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!