Maggoths and daemons and beasts, oh my!

Forgive me Grandfather, for I have sinned. 

lright, that's not really true, but I have been ignoring my Nurgle stuff for a long time. I've been busy on my Warhammer: Age of Rebuilding project and Dark Eldar and other stuff. But recently, I've been feeling the call of the morbid and the monstrous again. The creeping spirits of John Blanche an John Carpenter have demanded to be set free again. And frankly, I decided it was time to finish some bits that have been hanging about far too long. 

My first offering today is what I shall refer to as the Great Unclean Two. The reason being, I already painted a plastic Great Unclean One when they first came out. However, I always wanted to paint the old Forgeworld one, and the plastic one's release meant that the value of the FW model declined somewhat. I grabbed this one for less than half of the price that GW want for it. 

I love the disgusting grandeur of this twisted masterpiece. Not only do they add character, they make him remarkably easy to paint. I didn't change up my usual infected flesh method, but I did try something new with the ends of the antlers. The darkening at the points is done using these new-fangled Contrast Paints (which are suspicously like a resurrection of the old Citadel Inks). The combo was Snakebite/then Gore Grunta then Black Templar. 

It's worth noting what a heavy model this is: your arm will get tired when doing the smaller parts!

Next we have a Maggoth! I initially got this guy during the End Times for WFB, but I didn't get to him at the time. If you'e familiar with my previous work, you'll know that Age of Sigmar is something which happened to other people. This is important, because when I got back to the model, I had to make a hard choice about basing: if I wanted to use him for WFB, I'd have to square-base him. But almost all of my Nurgle stuff is 40k, so ultimately I decided to put him on an oval. 

I added a couple of Forgefiend shoulder pads to 40k-ize him. Now, originally I had the idea of changing the Chaos Lord for a Plague Marine. But ultimately, I wanted the Maggoth to be a kind of lone stalking beast, so I green-stuffed over the saddle to make it look like tattered flaps of skin. It did't work quite as well as I'd have liked, but it was good enugh.

And there we have it! A couple of long overdue models finished, and my mind is ticking over thinking about new Nurgloid abominations!

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:

The Plagryn

Enforcer Tyllman wondered if he could claim time off in lieu for this. 
He doubted it. 
Six days. Six days of sneaking about in the corpse of a city, observing, transmitting. Inquisitor Horn has better be getting something out of all this. Tyllman had rarely slept more than an hour or two - and then, only in the most secure bolt holes he could find. He was tired and twitchy. He was hungry from self-imposed rationing. And his underwear was annoyingly sweaty.

Six hours ago, Horn had sent him the signal to get clear.

He drew in a breath and peered out across the open rockcrete space. A shipping yard from the looks of it. Abandoned now. Abandoned and empty. Fifty meters straight across. Then a few outer habs, and out into the woods. Tyllman could make it. 

Except he couldn't. He saw the single, stumbling mutant wandering out into the glass-strewn wasteland just before he began to move. Irritable, he sank back into the shadows of the looming septic tank. He watched as the shambling, diseased creature wandered into the open, shouting disjointed half-sentences. 
Just wait it out, thought Tyllman, wait it out and -

He jumped at the sound of a sudden, gurgling roar coming from the left. He ducked quickly behind the septic tank's supports as he saw the nightmare crash into the open. It was a massive thing, Ogryn-tall, loose threads of flesh and organ swaying as it moved unsteadily. The monster moved deceptively fast, and within seconds, great snapping mandibles closed on the head of the plague mutant. 

Tyllman watched grimly from the shadows as the monster crouched and began to messily eat the rotting thing. He struggled to identify what it could be. It had the general shape and outline of the Plague God's lesser daemons. But it was much bigger and more aggressive...

Which was when it occurred to him. It was a Plaguebearer. A Plaguebearer which had emerged from the mortal ruins of an infected Ogryn. Silently, Tyllman activated his body-mounted pict-stealer and made his way back, further into cover.

He wasn't going to get to leave yet. 

Spoilpox Scrivener - a glorious satire

I think that the Spoilpox Scrivener may be one of the most thematically brilliant models that Games Workshop has done in years. I don't know how much of it was intended and how much of it was the sculptor going into business for themselves, but there's some ruthless satire going on here. To understand this, we have to look at the lore for this unpleasant fellow. Codex: Chaos Daemons paints a picture of a humourless, self-important busybody bullying those around him with embarrassing zealotry. Remind you of anything? Because it sounds an awful lot like a corporate lower or middle manager to me.

The model is full of visual cues to support this. The most obvious is the massive, screaming mouth. Just looking at that bellowing maw evokes a sense of the corporate: a broadcasting, noisy mouth, seemingly neither listening to nor seeing what they're screaming about. But there's a secondary visual joke here. Look at the way that the trunk wraps around him before rising up over his shoulder. At a glance, it looks rather strongly like he's talking out of his arse. 

