Possessed of an urge to explain away an odd rule

Why don't Possessed have Disgustingly Resilient? I think the answer's fairly simple: GW wanted those units which appear in several codexes to be as homogenized as possible, to avoid confusion or whatever. But narratively, it's a bit tricky. Nurgle Daemons and Plague Marines both have the rule, so why would a fusion of the two not have it...

... unless they aren't actually Plague Marines. What if they're actually loyalists who have been possessed against their will? Subsequently, the spirit of the loyalist and the daemon are constantly battling for control of the body - not a goo recipe for Disgustingly Resilient.

I figured that it would also add a nice splash of colour to my army.

I decided that the appearance should representa violent internal conflict, with some limbs transforming into Plague Marine limbs whilst others mutate out of control and other areas are defiantly Imperial. I used bits from loyalist Space Marines, Gors, Plaguebearers and Plague Marines to achieve this. The Son of Medusa's long, ripping guts were created by sawing the body in half, creating a long central section with a long pin and then building up flesh from green stuff.

These are just the first two. I have an image of one doing a horrid crabwalk and a Terminator who looks like he's had a run-in with John Carpenter. We shall see!

A Land Raider from an older age

This Land Raider has something of a funny history. It has been floating about for literally almost half my life. It first came along in 2001, the year I turned eighteen. My friend Aidan got it originally for his Death Guard army. Years later, somewhere around about 2006, he gave it to me due to space issues. I stripped it and reworked it as an Inquisitorial Land Raider. There in about 2012 or so, when I was drifting out of the gaming side of 40k an thus didn't need coherent armies, I gave it to my friend Dave, who stripped it again and repurposed it as a Dark Angels army. Last year, Dave then gave it back to me because he wanted to greatly reduce the size of his collection for both space and fresh-start reasons. So I decided it should come full circle and join the Death Guard.

Let's be honest, now: the Land Raider isn't the most visually exciting kit. It's a brick. But herein is the great thing about chaos: you can gribble to your heart's content!

The doors on the sides are the excellent Spellcrow resin doors. I built around the edges with tissue, PVA and green stuff to make it look like the doors were warping out of the hull. On the top of the model, you can also see a Spellcrow plague bubo thingie.

I hacked a big lump out of the top-right hand side and fitted a spare mouth from the Great Unclean One kit. Again, this was built up with green stuff, tissue and PVA both to make it look like a a warping mutation and to gap fill.

Using the same method, I added areas of bulging flesh, in one case adding skulls from the Citadel Skulls sprue.

I think one of the most effective tactics for creepy-fying Nurgle is having inexplicable groping hands appearing from inside machines. I added a bunch of zombie hands to a gash I'd made in one of the headlights.

And there we are! After switching allegiance several times, the Land Raider has come home to Grandfather Nurgle!

Stynvor Blodfodt, the Priest of Slaughter

A couple of years back, Games Workshop realised the almost bewildering folly they'd committed by making White Dwarf a weekly magazine, and rebooted the monthly format. It was much better. The first issue contained a free miniature, the Khorne Slaughterpriest. An imposing model, usually costed at £13.50 from resellers or £18 with the GW premium for £4.99. I purchased it immediately!

Obviously, I wasn't going to use it for AoS, a system I don't play. But with a few quick changes and a sensible colour scheme, I imagined he could repurposed as a WFB character. Hi hulking stature was not an issue: I could easily have him as a freakishly big brute, concerned only with violence an slaughter. The character I had in mind was Fenris the Feared from Joe Abercrombie's First Law novels. Thus Stynvor Blodfodt was born.

First thing I did was fit him onto a square base. The morning-star type weapon looked a bit off to me, so I removed that and instead added the hapless Empire State Troop from the Ogre Kingdoms Stonehorn sprue. I forget where the head came from, but any suitably haggard head would do. I built his hair up with green stuff, and sawed a portion of his throat away. When painting the piece, I made sure to have arterial blood pouring from that removed section and correspondingly from Stynvor's blade, to signify a battlefield sacrifice.

I made the base very rocky with shale, green crystals and snow flock. I spattered some Blood for the Blood God to create blood in the snow. I envision this as the result of a disastrous Empire campaign into the far north which has led to the Empire's army being either destroyed or sent packing.

