Fallout Factions: Ghoul Survivors

Fallout Factions gives us a range of warbands to pick apart your choice of post apocalyptic wasteland with, and increasingly they’re available in high-quality multi-part plastic. Raiders are out, Brotherhood of Steel and Survivors on the way and Super-Mutants have been teased for the near future. But that’s not all that’s on offer for Fallout fans who want to play the fast and tight Factions rules.

Modiphius has a huge range of resin miniatures too, covering everything from Mirelurk Queens to Vault Dwellers, and with my Brotherhood of Steel crew finished, it was time for a new project. Playing Fallout 4 for inspiration, I realised I was spending a lot of time building up one of the best and most unique settlements available – The Slog. Founded, run for and by, Ghouls, the Slog is a strange paradise in quite a hostile area of post-war Massachusets and on every Fallout 4 run I’ve completed, I’ve ended up fortifying it and using it as a major trading base for those sweet sweet Tarberries. Without the intervention of the Sole Survivor, the Ghouls of The Slog are pretty vulnerable – several named NPCs can be killed in raids, there’s super mutants on the horizon and, worst of all, I think they still haven’t had a patch for their broken merchant.

I thought what if Survivors weren’t the irritating idiots in Diamond City, or Plucky Vault Dwellers, or any other smoothskins infesting the Fallout games like an unaligned, boring plague? What if Ghouls all over the USA did a little bit of aggressive defence? With that, it had to be a Ghoul Survivor Warband – not a roving bunch of ferals, but using the Modiphius Ghoul kits that you could reasonably say still had some semblance of sense – The Ghoul Survivors (The Slog) and Ghoulish Remnants.

I should probably have said this already, but thanks to Modiphius for sending these kits over!

What I Had

Modiphius resin is really nice, particularly with the more recent waves of Wasteland Warfare releases. It’s pleasant to work with, holds detail very well and sculpting quality varies between good and great. Both boxes arrived with minimal cleanup to do (though a brush with warm soapy water is always a good idea) and every model was nicely sculpted with no bubbles or other structural issues. I don’t usually mention this but they were well packed, too, with no broken components on arrival.

The Ghoul Survivors box contains six models – five of which are named NPCs and one representing a generic ghoul survivor, alongside six model-specific scenic bases. They are very realistically scaled so if you’re used to multipart plastic or Games Workshop models these will appear a bit spindly, but they’re made in actual human proportions which is a delight to see.

The Ghoulish Remnants are chunkier, with six feral Ghouls decked out in whatever they were wearing when their minds broke. Two soldiers, one police officer, one park ranger (I think? I’m not American), a fireman and a convenience store worker (I think, again), make for a great range of looks capturing the kind of mixed NPC group you occasionally encounter in the games. They look feral, but aren’t the rags-or-naked kind of ghoul, making them perfect for use in this kind of project. It’s a very nice kit with great detail and among the best Modiphius models I’ve worked with. 

Scale

The resin Ghouls have two distinct sizes that track across the resin fallout range. Models of specific game (or tv) characters have, in my experience, tended to the very fine, while NPCs and monsters tend to be a little more robust. That was the case here, with the Ghoulish Remnants box having a bit more heft than the Ghoul settlers.

If you’re converting the resin range into Fallout Factions models, before buying anything you’ll want to divide your bits into two distinct piles:

Fine scale: Disciples plastics, TV and Game characters resin range

Robust scale: Wasteland Raiders plastics, Operators plastics,  Pack Plastics, Brotherhood of Steel plastics (power armour), any power armoured models

In the plastic kits included in the “Robust” scale, the arms that match to the slightly slimmer female models will work to an at least ok degree with the fine scale models.

Converting

Fallout Factions is a WYSIWYG game, and I wanted to keep to that as much as possible. That meant converting or kitbashing every single model in both sets with different weapons and arms to create a Survivors list. You can be a bit more sensible than me and use the few (five) models out of 12 in these boxes that come with Factions-appropriate weapons as they are, but that would have been a bit too easy! I followed a couple of steps with this process:

1. Identify Challenge Level of Your Conversions

The survivors crew has options for crew members with hand weapons only or hand weapons and pipe revolvers. These are very easy conversions – hand switches or even just wedging a spare weapon into an open hand. With plenty of pistols in the kits and bits piles, this immediately decided on the plan for 5 of the Ghoul Survivors. 

More difficult challenges were around the Champion models. Survivor leaders can have Junk Jets (not in the bits pile), Combat rifles (boring), or a Sawn off shotgun and Officers Sword. Leaders also need (in my opinion) a clearly heroic/villainous pose.

2. Plan Out the Crew

Knowing the loadout of the most difficult and easiest conversions gave me a baseline of how many caps I was spending, so the rest of the plan came together fairly easily. I wanted a horde of fairly crap close combat models and just enough ranged firepower to take advantage of the Some Rain Must Fall ploy when one of my terrible little guys gets taken out.

