YouTuber Third And Only drew inspiration from the Valiant Gargoyles found in and around Elden Ring’s Leyndell when designing custom war walkers for his highly modified Warhammer 40k army. The talented model maker has put as much care and attention into the lore for these behemoths as he has to their conversions, to great, grimdark effect.
The UK based Warhammer 40k fan, who prefers to go by his online handle, has fully customised his army “with all the cool grit and feel you get in the artwork”. He’s created a task force of elite soldiers who serve the dreaded 40k Inquisition. They wear the bones of martyrs and saints, both to drive them to higher levels of religious fervor, and to shield their souls from the malign touch of the daemons of Chaos.
Third And Only created the Inquisitorial gargoyles because he “really wanted some kind of walker or at least heavier unit” for the army, which “was all infantry or tracked heavy weapons” at the time. There “wasn’t really anything that quite fit what I wanted” in any of the Warhammer 40k factions, but he “liked the vibe of the Penitent Engines” from the Sisters of Battle “with their gothic arches”, and made them the basis for converting the models.
You can watch Third And Only’s process creating these mecha monstrosities in this video from his YouTube channel:
The lore that Third And Only has created for these iron brutes would fit into a FromSoftware game just as well as it would into a Warhammer 40k book. The gargoyles “were made from parts of the Imperial Palace on Terra that were removed during the siege and lost in a storage unit somewhere never to be put back, until they were found again by this lord Inquisitor or one of his acolytes and repurposed into the gargoyles”.
It’s a great explanation for “why the head and wings are blocky and stylized… they were decorations that have been incorporated into something they weren’t intended to be part of”. Crude war engines clad in crumbling relics from a lost golden age… it’s pure Elden Ring, and pure Warhammer 40k.
Third And Only mostly plays 40k with friends; “the games are rarely very tight on rules like army composition and the like… I’ll probably run these guys as penitent engines but maybe for some more flavor bump the points up and give them fly if we think it would be cool”. Wargamer thinks it would definitely be cool. Or at least let them jump down from a belfry, original Dark Souls style.
If you’re an Elden Ring fan who’s always been tempted by this model-making malarky, or want to spruce up the miniatures in the Elden Ring board game, we have a great guide on how to paint miniatures that will be a massive help.
Come and say hi in the shiny new Wargamer Discord server, as well!
Source: Wargamer
