Techno barbarian. It’s a wonderfully evocative name, one that immediately invokes a mad-max
aesthetic, barbarians fighting over the ruins of technology they no longer understand.
And techno barbarians were what ruled terra before the emperor took control of it and began
his great crusade to reunite humanity. Unfortunately, Games Workshop has never
released any models for them, which is a pity because the little art there is of them is
so distinctively weird in a Rogue Trader way. For the base of this build I’m using one of the
lady marines I’d made in a previous video. She was the least favorite of the three I put together,
so I didn’t mind dissembling her and harvesting the stormcast legs to pair with a custodes torso.
The custodes as a whole are a gaudy and golden faction, and that matches
perfectly with the kitschy aesthetic I was going for with these techno barbarians.
The belt jewel was just a touch too much though, so I cut it off and smoothed milliput over the
gap to continue the robes of the stormcast legs. Taking off the jewel also turned her
silhouette really statuesque and elegant. To contrast it, I opted for this chaos
terminator autocannon. I love how huge it is compared to her, and also that it kind of
looks like it’s a modified anti air gun someone ripped off a turret and latched to a power arm.
It adds an element of the tarnished gold I was aiming for, a little ramshackle and blunt.
For the left arm I picked this power claw, and glued it in a pointing pose.
It gives my techno barbarian a little bit of a sinister, dramatic edge,
and the curved and bulbous armor is very kitschy. For her head I had a bunch of options that worked
really well, really made her weird and unique in the way I was looking for. A lot of the
male heads give her a nicely andrognous look, I wanted the head to be a little mutant looking,
no way for them to hide the underlying rot. I eventually settled on this primaris eliminator
head. It has a wonderfully eighties cyberpunk feel to it with it’s visor and rangefinder. The silent
scream look of the lower half of the face also adds to the sinister edge of my techno barbarian.
For my second techno barbarian I used a Stormcast Eternal Farstrider as the base. Stormcast Eternals
have a really strong rogue trader, eighties vibe to me to begin with. Honestly, it was actually
hard to figure out which parts to swap out, because they’re all already pretty kitschy.
For example, I hate stormcast pauldrons, but they fit that rogue trader and eighties idea of what's
cool aesthetic perfectly. Still, I needed to swap in techy bits somewhere, so I started
by snipping off the stormcast’s pauldrons. This would’ve been easier to do if I could’ve snapped
the stormcast in two, but I got this one off ebay and he was pretty solidly glued together.
The original stormcast head is also pretty great for a techno barb, but again I needed
to swap something, so I snipped it off. One of the reasons I picked the Farstrider
specifically for this conversion is that his handbow is already in a shooting stance.
For a hot minute I thought about snipping off the head of the house Cawdor explosive
arrow and glueing it to the handbow as a kind of techno bow, a bit like the one in Gears of War,
but decided to swap it entirely instead for the bolters from a Mark 3 marine. They have
a less distinctly marine silhouette than a normal marine bolter, and are a little more nondescript.
To replace the pauldrons I’d carved off I decided to use a casting of the same Custodes pauldron I
used for the two other techno barbarians to tie in their design language and make them
look more like one faction. In this case though I sliced off the ridge and put it on backwards
because it looked better that way. On the other shoulder I used a tartaros terminator pauldron.
For a head I chose this Space Marine commander one. It has a cybernetic
look that works kind of perfect for the weirdness of a techno barbarian,
and is the closest to a duck marine I’ll probably ever make. Just as with
my previous techno barbarian it undercuts the golden sheen of his armor effectively.
To add more of a tech edge, I drilled holes in the front of my techno barbarian and shaped
ribbed wire to look like cables. Usually I use guitar war, but in this case I’d invested
in some pewter wire which is enormously easier to use since it holds its shape.
The last aspect of the techno barbarian to work out was his sword. My first instinct
was to replace it with a chainsword, but that felt a little too easy, and I actually really
dig the angular lines of his original sword. Instead of replacing it, I decided to upgrade
it to a power weapon by snipping off the power portion of a mechanicus pistol, and glueing it
to the back of the blade. I then affixed guitar wire to the pommel of the sword and looped it
behind his cape to attach to some unseen battery. For the third techno barbarian I decided to use
another stormcast as a base; in this case this castigator I got as part of an ebay lot. I kind of
hate it. The legs are both skinny and seem twice as long as the torso, giving it really weird
proportions. But weird is the name of the game for techno barbarians, so that was kind of perfect.
The first step was to snip off the arms. I wanted to keep the arms and bow intact,
but didn’t much care for the chest so I felt no guilt carving into it. I planned to replace
it entirely with this adeptus custodes torso to match that of my first techno barbarian.
With the arms off, I measured them against the width of the custodes chest.
They’re annoyingly a little too narrow to fit properly. To get a better fit, I sliced the bow
in half and slotted in a few layers of plasticard. I was planning on replacing most of the bow,
so I didn’t worry too much about how it looked. With the width improved, I sliced down the
bottom half of the torso so my techno barb could retain the original stance.
I also took this opportunity to slice off some of the Stormcast iconography. That done, I used
a sheet of plasticard to make sure the height was right, and glued custodes torso to stormcast legs.
I didn’t glue on the bow and arm yet though, as I wanted to convert it into a rifle and that
would be easier to do with it unattached. While I thought about keeping it as a bow,
I felt like I could do better. I ended up not being able to, but hindsight is 20-20.
I cut off the arms of the bow, as well as a good bit of the front section. This I replaced
with a katephron torsion cannon. To add detail I replaced two of the plasticard wideners with
the magazine portion of a bolt rifle. Ahead of it I added the scopes from some other primaris kit.
I also added a few wires on the side of the rifle, but didn’t like how the barrel was looking it, so
I snapped it off and decided to replace it with this cleaned up potion of a mark 3 bolter.
As I alluded to a minute ago, I’m not in love with how the rifle turned out; it just doesn’t sing or
add any techno barbarism to the model. Still, I glued it in place, used globs of procreate to
attach the arms, and then used the same custodes pauldrons I had for my previous barbarians.
For the head I picked one from the Genestealer Atalan kit. It continues the goggles and
rebreather look of the previous two barbarians, but in this case is smaller. Being smaller it
gives the model an overly wide shouldered look that controls well with the skinny legs.
And with that my techno barbarians were done. In all I’m pleased with them,
and I think they provide a nice vertical slice of one possible techno barbarian factions vying for
control of pre-unification terra. They were a lot of fun to make since they were so different than
what I normally convert; usually I’m trying to create something badass and cool, but with these
I intentionally leaned into the kitschy, into creating something that was an eighties hair metal
album cover idea of cool, and some of Warhammer’s original Rogue Trader blanchitsu weirdness.
I’m definitely going to be making some more, though of a different faction
with different aesthetic. Because there’s not much canon on the techno barbarians,
do you have a suggestion for a faction? Let me know in the comments. Meanwhile,
hit the like button, subscribe, or check out some of my other videos. Thanks for watching.