Kroot Taste Like Chicken

I have to throw out one more shameful plug for my new book, 14.  It hit the top 30 bestselling books on Audible.com last week.  Not top 30 Sci-Fi or top 30 horror—overall bestsellers (#27, with a brief peak at #26).  Check it out.  Lots of people are liking it, and you can listen to audiobooks while you build and paint toy soldiers.

As for this week’s little rant... you want to know what I use all the time as “counts as” models?  Kroot.  Kroot really don’t get enough respect from a modeling/ gaming viewpoint.

As anyone who played with the old Kroot Mercenary army list knows, they are what they eat.  Fluff-wise and rules-wise, this means Kroot are one of the few units in the entire game where it’s completely acceptable for them to have a shifting stat-line.

What does this mean for the clever, on-a-budget hobbyist?

Between their mercenary ways and their shifting stats, it means you can introduce Kroot into a lot of armies as very solid counts-as models.  Which is very cool because a box of a dozen Kroot is relatively cheap and comes with a ton of accessories.  Heck, you can go to BattleWagon Bits and buy four of them on the sprue, or try the Bitz Barn.

(apologies for the picture quality on some of these, by the way—my camera’s getting old and acting up. If I can get some better shots later, I'll replace these)

In my Inquisition force, (yes, I’m one of those oddballs still favoring the Inquisition over the Grey Knights) Leviticus Gul is a big-time radical who employs xenos mercenaries (among other things) in his fight against Chaos.  So in his squad of henchmen, his death cult assassins are all Kroot Carnivores that were remodeled to have two close combat weapons (and a pile more strapped to their harnesses).  It’s very easy to do.  One of the Kroot arms already comes holding a knife.  There’s also an arm holding a rifle by the barrel, and once you cut off the weapon around it, that leather-wrapped barrel is suddenly a leather wrapped handle for whatever you want to attach.  Their Krull-looking weapons are just the bladed Kroot rifle stocks glued together.

Helpful Hint – Kroot have a double thumb.  From a modeling point of view, that means their left and right hands are identical.  You can swap back and forth to get whatever grip/angle you want on whichever hand you want.  With their different gloves and bracers, it’s easy to hide the cuts, too.

           

Gul’s Vindicare assassin is a Kroot, too.  He’s based off the metal (now Finecast) Shaper model.  A tiny bit of wire as a pin let me double the length of a Kroot rifle, and a few Ork gun sights made it seem like a suitable Kroot super-sniper rifle (reminiscent of the one in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen).  His Exitus pistol--most likely retrieved from some unfortunate assassin he ate--is an Ork slugga with the glyphs filed off and a Space Marine targeter on top.  It replaced the knife the Shaper had in his left hand.

           

Let’s peer at the Dark Eldar Court of the Archon for a moment.  Kroot can make great stand-ins for Sslyth.  After all, they’re mercenaries, too, and while they don’t have four arms they are known for being blindingly fast, fluff-wise.  Any oddities in the stat line can be brushed off as your Kroot eating a Sslyth a few months back. 

I call him Sirpenntarr

I built some Kabalite armor for this guy using shoulder pads from the Hellions and the Fantasy Lizardmen, then loaded him up with a bunch of spare knives, blades, and holsters from both the Kroot and  Dark Eldar lines.  I strapped a splinter rifle across his back to add to the mercenary feel and also help represent the shardcarbine. 

Sslyth come on a 40mm base, which looks a little large, but there’s so much extra Dark Eldar stuff (new and old) floating around in bitz bins it would be easy to make a mini-diorama with the extra space which would tie him to the Dark Eldar even more.  Maybe some vehicle wreckage or bodies of various Dark Eldar warriors who failed to kill this mercenary’s employer

Using this same logic, by the way, you could use Kroothounds as Ur-Ghuls if you wanted to.  Their stat line wasn’t quite as mutable in the game—they’re supposed to be an evolutionary dead end, fluff-wise—but if you’re using Kroot as Sslyth you can probably say “counts-as by association.”  I’d just paint the hounds a ghastly green or blue-white and say they ate something that didn’t agree with them.  Or maybe agreed with them far too well...

