Something new, something old, something painted, something bald

Some of you may know that I'm a huge genestealer cult fan. I've been collecting genestealers since first edition Space Hulk 1989, and the cult since the hybrids came out right after that. The plastic hybrids released in a Space Hulk expansion where damn awful, but the original metals were really, really nice.

Ahhh... pure Jes Goodwin purestrain Goodness... (get the pun?)

However, Genestealers have been treated very unfairly. Originally a sort of "Aliens"/"Invasion of the body snatchers" type of adversary it was very fearful in it's own right, but with the introduction of the Tyranids into the 40k Universe Genestealers were relegated to some kind of vanguard/infiltrating unit, and the cult itself vanished into the mists of forgetfullness.

Except for a small bunch of fans that kept the dream true, partly via such groups as the Father's Hall on facebook, to companies as Macrocosm doing their version of the cult, called the Malignancy. Personally I snapped up all the lovely plastic genestealer models that were released, even buying a metal Broodlord (everyone knows it's really a Patriarch), waiting for the glorious return of the cult of the Four-armed Emperor.



After about a gazillion long years Games Workshop released the boardgame Deathwatch: Overkill -- which my gaming group immediately started to make up names like Deathkill Overwatch and Killdeath Deathkill for. If you somehow have missed it it's brilliant! The game is rubbish of course, but it contains 52 Genestealer cult miniatures! Oh, and some spess murines forming some sort of lethal league, deadly team, hazardous horde, or whatever.

So I immediately bought it, assembled all the miniatures, and then did nothing. Just like I always did. But now I've started to paint some a little bit, and I've dug out the old metals too.

Two Aberrants from the new game. They are not finished yet of course

I'm not satisfied with the right chap's back. I tried to do it more purplish with a little bit of contrast, but failed. 

The game features a new kind of hybrid called an aberrant. I guess it's where the DNA mix isn't that successful. Big brutish models. The proper hybrids harken back to the old concepts by Jes Goodwin but are lovingly 3D renderd in plastic taking advantage of all the technological knowledge GW has regarding plastics. In short, they are beautiful and feels like classics. The old metal hybrids were a bit chunkier and cartoony, the limits of what you could sculpt manually really shows here. They were not helped by using the same plastic arms as the first Imperial Guard figures.

Nice sculpts, not really suitable arms though.

Still they are nice models and with some new arms they would not look out of place. So said and done I ordered Chaos Renegade Militia Arms from Forgeworld. Applying them to the hybrids took some cutting, swearing and green stuff, but in the end it came out good.

The arms fit well, style-wise at least.

The quality of Forgeworld is rapidly approaching Failcast quality. In fact, I think it IS failcast now.

The old sculpt has a bigger head and wider shoulders, but other than that it's pretty darn close. 

I also tried out a color scheme for my hybrids. I wanted the clothes to reflect workers or miners -- since that's what they were before the got infected -- so I chose dark grey for the ribbed padded parts, as well as the collar around the head. The pants and shirt was painted pale green but I chose to paint the cloth around the arm and hanging from the belt a rich purple to into the Purestrain colours.

No way finished yet, but already looking very menacing and alien.

I gave the skin a purple wash to put further emphasis on the alien ancestry. Only some details remain to be painted and of course, the gun. I won't paint the eyes however, they are too small for me to really bother.

I have a second set of Watchkill Overdeath genestealers, courtesy of Håkan, yet to be assembled. Rumours abound that GW is releasing something genestealery soon, let's hope it's a proper codex.