sho3box

Some degenerate cannibals, to hang out in front of other, less cool degenerate cannibals.

ghoul/ɡuːl/noun

1. an evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies.
2. a person morbidly interested in death or disaster.

As in most fantasy settings that I have come across, in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, ghouls are still-living (as in, not undead) humans who have somehow been corrupted either by eating human flesh (the wendigo myth, the movie Ravenous (1999)) or by a disease that makes them crave long-pig (the movie 28 Days Later (2002), the Left 4 Dead video games).

Generally, the thing that differentiates a ghoul from a modern, western pop culture zombie is that a ghoul is still a living, breathing creature and a zombie is reanimated dead.

Still with me?

In AoS, an army of ghouls is called a “Flesh Eater Court”, and is one of the more entertainingly macabre factions in concept.

Flesh Eater Courts are led by an “abhorrant”. An abhorrant is a bestial vampire, who is mind-bendingly deranged to the extent that he broadcasts/infects those around him with his delusions.

The abhorrant thinks that s/he is a squeaky-clean champion of a fairy-tale kingdom, surrounded by loyal subjects, hosting banquets and raising toasts to chivalry in between heroic crusades against degenerate outsiders (quite a lot like the “alpha” zombies that appeared in Army of the Dead (2021) that was released this week, as it happens. Except that they are zombies, not ghouls or vampires. Sort of).

But that isn’t what is really happening. What is happening is that the kingdom is a charnel house full of emaciated, feverish and aggressive cannibals, mostly naked apart from the layers of filthy clotting blood and offal [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER].

This juxtaposition (yeah, I said it…) adds a lot of fun to a Flesh Eater Courts project, and I have been planning tackling one for a while now. The first step was to test a colour scheme on some other miniatures, and the second step was to paint the lovely Grymwatch set for Warhammer Underworlds.

I think that the Goblin-town goblins work well with the Grymwatch. FECs need a fairly large pool of figures to rip their opponents into nuggets, so it makes sense to have a number ready.

The Grymwatch themselves are as lovely as any other Warhammer Underworlds set to date, and were fun to paint, even if my photography didn’t really do them any favours. More FECs are in the pipeline.

Filed under: Miniatures | Tagged: 2021, Age of Sigmar, Fantasy, Flesh Eater Courts, Ghoul, Undead, Underworlds, Warhammer |