5k views... and the Death Lord has come to thank you

I've just hit 5,000 views on this blog, which I'm really happy about! I've been working digital advertising for years, so I know that this number of views in six months isn't, in a general sense, that impressive. But I'm happy because it's the first time I've managed to maintain my own interest in a blog for most than a few posts. And I'm really happy that some people have taken some inspiration or ideas from what I've done. Thanks everyone!

Lord Eiterfex stood on the Calcifon Bridge, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. His ancient Cataphractii plate coughed as he moved, and the bridge's components moaned and sobbed in pain. Eiterfex didn't pay any attention to that. The Calcifon Bridge drooled stale blood and pus constantly into the black abyss below, but he didn't fear for his footing. He would fall only if he fell to the belief that he would. The Calciphon Bridge existed between the here and the there. The rules were different.

He was alone, of course. He had dismissed Thrombax, Maladax, even Doomhark. Even his palanquin bearers. No Plague Lord would offer the insult of walking the Calcifon Bridge with retainers. 

The muffled sound of screams billowing through the dark rose in pitch and volume. He looked up and saw the Gate of Faces ripping open, strings of matter hemorrhaging away, great rusted gears lubricated by the living tears of the gate's components. 

Two Deathshroud terminators stamped through the Gate of Faces in lockstep. They came to a halt amid the bloody loam before the Gate. They did not step onto the bridge. Instead, both slammed their Manreapers into the oozing ground seven times in ritual warning. 

Eiterfex sank to one knee in a scream of unwilling, corroded mechanisms. It was not easy or pleasant. It wasn't supposed to be. Eiterfex bowed his head. 

Then He came.

It was always more subtle than Eiterfex remembered. The footfalls of a spider. No... the trickle of sweat in a fever dream. The Death Lord did not come stamping with pomp and pageantry, like a king or general. He slipped in unnoted, until suddenly he was there, inevitable and unavoidable. Yet when he had come, that coming seemed unavoidable, the alternative unthinkable. The Death Lord was a fact, an immovable truth of creation. 

"Rise, my son," he said softly. The words did not come from a voice box. They whispered in the sound of moans, the buzz of insect wings. Eiterfex lumbered to his feet immediately.  

There was a shadow, a deeper patch of blackness in that abyss. Eiterfex inclined his head towards it, but did not look directly at it. 

"You have done well, my son," the Death Lord's voice buzzed and clicked, "I have been impressed."

The deeper patch of darkness wafted, shifted. For a moment, it seemed like a vast cloud of rotting locusts filled the world around Eiterfex. He felt unclean things crawling over and into him. He endured it. And then the cloud was gone. 

"And yet," the Death Lord went on, "I find myself unnerved by you. I find myself wondering about your ambition."

Eiterfex finally looked up. 

"You fear me a traitor, father?"

The Death Lord's laughter came, a sickly coughing susurrus. The darkness shifted again and Eiterfex felt billowing, cloying clouds swirl around him. The hopelessness of painful lives lived in stale, recycled air, yearning for blue skies that would never come. 

"We are all traitors, my son. I betrayed my father, who gave me life. Would it be strange if I feared my own sons would do the same?"

Eiterfex chuckled.

"I suppose not."

The darkness oozed around, somewhere behind him, and for a moment he thought he could hear uneven, gasping breaths pulled through a corroded rebreather. Affectation, of course: the Death Lord had not answered the quailing demands of biology for millennia. 

"But I do not fear your betrayal, Eiterfex. I fear your ambition. I fear that your brilliance will outpace our great design. And there are new players in this game."

Eiterfex remained still.

"You have seen it as well, father?"

There was a swishing, the sound of slime dribbling from a plague corpse. Something vast rustled and fluttered all around.

"I have seen. There is no counterfeit. It is him. I do not yet know how. But it is him. I sense my father's invisible hand at work."

Eiterfex released a bubbling expression of dark mirth.

"Nathaniel Garro," he said, shaking his head, "he never did know when to give up."

There was a strange sense of increasing tension, of the stomach pain that warns of the rising gorge. And the Death Lord became manifest before him. What hovered in the air above the Calcifon Bridge was a giant, monstrous caricature of the primarch who had once led the Death Guard to battle. The terrifying figure stayed aloft on soaring, dust-coloured moth wings, and every movement he made forced protesting screams and gouts of mouldering plague-spore from his pockmarked armour.

But the face...

The face was almost identical to what it had once been, the saturnine features and the pupilless white eyes, the expression ever-cryptic behind the ancient rebreather mask.

"My lord," Eiterfex said, bowing his head, "we know how dangerous he could be. He could destroy us."

Mortarion chuckled in wet, hellish glee.

"Which is why, my son, we will destroy him first." 

Typhus, the Herald of Nurgle

I'm in the camp who looks at the current Typhus model a bit askance. A nice piece of sculpting with a rather bewildering pose. What on earth is his free hand even doing? Anyway, I decided to follow the now traditional conversion path, with a few tweaks.

