The Witch Lord

[Stormbringer]

If you've been following my recent posts, I'm all about Hero Quest these days.

I've been wanting a figure to represent the infamous WITCH LORD of Barak Tor (a.k.a. The King of the Dead).

As most folks will know, the basic game comes with a figure known as the "Chaos Sorcerer", but strangely he doesn't really get to play the role of an actual Chaos Sorcerer in the campaign, and if he did I would rather use an alternative Chaos Sorcerer figure without a skull-face (even though that's a legit Chaos attribute).

So, I decided I would modify him a bit so he appeared less "Chaos" and more "Undeath". I replaced the orb between his horns with a decorative skull from the Hero Quest furniture and I sawed a couple of skulls off the Skeleton models and glued them to his hands. Like my Amethyst Wizard, this is a very simple conversion, but for my level of experience it's a fairly big deal and I'm quite pleased with how he's looking thus far.

I am going to give him a very simple, "evil/undead" colour scheme -- black robes, black gloves, iron and bone parts where appropriate, and his skin a deathly pallor.

 

[Fimm McCool]

Like it. Now what's all this about not doing the colour scheme from the front of Return Of The Witch Lord?

 

[Stormbringer]

Now what's all this about not doing the colour scheme from the front of Return Of The Witch Lord?

I have since thought better of this! I started my initial paint scheme and realised it just wasn't colourful enough. I am seriously considering the colour scheme from RotWL.

Has anyone noticed that head of the staff the Witch Lord carries in that picture looks like the head of the alien baby from Prometheus?

 

[inchmurrin]

Another smart conversion enough to make it clear who they are and well executed.

I'm with the witch lord colour scheme.

 

[Stormbringer]

Update!

Taking your advice, I tried painting him with the Return of the Witch Lord colour scheme. However, I was unsatisfied with the colour of the robe -- it just didn't seem to look quite right -- so I changed it to a deep blue, which just seemed to work for me. I did paint his helmet to be as much like the RotWL artwork as possible -- including the gold work at the front. I also toyed with replacing his horns with ones more like appear on the artwork helmet, but I quite liked the elaborate skull ornamentation so decided to leave it as is.

However, I realised that he really needs some kind of melee weapon for the purposes of the game, so I tried creating a sceptre/scythe like the one in the RotWL picture (the one with the evil alien-pterodactyl head) and I came up with a really good solution using a mish-mash of parts from different models.

HOWEVER, no matter how hard I tried, I could not make this work. It completely failed and broke apart!

So, I tried something else. I borrowed a hand from a Fighting Fantasy Orc holding a serrated sword/knife and stuck that on instead, which really worked a treat.

Here he is with the base layers (mostly) finished, but no washes or highlights applied...

I'm pretty pleased with how he's coming on so far, and although I'm disappointed my sceptre idea didn't work, I like his current choice of weapon because it looks like it could very easily saw through bone -- something I'm sure the Witch Lord takes great pleasure in!

 

[Fimm McCool]

He looks nicely sacrificial. As you say a shame about the staff, that looked a perfect match! Those HQ plastics are a bugger to glue, I think I had some success with PVC pipe weld.

 

[Stormbringer]

And here is the final result:

I am satisfied!

 

[Harry]

Brilliant. Great conversion.