Brother Agueon, the invasive toxin

In another life, Brother Agueon functioned as an advance vanguard agent, spying out the land for Mortarion's advancing legion. After the Horus Heresy, Agueon's penchant for roaming ahead and making observations has remained. Oftentimes, Lord Eiterfex sends Agueon ahead to land on a world unobserved before the Synod of Suffering arrives. The clouds of unnatural flies which surround him function as unnoticed eyes and ears for Agueon, flying behind enemy lines and observing field dispositions. And thus when Eiterfex arrives, the enemy find themselves inexplicably outmanoeuvred, their weakness and strongpoints unaccountably compromised. In these desperate moments, the defenders rarely notice the strange, buzzing laughter drifting on the wind... 

Ah, it's good to be back on the Nurgle! I took some time to do other things of late, but I felt the need for the gribblers again! And on Thursday evening this idea came to me whilst I rummaged through my bitz box. It's a really simple conversion but I think it works.

The body is simply a plague Marine from the Plague Marines box set - specifically the one who carries the flail. I cut down the flail end and replaced it with the axehead from the WB plaguelord, whose body I used for the Banegor. This made a nice plague cleaver. 

Now, I'd managed to either mislay or use the backpack elsewhere, so I co-opted an old Dark Vengeance backpack. Still, I wanted to Nurgle-ise it, which is where I got the idea for the flies. I thiiiiink that these flies were from Typhus before they got into my bitz box. I pinned them into place with the end emerging from the backpack's vent. 

Finally, it was time was the head. I took the snarling head from a Dark Imperium Plague Marine, which I feel is one of the nicer components, very aggressive and Nurgle-oid. 

And there we have it! A nice, ten minute conversion to add a bit of spice to the force!

Get carting

One of the things which I love about Warhammer Fantasy is the sense of it being a believable world - the Empire's resemblance to an early modern Europe gives it a nice point of reference. Right from my first encounter with the hobby in the mid-90s, I loved how immersive things were, both in terms of the background and the sculpted landscapes. 

A while back, I had this idea about making carts full of wares. No particular reason for this, I just liked the idea. And it was actually very easy.

The cart itself is just lolly sticks cut to size and glued together. For axles, I used matchsticks cut to a uniform length so that they were just a bit wider than the body of the cart. To these I fitted spare wheels from old cannon/chariot kits. The cart felt like it needed something to make it explicitly 'Empire', so I added a shield from the Empire State Troops kit to function as a kind of livery. 

The horse is a spare pistolier horse. I chose this model because all the bridle etc meant that he was easy enough to pass off as being in harness I cut down the front and back of the saddle to make it look more like a blanket draped across his back.The traces were added at this point, made from matchsticks. 

The sturdy looking merchant is a Free Company fighter with a repositioned hand and a Greatsword's head.

The last thing to add was the merchant's wares. I used a few barrels from various kits for this, and added in a crossbow - in case the merchant has to see off highwaymen!

It's a simple piece, but I think it's a nice addition to the world building aspect of Warhammer Fantasy.

Matt is the liberal under the bed

Hey there! Matt here. Matt the copywriter and photographer from Berkshire, England. Not Matt in hobby mode.

I don't want to bring politics into this blog. I've had lovely hobby chats with people totally on the opposite side of the political spectrum to me. We can disagree on things, people. That's absolutely fine. But let's get something clear.

I'm a moderate left-leaning liberal. I believe in a civil society. I oppose misogyny, racism, homophobia, nationalism, all of that. I'm also bisexual, as if I wasn't already scary enough.

These things don't matter to this blog or to our hobby. But I've seen some wildly unaware comments on my work today, and received a message from a guy congratulating me on 'sticking it to the libtards'.

Politics is unimportant to this blog, as I mentioned. My hobby is largely just artistic, with the odd game thrown in.  I absolutely will not stand for any suggestion that my hobby is being used to convey some kind of regressive message. This is not my intent, nor should it ever be taken as such.

Update: I've left the Facebook group where these comments appeared. Eventually, an admin stepped in and removed my original post. Given the shocking reactions, I support this. However, this triggered some extremely odd reactions from some quarters. Ultimately, I decided that I didn't want to be even peripherally associated with some of the very nasty behaviour I was seeing. My hobby is done for me, not for random Facebook groups.

The Slaver (caution advised for sensitive readers)

Despite being fairly easy to make, this was one of the toughest conversions I've done.

The problem was not the technical abilities required, it was the fact of what I was seeking to portray.

Slaanesh. The most vile of the Chaos Gods. Now, let me explain this perspective. Let's start with the obvious but sadly necessary to explain point: Slaanesh is not a sex god. Sex is nothing bad or to be afraid of,  but Slaanesh most certainly is. The source material is fairly clear about this, although sadly perhaps not as much as it once was. The reason why Slaanesh seems to manifest through sexualised creatures is that sexuality is an area of our lives which is most conditional on trust and obedience of societal rules and the area where we tend to be least rational. Simply put, a violation of boundaries in this area makes us extremely uncomfortable. And that's what Slaanesh is. Slaanesh was devised, I think, as the Chaos God of going too far. Excess. That excess could as easily take the form of gluttony, vainglory... potentially even puritanism when it goads the puritan into sadistic excesses of judgemental behaviour. Slaanesh is selfishness, nihilism, cruelty and sadism. It is to put yourself before others at all times, and to place your own sensation above any sense of a greater purpose or responsibility. And the ever more extremes of Slaaneshi behaviour mean that you really don't want to meet them.

