My Most Prized Possessions

This article is going to cover my Possessed Chaos Space Marines, a unit which I inherited from a friend.  At the time of starting this article I have 2 fully painted, several undercoated, built and slightly unfinished.  So I will continue to update this article as I work my way through them one at a time, I hope you enjoy the journey!

So as I said, this was a ”hand me down’ unit, that I got from a friend when he decided to sell off all of his Chaos Army.  When I got them, they were fully assembled and undercoated white.  I was happy to get them but as always, had many other projects going on so they just sat sadly in a box in my cupboard of shame.

“Looks like we have more new friends coming in… their not friendly! NOT FRIEEEENDLYYY!…”

At some point I decided to dig out all of my unfinished units and see what needed to be done.  I came across the possessed again and thought it was about time they saw a game.  According to various tactics and unit reviews I read they weren’t that great and were also overpriced, but that didn’t really bother me as I have a largely non-melee Thousand Sons army… not to mention I’m a very casual play that makes fun lists as often as ones where I try not to die.

Some thing bothered me about the unit thought, beyond their questionable use.  Its the Aesthetics. Obviously next to a standard Chaos Space Marine they look possessed, mouths in armour, obligatory extra spikes everywhere, deformed and evil faces cover the models.  At the same time… they are too uniform to me.  As I’ve mentioned before, they human brain is great at picking out patterns, so very similar models really stand out.  Back in they day when a space marine army consisted of  mostly they EXACT same model many times over (with the exception of the weapon), it wasn’t an issue.  The more detailed something gets though, the more real your brain tries to imagine it.  I converted the best part of 30 cultists for this exact reason, swapping heads, bodies, weapons because when i bought some of the new models of Ebay I had 8 sets of identical quadruplets. No while the Possessed weren’t exactly Identical… they were still too similar… two winged backpacks, that head there and there, those running legs with the cracks in the same place. Since they had more detail it bugged me to be able to pick out the similarities.

I started off just swapping some bits out for whatever I could find, I think for the first one I swapped out one guys chaos hand for a Grey Knight falchion and cut a serrated blade into it. another I got a piece from a spawn sprue and gave him a bendy, club arm to replace the original.  They started to have unique parts but still… seemed relatively uniform.

This got me thinking about the Lore of 40k.  The warp as I interpret it is the constant rolling storm of unreality where nothing has to make sense.  In there resides beings of unreality, of infinite forms.  So why when the Marines are possessed would they all have such similar Mutations? That’s when I started to have a little bit more fun with the conversions.  The ideas started coming with what ever parts I found, like… rather than “I need a piece that is like this”… I started picking up pieces and thinking, “right, how did this guy end up with this?”

If I had enough of the the right size hands, this whole mess could have been avoided.

So to start this post off I already have two painted Possessed. Spiked Club-Arm Guy and Mini Thirster. The inspiration for Mini Thirster came from the existence of the Minotaur type head from the spawn parts, in combination with the wing backpack and the hoofed feet that already existed among the Possessed parts.  I added a greenstuff tail and figured it was as if a Blood Thirster had Possessed a Chaos Space Marine.  As for the colour schemes, rather than having a scheme that was uniform and matched my Thousand sons I had other ideas.  These aren’t marines that have willingly given them selves to daemons, what if these were victims of rituals by my thousand sons to trap daemons in the bodies of their enemies?  So I will be painting the possessed in the colours of my friends space marine armies (also chaos), then what ever other marines seem appropriate for the possession.

 

 

 

 

Although its a very little thing, I like how the tentacle arm looks like its making a mockery of the Imperial Fist symbol.  All I did for this guy was to ad the spiked club, tentacle arm from a spawn sprue and I also cut the long horns off his head.

 

 

 

 

I really like the Mini Thirster, again, its not a big conversion, the only elaborate bit is the tail, the rest of the stuff just fit together. I quite like how the charging pose of the legs lends to idea that the horned head is getting ready to smash into something.

I hope you like these two guys, I’m now in the process of painting up more and finishing the few conversions left.  The more elaborate Possessed make some of the early ones look so tame I might actually revisit them before they make it to the article.

5/5/18

Another two Possessed ready to go! now I’m only one away from a fully painted and playable unit.  So these two are dedicated to a close friend of mine who collects both Ravenguard and a Khornate Chaos army.

The Ravenguard is almost only normal existing Spawn parts, the only conversion originally was where I cut the claws away from one Possessed hand, and attached them to his face like a massive misshapen beak. Almost as an afterthought I found the tail of the Forgeworld cockatrice I bought for a different conversion, it was about the thickness of an arm and was kind of bird related so I thought… why not, I chopped away one of his clawed arms for a bit more of a unique touch.

