GOLD for Hive Fleet Angrboda in AoP 2023

Though I wasn't able to get my display board finished in time for the international deadline for the online edition of Armies on Parade (honestly, GW, why shift the deadline from end of November to BEGINNING of November???), I DID manage to get it done in time for our local Games Workshop Toronto's Armies on Parade Day (though it was a near thing!).

Catching the Bug: Quick and Dirty Mycetic Spores

After playing a game of 40k for the first time in what feels like a billion years at the Ajax GW 40K 25th Anniversary, I've kind of gotten bitten by a bug to get back to my bugs with the end goal of actually getting them on the table and playing some games with them. That has meant some stripping and some basing...

...but mostly I have been wishing I had some actual mycetic spore models to put on the table. Though I've got fully sculpting and possibly casting my own spores on the back burner, based on the original design I came up with for the Casavant Prime board, I wanted something that could be done quicker to stand in in the interim.

I had some of my cast Tyranid Barricades lying around that I wasn't using, so I propped them up on some extra insulation foam, covered over them with some Apoxie sculpt to make it look like ploughed-up dirt, and VOILA!

The Infestation of Casavant Prime

To build up some content on the site, I'm going to be posting a few of my past projects that were kind of like milestones in my development as a sculptor. I'll call them "Old Strains," and you can feel free to check them out if you're curious.



With my budding work on Tyranid Scenery from scratch coming along, I was asked by some friends in Toronto to breathe some Tyranid life into their table build for Games Day Toronto 2008. These guys had been bringing original tables to Games Day for a couple of years, and the previous year their extensive trenchwork table had been beaten out by a PC speaker and a smoke machine. This year they were determined to bring the pain to their long-time table nemeses.

The meat and bones of the table were actually constructed by the original build team and took the form of a cityscape with a canal running down the center, and me, Accommodator, and our creative ilk were given free reign to add some flare to the cityscape by transforming it into one that was in the beginning stages of a full-blown Tyranid infestation. I jumped at the opportunity to have a focus for my until-now-largely-aimless Tyranid scenery building.

Mycetic Spores

One of the biggest chips out of my shoulder when it comes to Tyranid design is the way that the concept for Mycetic Spores/Tyranid Drop Pods has been mailed-in ever since it first came about with the Tyranid Seeding Swarm list back in White Dwarf and Chapter Approved 2004. Bitchy or not, I have never seen a model for a mycetic spore that I could love, and that's mostly because they all wind up looking like the same, bloated, rugby-ball-/coconut-inspired Tyranid fleshbags. Space Marines get these sexy, tapered drop pods that open up like flowers of death upon impact. Tyranids get exploding fleshbags.

Not. Cool.

It was with this niggling annoyance in mind that I set out to come up with an aerodynamic, lithe, distinctly Tyranid-looking design for a mycetic spore.