|
Many Legs Make Light Work? Okay, for those of you that are familiar with my army, you know that I like making my Tyranids into multi-taloned monstrosities, using Scything Talons for all the limbs. I think it looks really creepy and cool and it sets my army apart from others. There's just something scary about all those talons. I've had people tell me they'd have nightmares about my Hive Tyrant, and gotten comments like, "They creep me out," about my gaunts. Now, I'm mildly arachnophobic, which is probably part of the draw. Too many legs is seriously bad news. It's not a rational fear, the sort that you can reason with and control. It's primal stuff, back in the Reptile brain that knows only hunger, anger and fear. It's the part that doesn't get more cerebral than say "Fire Bad, Tree Pretty." Back at the back of the skull and down to the base of the spine is where we feel that too many legs is wrong. Insects are bad enough with 6. Spiders have 8 and feature in the nightmares of our racial memory. Scorpions have even more than that, some species have upwards of 14 legs! Creepy-Crawly indeed! Way back in my early days of collecting Tyranids, I was searching the web for all things gribbly. I came across a wonderful site by Sherman Bishop. He had a bunch of incredible articles about Tyranids, written from the point of view of several Magos Biologis who were studying Tyranids. Very cool stuff, some of which made it into the current Tyranid Codex. He also had a great gallery with lots of really wild converted Tyranids. There were a lot of weird and wonderful things, but what struck me the most was a simple Hormogaunt conversion that he called a Stalker. Replace the rear legs with a spare set of the spiky middle arms and reposition the middle ones to stabilize it, and it totally changed the look of the beast. There was a great picture of it sneaking up on an Imperial Guardsman. I fell in love with it and decided to do it. Then I read through the step-by-step instructions and realized I could never afford it. Back then, hormogaunts were metal, so you had to buy them in blister packs. Adding to the expense, you had to mail order the extra limbs, making it very expensive for a model I'd want in large broods. I still wanted to do it, I just wasn't sure how. Some time later, as GW was releasing the 3rd edition Codex, they also released plastic gaunts. It had been a long time, and I had nearly forgotten about the Stalker. As part of the release, however, GW held a Build-Your-Own Gaunt contest, and put the entries up on their webpage. One of the entries was a gaunt body with a Warrior head and 6 Warrior Scything Talons for legs. I jumped right up and bought 2 boxes of gaunts. Over time, I converted them into scythed terrors, making the extra limbs out of clay or casting them or even whittling Scythes out of sprue material and gluing them in place of guns on a gun arm. They looked quite good in spite of my painting, and I was pleased. 
After some time, I noticed that my Monstrous Creatures looked funny next to the Stalkers that I'd made. They didn't have enough talons! So, I converted both Tyrants and both Carnifexes to the same standard, using Lictor Scythes for the more delicate-looking Tyrants, and full TMC scythes for the Carnifexes. All was good. Then I started using Lictors in my battles and didn't like their two-legged look. More converting got me 3 Lictors the same way, using Warrior Scythes for "legs" and the TMC Scythes for arms. Now, with the new codex coming out, it looks like Warriors are going to be much more effective, and so I want some. Well, I guess it's back to work for me! I covered making Talons in my last article Talons, so I'll get to the heart of the conversions. First, since these were already assembled, I had to take off the legs and arms already on the models, and carve out little sockets in the joints to prepare them for the Talons. Then I got out my superglue and went to work. 
I experimented a bit with the posing for these Warriors, though I had a pretty good idea of what would look best from my previous work on Gaunts, TMCs and Lictors. The first one was sort of my TMC/Lictor standard Threat Display. Bottom four Talons are mostly support, while the body raises up high and threatens with the upper two. The second was an experiment with a lower body posture, but still with the upper arms as the threat. The final one is the pose that worked best for the gaunts: crawling forward. Support on the ground with one of the upper arms, while the other arm and the middle leg on the opposite side are raised up, as if you caught it in mid-crawl. Like the gaunts, this pose has a tough time with a base, but let's do one thing at a time. I'll work out what to do about the base later. They do need bases, however. In addition to rules that reference the bases of models, there are other factors to consider. I have two words for you: Carnifex. Bowling. Don't let this happen to you. 
 
If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |