These synergistic velociraptor-riding skinks are a new kit for the Seraphon, being available first in the army box with a general release in the next month or two. They are a multi-build kit, assembling either Raptadon Hunters for your ranged needs or Raptadon Chargers for melee punch.
Raptadon Hunters and Raptadon Chargers with a Saurus Warrior and the now retired Saurus Knight for scale comparison.
Each kit builds either 5 Hunters or 5 Chargers, and contains 3 sprues each. Both the Chargers and Hunters have full command options; a champion, a horn blowing musician, and a standard bearer with a choice of two banner tops. The Chargers wield Tepok Lances and the Chargers hurl Starstone Atlatls, with each receiving buffs if they coordinate their attacks.
The Raptadon mounts themselves are identical across both of the units, and if you assemble the units as instructed, the only real differences between the skinks will be the weapons in the right arm, the headpieces worn by the Chargers, and the fact that the Hunters have shields strapped to their left arms. Considering the heads and shields are entirely cosmetic, it would be a simple enough task with small enough magnets to just magnetise the weapon arm to allow you greater flexibility in how you run these guys. Whatever you do, the tail feathers and the skink heads are all interchangeable with each other, so some variety can be obtained in bigger unit sizes.
As you'd expect from a modern Games Workshop kit, the quality of the sculpts are great, but especially on the Raptadon itself; the detail on these is sharp, particularly towards the head and torso. There were some mould lines and these were annoyingly present on every model, but nothing too bad. The pieces are laid out in a logical manner on the sprues, with little in the way of wastage, and you barely need the instructions to assemble the models as a result. They built up relatively quickly although ten did feel a bit of a slog to get through.
From the image above, you can see that the now retired Saurus Knight models will make decent stand ins for Raptadon Chargers if you wish to get some use out of these models, but I'm frankly glad to see the back of them myself.
On the table-top, the Raptadon Chargers are a very efficient damage dealer within the new book and if you're only going to build one variant then you'll want to build these. The, albeit short, ranged damage of the Raptadon Hunters could be useful and it does have quite high Rend at -2 but they do not have huge output. As mentioned above however, they do buff each other when they target the same unit, the Hunters getting to shoot a second time, and the Chargers getting +1 to hit on their Tepok Lances. This might be enough to make the Hunters see some play but you're almost better off relying on All Out Attack which will give these to the not-insignificant Raptadon attacks too. As an addition, the Chargers get +1 Damage on their Tepok Lances when fighting near an Arcane terrain piece or contesting an objective. These could very well be the melee unit of choice in Starborne lists.
All in all, these are a great kit and beautiful sculpts, but, if I am being honest, these are the less interesting of the new cavalry options introduced with the new Battletome. Bring on the Aggradons!
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