Painted Blighted Trollkin Marauders

These are Blighted Trollkin Marauders, the last such unit (at least for now) to go in my Scourge of the Broken Coast armies for Cryx in Warmachine. They’re effectively a ranged version of the Bloodgorgers; on the one hand the Marauders can’t eat their way through units at a time but on the other hand they don’t have to get into knifing range to get work done. Before COVID-19 stopped me getting out for gaming I was planning a list with both of the Blighted Trollkin units (and Jussika Bloodtongue and General Slaughterborn, of course) but that will just have to wait a bit longer.

The miniatures for the Marauders are very detailed and I really like the sculpts. My main criticism is the number of repeated sculpts; there are only 4 bodies between the whole unit so there is a lot of repetition here even allowing for a limited amount of arm-swapping. I’ve tried to mitigate this a bit by mixing up the combinations of armour and skin colouring while painting so there are no exact duplicates. I got a bit bogged down in the middle of painting the unit; I think part of the issue was trying to get through ten fairly buy miniatures at once, and part of it was knowing that however far I got with the Marauders themselves, I still had the flames to get on with at the end. However once I made a little progress each time with the unit, I found that I got a little more momentum back with each painting session no matter how brief. The flames don’t work brilliantly at this kind of close-up but at tabletop range they do just fine for me.

This one is the leader and has a suitably impressive (and unique) pose. Interestingly he adds further data to the ‘what are those weird growths on the Trollkin’ question by apparently having horns made of them, one of which is apparently tough enough to require an additional cap of metal.

One of the heads for the Marauder grunts, plus the leader’s, has an eye-patch. So the unit has only 16 eyes between them. This strikes me as slightly more than bad luck, particularly as they’re fully equipped with all other appendages and organs. Perhaps this is a reference to the running joke about the prevalence of goggles in the Warmachine setting?

Although I really like the activity in these sculpts, I suspect that they’ll be a bit awkward to work with on the tabletop as those braziers are going to get in the way if they’re ever in close to anything.

The various head options are all rather more caricatured even compared to ‘normal’ Trollkin. I’m not sure if these over-developed chins and brows are a new design direction or if it is intended to reference their Blighted status.

Next on the painting table: Ghordson Driller.