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Saturday, March 10, 2012

Hive Fleet Moloch: A Killer Team

UPDATE: Marco Schulze/Hive Fleet Moloch lives again! You can not follow his work on his Hive Fleet Moloch Instagram profile!

As I mentioned in my previous post about the diabolical mind behind Hive Fleet Moloch, Marco was always into the creepy story behind the Tyranids. He communicated this in how he chose to photograph his Nids, but he also paid particular attention to their posing and basing. Nowhere is this fact more apparent than with the Crimson Stalkers of Tenebra Prime: a Tyranid Kill Team that Marco put together shortly following the release of the new plastic Genestealers in fourth edition.

(If you've not heard of Kill Team, it is a simplified rules set that Games Workshop introduced some time in...4th? Edition. It is some times referred to as 40K in 40 minutes as it used smaller, more characterful forces for skirmish-sized games. It was loved by gamers, so much so that there is a fan-made ruleset entitled "Killzone" that can be downloaded for free and is, IIRC, updated to be able to play in 5th Edition.)

Once again, I've been limited in what I can post by the fact that I mined most of these photos using the Way Back Machine as HiveFleetMoloch.com is currently offline and being occupied by cyber squatters. That being said, I was able to find a goodly number of photos.

So, I present to you, The Crimson Stalkers of Tenebra Prime:



This creepy player was meant to be a kind of psychic, Mini Lictor, extracting vital information from an Imperial Official:

Next are two gaunts sporting special weapons and are good inspiration for anyone looking to outfit their gaunts with Spikerifles or Stranglewebs.

The first carries a Spike Rifle and bio-targetter:

...and the second, of which I have only one photo, carries a Strangleweb:
I really love his eye-less, mandibled design :)

A kill team isn't a kill team with out some sneak-y, kill-y Genestealers, and I haven't seen any sneakier than these:





There needs to be a little bit of wound padding in a successful Kill Team, and in the Moloch kill team, this role is taken up by some John-Woo-style, splinter-pistol-totting, running-and-gunning gaunts:



There was a final mutant gaunt that rounded out the group, packing a beefy pair of envenomed rending claws, but, unfortunately, the only photo I could find of him (other than the group shot above) was the following:

I've got one more installment in my Hive Fleet Moloch series, and it is destined to be the biggest of the bunch: an article of godzilla proportions, if you will ;)

Here's a preview:

4 comments:

  1. Just found your Moloch articles, thanks for posting these, my life has been emptier ever since the Moloch website went down. Still like all good swarms I'm sure it's just amassing biomass so it can make a triumphal return!

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  2. :)

    Glad to hear it and glad you found the articles. I put them up because they needed to live on somewhere findable. This is not the idea home for them, though, and I have been in talks with Moloch to get them a better home.

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  3. So I haven't been entirely introduced to what these are from but are these made to be bought or simply for collection of the one who made them?

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    1. These were all conversions by Moloch to represent a Tyranid Kill Team from the first time the Kill Team rules came around. They were made for his collection, and I think they were once features in White Dwarf.

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