Building the Abbess (Mourngul)

I hadn't originally planned to include a mourngul in my Nighthaunt collection because I couldn't see how one would fit the background for the Procession of the Foolish Martyrs. However, when I came up with the idea of the Society of the Sanguine Rose degenerating into a Flesh-Eater Court after the demise of the False Apostle the fluff all fell into place. Mournguls are being punished for cannibalism, so I just needed to come up with some background to explain how one of the flesh-eaters had deserved such a fate after death.

Looking at the official model, I noted the key features (distended mandible, elongated arms with oversized hands, torso only) and had a hunt through my bits box. A friend had given me the large skull from the skulls box and I had just built a terrorgheist so I had some lovely zombie dragon head, neck, shoulder and hip pieces left over. It took a lot of fiddling and trimming, but things started to take shape.

I loved the look of the skulls and flesh hooks hanging from the vertebrae like a butcher's store - that fitted my background perfectly. I add the back of a crypt horror to represent a bloated stomach. Some leftover mane from a chaos manticore maintained the arc of the spine where I had replaced it with a piece of frame.

There were plenty of gaps to fill with green stuff but that gave me something to do while I tried to work out how on earth I was going to build the arms and make the thing stand up on a base.

Another leftover from the terrorgheist kit provided the basing solution. But despite trawling the GW range and asking friends I was at a loss for what to do about the arms.

In the end I decided to bite the bullet and have a go at building them myself. I had some daemon prince 40K arms from which I salvaged the suitably elongated and oversized hands. I was given a Freeguild horse head which I was keen to use as a nod to the horse being carried by the official Forgeworld model. The arms themselves started with some bits of frame. Glueing them to the shoulders required some patience but the end result seemed sturdy enough.