Last time I posted about my Evil/Chaos Warband I mentioned the next unit for it would hopefully be some cultists.
Units of religious zealots spreading the word of the Dark Gods through murderous deeds has always been a favourite concept of mine in fantasy worlds.
No self respecting evil horde of chaotic crusaders would be complete without a set of crazed lunatics chanting unholy prayers and bludgeoning anyone in their way.
I’ve blogged before about an old Regiment of Renown set called the Disciples of the Red Redemption. This set and the fluff written for it in 1985 finally stirred some great game ideas for me 30 years later.
My modern version of this regiment based on the Ral Partha Chaos Monk model is on my project list along with the Avenging Knights of the Cleansing Flame using Mantic Basileans. I don’t really plan to incorporate these Monks into my Evil/Chaos Warband though.
For the Warband I wanted something a bit different from just the Chaos Marauders and Warriors (infantry and cavalry) that are the mainstay of GW Mortal Chaos armies at the moment.
Searching the internet for inspiration I came across this blog post:-
https://xenite.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/chaos-cultists-work-in-progress/
These models pretty much summed up how I wanted my Cultists of Chaos to look. To be honest even before seeing these I’d considered using the Empire Flagellants as a basis. I dismissed it because the models didn’t look particularly conversion friendly. As proved above all the extras (hairy heads, Sigmar scrolls, burning braziers, figures walking in stocks, etc) are just additional pieces that are glued onto the main robed figure.
The other problem I noted was the rather chunky looking flails that come with the Flagellants, some with symbols of Sigmar. The only option I could think of was replacing these with the flails from the Chaos Marauder set. On pulling these from the box to examine them they were pretty awful too – which explained why I hadn’t use them for my standard Marauders unit. The overly muscular arms of the Marauder flails wouldn’t really have worked either with the smaller Empire Flagellant bodies.
Using twisted wire to replace the clunky chains and adding some 3mm metal beads as flail heads solved that.
Rather than rag masks I wanted my figures to have heads with a shaved and tattooed look. Each Empire Flagellant box only has a total of 4 bald heads so I needed to find more.
The closest in the Marauder infantry box is the shaved head with a top knot. This can be cut off leaving a bald pate. That supplied a few heads.
Searching my bits box for extras I only found 1 more suitable head from a GW zombie so I set about buying a set of 12 bald Sci Fi heads made by Scibor off of eBay.
This became a saga in itself when they went missing in the post, but they finally arrived 3 weeks later than planned, in the same postal delivery as the replacements…
Some of the Scibor heads are a bit large but I really didn’t want to wait any longer to finish these or have to purchase more figures just to use the heads. In the future I might replace these with some Mantic Ghoul heads if they start to bother me.
I’ve obviously gone for the ubiquitous colour scheme of maniacal despots, evil priests and Dark Gods everywhere – red and black.
The musician has a horn from the Marauders Cavalry regiment and the arm with the morning star was originally a Marauders infantry axe arm.
More Marauder bits were used on the standard bearer, the standard (with added bells from the Flagellant set) and an axe arm converted into a mace. I’ll paint something suitable on the standard at a later date.
In a nod towards The Disciples of the Red Redemption and Darkhoth’s ‘Darkhold’ (a transcript of the original scriptive book of Khorne discovered by Eroneus Balbadron) I decided I wanted to make use of the books in the Empire Flagellant set for the leader.
I used one of the hands from the head in stocks piece so he could hold the book above his head.