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Well it happened..I finally broke..It's time to get serious with my vague ideas about a 40K Skaven army. Why Blackhand you say? Why spend all that time and money converting and army that is basically Imperial Guard and will get crushed just as easily as your existing guard army?

Basically I am a masochistic glutton for punishment hence my previous army choices i.e. Tau , Daemonhunters and Guard

But why now of all times to start your ridiculous conversion heavy army Blackhand?

I blame those beautiful new skaven models in the new Island of Blood set, sure I won't be able to use the elves and will have to sell them, sure I can't use the two-piece clanrats as I need left arms to do the weapon conversions and sure that leaves me with like 10 usable models out of the entire box but if any of us glue-sniffing, finger-slicing, plastic addicted gamers had any sense we would be forcing GW to create affordable models, sensible rulesets, regular codexs and provide decent online hobby content....

...but well, thats not the world we live in and I want my little plastic rats!!!

Anyhow onto the actual modelling!

So ever since the last release of skavens made them sooo much better looking, and handily matching their hand size to a guardsaman, I have been itching to convert em to a counts-as Imperial Guard army but I was put off by the amount of models I would need to convert to fill an entire army. Thanks to me building an entire Guard army in the meantime I have realised that there is no need to make 100+ rats with flashlights and that I could get away with a few squads of stormvermin riding chimeras hopefully saving a crapton of time and money, yay!

So here is what I have so far, anyone reading my daemonhunters blog will have seen em but whatever, my new skaven havn't arrived yet from Maelstrom



these are my ratling snipers, I will probably end up with a dozen of these as they are a great way to distract opponents



and this guy is my general for now, and he will probably need a gun swap to a bolt pistol but I am waiting to see what my HQ ends up as.

The biggest conversion job in the army will be the vehicles as they have been a huge motivator for the army to finally get built.

So I love the screaming bell/plague furnace, so skaveny and evil looking and the ruined castle on wheels looks awesome. I really wanted this look to go with the army unfortunately I just could not find a way to attach a screaming bell to a chimera or leman russ that didn't look crap.

So what do you do when the base vehicle doesn't suit the crumbling/ruined masonry you want to mount on it?

You make flying castles!




This is probably the roughest mock-up I have ever done but try to imagine that the rats have excised a hunk of ruins from their ancient evil city, mounted a few chunks of warpstone in the base and floated it out of the ground. After a few run ins with the local guard units they have enough scavenged weapons to mount on the block of floating stone and packed a unit of rats into the tunnels inside the ruins then zoomed off the bring death and mayhem in the name of the horned rat!

This particular one is a counts as chimera FYI, and the weapon mounts will be all brass and copper to match the engineer aesthetic that the skaven have as well as plenty of warpstone chunks and braziers of green flame.

Now I gotta run but I hope this gets you guys thinking as I still have a couple of weeks till my ruins of osgiliath kits arrive and I'm gonna need plenty of help designing these damn things!

Feedback very much appreciated

Cheers

BLACKHAND

Edit - Fluff pasted from post below for clarity

The fluff for the army is that a whole clan of Skaven in the warhammer universe decided to create a portal to wherever they thought the Horned Rat lived and unfortunately teleported themselves and a sphere 100 miles wide with them to a an imperial jungle planet in the 40K universe.
They found that while they could live quite happily in the massive city they had brought with them, after a few days spent on the alien soil they would sicken and eventually die. This wasn't so much of a problem for the rats as they also had the hundreds of miles of underground passages and warpstone mines under the ruined city to live in and were still intent on summoning the Horned Rat.
Unfortunately for them the local imperials weren't so happy with a xenos city appearing on their backyard so they sent in the local guard forces to clean em out.. where despite wiping out hundreds of thousands of the furry critters where eventually overwhelmed, at which point the Warlock Engineers of the skaven had a field day with their weapons and vehicles tearing them to pieces and in some cases actually putting them back together!

Regardless, now the skaven had all these shiny new weapons and needed to put them to use but dammit!, to leave the city would mean suicide and while most of the rats were quite happy to die as long as they went down shooting their awesome new guns the leaders of the clan were looking for a plan with a bit more longevity..and of course they turned to the Warlock Engineers.

According to skaven logic, or what stands in for logic, if you can't leave the city to commit genocide, take the city with you! And so the Warlock's blasted out chunks of the city, crammed them with warpstone generators and backward engineered Grav field nodes, piled on the shiny new weapons they had stripped of the tin cans the humans rode in and rode to war!

Well blackhand your insane, thats cool cause sanity is for the weak right?

Anyway flying tanks which are castles...nice but I think you should use Cities of death kits just becaue they are GRIMDARK *insert evil laugh here* and can be combined with each other while the ruins of Osgilath are not as versitle IMO. also there is only one Osgilath ruins kit while there are several different CoD kits.

wasn't that rat a marbo count as before? I think you should leave him/it/she(?) as marbo and just create a commander from the new kits.

