Against the METAL Horde!

 

As I have said before, I am big on Heroquest. Here's an interesting snippet from White Dwarf showing metal prototype ogres for the Ogre Horde supplement. Now, it is certain as can be that these models cannot be obtained... though you can always hope, but they do, to my eye, bear a very strong resemblance to the Marauder MB12 Giant Ogres which came out around the same time. A coincidence? Neither Trish Carden (or Mauaruder) nor Bob Naismith (who oversaw the Heroquest plastics development) remember any link between the two, but let's do a comparison courtesy of Stoffofdemons...

Those head styles, short legs and weapon options look very close. Even with the other Ogre Horde plastics whose metal prototypes (if there ever were any) aren't shown here. The construction of the model is also very, very similar. I'd be amazed if the two weren't linked in any way.

Anyhow, it gave me enough of a jumping off point to try and do metal (or at least mostly, not plastic anyhow!) Ogre Horde models using MB12 Giant Ogre bits. It took about 6 months of tapping up contacts to get an assortment of bits to start, even getting short legs isn't easy... people seem to have preferred the long one (I can see why!)/ Then I set about sculpting new heads, adapting the available bodies into the pop-buttoned jerkins of the Ogre Horde models and modifying arms to be at the wider position. I feel like I managed to pull off the characters fairly accurately to the four Ogre Horde sculpts.

I then made up some more ogres from the remaining bits in order to give the full compliment to the horde.

Against the METAL Horde!

Questing Heroes

 

Last summer I was given a very special gift- a set of the original prototype heroes from Heroquest. Now, these guys bear only a passing resemblance to the eventual plastics and their story is to be found here, although the actual details remain a mystery. I'd already secured the barbarian, but converted him to have furry boots so this set gave me a chance to have both variants.

The chaos warrior I was not much of a fan of so he found a new home, and the other knight was donated to a friend's Bretonnian collection. Anyhow, they were nice models to paint and a cool addition to my Heroquest collection.

Questing Heroes

Undead artillery

 

For the Big Orange Book table recreation I am putting on at BOYL this year I require 5 skeleton bolt throwers and crew. I don't actually know what these bolt throwers are, I guess they could be historical? In any case I wasn't going to spend ages tracking them down when Alternative Armies produce a perfectly serviceable undead bolt thrower, and have just released a bunch of skeletons which work perfectly as crew. 

I built balsa wood stands for them and bent the bow arms to make them look a bit more similar to those in the picture. There's a nice lot of skully detail on these but I decided to just base coat and wash them to give the dark, nondescript look in the original photo.

The Alternative Armies weapon pack designed to go with the skeletons with open hands includes a bunch of spears. These work quite nicely in size and shape as a supply of fresh bolts.

Whilst I was at it I made this 'enhanced' skull chucker. The free see no, hear no, speak no skellies AA were giving away a few months ago all made me think they were going "oh no!" so I wanted to use them for something suitably dramatic. The idea being that the fourth crewman has been a bit close whilst the gun fires and has rather gone to pieces as a result. It's not quite as I imagined, I find myself a bit short on skeleton parts again! But it's quite fun nevertheless.

Undead artillery