I'll admit that in making this model, I immediately committed another stupid hobby-ism: you'll far more often find conversions of female models into Slaanesh than other chaos forces. This is an absurdity: there's absolutely no in-universe or real world evidence to suggest that women would be more likely to fall to Slaanesh than men. So I apologise for that. I like to believe that I am above this obnoxious pigeon-holing of women. I felt much more comfortable about sharing the more empowering images of the female Commissar and the Norse Queen. But in an area where misogyny seems resurgent and the industrial scale of sexual misconduct against women has become clearer, this monster is perhaps fitting. 

The recipe is quite easy. The steed of Slaanesh is from the Hellstriders kit. The Slaver herself is an Vampire Counts Coven Throne Vampire. Her head is from a chariot daemonette and her whip arm is from a Hellstrider too. The weeping slave is from Brother Vinni and the gagged slave is from Kingom Death. The rather suggestive mushroom is from one of the GW basing kits from a few years back, as are the ice crystals (painted with Blood for the Blood God to make them look like blood-stalagmites). The chains are cheap jeweller's chain. 

I'd like to talk briefly about paint. You'll notice that the slavers have a fairly healthy flesh tone, whereas the Slaver is chalky pallid with burning eyes. My idea with this is that she has become so obsessed with her own beauty that she's undertaken grotesque surgeries and treatments until she's become a caricature of herself - apparently unaware that her slaves look more like real people than she does. She has become a nightmarish figure of cosmetic exactness. There's nothing beautiful left in her. 

EDIT: Right. I've seen some troubling comments about this. This piece is in no way an endorsement of any kind of sexual abuse. It is not some sort of attempt to stick it to 'PC'. I do not and will not accept misogyny in my life. I will not have my hobby used as a way to promote bigotry of ANY kind. And since human trafficking and slavery are very current issues, any person who is made uncomfortable by this piece has EVERY RIGHT TO BE. It is not meant as a comfortable piece. 

One last thing. I you don't like my saying this last part, take a good hard look at yourself and ask your who is really the easy offended little flower. 

Crystalline deeps

And now for something completely different.

A Skaven looting party scurries nervously through the sombre halls of the Undgrin.

I had a random moment of inspiration recently. I was looking at some amethysts and my mind drifted to an old idea I had about making terrain for underground caverns. Regular readers may have observed that I have always been and remain an ardent fan of Warhammer Fantasy. An important part of that world is deep, dreaming caverns and monumental underways. I've always had this vision of vast underground vistas, where soaring crystal formations stand at the edge of subterranean oceans, lit only by the strange luminescence of curious fungi which have never seen the outer world.  This is the kind of landscape which the Dwarfs of old would have looked upon when cutting through the depths to build their holds. My inspirations included Holst's 'Neptune the Mystic' and the beautiful if primitive visual effects of the 1959 epic Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

And a couple of weeks ago, I decided that it was time to have a crack at it. Now, I thought about using clay to make the crystals but decided against it. I wanted to do a few test pieces first. So I purchased some cheap pre-made crystals from an Ebay Seller named Sixtownscenery. They arrived almost frighteningly fast and I set to work.

I made the bases out of 2mm MDF, cutting rough shapes out of a sheet. These were between 3" and 6" long. Now, all GW models have beveled bases and terrain looks a bit funny if the bases aren't beveled the same way. It's easy to do: using a craft knife or boxcutter, you can push through the edge of the base at a roughly 45-degree angle without much effort. New hobbyists - please watch yourself. The MDF doesn't give at an equal rate, and sometimes that blade will move fast.

Next up, I glued my crystals down with PVA and covered the majority of the base with sand, leaving some spaces for mysterious pools.

Now, paintjobs are each to their own, but I'll take a moment to explain the ground effect (the crystals were the normal layer/wash/drybrush combo). I wanted the ground to look a bit darker and a bit colder than if it was just stone. Indeed, I wanted to conjure a certain eldritch mystery. So I went all over with a coat of Eshin Grey. After that, I gave it a wash of Drakenhof Nightshade. Finally, a drybrush of Ulthuan Grey gave it just the right ethereal feeling.

The Ophelian 1034th advances through the eerie wonderland of an Eldar Maiden World.

I finished the pieces with some vivid green static grass. You can get this for a couple of quid from War World Scenics or Serious Play. The idea here was to have startlingly luminous fungus growing on the cavern floor. I think it works quite well.

And there we have it. Dwarf caverns, Night Goblin boltholes, Skaven warrens... or the weird landscape of a distant alien world. All in a couple of hours!