Introduction
Warhammer: The Old World was released almost two years ago now and would have provided the perfect opportunity to dust off my old Chaos army (and that is Chaos, not x of Chaos thank you very much!) were I not still playing 6th edition on a semi-regular basis. Although when I did I was always thinking of 5th edition Warhammer and the 4th edition army book.
My collection is vast and eclectic. I started playing in 1994, I think just after 5th edition fantasy dropped and that followed on from spending the previous year harassing my parents to buy me some Blood Bowl figures. I had no idea what that was but it sounded awesome and I wanted some. The gentleman that ran the long-closed-down KC’s Games, advised my parents that I would probably get on better with Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000, and thus began a lifelong obsession.
As a consequence I have a Sorcerer on a Palanquin of Nurgle from the 80s marching shoulder to shoulder with Chaos Forsaken from the 2010s and more of the original Chaos Spawn from the mid-90s than I will ever need to field (But one day I will field them all hahahaha)
I converted two chaos lords for my army, one is pretty simple. I ripped Egrimm Van Horstmann off Boudros and put the chaos lord from the manticore on it with a tentacled-chaos-spawn-head, and that is pretty cool! But people complain endlessly about Chaos Dragon riders so I never get to use him. I will paint him at some point but its not a priority.
My other, and, arguably more dangerous Chaos Lord is based on a Putrid Blight King model mounted on a hand-sculpted chaos spawn (I think I’ve lost the WIP-pics now but I’ll see if I can find them, if not it’s a good excuse to show off some rudimentary sculpting in a later post).
But I want something truly, exceptionally unique.
As I’ve been playing around with Blender more and more over the years, as well as programs like Nomad Sculpt, when I’m not breaking out the Green Stuff and Milliput and sculpting by hand, it seems very natural that I would now turn to these tools to create the kickass general of my fever-dreams!
Gathering Image References
As tempting as it is to jump right into Blender, or start building armatures, really I needed to take a step back and have a think about what, and who I am going to create. Open ended projects nearly always end in disaster, there needs to be some sort of guide. Parameters within which we will do magic!
Our first job then, is to grab a cup of coffee and start looking at pictures on the internet!
I use Pureref to collect pictures I can refer back to, there is a free tier and you can download it from https://www.pureref.com/download.php but there are loads of different options for keeping your reference material organised. I have in the past used pinterest, and back before Made with Mischief was unfairly taken from me, I used to that a lot. It had an infinite canvas!!! Before all that I used to just keep a folder on my computer. There’s no wrong way to do it.
Turn Obvious Ideas into Unique Inspiration
So my first mistake here was just searching for “Warhammer Nurgle” But that didn’t turn up anything particularly useful, as nearly all of the returned results can be bought off the shelf at Games Workshop.
So I took a step back, grabbed a pen and paper and did some brain storming! My army is Nurgle-themed (obvs) and Nurgle is the Chaos God of sickness, death (but also life), hopelessness, despair etc. Grandfather Nurgle is also a jolly, paternal god that cares for its followers, the mutations it inflicts on them are gifts, it takes pride in its worshipper’s (It’s children) to endure, and get’s violently protective of them.
All of these are really good, thematic search terms that we can use. But not necessarily directly, I’ll get to that later.
In addition to the Chaos God that the army is themed around, we need to consider the Warriors of Chaos army more generally. In the good old days (The better days!) chaos was presented, at least on the tabletop, as being made of renegade humans and other fantasy people from the other Warhammer factions.
Renegades from these factions would venture to the Chaos Wastes fighting monsters and other potential chaos champions on the way until they got to the Realm of Chaos and became Chaos Warriors, very much the Evil Black Knight archetype.
Later editions would ground Chaos with it’s own human faction, the Marauders which are predominantly based on “cinematic” depictions of Vikings, but Mongol-like Chaos Marauders are referenced too.
This gives us an army that looks like spiky Vikings (or sometimes Mongols) in plate armour, so in addition to the above concepts of death, disease, etc. We now have Vikings and Knights. These can also be broken down into sub-categories, or expanded upon to include semi-related archetypes, but this is enough for now.
Finding Inspiration Without Exploitation
As mentioned above, some of the aspects of the Chaos God Nurgle are death, and disease. It would be a simple thing then to go straight into google and start looking for photos of corpses and sick people. If you’re treating this journal like a tutorial and following along I am urging you not to do that.
Firstly, these photos are of real people. Even if you get an AI to generate a new image, it is likely to be taking a lot of influence from photos scraped from the net and there is a real danger, if you copy it too closely, that someone is going to see their sick or deceased loved one in your miniature and be really sad. On top of that its also a bit psychopathic so for the love of the Lord Jesus don’t do that.
An example of the above is Bioshock where the creators used photographs of burn victims and people who had suffered botched plastic surgery on the models for the enemies, which is in incredibly poor taste, its hurtful to anyone who recognises themselves or their kin, and it is also puerile. Don’t do it.
Secondly, you don’t really need to do that. Nurgle is a supernatural creature and his plagues are not real plagues they are supernatural manifestations of the Concepts that feed it. There is a whole world of folklore, myths and legends we can turn to, and that is what I did!
Designing a Character
So I had by now a whole mess of concepts and archetypes written down, interspersed with a list of books I wanted to read and films I wanted to watch (I didn’t get round to those sadly).
The key thing now is to take all of that and refine it into a handful of photos that we can use to start sketching out our reference image. By now I already had a clear idea of what I was sculpting. But I needed to think about who I was sculpting.
For me one of the things that stood out was that Nurgle is a jolly creature, that is in some descriptions oblivious to the suffering it causes rather than uncaring. I really liked that idea and I could already envisage a jolly champion of Nurgle roaming the out of the way places of The Old World with its warband, oblivious to the fact they are horrific mutants twisted into monsters by dark gods.
I also think the Black Knight archetype is important to Warriors of Chaos, but in keeping with our jolly and oblivious champion we can totally invert that. What if this Chaos Lord believed that It was the noble, virtuous one, or better yet what if it was virtuous?
What if this noble, but addled knight kept riding to the rescue of beleaguered Empire and Bretonnian citizens, only to have to fight his way to freedom as the poor deluded peasant, obviously traumatised by their ordeals turn on their saviour? This presented a fantastic opportunity to bring back some of the old school humour from the 80s and 90s. It doesn’t all need to be grimdark all of the time.
Thus Gaillard the Grotesque (or Gallant to his mind) was born. A Bretonnion Questing Knight whose adventures took him and his companions from one end of The Old World to the other, righting wrongs, championing the downtrodden. Most likely attrition claimed most of the companion with famine and disease the rest, perhaps lost, cold and starving in the Chaos Wastes they gave themselves to Nurgle in desperation or perhaps by accident. Maybe they accepted help from the wrong marauder tribe.
I will Iron out the details later. For now, I have enough to begin sketching Gaillard. If you want to use my canvas to follow along or do your own thing you can download it below!