Strengthening the Sentinels

Evening!

After I finished painting the first batch of my Scarlet Sentinels warrior chamber of Stormcast Eternals, they have not been seen in this blog that much. Not at all, actually. Now that is about to change: I have fairly recently finished painting 10 Liberators, with custom Grandhammers!

"Custom-what?", you're asking. Let me show you!

Here they are in all their glory, 10 Liberators with Prime and two Grandhammers (and an additional Prime if I ever need 2 units of 5 men). These are all models from the Age of Sigmar starter set, so they're monopose and armed with shields and warhammers. They bear the colours of my own Warrior Chamber: the Scarlet Sentinels, and as such their livery is dark red, purple, gold and steel. They stand upon the flagstones of an Order settlement, just like my Freeguild, to bind these two armies together in their background narrative.

I mentioned they were Easy-to-Build models from the starter set. What about those Grandhammers? I scratch-built them myself.

Some of the regular Liberators had poses that lent themselves pretty well to some conversion work. In terms of maximizing the efficiency of this unit and its damage output I would've been better off by giving the Grandhammers to the Primes; they make 3 Attacks instead of 2 in combat. 

I, however, don't care for min-maxing or winning at all costs. I think these hammers look better on regular Liberators, as I can leave out their shields altogether in favour of their two-handed weapons. This makes the weapon look heavier and more cumbersome than the weapons of the rest of the unit, reflecting its increased Rend and Damage written in the warscroll. It was also a lot easier to make Liberators look natural with this conversion, as the Primes are in such heroic poses that sticking a Grandhammer to it would just look silly.

Original pose on the left, converted cersion on the right

I left out their shield arms and cut away their hammers, replacing them with empty hands from the Judicators kit (I cut off all the bow parts). I lengthened the handles of the hammers with Dreadspear and Ungor spear hafts, and topped them all with Retributor hammers I had lying around (I converted my starter set Paladins into Decimators). Thus I had created relatively easy and extremely cheap Grandhammers for the unit to bash the enemies of the God-King with!

Here are some WIP-pics from along the way. Once primed, the conversion were blending in quite well. I'm very happy with the results and will do this again when I inevitably add more Liberators to my growing Stormcast force.


Until next time!