My Skaven Army – Giant Rats / Wolf Rats
In trying to (slowly) build up my Skaven Army for WFB (4/3) which I had as a child (sigh), I’ve not only gotten some new figures but painted up/repainted or did various bits to build up the forces.
I’m not the best at Photos but Oh well. Let’s try to see what I can do.
First lets look at my unit of Giant Rats / Wolf Rats
In WFB 3ed, there was a creature called a Wolf Rat:
Another Product of the Clan Moulder’s diabolic breeding program, the Wolf-rat combines the cunning and viciousness of a rat with the power and ferocity of a wolf.
They were mounted on 25×50 mm bases and came in Packs with the following stat line
| Name | M | WS | BS | S | T | W | I | A | Ld | Int | Cl | WP | PV |
| Wolf-rat | 6 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
They have 1 bite attack an fear fire.
Now.. confusingly, if you check the rules for Clan Moulder Beastmasters in 3ed, they can only have packs of Chaos Hounds, Giant Rats, Giant Wolfs or Rat Ogres.. yet from the bestiary they are CLEARLY Skaven in nature. Each handler can have a pack from between 2 to 6 Animals. If you brought a pack, by the way, they mostly came with either Giant Rats or Chaos Hounds, but the Rats were far more common.
In 4ed, Wolf-rats had vanished. the Beastmasters were now Packmasters and no longer had a limit of 8 per army. They were allowed to have units of only Rat Ogres or Giant Rats.
Giant Rats were like Wolf-rats, but smaller and kinda far more loyal. Giant Rats had a 25x25mm base and while seen as as creation of Chaos, unlike Wolf-rats, they were not really too bothered. Wolf-rats were purely chaotic, where Giant Rats could be either Evil or chaotic. They have a bit attack which is also venomous, interesting there strength to 4 (there stat line says 3), they are quite prone to chaotic mutations which can be done via D4+1 mutations in non-competition games (ugh, Competition games.. not always a great thing) and are quite nice guys in that they will not attack ordinary rats or Skaven due to there empathy with other forms of rat. There default stat line was
| Name | M | WS | BS | S | T | W | I | A | Ld | Int | Cl | WP | PV |
| Giant Rat | 6 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 2 |
As you can see, not much different from the Wolf-rat. In 4ed, all that changed (apart from the reduction in the number of stats used) was they were now 2 1/2 points a piece, up from 2. A unit could also be between 1 and 6 animals per handler.
Well.. I have nothing against Giant Rats but I wanted something more.. Thanks to Eric on the Oldhammer forum, I got that.
This is my Giant Rat / Wolf Rat unit. Using horse bases of 25×50 (I think), this is a pack of 6 Giant resin rats with two Pack masters handling them. Technically, if you look at the above rules, they aren’t quite right for either Giant Rats or Wolf-rats but when I think mutation Giant Rats, I wanted something you could ride into battle on.. THAT is a giant Rat! For a competition game, I doubt it would be allowed, but what kinda person thinks purely like that? while this could easily use the Giant Rat rules, I also have in mind them using the Wolf-rat rules, which is why I have been saying about them.
The use of two pack masters wasn’t due to the rules, because 1 can handle up to 6, but when a Pack master is killed, it does create a problem for the pack and sometimes, having 2 can be far more useful.
The first is a Classic citadel model I always wanted but never had as a child, and that is Thrott the Unclean, the Mutant Skaven Packmaster. In fact, he was pretty much the ONLY mutant Skaven figure Citadel released (not counting horns) despite them being chaotic and prone to chaotic mutations (which is how they were created in the first place) Thrott was very well recieved and not only kept in production for a very long time, but come 4ed with the raise of pre-made ‘special characters’, he was made into one where he could also be used as the Chieftain of your army, though you had to have 1 Clan Moulder pack in your army in order to use him. This gave him some special rules to make use of the 3 arms and even the Warpstone Eye ‘charm’.
However, for my Army, I have him just classed as a normal Packmaster.
The next packmaster was another old Citadel though this figure had some damage. While not part of the original 19 Skaven minis, he was another Jes Goodwin sculpt from the C47 range and is in fact ‘Mutans Manflayer’, a leader/commander miniature. His pointing left arm was missing and his sword was missing. So perfect for a bit of converting. The whip isn’t the best job in the world but it’s useable enough green stuff job. A bit thick bit like I said, does the job. His left arm was replaced with a plastic 6ed skaven arm holding a Bell. I think it’s meant to be from a plague monk, I’m not quite sure (I have a fair amount of 6ed plastic bits) but I felt for a pack master, a nice cattle bell (or a… wait.. Cattle is cows and oxen, but what are rats? just Vermin?) made perfect sense.
This gives my Skaven Army 1 unit of Clan Moulder Giant Rats, 15 points for the 6 rats (using the 4ed rules) and 20 points for the two Pack masters, making a total of 35pts.
Running Total:
Characters: 0pts
War Machines: 0pts
Monsters: 0pts
Regiments: 35pts
Total Army Points painted up: 35 pts