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New Miniatures Review : Mantic Ghoul Regiment

I've been playing with Mantic undead for the last couple of weeks, here's the third part of my review which covers their take on the ghoul troop type.

Ghouls, from a Warhammer point of view, have changed in purpose in the last 3 editions of their army book (Vampire counts).  Until the most recent book I only owned a very small number of them to use as a skirmish unit with reasonable success in games.  In the current version of the army ghouls are ranked units again, but continue to be effective in reasonably small units (10 or so can work well).  GW sell their ghouls in 10s, which includes enough parts to create a larger leader figure, the Ghast.

The Mantic ghouls come in a smaller pack than the skeleton regiment, containing 10 figures - coincidence?  The box is very similar to the skeleton regiment's, only a bit slimmer.  It only contains 1 sheet of foam so using the case as is as a travel case wont be possible as bought, but as 20 ghouls would fit in the case you'd get a second sheet if you bought a second box.   Oh and I'll mention the price again, £8.50 for these 10 figures which is pretty good!

You get 5 spures in the box, each one containing enough parts to make 2 figures.  As you can see from the shots above there's some part options offered on the sprues, 3 heads, 3 optional hands with weapons and a bag of body parts in case your ghouls need a snack mid battle.  The pieces are nicely detailed, weld lines largely unnoticeable apart from on the bald heads and gates again in sensible places to make cleaning them easy and impact minimal to the overall figure effect.

I made up a few ghouls to see what sort of variation I could get out of the sprues.   The ghouls legs are surprisingly dynamic, combine this with the circular stub mechanic on the base you can pose them in a lot of ways.  The upper bodies also work in a variety of angles so this means there's quite a lot of movement in a rank of the ghouls and its not obvious you are working with relatively few different parts.  I also tried out a few of the weapon options, the cleaver and the dagger.  You need to remove the existing hand to fit these however this is simple as the ghouls have cloth wrist bands that mark the point at which you should remove the appendage with a pair of clippers.

A huge bug bear of mine with the GW ghouls is that the hunched over gribbles really don't rank very easily.  I've had to go to fairly extreme lengths to get 20 of them to stand next to each other by positioning them on the very front and back of their bases and often raising their arms to avoid the figure in front.  The Mantic ghouls seem to avoid much of this problem in 2 clever but simple ways.  Firstly as you can see in the shot, the bodies and legs are all roughly at the same angle (and not hunched).  This means although leaning over the next rank, they don't collide much.  The second trick is that the legs are at two noticeably different heights, meaning they also rank up from left to right smoothly as the arms tend to be at different levels.  Of course you can pose the upper bodies so that they will clash so some care in how you assemble the ghouls should be taken so that you will be able to rank them in someway, but with these 4 I didn't check and there's only one combination that doesn't work I could find.

I also wanted to quickly paint up a couple of these chaps to see how they looked.  These two aren't in the ranked pictures above as I was already working on them when I had the idea to see how well they fitted together!  What you may have noticed about the Mantic ghouls by now is that they have a real piercing fetish - they've all got various nails and other spiky things sticking out of their legs, torsos and other areas.

Unlike most of my undead (and indeed most of my miniatures full stop) I've been painting ghouls from white undercoat.

My ghouls are purple.  Yes purple.  Not sure why, but several years ago I decided I like this look on the less dynamic ghouls that were available and now on these springy lively ghouls I end up with a sort of old school genestealer look, but that still works for me.  Here I've based coated the skin with Hormagaunt purple.

Next a generous wash of Leviathan purple ink does a lot of work for me.

Next I dry brushed the skin (I did say I wanted to do it quickly so forgive me!) with an old Worm Purple I have knocking around.  I see GW no longer produce this, but Hormagaunt purple with a bit of warlock purple or red of some kind in it might do the same trick.  Worm Purple is a bit warmer than Hormagaunt.  This finishes off the skin so its most of the work done.

To finish off the ghouls robes I used Catachan green with a Thraka ink wash then a Goblin green highlight.  Blood Red eyes and Charadon Grey nails were details.  The teeth on the grimacing head are white with lots of Badab black over the top to get that black rotting gums effect that's always so gruesome in movies.

So overall how do these guys rate?  Well I haven't taken any comparison shots here, my GW ghouls are barely at the highlighted stage above and if I'm honest I only bought them as I really felt I needed a larger unit in my army, not because I have any love for the figures.  These Mantic ghouls are far more to my taste, paint nicely, are the right size and rank up pleasingly.  There's a lot less variety in parts compared to the GW set, but with the much higher level of pose-ability in these figures that really doesn't matter.  The only downside is the lack of a champion character.  I found a way around this for the GW figures anyway so no reason to not use the same solution here.  Reaper do a range of Ghasts, all of which are huge muscle bound monsters.  This one is my particular favourite and with some careful trimming of the base can fit into the front rank of your ghouls.

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