Vraksian Traitor Militia are one of the cooler sets Games Workshop has ever released. They’re
less overtly chaosy than a lot of chaos kits, but still twisted and creepy. They are also,
unfortunately, out of production which means if you want them you’re at the mercy of
either resellers or recasters. I was able to get my hands on a set of their
torsos and their covered heads and breathing tubes and tanks immediately reminded me of
a twisted, warped version of skitarii. Which is exactly what I’m going to be converting
them into today: dark mechanicus skitarii. Since I only have the torsos I needed to find
a source for legs. Luckily the vanilla skitarii ones are the correct scale, though for one
of them I slotted in a sheet of plasticard to help with his proportions.
One of the cool things about the dark mechanicus is how personalized they can be. For my skitarii
I decided to go with a gaunt and vicious interpretation, which the vanilla skitarii legs work well
for, but there’s a lot of other equally valid interpretations because the Dark Mechanicus
are one of the few armies that Games Workshop only has a few models for, so the design language
isn’t fully fleshed out: are they the normal insectile and golden age scifi mechanicus
but with pentagrams and extra spikey bits? Are they more flesh and metal melting together
like forgefiends and helbrutes? Or infernal engines like heldrakes? Really it’s up to
you as the converter. The easiest thing to use for arms would’ve
been the vanilla skitarii ones, but... not only would that have made for a boring conversion,
but it also wouldn’t have taken full advantage of the concept of dark skitarii who are even
more twisted and transhuman than their martian brethren. After all, a dark techpriest would
have even less respect for their skitarii’s bodies than a normal techpriest, see them
even more as tools with the single purpose of killing their enemies.
To me it seems that unlike normal skitarii that are maybe lightly personalized by their
techpriest dominus, but still largely simply drawn from a universal pool, for the dark
Mechanicus it would be a significantly more individualized process, with each dark techpriest
building their own skitarii retinue in their own way.
To match that ethos I outfitted my skitarii with various weapon limbs. While I don’t
play warhammer and my models aren’t intended to be tournament legal, I still like to try
and keep them somewhat close to what they would be proxying. Which in this case meant
gun limbs. I had two main issues when picking them out. The first was that I didn’t want
ones that made my skitarii look too cool or in control because I felt like that took away
from the story of them as tools crafted by their techpriest. And the second is that finding
sinister looking guns of this scale is actually weirdly difficult. I ended up compromising
and only having two of them have ranged weapons. For the two that do have gun arms, I just
used the ones from the katephron kit. I did try to merge an arco flagellant arm with a
gun, but that simply didn’t look as good. With my skitarii’s main armaments in place,
picking their other arm was more about flavor than functionality. After trying a few different
options I settled on using the dark eldar talos vestigial arms. They’re creepy and
insectile and it’s hard to know exactly where the flesh ends and mechanical begins,
which is perfect for mechanicus of any kind, but especially my interpretation of the dark
mechanicus. While it wasn’t worth making multiple of,
I also converted a dark rustalker. This was a tad more complicated, as I had to first
saw the rustalker in half at the waist, glue the legs into the hips, and then glue to the
renegade militia torso. While I could’ve used the normal chord claws and transonic
blades, I opted instead for glueing in place a pair of flails from an arco flagellant.
They’re really reminiscent of cockroach antennas, creep me out immensely, and are
thus perfect for chaos. And with that my skitarii were ready to do
the dark bidding of their techpriest. I’m really happy with how they turned out, gaunt
and creepy and subservient. There’s an extent to which I’ve never
been particularly interested in the dark mechanicus because to me there’s already enough dark
gothic strangeness in the normal mechanicus that adding chaos on top of that seems like
putting a hat on a hat. But working through this conversion has made me really appreciate
the unique edge they can bring, and I’ll be trying my hand at more in the future.
If you’re interested in seeing those conversions when they come out, then hit the subscribe
button. I also have a patreon, so go check that out if you want to contribute to the
channel and get a say in what I convert next. Thanks for watching.