Bigger and more skanky

It's at moments like this when I find myself very confusing by my own feelings towards Games Workshop. On the one hand, some of the lore they've been writing seems to me to be bad to the point of self-satire (bigly marines, holes through the universe, Age of Sigmar etc). On the other hand, there's no doubt that some of the models they're producing are off the chart brilliant, and certainty aren't afraid of shying away from some bold and unsettling concepts.

The Gellerpox Infected could have been designed for me. I love the horrific, body-horror side of Nurgle and the grimly industrialised, Blachnian visions of the 4ok universe. These encompass such ideas perfectly.

There are so many brilliant aspects to these models. The horrible jumbled amalgam of man and machine, the ramshacckle stitching an the implied loss of self expressed through the multiple faces are all spot-on. These models are grotesque. This is Chaos at its demented finest, horrific enough and nonsensical enough to send all right-minded onlookers running for an Aquila to hide behind. The vestiges of the original crew's clothing just adds to the jarring sense of the obscene living nightmarre of the Ruinous Powers.

For these models, I wanted to put extra emphasis on the infections, crusted blood and bruising. Nobody here is having a good time, even if they've convinced themselves that they are. The models are very helpful in this regard: they're covered in cuts, wounds and crude sutures, as well as ripped an creased fabric, which is easy to mess up with a few good paint smears.

I'm not sure what if anything I'll use them as in games. The Rogue Trader supplement they come in has the vaguely puzzling tyranny of insisting that all of the Nurgle lads from that set must be taken together. My friends are easy going though, as I imagine I could get away with deploying them as a single unit as long as everyone understood. Or I could use them as Ogryns. Either way, it's always good to see the Lost and the Damned in any form!

The Hammer twisted

This squadron of Leman Russ Battle Tanks is actually a project I did in 2012-13. At that time, after what felt like several centuries of loyalty to the Emperor, I was just beginning to get into this whole heresy business. Now, in recent times I've been hooked on the new Death Guard because... well, have you seen those models? They are the awesomeness. But in general terms, I find the concept of mortals falling to Chaos even more interesting. Astartes tend to fall because of hubris or despair or jealousy or a host of other suitably classical tragedies. But mortal men and women... they might fall for much more relatable reasons. They could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They might have seen their friends sacrificed on the altar of the Imperium's ruthless pragmatism. They might simply not know what they're getting into. This is an aspect I find very scary and compelling, because it mirrors the twists in our own lives. I'm doing reasonably well for myself these days, but I've seen the other side. I've never felt angrier than the time I was laid off by my employer of six years despite being recognised as a very effective worker, just so that my job could be reassigned to some poor guy in Scarborough who was shoved into it with too much pressure and too little prep time. I raged at the hypocrisy and injustice. In 2007, for a couple of reasons I was forced to face the sobering reality that I simply wasn't as good at some things as I thought I was. At that time, I felt a really wrenching despair. Look, these aren't special. I'm not trying to claim my life has been particularly tough, we've all experienced these things. And in those moments, when the attractive falsehoods and over-simplifications we're often asked to believe in are exposed... you can well see the appeal of the Dark Gods of Chaos, of a self-destructive middle-finger to the universe. And that the thing about Chaos: it's a predator. It's your worse angels. It's the voice which says that one drink won't hurt. Chaos is the side of us that waits for us to be in a bad place, when its whispering suddenly seems to make sense.

The idea for this Traitor Regiment is that they turned on the Imperium after some harsh treatment, buoyed by the idea of a new way of life. All the promises have worn off, they're missing regular supply lines and despair is creeping upon them. They're well on their way to embracing Nurgle - and the Leman Russes, the symbol of Imperial might, have fallen furthest, possessing by morose and snarling daemons. 

I didn't want to stick garden rails on them, and I actually wanted the conversion to be minimal: I wanted the overall appearance of the Russ to be very similar, so as to make it stand out as even more striking among a horde of degenerate traitors. The conversions I made were minimal, as you can see. 

 The main thing I wanted to do was the bloody writing on the hull. At first I had this idea that as they drift into madness, the Guardsmen smear inane graffiti on the tanks. But then I thought it would be quite nice if the writing was actually blood oozing out of the hull itself - the possessing daemon's way of  communicating with both the ground troops and the enemy. I had this vision of them lumbering across the field after a battle, snuffling up corpses with those long cannon barrels, and then using the bodies to fuel themselves - and the blood as ink for their messages.

I used Blood for the Blood God to freehand on the messages. They're universally aggressive, threatening and foul mouthed - the daemon is not a pleasant conversationalist.

Now, this was during the sixth edition, when a flipped wreck was still a possibility. This gave me the idea that each of the tanks would have a final, venomous message streaked across the bottom - a threat or insult or promise from the departing daemon. It was pretty funny watching people jump in surprise when one of the tanks was wrecked!