It’s not too often that I get to put both the Age of Sigmar and the Warhammer 40k logo in the same post, but today I’m talking about my favourite unit in all of Warhammer and they’re relevant for both systems (and The Old World too for that matter!). My favourite unit? Daemon Princes of course!

We’ll come back to my love of Daemon Princes but as a brief little introduction and history lesson, the name I write under for my Warhammer related content, Elazar The Glorified, originally started off as a name for a Daemon Prince I created some background for when I returned to the hobby and started a Warriors of Chaos army (about 16-17 years ago now!)

Slaanesh has always been my favourite of the Chaos Gods and I wanted an army that worshipped Slaanesh through the angle of vanity and pride rather than any of the other excesses associated with The Dark Prince. I decided that there couldn’t be anything more vain than a Daemon Prince elevating themselves up as a god to their mortal followers as a proxy for Slaanesh (probably why I felt such a calling to the Pretenders sub-faction of Hedonites in when they came along for Age of Sigmar!). This Daemon Prince was known as Elazar The Glorified and my Warriors of Chaos were referred to as ‘The Devotees of Elazar’.

*
Rejoice,” he told me, “for I am Elazar!”
For his fell deed, dread Slaanesh gave him the gift of immortality. He was elevated to Daemonhood and I stood in awe for I had witnessed the birth of the death of man.
He rose into the sky on feathered wings, radiant, more glorious than the sun, it’s light paling in the Daemon’s aura. His harmonious voice filled the skies as he spoke to me then. My heartbeat froze, desperate not to besmirch the wondrous sound with its crude thudding.
“I am temptation, I am vanity. I am the voice that says yes when all others say no. I am the dark ambition that broods at the core of every man. I am your salvation and I am your doom. Love me or fear me, it matters not, you will be my slave.”
*

Account of Rumpolt Staudinger – used as evidence of his heresy and sedition by Witch Hunter Aldebrandt Veit

For me, two of my favourite bits of the hobby are creating minis that feel as unique as possible and creating background for those unique characters. As I built out ‘The Devotees of Elazar,’ each of my units ended up with an origin story or “fluff” piece that showed off some of their character beyond what the plastic, resin and/or metal could do – these often revolved around how that individual or group had found themselves in the service of Elazar. By the end of that particular army project I had so much background about the Daemon Prince but had never managed to get close to a miniature that I felt worthy to lead that particular force and it was a source of much frustration and false starts largely built around the purchase of a metal Necron C’tan – The Deceiver. History tends to repeat itself eventually – and we’ll circle back to that before the end of this post!

Daemon Princes, to my mind, are so cool because in a similar way to Chaos Spawn, they’re a bit of a blank canvas. Where Spawn are about the mutation and sheer loss of self to the destructive nature of Chaos, Daemon Princes are the even darker mirror to this. They still represent a loss of self, but instead through abandoning mortality to become a fragment of a god. Theirs is an elevation of character and power – these aren’t the mindless wrecks of form that a Chaos Spawn is – they’re something dark, terrifying and beautiful… at least in the eyes of their patrons!

That’s a hobby dream right there!

There’s all sorts of kits you could put into the eternal service of the Dark God of your choosing (but obviously, Slaanesh is the best one!) some of which we’ll explore below:

The Daemon Prince
Now, whilst Daemon Princes are an amazing excuse to run off and convert all the mad and wonderful things you can dream up, it’s worth pausing a moment to highlight just how amazing the newest plastic Daemon Prince kit from Games Workshop is:

It’s insane how good this kit is! There is so much detail on it and the faces seen on the two examples above are just the start, there are another four in the kit, one for each of the Chaos Gods:

My own Daemon Prince for my Emperor’s Children / Creations of Bile warband is built with only some minor tweaks from the base Daemon Prince kit. I wanted to create a more fitting sword to represent his blade ‘Rapture’s Kiss’ so I chopped the sword blade off and swapped it for one taken from the Keeper of Secrets kit (you’ll have one spare if you build Shalaxi Helbane from the Keeper kit instead). He’s also got a few extra trophies and trinkets I’ve added to his wings and person (not sure any are visible in the picture below though) including a Harlequin’s mask and additional Slaaneshi jewels and sigils:

