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).