The ultimate dungeon monsters - the Skaven. Yesyes!

There's something about the Chaos ratmen, Skaven, that makes them perfect antagonists in a Warhammer dungeon adventure. Dungeons are dark, damp and scary places that'd be filled with rats in any case, underground nests being their natural habitat when they aren't lurking about on riverbanks or rifling through my recycling bins. It makes sense that they'd be there, hatching cunning and cruel plots deep beneath the earth.

Furthermore, they aren't derived ultimately from Tolkien or Moorcock so they feel distinctly "Warhammer". Also very typical of early days Warhammer is the Skaven's mix of humour and horror. The idea of an evil "ratman" speaking in Queekish is inherently absurd/funny/cute.

Their mythic origin story seems deeply inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, particularly The Doom That Came to Sarnath. It's perfectly pitched in a "legend has it" style, combined with the fact that the Skaven's existence is generally considered a mere fairytale in the Empire itself.

Anyway, I could write more (a lot more), but for the moment I want to focus on my own initial steps into the kingdom of rats. 

My test subject Warhammer Quest Skaven painted in unlikely royal purple.

Before I regained a copy of Advanced Heroquest (thanks for the overwhelming Christmas present last year, Kitty), I still had my copy of Warhammer Quest, which was Advanced Heroquest's handsome son. Inside were twelve Skaven warriors, pretty similar to the older plastic Skaven pose-wise, but more detailed, more armoured and slightly less hunched over. In fact, as time went on, Skaven miniatures became less and less hunched over, more upright and stronger looking until they resembled muscular monkeys. Which is why everyone knows "manthing JesGoodwin" made the best, most Skaveny Skaven in the 80s and early/mid 90s.

Above you can see my initial painting test subject, Mister Scritchstink. Looking back through old copies of White Dwarf, and indeed, the dark memory cellars of my mind, it was apparent that the hands and feet of Skaven were generally painted flesh coloured, somewhat akin to the pink extremities of real rats. As you can see, I only made a subtle gesture towards that on my first Skaven because the first attempt with fleshy colours looked stupid to my mind. The ears at least should have been fleshy pink though. 

Clothes for rats. I can't imagine that Skaven have tailors, nor a textile industry. But who then makes their attire? Particularly as it all looks fairly uniform and stylistic, a sort of comfy quasi-Medieval outfit of tunic and liripipe. Probably it's best not to think about these things too much, similar to how we ought to ignore Tolkien's orcs talking about a "menu", with the implication that orcish restaurants exist.

Well, maybe Skaven stage regular hold-ups of travelling clothing merchants or something. In any case, I painted Scritchstink with a purple outfit, in keeping with the mid-90s feeling of the model. Really the liripipe should be a different colour to the tunic underneath, but this guy just likes purple a lot, alright? As for purple, it's a very unlikely colour really, purple being the most uncommon colour for textiles due to the rarity, and therefore cost, of the necessary dye. Hence why it was more or less exclusive to royalty. I believe at one point in the Middle-ages it was even forbidden by law for commoners to wear it. 

But, we're talking here about Warhammer, maybe Scritchstink is a regicide with a penchant for stealing clothes, I don't know. And purple contrasts nicely with the otherwise natural colours. That being said, I decided to paint the Advanced Heroquest Skaven in less flamboyant clothing.

Look how hunched they are. I think later sculptors mistook "hunch" for "hench".

It's weird in some ways that Skaven were the main antagonists for Advanced Heroquest, they don't even appear on the main box art. The painting, a somewhat more cartoonish version of the MB Games Heroquest art by Les Edwards, was clearly made to the same brief. I guess there were various commercial reasons why that was so, but nevertheless it felt a bit odd.   

Nonetheless, ecstatic with my new copy of AHQ (yes, by now it's a bit tiring writing the full name each time), I set about painting the included monopose warriors. As you can see, this time the bases were painted a brownish colour to better match the AHQ room and corridor tiles. These models have softer detail than the WHQ version but are still fun and simple to paint. 

I haven't yet painted the full horde, simply because I don't need to. The original idea outlined in the rulebook was to use different colour bases to represent the different Skaven, the sentries, champions and so on. But because I have adult money these days I've sought out proper models for those more specialist types. More on that in a later post. The remaining Skaven I've decided to paint as Clan Pestilens warriors for specific scenarios. More on that later, too.

As mentioned earlier, I went for a more subdued, natural and earthy colour palette for these, adding some brighter colour here and there on the shields for a bit of contrast. I think they look rather nice and give me the grimy, stinking Old World feelings that I crave.

More ratty shenanigans next time, manthings!