And that is the Church of Dagon posse for Dracula’s America finished.

Every miniature is painted, based and ready to take its place on the tabletop, which is probably more than can be said for the sanity of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter them.

Of all the posses in Dracula’s America, the Church of Dagon has to be one of the most entertaining visually. Cowboys, gunfighters and assorted undead horrors are all very well, but there is something particularly satisfying about turning up to a gunfight with a collection of people who appear to have spent rather too much time staring into deep water.

At the centre of the whole unpleasant congregation is the Emissary of Dagon.

She is the obvious spiritual leader of the group and looks suitably capable of convincing otherwise sensible people that worshipping ancient things beneath the sea is a perfectly reasonable lifestyle choice. On the tabletop she provides the supernatural heart of the posse, which is important because the Church of Dagon is not really about standing politely in the street and exchanging revolver fire at twenty paces.

That sort of behaviour is far too conventional.

The Emissary is backed up by the Scaly Hybrids, who demonstrate rather neatly what happens when membership of the congregation becomes a long term commitment. They are no longer quite human, although presumably the Church newsletter describes this as spiritual advancement.

I have two of them, and they are among my favourite figures in the posse. They have just enough humanity remaining to make them disturbing rather than simply monstrous. You can still see what they once were, which somehow makes the scales, claws and other aquatic improvements considerably worse.

There are also the two lay preachers that keep the congregation on the straight an narrow……………well you know what I mean.

Then there are the cultists.

Every sinister organisation needs ordinary members, and the Church of Dagon is no exception. These are the people who presumably put out the chairs, organise the sacrificial knives and make certain there are enough refreshments after the ceremony.

Some are armed conventionally, including the extra rifleman I added to give the posse a little more flexibility. He is perhaps the most sensible member of the entire organisation. While everyone else is developing gills, tentacles and an unhealthy interest in ancient sea gods, he has apparently decided that a rifle remains a perfectly adequate solution to most problems.

It is difficult to argue with that.

Others have progressed somewhat further along the Church’s career development programme.

The tentacled hybrid cultists are particularly fine examples.

At some point the normal induction process has clearly gone badly wrong, or extremely well depending upon your perspective. Tentacles have appeared where tentacles generally should not appear, and the distinction between worshipper and worshipped has become increasingly difficult to determine.

They are exactly the sort of miniatures that make the Church of Dagon such an enjoyable posse to paint. Individually they are strange. Put them together and they begin to tell a story.

This is not simply a gang of gunfighters who happen to share the same colour scheme. They look like a congregation undergoing a gradual transformation.

At one end are the relatively normal human followers carrying firearms. Move along the line and things begin becoming questionable. Skin becomes scaly. Faces become less human. Tentacles begin making an appearance. Eventually you reach the point where asking whether somebody is still technically human seems unnecessarily pedantic.

And standing behind the whole lot is the Emissary, presumably assuring everyone that this is all completely normal.

That visual progression is probably what I like most about the finished posse.

They look like they belong together without all looking the same.

There are gunmen for those moments when traditional Western diplomacy is required, supernatural followers when things need to become considerably stranger, and enough aquatic mutations scattered through the group to make any respectable frontier town reconsider the wisdom of building near water.

They should also make a very entertaining posse to actually play.

The Church of Dagon is not something I intend to use as a straightforward shooting gang. Where is the fun in that? The attraction is in using the stranger abilities and creatures available to the faction, getting close enough for the hybrids to become thoroughly unpleasant and generally making the opposing player wonder why the saloon suddenly smells of low tide.

Most importantly, they look exactly as I hoped they would when I started the project.

Individually there are some lovely miniatures in the range, but together they become something much better: a wonderfully bizarre mixture of the Wild West, Lovecraftian horror and people who really should have listened when their mothers told them not to swim immediately after eating.

So the Church of Dagon is complete.

The Emissary is ready.

The Scaly Hybrids are ready.

The cultists are ready.

The tentacles are definitely ready.

All that remains now is to find some unfortunate frontier settlement, preferably one with a suspiciously deep well, and introduce the locals to the benefits of Church membership.

Now one cannot have a posse for a themed narrative game without a backstory. Stay tuned. a post should arrive shortly.