At the end of July, a post on the In Rust We Trust discord advertised an upcoming Mordheim campaign at The Spire, a small tabletop gaming club in Manhattan. I jumped at the chance; I had never played before, but it seems to be the GW game of choice in the hobby circles I move in, and the aesthetic and lore have always called to me despite paying basically no attention to the Fantasy/AoS/Old World side of things at GW (except noticing which kits have good bashing potential). I scheduled a teaching game with Jack, the campaign's architect, and started thinking about which faction I'd play.
Just kidding, I never considered anything other than skaven. I already have a lot of bits from my rat marines project, so it was the economical option. Their sculpts are extremely characterful and plenty of third party options give a warband a lot of potential variety, so painting them will be fun. Also, they make a perfect thematic fit with the desolate setting and treasure hunting action of Mordheim.
THE WARBAND
The Skaven of Clan Eshin (the sneaky murder clan, and the only one in the original rulebook) have to bring an assassin, with options for few additional heroes, including one Sorcerer, two Black Skaven, and/or two Nightrunners. Initially, I maxed out my list on heroes because I thought they would be more fun to make, but then thought better of it and ditched one of the Black Skaven in favor of more henchmen. I was extremely tempted by the Rat Ogor, as I have two waiting to be painted and they are both incredible sculpts, but at 200 gold each, one would consume 40% of my resources. At that price I'll wait to recruit one further into the campaign. The heroes all got fairly kitted out (instantly knew I wanted to use the weeping blades and warplock pistol) which left me enough dosh to bring four verminkin with clubs, slings, and shields, and four giant rats, who don't get any equipment.
The Giant Rats are resin prints from Knucklebones Miniatures and the Verminkin are Clanrats. For the Nightrunners I used Stormvermin. The assassin is assembled from parts from Manuel Boria and it's probably my favorite of the bunch; it's so menacing and strikes such a powerful silhouette. The Black Skaven is a Frostgrave gnoll body with a pistol and head from the Stormvermin kit. The Sorcerer kitbash with the head, which is from Heroic Scale. Magic often mutates its human wielders into bestial forms, and so I figured the reverse might be true for a skaven, with gradual magical corruption making the Eshin sorcerer more and more human. Except for the horns, but when you worship the Horned Rat what do you expect? I put the head on a robed peasant body, gave him a tail and a hunk of wyrdstone and hung some skulls from his belt for good measure.
In constructing lore for my warband, I ran up against my least favorite thing about the skaven:
"Man-flesh tastes good good! Ruin-death to the man-things!" etc.
No no, this sucks and we're not going to do it. I understand why you'd want an idiosyncratic linguistic feature for anthropomorphized rats, but this just makes them sound like dummies. But skaven can become master martial artists, they practice a religion, and one of their clans is known to conduct highly unethical experimental medicine, so they are at least as smart as humans. I decided to take a different route, that I think still reads as idiosyncratic and characterful without being infantilizing. Here's the inside cover page for the zine I'm making to give opponents during the campaign.
I'm a sucker for religious themes so I decided to use that as the keystone for my warband's lore. Skaven are characterized as self-serving and opportunistic, regarding friends and allies alike as rivals waiting to be betrayed. Nox Greenblade, the assassin leader of the warband, recruits only the most devout skaven, as these are most susceptible to the meddling influence of his Sorcerer. Each warrior is magically instilled with the belief that they have been personally selected for greatness by the Horned Rat, with their comrades cast as supporting characters in the stories of their ascension to the god's worldly instrument. Each would-be champion sees their acts of murder and plunder as more than self-serving; every throat cut and treasure raided is a sacrament.
I'm still working on the formatting body of the zine, which will be the warband roster. After the campaign kickoff one of my henchmen got promoted to a hero and he's getting a new mini, so I need to finish painting him before I shoot the individual models. I'll put the zine in the next post about the campaign kickoff game. In the meantime, here are the front and back covers.
Comments
Post a Comment