Belisarius Cawl, Arch-heretek, Hellwright of the Plague Planet

In late 973.M41, the Ordo Hereticus began to ask quiet, sensitive questions about the conduct of a high ranking Martian Archmagos named Belisarius Cawl. The task of leading this investigation fell to an Inquisitor named Erasmus Horn. Horn was know for his subtlety, patience and most of all for operating away from the hierarchy of the Ordos. This was important for the Inquisition, because the investigation required plausible deniability. Horn knew and accepted that should he be discovered at the wrong time, his masters would disavow him.

The reason for this secrecy was that Cawl ranked among the most senior and revered Archmagi of the Adeptus Mechanicus, second only to the Fabricator General himself. Should the case against him fall through, a monstrous diplomatic incident might well be the result. But the rumours were too alarming to leave unexamined.  There were mutterings, whispered gossip that the Archmagos was heretically tampering with the Emperor's divine work, that he had indulged in the use of warp technology in a lunatic quest to improve on that which is holy and right.

Working with sympathetic magi inside the Martian hierarchy, Horn was able to determine that Cawl had for some time been making requisitions which, though individually innocuous for a senior Archmagos, painted an alarming picture when put together. Cawl had been obtaining suspicious amounts of Astartes geneseed, vastly more than was warranted for purity checks. Cawl had been careful to source through a number of different channels. He was clearly trying to avoid attention. On top of this, he seemed to have over several years acquired an alarming amount of cloning and genetic manipulation facilities. It was agreed between Inquisition and Mechanicus that this evidence warranted a raid on Cawl's Martian holdings.

A significant taskforce of Skitarii and Inquisitorial Stormtroopers assaults Cawl's forges, and after a brief ferocious battle was successful in neutralising Cawl's forces. It was quickly apparent that this was because Cawl himself and a portion of his forces were not present: either the Archmagos had been away on business or had got wind of the investigation. However, whilst Cawl himself had slipped through their fingers, what Inquisitor Horn and his Mechanicus colleagues discovered was enough to damn the Archmagos a hundred times over.

Whatever doubts there had been about Belisarius Cawl, they were all confirmed in that monstrous exploration of his laboratories. That Cawl was wholly insane there could no longer be any doubt. In his blasphemy, he had declared himself greater than the Omnissiah, claiming that he could better the work of the Emperor. The appalled investigators found hellish attempts to create a bigger, more pliable form of Astartes. In his arrogance, the vanished Cawl had labelled the abominations Primaris, a word which contextually has overtones of supremacy which mp proud Space Marine chapter would have ever recognised. Thankfully, Cawl's experiments had been largely unsuccessful: such warp-twisted abominations that were found in the laboratories were few and far between. Horn put them to the flame without exception. 

Further exploration of Cawl's holdings showed more heresies. An unfinished device was discovered the purported reason for which was to expand the Eye of Terror into a morbid scar across the galaxy. Every senior Archmagos consulted by Horn dismissed the device as a madman's fevered experiments. Yet the hellish purpose behind them was in itself enough to condemn any servant of the Omnissiah. Cawl apparently planned to use this fiendish warp-scar as a power source. His journals detailed insane plans to justify his actions by claiming that they came straight from Roboute Guilliman. Indeed, it was clear that he intended to create a cloned puppet of the thirteenth primarch to be his mouthpiece. All of Cawl's work was put to the sword and the purifying flame. He was expelled from the Adeptus Mechanicus and declared Excommunicate Traitoris in a unanimous vote by the Senatorum Imperialis itself. Cawl, however, had disappeared. 

It would be many years before Belisarius Cawl came forth again to blight the Imperium. Realising that he was discovered, the Archmagos had fled from Mars. Initially, his plan had been to travel to a secret facility he maintained in the Ghoul Stars. However, on his way, his ship was ambushed by a fleet belonging to the Synod of Suffering. The Archmagos was dragged before Lord Eiterfex, who offered Cawl a choice between service and death. To Eiterfex's amazement, Cawl agreed immediately. His bitterness and despair at the failure of his schemes had driven him further into the spiral of madness, and the degraded glory of Nurgle now appealed to him immensely.

Granted laboratories on the Plague Planet, Cawl set to work with deranged abandon. If the Emperor refused his genius and rejected his superior Astartes, then Mortarion and Eiterfex would reap the reward. In deep caverns that rang to screams and scrapcode, Belisarius Cawl found his true vocation. Great adominations of flesh, metal and Neverborn energy staggered from his putrid furnaces. 

By 015.M42, Cawl was ready. And at Lord Eiterfex's side, he marched out to take his revenge on the galaxy.

