Skaven Bilge Runners

 I'm still trying to round out my AoS Skaven army, and I really love the not-more-clanrats (which I own 60 of now. Christ, that's a lot of rats) aspect of Night Runners. I'd been giving James workshop a lot of money recently by getting the Skaventide box, so I wanted to go off-road and look into smaller indie shops for miniatures this time. 

I looked through a bunch of small shops for alternatives to GW models. since I will never play any sort of official tournament, it frees me to just go with rule-of-cool, which is what attracted me to the Wars hammer in the first place. I do kind of love how oldschool theirs looked, but I also wanted to give them a slightly more piratey look to match the rest of my army.

One of the ones that jumped out to me that I am for sure coming back to later is Mantic Games' Ratkin. They're amazing with obvious Skaven equivalents, and they have a lot of that chunky retro charm that I love. I didn't end up going with these this time, but I'm definitely eyeing them for future builds, maybe Storm vermin? We'll see.

But, what I ended up going with is a classic in US miniatures, Reaper Minis. I'd gotten some models from them before but never really did much with them. I'd intended to use them for D&D, but then in-person games stopped suddenly, sometime around 2019. Still, as I browsed through their models, I was astounded how cheap they are, especially the large scale monsters. I browsed around, finding and setting aside a bunch of good minis for future builds, but I really like the "Wererats" sculpt, and picked up 3 of those. They come with 4 each, but the larger taller spear rat seems like a great Storm vermin, so I set those aside for the future too. After trimming a couple of seams (and kitbashing a tenth rat! Since there were only 9 from the purchase), I got to painting.

I tried a lot of different paint schemes, and had trouble deciding. I wanted to respect the black cloaks and give them highlights of bright red to pop on the table a little, but couldn't really nail the fur color or the narrative. I decided on bright white, as a contrast to the black cloth, but after finishing off a layer, I realized how much bare skaven fur was shining brightly. Also, it didn't feel like it had a narrative hook to me. So, I looked over a bunch of different ideas to make them feel like not just clan Eshin. So, I gave my rats tattoos! I felt it made them look like they came from some other culture, and visually tied them together to each other, looking unique among their peers but still thematically oceanic.

You counted right, there's 9 there. I'd misplaced one and had to paint them in a catch-up panic!

So there's my Night Runners! I decided to call them Bilge Runners (a nod to Gutter Runners, the now defunct legends unit) to be all piratey. Thanks for reading!

- Miss Captain Bear