The Dead Below: My 2022 Hobby Project

“Beyond the shimmering veil stands a dread legion, blade locked to rusted blade, spear joined to crooked spear, howling out one name–the Undying King, the Usurper, the Prince of Sands.

Theirs is a language beyond mortal reckoning, a spoiled wail to spite the gods, inaudible, but loud as a tolling bell, loud as the doom-drone of a distant storm.

And they howl this name as they sally into the pale moonlight, as they slouch from the Ghooric Zone, from their dream-haunted slumbers, called by the imperious wind of dread Shyish, beckoned by a dark whisper.

And, lo, the despoiled dead cry out to the world!

'Nagash! We rise! We come to you!'"

Excerpted from De Umbris Malum, inscribed by Giordano the Tilean prior to his lamentable transfiguration into a Blue Horror of Tzeentch.

The Dead Below: A Restless Dead Warband

Cunaxa the Hexed
1 Liche
Total: 125 gold crowns
Spells: Spell of Doom, Call of Vanhel

Umbraxes Tol
1 Necromancer
Total: 40 gold crowns
Spells: Spell of Doom

Calchas Moldjaw
Grave Guard
Sword
Total: 50 gold crowns

Scylas Moldspine
Grave Guard
Spear
Total: 50 gold crowns

Winguric the Menogoth
Grave Guard
Sword
Total: 50 gold crowns

Zombies
4 Zombies
60 gold crowns

Skeleton Spearmen
2 Skeletons
Spears
60 gold crowns

Skeleton Warriors
2 Skeletons
Swords
60 gold crowns

Total gold crowns: 495
Total models: 13

You never forget your first love. 

My first love were the Undead. Maybe it was watching those hypnotically awkward skeletons in Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts too many times as a child. Maybe it was 1999's The Mummy. Or maybe it was listening to the Misfits and the Cramps. Whatever it was, something insidious imprinted itself on my impressionable and profoundly confused teen-brain, and forever doomed me to be a lover of things bony, rotten, and dead. 

Dead-ish, I guess. Dead adjacent. 

Anyway, when I played Warhammer Fantasy actively (the awkward years straddling 4th and 6th editions, back when the Crown of Command was sported by every snot-nosed Night Goblin Warboss with dreams of conquest and fungus beer), I was an unrepentant Undead player. I dabbled in other projects, but the Undead were my obsession.

And like all first loves, the Undead just kept clawing at the back of my subconscious. 

This year, I've decided to (in this case) surrender to the tyrannical will of that subconscious drive. I'm going to revisit the Undead. 

I plan to spend the next few months working on an exceedingly retro Oldhammer-style Restless Dead warband for games of Mordheim. The Restless Dead are a fan-made warband that ditches some of the obviously Gothic affectations of Warhammer's Undead. There are no vampires, wolves, and bats in this list. Instead, what you get are hordes of skeletons, zombies, wights, and liches. The list has a classic dungeon crawl vibe, which lends itself to vintage Citadel Miniatures. 

You can check out the list here.

The list I’ve outlined earlier in the post is not meant to be a competitive one. I’ve never been much of a power gamer. When I played Mordheim, I always tried to swamp my opponents in masses of ill-equipped rabble. It was a unsubtle approach, and it is most certainly the approach I’ve taken with this list. 

Regardless of the merits of the list, it’s really just an excuse to paint fun models. 

At the start of my projects, I obsessively curate an aesthetic I’d like to achieve. I’m an incurable Pinterest pack rat and illustration hoarder. The end goal is for this warband to be evocative of the illustrations of some of my artistic heroes: John Blanche, Ian Miller, and Russ Nicholson.

Especially Russ Nicholson.

I have many deep, dark, secret passions. One of them is the artwork of Russ Nicholson. Russ Nicholson is utterly bonkers.

And bonkers is very much my vibe.

Just look at this stuff. This was meant for children!

Nicholson's art channels the mood of German Renaissance woodcuts in cracked and disturbing ways. His work is gory, grimy, slimy, mucoid, and strange. It lacks the phantasmagoric weirdness of Miller's paintings, but it has its own idiosyncratic charm. It was Nicholson's aesthetic that drove me to select some ground rules for selecting minis for my own project.

These are outlined below:

Miniatures for this project must have been produced by Citadel or Iron Claw before 1989. 

Miniatures for the warband must come from Citadel’s venerable Night Horrors range and the C18 Zombies, sculpted by the talented Kev Adams. 

Several of the Skeletons are going to be sculpts by Bob Olley, an artist whose eccentric and fungoid style has a peculiar hold over me. His skeletons have a demonic malignance you don't see in most Undead sculpts from the 1980s. A lot of people hate them. I think they're bloody brilliant.

I want minis that look like they just burrowed out of an abandoned kurgan or slunk out of a peat bog. The overall look I’m aiming for is going to be heavily indebted to Russ Nicolson’s delightfully nauseating Undead, as depicted in the Fiend Folio, early Games Workshop art, and the Fighting Fantasy series. I want the warband to look like the dwellers of the last dungeon you’d ever want to visit.

Over the next few months, I'll be braving the spider-haunted confines of that dread dungeon. 

I hope you'll join me.