Lord Darmoth the Reborn, Hellforged Contemptor

This skull-crowned monstrosity is Lord Darmoth the Reborn, a Hellforged Contemptor Dreadnought for my World Eaters. A while ago I used my World Eaters in a game and took Dactylus Crux, my Warpsmith. However, I didn't take any Helbrutes and as Dactylus is known as the Master of Brutes I thought that was a little unfortunate. I already had five Khornate Helbrutes so six would allow me to take two Vanguard detachments and I'd been planning on making a Hellforged Contemptor for a while anyway, so the word was given, the sacrifices made and the runes struck. And also a lot of plastic and green stuff got horribly abused.

I started with the standard plastic Contemptor, from which I removed the head. The first challenge was giving him two close combat weapons, which was achieved by using a spare standard Dreadnought arm for his left, and cutting the elbow joint of the Contemptor arm down the middle to reverse it and move it to the right. This left his shoulders unevenly sized, so I mounted a Land Speeder's Typhoon launcher on the smaller one to represent a Havok Launcher, and fitted the targeter on the other side. I wanted the Dreadnought to be armed with Soulburners and a pair of Chainclaws- after a lot of deliberation I decided to simply replace one 'finger' of each Dreadnought fist with a chaos Chainsword for the latter. The former was a bit of a poser, since Forge World are a bit coy about what a Soulburner actually looks like. In the end I went for the old Khorne standby of daemonic skulls, which nestle in a bed of flame. I used a bed of textured Green Stuff into which I sank a couple of skulls from the new GW Skulls set. I also cut off the ammo feeds and box magazines from the two arms since they didn't make a lot of sense in this context.

For the head, after a lot of failed attempts I settled on trimming down a skull-faced shoulder pad from a Chaos Terminator. To make the model more imposing, I topped this with a pair of spare horns from the Bloodthirster kit, using an Ork skull as a spacer so the horns would be mostly clear of the arms and wouldn't look too much like they'd impede his movement. The chest plate displaying the World Eaters' symbol is simply an Ogre belly plate with the planet in the middle made with a disc of Green Stuff. A couple of power cables, which come from a set I got from Hasslefree ages ago, were added to go behind the plate and I hung another accessory from the Bloodthirster off one of them for added effect.

The chainmail tabard is the track-link tabard from an Ogryn, covered with Green Stuff into which I scored lines and then poked a lot of holes. I also added a Khorne icon, supported by a length of sprue which has a pin drilled into it to make the icon removable for transport. The shape of the sprue also means that it fits into a shallow Green Stuff socket that stops it wobbling about.

The final big stage was the hellforged skull texture. This was created by covering the surfaces with Green Stuff and then pressing a mould into them which I've used a few times before. This mould is flexible enough to curve to an extent, and whilst many of the skulls didn't come out quite a few did and the result is suitably warped and corrupted-looking. Since a Hellforged Contemptor can repair itself by killing enemies I deliberately didn't model any battle damage on it, though in practice something this mean rapidly accumulates it!

The painting process was pretty quick and simple. Due to inclement weather I dug out my nemesis, my airbrush, for the black undercoat and for once the thing was cowed into behaving itself. After that it was all standard brushwork, with a grey drybrush to illuminate the detail and a Leadbelcher one on the metalwork before Mephiston Red was laid in on the body. The golds were the standard Retributor/ Liberator job, the flames were based on Averland Sunset, built up to Flash Git, washed with Bloodletter and then re-highlighted, and the planet in the logo was painted with my old coloured metallics. The bone was based on Zamesi Desert, highlighted up through Flayed One Flesh and Pallid Wych Flesh and finished with a little white. I used Nuln Oil gloss as the main wash for the model before most of the highlighting. The blue glows were simply built up from Macragge Blue to white, and the eyesockets of the two skulls in the Soulburners were first filled in with a little water effect gel so the glow wouldn't be lost in the shadows of the sockets.

I used to use a Chaos Lord in my Daemonkin army called Darmoth the Doomed, the Thrall of Kor'lath, who carried the axe of that name from which a Bloodthirster erupted when he died. The idea here is that Dactylus scooped up the bits left over and stuffed them into a Contemptor, with predictably insane results. The Warband now consists solely of my five Helbrutes, Darmoth here, three Obliterators, Dactylus himself, and Kharn, who's probably responsible for the injuries that put most of the others into Helbrutes in the first place, and it's a lot of fun to play to say the least!

Photography by me, original miniatures (c) Games Workshop.