Last time I’d pretty much rounded off the gang in terms of fighters – I’d used up all the bodies and legs on the sprues I had and was pretty satisfied I had enough variation in fighters to play the gang again in a new campaign. I just needed one or two bits to round off the gang…
Home is where the hole is
Every gang needs home turf, and Hive Noon are no different. I’ve had all sorts of mad and wonderful ideas about making some elaborate scenery and set pieces, but I think that’ll wait for another time (I can’t shake the idea of a train heist scenario called The Great Strain Robbery). I did need something a little more universal – a Gang Relic.
Gang Relics are used in certain scenarios and when you have Home Turf Advantage – essentially they’re a little standard or icon that you plonk down on the table and they provide certain buffs to any nearby fighters, and in some cases can be used as objectives themselves.
I had a couple of ideas including a damsel tied to some train tracks for maximum moustache-twirling Machiavellianism, but settled on the idea of a spawning watering hole because, well.. I’d just watched Toy Story recently and I couldn’t shake the soundbite of Woody shouting “somebody’s poisoned the water hole”.
I had the perfect signpost that had been rattling around in my bits box for a decade, extended with a little plasticard so I can paint on the necessary words to reassure people that it’s a real watering hole. The bucket was assembled from a nubbin from a Russian biochemical factory kit, now sadly quite difficult to get hold of, and a bent paper clip. I’m sure it’ll serve my gang well.
Mungo like candy
The final piece of the puzzle was a heavy. Genestealer Cults (at time of writing) don’t get access to house-specific Brutes so have to settle for one of the generic ones, either an Ogryn Servitor or the Am-Bot. I’d already built an Ogryn Servitor and I have an Am-Bot on the way, so I didn’t feel like using a generic one. I wanted something a little more… alien.
Out of the two, the Am-Bot had a neater set of rules for ‘big angry frenzy thing that tears stuff up’ which sat well in my head for some big Genestealer Brute, but I wasn’t excited about the special rule that allowed other gangs to capture it and ‘reprogram’ it for their use. Although unlikely, it would have been weird if it came up. Ogryn it is!
A classic Carnifex crushing claw fit perfectly into the socket of a Chaos Spawn body, and I knew whatever I made was going to use that as a base. I was still figuring things out at this point – a pair of claws looked unwieldy and I wanted it to be equipped with something that could reasonably be described as a melee weapon with the blaze trait to emulate the arc-welder rules. Luckily, I had just the random assortment of bits…
After much fiddling and sculpting, I was happy with the finished product. The left arm was eventually donated by a plastic Lord of the Rings Troll and the head came from a GSC aberrant. I wanted to maintain the semi-human look of the regular-sized aberrants and make him appear as an overgrown mutant rather than a big Genestealer, which was my first thought.
He’s also a pain in the ass to photograph, I can’t seem to work out where the golden angle is…
There’s an upgrade to give the Ogryn Servitor furnace plate, which increases their armour save from the front arc. I couldn’t quite figure out how to make that look natural, so I added a few bullet holes into the huge armour plates on his arm and reasoned that he would cover his body with is as he advanced. Handwavium!
Very chuffed with my arc welder solution – I used a monstrous creature adrenal gland and a couple of pipes from a barbed strangler (I think) to create a long tube to the claw. Add a few more adrenal glands and paint them in bright colours, and I figure it can be some kind of hyper-acid. Hellfire acid shotgun shells already use the Blaze trait to represent acid damage, so why not here?
The green stuff work was a little sloppy in places – I was making him during the penultimate week of the campaign and I was really ill – I wanted to get him finished and onto the tabletop before the campaign ended. I’d loved to have spent weeks lovingly crafting him into the perfect hybrid, but in the end I’m happy I didn’t. Finished, not perfect!