The Cyclopean Blightstalker

This happened. And basically, it happened because I found myself staring in bemusement at the two Forgefiend models that I own. Bemusement because I couldn't fathom why I owned them. I have literally never purchased a unit for gaming reasons. It always starts with the look of the model. And... I didn't really like the Forgefiend that much. Yet somehow I'd ended up with two of them. Then I had an idea.

I envisioned this ghoulish object lumbering around the bleak swamps of a plague-riddled daemon world, scooping up the unfortunate and using their screaming, living bodies to fuel it's infernal bio machineries. 

It was a lot easier than it looked, although it should be noted that almost every component had to be secured with pins, poly cement and a good helping of green stuff. The first task was to create the central trunk. For this, I simply sawed off the cannons, the legs and the bunch of cables that serve it as a tail. I also removed the chimneys, as what I had in mind would result in them being left at a silly angle. I then stood the body up as you can see it to make sure that my idea wasn't crazy. 

The mouth/backside/whatever at the bottom was the spare belly-mouth from the Maggoth kit. It wanted it to have a kind of John Carpenter/David Cronenberg-esque feel to the creature, so I stuffed loads of zombie arms and hands into the mw, to give the bizarre impression of groping limbs driven by a horrible animus. 

The standard Nurgle horn is from the Maggoth kit. The cannon-tail is made from the leg of a Warhammer Fantasy Beastmen Ghorgon, cut to fir and tipped with one of the cannons sawn from the original Forgefiend. This was by far the most difficult part to secure on the model!

Once the whole body was thus completed, I simply added two Maggoth forearms for the legs. I then added some of the armour plates from the original Forgefiend to add the legs some extra bulk. 

I finished the piece with a few random bits of garnish - an extra creeping hand, a Nurgling and some grisly bits and bobs from the Warhammer Fantasy Vampire Counts Terrorgeist kit. All in all, the entire construction two me maybe two hours. When I get round to it, the other Forgefiend will be thus transfigured.

Return of the Tallyman

Epidemius has always struck me as a wonderfully ghoulish figure, one of Nurgle's seven chief administrators, the Proctors of Pestilence. Now that we have the severe Scriveners hectoring hordes of Plaguebearers for better results, it seemed like a good time to revisit Epidemius. Just one problem: I loathe the model.

I loathe everything about it. I dislike the bulky, lazy sculpting. I hate the crude, angular, inorganic appearance of the Nurglings. And I dislike just how unintelligent and generic he is: he's a tallyman, but he has no quills, no scrolls or books, the only conceit to his administrative nature is a hourglass, more suggestive of a timekeeper than a tallyman. Compared to the beautiful and intelligently designed new Scrivener model, he's very unimpressive. So I decided I'd have to kitbash him.

First of all was the palanquin: without that you can't get very far because the rest has to be built around it. I had some bits for the Chaos Warshrine lying about, and upon inspection I realised that the front end of the chassis would make a good palanquin. I sawed the component in half just behind the chaos starburst, and then sanded down the edge to remove the messy, frayed shreds left by the saw. I turned it back to front so that the leering face on the front of the Warshrine would face the back.

Next it was the Nurglings. These were incredibly easy: it was a case of just rounding up spare Nurglings from wherever I could find them and gluing them onto the palanquin in such a way that they were more or less on a level. Obviously, I attempted to pin and stack them together to strengthen the bond where I could. I added a couple of books from the Grey Knight Terminators box on the palanquin, with the imperial icons removed.

This left me with Epidemius himself. I wanted him to have an impressive bulk, and to at once signify his scholarly role and his brute strength. I chose Otto Glott because he's big, bulky, disgusting and because his feet are already on a slope, he's easier to move into a sprawling position. I lined his body up against the palanquin and wedged him in a half-sitting, half-sprawling pose. The angle was right, but it looked ridiculous - there was a massive gap between his back and the palanquin. I decided that I would fill that space, to give the impression that he's lounging on a throne of rotting human flesh and offal. I achieved this with a mixture of tissue and PVA glue. This is quick, cheap and easy to build up. It takes a while to dry, but it quite tough when it does. Once dried, I coated it in liquid greenstuff. At his sides I added detailed, particularly on the right where I added skulls and bones from various kits to create a kind of armrest. I had a special plan for this.

Next, though, came the head. Otto's head would be at the wrong angle, and in any case would be too 'mortal'. I chose a Plaguebearer champion head then glued and pinned it into place so that it was looking forward and a bit up. This left a massive gap behind it, which I filled using the tissue, PVA and green stuff approach detailed above.

The left arm was no problem: I wanted him looking as though he was declaiming, booming out pompous demands for greater productivity. A spare arm from the Maggoth kit did the trick. There I moved onto the right arm, knowing that this would be... awkward.