Like a corporate apologist, the Scrivener is obsessed with numbers and targets regardless of overall quality, productivity, sustainability or morale. The codex pointedly tells us that the Scrivener relentlessly browbeats the Plaguebearers, apparently unaware that his efforts are as likely to distract them as to have any positive effect. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment has encountered this sort of obnoxious martinet, militantly obsessed with enforcing their limited authority without any real understanding, wrapped up in their own perceived importance. This is also reflected in the way that the Scrivener is brandishing his scroll, like a spreadsheet of numbers. In his mind, it's the most important thing in the world. But ultimately, nobody else views it as that important. The Nurgling devouring the end of the scroll is a nice nod to the futility and waste of corporate process.

Whilst his third eye is open, his regular eyes are either closed or very narrowed - blind or blinkered, just as a corporate manager.

If you're wondering, I've worked or several corporations, some charities and in Higher Education. The difference in charity and HE are startling. You will occasionally find a decent lower or middle manager in the corporate world, who is invariably frustrated by the demands from above. But these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

In any case, a great model with some scorching satirical aspects!

The Harvester

The Eldar spat on the ground and glared up defiantly. The show of bravery vaguely amused Lord Eiterfex. Defiance was generally what happened when the enemy ran out of actual achievements to be proud of. 
"You think you have won, lackey of the Promordial Annihilator?" the xenos raged, struggling against the grip of the Plague Marine who held him more to show his unbrokenness than in an attempt at actual escape. 
"Well, my men are still standing and most of yours are dead," said Eiterfex cordially, "so I'm going with a yes on this one."
The Eldar didn't see the funny side and spat again. 
"Your vile feet may yet defile Eth-Athon, but with every drop of your blood we come closer to avenging Kurnous and wiping you from the universe!"
Eiterfex leaned over in his throne to Kallador Doomhark. 
"Which one's Kurnous?" he stage whispered. 
"Hunter god," growled Doomhark, glaring at the xenos, "this one's an Exodite."
Eiterfex grunted, and waved a hand to Brother Maladax. 
"Send in the Harvesters, Mal."
He stared steadily as the Eldar's face turned from hateful defiance to horrified astonishment as the awful, sawing buzz filled the air. dark, lumbering shapes passed overhead, and within moments the sound of shrieks came from behind. The Eldar struggled to see what was going on. 
"You're right, of course," Eiterfex said conversationally, "resources are the biggest problem we face. It's difficult to create a new son of Mortarion. That's why we need lots of spare bits and pieces."
The Eldar barely had time for the horror to sink in before a monstrous sting stabbed into his back, delivering him into a new world of horrors...

This was significantly easier to design than to execute, largely because of those wretched rotors! The starting point was a Dark Imperium Bloat Drone. Initially, I had the image of this being a vast, bloated monster, but on reflection I decided that a nasty, hooked wasp-like form would be better. So, I sawed off the back of the Bloat Drone, just behind the round metal bit, and then pinned the body of a Rot Fly onto the back. It looked rubbish! But that's usually the case at this point in the build. I used poly cement, waited until it ws firmly set and then went on.

Next up was the sting. This bit was easy. The sting itself is a spare Maggoth horn. I imply trimmed down the bottom of the Rot Fly's abdomen until the sting could fit smoothly then used poly cement to anchor it in place. I stopped at this point to do a bit of gap filling, and then moved on to the damn rotors.

I had the idea that there should be four rotors, principally because I hd four lying around but also because I wanted it t look bulkier than a regular Bloat Drone. There was no easy way to do this: the carapace of both the Bloat Drone and the Rot Fly are hatefully curved, which basically meant that it was a case of pinning the four rotors in place, drenching them in poly cement and then leaning the model at such an angle that on each side the rotors would more or less line up with each other. When this was finally one, I filled in the gaps.

Now, for its mouth I got aspare Maggoth mouth, trimmed down the back and glue it to the Bloat Drone just beneath the probe (I had to cut off some of the cabling for this) There was a lot of gapfilling after this, but eventually looked nice.

To finish up, I added four arms from a Dark Eldar Talos. I envision the Harvester slinking around the battlefield, stinging survivors to immobilise them, and then using those long, groping tendrils to scoop the still living supine forms into its vast maw, to boil in its guts until the Synod of Suffering can make use of the flesh...

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!

The Spidefiler scuttles from the hellish factories of Belisarius Cawl...

