Starting Vampire counts

[Seth-Ra the Everliving]

Hello all.

My 7year old daughter has decided she wants to start warhammer and has fixated on vampire counts.
I'm making sure she shows a sustained interest for a while before I invest in miniatures for her, but want to get quietly prepared to get her started in the hobby. (not too worried about the strong imagery, at the age of five she made up the "he's got no head" song while watching me shoot zombies on a console game)

I'm a long time warriors of chaos player, but know only a little about this army. I have a corpse cart which was going to be a war shrine, but it seems now that it might end up as nature intended as I can give it to her.

Thus far she loves the Isabella Von carstein model for her general, but has shown plenty of general enthusiasm.

What would be good choices for her first miniatures?

[Ekalbs]

Cant go wrong with a battalion,course you already have a corpse cart...
Varghulf are also very good.

[Petrocco]

Core is really the most important, so that would be a good place to start. How many points are you planning to build up to? Skeletons and zombies are very good in smaller games (i'd say up to 150 and crypt ghouls will shine in bigger games as they are more expensive. Grave guard make for a good unit at all point levels, just increasing the size for bigger games. The mortis engine is a very good addition in game and can be really fun to assemble/paint (so can a terrorgheist). Blood knights are very cool models and fun to paint, but are not a favourite of many in-game. Along with varghulfs, vargheists are really cool.

Anyway a lot of vampire counts are really opinionated, as I imagine she wont be playing in many tournaments, just get her to pick all the models!
Hope this helps.

[Seth-Ra the Everliving]

Yup, core are most important. No firm ideas on points goals, don't want to intimidate the little'un.

I also have some of the old armoured skeletons which I suppose could bulk out the back rank of a grave guard regiment, so that may be a good option. For some reason I also have two fell bats in my bits box.

I was disappointed to see that you don't get many skeletons in a box. Is there a good alternative to GW skellies?

[Ekalbs]

I prefer the gw models but heres a link to a post about alternatives:
http://www.librarium-online.com/foru...skeletons.html (Mantic undead skeletons)

[HappyJim]

If you want Skeletons generally I would say get the GW one, I bought a bunch of the mantic ones and regretted, they are awful models, zombies, Mantic, ghouls, make your own