Belomor

Continuing with the ancients, here we go with the second liche. This one is a model from Frostgrave - I found it when I was looking through their range, looking for something fitting to incorporate in the Zombie Legion. With his pointy hat/helmet and ragged robes, he was perfect as another liche - I didn't have to think long about buying him! The painting scheme is the typical one for wights/liches - and while Mertvet was interesting because of how much fabrics he had on him, this one has just the right amount of clothes, bones and metal parts and I think he turned out pretty well.

The second one of Daremnych's lieutenants was Belomor - an eager Varsavian priest that tried to convert some chaos tribes to his indigenous beliefs. He was found and saved by the Great Priest just when he was about to be sacrificed by the barbarians. After that, he quickly took faith in the Death God, the one that spared him after his old gods ignored his pleas. Soon enough he proved to be one of the most fervent members of the cult - spreading the faith however he could, by force if necessary. He was also known for always maintaining a kind, fatherly attitude, even while burning the villagers one by one to make an example for the rest. Killed during one of such spectacles and only now raised, he wants to show the unbelievers that he went too soft on them the last time.

And now I can show Daremnych with both of his lieutenants/disciples together. Now my wights have some magical support!

Zombie Legion - Varsavian Warriors

Part of the Zombie Legion. You can see the WIP post with the unpainted conversions HERE.

When I was in the last stages of gathering zombies for the legion, I came up to a point where I just didn't have enough bodies to fill all the bases. I have already bought all the GW sets that I found useful for that so I had to look for something else, possibly a big set of plastic infantry. Mantic didn't have anything interesting (and I really dislike their zombies) but then I remembered that there are some cool sets for Frostgrave! Cultists from that game could fit perfectly with my creepy cultists, but they weren't selling them in my shop - so I got Barbarians instead. Those guys looking as they do, it was an obvious choice to turn them into some kind of pre-Christian Slavic warriors. I mixed them a bit with some chaos marauder bits, added pointy helmets and some mustaches - and they were ready to go. Well, that and zombifying them too. I almost regretted zombifying them, because they could be also a very cool unit as living warriors.

The most obvious choice when painting them was to go with white clothes with red patterns on the edges - a combination that still lives in the Slavic folklore. But that would make them too uniform - and I wanted them to represent not one coherent unit, but various warriors took from various villages. So I added some dark and light browns, together with black + yellow patterns scheme that I use on my wights - they are supposed to be their descendants after all. Adding all that variation to them made them a bit too chaotic in my opinion, though. Still, they are in an even more messy mass of zombies, so they do their job fine.

Varsavia is officially a part of Kislev and its soldiers are defending its borders, but the people deep in the forests live on their own, following the old ways. There are many dozens of holds and villages scattered across the land, each one with their own chieftains, warriors and beliefs. Their technology is not as advanced as that of Kislev, but they are a hardy folk with marauder blood flowing in their veins with perfect knowledge of forest warfare - and they managed to survive all the years in this dangerous part of the Old World using only that. Their numerous clashes - some of them instigated by the vampires themselves, to keep the herd from uniting - are a fertile source of good bodies that can be raised and used in undead armies.

And again as separate warriors:

Zombie Legion - Bretonnian Peasants

Part of the Zombie Legion

My another collection that is still waiting to be finished are the Bretonnians. I got into that army because I really wanted to design and paint all kinds of different heraldic symbols, creating a big, happy, colorful mess. Then I moved to collect undead - a pursuit that proved to be much interesting in the long run - but my love for those dirty peasant and shiny knights remained still. So when I had to get some more bodies for the horde, buying some men-at-arms was a perfect solution. With their big shields, they were also a perfect occasion to paint some coat-of-arms. Every single one of those emblems is taken from a chart I prepared long time ago when I was planning my collection of knights. This will make for a nice connection between two armies when/if I'll get to paint the Bretonnians someday...

