About a year ago I decided I was going to convert a Games-Workshop miniature into Trap Jaw from Masters of the Universe.Because I could.
Because I had the power.
At the time I had thought about using him in a dark eldar army. I still had most of my DE stuff from the 3rd edition 40K box and also an unassembled raider and every once in a while I toy with the idea of actually doing something with them. I did most of the conversion work on him, starting with a chaos marauder as a base and then doing some green stuff work on the torso and a zombie head and making the gun arm out of a bunch of stuff from my bitz box. While I worked on Trap Jaw I had an idea of doing a Dark Eldar army with Masters of the Universe villains as the grotesques.
When I packed everything up for the big move to Florida in 2010 he was 80% done but then I kind of forgot about him.
I started thinking about Trap Jaw and the Dark Eldar again again a few months ago when I was trying to think of an army that I could do that would look nice but yet actually have a chance at winning games I used them in. See my conversion heavy, fluffy armies tend to really suck, and I had decided that for once I wanted to actually work on the list first, focusing strictly on playability.
Of course, the first time I broached the subject to people that knew me, I had to allow a moment to pick their jaws up off the floor.
But yeah, after the Eyes of the Medusa army I spent so much time and energy converting came in dead last in the two tournaments I tried to use them in down here and I still have yet to even win a game with the, I really did want to start being able to compete a little, especially in situations where I was in a tournament that had no separate appearance prize I could shoot for. So yes, I broke down and did a couple of things that had always been strictly verboten for me, like putting some thought into the list first before going out and buying models.
Since this has been so far without a doubt the most conversion heavy army I’ve ever attempted to date, at least I don’t feel I’ve sold out in any way.
I knew that I wanted the list to be flexible, so that I experiment with lots of different lists for the army. Since most of the models were going to be 90-100% green stuff sculpting, and were also not going to look anything like any of the models from the Dark Eldar line anyway, I decided to use this to my advantage and make it so that I could use these custom models as any infantry unit type I wanted. I realized I could accomplish this by using green stuff to sculpt scrolls across the bottom of the bases so that I could label what type of unit each model was, then magnetizing the bases and the feet of the models so I could just swap the bases out with bases for different units. I had wanted to do the magnetizing thing anyway, since I always thought it would be cool to be able to actually put the infantry models in the open topped raider transport on the table.
So in early November of last year I dusted off my Trap Jaw conversion, and also converted Beastman out of kroot parts and an ungor head, and started building Faker out of a chaos marauder. I also floated the idea of the army and asked for some list on the Ordo-Ineptus board and asked for some list suggestions. I knew I wanted to do something with hellions because I had always loved the idea of them on their goblin gliders and was so happy when they got a plastic kit with their new codex last year. My friend Bob had been having some luck with his Baron Sathonyx themed lists he had been doing, so I was thinking of going a similar route but was still open to possibilities. At this point the plan was to knock out a couple custom figures a month and by summer I should have the force I wanted. At that point I would build a big Snake Mountain display base for the army and be ready to attend the next big 40K tournament near me!It was around this time that I discovered (or actually Mrs. Carnivean discovered for me in Yahoo groups) a new gaming store that was only twenty minutes from me, called D20 Revolution. I stopped in to check it out and met the owners and found they were going to be starting up a 40K escalation league in December.
I had gotten most of the way through painting Beastman and Trap Jaw at this point, and was bouncing around different ideas for what army I wanted to go with, when I started thinking about what I would need to get the He-Man villains themed Dark Eldar army going. I figured I could probably do it with about 30 converted models, plus the 20 warriors and raider I already had from the box set, a couple more raiders, and some hellions. There were going to be 4 months of the escalation league, with each month being a different point value, starting at 500 and going to 1500 in March. I figured I could probably knock out about 8 models a month if I put the sculpting and converting process into overdrive, and have things all done for the 1500 pt games. I had been getting really excited about the project and figured ‘what the hell’!I decided to name my army the Kabal of the Snake Headed Mountain, to give them a little Dark Eldar flavor with a nod to the source material for the theme I was going with.
At this writing I've got one completely done and painted, another six (including Trap Jaw and Beastman) with some paint on them, six more that are all done but don't have any paint on them yet, nine I'm currently working on sculpting and converting, and another seven I still have to do after that. I resigned myself about a month ago to the fact that they were not going to be painted for most of the games, but in March, once the sculpting is (hopefully) all done, I'll be able to just focus on the painting and maybe have them all done for my last game or two in the league. I've been working like crazy on these, which is why I've been so dormant on the blog, since I haven't even had time to write a post. I'm going to try and catch up now and post some pics of the first couple waves of conversions, which I did take the time to take pictures of the various stages and document what I was doing. More to come!
