Beasts of Chaos Ungors

 

I'm picking up a project I started last year - some truly wretched Beasts of Chaos. The goal was always to make two ten-strong units of Ungors with accompanying heroes and a Herdstone. This month I'm working on finishing that second Ungor unit, with a few extra curveball conversions. Plenty more pictures and a deep dive into the process below the jump...

The base kit for the Ungors has been the Goblintown Goblins from Games Workshop's Hobbit range. A truly grotesque set of models that is deservedly well loved in the Inq28 / Blanchitsu community. They're monopiece models, which I cut into bits and padded out with parts from other kits.

One of the Ungors is an apparently normal goat. I like the idea of mixing "normal" looking wild beasts in with the low-level Ungors to suggest they're a rabble of uncanny animals. The goat is from the newish plastic Gloomspite Trolls - meant to be carried over a Troll's shoulder as a tasty snack. I cut away most of the Troll's arm, leaving a lump that used to be a shoulder, but is now disguised as a rock that the goat is dragging itself over. Trying to think of a way to justify the awkward pose, I decided to go full Satanic horror and have the goat disemboweling itself on the rock (courtesy of some sculpted entrails). Instantly turning it from a normal goat (OK that's already kind of scary) into a horrific harbinger of dark omen.

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The faun in the tree is based on Odilon Redon's drawing of Caliban. Redon made some beautiful horror images, many of them I came across looking for inspiration for this project. Redon's Caliban has a peaceful, eerie quiet to it that I tried to replicate as closely as possible here.

"Caliban on a Branch" by Odilon Redon, 1881

Throughout this project I've been thinking of the concept of "Sylvan dread"and the incorporation of Pan into Gothic and Folk horror (exemplified in Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan").

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The Standard Bearer was all finished last year except for his standard. The other Ungor unit has a Chaos Star that looks like it's grown naturally from a branch. I couldn't come up with anything for this one until I remembered the stick structures from Karl Edward Wagner's story "Sticks" (which inspired the same structures in the Blair Witch Project). I snipped some thin wire into sections and roughly glued them into a messy lattice of dry sticks. The excess superglue conveniently blobbed together into something like mud. Finished, after almost a year!

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As with the champion for the other Ungor unit, this one uses the lower half of an actual Ungor sculpt (the older plastic kit) to make him taller and more obiously Satyr like. His head is also crudely scratch sculpted, with the idea that it looks like a messy silhouette with white eyes peering out. Trying to avoid giving any of them any "real" weapons, I armed him with a branching stick taken from some Idoneth coral. I shudder to think how he might kill an opponent with it...

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Finally, I wanted to make something on an oval cavalry base. I considered making an Ungor with an enlarged arm, or weird head that would fill the space. That made me think of the mythical Catoblepas - an animal said to have a head so heavy it couldn't lift it (that was probably in reality a normal wildebeest or gnu that an unfamiliar natural philosopher got excited about). For this, I constructed a downward pointing body using goblin legs, Dire Wolf legs, a Raptoryx body and other scraps. I scratch sculpted the head over an Orc''s Boar's head. This left the head a little narrower than I liked, but my attempts to pad it out resulted in a nice hollowness around the eyes that reminded me of a T-Rex, which seemed like a really cool and unusual flavour to bring into the mix. I'm not counting this as an Ungor - the obvious thing would be to run it as a Warhound - but I'm treating this as a jumping off point to just make up more weird Beasts that don't necessarily have official rules.

I plan to round out this Ungor unit to a full 10 models to match the first unit. I also have plans for some more foul beasts to accompany them!