My all Mantic ratkin army

Right! This has been a labour of love for 6 months. Being a special snowflake, I wanted to make a ratkin army, but using only Mantic miniatures. So I bought a bunch of Warpath and Deadzone miniatures, and set to it. The theme is that the brood mother and her warlock escaped their total destruction in a basilean outpost and stumbled onto an abandoned dwarf mine on the edge of the abyss. They quickly repopulated (dirty buggers) and used the dwarven machinery and armour to force their new weapons. They captured adventurers and warbands to use as their slaves from the surrounding area, and fortified the muddied terrain (the flood, right?) with fortifications to protect against any invading forces.

This is the whole army so far. It’s way over 2500 points at this stage, and unless I want to run multiple blight (which I sometimes do, and I have some GW hordes for that), I can run pretty much most combinations.

These are tunnel slaves. There’s one ratkin brute made from a veer myn nightmare, and then just tons of other mantic minis converted with green stuff to wear rags.

With a special little visitor around the corner

More slaves, same principle. These ones are outside the mine.

Tunnel runners. These are the warpath ones, with tank tracks and green stuff spikes and blades. I’m least happy with these out of my whole army. They just look boring. But hey.

Close up.

Shock troops, made from mantic night crawlers. Green stuff armour and nose cones (??) added. Abyssal arms for the shields.

These are Blight, made from veer myn nightcrawlers with green stuff cloaks.

Brutes. made from Veer Myn Nightmares with tons of green stuff. These were among the first I made, and the paint job shows.

More Shock troops. These are from 1st generation veer myn night crawlers. The models are far more fantasy and easier to adjust. Same abyssal arms. The leader is the special edition “piper” model.

My little demonspawn. He’s made from the mantic dragon with green stuff tail, fur, and a heavily altered toy rat head. He’s… ok. the tail need redoing if I’m honest, but I am a hysterically lazy human.

Hackpaws, made from goblins (and one gore rider) with veer myn heads and tails.

Clawshots. Made from goblins with guns from 40k, and veer myn tails.

Close up.

Weapon teams from the veer myn gun units. Chopped off all the sci fi bits and green stuffed them to make them more steam punk.

Night Terror (again, green stuff for the sci fi bits), and a brood mother veer myn that I made into a death model for a tournament. Can go on a 40mm base for another night terror if needed.

Warlock (orc conversion), ASB (orc conversion with freehand banner), and ASB (goblin conversion)

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You finished this army in only 6 months? That is really outstanding with all that conversions :+1:

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Excellent use of creativity everywhere, really unique and dynamic look! The demonspawn in particular is an outstanding centerpiece, really grabs the attention!

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Love all the details. Really pops. And ambitious to create a Rat Army without Skaven. Honest effort there! Great job. Love the Mine and the ore car tracks. So good. Great perspective for underground.

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Thanks!

Actually one of the problems with the army is it’s very brown, so it really doesn’t pop. All the metal is rusted and there’s only the red to differentiate it. So on the table it looks quite unexciting!

I’m going to do a big display board to try and show it off, but at a recent tournament it failed to get any painting votes whatsoever lol.

My lesson for next army is make it dramatic! Lots of colour so it stands out. You can put all the work in the world into an army but if it’s just brown, it doesn’t show!

That’s just all kinds of neat, hats of to you :+1:

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Excellent execution of the army. IMO, reflects the character of the ratkin perfectly

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Contrast is king. Something that would add some pop would be to make the soil a colder tone to contrast the warm browns of the Ratkin. Maybe work a thin blue or purple wash over the ground cover. You could also add some colorful fungus to the mine scenes. As a critique if you’re going for paint competition, I would say that, overall, your models are a bit flat; adding more highlights and deeper shadows will really let your fantastic conversions be seen more readily. Great work though, especially in such a limited time!

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@VigoTheButch Thank you so much for this! I promised myself no more work on this, but I will try the wash on the soil to see if it works. I have pots and pots of old GW washes. I think a purple might make it darker, but a blue… hmmn!

As it happens, every time I have green stuff left over I make little mushrooms, so I’ll paint some up and see how they look in the mine.

Very cool! So much green stuff!

Daniel.

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Well that tickles my fancy. Really like This army, fantastic work, well done

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WOW! That is an impressive army! I love the tunnel slaves. They are basically dioramas. Great work.

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