Corrupted Light Acolytes for Silver Tower

I like to think of Light Wizards as jobbing professionals and their Acolytes as bumbling apprentices.  Here’s a bumble of Light Acolytes – one of the obscurest units in Warhammer of editions past.

Corrupted Silver Tower Light Wizard Acolytes
Left to right: Donkor, Aswad, Llam-Cheops, Wiss Qeb, Khontar and Wankh.

Two poses of Acolyte were released in April 1993 alongside the Light Wizard on foot. Empire player could buy them in units of five at 25 points to accompany a Light Wizard.  Rules were that if you deployed the five Acolytes in a pyramid formation (Light Wizards being all Egpytian and therefore pyramid-themed) with the Light Wizard at the apex you got an extra Winds of Magic card.  Now, I read “deployed in pyramid formation” and think this:

Corrupted Silver Tower Light Wizard Acolytes in a Human Pyramid
NAILED IT.  One bonus Winds of Magic please.

But no, they didn’t mean human pyramid formation, they mean 2-D triangle formation, as you can see in the iconic Gathering of Might battle report photo below from White Dwarf 181 (1995).  This unit in this battle report puzzled child-Curis as Warhammer Armies: The Empire didn’t contain any rules for it – it’s only now in 2018 that I know they had to be conjured up from the pages of the Warhammer Battle Magic supplement.

Corrupted Silver Tower Light Wizard Acolytes
Spot the pyramid.

The majority of my Light Acolytes had been rescued from someone that got halfway to converting them into Necromunda gangers or Warhammer 40,000 cultists – their hands and weapons had been hacked away and replaced with autopistols, stubguns and the like.  This meant there was no guilt at despoiling vintage miniatures for the sake of bringing their weaponry in line with the rules of the modern Warhammer game.

Corrupted Silver Tower Light Wizard Acolytes in Fogou terrain

Lazuli spearheading the official and far less silly pyramid formation.

Yes!  Modern Warhammer!  (As if the 32mm rounds bases weren’t enough of a clue.)  These figures have been specifically modelled as Kairic Acolytes for Silver Tower: two with hand weapon and shield, two with double-handed weapons and two with pairs of hand weapons.

I originally restored the Acolytes back to Warhammer Fantasy with contemporaneous 1990s Citadel weaponry, but it looked bad.  There was no Egyptian weaponry (it wasn’t until 2003 that the Tomb Kings range appeared), and so I suspended my Citadel-components-only rule and bought some WarGods of Ægyptus bits from Crocodile Games.  This does annoy the Citadel purist in me, and to get back to sleep I tell myself Crocodile’s Chris Fitzpatrick did a stint sculpting for Games Workshop.

Corrupted Silver Tower Light Wizard Acolytes

Silver Tower madness at Knavecon 2018.  Pat, Bruce, cheetor and yours truly looming over our various creations.

To get even more gaming use out of the figures I’d like to paint another three to make a full official Warscroll for Warhammer Age of Sigmar.  I’ve also got plans for them in a series of summer Mordheim games, where they’ll be fielded as Brethren in a Possessed Warband.  Watch this space!

Curis

Curis has painted for Games Workshop, Forge World, Warlord Games, Mantic Games, Avatars of War, Wargames Foundry, Studio McVey and many others. He's won at Golden Demon and Salute. He publishes monthly painting tutorials on Patreon.

29 thoughts on “Corrupted Light Acolytes for Silver Tower

  • May 14, 2018 at 1:18 pm
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    Personally I like your idea of a pyramid better then the GW one!

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    • May 14, 2018 at 3:47 pm
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      It’s still technically a triangle though. I think to make a proper three-tier pyramid you’d need six on the ground, three on top of them and then a Light Wizard on top.

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      • May 18, 2018 at 3:58 am
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        It’s arguable that you would actually need 14: a square of 9 for the base, a square of 4 on top of them, and then the Wizard at the very top ;)

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        • May 18, 2018 at 12:23 pm
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          Square-pyramidal pyramid as opposed to a tetrahedral pyramid! I like it!

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  • May 14, 2018 at 1:22 pm
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    They turned out well. I think I prefer your initial interpretation of the pyramid. I still don’t understand why AoS had to change the basing, oh well.

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    • May 14, 2018 at 3:47 pm
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      Thanks! Part of me regrets not modelling it properly like that.

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  • May 14, 2018 at 1:27 pm
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    I like few things more than seeing mutilated minis lovingly restored and given a cracking paint job. These are a very fine idea to represent Kairic acolytes. They look nice and opulent, and is that Eau de Tzeentch I detect?

