Jes: The new Talos Pain Engine has probably had more design effort put into it than anything else in the range. The general aim was simple: to have something that could render you down efficiently and above all gruesomely, and to provide a centrepiece for your Coven troops.
The original design didn't fit into the style we intended to use for the Covens, and the scorpion-esque shape was something I thought could be more radical. The sketches above were my first efforts at it, where I was concentrating on silhouettes and shape. In addition, I wanted to try multiple cylinders and flasks which would be the repositories for the Talos' victims 'ingredients', so you've got plasma in one, bile in another, brain soup in another and so on. Also, the idea of having someone locked into it as a pilot was something I wanted to shy away from, because we'd done that before.
I wanted to have a larger organic component to it, which seemed to suit the model better than it being completely robotic. I added a head or helmet to give the model a focus and then concentrated on the secondary arms and loads of vials and cylinders.
I continued with this upright humanoid type design, which seemed to go down quite well, but there was something that I wasn't sure about - so I parked it for a while. When I came back to it later, I tried taking it far closer to the original scorpion shape. The segmented carapace for was meant to echo the armour style of the warriors, but I kept the head - which now had a blank metal mask so you just don't know what's behind it. (It could be welded to the flesh, the expression could be angry or quite pathetic, you just don't know.) We did keep many of the secondary limbs, the two main offensive limbs and some kind of tail with the guns on. But I still wasn't totally happy with that, since it was starting to lose some of the non-robotic component, and I still needed it to be more menacing, perhaps with some Ogryn-sized organic element. Whenever the comments were 'That's sick' or 'That's wrong' - then I knew I was on the right track!
There's a time gap between all of these drawings, as sometimes you have to leave it alone for a while and come back with fresh eyes. But when it was time to start sculpting it I dug out the design, Ollie Norman would be sculpting the model on the computer, so we needed to settle on its final form. We took elements from the early version, and spliced it with the big forearms and the carapace of the robotic scorpion version. The carapace has echoes of Eldar design (there's a correspondence to the Wraithlord's head) but it needed to have more of a jagged silhouette - in the end we went for two racks curving over the back, made from extruded bone and bearing flasks and syringes (a feature occurring on other Coven models). The bulky forearms gave us a way to mount a wide variety of heavy close combat weapons. The flasks ended up hanging from the hip area, almost as if that's the sump into which everything is distilled. As for the rest of the model - well, Phil Kelly had a big list of weapons he wanted on there, and we kept thinking of more really horrible things to include. In the end we tried to make all of it! We kept the big organic chest on there (if you turn the model upside down you can see where the torso is), which all looks amputated, withered away or sewn in. What we wanted with the tail was for it to be organic but reinforced by a mechanical brace - half grown, half surgically altered.
There are plenty of real-world references in the designs. It wasn't until Ollie got working on this that we ended up with having the torso hung from hooks on the back. There's a shamanic ceremony in North America where they suspend themselves from ropes (with spikes through the body) from the ceiling where they then spin round, pretty gruesome. You can see on the model that the spine's bust out from its back, but the whole thing is held up with hooks. Towards the end of the design process I visited the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; they've a surgical museum up there full of really early prosthetics and surgical tools. It was fascinating and gave me a lot of inspiration for all these surgical details.
When designing the variants we wanted people to be able to put it together in many different ways; so the blocks that you have on the hip plate are all interchangeable and you can have that tail coming from the bottom socket if you want to. There's no reason why you can't replace the hips with sets of legs (Phil's infamous 'Drill-legged Shriveners' spring to mind). You can get a lot of variation out of it, even some tinkering with the silhouette, and that's before you get to the weapons. We wanted you to be able to get in touch with your inner Haemonculus!
So with the Cronos, what we wanted to do was replace the forearms, and replace the scorpion tail with a nest of four smaller tails to make it suggestive of a jelly fish or octopus We had an idea of doing two rows of spines or antennae on the creatures back to make it suggestive of a sea urchin crossed with a nasty insect, the kit has extra aerials that fit into to side sockets, so you can have it extra spiny.
For the spirit probe we wanted it to be a long, mosquito-like probe - something really nasty and sinister that changed the silhouette of the head. And we wanted to do the spirit vortex as a weird radar style dome with spiral designs, a sort of hypnotic disk.
Essentially, there's a logic to the layout of this thing - the tail guns stand sentinel, the front arms are the grasping, attacking limbs and the secondary ones are what do the 'unravelling', once you're absorbed into the body, it renders you down into your constituent parts and all these tanks fill up with your best bits.
