Carrion Crawler (Reaper Bones Charnel Grub)

Bit of a random figure here - I was searching for my basecoated Oldhammer ogre collection the other month and found Mr. Slimy here in the same box! He's a Reaper Bones Charnel Grub which is apparently their way of saying "Dungeons & Dragons Carrion Crawler". If you click that link to the Forgotten Realms wiki and click the "3rd edition" image of the Carrion Crawler you can definitely see where Reaper's sculptor found their inspiration for this particular sculpt!

As far as fleshy slug-maggot-tentacle creatures go, this is a nice enough figure. It's years since I cleaned up the standard figure and I remember struggling a bit to get all of the moldlines. It's sculpted with a nice trail of slime that it's obviously travelling along on.

Originally I'd planned on painting this creature in pasty maggoty colours, befitting a subterranean-dwelling beastie and I was almost finished with painting in that particular style when I decided that I disliked it's flaccid tentacular clubs (ala a giant squid) - they just sort of hung trailing onto the ground. Instead, I decided to chop off all the tentacles and splice the clubbed ends onto wire (with creative use of the pin vice), followed by drilling holes to allow these to fit nicely. These were then bent into shapes suggesting that the Carrion Crawler had just found some kind of prey and was either in the middle of an attack or a threat display. 

It was at this point that I decided to make things a bit more interesting - I needed to basecoat again, so why not in a lurid pink/orange combo, with the slime being in the aforementioned acidic orange? I also used copious amounts of gloss varnish to finish off this sickly-looking, potentially acidic or poisonous, dungeon denizen!

Here's where I currently stand for the year, with a bunch of other completed figures to blog about!