Several months ago I ordered a resin Hastur from Fenris Games, and it arrived not too long ago after the first version was lost in the mail and Fenris Games had some issues moving to its new workshop. Now, as I understand it this sculpt was commissioned for the
Cthulhu Wars boardgame by Petersen Games and I've been told that it was resculpted slightly in the plastic version being sold by Petersen Games. The plastic version has an integral base, and I believe it comes assembled. Mine came unassembled and without a base. It was also not terribly well cast. Maybe I've just been spoiled by producers like Kromlech, or even Forgeworld, but the resin had plenty of bubbles, including several missing tentacle tips. There was also some awful flash, including a bizarre column of resin about the size of a crayon attached inside one of the concavities keyed to fit the convex curve of an interior piece. Removing the flash and mold 'canals' is easy when they're on a convex surface, but it's much harder when it's inside of something. In putting the model together I don't think I did the greatest job of cleaning the excess resin off of the keying surfaces, meaning that the ass-crack in the back of the model was wider than perhaps it should have been, and the interior piece wasn't correctly seated. Or maybe the model just sucks. It's a thought I've been willing to entertain. Yet despite all the hassle and waiting, I'm very happy to own it now, and I'm in the process of constructing a ~100mm base so I can use it as a Greater Daemon. If you also need to own this model, I'll strongly recommend buying the plastic set from Petersen Games even if you don't particularly want the abortions of miniature art that come with it. They're just not my thing, which makes my love and obsession with this Hastur model even weirder than it has to be, given how I love the inclusion of Hastur in the Cthulhu Mythos. I'm something of a puritan that way.
In conjunction with this Hastur model I've been collecting Shadows of Brimstone Tentacles from Flying Frog Productions. These, thankfully, have been plastic, although again the quality of Games Workshop's miniatures has spoiled me and I've probably butchered them slightly trying to remove mold lines and flashing, and then what's apparently plain old miscasting of the suckers over the top of the tentacles. Given how difficult it is to get miniature Tentacles that can be individually based and used as miniatures in a 28mm game, however, I'm willing to forgive a lot. In fact I'm just glad that I can buy them individually. To these tentacles I've added some bells from the Games Workshop Warhammer Fantasy (AoS now, I suppose) Zombie kit, and some icons from the Games Workshop AoS Chaos Marauders kit that I've used on my Chaos Space Marines. Most of them are also painted up in the colours of my Night Lords as a base (Kantor Blue, Mephiston Red, some sort of Pink for the suckers, Bronze and Gold for metal bits) and the latest to which I've added the command bits (instrument, icon, something as yet undecided to make the champions) are as yet unpainted and unbased. I have a bunch of 32mm bases though, and correct basing is probably important when using 3rd party miniatures like this.
To deal with the enormous crack of the model's rear, I decided that I should go with the imagery that Aaron Dembski-Bowden presented in the Talon of Horus (recommended reading) where the souls that a daemon has consumed try to escape its corpus as it's hammered back into the Warp. Especially since I had lots of zombie-parts left over. I broke some off and reattached them, and will probably fill in the cracks with modelling clay or putty or what-have-you when I get the chance.
The general notion is that the model will be the nexus or head of a great daemonic beast, inspired by the daemon possessing the zombies in Black Library novel
The Furious Abyss (which is not recommended, aside from the notion of a daemon puppeting a zombie horde), with the tentacles as its...tentacles. Instead of the notion of a daemon horde as a bunch of scary monsters it's one great terrifying monstrosity. Obviously I need to find some sort of tentacles to be some sort of Daemonic beasts.
