With the release of the new Dark Elves Cold One Knights, many converters immediately recognised their excellent potential for use as mounts for Exodite Dragon Knights, myself included. I decided to convert some Dragon Knights as a test before considering tackling other units. I'd already drawn a picture of how I envisaged an Exodite Dragon Knight might look, so I decided to use that as a basis for the look of my first conversions.
The style of my Exodite conversions is based on several themes, ideas and rough guidelines that I came up with. Firstly, I didn't want them to look like regular Craftworld Eldar sitting on top of Warhammer beasts; I wanted them to have their own distinct appearance that drew on the traditional Eldar designs and incorporated more nomadic and agricultural aspects as well. I also wanted to completely eliminate any chainmail from the Dark Elf components, since I feel that this makes them stand out as being clearly from a different miniature range. That said, I still wanted to have a lot of pennants, banners, cloaks and the like to make the Exodites appear more extravagant than their austere Craftworld kin. I also envisaged them as being fairly nomadic and travelling (and battling) with a lot of other gear, equipment and supplies. I also wanted to have a lot of runes and gemstones as charms and decoration and to remove any Dark Elf symbols.
Whilst my goal was to proxy the conversions (rather than create my own rules for them), I didn't want to stick rigidly to the "WYSIWYG" school of thought. Trying to somehow incorporate twin-linked shuriken catapults onto a Cold One would just look too jarring, so for the Dragon Knights (which I plan to proxy as Shining Spears) I elected to arm the Knights with laser lances but not to include the jetbike's armament of shuriken catapults as this would make the models look too cluttered.
In the 2nd edition Eldar codex there were army list entries for Exodite Dragon Knights (and for Pirates too). Sadly these have fallen by the wayside for now and until/if Games Workshop decide to release an official Exodite codex, we have to come up with our own rules for fielding them. There are a number of fully-fledged, unofficial Exodite codexes scattered across the internet, but for simplicity's sake I've decided to just field Exodites as proxy miniatures for regular Eldar units that have similar armaments. Detailed below are my proposed substitutions; as many other players have done, I've decided that Dragons can represent jetbikes (they are fast and agile so should be able to cross difficult terrain with ease).