Project: Servants of the True Emperor

A few weeks ago, I started a project for 'deadcember'. Today, I finished it. That's a pretty auspicious start to a new blog!

rrr... mmrr..nrr.

Deadcember is one of those slightly silly hobby challenge things that people do. Orctober is probably the most obvious one; Serftember is another. I think my favourite is the Month of Marsh, which I first heard about via ZeroTwentyThree. I'd had my Mordheim undead miniatures lying around for the better part of the last two decades, and I'd never gotten around to painting them, so #deadcember offered a perfect opportunity to do it.

What really kicked me into gear was the work that some of the guys in the AOS28 community were doing. While I've never gotten into Age of Sigmar (a subject for a different time), the AOS28 are just incredible. The movement generates really evocative dark fantasy, sometimes quite intimate and detailed and always with an incredible aesthetic.

Steam trading card: Decay of Society

Alexander Wirnberg of Echoes of Imperium fame has recently been starting a project called Mordheim 2019. Slightly later than the original game's timeframe of 1999, with Mordheim having festered for twenty years and the Empire's anarchic civil war allowing corruption to blister across the continent, Wirnberg's project features the kind of horrible, intricate detail that you'd expect. He takes the weirdness vein already running through Mordheim and turns the dial up to eleven. It's fucking great.

My project was more humble...




I wanted to use my old metal Mordheim heroes (although I did have to reacquire one of the dregs), but I wanted to steer away from the old plastic zombies. I still have plenty of the bits, but they are a little dated. Besides, I've been getting full-throated into Oldhammer lately - and feeling specifically nostalgic for Gary Morley's 4th-ed Warhammer scultpts.

Warhammer Armies: Undead

Once I had a few of these, I decided to set some restrictions from myself: Only Games Workshop sculpts, and only metals. This made the wolves challenging, as the dire wolves from this period aren't my favourites. Reaper has some great Julie Guthrie models, but those aren't Citadel! sigh

Luckily for me, the Oldhammer community came to my rescue, as I stumbled over this post over at Lead Plague. The solution was just to get some skinny old Kev Adams wolves and give them glowing eyes! I'd never done that before, but how hard could it be?

Pretty hard, actually.

I also got some fun, weird sculpts, including a skeleton pirate, the Blood Bowl Star Player Frank 'N' Stein, and the limited release Chainsaw Warrior Vietnam War zombie. I think my favourite, though, is the old zombie with a crow eating his brains.

Friends!

My partner helped me out with some decent photos of the finished project today.  I'll add a page for them in the blog sidebar at some point soon, which will include names and backstories. In the meantime, enjoy the below photos. You can see more either at my instagram or on the old tumblr.