Kytan Daemon Engine (from DreamForge Leviathan Crusader)

A few months ago ForgeWorld presented their new Kytan Daemon Engine, giving those with the Khorne Lord of War kit something worthwhile to use the torso for. A lot of excellent builds of the FW kit, as well as various conversions have since been presented on blogs an forums around the net.

For me, it was an opportunity to dig out one of the two Leviathan Crusader kits I'd acquired from DreamForge's KickStarter campaign last year.

I've left off a lot of the armour plates that's included in the kit to expose more of the mechanical details that would otherwise be obscured. The initial dry-fitting of the armour plates in the model kit quickly showed me that all they added a lot more bulk than I wanted.


I had originally thought I'd use the original torso, but find a beast or daemon head to replace the Crusader's original helmet. In the end, though, I ended up sawing the torso front off again (It was glued on solid!.) to fit the Ogre Kingdoms Longhorn head instead. It took ha handful of pins, some balled-up aluminium foil and a sizeable lump of Green Stuff, but I did get it into a position where the horns didn't end up getting in the way of the shoulder armour plates.

With the basic build done, I dollied up a Knight base, pinned the feet to it and glued all the moveable joints and pistons to lock in a suitable pose. The arms remain moveable and the weapons can still be taken off and replaced - just in case someone at ForgeWorld comes up with other weapon options for the Kytan.

After the pose was finalized, it was time to dive into the bitz-boxes and fit an assortment of symbols and sigils onto the model. I even replaced the gatling cannon barrel with a spare Juggernaut head. I could not find anything large enough to cover the shoulder plates, though, so I ended up taking my very first stab at detailing with plasticard. It took me a couple of nights of cutting strips, fitting and gluing them onto curved surfaces before scraping and sanding them to blend them together.

The paint job doesn't differ too much from what I've done for my Word Bearers. Black primer, heavy drybrush of Warplock Bronze followed by a lighter drybrush of Leadbelcher. The red is the old Red Ink from Citadel Colour, but I'v also treated the metal parts to several other Vallejo inks and washes too.

Next? I have a couple of projects under way already, to enable me to use a few of the formations in the Khorne Daemonkin codex. One's pretty close to completion, so make sure to look both ways before crossing the road...

JørnN