Necropolis Ascended Undead

I recently read the rules for Necropolis for the first time, and was inspired by its grim vision of a dark fantasy world of undead. I love rules for building a warband, so I dug into Necropolis's versatile list of undead characters and was inspired to build a hulking Ascended Undead. In fact the enthusiasm for making something really grim and gribbly caught me, and I bashed this monstrosity together over the course of about two consecutive days. More photos and WIP below the jump...

 

One of the leader options for a Necropolis warband is an "Ascended Undead", which is suggested to be a behemoth version of one of the game's three undead types: blood, bone, or spirit (roughly zombies, skeletons and ghosts respectively, although that's underselling how much the game encourages you to get freaky with any of these concepts). This Ascended Undead takes after the blood element, as a huge animate mass of carrion and tangled hair.

 

To begin with, I knew I wanted a big model, and had an idea for a rough shape: something that sprouted up from its legs and then presented a heavy, hunched shape with an obvious facing front. I wanted it to look like a mass of combined elements that nevertheless had a single controlling mind (and not, say a tormented mass of souls like one of Dark Souls' many excellent "lots of undead stuck together" bosses).

This is the sort of conversion I would classify as a bitz box raid. I started off with a few seed elements: the mass of bodies and sea detritus from the Mega Gargant's "fishing net", and the matted shoulder pelt that turns the Mega Gargant set into King Brodd. I sang the praises of the Mega Gargant kit's usefulness for characterful spare bits in my last post, and I'll do it again today. Check eBay to see if anyone's getting rid of their spares.

With these very large seed parts I roughly built the top half of the model - the hunched back and front.

The other half of the model's front is the Wight King's billowing cloak. On my own version of the model I replaced that with some Nighthaunt rags, because I didn't like the way it looked like stretched green stuff. However it works very well as a hollow skin! The pink bit at the "head" is a rib cage cut from the bent tree trunk that the Orruk giant vulture perches on. It was tough to choose whether to give this monster a real human "head", but any particular head skewed the design in an extreme direction (too sad, too edgy, too obvious, and so on). I like that the ribcage suggests a head just enough. There's plenty of skulls, human or animal, scattered around the model, any of which might contain sentience.

Above is a WIP before adding milliput and texture paint. A few entire Nighthaunt bodies went into making its rags. Underneath it all are a pair of zombie legs (it has four legs in total) all though they're hard to see. The base is from the Skaven leader on a big rat beast, and looks like broken ground with a swirling vortex inside.

 

At the back, I even used some scenery pieces - some of the scattered beast bones and spines from the Warcry Realm of Beasts scenery sets. Also a lot of spare skeleton bits. The long fur pelt from the Gargant is cut up and arranged so it trails all the way to the ground.

Another view of the back

Painting was in a mix of black and warm browns and yellows. This restrained pallette means that the few pure greys and warm browns in the mix really pop out as if they were blue and pink (the ribcage is painted in Vallejo Saddle Brown, for instance). Once the base colours were down, the secret ingredient was a huge amount of Vallejo Thick Mud (Russian Mud colour). This is a technical textured paint I've used for basing before. Here it helps fill in many of the gaps between elements and adds visual weight to the shape. While it was wet, I selectively applied light dust pigments.

I'm thinking of expanding this into a warband (Necropolis has a nice low model count), so expect some more undead abominations some time in the future. Sometimes it's nice to knuckle down and make something really grim and dank!

Hek