Repent everything! It's the Witch Hunters!

 A few weeks ago, I painted an old monster hunting type guy. I thought it might be nice to give him some "friends". 

Of all the warbands of Mordheim, the Witch Hunters are my least favourite. They're often rather drab to look at, and they don't have exciting options for monsters and conversions, as the Undead and Chaos Cultists do. Aptly, given that they look like cartoon Puritans, they're not a lot of fun.

But I suppose it depends what you make of them. I found three old Necromunda models on ebay that would work. They're all from House Cawdor, the inevitable religious fanatic faction, and they have a nice medieval feel. They're juves - ie, raw recruits - and rather small, which adds to their weediness. They would make reasonable zealots, the cheap and low-quality minions of the Witch Hunters. Added to this, someone had cut off all their guns.

Two of the miniatures were identical, and the third was clearly built from the same basic model. I swapped out some of their big knives for rusty-looking swords (from Mantic skeletons, I think), and added shields and torches from GW and Frostgrave sprues (every band of Witch Hunters needs a man with a burning torch. It's the rules).

I didn't enjoy painting them all that much. For one thing, the details of the models are quite hard to reach and, for another, it's hard to paint models like this without making them look drab. However, I really like the facial expressions of these little guys: a mixture of fury and terror, which seems pretty appropriate for the City of the Damned.

Hubert, Dewbert and Lubert are three low-ranking members of the Brotherhood of the Downcast Mien, a Miserablist sect chiefly noted for celebrating absolutely nothing. They may also now be the highest-ranking members, after a warpstone meteor fell on their abbey while they were out bothering the citizens door-to-door. They have been volunteered to assist with vampire-hunting and similar duties, where their manic fervour is matched only by their incompetence. How could it go wrong?

Next up, I decided to make a flagellant. Flagellants are significantly tougher and stronger than the zealots, and, being mad, won't ever run away. On a whim, I decided to use a 40k arco-flagellant as the basis of the conversion and to de-tech the model into a raging medieval loony.

The body of the plastic arco-flagellant looks like this. It's got a good sense of movement.

I removed the arms and head, and cut and filed off all the sci-fi bits from the model. Then I added some new arms - these actually are from a fantasy flagellant - and a head from a Chaos Daemonette. I really liked the hair streaming out behind the head, and its mad expression. I sculpted the upper part of a dress with green stuff.

Then I used green stuff to make a tattered dress on the lower half of her body. It was difficult to work out how this would hang. I expect that, after a few crazed street battles, it's got somewhat torn. I forgot to take a WIP picture before I painted her with her finished dress.

Here she is:

Sinners to the right

Heretics to the left

And then there's you!

Hildegard von Garterhilde was once a successful tailor. Unfortunately, on seeing the comet strike Mordheim, she instantly went mad. Hildegard began furiously denouncing her fellow-citizens, and was promptly thrown into jail. Filled with wild strength, she broke her chains, killed her guard and escaped with his halberd. She has joined the ranks of the Witch Hunters, who value her furious strength and complete lack of fear - and don't dare tell her to go away.

I think she came out rather well! She does look completely insane, although, owing to me using a daemonette head, she doesn't have much of a nose. Maybe she's run into a lot of walls in her divine fury, or she cut it off to spite the enemies of Sigmar. Who, er, knows? Her base needs a bit of work, but otherwise I'm really happy how this odd miniature ended up, especially given the amount of green stuff involved.