First I did the normal business of swapping the manreaper to the other hand. I admit I didn't sculpt a new thumb but rather snipped, repositioned and filled the existing one. There are plenty of tutorials better than mine who can show you an in-depth look at this.

Now, the traditional route is to have him throttling a Fire Warrior, but I decided I'd rather have a Guardsman in the rather unfortunate situation. Now, the body and legs were easy enough: the running Cadian would do the job. I reposed the bottom of his right foot so that it wasn't oddly flat.

I thought he should be grabbing wildly at Typhus. The straight arm is a pointing Cadian arm with a zombie's hand. The bent arm is the Cadian officer with the swagger stick removed. The hand was replaced with a hand from an Ungor skirmisher.

Now, I liked this idea that everything Typhus touches gets hit with some sort of mega-virus which literally rots everything. So instead of a head, I mounted a skull on his neck and then built some green stuff up to represent flesh sloughing off. This is also why you can see black tendrils slithering around the unlucky Guardsman - the touch of Typhus is all-corrosive!

Enforcer Tyllman

Enforcer Erlin Tyllman had a feeling that it was going to be a long day.
In Tyllman's experience, most days in service to the ordos tended to be long and were upsetting more often than he'd like. That in itself had never been much of a surprise: he hadn't been under the impression that working for the Inquisition would be like looking after baby struthids.
That was a career he could get behind.
But of course, life hadn't turn out that way. Ten years in the Guard, then mustered out at 27 on some forgettable backwater. Two years of obscura, drinking away his pension and untreated PTSD later, he'd somehow ended up standing over a dead Ecclesiarch. Not long after that, he'd found himself sitting opposite a scary man named Erasmus Horn who had informed him that he had just killed an arch-heretic. He was given a choice: serve or die. It wasn't a particularly difficult choice.

Now, however many years later, crouched in a vegetable patch in the middle of a city overrun by plague zombies, Tyllman was beginning to question that choice. Death would have been a lot less effort. 
He looked around slowly, careful not to disturb the rotten fronds of root vegetables around him. The stealth-drone hovering silently at his shoulder projected a perception-distortion field which rendered him basically invisible as long as he remained still, but there was no sense in taking chances. 

Inquisitor Horn had sent him to Rhynstead City to scope the enemy out. Reports coming from the southern continents were sketchy, and the Guard were busy fighting a improbable number of heretics in the northern cities. But Horn had suspicions and had sent Tyllman to have a nosey. Of course, turning up to find that the enemy had already overrun the city was a bit of an issue.

He'd been aiming for the house, a small but solid hab with a second storey which might give a vantage point. Then three or four of the filthy buggers had stumbled into the alley behind him, forcing him to shelter in the nearer vegetable patch. He could see them milling about twenty yards away, near the open gate.

Not Poxwalkers: these creatures were less mutated, and they seemed to have a degree of remaining sentience. He could hear their lunatic babbling. He didn't think too hard about what they were saying The micro pict-stealer in his rebreather was recording. He hoped that Clademann could make some use of the footage.

Tyllman breathed out slowly as, without warning, the creatures jerked around and began to shuffle away. Cautiously, Tyllman crept across the garden. He looked around the edge of the fence, down the alleyway, towards the public square beyond. The creatures were clustering there, gathering around a towering figure in filth-encrusted armour. Tyllman sighed softly.

Plague Marine. 

It was going to be a very long day.

Making Tyllman was surprisingly easy: I sawed a cultist in half and then added an Imperial Guard officer's torso. This made it clear that he was Imperial. Both arms are spares from Empire Pistoliers. Hia augmetic claw is from Sicarian Ruststalkers (the gore is Uhu) and the autopistol is from a cultist. The head is from an entirely separate cultist, and he was completed with a random servo skull. Easy!

Aegyptor Astagath, Chapter Champion

I am the blade.

The purpose of the blade is to cut. The purpose of the cut is to destroy the enemy. I exist to destroy the Imperium's enemies. 
I have met the champions of other Chapters. Foolish, pampered creatures, fetishising concepts of honour and fairness in combat. What madness, to believe that a blade should possess arbitrary qualities and assigned virtues. These concepts are for mortal men, who are not designed but grow according to genetic whim. A mortal man may be anything, and so he must regulate himself with abstract concepts. 
Not so I.
Not so a Space Marine. 
I am the result of the Emperor's genetic genius. I am carved, sculpted, designed. I exist to destroy the Imperium's enemies. I will do so by any means necessary.
I am the blade. 

I'm struggling to remember, but I think that the trunk of this guy is actually a Chaos Marine with all the iconography filed off. The torso is from a Sternguard, the relic blade from a Vanguard and the shield from... an old school assault squad, I think.The Maximus helm is from Betrayal at Calth. I hung trophy skulls taken from random sprues on his belt, connecting them with jeweller's chain.