I’ve also been playing with the idea of building a Kroot model to serve as a “counts as” Guardsman “Sly” Marbo.  With nothing more than a paintjob a Kroot could match any Imperial Guard paint scheme, and it wouldn’t be hard to rationalize it as a lone, deadly mercenary the army had managed to hire.  With a few extra bits or the right paint scheme, a Kroot could even make a passable Predator.  And what army wouldn’t want the Predator on their side...?

So next time you’re struggling for a counts as model, think of the Kroot.

Next up, one last conversion tip with the Orks, and then it’s time for a new Paperhammer project.

Pure Paper

Okay, the Doom Scythe is dead.

I’m shelving it indefinitely.  And when I say “indefinitely,” it’s like when you asked your parents if you could go to Disneyworld and they said “We’ll see.”  Everyone knew what they really meant.

Let’s be honest.  It was moving at a crawl, and with the extra stuff we all have to do around the holidays that meant it was insanely slow.  In another two months the real model will be out and a bunch of very talented engineers will put out spectacular paperhammer models that my scratchbuild won’t come anywhere near.

Plus, to be honest, I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for the project.  It was just something I started to capitalize on the current Necron popularity.  And there’s just too many other ideas that I really want to be working on for me to be mustering up fake excitement in the hopes of getting one or two more followers here on my geeky blog.

So next time I’m going big with another Apocalypse-level unit.  Inspiration came to me while building the Baneblade/ Plaguereaper.  More on that later.

For now... a detail tip.

I don’t know why, but purity seals have always sort of embodied Warhammer 40,000 for me.  Maybe it’s the idea of prayers and devotions being bound up as physical things.  Maybe it’s the stark contrast between science and faith.  Or maybe it’s just the fluttery ends.

Regardless, purity seals are a great piece of detail that make any model look better.  Even paperhammer models.  So when it struck me how easy it was to make them... well, I had to share.

I took my 1/16” punch and make a few holes in a piece of card, leaving a bit of space around them.  Then I took the 1/8” punch, lined it up over the 1/16” hole, and punched.  End result—a 1/8” disk with a 1/16” hole in it.  If the hole’s not perfectly centered, don’t worry about it.  As long as it doesn’t look drastically off it’ll be fine.

Helpful Hint- You need to do it in this order.  If you try to punch 1/16” holes in 1/8” disks, you’re just going to end up with disks impaled on the punch.  And you’ll shred them trying to get the off.  Start small and work out, not the other way around.

I made up about half a dozen of those and then made half a dozen straight 1/8” disks.  These got paired up with the “donuts” so I had a disk with a depression in the middle.  If there’s a little extra glue on this, that’s okay.

Next, I got some plain paper.  If you’ve got any scraps of typing paper from templates it’d be great.  If you’ve got something a bit heavier with a bit of  a grain (some junk mail comes on really nice paper), that’d be perfect.  I cut out a thin strip (under 1/8”) about an inch long.  If you want to be clever, you can cut a piece like a tall, thin hourglass, but make sure the narrow bit at the center is under 1/8” wide.

I crumpled the paper and carefully smoothed it back out.  This gives it a little more texture.  Then I folded it in half, but not perfectly.  I want the crease at a bit of an angle so the two “legs” hang a bit apart, like an upside-down V.  I put a very tiny bit of glue inside the crease, too, to keep it folded.

Then I just glued the paper to the flat side of the donut and voila.  Purity seal!

If you want larger seals for dreadnaughts, tanks, or scenery pieces, use the 1/8” punch to make the initial hole and a 1/4” punch to make the donut around it.  You could also make the paper longer (for either size) and try twisting it or putting waves in it.  There’s a good chance such things will show up next year when I try making a few Imperial vehicles again.

If you’ve been playing with the card “flats” that have had a run of popularity lately, this is also a cheap and easy way to bring those 2-D models a little more into the third dimension.  Cover the purity seals printed on them, or add extras.

All for now.  Next time... something big and very classic.  And probably following my usual leanings.

Daemonhosts

Sorry for the long delay in posting anything. Dealing with a bunch of real-world crap, plus I’ve been busy painting Tyranids for the annual Memorial Day Apocalypse game my friends and I have. Yes, I’m finally going to field my Tyranid army. It only took eleven years.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure the geeky blog here didn’t get neglected too much, so I thought I’d look at a money-saving project I did a few years back. As I’ve mentioned, one of my main armies is the Relictors and they grew out of a radical Daemonhunters force I built. One of the mainstays of any radical force is, of course, the Daemonhosts.

