A Rumbling in the Wastes Pt I

Ash Waste Nomad Reinforcements!

My Ash Waste Nomads receive some BIG reinforcements

It's a fact that I may have gone a bit Necromunda crazy, particularly when it comes to my beloved Ash Waste Nomads. I have a habit of disappearing down narrative rabbit holes, coming up with new miniatures that I feel lean into the faction's background in a way that I find very satisfying. This was very much the case with the Nomads as I recently finished two miniatures that scratch that creative itch while still aligning with the Nomad theme. I'll cover the Sand Worm in part one and the Trappers in a follow-up post

Necromundan Sand Worm

Around the time I came up with the desert arena, I started thinking about how a Sarlac pit would look in the Necromunda Ash wastes. The obvious answer would be a horrifying mechanical maw beneath the sands. As much as I loved the idea and started collecting some bits for it, I had a bit of an epiphany while watching Dune part II - why not make that giant hellish grinding maw... mobile! And thus my homage to Frank Herbert's most popular novel series was born!

It just so happened that I had a spare chaos renegade Ogryn which was giving off strong Nomad vibes, so I decided that he would be the perfect wrangler for this giant mechanical beast!

Riding his ramshackle beast into battle, I like to think that he's as much of a danger to his friends as his enemies!

The colour of the worm's plating was deliberate, implying that the machine could have originally served a very different purpose for the Mechanicum in the past. I like to think it was one of many excavators used to dig the foundations of the mighty hive cities until it fell into disrepair, lying buried under the ashen sands until its discovery and reactivation by an enterprising Nomads tribe! If you look carefully, you may even see some industrial marks hinting at the machine's past...

Regardless of it's original purpose, this unpredictable robotic menace is now (mostly) under the control of a being only slightly more intelligent than your average canid - what could possibly go wrong?!

Sand Worm Build Log

I started the process with a rough sketch and although its quite basic, it conveyed the things I wanted - a partly submerged mechanical worm monster wit a rider on its back. I wanted the plates to be segmented and the head to be a hungry grinding maw...

I started the build with some gutter piping parts as they were about the right size to build the initial structure. I got the main structure of the head built fairly quickly as it just needed to resemble a gaping industrial tunnelling device. I also wanted some flailing mechadendrites around the face as they would convey movement by whipping back behind it. 

I made small angled ports around the head for the dendrites to extend from and retract into as necessary, allowing me to make the tentacles different lengths for a bit of variety. A number of them had to be heat bent to get the shape I wanted, but having the ports in place helped me to visualise what each one would be doing.

The main body was assembled from push fit gutter connectors with some corrugated card for the flexible inner detail. I got the rough shape I wanted then constructed a base large enough to work as a counter-balance for the huge foot long miniature!

Once the head was attached, the whole thing started to look a lot more worm-like! It's worth noting that I had to saw a large angled chunk off of the end to pose the worm at the correct angle on its base.

Before I locked everything in place, I tested the fit of the Ogryn rider. He was at too much of an angle due to the height and pose of the worm, so I decided to remove a section and repose it slightly from the images here.

The Ogryn rider was super fun to work on. I used a number of spare parts from the Ash Waste Noamads and a number of other kits to make this brute a bit more at home in the tribe. With a fair bit of sculpting, I added bandages, fur, breathing pipes and other signature details from the Nomads.

With the aforementioned changes to the underlying structure, the Ogryn rider now fit much better on his mighty steed!

The next step in the build was to add the rough shape of the worm's spiked armour plates with foamex - this was then followed by multiple sculpting passes with epoxy putty and car body filler. 

The final step of the build was adding some ramshackle armour plates which have been added by the Nomads to patch holes in the machine's hide. In addition to the plates, I also added some flying cables to give the miniature a sense of movement.

The huge base was textured with disturbed, roiling sand where the worm was exploding from the surface and some calmer looking dunes in front.

You can see from picture below just how enormous the worm's maw is! It could easily gobble up a whole krootox in a single bite!

The first pass when painting this beast was to apply copious weathering, corrosion and texture all over.

I painted a thick layer of paint over the heavily corroded plates, leaving certain areas bare so that the rust showed through convincingly. 

The primary red colour is a nod to the worm's Mechanicus origins, with occasional stark white panelling, copper and turquoise spot colours to tie in with the rest of my Nomads.

When painting the Ogryn rider, I made sure to paint his body black to signify his sealed body glove, complementing this with the usual Ash Waste Nomad greens, browns and beige tones. I did add some salmon pink to his plating to show that he is still using bug carapace parts for armour. I also used the same green tones for his spear as that used by my Beast Handler.