Chaos Warmaster

Warmasters are what happens when a traitor commander survives long enough to be handed a fleet. This one is built as a battlefield centrepiece: a towering armoured figure, helmed rather than bare-faced, carrying the bulk and posture of someone who stopped needing to prove anything to the troops behind him a very long time ago. The sculpt sits in the grimdark register without tipping into the writhing mutation you find further down the road to ruin. Layered plate, ornamented pauldrons, a weapon held with the casual weight of long use. He still looks like a soldier, which is the unsettling part. On the table he fills an HQ slot, which means he is the model a list gets built around, the one that anchors a deployment, and the one that tends to get painted last because you want to have improved a bit first.