Those snipers are looking pretty awesome BLACKHAND, liking the rifles alot.

Good old crazy BLACKHAND. Your ideas keep getting better.

This is a great concept but it may almost work better to loot a tank combining it with Doom Wheel bits and maybe the Warp Lightning cannon........

@commisar Agro - Damn straight sanity is for the weak!!
The reasons i am using Ruins of Osgiliath Vs cities of death is that the match the masonry arch on the screaming bell much better and so when people see them and skaven together it won't be so jarring.
Plus the fluff for the army is that a whole clan of Skaven in the warhammer universe decided to create a portal to wherever they thought the Horned Rat lived and unfortunately teleported themselves and a sphere 100 miles wide with them to a an imperial jungle planet in the 40K universe.
They found that while they could live quite happily in the massive city they had brought with them, after a few days spent on the alien soil they would sicken and eventually die. This wasn't so much of a problem for the rats as they also had the hundreds of miles of underground passages and warpstone mines under the ruined city to live in and were still intent on summoning the Horned Rat.
Unfortunately for them the local imperials weren't so happy with a xenos city appearing on their backyard so they sent in the local guard forces to clean em out.. where despite wiping out hundreds of thousands of the furry critters where eventually overwhelmed, at which point the Warlock Engineers of the skaven had a field day with their weapons and vehicles tearing them to pieces and in some cases actually putting them back together!

Regardless, now the skaven had all these shiny new weapons and needed to put them to use but dammit!, to leave the city would mean suicide and while most of the rats were quite happy to die as long as they went down shooting their awesome new guns the leaders of the clan were looking for a plan with a bit more longevity..and of course they turned to the Warlock Engineers.

According to skaven logic, or what stands in for logic, if you can't leave the city to commit genocide, take the city with you! And so the Warlock's blasted out chunks of the city, crammed them with warpstone generators and backward engineered Grav field nodes, piled on the shiny new weapons they had stripped of the tin cans the humans rode in and rode to war!

Oh and about the Marbo stand in, I played with him in a tournament and found I didn't do too well with him The model may end up as a Stracken counts as since I will have 4 rat ogryn in the army and I reckon that 4 ogryn and stracken may be a fun little unit.

@hobofishamn - Thanks, this is one of those instances where a neat model met neat rules to make a s*&t hot unit

@tim the biovore - Thank you, I believe I am getting crazier in my old age.

@Llamahead - Read the above answer to Agro as to why I want to keep the castle imagery, and I think I will be using predominantly IG weapons so that it is easier when playing against random people at my club. I will have to think of something to do with the Doom Wheel though.....


Cheers

BLACKHAND

Nice to see someone else uniting the universes!! (I am too...)

How will you do this? You mention Ratlings...so are you using the guard codex...would be exceedingly cool if you used a Skaven rule system as your base...

You might want to get some Necromunda (am I allowed to say that GW? AM I!!!!???) Ratskins...as well as the caller...maybe as human slaves or worshipers? And then there is the Caller...also from Necromunda. Also...things like this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Warhammer-Necromunda-Skavvy-Rat-/310236955943?cmd=ViewItem&pt=UK_Toys_Wargames_RL&hash=item483b904527

Anyway! As you can tell I am excited! Subscribed!

Great to have you here Manoknok!

The plan is to use the skaven figs with lasguns and special weapons and run them as Imperial Guard, the flying ruins will all be chimeras, leman russ and hopefully in one case a Stormlord

I want o keep them as codex counts as so that I can play them at my local club which pretty much sticks to codex only armies.

Ok, now with fluff it makes sense, I guess if anything can make sense in the grimdark future...

I can't wait to see how this insanity works out!

Ah...I see. Cool at least it gets them out and about!

I guess you could use something like Ratskins as Penal? RatOgres as Ogryns....

Rat ogres are already ordered, they will have a ripper guns made from grenade launchers and ork shootas,

Clanrast will stand in as normal guardsmen

Stormvermin will be carapace armoured vets

Warlocks will be counts as psykers

I will also try and convert the skaven two man weapon teams to heavy weapon squads

Sentinels wil basically be floating towers tron off the side of buildings with lasgun poking out.

Valkyrie/vendettas will be buildings that float higher and have their weapons on the underside rather than the sides and tops

umm..theres more but I forget

Sounds awesome! Looking forward to seeing it develop!

Looking good, will be following this thread closely, i love the idea as well

Hey Blackhand...

Thought you might find this interesting...

http://www.coolminiornot.com/article/aid/216

Manoknok

Love to see what you can do with a Screaming Bell or Doomwheel...

Excellent, you can count on me following this closely, keep it up you've grabbed my interest.

