Thank you kindly. It's always nice when someone appreciates the little details that we all put into our minis.
This is an homage to Half-Life's headcrabs that I kitbashed together while laughing maniacally. I took some liberties with the original design, but think it gets the point across. Here's the recipe:
1 not-Headcrab head from
CheckPoint Miniatures (metal, comes in a pack with five variants)
1 plague zombie body from Mantic games (polystyrene)
2 arms from Mantic Nightstalker Reapers (polystyrene)
Here's a primer on headcrabs for people who have never played a Half-Life video game:
Headcrabs are alien creatures that remove your head (presumably by eating it after they kill you with the razor sharp teeth on their underbellies,) then take the place of your head, rooting themselves in the host body's neck and gradually mutating that body to be more predatory, most notably weaponizing hands by turning them into long, bloody claws. Headcrabs aren't very smart - all they do is hunt, eat, transform, and kill - and their control of host bodies is crude, so they shamble about like unsteady zombies. In the video games they're basically a biological terror weapon deployed by smarter aliens to sow chaos and reap fear in the human population. While one headcrab or headcrab zombie is usually just a nuisance, they can be dangerous when they get too close.
Put another way, headcrabs are basically what real-life New England ticks, spurred by climate change, will mutate into in the next five years or so.
Finally, for some reason, unattached headcrabs look more than a little like plucked chickens. Plucked chickens that waddle around, leap up at your face with unearthly shrieks, and try to bite your face off.
