Monday, September 10, 2018

Enter the Dark Mechanicus...

o/


Whilst I've long been a fan of the Tech-Priest Dominus miniature*, I was not a fan of its price tag! Whomever it was a GW who thought that single, mono-pose miniatures are worth $30+ ought to be shipped over to China, and forced to package every last damned one of them by hand for the rest of their miserable life, but I digress...

I'm quite certain that this mini will be a beast to paint!.

Luckily though, I found one on ebay via one of my favorite bit sellers for less than a third of that price, and quickly snatched one up before they sold out of 'em! I wanted to do a conversion of this kit after coming across this amazing one done by WilhelMiniatures. Using that for inspiration, and perusing thru the various pages of parts in Blackdagger's store, I opted for a simple arm/hand swap which worked out quite nicely I think. 

The rear arm claws are from some sort of Plague-drone model.

Rather than use this for 40k, I'm thinking that it'll serve as an Auxilia Force Commander, leading a small allied contingent alongside my Blackshields with the cyber-augmented provenance. The chaos cultists always struck me as looking mildly cyber augmented anyways, and personally I think my Dominus fits right in with them aesthetically. 

Clearly its not a very high up on the totem pole Dominus, as its
schlepping around with a bunch of minimally-augmented menials...


*Image is a copyright of Games Workshop and used without permission.

6 comments:

WestRider said...

Looks nice and creepy! I really hope GW digs more into the Dark Mechanicum at some point relatively soon here. It's one of the big areas of the background that's long fascinated me. I'm really tempted by the FW Anacharis Scoria Model. He's one of the coolest Models they've done in ages.

As much as I don't like it, I understand why they price Characters like that. Molds for plastic Minis are hideously expensive, and because most people never need more than one of a given Character, they don't sell anywhere near the volume that they do of Units that are commonly taken in multiples. That means they don't have anywhere near the same volume of sales to amortize out the price of the mold, so they have to bump the price way up to keep from just bleeding money from that and the other fixed costs. Similar story with the regrettably high price of the Adeptus Titanicus stuff.

Da Masta Cheef said...

Yes I know that the molds for plastic minis is prohibitively expensive, however that doesn't stop them from doing them for limited release models though. That and the generic SM captain mini, with the full range of options is still only $22.50! I dunno, i just don't understand how someone would pay $35 for one guy, or $47.50 for a freaking DW apothecary!

Also thanks and yes, the Dark Mechanicus is a faction that really needs to be looked into. If they can do limited codexes for Rogue Traders and the Talons of the Emperor, then there's no reason why they couldn't do the same for a faction other than the frickin Imperium all the time!

WestRider said...

I suspect that the price of the Commander set is due to the fact that it's something like 12 years old at this point, and they've already paid off the molds. Also, the tighter sprue layout that the CGI design process has gradually improved apparently makes getting the molds machined even more expensive. Someone over on War of Sigmar was talking about that being why the Titanicus sprues are kind of sparse compared to most newer kits. It's another way to try to keep the cost down.

And, well, to be fair, they did do a Nurgle Mini-Dex along with the Rogue Trader one.

Zzzzzz said...

Schlepping about is perfectly normal for followers of the ruinous powers.

Da Masta Cheef said...

@Westrider: I see your point. and whilst they did, I'd like to see more than just nurgle everywhere for Chaos.

@Zzzzz: You can only get away with comments like that because you're (1) too far away to call out for a retaliatory strike and (2) you have more tanks than I have infantry, lol!

WestRider said...

Definitely not going to argue that. I'm really hopeful that we're (finally) going to be seeing some good Slaanesh stuff over the next year or so.