House Morrigan
“Put your affairs in order, mortals. I will feast on your hearts tonight for the offense you gave me. So swears the Morrigan.”
Painted to Tabletop Standard by Hexys
House Morrigan was never supposed to be a years-long project. Originally it was a single Knight Desecrator, but as soon as I’d come up with a name for her the gears started turning. And then continued turning for the 18 months it took to finish painting her! Given that much time to think, it was almost inevitable that I’d end up devising an entire knightly house and gradually adding ever more models to represent them.
There’s always more in the works for House Morrigan, but for now this is the roster as it stands.
Corvix Valka, the Crow of War
The Knight Desecrater is a truly imposing model, towering over pretty much everything else in my collection, and as soon as they were released I knew I had to have one. What I did not anticipate was how overboard I would go.
None of the canonical Chaos Knight houses quite appealed to me, so I’d initially planned to run this knight as a Dreadblade, but the draw of devising the lore and backstory for an entire knightly house was just too great. So Corvix Valka the Dreadblade became Corvix Valka, the Crow of War, piloted by Lady Badb of House Morrigan.
You may notice a few differences from the baseline Chaos Knight model. The most obvious are the carapace-mounted missile pod, and the cockpit interior, both of which are from Wargame Exclusive (specifically this and this respectively), and the former of which I believe technically makes this a Knight Despoiler. However, there’s probably not a single part on the model that hasn’t been modified to some degree. I built out mountings for the internal lights using milliput, restructured the left shoulder to conceal a battery pack and switch, drilled holes through the torso to feed the wires, drilled out the engine grill, kitbashed a mess of pipes and engine pieces to go beneath, and magnetised everything. Seriously, I went entirely too far on the magnets - every armour piece with the exception of the carapace is removable, as are the shoulders, arm weapons, void shield, heavy stubber, head, faceplate, the wrist-joint of the thunderstrike gauntlet, and the waist joint. If Valka gets knocked over, bits go everywhere! Pretty much the only thing that isn’t magnetised is the missile pod, which is actually attached to a toothpick that slots into the mounting point and down into the torso.
I often find it difficult in photographs to grasp the physical size of Knights, there isn’t a lot on them that lends a sense of the human scale. The skulls on the chaos variants help a bit, but the grim darkness of the far future is so bedecked with skulls that they tend to fade into the background a lot of the time. Instead, I decided to add some doomed imperial guardsmen to the base, turning this into a mini diorama. I spent a bit of time coming up with the story I wanted to tell, eventually landing on depicting the final moments of a small group of guardsmen fighting a losing battle in a city long overrun by the forces of chaos. Taking shelter amidst ruined buildings bedecked in heretical graffiti, they pause long enough to bury a fallen comrade, constructing an impromptu headstone from his gun and helmet. Their moment of respite is short lived, however, as the bespiked war machine smashes through their camp, barely seeming to notice the scurrying figures even as she slaughters them. Their sergeant is crushed beneath a titanic foot as the rest of the squad scrabble desperately for wapons and cover.
I used to be a bit of a purist when it came to painting - believing that anything that wasn’t brushing paint onto the model by hand wasn’t ‘real’ painting. As such I eschewed pretty much all washes, transfers, airbrushing, and anything else I saw as ‘artificial’. These days I’m much less judgemental, focussing a lot more on using whatever tools are available to achieve the desired result. Corvix Valka is somewhat emblematic of that shift, comprising pretty much every trick and approach I know how to use. Her armour panels are built up in layered airbrush stencils (I cannot recommend Fallout Hobbies enough to anyone looking to do fancy things with airbrushes), with transfers where the stencils wouldn’t work and freehand where the transfers wouldn’t work. Her superstructure and trim is a hodge-podge of drybrushing and washes, with a lot of care given to switching up colours and finishes to add visual interest while keeping the same overall values so that it looks cohesive. Her banner is actually a single giant waterslide transfer, with careful brushwork over the top to emphasise the shadows and highlights. Finding out how easy it is to simply print transfers at home, and how magically efficient microset and microsol are at getting the damn things to actually do what you want, has opened up a huge range of exciting options! This is actually how I did the cloth elements on Abaddon.
