Hello everyone!
It has been a quite a while since I have posted anything about my
Death Guard project but I have always been keeping a very close eye on everything Forgeworld releases on Horus Heresy. I have therefore decided to change this by completing a project I had in mind for some time now, making a squad of Grave Warden Terminators.
When I initially started creating my Death Guard army, Forgeworld had just released their Mk2 and 4 armor sets, along with some other cool stuff like the Contemptor Dreadnough. At that time there was no army list available to play these miniatures so I had decided on creating an army based on the Space Marines codex. That said, many things had to be changed so as to be compatible with the Space Marines Army list, and one thing that I really wanted to create was a Terminator squad. At that time I really liked playing with Assault Terminators with Thunder Hammers and therefore the result was something like this...
I had converted some old plastic Terminators using bits from various companies (Chapterhouse studios and MaxMini to name a few, check out my original post
here )
This was the original state of the models before the conversion.
That was a long time ago. A lot of things have changed since then, Forgeworld has released 3 Horus Heresy books and boy, did the options available have changed too! There was no longer any need for Thunder Hammer Assault terminators in my army, so I have decided to make a (not so small after all) change of the models to something completely different, Grave Wardens.
For those of you not familiar with the unit, Grave Wardens are a Death Guard specialist Terminator squad armed with grenade launcers and a variety of toxic warfare weapons. More on their fluff can be found
here. Foegeworld has released a set of very nice models that you can see
here . I have decided though to spare me the money and go for a conversion of the already available models I had.
This was the look I was going for converting my own Terminators.
The models have a great feral look with fur pelts and chains hanging from beneath the shoulderpads and this is what I wanted to achieve. I used greenstuff and some chain bits from the Flaggelants sprue and I think the result came out nicely. The combination of the great MaxMini shoulderpads and the fur pelts and chains give a nice result. Next step was to make the torso look a bit beefier and I had the right way to do so.
A good friend an fellow moddeler had given me one of his spare bass guitar strings (he is a very talented bass guitar player among other things) quite a long time ago and this was the perfect oppprtunity to use it.
Another thing that I had to take care was the back of the models. Their fluff wants their equipment to be toxic and Forgeworld's models have canisters of phosphus and other toxic warfare ammunition on their backs. I used a variety of bits for that fron cadian flamers to grey knights weaponry.
The other big conversion on the models was the weapons. Grave Wardens' main armament is a specially designed grenade launcher. I created this by using Cadian grenade launchers and terminator assault cannons with the cannon chopped off. The heavy flamer is an old school Terminator heavy flamer and the sergeant has a combi flamer made from a really old Warzone gun and a hand flamer.
Lastly the final touch would be the Death Cloud projectors on the top. This was a rather easy addition, just using bits of plastic rod.
I must say that I really like how these came out. I managed to make some models I would never use, useful again, incorporating some very nice bits from third party manufacturers. I would love to hear what you think as I am prepping these for the painting table.
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