The above is a page draft from my Warhammer: Age of Rebuilding project. It needs tidying up and editing. Obviously only for narrative game use. 

I'm hoping to properly crack on with this project in the near future.

Norway

I'm back!

You might have noticed that I've been away for a bit. Specifically, I was sitting at the end of a Norwegian fjord. I was staying in a wooden cabin in a place called Ovre Eidfjord. No internet, no television, and I turned my phone off for the majority of it.

I needed a holiday, I think. My life's been very kind to me recently - working at the University continues to be far more fulfilling than my years in the private sector. But there were a few things I needed to rinse out of my head. A few months ago, for example, a dear friend of many years had an abhorrent change of personality and subsequently ghosted me. I cannot account for it, but I think that accepting that disturbing truth fully required some time away. After a spate of ill-health, I was also worried about whether I was even capable of my old hiking holidays. I was, and I feel massive relief because of that!

I'm looking forward to returning to work on Monday - we're in prospectus editing season, and that always feels like a good time to be there - it's energising to know that your actions will help people get educated and thus improve the world.

But this is a hobby blog, so you probably want to know what this has to do with anything. The truth is, spending some time away has helped me to recharge my hobby inspiration, and clarify my various hobby projects. There are three main items I hope to be sharing over the coming months: 

• Continue to expand the Nurgle project
• Get my act together and properly sort out Age of Rebuilding, my Warhammer Fantasy alternate timeline where the world survived
• Properly get my Warhammer Fantasy naval spinoff, provisionally named Boathammer off the ground

So, a lot to be get on with. But I'm fresh, I have some new ideas and I'm looking forward to it. Watch this space!

It's flashback time: The Corpsewalker

Right. I know that base is a horrid colour. And I know that my paintjob could have been better. This was 2012, my first attempt at Chaos in 40k. But more importantly, I was so impatient for some reason. I'm planning to add some bruising and repaint the godawful base, but I thought you might appreciate the conversion. It's another example of those times when you can make something pretty decent out of the ruins of an old kit. I say this because I had three Sentinels from my old Cadian army way back when. That army was eventually repainted, but these three Sentinels had been smashed beyond any sensible repair by some really silly storage choices.

I also had a Vampire Counts Corpse Cart which had got... erm... compressed. It's always depressing when models get broken, and I decided to try to do something useful with them. That's how I came up with the idea of the Corpsewalker. This was long before the current Death Guard look, so I had some ideas which probably don't entirely fit in terms of general shape. But nonetheless, I had the idea of a ghoulish, slinking walker which patrols the battlefield after the Death Guard have secured victory, picking up the corpses of the fallen to be taken away for whatever horrible experiments the Plague Marines have in mind. This was years before Lord Eiterfex had taken up residence in the rotten corner of my hobby devoted to Nurgle, but I now imagine that the Corpsewalker is something which the master of the Synod of Suffering commissioned Belisarius Cawl to build.

One of the Sentinels wasn't smashed beyond salvation, but the cockpit was jelly. So I took it off and added a spare torso from the Maggoth kit, then filled around it to give the idea of a boiling, seething mass of flesh possessed by a daemon. I had some spare whips from the Witch Elves kit, and I added these as metallic feelers on the front. Now, I wanted to create a kind of flatbed to link it to a second pair of Sentinel legs. So, I got two of my Leman Russ sprues and used parts from the ozer blade component to create hefty metal rails. On top of this went the Corpse Cart.

The back was made from another Sentinel where the body had been shattered. So I attached the leg-chassis and legs to the back of the flatbed. It looked a bit odd at this point, and I remember deciding it needed something on the back.

Remember earlier on I said that my Cadians got repainted? Well, I reworked them as Traitor Guard, which involved head swaps. That left me with a load of Cadian heads. So I filled a spare cage from the Giant sprue with heads. To the bottom of this I attached an inverted set of exhausts from the smashed Sentinel cockpit, to serve as both a base and some sort of nasty dispenser for blood and disease.

An there we have it! Not my best conversion, certainly not my best paintjob, but a good example of how models broken in transit or storage can be put to good use!

