Magos Langyll, the Innovator of Rust

When Belisarius Cawl fell to Chaos, he did not go alone into damnation. Whole macro-maniples of Skitarii and other Mechanicus warriors fell. Quickest to embrace the power of Nurgle was Ingogen Langyll, Cawl's right hand man.

Cawl himself may be given some meagre credit inasmuch as his intent may have been noble in the beginning. His monstrous Primaris experiments, his blasphemous plans to capture the Eye of Terror and the lunacy of even suggesting he could resurrect a primarch were at least originally intended as plans to help the Imperium.

No such doubts exist with Langyll. Where Cawl had raged at the perceived blindness of the Imperium and its condemnations, Langyll was dismissive and without regret turned his attention to the saving of his various materials and experiments.

Langyll had been carrying out highly unethical experiments for centuries. He sought ways to marry flesh, machine and the power of the warp in new and bold ways. The man had no loyalty, no humanity and no real allegiance beyond a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. What a man of this disposition might yet achieve in the dungeons of the Plague Planet remain to be seen. 

Langyll embraced the power of Nurgle completely and without any sign of regret, quickly becoming fascinated with the seeming contradiction of his new patron's focus on decay and resilience. Motivated by this morbid fascination, Langyll has begun to experiment once more, and in deep dungeons of screams an despair, strange shapes lurch into unclean life...

The gate of Hell

This is such a quick and easy little conversion. I originally made it to represent the Portalglyph, an item in earlier editions of 40k. Now it's an ominous floating gateway which I'm planning to use in scenarios (where presumably Inquisitorial agents have to take out the portal).

So, we start with the main body of the gateway. This is the platform from the Warhammer Fantasy 'Balewind Vortex' kit which you can get from Darksphere or similar outlets for £7.50.

The emerging daemon is a Plague Drone rider (I never use them because I think that the Rot Fies look way better without them). I sawed him off about halfway down and then glued him onto the front of the starburst. Then, both to gap fill and to give a sense of a liquid, viscous doorway into a blasphemous sea beyond the gate of man, I used tissue and green stuff to make the whole area look gribbly.

Next I added a random bell (I think it was from a Maggoth) just to emphasise the Nurgle feel. Lasty, I filed down two small flying stands and arranged them into a 'V' shape so that the spur of the star would slot down into it. This was a little tricky, but soon took.

And there we are! Inside an hour, a nice, scary little piece for scenarios, objectives or whatever else you want!

Chapter Master Ulyssiad Sagath

"I felt his anger crash into the room like a bow wave before I ever saw the man himself. Lords Militant, Inquisitors and the Exectuor Fetial of Legio Agricola himself blanched. I felt a stab of fear, and then a kind of directionless horror. I had grown up on legends of the Astartes. On the one occasion I had met one, Brother Sergeant Sulbord of the White Consuls, I had seen the angelic being of purity and honour I had expected. But this... Sagath was a savage warlord in snarling power plate, a barbarian king with grisly trophies clanking from his belt. As if he relished alienation, he told us he cared not for honour or protocol. He was there to win. He was there to butcher the enemy and burn their cities down. And Emperor save me, I believed him."

- Lord Commissar Fadel Ibn Bashar

"Blood for the Emperor! Skulls for the Golden Throne!"

- Battlecry of the Brass Reapers

The Brass Reapers were born into darkness. Founded barely 900 years ago, the desperate struggles of the dark millennium are all that this grim Chapter has ever known.  They measure their worth not in honour nor great heroism but by the number of enemies destroyed, the number of threats extinguished. They barely co-operate with other Imperial forces, preferring to smash into the enemy far away from support and pull the heart from the foe. The vast majority of Imperial commanders who have encountered the Brass Reapers maintain a policy of monitoring these volatile Astartes almost as much as the enemy's movements.

Ulyssiad Sagath is the eighth Chapter Master of the Brass Reapers, and he epitomises their brutal, cynical approach to warfare. His scarred power armour and battle-torn flesh tell of three hundred years relentlessly making war. Sagath is more canny than he appears, a revelation which his allies find almost as terrible as his enemies: the Holy Sea of the Quintus Sector actually declared Sagath a heretic after he destroyed a holy templum complex in order to rob a Death Guard warband of their entrenched positions. Sagath shrugged when the complaint was raised.
"Build a new one," he was heard to say, "our enemies are dead."
Ultimately, neither the Inquisitition nor the Ministorum's Segmentum Diocese Command would ratify the pleas of the local Ecclesiarchs. Nobody particularly wanted to see what would happen if the Brass Reapers were driven over the edge. And so Sagath continues to wage a ruthless, almost unhinged war among the stars, at arm's length from his allies and almost as feral as the creatures he hunts...