Cawl coughed, infected mucus drooling from his faceplate. Scrapcode fevers gnawed through his innards with gleeful flushes of hot and cold. The Hellwright grinned, insomuch as he still could grin. Even now, bowing low, his life in the balance, he could not repress a feeling of pride. He could feel the masterpiece skittering about in the necrotic valley below, the gurgling wails of its victims forming a song of suffering and discord. 
"I like it," hissed Lord Eiterfex, above and nearby, "I think it will do nicely."
Cawl didn't dare rise yet. 
"I am glad it pleases, my lord."
Eiterfex chuckled, wet and rotten. 
"You've done well, Cawl, stop panicking. Grandfather will be pleased."
Cawl straightened up slowly, cautiously. He was careful not to look directly at Eiterfex. He still had waking nightmares from the last time. Instead, he looked down into the valley. The great horror of flesh and rust was weaving webs of steely thread around the yowling victims. 
"I'll start building the rest," he said eventually. 

Quick aside about the Defiler model. I love that model. Nostalgia has warped my perception, no doubt. I remember the first time I saw it. It was June 2003, a few days after the last exam of my first year at University. I was sitting on Sibly Hall's field with friends, lounging in the afternoon light. I'd purchased a White Dwarf earlier and I opened it to have a flip as we sat there. And that's when I saw the Defiler for the first time. I'd been in the hobby eight years, and I couldn't believe what I was saying. Remember, before this, a dreadnought was a massive centerpiece model for a 40k army. And here I was, faced with a massive metal spider-crab o' death. I look back on it as the beginning of the truly amazing models: the Mumak, the plastic Giant, the High Elves dragon, the Imperial Knight. Okay, they've sometimes gone too far (the clumsily overstated Archaon model springs to mind), but generally GW has wowed us with kits we always thought were impossible until we saw them. And it started with the Defiler.

So when I say I didn't want to use the model for my Death Guard, it's not because I dislike the model. It's because, as ever, I had an idea that wouldn't go away. And trust me when I say, this conversion was even more complex than the Rust Hound. So, I think I'd better break it down into different bits. If nothing else so that I can remember what I did.

Legs

I'm starting with these because they were comparatively easy. I removed the legs from a spare Adeptus Mechanicus Dunecrawler and then cut the foot off of each. I then got four of the long forelegs from the Arachnarok (I had a spare I'd picked up cheap for bits). Now, I had to cut the leg and the claw so that they roughly aligned. Then I used pins and superglue to quickly get a bond between the parts - they components really weren't designed to be together! I then used plastic glue to ensure the bond was solid and left all four legs to totally harden. Then I did some gap filling to make the join look smoother (well, in Nurgle terms).

Body and head

Urg, this was a struggle! I saw the Arachnarok's head off at the neck (and it has a bloody thick neck). Next, I assembled the body halves and face plate of a Bloat Drone. Then I sawed it in half, removing most of the tail so that the back was flattish. After a bit of lining up, I pinned and glued the head to the bod. I left it well enough alone for a while. Then I used tissue, PVA and green stuff to build up a neck so that the join didn't look comical. At the same time, I decided that it needed a mouth, so I inverted the Arachnarok's jaws and glued them onto the bottom of the drone's body, along with the two big mandibles. I had to use the above method to build some flesh up around them, but it didn't take too long. I finished the head by pinning three Maulerfiend tentacles beneath his jaws. The image I had in mind was similar to the scene in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie when Tom Cruise is trapped in the ruined house and sees the fighting machines doing some weird and gribbly thing with their long tendrils outside.

The cannon

So, this bit was actually a lot easier than I was worried about. The limb it's raised on is a Rot Fly's body from the Plague Drones kit. Attaching the cannon from the Forgefiend was easy: pins, glue, some filler. I knew that attaching it to the body would be a different matter. I cut the Rot Fly body until its curvature was about the same as that of the Arachnarok's back. Now, I knew that conventional pinning wouldn't be enough to hold the cannon in place. So, I got a much longer, thicker pen. I drilled a hole in the Arachnarok's back and a corresponding one high up on the Rot Fly body. I then put some superglue gel on both holes and fed the long pin all the way through. The superglue dried just quickly enough that I could position the 'tail'. Then I used a fairly large amount of poly cement to seal it. When that was fully hardened, I built up my PVA, tissue and green stuff method to both make the join more smooth and reinforce it a bit. Eventually, when I was certain that this was all completely solid, I clipped the pin off where it protruded from the Rot Fly. You can actually see a bit of it still, dressed up as a random spoke.

Attaching the legs

There really wasn't any easy way to do this. The end of the legs and the spider's body simply aren't meant to go together. It was a case of hack and slash: I cut the surfaces of both sides to be flat and then pinned them in place, with slatherings of poly cement. The gaps were big and ugly, so I built up flesh around them.

Webs

It's cotton glued down, coated in watered PVA and then painted. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

 Size Comparison

Think I might paint a rabbit next.