Chaos Cultists: Wargames Factory Style

I'm all in on Chaos Space Marines after putting the Rat Flail Cultist conversion together. Chaos is like crazy, crazy, crazy in your face, all the time. I traded a bunch of unassembled vanilla Marines for a bunch of painted Chaos Space Marines, so I have ready to.. um... repaint. They are good, but I just have something else in mind. But back to Cultists... DV comes with a paltry 20 Cultists, organized as two units of 10. Considering Cultist units can have 35 models in them these units don't seem very survivable. Enter the box of Wargames Factory Shock Troops I bought many moons ago. I didn't know what I wanted to do with them, but they seemed pretty cool and it was a pseudo-impulse-buy at the model shop I frequent. After a little time and energy, all of which was today oddly enough, here is an 18 model Cultist squad with autoguns.

These guys are normally built with their kaiser helmet / gas mask heads that make them look like DKoK. (They are pictured on the box that way, fwiw.) For Cultists, I went with the head I had the least interest in when I first got them..., the bug eyed mask (gas mask maybe?) with open back. For Cultists, it just seemed perfect, and I'm pleased with the result.

Oh, and did I mention that a box of 18 of these guys is $20? That's list price, not street price. 18 minis for $20. I am unaccustomed to that level of value. The squat little boxes they come in have six stacks of identical sprues with three figures and lots of options on each.

So the Cultists were built with almost completely stock parts, but I did throw a few knives on as bayonets. There are a few I used GW parts on to give them more of a Chaos flavor or switched parts around a little differently, and I'll show them isolated.

These four are the only models I did any real conversion work on, and even then it's barely conversion. The guy on the far left got the barrel of his gun extended by attaching the end of the flamethrower barrel to it. Since all six sprues have a flamethrower (and a grenade launcher, and the most uninspiring pistol in miniature wargaming history) there were plenty to chop up. The guy on the far right merely has a little chain from the Chaos Space Marine command sprue hanging from his gun. The third guy is nearly stock, but I glued the leftover axe blade from the Rat Flail conversion. The only real conversion work was on the second guy, who I will be using as Cultist Champion in the unit. The icon and spike are from the same command sprue as the chain from #4. The outstretched arm is the same pointing arm that #3 has (you can see him pointing better in the first pic) with the normal gun cradling hand glued in place of the pointing hand and the thumb re-sculpted the Space Marine helmet. The helmet is hollowed out, and after a rough cut getting a lot of material removed, I put some very thin Flex-I-File Plast-I-Weld (for the Touch-N-Flow application system... someone kill me Ple-A-Se.) and let it soften the plastic inside the helmet to a much smoother surface when it dried. The head is one of the regular shock troop heads with the top knot shape cut down. It looks like he's about to mic-drop that helmet. BMM-- wheeeeee.....

So now that I have almost doubled the number of Cultists I own by adding these, let's talk about Cultists in a Typhus army that are plague zombies! PZ's are fearless and have feel no pain, but you can't buy them upgrades and they can't use their guns. GW recently FAQ'd that you can add zombies beyond the starting count of 10 models. (Yes, there were some people arguing that adding models counted as an upgrades. Sigh.)

Here are the six I have assembled so far.

Unlike the Shock Troops, I feel like I'm missing something with these guys. Five of the six models on each spue have separate torso/legs, and one has combined torso/legs.  Hold on a second.... I need to get this out of the way...

Did I mention that a box of 30 of these guys is $20? Yeah, <$1 per zombie.

Okay, I feel better. Anyway I've only built 6/30 of these models but I don't feel like I'm doing it quite right. Some of the bodies didn't fit with the legs all that well, and I suspect there are combos that work better than others. I have plenty more to get the hang of them. As my previous post showed, they are a little less heroic scaled than GW models, but an empty Cadian helmet is going to fit one of them nicely. 

So between a starter box, $40 of Wargames Factory minis and a few dozen models acquired in trade I have better than 2k points, ready to be assembled. Let the Galaxy Burn, one insufficiently terrain covered table at a time.