Walking Dead Wednesday: Creating a Lurker

I was priming my new Rick on Horse figure and the walker figure that comes in the expansion kept puzzling me.

from Mantic Games

This walker is an alright sculpt but his hunched over appearance just kept nagging at me.  Not that there was anything wrong with it but it kept reminding me of something and then it dawned on me: the posture is perfect for making a sitting walker like I’ve seen so many times in the comic and TV series.

I thought of maybe cutting the model up and repositioning, using greenstuff to gap-fill but then I remembered the trick you can use to straighten out bent miniatures using hot and cold water baths. For more on using hot water to bend miniatures, check out Pair of Dice’s Youtube video tutorial. I decided to try it out and was pleasantly surprised with just how easy it was.

First I cut the model off the base using a small razor saw. I find when doing this kind of cutting, it’s best to use some thick work gloves to keep the saw from slipping and cutting up your fingers.

Next you’ll be using the actual hot water technique.  Since you’ll be doing this with a very hot model, I recommend using some safety equipment like pliers and/or work gloves.  Once you’re ready, dunk the model in the hot water using pliers or whatever you have available so as to not burn yourself.

Once the model is hot, fish it out of the hot water and simply bend the model over to a nice sitting position.  I used two sets of needle-nose pliers to get the effect. You won’t have too much time so bend it to an approximate position and then hold the model in the cold water to lock in the new position.

After about a minute or so in cold water, the miniature should be stable and you can pull it out and set it down to see how well it works.  It took me a few tries to get the position I wanted.  Putting the model back into the hot water will have the model try to reset to it’s factory position.  This can be used to help straighten out parts of the model that you didn’t want bent.  The legs of my model kept curling up and looked funny when I tried to set it down flat on the table so I dunked just the ends of the legs in the hot water. This “reset” them straight and finalized the position.

So I’m liking the model a lot but the other side of this was I wanted to have these Lurker walkers be different in the game so I also came up with the walker variant “Lurker” card below.  The supply deck already has a Lurker card but my card will be for corpse models laying around in the play area while the supply deck version will handle the ambush style threats they pose.  I think these will be especially fun when we get into expansions with tight spaces like the Prison or Woodbury maps (potentially as I haven’t seen them yet).

I’ll place these Lurkers just like normal Walker placement rules except they can be placed in contact with scenery elements but do not count as an enemy model for the purposes of searching or defending a barricade.