As before there are only 2 stipulations:
- *No tier 2/3 teams; gobbos, flings, vamps and ogres.
*Avoid anything I'd done before; Lizardmen, High Elves, Norse/Dwarfs, Khemri also Undead but they were done by Nazgob.
I have long been planning to do a Slann team and steadily acquiring bits, with the GT months away and having no other commissions this was a perfect opportunity to create a truly unique team.
My main concern with this team is that GW haven’t made any Slann models in decades much less an “official” team. So I wanted to ensure that the 3 positionals were easy to differentiate. I decided to go with the idea of making them different species, nothing as drastic as Lizardmen, but there would be obvious physical differences between the linemen, catchers and blitzers. I would also have to ensure that there are a lot of uniform and physical similarities to tie them all together.
For the linemen I chose Plaguebearers as they had a solid and static pose that I thought suited linemen. These guys were more toad than frog, so the warts were kept, but I do need to finish covering up all the gaping wounds in their bodies.
In addition their heads were ideal starting points for the conversion and some even had gill like ears. I drilled holes in their heads and filled the cavity with eyes from the chaos spawn, their single eye was replaced with a nose from genestealers. Their faces need quite a lot of greenstuff work too.
I added loin cloths from Ork nobz, choosing a similar style for them as these would be another difference between the players. The last thing added was kroot shoulder pads.
I was pretty happy with these players and started work on gluing them together, filling gaps and sculpting details. But when I started looking at the catchers I was concerned that the AV8 players looked a little bare, only being equipped with shoulder pads and loin cloths. The catchers would have the same amount of armour aside from having just a single shoulder pad.
Luckily having been gaming for 25+ years does have its advantages and I looked out my old 3rd edition copy of Warhammer Armies and turned to the Slann section. They did have elite choices named jaguar, eagle and crocodile warriors with armour and decorations made from skins or feathers. I did consider going down this route as these quite nicely fit the positions but wanted something closer to traditional blood bowl armour. However not too samey such as the armour shown in the 2nd edition blood bowl star players book.
The picture of the normal Slann warrior had some very interesting looking armour and I thought that had a lot of potential. The linemen got a chestplate from the tomb kings skeletons, this helped to hide the rather flat bellies I had given them after filling in the wounds the plaguebearers were modelled with. I also added knee pads from 5th edition humans and am considering adding some elbow pads.