I really wanted him to be doing something scribe-like, and I'd come up with the idea of him writing his tally in blood in a ledger, a daemon bookkeeper cheerlessly writing eternity away. I also wanted him to be holding a quill pen so that I could visually keep him consistent with the new Scrivener model. But how to achieve this? I took a weapon hand from the Blightkings kit and removed the weapon. Then I drilled a hole diagonally (downwards from back to front) through the hand, so that it exited between the fingers. On the front, I pushed in the point of the quill, which I made from a random thin spike. Then I added the bulk of the quill to the other end of the drilled hole, using one of the plumes from the Warhammer Fantasy Empire Pistoliers kit. I left this to bond with poly cement for a good long while, then added it to the arm. I wedged a book from the Burning Chariot of Tzeentch kit underneath the hand, and then filled the gaps as needed.

An then we have it! Epidemius... but a bit more fitting!

Manufacturing Blightspawn

I actually do like the Foul Blightspawn model. He's a nice Plague Marine. Buuut... when I read the description, the model didn't feel entirely right anymore. My vision of the Blightspawn is an insanely disgusting creature, so foul that even the other Death Guard are saying 'steady on old boy'. Probably the best analogy is the way that the Pyramid Head creature is presented in the 2006 film adaptation Silent Hill: wading through rivers of filth with hordes of pests surging around him. I liked the idea that he'd become so corrosive that even his own armour was corroding away, the ceramite no longer able to withstand the toxicity of his presence. Also, I wanted him to look different to other Plague Marines.

I started with the body of a Putrid Blightking. They're roughly Marine-sized so it works. To make sure that he did, in fact, look Astartes, I added the head and arms from the Plague Marines kit, selecting the weapon which looked like a good approximation of his armament. This also allowed for a suitably bulky backpack from the same kit, good for suggesting lethal diseases festering away. So far, as you can imagine, this was actually pretty easy. However, the Blight King Body and the Marine bits weren't overly fond of being glued together - I had to use pins, poly cement and a good deal of gap filling afterwards!

Now, something mentioned in the lore is that the Blightspawn has a sort of churn rammed into his guts which is constantly processing new diseases. On the official model, you can't see too much of this. I used half of a spare set of gun barrels from the Skaven Stormfiends kit (jammed in and gap-filled) to represent the ever-spinning churn.

I was relatively pleased with the result. He looks more disgusting and degenerate than even his brethren and stands out enough from the rest. Plus I made him from bits, which is cheap!

The Great Unclean One

No funky conversions today. This model doesn't need them. I think that this model is one of the best we've seen in some time, a gruesome masterpiece which lovingly references its predecessors but is deceptively easy to build and paint.

I chose fleshy tones because I think they have the potential to be more horrendous, what with the inevitable comparison to human flesh. The bulk of the model was thus really easy.

• Basecoat Bugman's glow
• Wash Reikland Fleshshade all over
• Drybrush Cadian Fleshtone
• Drybrush Kislev Flesh

The bruising was a bit old school, mostly because I was enjoying myself. 

• 50/50 mix of Khorne Red and Macragge Blue
• Water first layer down until it's basically purple water and slap on
• Apply a second layer a bit thicker over a smaller area
• Repeat process, getting thicker and over a smaller area
• Touch up areas with Druchii Violet if more depth required

The warts were actually very easy. 

• Base Deathworld Forest
• Wash Agrax Earthshade, beloved of all
• 70/30 mix Blood for the Blood God and Abaddon Black
• Paint over warts
• With a tissue or fingertip, wipe the mixture off of the upper areas. This will make the blood look congealed and highlight the green

The guts and muscles were next. Now, guts and muscles aren't really purple the way people assume, they tend to be pink or red. The guts were simple:

• Paint a flat layer of Bugman's Glow over the guts
• Wash Carroburg Crimson
• Mix 70/30 Blood for the Blood God and Abaddon Black
• paint over the guts, being sure to slosh some onto the edges
• Add random details of Nurgle's Rot for extra gribbles 

And the muscles, which was just a tiny bit more complex:

• 40/60 mix of Khorne Red and Bugman's glow
• Paint over the muscles
• Wash Carroburg Crimson
• Paint Blood for the Blood God over the muscles and surrounding flesh

The bones and horns were pretty straight forward, too.

• Base Balor Brown
• Layer Karak Stone over the top
• Wash Agrax Earthshade, beloved of all
• Paint a 70/30 mix of Blood for the Blood God and Abaddon Black around the base of the horns
• Use tissue or a fingertip to wipe the majority away so that it sits only in the grooves and around the very base

The sword needs to be extra manky, so...

