Refitting Beastmen Part 1: the Beastlord

Beastmen have always been my favourite flavour of Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy: there's something very evocative about herds of giant evil murder-goats loitering in the forests, an odd fusion of Visigoth and faerie tale monster. They're the thing that goes bump in the night. They're the monster that ate grandma.

But Games Workshop never seemed to quite get behind the idea. We're not talking about the same sort of self-inflicted problem as Chaos Dwarfs, but their efforts with Beastmen always seemed a bit half-hearted. The 2003 Beasts of Chaos release, for example, featured only one plastic kit and the importing of several 90s kits (this is in the same era as Bretonnians getting four plastic kits, Wood Elves getting three and Ogre Kingdoms getting four). One of the bigger problems for the Cloven Ones was the lack of variety in Beastlords. There was two released in 2003. Both were nice enough models, but they had problems. The great weapon wielding one was a one-piece casting in metal which made him almost conversion-proof, and the other had two separate axes but basically no way to customise him. Added to this, neither one of them was as imposing as we might like.

This was a problem which was unexpectedly solved when Games Workshop released its recent Beastgrave game. One of the factions was the muddled mess of conflicting identities and reused CAD that you'd expect from an AoS original concept, but the Beastmen were very much in the spirit of the Old World. What's more, the Bestigor was large enough to stand out as a leader in a Beastmen army. And look how freakishly well he stands on a 25mm square base!

So there it was: finally, a Beastlord worthy of the name. And that was just the start of my quest to bring the Beastmen into the modern age...