I would have loved to come up with my own Imperial Guard regiment as well, but since they’re not the main focus and I didn’t want them distracting from the knight herself, I prioritised something that would read very clearly to the viewer. As such, Cadian shock troops was the only real choice - they’re the posterchild for the IG is the same way that the Ultramarines are for the Astartes, making them the most instantly recognisable and familiar. It also helps that their desaturated green and khaki ties them nicely into the gravel and grass of the base while contrasting the red of the knight herself.
Laith Luakra and Bofhmall the Huntress - Wardogs of Valka
I’d been planning on expanding House Morrigan for a while, even going so far as to acquire a pair of Armiger Helverens with the intention of turning them into War Dogs. These, of course, sat unbuilt on the shelf of potential for about six months, until a chance encounter furnished me with a bits box containing, amongst other things, roughly half of a Helbrute. And just like that the siren song of the kitbash began playing.
Laith Luakra
The first Wardog of the pair came together incredibly easily. As soon as I test-fitted the comparatively tiny Helbrute head into the lumbering abomination the entire character of the model fell into place. Luakra is a precise, purposeful hunter, more of a tracker than a direct warrior. I wanted to capture her in the process of searching out a target. Her quarry has gone to ground, and she has paused for a second to reacquire his trail, bladed tendrils twitching in the air as augmented sensors seek out traces of sweat and adrenaline, the reek of fear.
Bodhmall the Huntress
In hindsight, I should have known what I wanted to do with the second Wardog as soon as I’d built Luakra. However, it took an embarrassingly long amount of time to land on the idea of contrast. Where Luakra is quiet, precise, and purposeful, Bodhmall the Huntress is violence personified, tearing through her foes on bladed limbs, screaming defiance and fury from an iron throat. Unlike Luakra’s target who tries to hide, Bodhmall’s never get the chance. By the time they know she is coming, the huntress is already on them, and the only hope is to flee.
The bird-like, bipedal gait of Luakra obviously wouldn’t do, so an Onager Dunecrawler was sacrificed to the kitbash gods to create a spider-like quadruped.. This created a very noticeable height difference which made the two wardogs hard to read visually as being the same type of unit. Therefore, to bring back a bit of symmetry and give a suggestion of Bodhmall’s speed and power, I posed her in the process of clambering over a ruined structure about to drop onto her prey with bladed feet.
Luakra’s prey cowers in fear, praying to the Emperor that the great war machine will pass him by.
The painting on these two isn’t particularly complex, especially since I’d already worked out the kinks over a year of chipping away at Corvix Valka. I did have some fun designing variants on the heraldry for these two, even though there’s not way you could mistake them for eachother. The kitbashing, on the other hand, is probably the most complex I’ve ever attempted. All told these two have parts from about a dozen different kits including:
Pretty much all of two Armiger Helverens
Assorted heads, arms, and armour pieces from a Helbrute
The legs of an Onager Dunecrawler
Assorted spikes, banners, and a chest-piece from the old Chaos Space Marines box
Assorted Imperial Guardspeople to serve as hapless victims
Hands from crypt ghouls to give the aforementioned hapless victims some more desperate poses
An alternate head from somewhere so that the guards would have a little more diversity
At least one piece of terrain that dates back to the 40k 3rd edition starter set from 1998
Not to mention various bits of random junk like lollipop sticks and bits of sprue needed to hold everything together…
Bodhmall crouches atop a ruined wall, watching her quarry try to flee. Above his head, one of her bladed legs waits, poised to strike at any moment.
Of course, having put all of this time and effort into creating some suitably Chaosy Wardogs, GW promptly revealed their updated chaos knights box with some absolutely lovely spikey Wardogs of their own! C'est la vie, I suppose at least that means the next set of these I add to the house will be quicker to build!
I’ve really enjoyed continuing the ‘doomed imperial guard’ theme across these models, and you can rest assured that I have even more elaborate plans going forward, some of which may explain the numerous bits of Leman Russ tanks I seem to be accumulating…
