Oldhammer Arachnarok

Ti Pouchon

Member
After a first glimpse into the 8th Ed Warhammer rules, I noticed that these days no high-speed gobbo assault is complete without something called an ARACHNAROK - it's a ginormous spider ridden into battle by a whole squad of Forest Goblins on a howdah.
And of course there's a lovely ginormous model kit available for the arachnarok and of course it's all new-fangled and entirely made of plastic.
Not for me, then.
All my Greenskins are 3rd edition minis, the only exception being the utterly lovely Kev Adams sculpts done immediately after 4th Ed dropped. '87-'92 it is. No ginormous spiders available then. Well, there's Mr. Legs, the super-slim, all-legs giant spider mini but
a) I don't have one, b) it's too slender to fit a howdah and c) that thing gives me the willies.

So I went for the giant scorpion mini instead. Might not be a spider but at least it's an arachnid and hey, if my gobbos manage to capture and tame an eight-legged, lethally poisonous and monstrously huge monster crawly, are they supposed to let it go free again simply because it's got some very fine pincer claws? They might be gobbos but they're not dumb.

So I assembled and based the scorpion and then designed a rickety howdah to fit on top.
Since the scorpion is rather, well, flat, I decided to build the howdah a bit larger to make the model more impressive.

Here is a WIP shot:

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It's all made of shashlik sticks glued together - the string is just for looks

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The boards are cut from balsa wood with a jack-knife and no ruler. I did no measurements at all, just play-by-ear and rule-of-thumb like a proper gobbo engineer

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The only precise thing is the cardboard box providing the frame of the little hut. I drew and cut a folding diagram, and then glued more balsa planks all over the outside of the finished box. The supporting wheel was stolen from a dwarf cannon, as befits a proper gobbo engineer

I painted the scorpion and howdah seperately and then glued them together.

After that I painted my crew of gobbos and stuck them all over the thing. Here it is finished:

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Let me know what you think and thanks for watching!
 

portman

Member
That is absolutely fantastic - I love the concept and you've done a superb job of putting it together.

I would scare the crap out of me!
 
That is brilliant!

I loved this line:

Ti Pouchon":3mvm8pfy said:
I did no measurements at all, just play-by-ear and rule-of-thumb like a proper gobbo engineer

:lol:

I'm particularly fond of the banner design.

Is there any kind of restraining mechanism for the stinger, though? How do the goblins avoid being stung?
 

Ketil Trout

Member
This is a great Oldhammer take on an Arachnarok. I love the old scorpion figure and the forest goblin sculpts, lovely painting too.
 

Ti Pouchon

Member
Thanks guys!

The stinger is the weak bit of this model. It's simply too short. it should loom over the scorpion's back but it just gets lost. I've left room in the middle to theoretically allow the stinger to dart forward but the visual impact was so low that I stuck a gretchin serf on after all.
The goblins don't get stung - they've become fast friends with Spidey the scorpion, feeding him juicy Elf meat.
 
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