Another Army for Sale: Undead Skaven

Veteran readers will recall this blast from the past, this undead army of skaven. Heavily converted, these beasties slouched across the table to menace my adversaries a few times. Alas, due to being my currently underemployed, they have to go. Ebay listing here.

You'll recall Skreinlich Skremmler, the Skavenmaster, and his hulking cohort, Skranfred von Karstein, the Skittering Terror of Mordeheim. 

They're accompanied by Skaverias the Everliving and his cybernetic mount, Snert.

Backing them up, of course, is their ever faithful horde of decaying clanrats. It took forever to whittle down all those skaven heads to make them into rat skulls. 

Some became zombie-ish by way of spare skaven parts. The skeleton bits came from a reasonably-priced metal blister of 20 skellies from a local game store. 

Perhaps the most labor-intensive bit, I reposed nine skeleton horses from the Reaper Miniatures Dark Heaven range into giant mounts for the cavalry. I thought they turned out rather well. 

I also ordered nine giant rats directly from the old Rackham range and mounted some metal Black Tree ratmen on them. You could have skeleton knights and Black Knight Wights in the same army at the time, and I liked the idea of having a cavalry-heavy undead army. 

Loping along at their side, ravenous dire wolfrats from the Reaper range. 

Although bats are kind of flying rats, I stuck to the theme and based some Reaper rat swarms to take their place. 

As I said, this army's now on the block, so if you were thinking of some undead action, get it while it's hot!

Vampire Skaven Part 3: The Doomtrain

Now that we're past the footsloggers, here's my favorite model in the entire army, if not my Warhammer Fantasy collection. The Doomtrain came about in those heady days when you could just order bitz willy-nilly from Games Workshop. The Storm of Chaos had just come out (yes, I've had it that long) and with it, the lovely Hellcannon kit in all its awful glory. About the same time I was painting dwarves for my friend Brian, and he paid me in trade with an Imperial Steam Tank (yes, the old-school metal model). A Hellcannon and a few bits orders later, and this monster came about.

This is another one of those cases of a model practically building itself. The Hellcannon and Steam Tank parts went together like they were made for each other, and the Screaming Bell bits followed shortly thereafter. The thing was an absolute joy to build and paint, to boot, from the little furnace full of soul-fire in the back to the wight-skaven drivers. It's also too long for even a chariot base, so damned if I know how I'll ever use it in battle.

The little stools of the Warp-Lightning Cannon's engineer minders actually fit right into the little peg-hole in this steam tank deck piece. I particularly love the little gauges and dials, which fit the skaven to T. 

The huge jaw piece for the Hellcannon still sits in my bits box, but the bigass skull piece needed minimal embellishment before fitting to the Steam Tank hull-turned-cowcatcher. I fitted skaven icons over the Empire shield mountings, and the warpstone reactors just fit the model perfectly. The end-bits even run into the grooves on the massive cog-wheels. 

The warlock-engineer hanging off the little platform to the side was an afterthought, as were the chains streaming off of the smokestack on the front. Of course, since this thing is powered by the souls the machine sucks out of the living, what's the stack for? I don't even think the steersman can see over it, anyway. If I could come up with a base to fit it, I might even enter it in a Games Day mini competition. I'd have to come up with track bits that would even hold it up, but it weighs a ton, so stability is ensured. If I did enter it, I'd also want to make a tender for it, if not some other, equally interesting car. 

Here's a shot from the other side. No crewman here, owing to the theory that odd numbers and asymmetry are more interesting. Those warpstone reactors look cool any way you turn them, so no problems with symmetry here, either. I thought of fielding it using Black Coach rules, but it looks even more durable than one of those, if not more deadly to the surrounding troops. 

This is a beauty shot, not an actual battlefield pic. If it were, the thing would steamroll right over that poor rat swarm in the front. Next time, we polish off the army showcase with cavalry. 

Vampire Counts: Skaven Pt 1: Characters

I always liked the Vampire Counts army list from Warhammer Fantasy, but playing a bunch of Bela Lugosi-style vampires wasn't my cup of tea. I mean, really? Guys in red capes and crap like that? Come on. Besides there's lots of fluff text in the Codexes and old issues of White Dwarf about the Skaven raiding ruins and graveyards for warpstone, stuff to eat, etc.  It makes more sense (to me, at least) that some warped Warlock-Engineer from Clan Skryre went even more crazy and decided to start doing things like reanimating dead rats, making Frankenstein's Monster style boss monsters, etc etc. I mean, the Skaven do that sort of thing anyway (Boneripper, Clan Moulder, etc). Thus, my third WHF army was born. 

This fellow was really the seed of the whole thing. I had been using him in my stock Skaven army as a Lord-level character. Based on an Reaper Orc character, he really was too monstrous to be any old rat with delusions of grandeur. Thus, the figure got a complete makeover (sorry, no before- pictures) and gained white skin, dingier-looking armor, and a wicked blade-arm where his weensy little sword used to be. You can picture him storming back into the rat-warren in the dead of night and sucking the blood out of everything in sight. Of course, such a monster needs a sidekick, which leads us to the Skreinlich Skremmler, the Sklichemaster:

I had originally planned to make him a rat-parody of the old Heinrich Kremmler model, complete with wide-brimmed hat, but when I saw a particular steampunk wizard from the Warmachine range (my old standby for years to come) I thought what an awesome Skaven he'd be, and voila! My necromancer was born. There's a champion character from the Necromunda range that rides a humongous undead rat, so maybe another character will appear someday, riding a "zombie dragon" with helicopter engines and rotors in place of wings.  Ahhhh skaven engineering.... Speaking of which:

This mad fellow and his crazy-ass mount came after I had finished the skeletal-giant rat cavalry. A steam-powered wight-skaven with a warpstone glaive packs quite a punch in the battle line. Another reason I wanted to use a vampire  counts army was their fear-generating cavalry, something neither my first army, the Dwarves, nor my second, Skaven, had access to. The new Skaven book has all sorts of new, awful things (for that matter, so does the new VC book) but until I can find another WHF opponent around here, upgrades to that army will have to wait a while. 

Here's another view of the rear of this thing. It really is one of my favorite models, from the mono-wheel and heavy suspension to the warpstone globes behind the saddle. Come to think of it, he sort of looks like a little Doomwheel. For my skeletal cavalry (which you'll see in part II of this series) I ordered a bunch of skeleton horses from Reaper (their prices are real steal!) and then cut and bent the pewter parts until they resembled a rat skeleton I found photos of on the web. I botched one rather badly, but the ribs, head, and tail were intact, so this model was really sort of an accident as well. It was another case of a model just building itself after a certain point. 

In life I suppose he was a bit of a daredevil, as all Skaven are, so I gave him a WWI German helmet made out of an old Tamiya 1/35 infantry hat and a bayonet. That shield is a leftover from the Black Tree Design regiments I used to build my skaven army. His skull is from the skaven plastic sprues I eventually got on the cheap on eBay. Who knew every 5th head was a skull? It helped when I was building those regiments of skeletal Skaven.

This fellow is one of two Wight characters to join either my Grave Guard or Skeleton formations. He's a simple conversion based on a re-bent Necron Flayed one, as is his drinking buddy:

A bit more heavily-armored than his fellow, he fits in a bit better with my Grave Guard models, who are more than a little "enhanced" themselves. I guess that Skavromancer thinks power fists are as good as Wight Blades. 

Next time, Cavalry! Yeeeehaaa!