The trees have an attitude problem

I haven't done anything clever with this model, I just love it!

GW have done a lot of things in the last few years which ensured that I would not do the dance of joy for three moons (AoS, holes through the galaxy, bigly marines etc). But on the other hand, they've done lots of amazing things (8th ed 40k ruleset, many lovely models, much improved engagement etc). And one of the things which I love is the initiative of putting new pieces of scenery in with releases. There are a couple of reasons why I love this. Firstly, it encourages hobbyists to think of the broader, rich context of the tabletop events. Whilst these models have rules, you can't help get the feeling that these were made for the hell of it and then had rules thrown in. Which I am more than fine with. Secondly, whilst I am a bit of a terrain maniac (look in the background of any of my model photos), not everyone is. Nor has everyone worked at GW and had to learn how to manufacture terrain. For less confident or experienced gamers, these new terrain pieces are a great way to populate a table with characterful landmarks without getting frustrated or breaking the bank. I'm a big fan of the Beastmen Herdstone and the Night Goblin shrine wossname, and the Vampire Counts gate thingie is nice too. Of course, for a square-base maniac like myself, being able to reverse engineer these pieces into WFB is nice too!

The Gnarlmaw is one of my favourites. It manages to straddle the line between absurdist humour and body horror perfectly - and makes a convincing presence out of a gurning devil-tree!

Bringers of various undesirable things

I've been tidying up some of my half-finished or incompetently finished models recently, and I found these two Heralds. The Poxbringer model was sitting there with a basecoat on looking sad. I've only included him here because I finally bothered to finish him.

The other one is a conversion I actually did in about 2012, when I first got into 40khaos. But I'd painted him in a bit of a silly way, and given him one of the godawful blueish bases I was inexplicably enamoured with once.

Anyway, even back then I leaned towards Nurgle. I had some Plague Drones because I love the Rot Flies. This being said, I've always thought they look about eight times as scary without some grinning joker sitting on the back of them, which means that I've always ended up with the riders spare. On a whim one day, I decided to create some suitably grub-tastic Herald with one of them. Originally, I had this idea of him riding a kneeling Guardsman around, inspired by that old-school story of the Bretonnian widow who prays to Nurgle to kill her husband and ends up being ridden about by a mass of worms (it's called something like 'The widow of Remy Brousse'). Anyway, that plan fell down because Guardsmen simply aren't big enough.

So instead, I decided to have two Guardsmen fused together through some hellish rot-magic, forming one miserable conjoined mount for him. It's literally just two Cadians with their heads and arms removed, joined by a fleshy cable of green stuff. On top of that is the most imposing of the Plague Drone riders, pretty much out of the box. At this point I realised he would need a 40mm base, but said base seemed a bit too big. Hence the two plague zombies in front of him. These two unlucky fellows are Guardsmen with their heads swapped for Deathsheads from the Plague Drone kits. Their hands have been replaced with outstretched hands from the Crypt Ghouls kit.

Really simply conversion, but it made me happy! The other bloke was fun to paint too:

Nurgle Rhinos: solving the box problem

Space Marine Rhinos bother me a bit. They bother me largely because I get bored painting them. It's a big box. Admittedly, it's a better big box than the original big box model, but it's still not very inspiring. I decided that I had to do something about this.

My first idea was just to madly convert the heck out of them. My first attempt involved adding a bell-ringing tentacle, a bunch of groping zombie hands, a big maw and a Rot Fly's alien-esque tail. It still felt a bit bare, so I drilled some holes in it to have unpleasant liquids oozing out of it. There are some pictures of this first attempt near the bottom (I wanted to show off my cool ones first).

Anyway, it was fine, but it felt like something was missing. I couldn't help the feeling that I wasn't covering enough of the surface to make it either interesting or Nurgly enough. 

My next step was conversion pats. Spellcrow seemed to have the best at an acceptable price, so I ordered some of them. The top and side doors you see on these are the parts in question. And truthfully, they look the part. But I still had a problem: the majority of the models were still looking a bit clear. Now, I know Chaos is all weird and stuff, but it seemed a bit strange to me that Nurgle would possess the doors and ignore the rest of the vehicle. Then I had a couple more ideas.

I added some great buboes to one of the Rhinos - these also came from a Spellcrow bitz pack. Then a once again drilled a few holes. But this time, I glued Woodlands Scenics foliage to be stealthily oozing out of them as fleshy fronds. Some may recall my Nurgle Knights having a similar effect.

Then I decided that I wanted to create an effect where parts of the tanks were beginning to become organic, calcifying and rupturing. For this, I decided on something a wee bit different. I got hold of some Martian Ironearth technical paint and slapped it wildly on the hull. This stuff has to be applied in buckets and left for a good long while, but I wasn't in a hurry. When it had set and cracked, it had very much the effect I'd hoped for: areas of the tanks looked pocked, diseased and organic. More importantly, enough of the hulls were covered to stop it all looking a bit monotonous.

So there we have it. Metal boxes... but EVIIIIIIL!

The Rot-maw

One of the biggest problems faced by Games Workshop's The Lord of the Rings Strategy Game was the peculiar refusal to properly support it. The game itself was actually really good, but GW tables were never up to the task: it was a game that required very dense terrain which the players use very intelligently. But they didn't. During the time I worked at GW (2005-06), the game was already struggling. And whilst I'm an epic Tolkien nerd, my experience of trying to promote the game left a bad taste in my mouth after I left the company. Sadly, I was never able to get back into it.

Which overlong preamble leads us to this conversion. The basis is the Cave Troll from 2005's Mines of Moria boxset. Like all staff, I was required to have the box. But sadly, all that the troll did was gather dust. He was just too different to use as a Warhammer Fantasy troll, and his true-scale features would have looked weird anyway.

Then, one night a couple of years back, I had a weird brainwave. I grabbed my bitzbox and got hacking.

The vision I had was of a hellish Nurgloid mutant who was once a Guardsman who got cut off from his column during an ill-fated attack on a plague world. Lost behind enemy lines, his wounds became infected and he became delirious. Worse, everything around was clearly unfit to eat. Sick and starving, the Guardsman was near death. And in his madness, he begged any power that was listening for salvation. Nurgle took pity on the man and gave him the ability to digest the poisonous flora of the plague world. As time passed, he mutated into a nightmarish snapping maw. Because his hunger had led him to think with his belly, his head slowly moved down into his gut and an impossibly vast mouth opened where his head should have been. And now he roams the wastes, constantly devouring, occasionally being lured onto a plagueship to visit death on his erstwhile Imperial comrades.

So, first thing was the gob itself. The Maggoth kits gives you an almost puzzling number of spare mouths, so I decided to use one of these. I took the troll's head off and cut down the back of the mouth so that they could more or less fit together, then pinned them in place. Green stuff was used to fill the obvious gaping voids.

The arms were a shade too nice looking for me. Luckily, I had some spare Crypt Horror arms lying about, so I replaced the troll's arms with these. Lastly, the Guardsman's original head was added (with a pin and loads of green stuff) to the gut. After painting him, I used some black static grass from World World Scenics to give him rough, insectile fur. Voila!

As with most of my conversions, I had no clear in-game use for him when I started out. But should he be rolled out, he will use the rules of a Nightmare Hulk as detailed in Codex: Gellerpox Infected (my gaming friends having already waived the numeric limits on models from that codex).