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).

Nasty bugs

I've mentioned before that one of the things I like most about GW's current 40k sculpts is the weird variety. I was more than pleased by thing: after the exercise in blandness that was AoS and the earlier bigly marines, I was worried about where this was going. I was pleasantly surprised that they started, in their models at least, to explore the peculiar corners of the dark millennium. This is particularly important in the case of Chaos.

The worst examples of 40k Chaos armies appeared probably around 2007-8, when a bizarrely luke-warm codex essentially made Chaos Marines into slightly spiky versions of their loyal brethren.

The best Chaos armies, by contrast, are nightmarish agglomerations of deranged and twisted creatures and madmen. Superhuman traitor Astartes marching beside Neverborn horrors and deranged maniacs. And worse things. With this attitude, you can well imagine how much I loved the Gellerpox Infected when they first arrived.

As well as the rampaging Nightmare Hulks, the small, scurrying things appeal to my Blanchian sense of the 40k universe.

Someone asked me recently why I tend to paint everything Nurgloid in human flesh tones when I can. The simplest answer is that it's more horrific: Plaguebearers look kind of ridiculous green, but they look hideous in flesh tones.

They're pretty quick to paint, too.

Zombie pirates from SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

I think I've probably said this before, but my current relationship with GW is confusing even to me. As someone who has worked in marketing since the early Eocene era, it has been nice to see their new management making some intelligent decisions. From a hobbyist perspective, though, it's all been rather odd. It feels a bit like every time they've tried to write new lore in the last four years they've managed to make pig's ears complain about the comparison (bigly marines, holes in the universe, Bjorn is a psyyyyyker, Age of Sigmar etc). And if it was purely about background, I wouldn't have much time for them these days. But conversely, they have definitely been producing some amazing models (if you exclude the pathologically bland child of focus groups that is the Stormcast Eternal range). What's perhaps more surprising is that they've really got into exploring the peculiar, gothic corners of the 40k universe which attracted a lot of us in the first place. The crusty, bling infested Rogue Traders, peculiar looking assassins and overdressed armsmen we've seen recently all come straight from the drunken Regency fever-dream that I see Imperial society as.

And these fleabitten thugs symbolise the visceral body horror of Chaos vividly well. They're ugly, insane, suffering and dirty. 

I'm really glad that GW has finally put more effort into this side of the 40k universe - the weird, knackered clapped out bits of a galaxy a bit too long in the tooth.

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!