3. Match Models to Stats

There’s a wide range of poses and looks within the two Ghoul boxes, and once the crew list was (albeit vaguely) put together, I thought about the “core” model poses – the torso and legs poses, with the arms being freely removable if needed – and matched them to the crew members I wanted.

Arlan was an easy match for the leader, with a strong pose and hands that would be simple to switch for two weapons. Likewise, the Ghoulish Remnants would work well for hand weapons and/or pipe rifles and the slightly more feral look makes them good horde models for the grunt part of the crew. The Ghoul settlers have a great set of poses that worked well for various specialists.

The crew ended up as:

4. Get Chopping and Gluing

Let the kitbashing begin! The vast majority of this was simple – if a pair of arms could be found in the bits box, I chopped the arms off and glued them on, without worrying too much about size differences between bits and core model. Likewise for hands, particularly for pistols – off comes the hand, on goes the pistol.

I had far fewer options in the bits collection (thanks to Steel Mentor for sending these over by the way!) for the fine scale models, so they got priority for any likely looking pieces, and any resin components. Initially I was determined to be absolutely WYSIWYG, but then realised that at tabletop height a long gun without glowing bits is a pipe/auto/hunting rifle, and all pistols look exactly the same, so I stopped worrying about it. As long as it’s all readable at a glance, and consistent across the warband I consider this good enough.

Where arms were too large – or too easily identifiable as coming from a particular kit – I sanded, trimmed and cut the pieces into appropriate shapes and sizes. That has meant losing a little detail, but ties everything together. The Ghoul Survivors particularly are in fairly standard clothing, so suddenly having one arm heavily armoured in obviously raider-coded grilles didn’t look right. Having said that, one of the pleasures of the modern fallout games is creating the most bizarre looking player character possible, so it’s more than possible to just go nuts and still be within the Fallout aesthetic.

5. Making Specialists

The Champions of the crew needed a little more thinking, and more creative hand swaps. I scoured the range of bits for something that would work as an in-scale medikit, precision rifle and Officer’s sword, finding exactly one suitable bit for each.

All hand swaps with the fine scale resins were nightmarish, eventually requiring my finest drill bit and very, very thin plasticard rod to give tiny contact points something to hold on to. The shotgun on the leader was one of the most irritating bits of building I’ve done – my own fault as Arlan had a perfectly good arm already – but I latched onto a specific pose and was damned as a result.

Where arms didn’t quite match, I used very simple sculpting techniques to bulk out shoulders or to cut and fill arms. The crouching Hunter specialist is a good example – the left arm is a wire cut and bent to shape with a completely untextured tube of milliput over it. It won’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny, but looks good enough!

Sometimes in conversion projects over a whole warband/crew/army, you get locked into thinking they all look great, so I took a few days to let the fully converted crew sit there before priming. This meant I took apart two models that really didn’t work, switched around a few weapons and generally improved the look of the crew as a whole. I think this is an important – and underrated! – part of kitbashing. I could have left it longer, as there’s two more poses that could have been improved and would have been more noticeable with more time to reflect. 

Painting

I didn’t want to stick to the patterns and colours of the Slog characters, so I went with a fairly standard fallout-ish palette of browns, greys, greens and blues. I wanted really high contrast to give a kind of comic book effect with the highlights, but didn’t fully commit to it and as a result didn’t really pull it off. There’s nothing particularly special or indeed that interesting about the cloth and clothing – paint it as you like!

I spent more time on working out how to paint the uniquely disgusting ghoul skin tone and texture. Ghouls have a huge amount of skin texture that varies from the unnerving smooth and pink Walton Goggins to the absolutely terrifying Beatrix Russell of Fallout New Vegas, so I wanted to do a very simple and effective textured, varied skin effect to make sure these were very obviously ghouls even at tabletop distance.

This was a four stage process:

1. Basecoat flesh

2. Blob two highlight flesh tones semi-randomly – larger blobs than you’d get from stippling, but still not full brush strokes
3. Wash with watered down Blood for the Blood God
4. Final extreme highlight across nose, brow and knuckles

I think this has succeeded – it’s obviously not “normal” skin, and reads as Ghoul decay without being a nightmare to paint or appearing inappropriately even. 

Give It a Go!

With the Fallout Factions plastic range expanding quickly there might be less and less impetus to go out and convert an entire crews worth of resin models, but Modiphius make more or less everything you can imagine for Fallout Wasteland Warfare. There’s a massive range out there to play around with while we wait for plastics to catch up with our imaginations! If you’re interested in making a niche warband like this one, or want to get Caesar’s Legion, the NCR or Children of Atom warbands, create crews out of game companions or just do you own thing, try out the steps I’ve outlined here and you’ll soon have your own, completely unique, crew up and running.

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