Free City of Scales

 Some of the major players that provided this inspiration where the Magmadroth, Fyreslayer terrain piece, Black Ark Corsairs, the new Scions of the Flame, and the Scourgerunner chariot.

With these images percolating in my head I looked up some free cities and decided that Vindicarum would be a good place to base this force. Vindicarum is a City of Sigmar built in the caldera of a volcano in Chamon.

Once I had a place in mind I decided to start with some base troops. I wanted a mix of human and aelf units and ended up with four conversion ideas. The first, and easiest to mockup were Freeguild spearmen. Using Saurus Warrior spears or even just the tips should be enough to show that these guys are slightly different or in a new location but are still one of the main freeguild units. 

A whole unit is even easy to imagine, replacing the traditional banner with the Saurus Warrior standard. 

Next up is an idea I had using Fyreslayer Berserker shields and axes. These are pretty clean looking weapons, missing any sort of scaly or obsidian/stone look but scream underground forge/fire to me.

GW doesn't show these very well on the website and its hard to find pictures online, I guess they aren't the optimum load out for matched play. However, I love them and I think using them with the Greatsword chest armor and fairly static poses would give a pretty cool looking "elite" foot unit vibe.

It is kind of hard to mock up the Greatsword images as the arms that come with them are cross bodies and two handing swords. Here is the best I could do. If I was going to actually do this, I'd probably use Dreadspear or Freeguild Guard arms as I have tried those in the past and they fit pretty well.

This first image is pretty blurry but I think the concept works and that the Fyreslayer head dress pieces would fit on top of the Greatsword helmets.

The second image has some bad item rotation on the banner (It's from the Fyreslayer Battlesmith). This wouldn't be a cheap conversion for a unit banner but if there was one unit to do it for, I think these guys would be the one.

A problem with this conversion is there isn't a good counts as option. For Greatswords they need a two handed option and they are too cool for regular Freeguild Guard. Maybe a Duradin unit but then the height becomes an issue.

That gets me to the two aelf units I thought of. The first uses Black Ark Corsairs and just replaces their heads and one weapon load out. These guys come with scaly cloaks so giving them scaly shields makes sense to me. Also, giving them shields makes easy Bleakswords counts as. I would also use less spiky aelf heads and get rid of the spiky collars.

The next conversion gives us Black Ark Corsairs using Dark Elf Bloodbowl bodies. You could make a lot of different units with these, I think anything that was a short weapon or a weapon in each hand would work. Spears or long hafted weapons may look weird due to their movement. The Blood Bowl Dark Elves have scaly clothing bits on them, so that helps carry the Corsair theme as well. Here I've given them Corsair hand crossbows and Saurus hand weapons. It is really hard to find images of Corsairs with crossbows online so some of the hands are off but from looking at the sprues I'm pretty sure it would work out.

That gives us four core units, two human and two aelf. This is nice because it allows hero variability and a number of battle line choices when trying to build a legal army list.

I am also getting multiple uses out of some kits. The Saurus warriors are providing the Freeguild spears, Bleaksword shields, and Corsair hand weapons/swords. The Corsairs are getting their bodies used and then giving some weapons to the Blood Bowl unit. The Fyreslayers are getting stripped for bits but there would be bodies, heads, and picks leftover. Finally, you would need some bleaksword heads, but I have some of those laying around.

Not counting the aelf heads it ends up being 6 kits for 4 units, which in kit bash land isn't bad at all.  

I really wanted to use the Scions of the Flame kit but there are only 8 models in it and a couple of them are really only good as hero models. Staff lady and the dude on fire primarily. The 3 lesser imitates and the Fireborn (he's the unit champ to me) would work well in a unit, you could give them a hand weapon and a shield if you wanted but even when the double box comes out, that is only 8 bodies. Maybe you can figure out a way to make a standard bearer and musician or whatever out of some of the others but I can't see it yet. The blazing lord and the overhead champion guy are the hardest, they don't really fit into a unit with the initiates, especially when you double up poses.