• Coat the entire sword Leadbelcher
• Coat with Typhus corrosion, except for the skulls
• Drybrush an orange of your choice (think I used Fire Dragon Bright)
• Base the skulls Balor Brown
• Layer Karak Stone over the Balor Brown, leaving most of the recesses Balor Brown
• Wash with plenty of Agrax Earthshade, beloved of all
• Cover with a 70/30 mix of Blood for the Blood God and Abaddon Black
• Use tissue or a fingertip to wipe the mix away from the skulls, so that the stale blood appears to be caked in. 

The cloth work was my usual mad-doctor colours. 

• Coat Administratum Grey
• Coat... white. Whichever one. 
• Wash in Agrax Earthshade, beloved of all
• Spatter messy patterns of the 70/30 Blood for the Blood God and Abaddon Black mix
• Add a few horrid trails of Nurgle's Rot

And there we have it. I think it works. 

Beyond the grimdark

The other day someone asked me why I didn't care for the new 40K lore and preferred to tell stories in an alternative 40k universe without Guilliman, the bigly Marines or the giant warp storm running through the galaxy. They politely asked if it was the reduction in the level of 'grimdark'. But that's not the case at all. Instead of going on at length in a possibly negative way about what I don't like, I thought I'd talk about what I love about 40k. And I do love it, very much. It's probably my favourite science fiction (let's not quibble over definitions) world.

Part of it, of course, is the models, the imagery, even the game. I love poring through books like The Emperor's Will for inspiration. I love the peculiar fusion of the medieval, the futuristic and the gloss of Gothic and Baroque traditions. I love the image of scribes with bionics scribbling in dusty tomes with quill pens, whilst incense burns and supercomputers murmur in the background. But in order to have these things, you need the lore of 40k. A lore which is just so beautiful.

The 40k universe is a secular universe which has inadvertently dumped the supernatural on itself. The early 40k universe developed, I've no doubt, out of the same tapestry of chemistry which our own world did. Sentient races evolved through natural selection and the passage of aeons. Man conceived of God, and so God was. This is true in two ways: the first and most obvious way is that the unconscious impulses of man created the chaos gods in the warp. Less obviously is that the Emperor himself, a compound of God, Christ, Mohammed and numerous other monotheist figures, is a hyper-evolved human being, created by the desires of humanity for a better incarnation of itself (this story is eloquently told in Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned, 1990). Mankind created the God that they wanted to believe was real, and the gods that they feared were real. Both were the essence of human potential, the inevitable clash which the two sides came into was, as with almost everything about 40k, some facet of Man vs Himself in grand scale. 40k is almost completely about the human race, far more than even Warhammer Fantasy. The Xenos are interesting players, but they are secondary to the saga of humanity, and the war within humanity. Nature and chaos, survival or destruction. Man as monster and saviour. In this universe, God and the Devil are different components of humanity, and ultimately it is up to humanity to choose between them.

I think that there's a really interesting parable in 40k about the dangers of absoluteness. The Emperor is unparalleled in knowledge, but He still has human failings. After the Dark Age of Technology, He determines that perhaps a crude, simplistic imperialistic society based on an unquestionable 'Imperial Truth' is the best way to safeguard humanity until he can avert the most destructive aspects of their oncoming evolutionary stage. With this in mind, he founds an empire on militant secularism, enforced through firebrand orators called 'Iterators'. If there's something alarmingly like a reverse theocracy in the depictions of the 31st millennium, it's because it is. The Emperor's mistake was perhaps to underestimate the inquisitive nature of his fellow humans. Imperial Truth could not, ultimately, prevail because it wasn't entirely true. It was a lie with the best of intentions, but a lie nonetheless. In absolute terms, it became impossible to stop everyone from finding this out. Horus, despite his acknowledgement of warp entities and his classification of them as dangerous Xenos breeds, is ill prepared for the way that they can get at his deepest fears - because they are a part of humanity. He turns upon the Emperor, a combination of a Luciferian rebel and a wayward son. And we all know how that ended. The Emperor takes on a Christ-like quality at this point, sacrificed to save humanity from evil. He sits on a throne rather than a cross, but the parity is remarkable (he even has a massive wound in his gut). He then watches over humanity from afar.

When the Imperium resorts to fanatical theocracy, we see the danger of absoluteness from another side, one which we're probably a bit more comfortable with. A monstrous combination of Catholicism, evangelicalism and Wahhabism's worst traits, the Imperial Creed is obviously oppressive and intolerant, fuelling the very superstitious fears which will power the Chaos Gods. But... but... it's more complicated than that, of course. Because 40k is refined and intelligent. The message is not 'religion bad' any more than the Imperium's foundation makes it 'atheism bad'.

