The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Redeeming Features

Hey guys!

First off, I'll apologize for not having updated these past two weeks. School's been hectic, and I've been taking a class during the law school's 'winter semester', which is basically just the few days leading up to the regular semester. Still, there's time for a few admittedly small updates, so I figure I might as well get cracking on that.

The Legion army I hope to eventually play is going to be, basically, 'Saladamnders', to borrow a phrase coined by a friend. The regular legionnaire will be your standard Tactical Marine, but I'm going to go melta and flamer heavy with the army to fit their fiery style. Because of this, I need a 'counts-as' Vulkan He'stan character for the army. I do, of course, have my old Vulkan conversion to consider, but he doesn't seem very Legion-esque, all told, so I think starting from scratch'd probably be a good course of action.

After a bit of deliberation, I decided that I really liked this Chaplain as the base for the conversion.

He's already got the bone motif in the form of the ribcage on his armor and the skull helmet, and his arms-wide-open pose should lend itself to some easy converting.

Now, let's talk wargear for a moment. Since I'm making a counts-as Vulkan, I need to pretty much match Vulkan's armament. This means my character needs the Gauntlet of the Forge, Vulkan's Spear, and Kesare's Mantle; basically, a big flamer-glove, some sort of mean looking relic weapon, and a badass cloak.

The spear is probably the outright easiest of the bunch to replace - the chaplain model above is already holding his Crozius pretty nicely, and I figure I can hack the mace-like eagle head off the thing and lengthen it out.

Given that this is the Legion of the Damned we're talking about, nothing would be more appropriate here than a scythe for the Grim Reaper / Death connotations. With that said, I set about planning the scythe out a bit, and quickly produced the mock-up parts below:

You'll notice I have one blade that's basically nicked and rougher looking, and one that's otherwise normal. I think I'm probably going for the nicked blade design instead, since I doubt the Legion get to resupply or repair their stuff that often. Still, you'll get the idea of what I'm going for - going to hack the crozius down, lengthen the shaft a bit, and attach the scythe head right to it. If I feel really bold, I may take a shot at sculpting some flames bleeding upwards off the scythe blade - we'll see.

Now, the Gauntlet of the Forge stand-in is not nearly as simple, unfortunately. On my old Vulkan conversion, I used an Apothecary arm and replaced the drill/surgical bits with the flamer. Unfortunately, there is no right-arm Apothecary bit, so my options there are substantially more limited. I've been brainstorming a bit about what I could do for the right arm, and I thought I'd lay out the options I've come up with and see what all of you thought.

For point of reference, the Gauntlet of the Forge works like an Assault Heavy Flamer - Vulkan can just spit out flamer templates like nothing.

I have two arms that I'm currently considering using for the right side. The first one is an actual Heavy Flamer arm, taken from a 3rd edition metal terminator. The upside to this is that it's pretty clear why the dude's firing a heavy flamer template, and the 3rd edition shoulders for termies are almost the same size as current Power Armor... so the whole arm is pretty much properly in scale.

 

It's probably the most simple, and I could sculpt flames onto the shoulder pad to Legion it up pretty easily. The downside here is that it's not some crazy gimmicky gauntlet, just a dude with a heavy flamer, which eliminates some of the 'cool' factor.

The other gauntlet idea I've been thinking about involves the old Marneus Calgar model. He has a bolter in his glove, though, but I figure I could hack the ammo feed, replace it with a hose, and put a nozzle on it...

 

The downsides to this one are a bit larger - first, I'm ruining an older model that's hard to get nowadays. Second, the eagle-motif on the shoulder pad doesn't exactly fit Legion designs.Third, I'd still have to do some extensive conversion to make that stormbolter look like anything other than a stormbolter.

I could probably mock up the same kind of under-slung weapon design as what's on this arm onto the stock Power Fist that comes with the Chaplain model, but that opens up a whole new set of issues: mainly, the fact that Vulkan doesn't actually have a power fist.

I'd be interested in hearing ideas from you guys. It's actually a bit of a shame that Vulkan's gauntlet is lefty, because I'd just as happily carve his arm up and put it on my guy if I could.

As far as Kesare's Mantle goes, I have that cloak angle covered... but that's secret for now!