Building a base for a Terrorgheist

A Terrorgheist scream is a truly awesome thing and having been on the receiving end of it with my Empire army was all the encouragement I needed to add one to my Vampire Counts army.

I thought that I would start with the base. Now I have two significant problems with the GW base build;

1. It is just too barren. The base is very large and the small amount of jagged rocks not only look a little lost, but don't look gothic enough for my visual image of a VC setting. After all where are the skulls? I thought the GW approach was at least 20 skulls per square inch of base!
2. For reasons that will become apparent when I go on to assemble the Terrorgheist, I need more height!

This is the base that evolved, and I will talk through how this came about.... 

The base itself was a bit of a disappointment. It was warped at the corner. I tried setting it again by placing in alternating boiling then cold water, but that did not work. In the end I just learnt to accept it and hope that the weight of the scenery on it would hold it down (it has not).

 

I then assembled the trunk of the Terrorgheist. I knew I wanted him to stand on the garden of Morr wall, but needed to learn how high the support for the other leg needed to be. So I made a little mock up. I tried different sized pieces of plastic until I got the assembly to look about right. Thank you blue-tac.

The gravestones were put together using scenery pieces from a company called Renedra. They fit great and were very easy to place. I selected one just the right height to support the beasts left leg. The only slight problem with these is that they have quite a few crosses and Christian iconography, which just does not fit into the warhammer world. Never mind, I was able to find sufficient to suit my needs.

I made a path out of flagstones from a spare GW movement tray kit. I did this mainly because I wanted to use a gate, so needed a reason to have a gate. I had to remove then rotate the gate so that the skulls etc were facing forward on the model.

I then added to old spare tree trunk bases from microart studio to break up the space at the front of the base. Next comes the beast itself!