 

 

The Predzerker as I have come to affectionately refer to him is again, one of the the much more simple conversions, simply the top half of a Berzerker helmet onto the Predator style mouth of one of the Possessed heads. I was also short of a few backpacks after losing all some winged ones, so i replaced his wih a carnifex scything tail. It added to the organic weird alien quality and was the right sort of dimentions. I also gave him the chainsword hand of a Black Templar and just had to cut away the Templars symbol.  I didnt like the way his feet positioned him… it did make for a kind of cool full on sprint look but you couldnt really make out a lot of the detail because he was at such a shallow angle.  So I took a page out of Krakendoomcool’s book, and popped him on some rocks.

 

 

I hope you like how they turned out, im pretty pleased with them.  Keep your eyes peeled for more Possessed treats soon!

 

13/5/18

Another two possessed down, this time its the Slaanesh Ultramarine and The Dark Eyengel. The Ultra marine is another very low level conversion, it had a sort of fencing pose which reminded me of the stories of the Emperors Children from the Horus heresy, the characters that strive for perfection and grace.  That sort of cemented the Daemon aspect. I found a normal head to put on him to add a a variation on him, after all the rest of him is quite possessed (or at least I thought so until I carried on with the others). It was a bit mundane though so I cut the eye and head tentacles off a Blue Horror Herald head and replaced that quarter of the models head.  I’m quite happy with the results.

 

 

The Dark Eyengel went on a bit of a journey. Orignally the only thing I did to the model was, as he was leaning back and exposing his midriff… I cut out his belly and put in a big Spawn eye.

He was destined to become one of my Thousand Sons sorcerers that had succumbed to the daemons they dabble with, a big eye of magnus staring out of his stomach.  However this was some time ago.  When I recently picked up this project again with a bit more fervour, I asked on Twitter if there was anyone who wanted someone from the ranks of their Chapter or Legion to join my possessed.  I would then paint the possessed up in their colour scheme. This went a step further when @DrakePoldragon on Twitter offered up a Dark Angel.  He talked about how secretive they are and blind to some truths, I decided… this guy would be the Dark Angel and he would not be blind.

…Not by a long shot.  I sculpted 7 eyes onto him this also made his head a lot bigger so I added in a big rictus grin up one side of his face for good measure.  Then while looking up the dark angel colour scheme, I totally forgot about their iconic cloaks.  So I had a go at sculpting my first cape.

I was pretty happy with the results. It was a bit fiddly as this guy was already assembled, had one big horn and a backpack on. I was happy with how it turned out though.

 

 

There we are, another 2 for my ranks.  My Possessed have started gaining some attention on twitter and I’m really grateful for all of the support from people on there. I put up a poll to decide the next guys to be painted and the results were the Black Templar and the Blood Angel, or Angel Sanguine to be more accurate, a custom successor chapter also kindly donated by @DrakePoldragon.  Hopefully back soon with 2 more Possessed…

 

25/5/18

Finally I’ve finished (at least to a standard I’m happy with for now) the next two possessed. I got side tracked on the conversion of another Possessed model that is part of a collaboration with Krakendoomcool (I built it, he’s going to paint it).  For now though, lets concentrate on the one’s I’ve just completed. Wingman and The Serpent Templar.

First up we’ll look at the Angel Sanguine, the second offering from our friend @DrakePoldragon from Twitter.

This was the photo I received that I would use as reference for the colour scheme. The model I chose for his destiny is a partially converted Chosen Chaos Space Marine from the Dark Vengeance box.  I bought all the chaos stuff on ebay, but I was surprised to find I had two identical models for one of the chosen. I’m not sure if that’s normal (which would mean all of the incredibly high detail Chosen were completely unique appart from one EXACT duplicate) or if I was accidentally sent two. Either way, I wasn’t going to be happy with this copy in the unit so I set him to one side and he ended up as Possession fodder.

…oh, it turns out, it really is that weird, here are the parts, check out the twins in the bottom left.

As you can see, this kit is pretty limited as the starter boxes usually are. So I cut the horn off his arm as it looked like a pretty prominent feature. I didn’t give him a backpack as I thought I could spread around the nice high detail parts… and then I ripped off his arms and grafted on wings.

I took the wings from one of the backpacks, which while quite cool, are just way to distinguishable, and unless you have enough for a whole unit of flying models… it seems weird. This had all been done before I had been on Twitter and that brings up to speed and the choice of model. The donated faction is a Blood Angels successor, so much like the secretive Dark Angel hiding from the truth, now being unable to avoid seeing anything… I thought this model made a decent mockery of the Blood Angel with his “Angelic” wings.