Karl Franz Holswig-Schliestein

Warhammer Fantasy is what got me into this hobby, and ultimately remains my first love to this day. This strange, vibrant, deep, murky world of dark pine forests and soaring mountains, of great palaces and candlelit taverns. My friends and I do not recognise Age of Sigmar as canonical, preferring our alternate universe continuity where the world survived. Nothing against AoS fans, it just wasn't a setting I could enjoy. A world where instead of needing overblown super warriors, the world survived Archaon because of the ingenuity and bravery of mankind. Our version of the Warhammer World survived for many reasons. But the man who brought it all together, who fought and killed Archaon, was the great hero at the centre of the Old World: the Emperor Karl Franz.

Karl Franz is a paragon hero, there's no about it: a great warrior, a master tactician, a man of the arts and sciences, of an ancient line but understanding the common man. He is a beacon of hope, and an endorsement of what ordinary human beings can achieve when they rise to the occasion.

If I had to get rid of all my models except one, Karl Franz riding Deathclaw is the one I would keep, because he's a character with such emotional connection. The best of us, but still one of us: not a God-king or a lightning-forged hero, but a man of flesh and blood. The model captures that. But it also captures the magical side of the Warhammer World, with Ghal Maraz and Deathclaw. The striking, recognisable look of the Empire is captured in Deathclaw's armour and the Emperor's plumed helm and armour. To me, at its core, Karl Franz is Warhammer. If I could only keep one model, it would be this one because it symbolises the hobby I love.

It was years ago that I painted this model, but I still remember how much I enjoyed it. There could be no shortcuts: Karl Franz has a colour scheme and look established for decades. Deathclaw has always had aspects of a tiger and a bald eagle, so I had to d things I wouldn't usually. Painting Deathclaw was a particular joy: his fur isn't orange, it's brown with an orange wash. His stripes are Rhinox Hide rather than black, because black looked too stark.

I also wanted to create a version of Karl Franz on foot. This wasn't really a gaming thing - I've only used Karl Franz a couple of times, in massive games. It was just because I... wanted to have one!

It was quite easy tom do: the legs are from an Empire General. The body, head and Ghal Maraz were all spare from a second griffon kit. His left arm and cloak came from the Empire Captain model.

So there we have it. The man, the legend. Karl Franz, the hero we needed, not the one we deserved. And as long as I'm around, he'll still be the one, true, undisputed Emperor. 

More depraved denizens of the plague worlds

I like the morbid body horror of the Plague Planet and other Nurgle daemon worlds. There are some nice pieces about them in the Fantasy Flight Tome of Decay. Add to this the fact that I find Poxwalkers almost unfathomably difficult (I really don't know why) an I decided it was time for some more morbid plague world gribblers. I've made two new Pestigor, and two tribesmen. 

The Pestigor

There were really easy, especially as my love of Beastmen has led me to have - no joke - hundreds of spare Gors. With these two, I started using basic Gors. I switched a couple of the weapons out for Nurgle plague weapons, both to make them look more 40k-ish and more Nurgloid. 

Now, Gors have a somewhat Brau Strowman-esque musculature, which is fine, but I wanted to have more diseased look. I added some tumours/giant boils with green stuff. I created the various open wounds by drilling down a little and then expanding the hole with a craft knife held at a shallow angle.

Still, it was missing... something. After a while, I decided that I wanted them to have weird plates covering their eyes. This was a tad awkward - I had to carefully remove the eye-grill shapes from spare Marauder Horsemen horse heads. After a good bit of trimming, they fitted on relatively well. The one above worked better than the one below: the leader's horse head is far better.

The Tribesmen

As I've said before, I like the idea of plague tribesmen as Hollywood inbreds from the backwoods. I sawed two Empire Flagellant bodies in half, and mounted the bodies of a poxwalker and a Vampire Counts Crypt Ghoul respectively. 

I used arms from the Crypt Ghouls. On one of them, I chopped off the hand and replaced it with a cleaver hand from a Skaven Clanrat. 

The heads are faceplates from Putrid Blightkings. I imagine that they rarely remove them.

Not that difficult! Bt I do need to convert... quite a few more!

Let's forge a narrative part 2

Part 1 of my story was well received, so here's part 2. Will Belisarius Cawl and Master Pustolion be able to carry their diabolical plan, or will Inquisitor Horn be able to foil them?