Nuckelavee

James Torrance, 1901

The lower part of this terrible monster, as seen by Tammie, was like a great horse, with flappers like fins about his legs, with a mouth as wide as a whale's, from whence came breath like steam from a brewing-kettle. He had but one eye, and that as red as fire. On him sat, or rather seemed to grow from his back, a huge man with no legs, and arms that reached nearly to the ground. His head was as big as a clue of simmons, and his huge head kept rolling from one shoulder to the other as if it was meant to tumble off. But what to Tammie appeared most horrible of all, was that the monster was skinless; this utter want of skin adding much to the terrific appearance of the creatures naked body.

– The Scottish Antiquary, or Northern Notes & Queries, Vol. 5

Nuckelavee is a supernatural creature originating from the Orkney Islands. During summer, it was confined to the sea by the Sea Mother, and I assume it became free to rampage on land after the Gore Vellye and the return of Teran from the bottom of the sea.

I picked up the Nuckelavee miniature from the Pathfinder Battles line (Ruins of Lastwall #28) because I thought it was an interesting sculpt, and it seemed like it might be large enough to look like various artistic representations of the monster.

Unforunately, the miniature was not as large as I thought it would be, and the humanoid portion of the monster is actually similar in size to a 1/72 scale human rather than the 28mm human I was expecting.

To fix the miniature up a bit, I decided to replace the humanoid portion with the upper half of a necrotic warrior from the Arcane Legions game.

I also drilled out the existing eyes of the horse head, and added a new eye to the center of it's forehead.

I may replace the head later, since the humanoid part of Nuckelavee was described as being akin to a monstrous bobble-head, but I like the necrotic warrior head, since other accounts mention that it had a protruding muzzle.

There's still a bit more work to be done, and I'm playing around with the idea of incorporating parts of the design from the RWBY Nuckelavee in my conversion, but I think what I have so far is a pretty good start.

RWBY, Vol. 4 Ep. 10