Chaos Gets My Goat

As I'm sure both of my readers are aware, I've been slowly working my way through some very old metal miniatures in an attempt to create a Chaos army for Warhammer: The Old World which is reminiscent of those that originally appeared in the Realms of Chaos books, specifically The Lost and the Damned.

Having worked my way through Chaos Thugs, assorted Barbarians and mutated Chaos Dwarfs, I've now turned my attention to my limited assortment of Beastmen.

Astute observers will no doubt be somewhat confused as not only do Beastmen not appear in the Chaos army list, they also have their own entire army list.

Does this mean I'm engaging in some allied shenanigans?

No. I only have six Beastmen and I'll be adding them to my Chaos Marauders in an attempt to bing even more mutated variety into the unit.

I think I've said before that I really didn't like how as the concept of 'Chaos' developed, it became less and less chaotic in both aesthetics and army design.

The models I've painted actually come from three different generations of Beastmen, and, to some extent, chart the development of the concept.

First up is this sculpt from 1987, apparently called Asmos, that was later branded as a Beastman of Slaanesh at points. There's nothing that screams Slaanesh about this model, although I'd suggest that the straight horns were similar to some of the later sculpts for the God of Pleasure's servants.

This is from the 'anything goes' era of Chaos and so the model lacks the traditional cloven hooves, perhaps it's more a goatlike mutant of the 'Bray' than a typical Beastman Gor.

There seems to have been a veritable herd of Beastmen being released at the start of 3rd edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles, and so these three, along with many others, showed up in 1988.

Although they lack names (other than Mace 1, Mace 2 and Morning Star) they are part of a range sculpted by Bob Olley that have a definite look that suffered than what else was being released. They are chunkier than the earlier models and lean into the goatman look that Beastmen came to embrace.

Finally we jump to 1994 and these two Beastmen who seem much more slender and upright, with more prominent horns. These sculpts demonstrate how Beastmen had become much more uniform in appearance. Something that would only increase with the move into plastic.

The shields aren't original, but do suit them well.

I do actually have one other Beastman in my possession, but hest unfortunately a Khorngor. I could look past the doglike appearance as just another mutation, but I can't bring myself to file down the rune of Khorne on his warhammer.

And here they are with the rest of the Marauders, forming a slavering horde of 21 models. I still need to add a standard bearer and musician (which will require a little conversion work) and I also have a mind to create a unit filler to really bulk things out.

I personally think this is a massive improvement on the frankly awful plastic offerings that were recently re-released, and seeing them together is giving me impetus to get on with this project.

Once I've finished this unit, I'm going to treat myself with a character model of some kind.

Acquired: -79

Painted: 385

Lead Mountain: 386