The Shadowspark Foundry

  Today I we're starting on the first Verminlord. This one is going to be a Deceiver. Luckily the modern Verminlords pay strong homage to the classic. The pose is basically reversed, but the elements are mostly the same. The modern kit comes with options for 4 flavors of Verminlord. There's a character option, Skreech Verminking, who is probably closest to the classic in appearance, sporting a glaive and half skull face. There's a caster variant called a Warpseer, who is still pretty similar carrying a glaive and a seeing stone. The Warbringer, which is melee option, and he's still got the glaive, but has bladed gauntlet on the other hand. Then, there is the Pestilens offering, the Corruptor, whose got a pair of reaping hooks. And finally the one I'm replicating here, the Verminlord Deceiver of Clan Eshin. This fellow is armed with a dagger and a throwing star and wears a mask. Those three elements are what we're going to use to sell this classic as a Deceiver: ...

  Skaven, huh? I fell in love with these guys back in 6th edition and I wish I had put an army together back then. The Storm of Chaos was too much for my teenage mind. A frozen city of wolf-god worshipping men? Dark Elves devoted to Slaanesh? A full on Clan Eshin army? I went Middenheim. And I think I almost immediately regretted it. Regardless though, the Skaven models from that era have really stuck with me. So when posed with the question of what was going to be my first army for AoS, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that Skaven was pretty high in the running. Clan Eshin has always been a love of mine, so I was torn when I saw the vintage of the current range. Those late 90s models are total classics, but it would be so cool to see those lads get the modern treatment. I had even put together a whole plan to base my Eshin on the Nighthaunt range, but then it struck me: lean into the nostalgia. All the units are there, I just need characters. After seeing the prices on eBay ...

I think the Skaven were the first Warhammer faction I ever wanted to play. It was probably 2004 and I think I was still in middle school. Maniacal ratmen were totally my thing. But I was a kid with a short attention span. The Storm of Chaos was raging and Games Workshop still had their own forum and the Black Gobbo was a thing. And I had spent all my birthday money on Lord of the Rings figures, so a single Plague Monk command and the Army Book were all I could afford. By the time I had more cash in hand, Middenheim was just too cool, so I jumped into that. I bought everything I needed for a 500pt army, put that all together, painted the first model in the army and fell madly in love with Space Marines. So I bought some 40k models and started on that. But of course my poor, excited teenage self blew all my money on whatever was available at my LFGS and quickly lost interest in that project. My next obsession was Vampire Counts. I bought some zombies, tore apart my Middenlanders and bash...