Spotlight on: Nagash!

When I first created this blog I put a picture up of this beautiful model that I use to represent that most notorious of arch necromancers Sauron Nagash!

I think it’s one of the nicest miniatures ever created and though I own the original GW Nagash and did my best to “save it” with the paint job, it still wasn’t quite good enough alongside modern miniatures for the high standards I aim for (even if I don’t always achieve them). 

Now I wish I could tell you what model this is and I’d certainly be grateful for anyone who can remind me. I bought it on eBay a couple of years ago and I just spent ages searching for it again just now.

Each year I hope GW will release a campaign book about the return of Nagash but still no word as yet. I always hope he’ll appear in one of the undead army books, but no luck so far.

Of course my entire campaign storyline is based on Nagash leading his undead armies north toward the Empire so having him appear in games is pretty vital. Sadly, so far he’s not had much luck in games. I used rules for him based on those on the excellent Nagashizar website. And I just found sort of rules for him in the Vampire Coast campaign book on the Tempus Fugitives website.

Bascially in the game, he’s such a vast sink of points that he struggles to earn the points back. I guess it’s just a case of reducing the points until they make better balance. For example, in one game, he was in combat with a huge unit of zombies alongside. The zombies got their asses kicked but good while Nagash killed loads of the enemy, but because of the overall combat being a loss, Nagash was killed through combat resolution. The annoying thing being that if he hadn’t had loads of zombies “helping him” he would have easily overrun the enemy unit and gone on to win the game.

It’s that kind of thing. 

But who cares in many ways. He’s a beautiful model with a fantastic history that is integral to my campaign storyline.  

To paint him I used turquoise over a very dark blue for the robes and bronze over Tin Bitz for the armour. I was aiming for a fairly subtle realistic look.The "skin" was a series of greys.

I decided to have the skulls as bronze accessories rather than real skulls - because the model is 54mm and they would have been way too big for normal skulls. 

The dust weathering was graveyard earth under bleached bone. 

He has a really nice aggressive stance, making him look like a martial general rather than just an evil wizard. I just really do love this guy!