My Skaven Army – Lord Skrolk and Rats
Warhammer 4ed pretty much introduced the Pre-made Special characters. I say pretty much because you have had special pre-made characters since atleast 2ed. Scenario packs often came with special characters and rules for them in there, White Dwarf also featured special characters. With the new Army Books that 4ed had for each army (well, kinda), they put pre-made special characters into them making them… maybe a bit less special but still limited.
Of the Skaven Special Characters, I technically didn’t have 2 of them when I was a kid and you could buy them at a decent price in a shop. £2.50 or so was alot of money back then. Anyway, out of them two, I technically am only missing one now as I got hold of Thrott the Unclean, but while they made him into a special character, I never really took him as such, so he is just a mutant pack master (or just normal pack master) in my army. (Ikit Claw is the one I’m missing now by the way. I have his backpack though.. but while it’s an okay figure and I would like to pick it up sometime, it’s not big on my list and he always seamed a bit too cyborg for my taste, though I think alot of it is armour.)
Lord Skrolk Plague Lord of Clan Pestilens one very old and one of the highest ranking Plaguemonks of Clan Pestilen, Just under the highest, Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch, One of the 12 Lords of Decay. He can only be field if you have atleast one unit of Plague Monks and back in the day, I didn’t. I just got the figure cause I wanted it and wanted some plague monks in the end, though I might have used some normal generic skaven as placeholders ^_^
I had this one painted in the past and I didn’t take a photo but… it wasn’t good. At all. blobs of paint and that’s it. Anyway, Now he is all painted up. The Book came out better then I expected but probebly could be better.. that said, If you look at the studio model.. I’m not 100% convinced that it isn’t a pasted image. Though I know some of them could have painted that well.
Skrolk is 225 points, as most special characters are heavy on points because they are special. He also has 2 optional items, the Liber Bubonicus, or technically a copy of it, costing 75 points, and the Rod of Corruption for 100 points.
The Liber Bubonicus (roughly that would be Book of Plagues but officially they call it the book of woes) allows him to act as a wizard Champion, with a magic level of 2 and two spell cards which he does not have to draw at random. The spells can pick from some Skaven and some Nurgle spells, as the Plague monks are very Nurgle-y. The Rod of Corruption basically is a very powerful weapon as when he hits with it, the victim needs to roll D6 against their toughness and if they roll higher, they instantly collapse into a festering pile of rotted flesh and Normal armour doesn’t protect them. a 6 is a automatic hit.. kinda (the wording I think is awful.. “a roll of 6 is always a failure regardless of the victims toughness”.. so.. from the victims point of view it fails so they die (in which case the change in subject to say ‘victims toughness’ is odd, OR from Skrolk’s point of view, so a roll of 6 means HE fails, but then the ‘regardless of victims toughness’ still sounds a bit odd as a toughness of over 6 is… not common.)
So, all in all, if you fully kit him out, that’s 400 points.
Next, another unit of Giant rats, but this time, the rats are much smaller. They are the official giant rats which was brought, again when young and painted very poorly) with a Pack master. Bit annoying it was 6 rats but only 5 sculpts but oh well, not important. While my other unit had 2 Packmasters, I only got one for this unit, so he is 10 points, with 15 points making 25 pts for that unit. Yeah, much cheaper then Skrolk.
So lets update the running total if I got this right:
Running Total:
Characters: 433pts
War Machines: 0pts
Monsters: 0pts
Regiments: 366pts
Total Army Points painted up: 799pts