The Coven of Verminlord Skrax - WIP Talos (Taloi?)

The Talos are to be the main brunt of this army. These are the Sigcourax' greatest creations. I plan on running 2 formations with them: the Corpsthief Claw (5 talos all in one squad, with scout and the ability to generate VP when they kill things in combat - essentially a Dark Eldar deathstar) and the Dark Artisan (a talos, cronos, and haemonculus in one squad, granting all sorts of benefits - amazing protection for a haemonculus warlord).

First up are the 5 talos making the Corpsthief Claw formation. A lot of conversions went into these. Their base is the Skaven Stormfiends kit. The stormfiends are about the right size as a Talos on floating base from my research, so this should work out. What's better is the stormfiend box comes with 3. So you take that and a bunch of Dark Eldar bits (like the twin-linked Haywire Basters jutting from their backs) and some creative greenstuffing to finish belts, straps, and cover blank areas. The large cables I am proud of. I took data cable twisted wire, and cut up plasticard tubes into several tiny little sections, and glued them spaced out on the wire. This type of conversion, making talos from stormfiends, isn't new. But generally people replace the rat heads with Talos heads. I am glad I get to keep the rat heads on these kits, because they are beautiful.

Then the talos that will be going with the Dark Artisan formation. This is to be Sigcourax' proudest achievment, a hybrid with Tyranid strains, having found the way to keep it stable and controllable. I wanted to go for minimal technology and get the mostly muscly and protruding bone look of the tyranid. This picture I am still working on the greenstuff, but this project reminded me a lot of doing the Extreme Carnivean project. Some subtle conversions I like is repositioning the jaw so the mouth opens a little wider, create a leaping pose, larger raptor-like talons on the feet, and the not-so-subtle greenstuffing on the back to create the enhanced spine. I really had to channel my inner H.R. Giger when sculpting that, and I'm so excited to get it painted.

The Coven of Verminlord Skrax - WIP Grotesques

The grotesques are made from various Rat Ogre parts. Including 2 from the Island of Blood box set, and the one from the Screaming Bell kit. The latter 3 rat ogres come with smaller heads compared to the regular Rat Ogre kits. I went ahead and gave them all the same size bigger heads to keep them uniform.

Each one has on their backs a set of coils which I will be painting in a glow. This is to represent that these guys teleport in to the battlefield, lead by their own Haemonculus with Webway Portal, who will also have a similar coil on his back. And what are these creations without some exposed wire? Data cable wire is used on a lot of my projects. With 9 Grotesques dropping in without scatter, it should be of major concern to any enemy of the Verminlord.

The Coven of Verminlord Skrax - WIP Venoms

These are my take on the venoms that the wracks will be tooling around in. They were inspired a little by that blog article I linked, but I wanted them to be made partially out of real venom kits, so they can be easily recognized by other players, but looted. I had to draw a fine line between Orky looting and ratmen looting. The way I saw it is these creatures actually have an understanding how the technology works and care about performance, rather than cobble a bunch of junk to it and hope it works. So these 3 venoms were wrecked from a previous battle and the Haemonculus Sigcourax had his smartened rats try to get them working.

Some of the lighter bits are from various Mantic kits that I got from bits sites, parts that I figured could look good. Luckily I was right. The pilots I am especially proud of. They are the little brain-rats that mount of the backs of the Skaven Stormfiends. When I got a stormfiend kit, I found they were a perfect fit and looked the part inside the cockpits. The smaller large-brained rats would have heightened reflexes and know-how to operate the advanced flight craft that are Dark Eldar vehicles. The flags are from the Clanrats kit, and of course the weapons are true Dark Eldar splinter cannons.

A quick note on the flying bases. I found this youtube video, and fell in love with the idea. I have always hated the flimsy flying stands for the vehicles, and these are really tough. I have since done this flying stand method on all my Tau vehicles as well.

The Coven of Verminlord Skrax - WIP Wracks

I will do a small series of blog posts detailing the idea and contents of my Dark Eldar(Haemonculus Covens) army I want to get done this year.

First off I will talk briefly about what got this all started. Simply it was this. An amazing blog, by the way, I highly recommend everyone follow it. It's a Finnish(I think) gaming club and they always have exquisite photos taken of all their armies and events. Inspirational stuff.

The post I linked in particular was a project where they tried making 40k armies out of Mantic Games kits. Scrolling down you can see that they made the Veer'myn into a small Dark Eldar force. So I blatantly stole the idea and rolled with it, trying to put my own twist on things.

The idea I am going with mine is a Haemonculus gets stranded on a deserted imperial world, left by a rival Haemonculus. This stranded, Sigcourax, begins to go crazy from the isolation, and works to build his own coven from scratch. Lacking cloning or vat technology, he had to find another source of servants. He began to mutate and uplift the native rats. Soon he has built his coven out of the rats, and plots his revenge on the Haemonculus Covens that abandoned him.

First off I will show the Wracks. I did these in just about the same way as the Warhead blog. I really liked the menacing look of the canisters on their heads and the electrowhips. WYSIWYG is very important to me, for ranged weapons at least, so a few of them you can see have actual Dark Elf liquifier gun bits. For all shooting weapons, and some melee weapons, this army will be using original Dark Elf bits. I want them to definitely fit the part of looking sinister as the Dark Eldar.

This is another unit of Wracks I made out of Mantic Skittersneak Stealers Dreadball team. I used all the masked heads I had. I just love the dynamic action posing of these guys. I did the electrowhips to keep with the theme of the rest of the wracks.

Zone Mortalis Tiles Project - 12 down, 4 to go!

This is everything I have built so far. That's 12 tiles, 4 large doors, and 4 small doors. My kitchen table is now completely full. When I build the last 4 tiles at the end of this month, I will have to display them on the floor.

Zone Mortalis Tiles Project - 9 down, 7 to go.

Emperor knows what lurks in these dark corridors...