I hoped that they would bring some color into the horde, but I severely overestimated them in that regard - they make only about 5% of the whole horde - so they don't change that much. If I was to turn back time and do it once again, I would buy more peasants. But I am not doing that and they'll have to do as they are. That's good too because I was running out of ideas how to make them into interesting zombies that would also look bretonnian enough.

Zombies drawn from Bretonnian peasant levies are a common sight in the horde - ever since the conflict with the knights from a long time ago. Their colorful uniforms bring some variation to the undead mass - and that’s about the only thing that makes them useful - malnourished peasants from Bretonnia make bad soldiers even when alive. Still, Constantin likes to collect their coat-of-arms not only as a grim memento of past battles, but also to mock the hated knights that keep trying to hunt the vampires down.

And pictures of the single zombies from that unit:

Zombie Legion - Trolls

Part of the Zombie Legion

Another batch of zombies - trolls this time.

The one in the middle was sculpted and painted much earlier than the other two - in July 2016 to be precise. I wanted to have a zombie troll in my army, but I didn't have much troll parts other than some arms and heads from the GW River Trolls set - so I had to work with exactly that. Besides those two arms, the top half of the head, the ribcage and the branches - it's all sculpted. Back then it was probably my biggest sculpting project - thankfully decaying zombies are pretty forgiving and it was easy enough. You can see the pictures of it unpainted HERE. While I was at it, I added branches and some fungi on it to make it a Forest Troll - which fits my theme pretty nicely.

Other two are recent stuff. One on the left is an Undead Troll from Reaper Miniatures and I gave it a big nose and much larger ears to make it resemble a Stone Troll from the WFB universe. The one on the right is a Zombie Snow Troll from Frostgrave and it isn't converted at all. Both of them are metal and pretty heavy - bases needed more magnets than usual to make them stick to the tray. You can see them unpainted HERE.

Many kinds of trolls can be found in Varsavia. Local ones take characteristics from their environment and are easily recognizable by branches, moss or bark covering their bodies. Orcish incursions can bring stone and river trolls, and roaming black trolls always come down from the mountains in search of food here. Vampires need to deal with them rather regularly. Thankfully, despite their regenerative abilities, they can still be killed and raised as zombies - and they rot much slower too! Their stupidity legendary, they are also probably the only creatures in the world that get actually smarter after becoming mindless undead.

Zombie Legion - WIP #10 - Varsavian Warriors

Early in November 2017, when I had to wait for some Milliput to cure, I took a box I bought lately and started putting it together - that was Frostgrave Barbarians. I thought that with some light converting I'll be able to make them look vaguely Slavic as an alternative to kislevites in my zombie horde - just as pre-Christian Slavs are to polish commonwealth nobles. It's a nice set, by the way, the quality is good and the options are varied.

Here you can see the whole 20-man unit ready to be based and sprayed.

Zombie Legion - WIP #9

Even more zombies - I managed to build yet another two units. That was the end of October 2017. Here is how that new messy rabble looked like:

And now for some highlights of that part. First, the spiders. Because who said that only vertebrates can become zombies? Only something had to be done about those static and monopose models. Shame that they were so hard to work with - it was quite difficult to cut the legs away from the body - I did that with a red-hot scalpel, really testing its heat resistance. Setting them up in new positions also required lots of pinning. Good that I didn't have to do so many of them - three here, with one more coming up later. They will be a great occasion to try doing stringy gore out of glue and paint.

Here are some single miniatures, two made out of 40K chaos cultists and one elf. One in the middle is supposed to be a victim of an alleged Viking execution method called the blood eagle.

The tree of the dead. An idea I had for quite a long time - it came to me when I noticed how many of those cage bits I had laying around. It was also good to use that 'hanged zombie' as intended for a change. Aptly, yet another creepy cultist is overlooking it.

And last ones of this part, more trolls to accompany the one I did earlier. The first one, an Undead Troll from Reaper Miniatures got refaced a bit to resemble a classic WFB Stone Trolls - because I really like them. The second one is from Frostgrave and it was nice and undead enough to not need any conversions - and that's rare in this project.