The Imperial Creed is a tyrannical, hateful religion from what we know. But that being said, it does have certain empowering tendencies, as demented as we may find them: implicit within the raging call to arms is a tacit implication of the power of men to change the universe. The human form is celebrated as divine, and the nature of sin is one which direct action can tackle, rather than purely on the spiritual shield of a single deity¹. By focusing enmity on non-humans, the Imperial Creed does seem to have eliminated most of the idiotic prejudices of the modern world (I've never read any real evidence of sexism, human racism, homophobia or anything like that).

And this is one of the many joys of 40k. There are no simple answers. It's easy to classify it as a miserable, hopeless universe, but I think that ignores so much of the material. Yes, it's a scary place. But humanity is still strong, still vital, holding onto millions of worlds in the face of unimaginable horrors. People are capable of profound feats in 40k. For ten thousand years, mortal humans have literally confounded the will of a pantheon of evil gods. And they are still there. Massive invasions of Orks, a six-pack of Hive Fleets, Thirteen Black Crusades, an empire of jumped-up little blue people, insomniac Necron dynasties and more Chaos invasions than you can shake a stick at have flung themselves at humanity, and it's still there. Yes, it's grim and it's dark, but it's hopeful too. There is an energy, a defiance in the human race of 40k which simply will not die. Another question on the back of that, though, is... should it?

The Imperium is a pretty nasty organisation when viewed from a distance, explained in the lore itself as 'the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable'. From a survival perspective, it can be argued that the Imperium needs to be that harsh. But this leads to two further questions. First, does survival justify such a level of murderous and hateful behaviour. Is survival an end in and of itself? Will the Imperium be justified in some theoretical future where humanity outgrows it? Secondly, can it be entirely irredeemable if it produces good men? You wouldn't call Ibram Gaunt an evil man. This question leads us to uncomfortable but necessary questions about whether our political opponents (wherever we stand on that issue) might be more human than we tend to think.

What are the answers to these questions? Truthfully, I don't know. And that's what's so appealing about 40k. It is very complex. Every answer spawns two new questions. Some of the answers are unacceptable or uncomfortable. There is no simplicity to any situation in the 40k universe. I dislike it when people say 'there are no good guys' because I think that's pretty lazy thinking. Better to say that it requires significant scrutiny in every situation, and you might not get a good answer then. Better to say that the 40k universe is full of people trying to make their way in difficult times. And that's why is seems so real: because the muddy, complex moralities of the 40k universe land very close to the real world. The more you think about it, the more questions you find yourself with.

It's a world which both endorses and critiques religion and secularism. It's a world which examines fascism, communism, oligarchy and to a degree democracy and finds fault and more unsettlingly sometimes positivity in all of them. It's a galaxy of mysticism and astounding scientific advancement. It's a saga where the most sophisticated weapons are used and yet the deadliest fighters often use swords and axes. There are so, so, many themes and aspects of the 40k universe that you can never easily boil it down to 'him good, him bad'.

And this is why I don't like the new lore so much. One of the key tacit admissions of the 40k universe is that superhumans ultimately failed. Space Marines and Primarchs plunged the galaxy into madness. Custodes retreated in bitterness back to Terra to brood over broken dreams. The Emperor Himself, though he ultimately took on an incredible self-sacrificing responsibility, paid for his dangerous experiment in almost the worst way he could. The Imperium is run by flawed, mortal humans. The High Lords are humans. The sector governors are humans. The monolithic might of the Guard, the Navy, the Inquisition and the endless trillions of souls who make up the population of the Imperium are human. And for a hundred centuries, beset by horrors from every side, they have kept it together. That's one hell of an endorsement from the writers. And Space Marines, as autonomous bodies within the Imperium, had their own agency and could be appreciated on the simple but appealing theme of their righteous might. So when I read that Roboute Guilliman had come back and taken over and that his cure for the universe's ills was even bigger superhumans, I decided that GW and I had to agree to disagree. It seemed to me to rob humanity of agency, implying that some kind of greater-than-human superhero was required because humanity couldn't hack it. It felt a bit like a replay of the Warhammer Fantasy problem, where the Empire was trampled underfoot without much of a fight, the world was destroyed and the only thing which could save humanity was an army of huge golden Space Marine analogues. Now, let me be clear: if you love the Primaris Space Marines and Guilliman and the giant warp rift and all that, I have zero problems with that. I'm glad it improves your hobby. I have no problem with GW. They have a product, they want to take it in a direction which I mostly agree with but disagree with the lore aspect. So my 40k universe is a little different, and the saga of the Imperium of Man will go on.

---

1 This is a massive bugbear I have with Christianity. The concept of original sin is profoundly non-Biblical, inasmuch as God already issued punishment for the sins in the Book of Genesis when he cast man from the Garden of Eden, see Genesis 3:17-23. And don't get me started on how this passage could be read as being very friendly to women as it could be said to infer that Adam loved Eve more than God. Theology grumble over.^↩

The Pestigor are back!

