We come from the land of the ice and snow

I've always liked Immigrant Song, the Led Zeppelin track referenced in the title, but I love it even more now, since it was used as the theme to Thor: Ragnarok. That film, in my opinion, is everything a Marvel film should be.*

I watched it again recently, this time with my kids, who are probably still too small to have been exposed to the Goddess of Death, the melt stick, Clancy Brown as a 1,000 ft tall fire demon, people being punched through walls, Jeff Goldblum's dance moves and a traitorous, bald-shaven Karl Urban. It's a film rich in excellence: the Jack Kirby–style visual design, Chris Hemsworth's comic timing, the Hulk's armour, and I particularly liked the moment at the end of the opening scene, when Thor straps a giant demon skull to his back. It struck me as something that would look pretty cool on a Warhammer Chaos Warrior.

And that started me thinking about other movies where we've seen fighters, knights and bad guys that could, conceivably, pass as Chaos Warrior types. And the first film that sprung to mind, just like Thor: Ragnarok, also featured Vikings, Clancy Brown and Karl Urban. For movie aficionados out there, it was, of course, Pathfinder (2007).

The Vikings in that film have a particularly Chaos-like feel to them, both in appearance and behaviour. They look fantastic, and never more so than when their dark and burnished armour is set against the bright white ice and snow of the mountains.

From there it was a short hop to the equally dark and burnished armour worn by the, albeit far less evil, knights of Britain, prior to the creation of the Round Table in John Boorman's truly epic Excalibur (1981).

And then, finally for now, while we're talking about 80s classics, on to Thulsa Doom's cult of terrible bad guys in the original Conan the Barbarian film (1982).

All these movies have sat in my subconscious, waiting for a time to see their influence surface somewhere in my miniature collection. Waiting for that chance to bubble up into the toy soldiers that I make and paint, filtered through my own ideas of what works and what doesn't. Ideas that mix together, then search out a place to live within the existing lore of the Warhammer universe.

And it seemed like a good time to turn to Chaos for other reasons too. After the successful completion of my Undead project a couple of months back, it made sense to try to repeat the trick of working on an entire army from start to finish – taking every single relevant miniature from my collection, and constructing and painting them all together.

But where to start?

With the Undead project, the first thing I did was grab the handful of already painted skeletons in my collection to use as a kind of proof of concept. Adapting them to sit on the round Age of Sigmar bases.

But where I only had 5 pre-existing skeletons, I already had 30 or 40 finished Chaos Warriors from my previous attempt to paint them up, and none of them really fit my new brief. I wanted to change the look of this army. Not the disparate individuals of before, but a more unified look. Darker and more muted, and based in the wild winter wastes.

So this was going to be a long slog. In fact I'm still only right at the beginning, so it IS going to be a long slog, but below are the first 15 adapted Chaos Warriors from my old collection, as preparation for the forthcoming rest of the force. I've darkened much of their armour, muted any fabrics they might be wearing, and brightened all the skin tones, to a more pallid, sickly tone. None of these are new miniatures, so my Addiction Challenge score is un-dented, but I'm fairly pleased all the same. These guys are definitely coming from the right place.

We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
How soft your fields so green
Can whisper tales of gore
Of how we calmed the tides of war
We are your overlords

* Or at least a significant chunk of the winning formula. I'm also a big fan of the Captain America high-tech espionage films: Winter Soldier and Civil War. Then there's the whole origin story genre, where nothing has beaten the first Iron Man film **
** except maybe Batman Begins, but I wasn't really talking about non-Avengers stuff. In fact I wasn't really talking about Avengers stuff either. This post was meant to be about followers of Chaos. That totally random force that sees you setting out to talk about one thing, only to end up talking about something completely different.