Kill It With Fire!

I'm still building up to the Battle of Marshport, the third scenario from the Lurkers From The Deep feature pack for 7TV. Completing the heroic cast required the addition of a Flamethrower, and the the villains needed me to conjure up one of the defining Lovecraftian eldritch horrors: a Shoggoth.

The Flamethrower team are Warlord Games metal models I picked up from eBay. I'm never massively impressed by Warlord's metal models, as I find them a bit spindly and awkward when compared with their plastics and other ranges like Crusader Miniatures and Artizan Designs.

However, they came in a pack of two, and I couldn't actually find any other US Army flamethrowers available that I liked better.

Painting was done exactly like the rest of the GIs but I found them faster and more enjoyable to paint. It could just be a numbers thing, but I do prefer painting metal to multi-part plastics. It could also be simply the fact that they are both kneeling and so there was proportionately less to do.

Anyway, my heroic cast for scenario 3 is complete and I definitely have a tine US Bolt Action force now, because Flamethrowers, according to Bolt Action gamers, were used in every engagement in World War II - often mounted in Jeeps and sent barrelling forwards towards the enemy.

"a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor,"

- H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The formless horror that is the Shoggoth is one of the most iconic creatures in H.P. Lovecraft's work, possibly only behind the Deep Ones and the Big C himself in notoriety.

Although there are many companies that make excellent interpretations of the creature (including Crooked Dice), the whole 'formless' bit gave me an idea of how I could make one myself.

Hot glue.

My Shoggoth is simply hot glue squirted straight from the gun onto a resin base I had lying around and allowed to dry. Most illustrations of Shoggoths feature eyes, maws and tentacles which are simply some chaos bits (Screamer eyes and tendrils, Pink Horror mouths) I had left over pressed into the glue before it dried.

Painting is just a coat of Emperor's Children with a Baal Red wash and the details picked out. Shoggoths tend not to be depicted as pink, but I wanted mine to match other similar monstrosities I've done in the past as my Lost Faculty of Cryptobiology and Pseudoscience cast.

Overall, I'm really pleased with how this turned out and I'm not considering using similar techniques to make some Chaos Spawn for 40k using more leftover Daemon bits. Unfortunately, it doesn't count towards the Lead Mountain as I never considered the bits box as part of the problem.

Acquired: 71
Painted: 178
Lead Mountain: 493