The Keeper of the Flesh
I will tell you of the days when the Great Hunger stalked the Stone Children and the Flesh Baron and the Spirers in their golden mountains. The weak starved and the strong endured. All hungered and many changed. In those times lived Ghela of the Yaike, daughter of Warfather Aral the Black. And she made her tribe proud. She was young, but wise and strong. One day, after Red Wind had left and the tribe was on the trail to the Great Gathering, the Tainted came. Many a Brother died, but the Tainted were many and wild. Away they took Ghela, towards the mountains, to be their breeding slave. But that night, when the Tainted celebrated and fell drunk, Ghela escaped their shackles. For days and days she wandered, eating roots and drinking of the Spiked Flower. And one day she saw a gate in the rock. The Skull-Cog was on it and behind it was a great cave where Rustmen toiled around great machinery. There lived Da-Ar-Vin, the ancient holy men that talked with the Rustmen. He saw Ghela and he saw she was strong and wise. He took her with him and tought her of the days before Black Cloud and Fell Water. He tought her the language of the Rustmen and the secrets of the Flesh. He taught her how to keep It pure and strong and how to breed man and animal. And his teaching, she recorded in the language of the Rustmen. And one day, Da-Ar-Vin returned to Mother Stone and the Rustmen fell into slumber. Ghela took the Book of Da-Ar-Vin and sought her lost tribe. When she found them, she was old and her womb dry, but she tought them how to make their Children stronger. And when Mother Stone called her, she passed the Book of Da-Ar-Vin to the wisest of the Mothers. And with the teachings of Da-Ar-Vin, wise Mother after wise Mother keep our Flesh pure. So it is that Ghela's tribe came to be the Purebred.
While I was building the Purebred and developing their fluff over the last couple of months, I thaught the Keeper of the Flesh needed to be represented by a model. After a quick chat with Saul I settled on the Necromancer as the base model. First of all, I replaced the skeleton on which the model is standing with a front plate from the Sentinel kit.
To convey the idea that the Keeper of the Flesh is a debased kind of Magus Biologis and that it (at the time I wasn't sure about its sex) also operated the Blemished to remove their mutations, I used the head and harms from the Medicae Servitor from the 40k Objectives. To attach the arms I had to cut and resculpt the pinion-like sleeves of the Necromancer.
Then, I wanted to give it long, flowing hair. Here again Saul had the brilliant idea of using the Tree-revenants hair. Two of them were cut and glued around the head and Greenstuff used to join them and add some more strands running over the model's shoulders.
I have also removed the Necromancer's dagger and replaced it with a tech trinket from the Inquisitor range from our bitsbox. The book, I kept, and built it into the fluff of the Keeper of the Flesh.
The paint scheme was alredy set, but to distinguish the Keeper of the Flesh from the fighters among the Purebred I added some green and painted its hair white. It was while painting the model that I realised it must be a woman. It fit its appearance but also the social structure of the Purebred, with the healthy males fighting, the healthy females breeding and the Blemished acting as menials and expendable cannon fodder. The Keeper of the Flesh sits outside this structure. Although old and a Blemished herself, she is vital for the tribe's survival. And the other great thing is that, since we will use Necromunda rules, the rules for a Rogue Doc fits her perfectly!
I have also been working on a shanty for our board, using the STC-Ryza Pattern Ruins as the base model. The sprue itself and a piece of old moving tray provided an armour for some ondulated cardboard, creating walls and roof to close the corner formed by the two pieces of ruin I used.
Then I took an old napkin, cut it to size, tore some holes in it and soaked it in liquid Greenstuff to create a tarpaulin cover. The chimney stack is a coctail straw with a tiny bit of ondulate cardboard glued on top.
Before painteing the model, I glued some slate chips to represent the stones used to keep the tarpaulin in place.
The palette is again made of browns, oranges, sephia and metal applied as drybrushes and washes over a black undercoat which had received two zenithal highlights of reddish-brown at a 45º angle and, very lightly, of white at a 90º angle.
While the Purebred are now complete, I have plans to build a small shanty town and some natural features such as pools of contaminated water and tar. Hopefully, I should have them ready before we start the campaign in two weeks time!
Cool!
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