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    • May 14, 2018 at 3:49 pm
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      Thanks! I was thinking about free-handing a Tzeentch icon onto the shields, but I ran out of time ahead of my game with the lads and just went with plain marbled surfaces. If I could combine the icon of Hysh with the icon of Tzeentch I may revisist these.

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  • May 14, 2018 at 2:49 pm
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    I wasn’t much of a fan of the range when they came out, I’m still not either, but your conversion work and subsequent paint jobs have really brought them to life Curis. The names are something else :D

    I didn’t realise that you were a GW purist at heart, how do you stomach what you see us do to our GW mini’s on a regular basis?

    Stellar work mate, really great!

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    • May 14, 2018 at 3:50 pm
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      They are considerable chunkier than I remember them being, I’ve got a quartet of other wizards on my desk this morning courtesy of antipixi and they’re incredibly wide. How they ever fitted on 20mm squares and ranked up is a mystery.

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    • May 14, 2018 at 3:54 pm
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      I’m a GW purist as I’ve been conditioned by years of official GW tournaments and the rules of Golden Demon, plus the idea of my figures appearing in White Dwarf. I am a little less puritanical these days (see my Cockatrice), expanding it to include other contemporaneous manufacturers. So I don’t twitch when I see non-Citadel components grafted on as much these days. It’s more about whether their sculpting style and scale blend with the Citadel pieces.

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  • May 14, 2018 at 3:50 pm
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    I love the composition of these. Well done on taking something pretty vanilla, and making it darker and much more interesting!

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    • May 14, 2018 at 4:53 pm
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      Thanks Nick! I hope to develop the theme of these figures a little further with the next batch – converting a pair of them into a to be a scroll bearer and a Vulcharc wielder so they slip into modern Age of Sigmar comfortably.

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  • May 15, 2018 at 8:55 am
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    These are rather excellent. Rather, these are very average models made excellent by your painting and Fitz’ weapon replacements.

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    • May 15, 2018 at 9:07 am
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      Thanks! I love how he called himself “FITZ”, even going so far as sculpting it as a signature on some of his Games Workshop pieces – like the ALbion Truthsayer.

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      • May 27, 2018 at 2:38 am
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        A lifetime nickname, no doubt. I remember a kid we called “Fitzie” even back as about 10 or 11 years old.

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  • May 15, 2018 at 9:23 am
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    This is amazing. I too was fascinated by this obscure rule, so I tried to make this exact same unit for home Age of Sigmar games last year.

    I had the Talisman 3rd Edition Light Wizard at the head of the pyramid, then I used five HeroQuest wizards as the Acolytes. I used the HeroQuest candlesticks and glued them onto the end of the ‘Acolytes’ staffs, so it looked like a choir all carrying church candles. It was a great idea, I thought, but I abandoned it before it got anywhere.

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    • May 15, 2018 at 6:16 pm
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      Five HeroQuest wizards?! How did you get your hands on that many? That’s some eBay patience?

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      • May 16, 2018 at 6:31 am
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        I already had two from when I purchased two sets of HeroQuest some years ago (American version + British version). Then I found some guy selling individual HeroQuest figures on eBay for several pounds each. I bought three for the purpose of the “Light Pyramid”. Getting the wizards wasn’t so hard. The really difficult bit was getting the HeroQuest candlesticks!

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  • May 15, 2018 at 9:33 am
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    As these are dark, corrupted light wizards, when you put them into a triangle formation they should get an extra… poo. They get poo. Big jobby plop plops. Extra.

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    • May 15, 2018 at 6:17 pm
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      I am writing a letter of recommendation for you, addressed to the Games Workshop rules writing team.

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      • May 16, 2018 at 2:27 pm
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        Oh I’m sure they know me by now, I’m always writing to them about my great rules ideas, like how they should give elves bonuses if you play them at Christmas, and how oger players should like, eat their opponent’s minis to get powers, and, and, this one rule where if a troll uses a vomit attack, you could use real vomit as a template!

        I’m sure they’ll get back to me soon. I know they are busy busy bees. It’ll take them a while to look through my realvomit template photo gallery I sent too (one of the pukes looks like Karl Franz).

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    • May 24, 2018 at 1:37 pm
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      Next challenge: inverted pyramid.

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  • June 11, 2018 at 10:12 pm
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    Surely not? An early form of the Tower of Wankh if I’m not mistaken

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