You know when you get one of those ideas that won't go away? The Brass Reapers are like that. One of the main problems I have with loyalist Marine models is that there's no sense of threat about them. For massive transhuman warriors designed specifically to be the thing which nothing could answer, they often suffer from being static fellows wearing big slippers. I wanted to do something... scarier. 

Firstly, Sagath's base is a bit built up to give him a little extra height. now, I wanted a sense of motion as well as size. The body is actually the power fist wielding Chosen Chaos Space Marine champion from Dark Vengeance. He's got a good sense of foreward motion and he's pretty solid in the trunk.  First things first, I removed all of the chaos markings and overly pointy bits on the banding. Now, there was originally a chaos starburst on the loin cloth/tabard at the front. I was about to remove the chains it hung on when I had the idea of replacing it with an Imperial symbol. So I got a small plastic aquila (can't remember where from) and added that. I added purity seals here and there to ensure that the right idea came across. I replaced the power fist with a sword from the Raptors kit, with all the spikes filed off Probably the hardest part was sawing out the front of his chest and replacing it with a Space Marine chestplate. I wanted to give him both more mass and a sense of brutish danger, so I attached skulls hanging from chains to his belt. The chains binding his weapons to himself are budget jeweller's chain which you can get from Ebay from no more than £1-2. Finally - and with a bit of sawing - I added a spare Dark Elves Beastmaster cloak to a standard power pack and put that on his back. I finished the piece with the scowling, scarred bald head from the Empire Greatswords kit - one of my favourite components. 

So there he is. A bit of work, but pretty scary I think!

Battle brothers of the Synod of Suffering

The 2017 Plague Marines are a work of art A monstrous, horrible work of art, but a work of art nonetheless. I love the grotesque details on them so much that I - a pathological tinkerer - don't feel the need to convert every one of them. In this squad there's only one conversion (the champion's hefty axe). 

A question I sometimes get is: 'why don't you ever paint Nurgle green?' The reason for this is actually pretty simple: green doesn't say 'decay' or 'disease' to me. Green evokes life and fertility to me. Now arguably, in a dark way those are aspects of Nurgle. But to me, that monstrous feeling of disease and misery should be pervasive. The armour colour is simply Leadbelcher>Typhus Corrosion>various oranges drybrushed. This dilapidated brown/orange to me suggests slow rot and degradation. On flesh areas, if they are large enough, I sometimes also use a range of purples and very thinned yellows, the colours of bruising and infection. The only green I use is fairly random splashes of Nurgle's Rot, to suggest oozing pus or slime. 

You've probably noticed that everything is caked in stale old blood. The reason here is that I think everything Nurgle-oid should be suffering. Now, being that they're lunatics who have given themselves over to an insane god, they can shrug off that suffering, not even feeling it or even delighting in it. But nonetheless, I feel as though every Plague Marine should be actively... dripping. That's also why ichor is trickling from joints and corroded patches in the armour - I don't think there's anything like the biology of a sane universe under that armour. 

I used a kind of parched yellow static grass on the bases, as well as areas which I didn't sand and instead filled in as unwholesome gloop. Where there was room I added coils of rusting barbed wire or chainlink to give a wasted, World War 1 type feel to it. I debated black grass at first, the idea being that the presence of the Plague Marines has leeched the life out of it, but the models are largely dark, so I wanted a lighter shade.

Some people don't like painting these models, but I love them. I've got four fully painted squads and another one on the go. They're different enough from each other to make it fun. 

The Hammer twisted

This squadron of Leman Russ Battle Tanks is actually a project I did in 2012-13. At that time, after what felt like several centuries of loyalty to the Emperor, I was just beginning to get into this whole heresy business. Now, in recent times I've been hooked on the new Death Guard because... well, have you seen those models? They are the awesomeness. But in general terms, I find the concept of mortals falling to Chaos even more interesting. Astartes tend to fall because of hubris or despair or jealousy or a host of other suitably classical tragedies. But mortal men and women... they might fall for much more relatable reasons. They could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They might have seen their friends sacrificed on the altar of the Imperium's ruthless pragmatism. They might simply not know what they're getting into. This is an aspect I find very scary and compelling, because it mirrors the twists in our own lives. I'm doing reasonably well for myself these days, but I've seen the other side. I've never felt angrier than the time I was laid off by my employer of six years despite being recognised as a very effective worker, just so that my job could be reassigned to some poor guy in Scarborough who was shoved into it with too much pressure and too little prep time. I raged at the hypocrisy and injustice. In 2007, for a couple of reasons I was forced to face the sobering reality that I simply wasn't as good at some things as I thought I was. At that time, I felt a really wrenching despair. Look, these aren't special. I'm not trying to claim my life has been particularly tough, we've all experienced these things. And in those moments, when the attractive falsehoods and over-simplifications we're often asked to believe in are exposed... you can well see the appeal of the Dark Gods of Chaos, of a self-destructive middle-finger to the universe. And that the thing about Chaos: it's a predator. It's your worse angels. It's the voice which says that one drink won't hurt. Chaos is the side of us that waits for us to be in a bad place, when its whispering suddenly seems to make sense.