Not a very sophisticated conversion, but it works!

Guards or spies?

"How is my father?" Lord Eiterfex asked conversationally, as if there were no tension in the air. The distant wails of the populace floated to them, but close at hand all was silent except for the muttering crunch of gravel under the boots of three cataphractii suits. For a moment, it seemed like none of the three Deathshroud would answer., but eventually one of them spoke. None of the onlookers were sure which.
"He worries, Lord Eiterfex."
"He's a sensitive soul is the Death Lord," said another, though again it was difficult to tell which.
"Too many betrayals," said a third... or possibly the first... "his father, his brothers... some of his sons. Makes him melancholic."
Eiterfex didn't rise to the bait.
"I understand," he said, his voice dangerously jovial, "I've had my disappointments too. I grow distrusting of strangers."
All three of them caught the barb, and all three of them pretended not to.

"Alas," said one of the Deathshroud, "we've all seen too many woes. Lord Mortarion worries about his loyal sons. You're one of his most loyal sons, aren't you, Lord Eiterfex?"
Eiterfex shifted slightly on his throne and looked down at one of the Deathshroud. He didn't bother to attempt distinguishing between them.
"Careful now," he hissed, "I grow tired of our little word game."
The Deathshroud in front of him bowed his head before moving on. The three of them continued to circle the Lord of Suffering. They were surrounded: Eiterfex's own Blightlords, Helbrutes and a hellish arachnid daemon engine were all close at hand. But protocol demanded that the Deathshroud could go where they pleased, and none of the three seemed intimidated.

"We apologise," said one of the Deathshroud, "but these are fraught times. Factions move. Powers decay. Things change. The failure of the last Black Crusade has led to shifts. We must keep out loyal friends close. The Death Lord sends us to protect you and make ready."

"Make ready for what?" Eiterfex asked. 
"For his coming," replied one of the Deathshroud, "he is pleased with all you have done in taking this world. The Death Lord is coming to fight at your side."

"Mortarion is coming here."

Airborne pestilence

The airborne shock troops of Hytothrax the Younger are among the more horrific of the forces fielded by the Synod of Suffering. Attacking with a swiftness at odds with Death Guard battle doctrine, great swarms of Bloat Drones and their monstrous Harvester cousins thunder down on enemy emplacements, drowning the astonished foe in a tide of hacking blades and putrefaction.

The leader of this benighted company is Hytothrax the Younger, and even by the standards of the Death Guard he is far gone to insanity. Hytothrax the Younger never knew a normal human life: he was born in the hellscape of the Plague Planet amid the lunatic tribes of that nightmare domain. Even from that early age, the boy enjoyed the inexplicable favour of Hytothrax the Elder. This is not to imply that the daemon prince’s patronage gave the youth an easier life. Indeed, the Elder seemed to enjoy inflicting all manner of appalling trials of the body and mind. By the time he was raised to the ranks of the Death Guard, the Younger was barely recognisable as a human being. Proud of his progeny, Hytothrax the Elder conferred his name upon the newly raised monster.

Hytothrax the Younger is everything which the Synod of Suffering aspires to. And yet, his rise has not been smooth. Lord Eiterfex seems barely able to tolerate his presence. Whilst he has granted the Younger plaudits and command befitting his abilities, the Synod’s dread lord is at best frostily civil. On the rare occasions when any dare to press him, Eiterfex answers that he finds the Younger reckless and ill-disciplined. None are entirely convinced. Even Kallador Doomhark does not know the truth of this.

Yet Eiterfex allows the Younger to rise and gain acclaim within the legion for his daring, bloody raids. Some wonder whether Eiterfex’s dislike may stem from a fear that he may one day be supplanted…

There’s isn’t too much conversion here, at least not that much which had been discussed. The Harvester has been discussed elsewhere. It is worth noting that the three Bloat Drones were a lot cheaper than could have been the case. I was given the multipart one for my birthday by a friend, and the other two are Dark Imperium Drones. The one with a Blight Launcher uses spares from the multipart kit. Now, you can find Ebay sellers doing DI Bloat Drones for about £12 and you can get the multipart one for £22.50 from Darksphere or a similar retailer. That’s around £46.50 for the three – much better than the comedic £90 GW asks. 

Barring the Harvester, the biggest conversion here is Hytothrax the Younger, and if I’m perfectly honest he’s not really that clever a conversion. Other have done the conversion first, so I can hardly claim to be an innovator. The majority of the model is simply a Pusgoyle Blightking kit. But instead of using the torso and weapons supplied, I sawed a Plague Marine in half and used his torso, backpack, head, shoulder pads and great plague cleaver. Worth noting is that I took the now redundant body of the Blightking and mounted it on the spare legs, creating the Taskmaster. Somewhat ironically, I finished painting him months before I finished the conversion that I actually wanted to do!

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!