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: