Tzeentch has many Silver Towers floating through the Mortal Realms, but the one I am building is full of throwbacks to a time when metal miniatures reigned supreme. Welcome back to my Silver Tower of lead.

The initial spark that led me on a four-year quest to reconstruct the Silver Tower game with 1990s lead miniatures was two of the tiny familiar miniatures – instantly recognisable as reimaginings of Citadel classics from days of yore. I’ve painted a complete set of modern plastic versions, and a complete set composed of 1980s/1990s analogues.

The CH5 Lune Familiar is an adorable moon-headed mook who was reborn in plastic complete with his original moon on a stick, tintinabulous jester shoes and scowling moonface.

The CH5 Walking Book Familiar was a perennial favourite of Warhammer players, popping up as a wizard’s helper in Chaos and non-Chaos armies for years. I’ve not thought of anything high concept enough to paint freehand on the pages of the plastic version, so I’ve left them blank for now. Maybe I will leave it blank forever and claim it’s an unwritten journal.

The small Lord of Change (Lord of Small Change?) was probably originally sculpted as a 6mm Epic Greater Demon miniature, but rolled into the CH5 Chaos Familiar range for the 1991 Citadel Catalogue Section 2. I’ve painted mine in orange and turquoise to match my 28mm Greater Demon. The new plastic version takes the mini Greater Demon vibe even further, having been written up in the background as a mischievous sprite with the delusion he’s an actual Lord of Change.

The fourth and final Silver Tower familiar, Slop, is a subtly different kettle of fish to the others – inspired not by a CH5 Chaos Familiar miniature but by Mordheim’s leitmotif of mutant fish artwork or old Ian Miller illustrations. I’ve painted the plastic Slop’s the tail with a Rainbow fade to match Blot.

That’s another adversary group ready for Silver Tower. You can see Brimstone Horrors here, Light Wizards here, Light Acolytes here. Tzaangor here and Deathrunners here. Time to start work on the next of the nineties nasties.

Ninjabread out!

Q. What do you get if you cross a Chaos Centaur of Tzeentch, and a zebra?
A. A “Tzebra”.

Presenting Tzebra Doomstripe, the latest monster to swell the ranks of my vintage Warhammer collection.

This tzoological monstrosity was my entry into the “Make a Trish” competition in the Oldhammer Community. Challengers had a month to model and paint a Trish Carden miniature, and the Mistress of Monsters herself would pick a favourite.

Tzebra is not one actually one Trish Carden monster, but two mashed together. The MM94/1 Chaos Centaur Lord was a metal human torso designed to be fitted to the standard plastic Warhammer horse torso (henceforth: “horso”). But the plastic horso had spindly legs that looked wrong with the human torso’s majestically beefy barbarian arms, so I decapitated Trish’s MM83 High Elf Unicorn and used it as a replacement horso. This new unicorn part is, importantly, also saddle-free – Tzebra is a Lord of Chaos and tolerates no riders upon his horso.

To nudge Tzebra into Tzeentch’s visual territory, I swapped his barbarian broadsword for a scratch-built khopesh. His helmet plume was switched for a plastic Ork topknot, whose flowing lines better matched the new unicorn tail. Historically, these helmet plumes were made from dyed horsehair, meaning Tzebra has made a hat decoration out of his own bodyhair.

The skin was painted light blue at first (using a modified version of the Ur-Ghul recipe Patreon backers have access to), and had dark blue strips added afterwards. I did a digital mockup of the colours to experiment with continuing the zebra strips onto the human elements, and also to work out if the blue and white stripes that worked in my imagination would look too “Bananas in Pyjamas” (thankfully not).

Tzebra didn’t win Trish’s competition, losing out to Jonathan Marshall’s atmospheric Albion Fenbeast. You can check out a gallery of all the entries here . Thanks to Asslessman for organising the competition, and Trish for judging and providing the prize.

More tzany Tzeentch creations coming soon!

Move over Penn & Teller, move over Siegfried & Roy – a new magical double act is in town.  Coming all the way from the pyramids of the Old World are twin brothers Lapis & Lazuli  – fantastical Wizards of Light.

Masters of the mysterious and occasional caberet performers.

This magical duo are going to be the Kairic Adepts in my vintage Silver Tower project – where I replace all the 2016 boardgame pieces with Citadel Miniatures from about 20 years previous.  Like the Brimstone Horrors I painted previously, 1990s era Warhammer didn’t have Kairic Adepts, but did have Egyptian-flavoured magic users in the form of Light Wizards. And the 1990s Light Wizards also had Acolytes, which are perfect for Silver Tower Kairic Acolytes.

These Light Wizards turned traitor from the College of Light alongside their Patriarch – Egrimm van Horstmann.  They have found sanctuary from the Empire in a Silver Tower of Tzeentch in my personal Warhammer canon.  Egrimm himself will be big boss of the Silver Tower, as he was Tzeentch’s favoured servant in the 20 years before Gaunt Summoners were invented.

Lapis & Lazuli supported by Blue Horrors in their Silver Tower.

Games Workshop originally released the plastic Light Wizard (on the right in the photos) as the High Priest in the 1994 Talisman expansion Dungeon of Doom.  He later appeared as one of the eight free wizard miniatures on 1995’s White Dwarf 186.  Getting a Warhammer character miniature in plastic was an insane novelty in the 1990s, as plastic was normally reserved only for the massed ranks of mono-posed regiments.

Here’s Lazuli with the other classic 3rd edition Talisman miniatures I’ve painted to date.

Lazuli and Pazyryk Banefire in the ruins of a non-metallic tower.

Coming soon on Ninjabread: more vintage lead miniatures to populate my time-warped Silver Tower.

Brimstone Horrors!  The cheeky pairs of scampering bastards you get when you kill a Blue Horror.  I’ve painted four sets of these quarter-daemons, but with an Oldhammer twist.

And it’s all in how you mix the two.
And it starts just where the light exists.

Ever since 1989, Pink Horrors split into a pair of Blue Horrors when killed – it was the Tzeentch lesser daemon gimmick.  But when Silver Tower arrived in 2016, the GIMMICK ALSO SPLIT IN TWO as Blue Horrors started to split into pairs of Brimstone (or Yellow) Horrors.  This troubled me for a little while, as there are several generations of vintage Pink and Blue Horror miniatures with no corresponding Brimstone Horrors if you want to use them with modern Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 rules.  But then I remembered the tiny Epic-scale Pink Horrors from 1992.

Do your demons, do they ever let you go?

Epic was nominally a 6mm game, but these Horrors were hilariously overscaled and make great 28mm familiars – as I discovered way way back in 2010 when I painted Inconstantine Bowie, Champion of Tzeentch.

Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-changes

It has taken me a while to work out why yellow was chosen as the colour for the new tiny Horrors.  The answer is in this passage from White Dwarf 113 (May 1989), which highlights the importance of colours in the early Warhammer lore.

Tzeentch is the Changer of Ways and, true to his nature, he has more than a single colour. The Pink and Blue Horrors, Daemons of Tzeentch, use magic of their own actual colour, reflecting the changing forces of their master as they turn from pink to blue. However, aside from the Pink Horrors who are associated with the Amethyst College, Tzeentch’s colours are very bright shades of blue and yellow. These colours are often dominant, though by no means exclusive, in the worship of Tzeentch. The two colours are particularly significant because they are the province of the Golden and Celestial Colleges which lie either side of the green magic of Tzeentch’s adversary Nurgle. A follower of Tzeentch could therefore be inferior or superior to Nurgle depending on his colour.

I really like how daemons align to the Colleges of Magic, and will use it as an excuse to model some Golden and Celestial Wizards to be corrupted by Tzeentch.

Wave your hands in the air like you don’t care.

These newly painted Horrors join my existing 1980s Kev Adams Horror force I started 9 years ago. I’ve rebased these minis onto 32mm round bases which means they don’t have any of their toes poking over the edge.  They’ve seen plenty of gaming action down the years so there were a fair few chips to repaint.  I really enjoyed the restoration; it was like catching up with old friends, or wearing an old t-shirt from back when you were 14.

New and old paintjobs together mean I’ve got all 10 of the various daemon incarnations needed to play Silver Tower.

Coming soon, more vintage lead substitutes for the modern plastic pieces in Silver Tower – some of which you may’ve already spotted on the Ninjabread Workbench.