Halloween Ghouls

Ghouls for Halloween

I can't very well have a vampire called the Ghoul Queen and not have any ghouls in the army of the dead, now can I? It really was the last missing unit from the undead roster.
Trouble was, ghouls are complicated.

For the longest time, Warhammer touted ghouls and the only unit not actually "undead" in the undead roster, but instead keeping them as the only living creatures, kinda like they couldn't make up their minds about necromancers either. They were supposed to be once human, turned to cannibalism, subsequently over time evolving into a different species.

Now, I wasn't a big fan of the metal sculpts of the 90's, but they weren't particularly bad, and then when ghouls were redone into crypt fiends and crypt horrors to make them actually undead, I wasn't really sold on those models either. I was still in my D&D head about ghouls being crypt and grave robbers, corpse eaters, undead and afraid of sunlight, perhaps even blind, and possibly so filthy that their talons had that paralysing bacteria that would make any victim an easy meal.

I looked for alternatives, and even tried to get the 90's metals, but they were always scooped up very quickly by other collectors, until I saw them. Ur-guls. Not Steve Ur-gul, just the new 40K plastics.
Interestingly enough, these were the kind of ugly, blind, evolved corpse eaters I was after.

 

Lacking eyes, these ghouls had evolved highly sensitive sensory orifices to seek out food, whether it be buried, fresh or still living.

Highly agile and equipped with ultra sonic hearing, nothing escapes their notice.

Their talons have formed for digging, snagging and rending flesh.
Their teeth are sharp and their jaws strong enough to shatter bone.

Often holing up in tombs or caves far from the sunlight, the pack will form a 'nest' and will often drag back prey for the rest to feast upon. 

I had quite a lot of bits I could use to add some flavour to their bases, as I only had 2 poses, but with some severed hands, bones, gravestone and a fresh corpse, there vas plenty of variety.

I had a long look at painting styles and decided I really wanted to have some horror and gore element to these little nightmares, so I didn't mind messing them up with bloodied hands and faces.

Some of them I wanted to keep clean.

Some of them had been eating long dead corpses.

Happy Halloween!