Beginnings of the Shadowborn

Greetings all,
Today I'll introduce my Slaves to Darkness Warband, the Shadowborn. Their journey to glory or destruction will be told during the escalation campaign that will start in about a months time. So I've got my work cut out for me to get the Warband all painted for the beginning of the  campaign.

A bit of history. I get bright ideas all the time on cool little armies or things I'd like to do. Some of them I take a whole lot further than others. Some of them should probably have just stayed ideas. And some of them are just ideas, and never progress any further. One of the major issues I've had with Warhammer in the past is, you have to really go big or go home. Sure, maybe at the start of 8th, when people were learning the ropes, everything was fresh, maybe smaller scale games were being played then. But they weren't particularly enjoyable once someone broke the system, especially with some of the scaling issues that are in 8th (and also in 9th Age).
So while I have ideas, most of them were I'd like to build a small force of this. If I want to take it further, great, otherwise hopefully I'd be able to get use out of them even at that small size. My High Elves are one of those armies, where the Island of Blood models were awesome, build a small army of them, and for many years they stayed in their state of about 1200 points of models (With a few random but small purchases over the years). It wasn't until recently I started splurging on them.

So what does all this have to do with Age of Sigmar. Well, Age of Sigmar I think does a fairly good job of a ruleset that should be able to be fun in small scale games. Not only that, but allies being a very accessible part of the game, means the creative juices can flow even more and do smaller forces of models that can join together for a bigger game.
I've wanted for a long time to have a small Chaos Undivided warband led by Crom the Conquerer (a model I picked up when there were a lot of rumours going on about how fast metal models would be axed). I love the look of the black armour with metal trims. A few months ago, when I was beginning to think about running the Escalation Campaign, I was humming and haaing about what I would do. I saw some cheap second hand Warriors of Chaos models, and decided to just go for it. So this is the beginning, of my Age of Sigmar warband.

So lets get into it, my first unit completed are The Blades of Darkness.
The Blades of Darkness are a group of nefarious Chaos Warriors that particular enjoy slaughter in the dark of the night. The Free Peoples cower in fear as the Blades of Darkness swoop in on their settlements, their blades reflecting the torchlight illuminating their townsteads where the Darkness slowly consumes all.

The Blades of Darkness in their glory

The command group, let by Ironus Darkblade

The remainder of the warband. Abnir the Pale secretly covets to take over

So all of the above models came pre-assembled. So I didn't have much choice in terms of posing, but luckily for me there are some interesting poses in the lot.

I'm unhappy about two things. First is that it's a little hard to pick out the champion if you don't know what you're looking for. If someone saw the group of them, I think they're more likely to pick out the guy with the steel face plate or Abnir the Pale than the leader hefting his Axe forwards.

Second is that I'm not particularly good at chipping, some look good, some look crap. Need to work on that, hopefully by the end I'll be a chipping master!

Originally I also painted the chaos star on the banner black, but it didn't stand out at all, so I changed it to be brown (and will add a little more highlighting later). At some point in time, I am going to get some tufts to add a bit more variation to the bases (rather than cracked dirt and some loose stones).

Lastly, I have begun work on my Chosen. The only problem I have at the moment with the test models, is it doesn't stand out from the regular Warriors of Chaos. You could easily mistake him as a regular Chaos Warrior just with a large axe. I'm thinking that I might change their helms to be red, to try and distinguish them a bit more. I don't want to make the helms bronze/gold since that will likely be reserved for leaders/characters (Since another problem is whether the Chaos Lord with 2 Axes model will stand out from the Chosen).

Chosen between two Chaos Warriors

Let me know what you guys think.