Primarchs
The two loyal Primarch models for Warhammer 40k could potentially make compelling bases for a Daemon Prince conversion. In plastic, there’s probably a fair bit of scope to work with the kits. On the surface of things I feel like Roboute Guilliman might be easier to work with as a starting point than Lion El’Johnson. As far as the elevated marine aesthetic for 40k Daemon Princes they’re pretty perfect size-wise, so it’d be about making them as Daemonic as possible. Also, please insert your own obligatory joke about The Lion already being a traitor Primarch etc.

Another option that’s far more expensive and not for the faint of heart would be to use some of the Horus Heresy Primarchs. I can’t stress enough that this is madness with the kits being so expensive, so nice and resin not always being the best medium for lots of difficult conversion work – however, sometimes you just have to indulge your imagination…

Which is what I did for Kastoros Lydon – The Choirmaster, a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh for an older rendition of my Emperor’s Children about 7 years ago now. I purchased the Horus Heresy Fulgrim mini with the full intention of splitting the kit up for a couple of projects. One of those was an ill-fated attempt to make the Daemon Primarch himself. After chopping off his legs though, they and his scenic base were going spare – waste-not want-not and all that! The conversion took a lot of time and I was never fully happy with it, but it used pieces from the Helbrute kit, the Chaos Terminator Lord kit, a Khorne Blood Reaver from Age of Sigmar, Chaos Possessed and the wings of a Drukhari Scourge:

Other Monsters and Characters
There are so many great monster kits or larger characters that’d work as a great base for a Daemon Prince. You could look at anything from a Sons of Behemat Gargant, a Mindstealer Sphiranx in Warcry, the Bloodwrack Medusa for Daughters of Khaine to any of the Necron C’tan from Warhammer 40k…

See I said we’d circle back to The Deceiver eventually!

Ok, so I mentioned my frustration with trying to create a model to represent Elazar The Glorified. Well, it took about 14 years but I went back to The Deceiver to create a Daemon Prince for my Hedonites or Slaves to Darkness for Age of Sigmar; or my Chaos Daemons in 40k. In my head it was always a cross between something mortal, something corrupted and Slaaneshi, and something beautiful and angelic. I’d be wrong not to recognise Azazel as some of the inspiration for this way back in the mists of time and, I know I’m not the first person to use a C’tan or specifically The Deceiver to make something Slaaneshi.

The wings for my Daemon Prince were taken from Yndrasta from the Stormcast Eternal range in Age of Sigmar. The rest of the pieces were sourced from the spares of my Hedonites of Slaanesh with the claw, sword and head previously belonging to a Slaangor. They felt like the perfect beast (literally) to splice with The Deceiver to create something markedly Slaaneshi and a nod to the more goatish aspect of some Keeper of Secrets’ faces. This conversion was really my homage to my own failed attempts to make the Daemon Prince of my dreams so many years ago so we also had to follow a similar naming convention to come up with – Itxaro The Resplendent:

Vehicles
Ok, so I don’t have any examples of this. But it is a thought I keep going back to. Thinking about Bjorn The Fellhanded, for example, and his status amongst the Space Wolves, I do wonder about the fallen renegade marine entombed in a Dreadnought sarcophagus who, even in death continues to pledge the souls of the slain to his patron deity and is eventually elevated to Daemonhood… What would that look like? Would they shed the mechanised metal tomb in their apotheosis or would it be so much a part of them now that their new form would share the same starting point. Really, I’m just trying to justify the purchase and corruption of a Leviathan Dreadnought I think…

Maybe that’s provided some inspiration for you. I know I have a few What about your Daemon Princes – built or imagined? What kits would you use or have used to make them?