Raid Spoils: Coven Clawed Fiend and Urghul

I'm a member over on the All-Dark-Eldar message board, the Dark City, and every christmas they run a Christmas Raid. It's kind of like Secret Santa for the Dark Kin: each participant pledges to give a model-related gift of $20 value or more, and each participant makes a request for something they'd like in their army.

When I drew my "victim" for the raid, he had requested Clawed Fiends or Coven stuff, so I thought this was the perfect excuse to complete my proof of concept model for a feral Grotesque to represent a Clawed Fiend in an all-coven force. As I detailed in my previous post, I used a Vargheist/Crypt Horror as a basis for it, added in some Talos bits and a Nagash spine, some Greenstuff, and—BOOM—Grotesque Fiend:

Coven Wyches Conversions - Nurses

I take this whole making a coven version of every unit in the codex thing seriously.

What's more, I'm not a fan of just slapping a tentacle or a atrophied talos arm on something and calling it a coven unit. For that reason, I still think I could have done better with the following unit of wyches. However, I'm not a huge fan of Wyches, particularly now that they've been depowered, so I figured I should just get this unit done with and move on.

Figuring Out Paint Schemes

When trying to decide on a paint scheme for my coven force, I knew that I wanted one that would be pretty light, almost white, because I wanted there to be lots of contrast when I elected to splash them up with some blood.

I wasn't really sure how I was going to do it until I cracked open the Haemonculus Covens books and spotted the following:

It was the colour scheme for the Hex, and it was PERFECT.

Coven Mandrakes

Well, with it being Halloween and all, I thought I'd share something particularly horrific from my work on my coven: Mandrakes!

Once I'd found a suitably horrific solution for the Cronos, I had the itch to replicate this hideous treatment for Cronos parasites in other places in my army. I see the Cronos as kind of vacuums/generator for the whole coven. They are black holes into which souls/spirits pour, and they store the energy for the coven. I wanted them to have a pretty central role in the coven, so, if one gets destroyed, there needs to be a fresh supply of replacements.

Enter the idea of including nascent parasites, which are being groomed and grown to one day assume their roles as full-fledged engines. When looking for a role that I could rep with a baby Cronos, the Mandrake was the most obvious ones for me, particularly now that they seem to be stealth DEATH machines with the new 'dex.

It Will Not Die (The Return of Flesh Friday)