Maniacs

Presidential Decree 69784/603/17
Top Secret

Dear science guys,

Listen, I have had the best idea how to solve the prison overcrowding crisis and the recruitment problem at once! We get convicts and fill them with drugs and stuff until they're really big and kind of mutated like that guy in that cartoon. And mad, too. They've got to be mad. Then, we point them at the bad guys and let them loose! Cool, huh?

 Of course, we'd want real crazies to begin with, homicidal maniacs and stuff, otherwise it won't work. And we'd need to give them lots of big weapons. Sometimes, I amaze myself with all the brilliant ideas I have. It's gonna be great, so great. I can't see how this could go wrong.


For a while I've been interested in the "Storm of Sigmar" starter set for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: mainly because for £20 you get a lot of pretty decent models. In particular, I think the armoured Khorne chaps are really well sculpted and would make an excellent replacement for the old and lumpy plastic Chaos Space Marines. I've also been tempted to have a go at converting some Sigmarines, and this seemed to be the easiest way to get some on the cheap.

The box comes with five "bloodreavers". These are low ranking Khorne fighters (Khorne seems to be the chaos god of choice in AoS, and now everything Khorneish has "blood" in the title), and to my mind they're a bit too massive to be entirely convincing as normal humans. I thought it would be good to update them to look like post-apocalyptic maniacs, like the War Boys from Mad Max or the Raiders from Fallout.

That involved cutting off their Viking-style helmets and replacing some of their weapons. I also did some minor converting to make the poses a bit more dynamic. I gave them metal gas mask heads from Pig Iron Productions to make them look more sinister.

Painting-wise, I went for orange convict-type trousers and a lot of dirt. I wanted to use a messy style on the torsos, with a lot of washes over a pale undercoat, but it was too messy and I just ended up painting them in the usual way. Oh well: it's pretty messy as it is.

Now, on a different note, you're clearly people of excellent taste (after all, you're reading this...). So why not pre-order my next novel? The Pincers of Death, an exciting tale of war, giant soldier ants and hovering teapots right: HERE. I can promise that the jokes in it are even better than the ones here. Honest.