Time for some pix again.

A while ago, I decided that it was time to try out an idea that was demonstrated to me over at the Forum of Doom. The idea was to take some heads from Pig Iron Kolony Inner Guard and put them onto Grymn bodies. The miniatures that I saw had converted weapons as well as head swaps but I didn't want to go that far because I knew I would be building an army...so all of the basic miniatures would have the standard weapons that the Grymn came with.

Once I had bought some heads, I looked through my extensive, unpainted, Grymn collection and decided that I would just grab a handful of differently armed troops to convert. By doing this, I would keep things interesting and that would help the task of army building. After clipping off some heads and pinning on new ones, I found that there was a bit of 'unsightliness' behind the neck so I sculpted little humps to cover things up...once this was done, the tunnel fighters were born.

Here is a pic of the first four conversions and they show a variety of troops:


Once I had the basic conversion pattern worked out I just continued working through my unpainted Grymn until I ran out of miniatures. At that point, I thought it would be a good idea to group them into squads. With what I had already painted, the best squad size was 9 so I worked towards arranging the troops into their requisite squad sizes. Each standard squad would have 7 troops armed with their basic weapon (including the squad leader) and 2 with special or heavy weapons.

After buying all of the missing troops, I ended up with 6 squads of 9 troops in each. There were 2 squads with pistols, mini-guns and grenade launchers, 1 squad with shotguns and flame-throwers and 3 squads with pulse-guns and heavy pulse-guns. Obviously, I needed to sort out an army commander and his command squad so I thought about how to make him different...I ended up giving him a coat:


It was at this point, I went to Salute; the UK's biggest war-gaming extravaganza. While at Salute, I found two things of great interest to me. First, I found some 'spider droids' from Ground Zero Games which I thought would make great little robots for communications duties. I bought enough of them to add 1 to each squad (rounding each squad up to 10 models)...here are a couple of examples:


I also found some 'Mini-Mawes' from Hasslefree Miniatures and immediately thought that they would make good sniffer/guard animals for some Grymn to delve into tunnels with. They came with integral bases so it took a little work to base them with their handlers. I ended up hollowing out some resin bases, gluing the miniatures into the hollow and then filling the gaps with Green Stuff. Here are the finished scouts:


Now that I had a fairly substantial army building up, I thought about a bit of support for them. I didn't think tanks would be appropriate for the army because they are tunnel fighters so I had to think a bit harder. It then occurred to me that I had the perfect solution in the form of some mechs that I had bought for another project. Fortunately, I had a few spare so they were quickly pressed into service. The mechs are from the now extinct Warzone range and are Vulkan Battlesuits from the Bauhaus faction. They just needed a small conversion to the head area and they were good to go. Here is one of the squads:


It was at this point I started thinking about where I was going with the army. I had a lot of infantry, a command squad, some scouts and some support...the next thing to do was get a picture to see what it all looked like together:


After looking at the army I thought that it would be nice to add a few more squads of basic infantry so the plan is to add another 4 squads armed with pulse-guns and heavy pulse-guns to round the infantry total up to 100. That would give me a total of 12 squads (including the scouts). I also started thinking about transport options and have decided to scratch-build my own...all 12 of them! In the future, once I have finished the extra troops and all of the transports, I may add a few extra command elements and maybe some sort of tank-destroyers but I will have to think about what sort of heavy weapons would be suitable for fighting in tunnels...

So that is how my little army is going and I thought it would be nice to try to explain how I went about building it. At no point in time have I thought of attaching it to any sort of rule-set, I have just gone with what seemed right at the time...however, with a small amount of tweaking, I reckon it would fit in with most rule-sets available for mass battles.

...and to think, all this came about as a result of seeing Sagunt's converted, steam-punk Grymn over at the Forum of Doom:


From little acorns and all that...