The idea for this Traitor Regiment is that they turned on the Imperium after some harsh treatment, buoyed by the idea of a new way of life. All the promises have worn off, they're missing regular supply lines and despair is creeping upon them. They're well on their way to embracing Nurgle - and the Leman Russes, the symbol of Imperial might, have fallen furthest, possessing by morose and snarling daemons. 

I didn't want to stick garden rails on them, and I actually wanted the conversion to be minimal: I wanted the overall appearance of the Russ to be very similar, so as to make it stand out as even more striking among a horde of degenerate traitors. The conversions I made were minimal, as you can see. 

 The main thing I wanted to do was the bloody writing on the hull. At first I had this idea that as they drift into madness, the Guardsmen smear inane graffiti on the tanks. But then I thought it would be quite nice if the writing was actually blood oozing out of the hull itself - the possessing daemon's way of  communicating with both the ground troops and the enemy. I had this vision of them lumbering across the field after a battle, snuffling up corpses with those long cannon barrels, and then using the bodies to fuel themselves - and the blood as ink for their messages.

I used Blood for the Blood God to freehand on the messages. They're universally aggressive, threatening and foul mouthed - the daemon is not a pleasant conversationalist.

Now, this was during the sixth edition, when a flipped wreck was still a possibility. This gave me the idea that each of the tanks would have a final, venomous message streaked across the bottom - a threat or insult or promise from the departing daemon. It was pretty funny watching people jump in surprise when one of the tanks was wrecked!

A brave-hearted attempt to recreate the might of Albion

I'm one of those recalcitrant old codgers who believe that fantastical adventures should take place on square bases, with nary a Space Marine allegory in sight. One of the key advantages of this failure to believe that Sigmar is the Emperor's little brother is that I have something of a developmental sandbox. I know in the most literal sense that Games Workshop will not do any development for Warhammer Fantasy for a long time, if ever (recent behaviour has shown a more conciliatory attitude towards Warhammer fans, so perhaps in the fullness of time it will return as a specialist game, who knows). I'm lucky enough to be part of a small group of hobbyists who are eager to still develop the Warhammer Fantasy world. And something I always felt had more potential was the land of Albion.

We know a lot about the Gaels of Albion, from supplements such as Dark Shadows and older roleplay materials. We know that whilst obscure, the Gaels have an important effect on the world of Warhammer, having some nebulous connection to the Old Ones. There's a fair bit of artwork showing these wild looking tribesmen. But after all these years, we only ever got two giants, a druid, a Fenbeast and a Truthsayer (the Dark Emissary is more of a budget chaos sorcerer, what with being Bel'akor's minions). 

Queen Gwenlaen leads a Gael raiding party.

When looking for new models, the first thing I did was to research Picts. I was a little disappointed: Picts looked a lot more... well, civilised than I'd hoped. I quickly realised that I didn't want my Gaels to really look like Celts, but rather like Hollywood depictions of them: Braveheart, Centurion and King Arthur were the kind of things I was thinking about. I briefly considered using the 2002 Chaos Marauders, then quickly abandoned the idea. I think they can be made to look acceptable with some time and care, but they just don't look the part. 

In the end, I decided that if I was going to do it, I would do it properly. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted, and part-farming became the order of the day. 

The kilted legs came from Victoria Miniatures. The torsos are feral scout torsos from Spellcrow. The heads are the wilder looking heads from Empire Greatswords and Marauder horsemen. The arms took a bit of thought. For the shield arms, I used the arms of Ungors very specifically from the 2003 Beast Herd kit. Now, I have plenty of these, but I do intend to sort out a mould for them because they are a finite resource. Obviously, I removed the fur from them. The sword arms are the hand weapon arms of Marauder Horsemen. Their hand weapons have been removed and replaced with the sword hands from Empire Swordsmen. All of my Empire state troops are Halberdiers or Spearmen, so I had stacks of them about. 

