Strange Tyranid Creatures

 Time for some more tyranid weirdness. I bought a copy of Shadow War: Armageddon off ebay this week. It's a skirmish game, in which small teams of orks, Imperial Guard and space marine scouts fight it out in the ruins of the hive-world Armageddon. It was released in 2017, but feels like something from a long way before that. 

While SWA sounds like it should be like Kill Team (actually, SWA sounds like it should be an early 90s rap band), it's actually based on the rules for the original version of Necromunda, slightly streamlined and slimmed down. I really like the idea of a skirmish game involving lots of different species, although in the only game I ever played of SWA, a force of orks was utterly wiped out by harlequins, which suggests some balancing issues.

Anyhow, if you're mental enough, you can take a squad of tyranids! To my surprise, this involves just the big tyranids. I've already got three oldhammer warriors painted up, and the list allows you to take a "gunbeast", which I assume is meant to be a warrior with a heavy weapon. However, I thought this was a nice opportunity to make something more unusual.

I dug out a really old metal model for the game Epic. This was the oddly-named "tyranid dominatrix" (there's a mental image for you), a sort of massive armadillo-type thing with a big gun on its back and a little dude who looks suspiciously like the dead space jockey from Alien (before Ridley Scott ruined it all, but that's a different sad story). It's much more animalistic than the warriors, but then a lot of the Epic tyranid models were wacky to the point of daftness.

Next up, some very little critters. The original tyranid army list was quite interesting: it was published in White Dwarf and allowed you to take all sorts of odd stuff, including genestealer hybrids and several hundred points from any other army (they were mind-controlled, you see). It also allowed you to take swarms of goofy-looking squigs. These were soon replaced by ripper swarms, which feel much less silly and more alien, and the squigs went back to being purely ork-related.

Here are some of the creatures from the squig swarm, which I've probably had lying around for 20 years or so. I don't think they have separate rules. They were such charming models that I thought they deserved separate bases.

This little guy is largely made of legs and teeth. I painted him in an unwholesome flesh colour, rather like the facehugger in Alien, and dotted in his pupils so that he would be looking upward - either at his owner or, more likely, at his next meal.

The next animal looks rather like a cross between an ork and a slug. The very orky face inspired me to paint him green - a bit brighter than I'd usually do ork skin - and the blue hairdo just seemed to contrast nicely. I expect he crawls around, eating whatever unwholesome things he can find, probably leaving a trail of slime.

This little creature is perhaps the most wholesome of the three, but it's a close thing.

First contact!