Building a Necron Tomb Lord

January 29, 2006 by Blackhat · Filed Under Painting

Building this guy used a few extra tools beyond the old clippers and super glue. I used a razor-saw with a reasonably fine blade, green stuff, super glue, a file set and pin drill. The bits I used are all from a Tomb Spyder or a Destroyer lord set. I won’t list the bits, you can check them out on the GW website.

Looking at the figure you can see that most of the work is fitting the destroyer lord torso onto a TombSpyder body and the big trick here is getting rid of the Spyders shoulders.

This picture shows you which bits to cut off and what to keep. It would be much easier to slice the whole front end off but you want to keep that neck bit to sit the torso on top of (sounds a bit wrong way round but who’ll see what I mean). I used a razor-saw for this and used the edge of the TS carapace as a guide-

You have to be careful not to cut too deep as you then need to cut inwards at ninety degrees along the top of the neck until the shoulders are completely cut away. If the cut is a little untidy (mine was) then a bit of filing with a flat file should see you right. The filing doesn’t have to be super as a lot of this will be tucked away.

The next bit is to mount the plastic spine from the destroyer on the protruding neck. This takes some more matching up and judging to get right. Try and angle the spine (I’m talking about the lumbar bit that the actual torso sits on here- not the sticky out back bone bit that’s actually on their back) so that it tilts slightly forward. This will look a bit odd but when the body is rearing backwards it gives the Lord more height and makes him look more natural, rather than tilting backwards. I had to line this up by eye but the plastic is easier to work with so you shouldn’t have too much trouble here.

When you’ve got a good position for the spine then superglue it in place but leave the torso off for now. Now get the actual spine (now I mean the sticky out bit that glues onto the destroyers back) and fit it under the body with the thick end forward. You’re trying for a continuous spine effect connecting the upper body to the spyder body. Check this picture for a clearer explanation-

The purple out line shows the protruding neck from the TS body (see why it’s handy to leave it?), the red arrow points at the ‘lumbar spine’ that holds the torso up- it should fit nicely on top but don’t worry if it overhangs slightly. The green arrow is the destroyer spine glued underneath. Lastly the blue arrow is the ‘pelvis’ bit from the destroyer. I think this needs a bit of clipping to get into place but it works to hide some of the other construction.

When all these bits are in place most of the work is done (difficulty wise), and you can begin building the model. The destroyer lords body goes together as normal- I chose a phylactery (the wee scaraby thing on his arm) and a warscythe as this guy can be mayhem in CC (I also wanted to keep the staff of light for a walking Lord).

The TS body is also put together basically as normal but you need to pay some attention to the legs. Usually the legs are kind of closed in and they make the lord look a little static and boring. You’ll need to bend them outwards a little to get a more dynamic position- certainly with the first pair at any rate.

Even with this done the bulk of the body will be level and a bit boring. To get him rearing backwards and towering over other models you’ll have to alter the way the flying base fits into the model. To do this I filled the old socket with green stuff and smoothed it over (this is better done before the legs are glued into place. Next work out what angle you want the lord’s body to be at and carefully drill a new socket into the bottom of the figure. Because this will be at an angle it will almost certainly be going through part of one of the legs so you’ll have to glue them into place first. Make sure that you use a central enough position for the socket that the lord doesn’t over balance his base. I used a short flying base to keep him near the ground to increase the appearance of scuttling nastiness.

That’s pretty much it! Now you just need to paint him up. I used a sliver to gold colour scheme for my army with the different ranks in different colours- warriors- silver, immortals-bronze, lords-gold) I wanted the Tomb Lord to be obviously the most senior rank so he got a really dark gold colour. I didn’t want to make the entire figure gold, though as that might have been too much of an eyeful. He ended up with a gold torso blended back to the same aged, dark metal that I used on the other Tomb Spyders and a bronze underbelly to keep it dark but obviously different to the carapace.

I hope this has been helpful to you and that your new lords are soon wafer slicing whole terminator squads. Good luck!