The Dance of Lost Souls - Chaos Baggage Train Part 1

"Bringing up the rear of any Chaos horde may be seen their hideous train of camp followers.  Foul beings including those mutants too far gone to be worth putting into the battle line.  They accompany awesome, creaking wagons of  horrific form, riddled with woodworm and decay, and drawn by pathetically deformed beasts of burden...

These weird wains are piled high with cages, cauldrons and sinister inlaid caskets, while implements of torture and insane ritual are hung about them.  A continuous, eerie sighing emanates from the sad, snuffling and cowled figures groping behind the wagons..."
                                                                                                                  -Warhammer Armies

Who among us was not mightily inspired by that passage, reading it as a kid?  Twenty-some odd years later, Nigel Stillman's words have finally resulted, partly, in this.

This baggage train section was quite a colossal kit-bash. The wagon model is based on a RAFM Skeleton War Wagon model.  I bought a pair of them very cheap from RAFM direct and I added some wheels from a new-school Skaven war machine kit, purchased separately on ebay.  The skeletal horse came with the Skeleton War Wagon kit.

Added some other plastic and resin bits from Armorcast and GW, including the cage in which our Devil Pig (I like to think of him as some sort of lesser daemon of the minor Chaos God of gluttony), is keeping a particularly tasty bit to eat later on.  The tasty bit is an old Ral Partha slave girl.

The Devil Pig himself, the whipping horse and most of the camp followers are from Eureka's delightfully old-school flavored 'Chaos Army'.  The line isn't so much an army as a mob of mutants with a very Bosch/Bruegel theme.  Very cool.

The Whipping Horse.  Poor Fellow.  It's a sad figure but I'm very attached to it.  When I saw it, I was immediately reminded of the Devil's horse in Albrecht Durer's The Knight and the Devil.  I found this illustration in a book on medieval warfare when I was a very small boy.  It has exercised a very powerful hold on my imagination ever since. Particularly that miserable horse.  I have no idea why.

The first of the 'sad snuffling and groping figures...a mutant too far gone to fight in the line but still rather scary.  Nice mini. Could easily be a Cenobite from Hellraiser...  A Eureka piece...

An old Citadel Witch.  Seemed like a good choice for a cultist model.  Careful inspection reveals that her personal equipment includes a flashlight/electric torch!  As good as a wand of light, I guess.

Here we have a miserably mutated creature...approaching being barely functional.  I think this is a Heartbreaker model.  I'm not sure.  I painted him a long time ago, you can see he is painted and based somewhat differently from the others.  I thought he'd fit in well, though.

 Bird/crab man.  Very Bosch/Bruegel flavored.  I like him.

Egghead.  Another Eureka  A fun piece.

Another shot of the wagon...

And of the section as a whole...

Still another RAFM cart and lots of Eureka mutants to fashion into a second baggage train section for Aulech Henschblut's Chaos raiders.

Nov 13 2015

Star Wars: Classic Rebel Heroes Part 4: Chewbacca and his Wookie Scouts

Unbeknownst to pretty much everybody but myself, the mighty Chewbacca recruited a small band of Wookies from his home planet of Kashyyyk during the mid-and-latter stages of the Galactic civil war.

When not hovering around Han Solo protecting Han from himself and others, Chewie led this band of scouts and jungle fighters in a series of raids and intelligence-gathering operations on a number of planets throughout the Empire.   The famed Wookie warrior is shown here with a detachment of this famed Kommando.

The unforgiving nature of Kashyyk's vast rain forests forged tough and resourceful warriors who could thrive in  environments where Imperial forces struggled, and the services of the Wookies proved invaluable in numerous engagements.

Who doesn't love Chewbacca?    Alas, as was so often the case with Grenadier's Star Wars line, we only get one generic figure for the species, armed with a laser rifle and power ax, and wearing a smock type garment.

 It's not a bad pose, and I dig that the figure is armed to the teeth with rifle, pistol and close combat weapon.

Would have been really nice to have even one or two more, though, with bowcasters and muskets, maybe, to represent wookies at home on Kashyyyk.  There was one more wookie mini made for the line, but it came along later, was not a Julie Guthrie figure, and doesn't look particularly great.  I'm trying to figure out something I can do with it.  It wouldn't have fit in well with Chewie's Commandos.  I may try painting up a few more of these guys someday, maybe with a conversion or two, but the pose is pretty solid, with no obvious points of separation to play with, so this may be it for wookies.

I thought that the smocks would be fun to do in camo, but now I'm afraid the scheme I used just makes them look like candy stripers.

Oh, well.  Can't win 'em all.

I do really like the Chewbacca figure.  Julie's lovely sculpting nicely captured his character, I think.  And he has the bowcaster, which is great.

So, that's it for Chewie.

One more thing.  For a while, the closing themed pin-up pic was becoming a tradition of sorts within my Star Wars mini posts, but through the last couple of posts, I've been slacking.  Traditions are good things.  Once we've started them, we shouldn't abandon them.  So here's a little Wookie-themed something to help you think warm thoughts as the season changes.

'Til next time, friends!