Old-School Termagants

 Back in the days of Rogue Trader, there were two sorts of tyranid: warriors (aka just "tyranid" or "protonid") and zoats. Zoats were later edited out before being edited back in again in a very limited fashion, and the protonid was replaced by more modern warrior sculpts, with their upright pose.

Shortly after that, two new monsters joined the ranks: the screamer-killer (of which more some other time) and the hutner-slayer. Later on, these would be renamed as the carnifex and the termagant.

So what is a termagant? Well, it's not one of these:

That's a ptarmigan, a sort of artic bird. The actual word "termagant" comes from the name of a god that medieval people believed Arabs to worship. Termagant was apparently an angry god, and as time went on came to be seen as female. By the 19th century, a termagant was a word for a bad-tempered woman.

None of which really helps us at all. Next week on "Unusual Tyranid Name Origins" we'll be looking at the dominatrix.

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Anyhow, I happened to find a bunch of really old termagants at the back of a cupboard. They date from the early 1990s, and must be some of the earliest miniatures I ever bought: I can remember my dad giving me a lift to Luton Games Workshop to buy a box of plastic termagants and the lurid 2nd Edition tyranid codex. I was surprised to find that my painting back then wasn't absolutely awful (well, I kept inside the lines), but I reckoned I could do better now, and so I stripped them. I also had a few metal termagants, and put them in as well.

I started off with five metal models. Three have fleshborers (the standard rubbish gun) and two have stranglewebs (the standard rubbish flamethrower-type thing). They're old models, and clearly made to fit into a rather flat two-part mold. But I like them: they've got a certain derpy charm, and given the limited options, the poses are quite good. Since the average termagant is a poor in attack and feeble in defence, they seemed just right for a model that wouldn't be spending long on the battlefield.

I used Flesh Tearers Red, a Citadel Contrast paint, for most of the bodies. It worked quite well, probably because there are lots of ridges and bumps for the paint to run into on these small models.

I think I'll try some of the plastic ones next.