Dragon Ogre Shaggoth (335pts)

So here’s the first character for the army, a Dragon Ogre Shaggoth, a level 25 hero at 335pts. There was no option for one of these in Warhammer 3rd Edition Armies and I think it was several editions of Warhammer later that he was an option for Chaos forces, which must have coincided with the release of the model upon which my conversion was made. But of course the Lost and the Damned book had the option to field one, so here’s my Nurglified version:

I remember being on a lengthy hiatus from the hobby, but the release of this model somehow infiltrated my ignorant bubble and I was mightily impressed. Such an imposing sculpt. So when I did return to the fold, this was a model I wanted to get my hands on and convert. You can see more about the process here from 5 years ago!

And here’s the info from the Lost and the Damned, those lovely stats come at quite some points cost...

This is now a total of 2790pts for the growing army, another character next...

Retinue Table: Dragon Ogre (Shaggoth)

Although this is a relatively modern sculpt from GW, it is one that I've always admired and one that I've longed to paint. I captured this from Ebay a few years ago, painted terribly and in a pretty bad state. So after a good clean up I decided to get to work on it and 3rd Edition Nurglify him a bit. The iconic Dragon Ogre by Ivan Bartleet (see later in the post) with eagle perched on his forearm, has always been an inspirational piece, so I used that to influence my own take. Using an Undead Carrion bird as his pet, giving him a plaguebearer's cyclops eye, hernia issues, with Nurgling playing with intestines and arming him with a a rusty flail; this is what I came up with:.

I've kept the palette decidedly pastelly, to provide some contrast with the dark open wound and tried to create a kind of scabby appearance to the scales on his back by using a range of yellow and orange glazes. As you can imagine it was a bit of a pain to paint, because it's such a hefty model and also because I'm pretty inexperienced of working on such a scale. There are quite a lot of large surface areas of skin, so to add some interest I included some blue veins (which are a bit washed out on the photos).

You can see the blue veins a bit more clearly in this photo.

So this fella was sold as a Dragon Oggre Shaggoth and when I delved into my Lost and Damned tome I noticed that a Level 25 Dragon Ogre was indeed called a Shaggoth. It's 3rd Edition stats come in impressively as:

M WS BS S T W I A Ld Int Cl Wp PV

6 7 4 6 6 7 5 6 10+3 6+2 9+3 9+3 335

And here's a bit of background from p.154:

"When forks of lightning sunder the night sky and the roar of thunder sends children running to their parents in terror, the people of Kislev say that the Dragon Ogres are fighting each other on the peaks of the World's Edge Mountains. A traveller, a mule skinner or miner huddled in a cave to shelter from mountain storms might see the battling Shaggoths and Sharunocks, as the oldest Dragon Ogres are called, silhouetted against the night sky by lightning-flashes. When the lightning falls in the night, as the tales proclaim, the Dragon Ogres are wakened from their death-like slumbers. As they stir they bellow with the thunder rolls and emerge to fight each other for the chance to become a Champion of Chaos."

Imagine having one of these brutes in your Chaos Warband retinue, well that's exactly what I hope will happen when I roll my next warband - it would happen on a roll of a 76 or 77 and then a 1 in 10 chance of him being a level 25 Shaggoth... I'll take some shots with him in an "unrolled" warband soon...

Here are the WIp photos so you can see the conversion work, which was pretty straightforward really:

And the inspiration behind the piece; on the one hand the work of Ivan Bartleet's Dragon Ogre champion from an 80's White Dwarf:

And Adrian Smith's Dragon Ogre Champion illustration from the Lost and the Damned:

WIP - Dragon Ogre Shaggoth of Nurgle

Having languished for many months as an almost finished conversion, I've worked a few more hours on this tonight to get to... almost finished! Tonight I added the ballbearing and chain to create the flail and filled a few extra gaps. I now only need to greenstuff some talons onto the carrion crow and to sculpt wood onto the shaft of the flail to realise my intentions..:

So what were my intentions? Well I was heavily inspired by Ivan Bartleets Dragon Ogre Shaggoth of Nurgle which was of course featured in the Lost and the Damned book. You can see his work below. 

I've obviously used the more modern Shaggoth model (which is an incredible sculpt) and made some Nurglification adjustments by adding a bead into the center of the greenstuffed head to make a cyclops like plaguebearer head. Adding a Nurgling playing with the Shaggoth's intestines is an idea I've been wanting to create for a while and I'll just add some extra modelling in there to make it look less empty.

Will finish it this weekend and will make a start on applying some paint too, watch this space....