ToMB Month 4: The Full McMourning

Here we are, my Month 4 post for the Tale of Malifaux Bloggers!

Bayou Construct

One of McMourning's passions is grafting parts from different creatures together. He would do this regularly when creating his infamous "Flesh Constructs" back in Malifaux city, and he certainly didn't stop when he moved to the Bayou. Most of these creations proved even less useful than the creatures those parts came from, but one of his more notable successes are his "Bayou Constructs". 

Put simply, McMourning's Bayou construct is an undead waldgeist existing within an undead silurid. The symbiotic relationship seems to benefit both entities, with the Waldgiest lending it's resiliance and the silurid providing better locomotion with which to catch it's prey. The pliability of the Silurids brain is an added bonus for McMourning. It makes it easier for him to command them or at the very least, make sure they don't eat too many of his other experiments.

Porcine Remains

It was perhaps inevitable that Sebastian II would further emulate his employer and begin attempting some necromancy of how own. The Piglets were the natural choice of course. After all, the creatures were in plentiful supply and McMourning had long since moved on to experimenting on larger and more challenging creations. Initial attempts to raise piglets from the dead proved...messy, especially when he forgot to kill the piglet he was attempting to resurrect in the first place. But lessons were learnt and after some months he found himself able to resurrect piglets with relative ease. 

Another pic of the crew - I was so excited when I finished Silurid/Piglets that I just had to pull everyone out for a group shot. :)

Spending!

Below are my final month's purchases. As usual, prices are from http://elementgames.co.uk/

Allowance for Month 4: £15.00

Left from last month:  £13.08

3x Silurids: -£13.60

3x Piglets:  -£10.19

Money remaining: £4.29

You might have noticed that I technically had the money to buy the piglets last month. The problem however, was a lack of 30mm translucent rootbeer bases. Fortunately they arrived in my order for this month, along with the Silurid and Piglets. 

Nooo! I had to use non-Wyrd bits. :(

Modelling

Modelling and painting the piglets was a pretty simple affair. I'd already worked out the paint scheme from the piglet and warpig I painted earlier. So the hardest thing came down to converting them into looking undead, which basically involved me doing the same thing I did to Lenny - removing brains (or faces), drilling out eye sockets and cutting bits of them up.

The Silurid, of course, were a much trickier prospect. If you've read my previous blog posts you'll know that I was having trouble figuring out how to do flesh constructs for my Bayou McMourning crew. I eventually decided on using Silurids for the base model, since they seemed like the closest I could get to a Bayou-themed model that would look Ht 2 and fit on a 40mm base. 

Making the Silurids more like undead flesh constructs was another matter. I thought about bulking them out with modelling putty or sculpting some tentacles, but I'm really not convinced I'm good enough at sculpting to pull that off. So eventually, I relented and decided to cheat. I delved into my bits box and cannibalized some GW Dryads for waldgeist-type branches. 

To paint the silurid I wanted them to look like an undead version of their old colour scheme (green with purple fins), but I didn't want the green to match the gremlins. So instead I started with a bright green (GW scorpion green...blending up to yellow on the belly), then washed with GW agrax earthshade and drybrushed with GW elf grey. After I figured that out, the rest was pretty simple. 

Deployment vs Colette

Gaming

On writing this, I did manage to fit in a game with my full Bayou McMourning crew! The game was Stake a Claim against a Showgirl-heavy Colette crew played by regular opponent Chris. My 50SS crew was as follows;

McMourning

- Moonlighting

- Evidence Tampering

- Plastic Surgery

Sebastian

- Transfusion

Rogue Necromancy

- Necrotic Preparation

Zombie Chihuahua

3x Guild Autopsies

Nurse

Rotten Belle

Nobody fucks with John Carpenter...

So no Student of Sinew/Undead Lenny, but I finally had the models for McMourning to summon with his Moonlighting upgrade! I won't go into the details but basically, the crew kicked ass and took names! McMourning summoned just one Flesh construct but between the crew's killing power and the plentiful poison going around, poor Colette couldn't handle it and she was wiped out on turn 5. 

McMourning finally gets to use his Moonlighting upgrade. :)

To be fair, Chris is an experienced gamer but this was his first game with Colette. Her lack of killing power sort of exaggerated what McMourning could dish out, but it still gave me a taste of how brutal he can be. 

I think the above crew is more or less what I'd want to take in future games with McMourning. It's got a good balance between killing power and numbers, and a hell of alot of poison-centric synergy throughout the entire crew. The only change I might make is to add "Those are not ours!" to Sebastian, but otherwise it's a fairly solid crew.

Unfortunately for Colette, the green dice denotes their poison value. 

Reflections!

Being month 4 I suppose this officially ends my participation in the Tale of Malifaux Bloggers! I am, of course, EXTREMELY happy with the end product. Almost every model in the crew is converted, with the only exceptions being the Gremlinette (whom I couldn't bear altering) and the metal piglet. I also managed to use translucent bases for the crew which is also a bonus, especially when it actually fits in with the crew!

Overall, I had a blast building/painting the crew, and the huge amount of positive feedback on the models was really encouraging! 

Post-game crew shot. 50SS of OHMYGODTHEPOISON!!!

But if I learnt one thing from this experience, it's that Bayou McMourning is the only kind of crew I should bother collecting. I have alot of Malifaux - 33 painted crews in fact. But the crews I love the most are the ones that are completely different from the norm. Crews like Neverborn Perdita, the Mei Feng Cake crew, Jack Daw and now Bayou McMourning - these are all crews that I love because I put some real effort into making them look different. It's also a part of why I've had trouble finding a Resser master I enjoy using. After all, Bayou McMourning is the only one I have from that Faction who's "non-standard". 

So what does all this mean? Well I'm going to stop mindlessly painting crews. Completing my Malifaux collection is all well and good, but unless I can find some way of making them look unique then I might as well just not bother. Of course the flipside of that is that I'm now going to look for new ideas on how to make the crews I build genuinely unique. And hopefully for the next ToMB, I'll have something unique enough to at least rival Bayou McMourning. ;)

Until next time, 

Adrian

The summons...please excuse the bases, they were finished after my Colette game. :P