The title is a bit misleading, as there's nothing wrong with Daemonspew really, I've just personally never been a huge fan of his sculpt. The Maggoth is awesome, but the rider has always left me a bit wanting. I also really like the idea of making my own, unique Maggoth Lord, so with that in mind Orghotts went under the hobby knife!
Like I said, there's nothing inherently wrong with Orghotts' sculpt, it all comes down to personal taste. For me though, there are two main things that I'm not a fan of. First off, his pose seems very docile. He's just kind of holding his axes off to the side not doing anything. I'm also not a huge fan of his axes, but that may have been fixed if he was doing something more with them. Secondly, I really don't like his face. The idea of the horn growing out the side is cool, but the human side of his face looks like he has no clue what's going on. He doesn't look like a warlord who's in the midst of a battle. He just looks kind of lost and befuddled.
With those thoughts in mind, I left his Maggoth untouched, because that is an awesome model! The only thing I did was use the gut from Morbidex's Maggoth because I like the sagging intestines more than the second mouth.
For the rider, I wanted to make someone who is unique and I can craft into my own general of my army. At first I played around with using Orghott's torso with new arms and a new head, but I wanted him to look distinctly different. I had recently finished assembling two Pusgoyle Blightlords, so I had a spare Lord of Afflictions body. Clipping off Orghotts' gut plate made the Afflictions torso almost a perfect fit! I even considered just assembling the Lord of Afflictions as is and sticking him on Orghotts' legs, but decided I wanted to change it up even more. This mostly came from that fact that I hope to include an actual Lord of Afflictions in my army at some point and will probably just use the stock model.
Since I will be using Orghotts' rules in the game I knew he needed an axe. Like I said earlier though, I really don't like his axe, so I raided my bits box. I found the axe head and the hand holding the longer pole from the Blightkings box and glued those two together. I then angled the hand a bit, and used the arm from the Lord of Afflictions, but glued it on at a new angle to get the pointing position I wanted. The Blightkings box is amazing for Nurgle bits since you get so many extra pieces in it. I then glued on a sheathed sword on his other side.
For the left arm I played around with the idea of a shield, but decided I wanted to evoke imagery of one of my favorite Lord of the Rings baddies, Gothmog. I cut the left arm off of Bloab and trimmed it until it fit. This looked like a great bloated and limp arm. I then found a spare shoulder pad, and a cool helmet with some antlers and he was done!
Or so I thought. After letting it sit over night I looked at it again in the morning with fresh eyes and decided parts of it just didn't work. I tore off the left arm because it wasn't sitting flat enough against the body. To fix this I took off the sheathed sword and re-glued on the arm. I also decided to replace the shoulder pad for the arm with something a bit smaller. There was a bit of a gap on the front of the arm, so instead of having to worry about sculpting something there later, I just filled the space with a severed head hanging from his shoulder pad.
The next thing to change was the head. It just wasn't working, so I went with another one that actually fit onto the neck even better. This was actually my second choice head before I even glued on the first one. Without the antlers though I felt he looked a little plain. To remedy this I glued some horns, donated from spare bits from other Nurgle kits, onto his back to mimic the ones that the Maggoth has. This gives him some height and adds something of interest to his back.
The last change was his axe. It just wasn't big enough. Luckily I had plenty of spare axes, including another one of the same kind. I cut off it's blade and glued it onto the other side of the axe. This made it much more imposing, and also helps reflect the rules a bit more since Orghotts has two axes. Since I only have one, at least it has two blades!
Now that everything was glued together I just needed to do a bit of sculpting to blend it all together. This included extending his flabby skin sticking out from under his torso armor to blend it into the legs. I also need to add some flabby skin in the armpit on the right arm and that same wrist. Nurgle can be fairly forgiving to sculpt and this definitely helped as they was all rather round and amorphous shapes.
Besides that I just needed to do some gap filling and blending of parts, such as the second axe head, around the horns on his back, and where the left arm meets the armor that's not covered by the shoulder pad. On the Maggoth it was just a bunch of gap filling as I wanted everything to be nice and smooth.
With that my Maggoth Lord is ready to lead my forces to battle using Orghotts rules! I still need to name him and give him a bit of backstory, and of course paint him. I know in the battletome it says that they believe that only the three Maggoth Lords had been given Maggoths, but clearly that historian didn't know about my lesser known Maggoth Lord.
I left the tongue off (which is why it's not in these pictures), and also left the rider unattached to the Maggoth. This way I can paint him in easier subassemblies. Each can also be sprayed a different color when I prime them to speed up the painting.
I've always loved the overall look of these guys, and had intended to build Bloab back in the day (which is what I originally bought this kit for about two years ago). I'm really happy that I have my own unique leader now though. I may still add Bloab in at some point in the future, as he's my favorite sculpt of the three Lords.
Until next time,
Tyler M.
No comments:
Post a Comment