Firstly, they're all barbarians, a category of character in the Warhammer world that was long ago subsumed into Norsca and the tribes of the Chaos Wastes.
Secondly, they were once heroes with names that were known far and wide.
Now, they walk the path of the damned.
Due to what happened later to the concept of barbarians in Warhammer, these four models from the mid-eighties fit well into a Chaos force.
Three of them were originally part of the Dungeonquest boardgame and its expansion, and until I started looking up their names today, I was convinced the other one was too.
Apparently not.
Ulv Grimhand is the original plastic barbarian character from the Dungeonquest boardgame. He's a chunky boy and not particularly well sculpted or proportioned, especially his mahoosive hands.
Fortunately, odd scales and proportions don't look out of place in a Chaos army, and so this hulking giant has clearly begun to mutate.
He's actually the first model I've converted in any way for this project, but not in any major way. The horns on his helmet were broken after thirty years of misuse and so it was a simple bit of surgery to add some new horns from a Chaos banner.
Siegfried Goldenhair (yes, his hair's actually black) comes from the Heroes for Dungeonquest, a box that contained 12 additional and I could swear he had a different name on the Citadel Combat Cards.
I'm a bit sad that I haven't taken a picture of the back as I've done a pretty good job of getting a dirty effect on the lower part of his cloak with Typhus Corrosion. However, I've always liked this model and he makes a more than suitable unit champion.
Helena the Swift, also from Heroes for Dungeonquest, is a strange on. All the images I can find online have this model having wings on her helmet rather than horns. I've no idea why this one is different but it does make her a better fit as a Chaos Marauder, albeit one with no trousers.
She is the model I'm least happy with from the four. Mainly this is because of the skin on her legs being so mottled. However, I also think that cleaner legs would look weird given the basing I've done, so I'm just going always look at her from three feet away from now on.
Osamund Doomspinner is the model I'd misremembered as being from the Heroes for Dungeonquest box. In fact he was released as a simple Berzerker (spelled with a Z on the original flyer) in the C01 Fighters range, and later given his somewhat overblown moniker when they were re-advertised in the Citadel Journal.
His two hand weapons throw an extra bit of variation into the great weapon or shield (or both in Ulv's case) dynamic that the unit have going on.
In fact, I can actually call them a unit because 10 Chaos Marauders armed with great weapons and light armour (which is the current majority loadout), led by a unit champion are a legal unit in Warhammer: the Old World.
Not a very good unit, and only 97 points, but still, it's a very small milestone.
I am a little conscious that they all have viscera smeared across their weapons but not anywhere else. However, I'm not sure I want to splatter blood all over them yet. I might get to that in time, but I'll probably want to experiment first.
Having exhausted the humans I have available that aren't more suited the Chaos Warriors, do my next additions to this units are going to be either pre-big hat Chaos Dwarfs or Beastmen, both of which will bring more than a touch of mutation to proceedings.
Acquired: -29
Painted: 26
Lead Mountain: 604