A little background, in Third edition Fantasy battle there wasn't Vampire Counts and Tomb King there was only Undead. One unit now gone from Vampire armies were the Skeleton Grim Reapers. They were skeletons equipped with scythes, that they used as two handed weapons. The original Skeleton army box had the bits for ten grim reapers and I built them that way back in the day. A couple editions later I was rebuilding my army into a Vampire counts army and did away with the grim reapers. I broke off their scythes and rebuilt them into swordsmen. I saved the bits and have since rebuilt them. I only had ten and I wanted a unit of twenty for my game against Chuckaroobob. So a raid into the bits box.
I knew I had a bunch of scythes from the old zombie set an my original plan was to just use them as is. After mocking up a couple I didn't like the look and didn't want the Grim Reapers to have one fleshy arm and the rest all skeleton. So time to convert a zombie scythe to a skeleton scythe.
The start of the conversion, a zombie scythe arm and a skeleton morning star arm.
My first go at the conversion was cutting the both arms at the wrist and pinning them together. It went together pretty good but then I had to go back and sculpt the wrist bones back on with greenstuff. I could make it work but back to the drawing board.
Plan B, more straight forward. Cut the morning star off of the skeleton hand and drill a hole through the grip. Then cut the zombie hand out of the center of the scythe and drill both sections. Then run a piece of brass wire through the skeleton hand and set the two sections of scythe on the wire and glue. I was careful to drill in the center of the hand and scythe handles. After I glued them on, I just had to go back and greenstuff the gap between the handles and the hand. Ready for the model.
The second half of the Skeleton Grim Reapers starts to take shape.
The second half of the Grim Reapers finished. I though about making a more dynamic pose with the skeletons holding the scythes across their chest but decided to stick with a quick conversion and have less trouble ranking them up.
The whole unit of Grim Reapers. The old style scythes are decidedly smaller than the zombie scythes but I can live with it. I still might make some command models for them or just use one of the other sets I already have built and painted. I plan to have them lead by either a Necromancer or Undead hero for the game but I am still finalizing my list.
About half way through building them I started asking my self what I was going to do with them in a game for the current edition of Warhammer fantasy Battle. The first option is to use them as back rankers for my skeleton spear man unit. That will give me a forty skeletons for a good sized horde formation. I think the better option is as back rankers for my Grave Guard unit. That would give me thirty five Grave Guard, probably a better use until I get some more oop Grave Guard to fill out the unit.
Thanks for looking
ColKG
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