I have a peculiar admission to make: when the Death Guard Codex came out, I was perversely pleased that it didn't have Pestigors in it despite the fact that I wanted them. My reason for thinking that they might be in there was the presence of Tzaangor in the Thousand Sons army. In the end, of course, GW decided to have Poxwalkers as their fruity troop choice, which was fine. It was also fine because I'd already made this one and didn't want my work surpassed!

Making him was surprisingly easy when I got my head around the idea that I shouldn't base it on a Beastman. You can add all sorts of manky bits to a Gor, but you're really just creating work for yourself. Instead, I based him on one of the Plaguebearers who rides the Rot Flies in the Plague Drone kit. I never mount those Plaguebearers because I think that the Rot Flies look vastly more threatening without them. I removed the legs, and at the same time removed the legs from a Gor. It's worth mentioning that the legs of the Gor will not be going under the body but on either side of the gut. I pinned the legs in place to stop them flopping about and then filled the gaps with liquid green stuff. I left this to set before adding the rest.

The left arm was easy: that was just the arm from the same kit as the body. The right arm was easily made from a Gor arm with a sword from the Plague Drones kit. And the head is just a Gor champion head with an extra horn added!

Now I just need to make six more...

The problem of Eldar

This is a bit off topic, but the appearance of Craftworld Eldar has always bothered me. The lore has always gushed about how they're so graceful and beautiful and intelligent and so on and so on.

So how come the models never looked like that? Chunky, bulky sculpts, ugly knobbly armour, disparate designs which when brought together look bland and toyish. The second release of Dark Eldar and Harlequins made them an embarrassment. I decided that I had to try to do something about it.

My first task was to find a body which actually fitted all of the rhetoric, and the body of a Wood Elf Eternal Guard seemed to work well. I then added a shuriken catapult and arms from a Dire Avenger. I was going to add a Dire Avenger head, but when lining the component up I realised that it was comically oversized. Instead, I removed the spikes from the head of a Dark Eldar Kabalite and used this. Finally, I mounted the model on a resin Eldar base which can easily be found on ebay.

I think the result looks far more like what an Eldar should be!

Putting the brute into Helbrute

To me, a staunch square-base loyalist, Age of Sigmar is largely something that happened to other people. But when I saw the Khorgorath model, I had an idea that it could be used as a Chaos Dreadnought/Helbrute (largely because it seemed to be a CAD rework of the Dark Vengeance Helbrute). I then promptly forgot the idea until late 2017.

The 8th edition reawoke my love of 40k, and with that came the desire to make the Helbrute. I ordered one off of eBay and did a few sketches.

Helbrutes are interesting beasties. Conceptually, they're quite different from the old 'Chaos Dreadnought' idea, even if they're representing the same thing. A Chaos Dreadnought is a nightmare of claustrophobia, a miserable metal tomb where a Traitor Marine slowly drifts into madness from his living entombment. But a Helbrute is depicted as a more vital, active creature, a constant battle between the mechanisms and the rampant flesh growths. My Helbrute represents the idea that the flesh has all but triumphed, devouring the Helbrute from within until the metal seems to be desperately trying to fight its way free. It unpleasantly made me think of some sort of appalling, daemonic cancer which has metastasised and overcome the original construction. It was a horrible thought. But then, that's Chaos: the insane, the demented, the wrong and the abhorrent. Chaos is not your friend. Chaos is hell, walking about with an idiot grin on its face trying to convince you it loves you.

I removed both of the fists, the uninspiring head and the loincloth. First I had to tackle the trunk of the body: it was far too muscular, and the mark of Khorne was a bit too clear. I filed down the mark of Khorne until it was much less visible and could be passed off as ripped skin. For the stomach, I added the open guts that I had spare from a Maggoth kit. I used poly cement and pins to ensure that it stayed in place - the fit was good but not great, and there were gaps. I filled these by mixing PVA glue with tissue and creating a kind of adhesive padding. When this dried out, I coated it with liquid green stuff to ensure robustness.

The head was easy: I took the head of a Rot Fly and added antlers from a Plaguebearer head to gift it more width. Now, the long proboscis of the Rot Fly was looking like it would come down too far and draw attention from the centre of the model. So I removed the end of the proboscis and instead put one of the Alien reminiscent mouthed tail from a Rot Fly on there. Again I used pins, poly cement and liquid green stuff to create a nice join.

The weapon arm was easy too: I used the drill from an Ork Killer Kan was this. It looked suitably nasty and scaled well. The cannon arm wasn't quite as simple. The component is a cannon from a Forgefiend. The problem I discovered was that the weapon was too long and looked silly. I had to saw the arm at the elbow and take some of the gun's housing off. Then it was a bit of crude pin and cement job, followed by the filling method described above.