To finish up, the shields are a mixture of Marauder and Marauder Horsemen shields, with the iconography filed away. The shield bosses are 'Small celtic Shields' from Scibor Miniatures. Be warned, there are two different packs of these and only one is right for this. 

Anyway, there we have it! The fierce people of Albion coming to Warhammer Fantasy battlefields - and it's pretty easy!

FLESHMOWEREN!!!

(to be shouted to the tune of Finntroll's classic 'Trollhammeren').

I really love the Foetid Bloat Drone mode, even if I can almost never stop myself from calling it a 'Blight Drone'. It's a charmingly absurd and has just the right degree of absurdity. GW wanted far too much money for it, but there's a nice workaround: you can get one for £22.50 from Darksphere or similar outlets, and the kit has enough spares that you can then put them onto Dark Imperium Drones, which are available much cheaper on Ebay.

One of the things I'd like to look at briefly is that the Drone is a perfect opportunity to work on nice, moody bases. The Drone itself has minimal contact with the base, and there's plenty of space around it. In this case, I used coils of model barbed wire and pools of goop. Other things I've used are crumbling jetties sticking out in rivers of filth, which can be easily made with matchsticks glued onto the base. 

Coeddil the Damned, the Tree of Woe

And now for something completely different.

Working on my Death Guard recently made me think about this bloke who I made in 2017. He's part of my gaming group's Age of Rebuilding project, an alternative Warhammer Fantasy continuity where the world was saved and the Empire is busily trying to get itself back together. One of my early ideas was to have Coeddil (one of the three eldest treemen) return as a deranged chaos tree. GW touched briefly on this idea in the final End Times book, but as with most things in the End Times book, it wasn't terribly good.

Now, as to the conversion, this is a project which is very easy to explain but I'll warn you, pretty difficult to do, almost to the level of that bloody daemon prince but fairly work-intensive anyway.

The centre of the kit is a Maggoth's body. I put the torso and head together, but didn't attach arms or legs. Now, right from the off I wanted aspects of his Treeman heritage to show through, so I used the strangleroot and beard components from the Treeman kit as a tongue and... well... beard. I had to pin them and do a fair bit of filling.

Next came the legs. I was vaguely inspired by Lovecraft's Dark Young creatures. To this end, I a Citadel Wood which was sulking in my cupboard. I sawed the trees in half an used the bottom halves to create the three legs. This was very tough. I had to pin them in place and tack them with superglue whilst holding the body in order to get the whole affair stable enough to pour in some poly cement. When this was fully set, I had to do a lot of filling.

I arranged the top half of the trees around the top of his body, again gluing and pinning before filling some big gaps.

After this it was a case of finishing touches. I added an evil looking owl from the Dryads kit, a random Nurgling and a clawing Plaguebearer's arm on the base to be emerging from a pool on the base. The rags of flesh hanging in the branches are Woodland Scenics clump foliage painted to suit.

It was a lot of work, but worth it, I think. I use him for WFB, but he could serve equally as a Great Unclean One using the 'Garden of Nurgle' theme.

The Taskmaster

Brother Ammonias Cystor was, in another life, a trainer of recruits in the Death Guard legion. A hundred centuries and an eternity of madness later, Cystor is a ruthless Taskmaster of the disease factories controlled by the Synod of Suffering, working a thousand generations of slaves to death. As time has passed, Cystor has slowly burst out of his armour. A third arm has grown from his shoulder even as the original limb withered away. True to his nature, this arm has grown into a lashing tentacle, a cruel lash which has tasted the blood of uncounted slaves. In battle, Cystor uses the same limb to lash hordes of diseases slaves and cultists into the mouths of the enemy's guns. 

This was one of the easiest conversions ever! I'd been constructing a conversion of a Plague Marine riding a Rot Fly (more on this later) and this left me with the bottom half of a Plague Marine and an unused Blightking from the Pusgoyle kit. With a bit of trimming, the Blightking torso fitted nicely onto the Plague Marine legs. It was a bit big and needed some filling with green stuff, but it gave a nice mutated look.

The boltgun was easy too: the Blightking's wrist can be fitted to one of the Boltgun hands from the Plague Marines kit by just trimming off the tag on the arm and cutting the back of the hand down a bit. I pinned it in place just to be sure.

The shoulder pads, backpack and head were all spares from the Plague Marines kit. The only slight issue was the head, which had to be pinned in place and then have a neck built up with green stuff. Overall, though - about an hour if that for an interesting and different character!