Recently I’ve been getting excited about my Underworld team again and I intend to pick up this project soon and take a slightly different direction with it. Before I do, I’m going back over my old work in progress and draft posts and finishing them off to bring this project log up to date. Most of the content of this post was written in 2018.
Past me: I’m using yet another Skaven Warlord (the 3rd one in this team) as a base model for the second thrower. This is the Warlord from Island of Blood, an old-ish Warhammer boxed game. I cut both his arms and his head off, and magnetised the left arm and head (it looks like two separate models here, partly because of the angle and partly because I switched the heads from the standard one that comes with the kit to a horned option between the photos).
Like the first thrower, I wanted this one to have some sort of mechanical contraption to throw the ball, but not simply a replica of the big claw/launcher affair I’d built a few weeks ago. After digging through some bits I found an interesting looking Kharadron Overlords part I’d bought from a bits site, originally intended to make some techno barbarians/junkers for Inq28/Necromunda. Cut down, this made a decent looking underslung blunderbuss or bazooka type contraption. Such a device is more similar to how the one carried by the Skaven thrower in the computer game works. There is also an existing chaos dwarf star player who uses a handheld version (Boomer Eziasson). The plan is to hook it up to a Warpstone powered backpack compressor via a stitched leather tube. Once the ball is loaded, pulling the trigger releases the air, propelling the ball across the field. At least, that’s the plan.
I glued the device to the forearm of a ghoul arm, and built up a metal locking strap around the forearm with plasticard. The backpack is also from the Kharadron Overlords, with a ball shaped compression chamber. The pipe connecting the two is taken from a Skaven Stormfiend’s back mounted contraptions, but had to be gently heated with a lighter and bent into shape to fit the thrower. Finally, I sculpted some Warpstone vapour emerging from the backpack vents.
All of the above sounds really cool doesn’t it? Unfortunately as I’ve come back some time later to finish this blog post I can’t find any of these parts, and the thrower itself is no more progressed. Instead, I seem to have built a totally different thrower, so let’s talk about that one instead.
My 3rd underworld thrower is built from the uber cool Warlock Bombardier. This one was a much less involved conversion than the first thrower, and simply required snipping off the front of the weapon, gluing on a large blunderbuss type barrel, and then wedging a ball into the end, carefully shaping the ball to look as though it’s been deformed as it was stuffed into the barrel.
Past me: The teams second blitzer is based off of Skritch Spiteclaw – leader of the Skaven underworlds warband I’d used to create my linerats. Skritch is a very dynamic model, posed mid-leap off of some sewer ruins. I simply magnetised the head and left arm, and added a couple of shoulder pads (one from a human blitzer and one from the Grave Guard kit). Later, I can build left arm options for a claw, two arms mutation or big hand mutation.