And there you have it! A brutal Helbrute who stands out, looks very menacing on the table and... well... even if you don't have the bits lying around, will probably still cost less than the official model!

The Plagueburst Biomortar

This was an oddity. I accidentally predicted the Plagueburst Crawler years before it happened. I made this piece about two years ago, basically because I had some leftover bits and pieces from other conversions.

There's a distinctly First World War feel to the Death Guard, with the gas masks, the Prussian helms and even their general footslogging attitude to warfare. Therefore it made sense even before there was Plagueburst Crawler that the Death Guard might have a lumbering, monstrous artillery piece.

My idea for the Biomortar is that it's a daemon engine similar to a Defiler, albeit more limited and slow, with aspects of the Hellcannon from Warhammer Fantasy. Basically, it's a big, dangerous, unhinged monster that spits warp-death and is dangerous to know. You'll notice the ghoulish figure off to the side with the shovel and the wheelbarrow full of offal. My idea is that he's a kind of ritual butcher who hacks plague victims up and feeds them to the Biomortar to fuel it. The capering mutant at the front is there to provoke it into shooting, which is a dangerous game to play!

The construction was really easy. With the Maggoth kit, you get extra arms and legs, and the components are really helpfully proportioned. With only a little trimming I was able to get the arms to fit into the Defiler's gun-housings, and with a bit of green stuff, the leg fitted onto the back. If you look carefully you can see a humanoid arm groping out from the monster's interior, which is just a Plaguebearer arm. The mutant at the front is a Gnoblar spotter from the Ogre Bulls kit with his head switched with that of a Cadian. The butcher has the torso and arms of a 2003 Ungor, a Dark Eldar Reaver's head, the lower half of a High Elf archer and a zombie's weapon. The wheelbarrow, if memory serves, comes from the Dwarf Cannon kit. The various spiders were added to give it an 'infested' look. They're all spares from the Warhammer Fantasy Arachnarok.

And it really is that simple!

"Behold, the Daemon Prince comes and the time of woe is upon us."

The title of this post is part of a description first published (to my knowledge) in 1988's classic Slaves to Darkness and later reprinted in the 1997 volume Realm of Chaos. It's a pretty apocalyptic description. And it really doesn't fit some bloke standing in a very 1996 pose hold a sword at a funny angle (the plastic Daemon Prince). I have issues with the plastic Prince. He's not a bad model, but he's very... very... well... he's not very flexible, is he? I mean, he's good for a traditional 'devil' look, but I really couldn't see him being a Nurgle piece. Still, I picked one up for about a fiver on Ebay and after glaring at it angrily for some time, I decided what I needed to do. I knew that it would like a miserable amount of effort, but desperately hoped it would be worth it. I think it was:

Let's start with the easy parts: the model is so muscular that he looks like Brock Lesnar's angry big brother. Nurgle creatures are fiendishly strong but usually bloated and rotting. The solution was easy: I attached the body front of a Blight King to the torso, using poly cement to ensure a good bond. Obviously, it didn't fit exactly, so I filled in the gaps with a mix of tissue and PVA glue. This sounds crazy, but it hardens to be light and solid. Once that was complete, I painted liquid green stuff over the top to ensure the seal. 

Next up was the head. The one I got had a botched conversion of the head (hence why it was so cheap). I cut that off, smoothed the surface down and then added a spare Rot Fly head from the Plague Drones kit. This looked cool, but something was a wee bit off. So, I sawed the antlers off of a spare plaguebearer head and attached these on either side. It was a subtle change but added some needed bulk. 

Next up was the jump pack. Taking some inspiration from Maxime Pastourel's incredible Daemon Prince, I wanted him to have mechanical flying aids rather than wings. So I sawed the ends off of the heavily mutated backpack you get with the Prince and attached Bloat Drone engines to the ends. These didn't really need pinning, as the contact surfaces were large and flat. Obviously, I used poly cement here and wherever else I could. The tank on his back is a resin septic/water tank I found from a random model train company. It only cost about £2 and was pinned in several places onto his back. I then filled the gaps as described above so that it would appear as if he were fused with his pack. 

Then came the tricky bits. I had this idea that he should be flying. And that he should be holding a massive scythe. The model was not willing to co-operate on this. The arms are not designed to hold two weapons, and the legs certainly aren't in a flying pose. So, after many deep breaths, I sawed off his arms and legs are the knee and elbow joints. I then repositioned them into the pose I wanted, using superglue to tack the parts together and drilling long pins through both components involved in each positioning. These pins held, for example, the forearm and the upper arm together despite the huge gap and the minimal contact points. I then made sure to drop some ploy cement in so that the small contact point would at least fuse. Of course, this left me with the problem that the arms might be fragile and snap. To compensate, I chopped a sprue into lots of little cubes. With a liberal application of poly cement, I stacked these small lumps of plastic into the elbow and knee joints, and then waited for them to solify into a mass. Then I used the tissue/PVA/green stuff method detailed above to smooth off the joints and make them look natural. 

