Cheap Helbrute Conversion

So, lots of people are already talking about the new Horus Heresy plastics. I might at some point in the future, too.  For the moment, though, I wanted to look back at the last big sci-fi set...

           

(okay, seriously, how do we describe the connection between 30K/Heresy and 40K?  Are they just the #0K games? Imperium-based games?  Grim Future games?)

           

...their last box set from mankind’s grim future, and show something fun and cheap you can do with that.

           

You can still find lots of Dark Vengeance stuff online, most of it at half to 1/5th what you’d pay for them as individual units. A full tactical squad is about twenty bucks.  A lot of HQ characters are just two or three dollars.  And you can usually find the Dark Vengeance Dreadna—sorry, old habits—Helbrute for under ten bucks.

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a reason for this.  Like most of the Dark Vengeance models, the Helbrute’s a block of plastic that takes some serious time and effort if you want to do any major conversions (that said—I’ve seen some great ones).  But it is possible to do some neat looking ones on the cheap without half as much effort.

           

For example...

           

This particular Helbrute is going to be named Occulus Blight, and it’ll be joining my Death Guard.  Before I even started putting him together, I rolled up a little ball of green stuff.  A little bigger than a pea, a little smaller than a marble.  I rolled this back and forth between my fingers until it was as round and smooth as I could get it.  Then I very carefully pushed it into the hood/collar hole where the little face piece would normally go.  I didn’t want the teeth/claws around the hole to gouge the surface of the ball.

Once this was in place, I stretched the putty out on either side to help hold it in place. Again, I had to be careful so I didn’t force it into the teeth/claws on the other side. This was tricky and I had to try twice.  Fortunately, on something this simple, messing up just means pulling the blob out and rolling it smooth again. So don’t panic too much.  It maybe took ten minutes from starting to mix the green stuff to having it in place.  I let it  dry for another fifteen minutes—face up! I didn’t want its own weight to make a flat spot on the ball—and then assembled the Helbrute as normal.

Look at that.  One big eye in the socket.  Much Nurgle.  So pestilent.

 

I did a few quick detail things.  An old scenic rubble piece went on the base.  I snipped off the chains that hang from the power fist and added some “tentacles” made from the horns of a Chaos Marine helmet.  It’s hard to tell, but I also added a big tentacle to his power plant—one of the ones from the old mutation sprue.  It looks really good there, and it’s got me thinking some of those bulkier pieces might work really well on other Chaos dreadna—sorry, did it again—Helbrutes.

I didn’t glue the front plate-armor-hull piece in place because I want to paint the eye without too many extra bits around it. So I’ll prime those seperately and assemble them later.  As one last bit of detail, I added a centered horn to the armor plate.  It’s something I pulled from the bits bins at one point—I think it might be from the Chaos Terminators set.  Central horns are distinctively Nurgle in 40K (and related games).

All in all, maybe an hour to make a distinctive Helbrute.  And about a third of that was just digging up parts and mixing drinks.

(Primed and basic paint pictures coming this weekend)

Yet Another Dark Vengeance Update

Just wanted to share these real quick...

I’ve been holding off assembling the Hellbrute for two reasons.  One was that I wanted to actually read the codex first and see if there were any noteworthy changes or options I wanted to make as far as the model went.  Two is that I wanted to read the fluff behind it and see which of my Chaos armies it’d best fit into... which could also result in changes.

Overall, though, it struck me that the Hellbrute is just a renamed dreadnaught.  Which feels like a bit of a cheat, but hopefully it means Chaos is finally going to get a new dreadnaught model after just... oh, sixteen years or so.

Anyway, I decided to make two quick changes to the Dark Vengeance Hellbrute.  Like a lot of models in this set, it’s built into a very static pose and there’s not a lot of places to alter it.  One place you can, though, is the head at the center of the model.

I’d decided this particular Hellbrute was going to join my Thousand Sons army, so it seemed very out of character to have an exposed head.  I dug around and found one of the very old Chaos Warrior helmets from the Fantasy line (back when all those models were a bit more hunched and cartoonish).  Once the tall spike was cut off its top, it had a surprisingly solid resemblance to a Thousand Sons helmet.

The big trick, though?  I didn’t gouge out the Hellbrute’s face, I just flipped it around.  By turning that face plate front to back, it gave me a nice little cradle to set the helmet in. I also discovered if I rotated it 90 degrees the edges fit well against the inside shapes of the “sarcophagus.”

The other little tweak I made was the base.  I had a spare dreadnaught base—the one with all the rocky terrain and shell casings—and decided to see if the Hellbrute would fit on that.  Turns out he does once you snip off the support pegs.  The two low quadrants are pretty much level.

Helpful Hint – You’ll need to clip the inside corners of the scenery-slab under the Hellbrute’s left foot to make this work.  Not much, just maybe an eighth of an inch.  There’s also a shell casing or two that can be trimmed off the base to get a good fit.

Voila.  Cheap and easy conversion to make my Hellbrute stand out.

Here’s another one.  Some of you probably caught this already, but Chaos has a bonus HQ model hidden in the Dark Vengeance set.  Let’s take a look at that Chosen champion, Draznicht...

He’s dressed in pretty elaborate robes and capes.  He’s got a power mace.  His helmet is a stylized skull that’s grown some horns somewhere along the way.  The “vents” of his backpack look like a censer.

He’s a Dark Apostle.  You don’t even need to convert him.  He’d work absolutely fine as is.  However, if you wanted to make two simple tweaks...

I filed down the top of his backpack and gave him one of the chaos star icons from the basic Chaos Marine set.  Someone you know who plays Chaos has a pile of them, I guarantee it (assuming you don’t already).  I also gave him a little banner from one of the old Plague Monk sets (I think that’s what they’re called—it’s a fantasy Skaven thing).  This is a great little piece I grab whenever I find one, and I use it all the time as an additional frilly-prayer piece.  It looks great on Relictors, Grey Knights, and random Word Bearers.  And now on Dark Apostles, too.

And there you have it.  Dark Apostle Keven of the Alpha Legion, ready to lead his cultist army to...  Well, to their deaths, probably.  That’s what generally happens to cultists, after all.

And, yes, Keven is a subtle reference to The Cabin In The Woods.