning on revisiting my Night Lords for some time. They were going to stay a legacy army for a bit, while I worked on other armies. I had been working on and upgrading the painting on my Black Legion army through most of 2022 and 2023, and was really happy with how they were turning out. I took them to the Grand Narrative events both years and did increasingly well.
Not winning best painted in 2024 left me with a sour taste in my mouth – mostly, a realization that a black armor army just wasn’t going to be able to win best painted at a large event. I needed to go bigger and brighter. And as luck would have it, in April of 2024 Kill Team: Nightmare released, giving us a brand new Night Lords upgrade kit for Chaos Space Marine legionaries. I was immediately hooked, and I’m pretty sure I bought half a dozen of those boxes just to get night lords bits. I started working on a new, updated Night Lords army with the goal of winning best painted that year at the Grand Narrative.
It started with a unit of Raptors:
And of course once I’d painted them I had to do a jump lord. But I wanted to do something special so I did a conversion of Haarken Worldclaimer. This is Anrac Shan, lord of the Night lords.
Next I painted up a unit of Legionaries and a Nemesis Claw unit for the army, so I’d have some baseline guys running around:
Then a unit of Terminators, using the Contekar models from Horus Heresy as the base. These look great with updated plastic terminator weapons, and fit wonderfully with the army.
I needed some new transports, of course. So I painted these three Rhinos. It took me a long time to source the original Night Lords Rhino doors for the latter two, but it was worth it – nothing quite matches the detail and character of those old Legion Rhino upgrade kits with the Wayne England art made real. I decided after the first Rhino that I wanted the sideways skull with a single wing to be the personal heraldry of Anrac Shan’s warband.
My terminators of course also needed a ride and Land Raiders give you a lot of space to work with for cool lightning bolt effects.
Those vehicles were much cleaner originally, but after placing second at Armies on Parade that fall I realized I needed to add more detail to them and went back and added a ton of small scrapes, nicks, and scars to their armor, giving them a lot more visually interesting look.
This was also when I decided to go back and update one of my Heldrakes. The Heldrake isn’t amazing in 40k right now but it’s not terrible and the model makes a wonderful centerpiece for an army that CSM can otherwise lack. So I went back and added edge highlights to the model and really cleaned up some of my old work, improving the basing as well.
The net result is much more striking, and I will eventually have to go back and update the other one to match. One of the other big differences between my modern Night Lords and my older Night Lords is that I’m doing edge highlighting now on the gold, using runefang Steel to give the gold a brighter, colder look.
And this was also when I added my Vindicator. The Vindicator is also a must-have in display armies in my opinion; it offers a lot of great edges for highlighting as well as a massive, easy to paint on canvas with the siege shield.
The other big project I undertook for this army was making Chaos Bikers. I really wanted to do new Night Lords bikes, but the challenge is that the old bike models looked terrible. The bikes themselves were OK, but putting a modern Chaos Marine on a bike is a lot of work. I ended up having to cut their legs in multiple places and use green stuff fills to make them work with the new bikes.
I did three of these and I’m incredibly happy with the result – they look great and are super eye-catching but there’s just one issue with them: They might be too good – if you didn’t know there weren’t modern Chaos bikers you might think these were official models and then not even know they’re conversions. That’s the ideal in my mind, but can also hurt you sometimes with paint judges. I finished the bikes off using finecast helmet wings from the old Night Lords upgrade kits. They’re too bulky and silly to use on helmets now, but they make great ornamentation for vehicles and bikes – just slap them on either side of a skull and you can get a striking visual effect.
The Grand Narrative also allowed for the use of Legends units, so I took the time to do an homage to my Sorcerer on bike by doing one of those as well. This was one of the more difficult conversion projects I’ve done, but the end result was worth it and looks amazing.
Finally I had two characters I added to the army. The first was a Chaos Lord on foot made using the Night Lords Legion Praetor for Horus Heresy. He’s a smaller model but looks great when mounted on an angled hero rock from the plastic Terminator and a Night Lords skin cape backpack.
The other was my Master of Executions, made from a Fabius Bile model with extra bits from the Nemesis Claw to give him even more of a Night Lords aesthetic.
I supplemented the army with some older Warp Talons I’d painted that still looked good and some Black Legion models to represent the influence of Kaervek, the sorcerer I’ve been running as my character during the Grand Narrative events. The army turned out great, and it all paid off when I won Best Painted at the 2024 Grand Narrative.
It was a sweet moment and the culmination of more than three years of work on my painting skills and more than 25 years of work on my Night Lords. I built the army with a plan to win best painted at that year’s event, and that’s exactly what I did. Turns out lightning bolts were the answer all along.
That could be the end of the story, but I kept going. When new Creations of Bile rules dropped that Christmas, I found I already had a lot of the pieces I wanted for the army in my Night Lords, and kept painting them. I added a Predator to the ranks:
And while it took a while longer – I was in the middle of painting Emperor’s Children and more Death Guard earlier this year – I eventually got around to adding a few more choice units. When it came time to prep for the 2025 World Championships of Warhammer, I decided to go with my Night Lords for the event as my Emperor’s Children weren’t like to be ready in time. That said, I still had some units to finish, such as these Warp Talons:
I updated my older five Warp Talons and added five more models, giving these the heads from the Heresy Night Lords. It gives them a lot of variety and I really like the skull-faced beakie helmets on them.
I also had a unit of ten Chosen to paint, and one of the benefits of that particular unit is that it gives you lots of combi-weapons to work with, and those give you opportunities for eye-catching OSL effects.
The Obliterators were one of the last parts. I’d been using Black Legion Obliterators earlier in the year but it became clear I’d need to paint some Night Lords variety for my WCW army, and four of them if I wanted to run Veterans of the Long War. So I painted up for of them, doing some headswaps to give two of them a more Night Lords look.
The final army turned out great and I was very proud of the work I’d done. It wasn’t the strongest army I could have fielded, but I decided to sacrifice a win or two in favor of a better shot at winning best painted. I think that paid off – my Death Guard would likely not have made Showcase – and while I only finished 8th in paint score, that’s nothing to sneeze at and I’m very proud of it given the level of competition this year. I did get featured on WarCom however, which is always great. In particular because great photos always make the army look so much better.
What’s Next
In all, I think I’m more or less done with this version of the army. There may be a few models I add to it – it could use a second Predator Destructor if I want to run it competitively, and that other Heldrake will get updated at some point, and I may paint up to ten more regular marines just to flesh out the actual number of bodies in it for my own satisfaction, but it’s more or less done, barring the release of new Night Lords-specific units. I’m ready to move on to some other Chaos-related projects now, and next up is painting my Emperor’s Children.
That said, I’ve been working on my Night Lords for 30 goddamn years now! That’s an insane amount of time to put into a project, and it’s cool to look back on it and see the gap between one of my earliest models and where I’m at now. It was also cool to think that the Night Lords are what won me Best Painted last year, and still somehow my prettiest army. That’s something I’ll likely break when I finish my Emperor’s Children, but it’s cool to see and think about.
If you’re still reading this far, thanks for doing so. Hopefully you found this meandering walk down memory lane and through my army inspiring. I certainly think it should be – those early models I painted looked like absolute shit, and being told that only made me want to work harder to get better with them. I think if I’d have been starting out these days it would have been easier – there are a lot more resources out there now and the quality of paints and brushes has just improved dramatically. But even with better resources and tools, there’s no substitute for sitting down and putting in the work.
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