Mordheim Warband: Cult of the Possessed

Who
Cult of the Possessed

Boxes
Forsaken (10 bodies)

Optional
Free Company (20 bodies)
Flagellants (10 bodies)

Why These
After the new chaos release the perfect box for your possessed warband's heroes has emerged! All of that lovely mutation from cloven hooves, great claw, extra arms, tentacles, etc is pretty much all there. Besides the beautiful models you'll have all of your heroes in a single box with options to switch them out with different builds. I also suggest either getting Flagellants or Free Company (Empire Militia) is for your henchmen. The Free Company box will of course give you a larger selection of equipment for you to field while the Flagellants box just has some crazy people that goes perfectly with this warband. Either way your warbands heroes will really stand out and you will be feared after your model count goes above four.

Thoughts
Possessed is a slow warband to start due to their high cost heroes since they are 380 gold minimum without equipment for all five heroes. That is also just taking the cheapest mutations which you'll probably want something a bit better like Scorpion Tail. One of the strategies I've read about which I'll probably try in a campaign is just taking the Magistrate, two Mutants with Scorpion Tails, and a naked brethren. Then for the first few games I'll send the brethren to die and rout. Not very interesting but since I'd get the underdog bonus in almost all the matches I'll be able to level my mutants very fast and I'll have enough rounds to get a possessed or two and with that I'll have strong enough heroes to wreck.

For myself I grabbed a box of Forsaken and am currently in the process of deciding what legs should go with what bodies, but I feel the more deformed combinations will be saved for my Possessed while my Mutants and Magistrate will get the less mutated models respectively to set them all apart.

After looking at the mutations table, I'd love to have 400 gold to hire a single Possessed or Mutant with! I can just imagine what a hero would be like with Great Claw, Scorpion Tail, and an Extra Arm as his mutations. Three extra attacks in combat will absolutely destroy. Out of all of them the Scorpion Tail will probably give you the best results since it is S5 by default. Another thing to remember is that Possessed already cause fear so remember not to give them that mutation.

All in all the Cult of the Possessed has some nasty heroes that can absolutely ruin someone's day if you spend some gold on them.

Cheap Mordheim: Cult of the Possessed

As the number of official warbands dwindle it gets harder and harder to find workable cheap sets that can set each warband apart from another besides painting guys from the Empire Malitia differently. When looking at the Cult of the Possessed entry I've tried to mull over how to best model them without dishing out for some cool chaos spawn models for my possessed.

The biggest difference between Cult of the Possessed and other human warbands is the use of green stuff. In order to set your different characters apart from each other and normal unenlightened humans is your gifts of mutations. These range from extra arms, tentacles, a tail, poison blood, and ugly faces. To show these things you can glue on extra bits and blend them in with green stuff or just use the green stuff to show things like boating or non-standard appendages. Thinking about how they would look modeled and since Empire Malitia is pretty overused already I'd say that Marauders of Chaos would be a better fit in this case.

The biggest thing Marauders are missing is bows though looking at the warband they are close combat orientated anyway, and if you need bows there is always the ability to model them (cut up sprue / green stuff on the base). Yesterday was my first game playing with something besides my Reiklanders (mostly ranged) for my new Orcs and Goblins warband against my own Reiklanders though we did remove their lucky charms, rabbits feet, and skills to make it slightly more even (100 rating vs 230ish). This taught me a lot about how powerful long bows can be, but also how devastating my Orcs can be in close combat.

In all close combat warbands speed and combat skills are the most important, you need to race across the map between cover (hopefully complete so you won't get shot) and getting into combat with nasty skills like Strike to Injure. It is very intimidating when an enemy model can move 12" or more. The cult also has a very interesting addition to it in the form of mutations and the Rewards of the Shadow Lord. You can get extra arms, hooves (+1 movement sexiness) and more reasons to bedeck your heroes with all manner of cool looking modeling magic. (glue an arm on their back, some green stuff to blend it in, and bam!)

If done right the cult can be one of the most interesting warbands to model and paint up along with being extremely fun when you get a few skills under your heroes belts. I'd probably start them myself one day out of bits I have laying around and a Marauders box but that is for another day.