Kill Team Tiamat

Genestealer Cults have been a fascination of mine since the 90's. I had a small army in the grim darkness of the Rogue Trader days based around the theme that a chaos cult skulking in the sump stacks of an Imperial world had been infiltrated by genestealers. There was a whole campaign, ran solo, based on forces only slightly larger than what might find now in the new Kill Team.

My old force is lost to time, but contained genestealer hybrids, chaos beastmen, chaos hounds, and a handful of imperial army models I'd painted in corrupt colors, much along the lines of the one that appeared in White Dwarf a zillion years ago (well, I didn't look up the date, but it was old).

When Games Workshop released Genestealer Cults as a full army for Warhammer 40k, I bought a pile of plastic for it, but never actually got around to painting any of it. With the launch of Kill Team it seemed like the perfect opportunity to have a go without the need to paint up fifty models (and what better foe to pit against Kill Team Crucible?).

With only needing a handful of models, I wanted to take the time to include some conversions and try to capture elements from my old army. I sat down with the Kill Team rule book to work out an initial force, with an eye toward including an eclectic mix of models...

Only when I started rolling on the charts in the book did I fall in love with this force.

My leader ended up with 'Born Survivor - This warrior is well used to fleeing from trouble to fight again another day.' As I had intended on using a Magos model rather than one of the more fighty types, this was great. I meant for him to be more for morale buffs than combat prowess and having him skulk around in the back fits perfectly. Also with the announcement of Kill Team Commanders containing psyker rules, I can see Onderghast getting a promotion soon...

For the background I rolled 'The Prophet's Claw - This Kill Team is the hand-picked retinue of a Genestealer Magus.' This sounds like the genestealer equivalent of an Inquisitor warband! I had viewed Onderghast as an Interrogator, but with the aforementioned announcement I am really going to play this up, kitting out the Magos to total badassery (which makes my list above irrelevant but I included it anyway because it was important to my initial process)... STILL a bit cowardly though!

The final interesting bit was the squad quirk 'Twisted Physiologies - Aberrations in the xenos gene have caused these warriors to develop a variety of unsettling mutations.'

So my first thought was how can I add beastmen to the kill team? Twisted Physiologies has me covered and could have simply replaced a few of my Neophyte Hybrids and armed them appropriately. However, the revelation came after I dug some spare beastmen sprues out of the cupboard. These guys are way bigger than men. That caused me to look at the Aberrations...

Oh... yeah! There was some putty work required, but the scale was perfect. I can only fit one into my initial team, but as the parts were scattered across the desk I went ahead and built two. The chaos power the cult was dedicated to (before merging with the True Faith) was Slaanesh so the pale skin tones of the genestealer aberrants will look perfect on these models.

Speaking of Slaanesh, I decided I wanted to add more than hunchbacked men and grabbed a sprue of Necromunda Escher to see what I could accomplish...

I managed to put together three of these ladies - again there was some putty work the fill out the heads, but the final results turned out great (you'll have to take my word until get them painted).

The rest of were going to be standard Genestealer and Hybrid models, but I realized I hadn't included a chaos hound. With all of the fuss received by 'the bestest boy ever' from the Rouge Trader box, I KNEW I need a dog... err... hound... er... canid. The Hybrid Metamorph Leader seemed like the perfect candidate...

I don't know how 'official' venues would view this level of deviation for a 'counts as' but I don't play at places like that so... The one thing the model lacks is the autopistol and blasting charges. I played around with a weapon mount on the other shoulder, but I really liked the non-symmetrical look of the model as is. I'll run Snarl without them and I doubt anyone will complain if I drop free wargear.

So that's it. The guy with the bonesword is not in the current list, but will probably take over once the Magos makes his ascendance. I can see expanding this force to the full twenty models allowed in the campaign rules (and maybe even into a (very) small 40k army. I'm going to be stuck in a hotel room for the next ten days but I packed a travel paint set so I hope to finish them during that time. I'll post the finished pics when I get back...