The Sphincter Beast

Greetings vaqueros! Today we're delving deep into the slimy, gaping horror of the sphincter beast!

"I changed my mind I don't wanna go on this ride now aaaaaaah!"

Long considered a myth amongst the Oldhammer faithful, spoken of only in whispers, it was only in the latter half of 2014 that anyone outside the clandestine inner circle of Rick Priestley's Laserburn Gaming Cult and Benevolent Society* actually managed to see one. And it was... well it was what it was:

"Am I everything you ever wanted? Do you find me beautiful?!"

Image sourced from Eldritch Epistles

The model was designed by Rick Priestley in 25mm and remade in 15mm for Asgard; possibly by Bryan Ansell himself. In Rick's own words he was 'messing about with a bit of spare Milliput,' and boy are we butt-fanatics glad he chose to mess about on this particular concept. Of course this does beg the question as to what exactly the 25mm version looked like, it indeed it still exists...

Yes, you stand back there. Yep. A little more back. A little more. About 10km more.

Now fighting giant sphincters is a proud tradition in a number of fantasy settings, including the Watcher in the Water from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings...

"Blurble-blurgle GET IN ME SMALL MAN!"

The iconic Sarlaac pit from Star Wars...

"Blibble-slurp GET IN ME ARMOURED MAN!"

 And of course everyone's favourite Dungeons and Dragons adversary, the otyugh...

"HAAAAAAAAAAAAY GUUUUUUUUUUUYS!"

So just what IS so fascinating about a giant orifice filled with teeth? Is there something exciting about the threat of getting some, or part, of you swallowed up, bitten off, shredded to bits by some unrelenting gaping chasm? Is there perhaps something empowering about it? Possessing the ultimate sexual power?

I dunno about any of that, I just thought it would be cool to have a giant toothy butthole with a raygun to play games with, and so did my good pal JB Assless, who began sculpting this horror for the Oldhammer Forum Sphincter Beast Challenge!

From  little sphincters, big sphincters grow

JB's original concept was to have the toothy sphincter above as the torso of the creature, with a pink horror upper body and arms placed on top of it - and he went as far as sticking that all together when the project was stymied somewhat by the big reveal of the real sphincter beast. The arse-fiend was shelved by the Asslessman indefinitely, until the day he decided to send it to me...

"Oh gawd I knew I shouldn'ta eaten that there vortex grenade! Oiiii!"

Now I don't claim to be the world's leading expert on sphincter-monsters, but to me, the creature's main focus should be the giant gaping maw part, and the pink horror distracted the eye somewhat from the goody goody goods, so I took it away. I briefly considered keeping the arms, but I really wanted it to hold a raygun, and I had this nice arm with a webbed hand that was just the right size, so I put it on instead, and sculpted the other arm from scratch to match.

Fastest gun in the latrine, that's him.

The gun was a separate accessory piece from Alternate Armies. I sliced the barrel off and turned it around to present more of a cone shape. I don't know what that deadly raygun will shoot, but it will probably be rays of some kind. Deadly ones.

The webbed hand gave me the idea that the sphincter beast was probably aquatic, so I gave him bigger feet so he could swim faster and a re-breather so that he could survive on land. I imagine him darting through the water, opening his cavernous mouth wide and swallowing whole schools of space-fish in one gulp, the rows of inward facing, needle-like teeth making escape all but impossible.

Painting this guy had me stumped for a while. I'd been looking at him in Greenstuff for so long that I kinda thought of him as being green. But green aliens are boring (sorry guys, but you are). I needed something more visceral, something befitting a creature who is more orifice than creature. I went for pinkish and fleshy, because noone likes large lumps of pinkish flesh, do they? The various nostrils, gills and anuses were treated with red glazes, clear red dabbings, greenish ichors - basically anything I thought would cause feelings of revulsion, bordering on hatred for their creator. Did I succeed?

Baby got back. Sort of.

One last detail that I added was a nasty, sticky butt-slug being evacuated from his actualanus. There is ample opportunity for a creature with such blase eating habits to easily swallow parasitic organisms, which, when reaching maturity, would have to be pooped out for the sphincter beast to remain healthy. Nobody likes giant slugs swimming around in their gizzards, nomming all your digestiaries.

"Kerplop muthafuckas!"

Lastly, the original sphincter beast was named a 'Bouncing Vrubee', but that to me doesn't sound right for this particular species. I'm challenging you all out there in Blogland to come up with something more fitting for this grotesque and sticky creation. Chuck them in the comments, and the best one will win a romantic dinner for two with a sphincter beast butt-slug.

And what's next? Well, the galaxy is full of strange xenos, and we owe it to science to document them all...

"No YOU'RE a zoat..."

Adios for now!

*Not a real thing