Steve

Thanks for all the comments guys!

@manoknok - Thanks, I've seen the marine rats before. I'm not sure about them as they lose a lot of ther skaven-ness, the ragged cloth , spiked armour and hunched over posture but as one of the very few people who have tried this it still interesting to see his interpretation of 40k rats.

@P4NC4K3 - At the moment I am intending on using the screaming bell for a leman russ with a Commander Pask "coutns as", the horned preist hanging onto the bell and pointing seems like a cool tank commander to me, not sure how I will use the plague furnace parts...

I hope to have some pics up tonight of the master models for my hatches and turrets, I will be casting them in resin so that I have the same look over all the vehicles I plan on building

Cheers

BLACKHAND

Hey Blackhand,

Yes your right...not very skaveny...but one of the few things out there thats in the 'space rat' area...ish.


M

Ok so I have a few pics of the masters I have been working on in while waiting for my models to arrive from maelstrom.

first up is the master copy of my hatch design



Basically a space marine hatch on a piece of christmas decoration glued to the base of a paint pot. Not too detailed yet as I will be casting it, the final versions will have ladder rungs from the leman russ kit as handles.

next is a very early design for my chimera turret.



I will be adding plating where the gun emerges from the hemisphere but I may decide whether I am going with multilasers as the main chimera weapon in my army first. I have always found them to be pretty handy and skaven don't really suit flamers in my mind.

And last is a hull gun,



I'm not too happy with this yet as it provides too much movement for a hull gun but is not good enough for a sponson gun. I will probably end up going with something more angular with lots of plating and rivets.

Well thats as far as I have gotten due to Real Life sapping my will to model but I figure once the minis arrive I will be moving along at a better pace

C&C welcome


Cheers

BLACKHAND

Eager to see more. Love the concept.

Subscribed! I like this idea.

Love it Blackhand... excited about watching this project get "off the ground". (pun intended).

Fly-fly.Kill-kill. Get the man-thing's warp-sticks. Fly-fly.Kill-kill.

Have been fascinated with the idea of 40k skaven since my first RTB-01 marine set and made a couple up with the plastic skaven heads they had at the time. That and the seeming references to them in some of the old fluff. Still plan to do something more with them than the ratling snipers I've been hoarding bits for for my eventual Hell Legion, but in the meantime I'll just kick back and watch what you come up with


edited for punctuation

Lol, I am still trying to decide on the way that 40K skaven will speak in my fluff, I want to keep away from the Ork-speak but I still want the average rat trooper to sound pretty feral and uneducated. The Warlocks and warlords will definitely curse a lot at their subordinates, you know "mangy pus-filled mold eaters" and the like. I amy have to use the "kill-kill-kill" for the rank and file troops as a marching song though

I would have them talk exactly like Skaven in WHFB, since that's where they're coming from innit?

That would be logical, and there for out of the question!

Very cool! I'll be watching...

Ok so we have some minor progress!

I have managed to cast the hatch successfully and have a working prototype for the sponsons which will hopefully work as both the front hull guns on a chimera and the side sponsons on a leman russ.

I have hit a major snag as I am not happy with the effect I am getting on my ruined stone! I initially thought I could carve the stone out of styrofoam then lay on a s"skin" of plaster of paris to cover the bubble look of sliced styrofoam...needless to say it looks crap and is way to time-intensive to be practical, dang.
After a PM to terraformer for a bit of help I thought I could move to denser urethane foam that has no bubbles due to how it is produced and will carve and sand better. But after a week of ringing and googling I have discovered that in NZ this type of foam is ridiculously expensive.

Seriously. A sheet 2.50m x 1.40m x .05m is $450 BEFORE freight!!!

But did I despair! hell no! I asked around and managed to get a 2 foot square piece of styrofoam from a fireplace store that is far denser than normal and has very small bubbles and after a nights work I think I will be able to use it, woot!

I have also made a start on some custom bases for my stormvermin, they will be cobbles, flagstones and ruins to match with the ruined castles and I will be casting them in resin to make enough, this is much slower going then I ever thought it would be and is using up a LOT of GS but in a week or so I should be ready to make my first mold.

In other news my maelstrom order has been split up as GW didn't send all of my order to them :( Which means my rat ogres will arrive soon but the rest of my bits are still weeks away....gutted.

Why am I telling you all this and not posting any pictures I here you say? Why would you do this BLACKHAND why?

I genuinely intended to post pics but my camera battery is flat...honestly!

SO I will get to taking pics tomorrow and will give you all a look at where I am up to in what is turning out to be the slowest PM blog I have ever done

Cheers,

BLACKHAND

subscribed.

You really need to make this happening man! I'm already impressed by the jumping guy with the bolt pistol. And the Storm Vermin with those Kroot guns, that's really neat! I will follow this.