Sister of Battle Funny Old Models

Greetings friend! And welcome to the domain of the Sisters of Saint Nora. A fully converted Sisters of Battle army – out of plastic.

This article is more or less a combination of all the other conversion-posts so far and will be updated regularly – take it as some kind of "Master-post". It shall combine all the models and bits I used, all the techniques and plans that were useful and give you an overview of what's possible so far, to build a whole selfmade army of the Adeptus Sororitas.

Bodies and Armour
Heads and Helmets
Weapons
Backpacks and Jumppacks
Details and fluffy stuff
Pricing
Sororitas Knight
Showroom

And by the way, I always try to keep it cheaper than the classy metal-models of Games Workshop. I really like those, but I can simply not afford them without a bad conscience and I really love to build stuff out of plastic models.

So, without further delay, let's dive in.

Bodies and Armour

Every single Sister so far, is based on the same body, theEisenkern Valkir Heavy Troopers of Dreamforge Games. They are well-known to many Sister of Battle Players and shown in a couple of different conversion-tutorials already. The reason is simple:

They look wonderful. They are very detailed, high-quality plastic, have dynamic poses and are easy to build.
They have a lot of equipment options and therefore a lot of bits to use later on.
They perfectly fit my fantasy of the Adeptus Sororitas by offering tabards, armour plates and an overall knightly style, including 2 great helmet options.
You can use some of the weapons for later conversions like meltaguns and flamers.
They are cheap! You get 20 models + lots of weapon options and bits for roughly 60€. Hard to beat!

Assembly options of the Eisenkern Valkir Heavy Troopers — Overview of the Eisenkern Valkir Heavy Troopers.

Heads and Helmets

The Valkirs already include a great helm option that I roughly use for 50% of my army. And let's be honest, wearing a helmet is essential when you find yourself in the midst of battle!

Anyway, we want to show our enemies that they face an all female army. Best way to do so, is adding female heads to our Sisters. Also known well thoughout the community, are the beautiful heads of Statuesque Miniatures in the UK.

10 female heads of Statuesque Miniatures — Just a glimpse of many fantastic female heads

These heads are admittedly metal, but as the only metal-part for the whole miniature, we can accept that I guess. Anyway, they look fantastic. They differ a lot in their expressions and there are many different sets that will give you even more variety.

3 Sisters with female faces — I'm not good at painting faces, but the models are great 😉

Weapons

Of course, every Sister needs weapons. And the most iconic ones, are those of the holy trinity of weapons – Bolter, Flame and Melta. Luckily, all of those are easy to get, when you choose the Eisenkern Valkir Troops and some classic boltguns from the bits-shop of your choice.

3 Boltguns of the Blood Angels with both arms. — Boltguns from the Blood Angels

For most of my weapons, I use the Death Company boltguns and arms from the Blood Angels. Not because I have a lot of them, but they come at a very low price and include both arms! And by the way a lot of details I love for my Sisters.

Now what about the special weapons? Fortunately, the Valkir Troops bring 20 Assault Rifles per box and the front parts are perfectly fitting for meltas! Just cut them off and add them to the boltguns. All you have to do is to remove the bolt-magazin and voilà, a meltagun is born – for no extra costs! Flamer can be built in a similar way, you could just add some parts of the Valkir-flamers also.

2 Squads of Dominions with converted meltaguns. — Two squads of Dominions with converted meltaguns

My first Sister of Saint Nora - holding a converted meltagun. — My first Sister of Saint Nora – holding a converted meltagun

Backpacks and Jumppacks

Talking about iconic elements, every Sister is wearing Power Armour and that normally includes Backpacks as well.

You can get a lot of different backpacks – depending on your preferences – for really small money. Some are very detailed, other more simple, but no matter which style your army shall reflect, there are propably the right backpacks out there.

3 Blood Angels Backpacks — Blood Angels Backpacks

Sadly, the Space Marine Backpacks are missing some spikes around the Jets (?), but if you get some with a halo on it, this will perfectly do the trick.

For my HQ models I even got a little heretic … I took some old Chaos Space Marine Backpacks and they look pretty awesome. As long as you really limit them to your Canonesses, I think the Emperor will forgive me. (Haha, as if …)

And last but not least, there are some models with Jumppacks – namely the Seraphim and even a Saint. Of course they don't need simple backpacks and luckily for me, I found some pretty great Winged Jumppacks from Puppetswar.eu.

Details and fluffy stuff

Last step and round-up for my Sisters are some details in form of seals and similar stuff. I always try to add at least 1 detail to every miniature, where some are cheaper and some more expensive. On important models like a Canoness, you can really go crazy and most of my conversions are based on the bits I have left.

Books, seals, scrolls and reliques for the sisters of battle. — Lots of different bits for the Sisters of Battle

My main source where definitely my old Grey Knight models. Years ago I bought a squad of Grey Knight Terminators and a Grey Knights Strike squad and I still use lots of the bits that gave me. (Oh, and I don't play them anymore, so some models had to give away their equipment *cough*)

Generally, you want to go for seals, parchments, books, skulls and bones and everything knightly, like heraldic shields and additional armour plating. But everything you connect to the Adeptus Ministorum is fine in the end. This also led to my Simulacrum Imperialis conversion on my first Imagifier.

By the way, it is pretty easy to make your own purity seals and scrolls out of old plastic sprues with just a knife and a candle! A post that I should also update sooner or later …

An Imagifier and Hospitaller built with lots of different bits. — Imagifier and Hospitaller with lots of different bits

Pricing

As I said earlier, I always try to keep things cheap. At least cheaper than the GW originals. So here are soem calculations and comparisons.

What do I pay for my plastic sisters on average?

3,00€ for bodies
0,20 € for heads (in a 5=% mix with helmets)
0,35 € for boltguns and arms (Blood Angels)
0,25 € for backpacks or 1,60 € for Jumppacks
0,35 € for bits and other details
2,00 € for additional bits on characters

Unit-breakdown and comparison to the ncurrent GW-Range

Battle Sister: 4,20 € (35% safe)
- GW: 6,50 €
Dominion with melta: 4,20 € (47% safe)
- GW: 8,00 €
Canoness: 6,20 € (50% safe)
- GW: 12,50 €
Seraphim: 5,55 € (46% safe)
- GW: 8,50 €
Imagifier: 6,20 € (40% safe)
- GW: 10,50 €

So you can really save some money while building your army. Obviously, it is not an official army though, so if you aim for playing tournaments or at your local GW-Store, this will not work at all. But if so, you might not even have read all this 😉

Sororitas Knight

Not really part of the Sisters of Battle, but still a part of my army, is an Adeptus Sororitas Knight. Simply a converted Imperial Knight, that shares the same colours and symbols as the Sisters of Saint Nora.

If you want to read more about it, you can find some additional posts here. But mainly I added a lot of Bits to the model, put some LEDs and magnets in and took care that the base resambles the same conflict as for my Sisters.