The feet were a nagging issue. I wanted hooves, not regular feet. So I removed his feet and pinned/cemented on hooves from one of the Varanguard, Archaon's ludicrously overpriced horsemen fellows. I'd managed to get one of the horse bodies for another conversion that didn't work out, and this seemed a good use for them. 

Which just left the scythe. Building the weapon was fairly easy. I can't even remember exactly what I used, because you could really use two or three 'spear' components from any kit, or just plain off a bit of sprue until it's round. I pinned a couple of such lengths together to form the haft. The head is from two kits: the mechanical parts are from a spare scythe you get in the Deathshroud kit. But the blade of that scythe looked a bit puny next to him, so I cut it off, being careful to maintain the mechanical bits. I then replaced it with Otto Glott's scythe. 

I wanted him to hover, so I attached the spare cabling from the multipart Bloat Drone to him. This had to be ruthlessly pinned to the base, and I had to be very careful to make sure that the heavy resin tank on his back was pushing directly downwards and reinforcing the strength of the pins rather than pulling against them. I left him upside down for over 24 hours to dry after that. 

One other thing of note: when he was painted, I added the thick, coarse hairs you see on a fly by glueing black static grass onto him with PVA. You can get this sort of black grass dead cheap from War World Scenics, Serious Play, anywhere like that. It helped give him a bestial, wild feel. 

And there we have it! One floating Daemon Prince. Now if only I could convince him to pass some Disgustingly Resilient rolls...

Back on the Warpath with the Synod of Suffering!

Erm, yeah. This seems like as good a place as any to start. Eighth edition 40k, what a time to be alive. Never thought I'd be playing the round-based madness again, but here we are. Worth mentioning: any model I post on here works on the idea that it's early M42, the terrible wars of 999.M41 have eased off or been contained and it's business as usual in the 40k universe. I got no time for bigly Space Marines, holes through the middle of the galaxy or loyal primarchs waking up.

This is my first offering for the Synod of Suffering, a Plague Company of the Death Guard. I actually love the Plague Surgeon Model, but I'm also feeling pretty skinflint at the moment and have a huuuuuuuge bits box.

So, pretty obviously I started with a spare Noxious Blightbringer. When Dark Imperium came out, I swapped the loyalist half (see above, re: bigly Marines) for a double dose of Death Guard delight. I made one of the Blightbringers as... well... a Blightbringer... and then later decided this one would make a decent Plague Surgeon. The main trunk of this model is really solid, with good bulk and a striking, slow-striding pose. The tabard thing would make a good filthy surgeon's apron (with an unpleasant suggestion of butcher).

The Blightbringer is pretty striking, so I knew I'd have to do a fair bit of work. Firstly, I took off all the censers and most of the bells. Most important was taking off the epic horn with the Nurgling on the backpack. Waaaaay too distinctively 'Blightbringer'. Next came the arms: I had this idea about converting the existing arms, but in my head, it kept looking daft. I wanted his posture to be restrained, stalking and sinister. So I took the right arm off and removed the bell-hand from the left hand. The right arm was a bit of a fiddle: it's one of the more restrained plague knife arms from the multipart Plague Marine kit. I removed the knife hand and replaced it with the clenched fist from the grenade-pulling hands, again from Plague Marines kit. I then pinned and glued the fist onto the arm, which was all kinds of fun. His dodgy narthecium is actually a spare bit from a Dunecrawler which I'm hacking up to feed a dismayingly complex Defiler conversion. This bit was one of the easiest aspects of the model: there was plenty of contact area to glue it onto the arm. The arm then went to the shoulder pad without much difficulty. For the Bilesword, I used a spare Blightking (which was a surprising amount of fuss to pin to the hand).

I chose the bare head from the Plague Marines kit because Plague Surgeons are among the darker, nastier characters in the new Codex. A glimmer of humanity would, I was sure, make him seem more vile and cruel.

I finished up by attaching spare feeler-claw-things from the multipart Bloat Drone to the backpack. They give the model that bit of extra size and the slightest Fabius Bile-esque vibe. I envision them as long surgical blades prying apart victims to inspect the progress of diseases.

Given the parts I've listed, I know this isn't exactly the cheap alternative to the official model. But hey, if you have an expansive bits box, maybe it'll help to inspire you!