Female Kharadron Overlords—a Journey

One concern that I have had in building my SkyDorfs is that I didn't want them all to be men. While simple biology points to the presence of women among the Duardin, the art in the most recent codex definitely shows that there are females among the leadership of Kharadron Overlords.

There's a great old blog post over at Between the Bolter and Me on Representation in Wargaming (LINK), that I wholeheartedly recommend. And that post got me thinking on how to bring a little balance to my own army.

My first attempt was to use one of the runners from Kaosball's New Victoria Klockwerks:

It's not a great miniature: the plastic much softer than GW, the pose is problematic, and the sculpt in general has some issues. But, my plan was to use just her head and put it on one my Thunderers. However, I thought her pigtails would read as female even in big, bulky KO amour. Also, the goggles read steampunk. Unfortunately, it didn't quite look right.

Part of this was caused by the hair—it forced me to have her head sit higher and forward slightly more than the eye could take. It just looks off. So, I wound up pulling her head off and slapping the standard helmet on to the Thunderer.

It then occurred to me that maybe Duardin women would want armour more in keeping for their own bodies—complete with stylized helmets that don't have giant beards. With this in mind, I looked around and landed on Clockwork Angels from Warmachine.

Thinking in terms of the Bolter&Me post above, there are a lot of problems with the sculpt. They are have the standard (and cringe worthy) boob armour comment to a lot of fantasy minis. Also, the proportions are awkward with a shortened trunk and longer legs. And then, there's the curve of two of their backs which accentuates their breasts. However, the Artdeco motifs and steampunk aesthetic are pretty close to the Kharadron; the arms and wings are separate from the body, so conversions should be easier; and the shortened trunk is an asset when trying to compress the model to represent a Duardin.

My test model was to use extra bits leftover from a skyrigger sprue to build up a female endrinrigger. As you can see, I'm just using the body of the Clockwork Angel. I started by snipping off her right leg so that I can use both the legs for the KO. 

The legs look awkward by themselves; but once I added the arms, weapons, backpack and harness, things look a lot better. I use green stuff sparingly to help smooth over gaps—with models this small there wasn't the need to add much. Additionally, the tools and gubbins of an endrinrigger hide a multitude of sins.

All in all, I think she reads as a female SkyDorf without being too weird. I have two more models left in the Clockwork Angels pack—the leader and the other 'grunt.' I've toyed with the idea of an all-female team of endrinrigger weapons specialists, but I might also just disperse them throughout the army as well.