Trouble is I had some grotty bits where I had cut his arms away and obvious holes to fill where the wings joined.  I also had lost detail where I cut away the large spike off his shoulder pad and the void where his backpack should have been.

So I green stuffed the detail back in as best I could filling the gaps and rather than fill detail into the areas like his shoulder and back, I decided to follow suit with the wierd horn tentacles coming from his belly (taken from helbrute spares after the other conversion), and give him more tentacles bursting out of those areas.

 

Next I did a little green stuffing where his sword had been damaged. I still wasnt happy with the huge flat areas of wing. There was a lot of space there and it just wasnt interesting enough. The wings are a huge focus on this model, as opposed to the Mini Thirster which I think attracts a lot of attention with his dynamic charge and over all appearance.

Then I had a flash of inspiration… Feathers. Angels have feathers… but this guy is no angel anymore, lets make his feathers a little more… sparse (which would also save me a hell of a lot of work.

 

 

I’d never sculpted feathers before, so I looked a couple of tutorials and knocked out what I could. I am pretty happy with how these turned out and I may try to do a model with fully feathered wings in the future at some point.  After this, it was simply a matter of painting him up and he was done

 

 

The Serpent Templar is next and while he was fun in the end, this was the model I was least looking forward to doing.

This is the earliest photo I have of him, once again, pre-blog and before this project picked up the momentum it currently has. The basis for this model was using only three pieces from the possessed kit, trying to make another ambitiously different possessed. I had a spare Tyranid Ravener body as the kit comes with four. I found a space marine head from somewhere and while the Ravener body comes with no front, I found a Black Templar chest plate, complete with a tabard that locked in his future faction. This was one clumsy and ugly build at this point, everything sort of jammed together. Although I had gone to the effort of green stuffing the chest plate so the front didn’t just end at the shoulders and waste… the body was obviously from the Ravener kit (obvious to me at least) and the head… oh god the head was a shameful state. all I had done is cut the neck off the head, and the rounded top off the Raveners neck and glued the head on.  The neck was massive compared to the head and I think I justified the ill fitting head previously as… CHAOS.

… when in reality it was just garbage.

A fortuitous conversation broke out between myself and @Leaky_cheese when he posted a really old Tyranid model that looked like something from the thing, with a face and a hand coming out of its head.  I then told him that I had some really old “Tyranids” I’d never seen before that my wife bought of ebay one year for me for christmas.  I never told her but I didnt want to use them in my army… or more accurately, I could not think of a way to include them.  Well Mr Leaky Cheese has an apparently extensive knowledge war games and recognised my wierd little monsters as Kryomek Helions from the Fantasy Forge range. To me they look like Emohawk from the UK Comedy sci-fi Red Dwarf…

None of that… isn’t actually relevant anyway. What IS relevant is that this conversation made me get these weird things out of the box. Without doing so during this critical time period of working on my possessed, the next stage might not have occurred…

After cutting the head off the Kryomek Helion and grafting it onto the model where the old Ravener neck and failed head transplant used to be… I instantly preferred the model… even liked the model. It still kind of reminded me of that goofy Emohawk, and was starting to get a bit out there for a Possessed Sp[ace marine, but I really liked how it was going now.

I was starting to find tune the model now and I was very aware that the Ravener body still looked like one, so in an effort to make it less obvious and break the possessed mystique, I cut off the end and fitted a foot from the spare parts of the Forge World Cockatrice (The same kit the Ravenguards arm claw came from).

It looked a it stiff so I used a heat gun to bend it a bit and make it look a little more natural.  I think while defending against the suggestion that the model was looking more spawn-like than Possessed, I nearly said something like “I don’t know what you mean, they all have a head, two arms, a body, two le-…”. Except this guy doesn’t have 2 legs, he has a huge serpentine tail. So to try and bring him back from the brink of Spawndom slightly and closer to his Possessed brothers, I tried to suggest that at one time he did have both legs and still sort of has two lower limbs…

At some point I was reminded of the whole chain deal with the Black Templars, possibly when my friend pointed out the that they stole the idea from the World Eaters.  Suddenly I realised my poor Black Templar was missing his chain! so I got to work giving him his chain on his sword arm, gave him a lick of paint and he is pretty much done. I think I spotted a bit I forgot to finish painting but it escapes me what it was now… anyway, here he is.

 

 

I hope you like how these are going, I plan on working on more in the future. Let me know what you think!

 

~Pandora’s Bitz Box~