What Possessed Me?

Here's a quick transparent Archon Rampart guy who'd been nearly finished for ages as window dressing. But that's not what we're here for today.

That very nice man Stylus, as well as painting me with my octopus teacher, also sent me some spare Greater Possessed models. They don't exist anymore, see, which made the two I have a bit redundant. But with three new bodies, I could field a unit again!

But first - what to make with them? I mean, I can't just have carbon copy Possessed, that seems a bit ordered for such chaotic champions. My bits box has tons of stuff in it, but when I looked through, it was quite hard to take all those parts and come up with a unified plan with them. 

So I decided, sod that - better throw myself on the mercy of darker powers. Deep in my cupboard lurks an original hardback copy of Slaves to Darkness. And deep in that copy lurks the most powerful random table ever created: the Personal Attributes table. 

It's a d1000 table to generate random mutations. It embodies everything Warhammer - ridiculous, horrifying and capable of taking game balance in two hands and breaking its spine over one knee. So hard that it can't even re-learn ninjutsu in a Thai prison pit.

 So my plan was now roll three attributes for the three models, re-rolling anything that I couldn't model (Silly Voice or Strong, for example, those are already baked into all chaos sculpts), and then trust in my glue and pliers to do the result justice. A fool's errand, the best kind!

Here's the first set of rolls: 

• 434 GM's Choice
• 347 Evil Eye
• 624 Mechanoid - Head

GM's choice was a nice one, giving me free range. I went with Snapping Maw In Chest, insect arms plus some extra lashes coming out of one hand. Hybrid with some deep sea organism, I guess, if I wanted to give it a name. Really I just wanted to use the fly arms from the Blightkings sprue, they've been tempting me for ages.

A mechanoid head? A bit harder. I thought I still had an old plastic Titan head somewhere, but couldn't locate it. In the end, I took a CSM backpack and trimmed the nozzles off, giving me a nice square frame with an eye in the middle. An Evil Eye, in fact! That plus some big horns from a CSM head looked pretty weird, which meant I was doing something right. 

I ended up with loads of spare green stuff later, I'm bad at estimating how much I need. So he got a shapeless flesh blob on his base, with a reaching tentacle encouraging him to run forwards.

Number two:

• 306 Crown of Flesh (toes)
• 900 Tentacles
• 455 Headless

Much more of a challenge, this. A Crown of Toes? I wasn't sure how to do that, so I decided to cheat. Using the backpack nozzles I'd just clipped off, I improvised a Crown of Flesh (weird mouths) which went in instead of his head. The rotting flesh is courtesy of a Putrid Blightking, which also meant it had a Mark of Nurgle on it, which means this guy is also the Icon Bearer and got a spiky sigil to represent it. 

The tentacles were done on one side with green stuff, wrapped round a tyranid claw. The other side were Tyranid lash hooks, which are all a bit straight for my taste. As I was feeling dangerous (or drunk), I held the model over a candle flame just enough to get them soft and twisted them around a bit. This was a pretty stupid thing to do, really, so I'm lucky it came out well!

His leg tentacle is more Tyranid bits plus a weighted chain from a Renegade Psyker. Not rolled up, but I wanted to change the legs away from the original sculpt more, it was still looking a bit samey.

Last one:

• 918 Tentacles (again)
• 562 - Long Legs
• 832 Silly Walk (rerolled from Invisible, rerolled from Teleports, rerolled from Fast, rerolled from Strong)

It was bound to happen sooner or later - a series of results that would be meaningless to model! Except Invisible, which felt like cheating again. I mean, I could just do a base with footprints in the snow... But by the time I'd rolled Silly Walk, I felt the gods were trying to tell me something, and stopped. 

While I was looking for the titan head, I came across some bits of the Giant kit I made years ago. I still haven't run out of those bits! Hooved feet plus a silly walk and long legs, well, I reckoned I could do something with that. Here it is, combined with some tentacles from a DnD Carrion Crawler, doing its finest John Cleese. 

Not the longest legs in the world, but he's a bit taller than the others in his unit.

So that's the unit - Mark of Nurgle gives them a weird semi-transhuman thing to help shrug damage, and they're plenty hurty if they reach anyone. Their Alpha Legion paintjob helps disguise the fact that their bases are technically too small, but I'm well pleased with them. Good fun challenge, that, I'd happily do it again some time!

Colourshift paints - as hard to photograph as ever!