None of the GW Daemonhost models really did it for me, though. As it happened, I had a few frames worth of Warhammer Fantasy zombie parts, and I thought I’d be able to piece together something more dynamic and appealing. So I gathered up some stuff and went to work on M’ndragora and Deminos.

The image of someone in full stocks and chains was firm in my mind, so I decided to go with that for M’ndragora. I picked over the zombie bitz until I had a body and limbs in a good, dynamic pose (keeping in mind that he was going to be floating in the air). His head is the bound-and-stitched one from the old Chaos mutations sprue, which seemed very appropriate. One of his feet is actually the bare foot and calf one zombie hand is using for a club. The stocks help hide the join.

The stocks themselves are just strips of plastic. I cut them to size and marked where they lined up with the arm, neck, and legs. Then I carved them out with an XActo blade and smoothed the holes with a file. I glued them around the body, and then also added a trim piece to the front and back.

Helpful Hint-- This project is a great example of why you should always hang on to scraps of plastic. It may seem silly to hang onto a 1”x 1/2” piece, but on 40K scale that’s gigantic. It could be a door big enough for a Space Marine to fit through. Both of these models were built with leftover scrap from other projects.

M’ndragora is pretty much done at this point, but the details helped make the model. The purity seal came from some Space Marines. I shamefully admit all the locks were a special purchase back when you could buy individual bitz from GW. They’re from the Cherubael figure for the Inquisitor game. Not cheap at all. Although on this scale it wouldn’t be hard to do very passable ones from green stuff.

Helpful Hint--If you ever need chains for 40K, go hit your local 99 Cents Store, Big Lots, or similar place. Go look at all the jewelry for pre-teen girls. It’s the stuff that’s kind of stylish but still very cheap. Sift through a few and you’ll find some that are perfect chains. I got about twenty inches worth of the chain for these models for two dollars.

Deminos took a bit more work. I got the two straightest zombie arms and then used putty to make them look good stretched out perpendicular from his body. His head is the same Chaos mutations one again. I had to cut and pose the legs with a little putty so they’d be side-by-side and crossed at the ankles. And, yeah, that’s the same bare foot again, too.

The cross is double-thick plastic to give it some real heft. You can’t tell in the picture but there are a few notches cut into it to help make it look like scarred metal. There’s also an Imperial eagle from the tank sprue (back when the Imperial tank sprue had a lot more cool stuff on it) on the back that lines up with his shoulders.

I used up another five or six inches of the chain here for detail. I had to try wrapping it a few different ways before I found one that looked symmetrical and binding but also left the eagle exposed in the back. Those big bolts and hex-hunts are off some Ork hubcaps. The padlock is one last one from the Cherubael bitz.

It’s worth mentioning that after getting Deminos assembled I had this sudden religious crisis. After all, in the age of the Imperium wouldn’t this poor sap be nailed to a large capital ‘I’ or something shaped like an eagle? Peace of mind came from my friend Marcus, who pointed out that the cross was a convenient shape people were getting nailed to long before the rise of Christianity and probably still were 40,000 years in the future.

Both Daemonhosts got mounted on modified flying bases so they’d be hovering high above the ground. It’s also great to see them looming over an enemy squad.

As I’ve said before, painting is not my strong suit, so here’s the quick version of what I did. Their skin is Ice Blue, drybrushed down to Bleached Bone to accent the fact that this is a dead body animated by the forces of Chaos. Their clothes and binding straps are Red Gore so they tie into the rest of the Daemonhunters force. The padlocks and aquilla are Tin Bitz drybrushed with Shining Gold (to show how sanctified and pure they are).

That’s M’ndragora and Deminos (although it’s worth noting M’ndragora fell off his base while I was getting these “beauty shots,” so here he’s just stuck on a flying base with some earthquake putty). Not the most inexpensive things I’ve ever shown off here at the Grim Cheapness, but still far cheaper than the thirty-odd dollars it would cost you for two GW Daemonhost figures.