Now that I'm generally happy with the look of a standard hybrid/broodbrother for the cult, I've been tinkering with more plastic to construct some more bestial hybrids. These will carry special or heavy weapons in the various units. I'm leaning towards using the Astra Militarum book as a guide to unit construction, but I'm not really big on loads of tanks, so the jury is still out. The Militarum Tempestus book looked promising, but the f@$k*%g thing is sold out.
The fellow above uses a Deadzone plague model as the base. (Many thanks to Paul from the excellent sho3box blog for some great leads on parts for the hybrids.) His original head is teeny tiny, which is great as the mask fits on lovely in it's place. He's so deformed that it looks suitably grotesque. The third arm is verging on too large, but I'll be chopping it up to pose it better anyway. I still need some proper weapons, I guess the Cadian Imperial guard kit will furnish those, I can use the arms on my metal hybrids as well I guess. I have some dark eldar talos sprues coming my way, which are loaded with biomechanical goodies. Seeing as this is an infected mechanicus cult, they should fit in great. Tubes, limbs, odd spinal augmentations, this kit has them all. I think that should then finish the main quest for parts, and the assembly can really kick off. I'm already looking forward to converting crypt horrors into oversized mechanically augmented hybrids.
This army looks set to be another visual treat (and correspondingly massive workload). It will be fun to cheer from the sidelines, even more so because the Adeptus Mechanicus are one of my very favourite elements of of 40K.
ReplyDeleteThe clawed arm may be a fraction on the large size L suppose, but if thats the off-the-peg length of that component then I would would be inclined to use it that way to save many hours of repetitive arm-shortening work later. You are more of a perfectionist than I am though :)
I tend to see the hybridisation process as more uniform than the higgledy piggeldy mutations usually seen on a 40K table, but your vision of it might be different. I would get a kick out of being able to tell at a glance which generation a hybrid is, just because they simply look like that generation always looks like, if you get what I mean.
Do you have a colour scheme worked out for these guys? WIll the stealers elements be the classic blue/purple and the AdMech predominantly red? Im very interested to see how you plan a scheme for a big project like this.
Thanks Paul, I can see I'm setting myself up for another epic convertathon.
DeleteYeah, the claw arm is too big for sure. It'll certainly be shortened, and indeed I may reposition it at the elbow. I'm equally keen to see the various generations by glance, but having said that, I'm not too upset about mixing them in one unit. The guy in the foreground would be 1st gen, the guy at the back 3rd. I think it'll make for more characterful units with earlier generations carrying the heavy weapons. Harder to reconcile will be the larger ogre sized hybrids. Maybe some mechanicum augmentation to 1st gens or something.
Colour scheme is a big one. I don't think I'll be going classic colours on this one. I think pale faintly purple tinged skin, and possibly black for the carapace. I've been looking at shiny beetle exoskeletons and the contrast would be nice with the skin, but I'm a long way from deciding a final scheme. Red cloth would be required too, and I'm looking at Dune for ideas too.
Justifying ogre sized hybrids as Skitarii is easy. Skitarii/Tech Guard vary depending on the scientific school that their Magos/Forge World etc favours. Even in official canon (recent Dan Abnett works) many are biologically rather than solely bionically enhanced:
Deletehttp://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Skitarii#.U1kiiehX-uY
So 'roided up hybrids are fully in keeping with the the bio-science side of things, canonically speaking. I have a heap of cyberdised, non-hybridised beefcakes lined up for my eventual AdMech.
I agree about including red in the scheme: without the red its that bid harder to identify them as AdMech, rather than common or garden robed cyborg mutant cultists. I also agree that making the traditional 'stealer purple/blue would be hard to get to work.
Lots of agreement then :)
*I also agree that making the traditional 'stealer purple/blue work with red would be hard*
DeleteMaking the skin tone on the hybrids almost grey will make it nicely neutral. The red will want to dominate, so the colour of the carapace on the hybrids is pretty crucial. I'll need to pick a spot colour, yellow or turquoise I'm thinking.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link! Seems I have some reading to do. There looks to be a mechanicus army list in the Horus Heresy series, I might draw from that for structure too.