Heresy & Heroes

We had a long weekend over here in the UK this week and I was watching a little of Rick & Morty season 3, and while watching arguably the best episode of the season so far, my brain had a really stupid idea. “Why don’t you try and sculpt Pickle Rick for Warhammer 40,000” and that’s how I lost my long weekend.

Now, I am no great sculptor of miniatures. The medium of Green Stuff is one that I find fiddly and frustrating at best, but I thought I’d give it a shot. Now, in order to do any sort of detail on this, I couldn’t make it too tiny. It’s not to scale. or, I guess maybe a Rick (perhaps from dimension L-211) landed on Catachan (where everything is bigger, tougher, stronger and scarier) and discovered Catachan Pickles. He used these to improve on Rick C-137’s original designs, along with the necessary parts from a Catachan rat that was to scale. But I digress…

The limbs are literally made of cut and shaped staples and even bits of cotton thread. His shoulder mounted Lascannon is made from parts of a Hunter Killer missile, while his Xacto/Screw weapon is made from one of the smaller pouches that come with Space Marine kits. There’s also a pouch full of batteries – the pouch is made of green stuff, while the batteries are actually the bolts from a Chaos Space marine Bolt Pistol.

As he’s so tiny (I’ll show you some comparisons in a sec), I had to make his base a bit busy. There are some rocks, a spire thing, a skull, some barbed wire, and a glowing green rock because we all know how Rick loves glowing green rocks.

This is by far the fiddliest thing I’ve ever painted, but hopefully I got plenty of details in. I even managed to do the tiny rat brain at the back…

That brain is about the size of a pin head, which is slightly larger than the individual vertebrae that I somehow managed to do without swearing too much. I’d really like to get some better pictures but my camera/software is still out of action. When it functions again, I shall take some better snaps of him (and some other models) and share them here.

Now, how about those size comparisons…

So, he’s about knee-high to a Primaris Space Marine. Or to put it another way…

…about the same size as an individual (and very dusty – I really need to dust my miniatures!) Nurgling. To be honest, I never want to work on anything this frail, fiddly or tiny again. Especially if it involves green stuff. I started work on a Rhino straight after this as I just wanted to work on something big and get my perspective back!

Now, as well as putting together this miniature, I didn’t want to leave it at that. What would be the point in having this miniature at my disposal, if I couldn’t use him? So I wrote some rules. Full disclosure – these are very silly (like, mega silly), though I hope in keeping with the character. They have not been play tested, and to be honest, I started with Roboute Guilliman and toned it down slightly. Because why not, right? So, if you want to torture yourself my making a tiny pickle man (or Solenya), then you are more than welcome to use these rules (provided your opponent is mad enough to agree to you using them). Here you are:

Like I said: Silly. He becomes a more accurate shot the more wounds he takes, he hates Necrons and they hate him, and he will pretty much fight for anyone who will take him. I like to think that the Inquisition regard him as an oddity worthy of study, while the Chaos Space Marines think he could be a daemon in the employ of some new dark God. The Ad Mech are in awe of skills with machinery, the Dark Eldar are in awe of his sadistic nature, and the Orks are in awe of his violent tendencies. I could genuinely see him fitting in with any of these forces.

So there you have it. That’s how I lost my long weekend and gained a ridiculous miniature with a ridiculous set of rules. It was fun at least. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing this …no, there isn’t a better word than “Ridiculous” post, and normal service will resume shortly. Get Schwifty, y’all. Onwards.