War Beasts? More Beasts!

"It's like the four elements, right. You've heard of the four elements? Except here there's only three elements. And those three elements are - Metal, Lightning, and Smashing Things!"

Today we have three more builds for the troll warbeast stable - the Slag Troll, Storm Troll, and the newest heavy option, the Dire Troll Mauler Brawler. Let's dig right in.

Those Elemental Troll Nights

"The three trolls came back home, but they did not know how to find the best opportunity for showing their skill, so they sat down and consulted together."
 
When presented with the first three light beasts of the elemental persuasion, I was afforded several opportunities to break with the usual muted color scheme I'd been going for. This meant using some different painting strategies than normal, and my first foray into literal model fire.

We Three Brothers.. Always Fight Together!

A raging inferno isn't something you put inside you. It's already there! Sometimes you just need someone to help you ignite it!

The pyre troll conversion is another one from the archives.  Along with the Mauler, Axer and Impaler, it was one of the first builds I did since, at the time (in the second half of Warmachine mk2) it was a completely indispensable piece for trollbloods.  Shortly thereafter I added the Swamp Troll and the brand-new Night Troll to the battlegroup selections as well.

Hungry Beyond Mortal Ken

"No recognised school had animated this terrible creature, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone."

If ever there was truly a flagship model to this army, it would be Mulg. Our crack team of scientific experts have already proven Mulg's potent position of palpable primacy, and we persist to placate your plaintive pleas for a paintjob with plenty of panache.¹

To that end, I present this exposé on what was, in all seriousness, a solid weekend of painting and something I always love to drop on the table to strike terror into the hearts of heavy warjacks.

Old Beyond Mortal Reckoning

1. a Mulg at rest will tend to remain at rest, unless it is acted upon by an outside Food.
2. once compelled to motion, Mulg will remain in motion. 
   Deal With It.
3. when Mulg's body exerts a force on a second body, it dies.

Everybody knows that Mulg is the best.¹  He's got the most toothsome backstory, the meatiest big fists, and the writers give him all the wittiest one-liners.  He's a perpetual fan favorite, a cross-genre break-out character, and the troll softball team's MVP and Home Run Derby winner ten years running.

Labyrinth II: Still Lost

Nor did the creature keep him waiting, but struck suddenly and started in; he grabbed and mauled a man on his bench, bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body utterly lifeless, eaten up hand and foot.

As we have mentioned before, gentle readers, the troll light warbeasts in this project have been replaced with custom made minotaurs. These products of my esteemed colleague's skillful hand presented numerous opportunities to bring  several distinct looks to models that might have otherwise faded into a unified, and ultimately boring, color palette. However, creatures so adept at defying gravity and conventional physics should have similarly distinctive paint jobs.

Center of the Labyrinth

The monsters stirred, those demons, those fiends - who haunted the moors, the wild marshes, and made their home in a hell. Not Hell but hell-on-earth. Spawned in that slime of Caen, murderous creatures banished by the Creator, punished forever for the crimes of their abhorrent Sire.

An early acquisition for the project was a pair of mark II plastic Trollblood battlegroup boxes.  Getting two of them wasn't originally in the plans, but as the old saying goes, "No plan survives contact with a 30% off sale at the hobby shop".  So we ended up with two each of Madrak1 (one of whom would be eventually be the base of a Madrak2 conversion) and the Troll Axer, and a hefty four Troll Impalers... all solid little beasts, albeit rarely taken in those quantities in Hordes.

Mauler: Red and Green

"Oh! Are you hungry?" she asked, turning to the Troll, who was just then yawning so widely that he displayed two rows of terrible teeth and a mouth big enough to startle anyone. "Dreadfully hungry," answered the Mauler, snapping his jaws together with a fierce click. "Then why don't you eat something?" she asked. "It's no use," said the Mauler sadly. "I've tried that, but I always get hungry again."  

 

As suggested by my colleague colleague, the first warbeast I wanted to tackle was the Dire Troll Mauler. It offered me the chance to get into summa dat good exposed troll flesh and work on building up some techniques for painting large amounts of beast, muscle tissue, and different textures when compared to the infantry. Aside from that, painting a warbeast is always a genuine pleasure since they can  each quickly become a centerpiece for forces of small to medium sizes.

Gotta Maul 'Em All

"Urcaen has no rage, to match the shaman's zeal.
Nor Hell a fury, like a dire troll 'fore a meal."

The Dire Troll Mauler wasn't the first warbeast conversion I did for this project, but it was easily the most extensively modified of the first batch of models.  I wanted to build one of these for Jack early on, because in addition to being a relatively simple model for a new player to get a handle on, it also ends up being a cornerstone of a lot of lists as you start playing larger games.