The In Rust We Trust Secret Santa 2026 Experience

 

 I love giving gifts. I'm actually great at gifting, nobody gifts like I do. Since In Rust's annual secret santa event was now open to people outside the US, I knew I was going to join and make it clear that I was the best gifter of ALL TIME.

I'll bring you up to speed if you don't know how the event works. Every participant is required to give a short prompt to give your santa an idea of what you'd like to recieve, and then you get matched with a victim giftee, read their prompt and off you go. Everyone is required to kitbash something that fits the prompt, but painting it is optional. The deadline for shipping was december 20th, which gave me a little over a month to complete the gift.

The prompt I was tasked with fulfilling was "Retrofuture, Armored, Violence", by Elijah (who you can follow on instagram here). I loved the prompt, and it really sync'd with my mood at the time. I wanted to do some scifi, I wanted to revisit armor modelling and I wanted to do a quick standalone project to clear my mind after a long an stressful project at work. My plan was to make a system neutral warband of time travelling adventurers, exploring different retrofuturistic aesthetics along the way.

 

You've seen this first guy before on here ! He's built from a trench crusade body, a Cities of Sigmar head, a krieg pistol hand and a victrix shield, with a good amount of putty work for the scarf, shinguards, etc... The core concept for this one was to have a WW1 british soldier be the descendant of King Arthur. He's sent back in time to find excalibur or something like that. All the characters in this project have a barebones backstory like this guy. It exists moreso to give me an idea of what they'd look like rather than railroad Elijah into playing out a set story. Think of these little lore snippets as just hooks for an RPG session. The whole WW1 King Arthur idea is inspired by Hellboy, where that same concept is used at the first major climax of the series.

 

 

The next three feature some pretty extensive sculpting. Our Frog friend is based on a Necromunda squat but the head and space gun are sculpted. I think you can sort of figure out this character's story pretty easily. They're a test animal spationaut for the French space program, exposed to cosmic rays and mutated ! There's a bit of old comic books, and a bit of cassette futurism in there.

The center character is the most unassuming looking conversion but the head is fully sculpted, inspired by the silouhette of the Gundam MKV. This one was the most laborious to properly iron out the concept. I wanted a roman inspired character from the get go. The first idea was a legionnary with a space helmet but that felt redundant with the previous frog. The concept I settled on was a kind of Leonardo DaVinci character, inspired by antiquity but not from that time.

The robot on the right was built from a single assassin kit for 30k, that was heavily modified through sanding and sculpting. This one is based on the look of Lucy, a character from Reverse 1999, itself inspired by the iconic robot woman from Metropolis. The hair and the coat came out especially nice on this one, and I've really happy with the simple silouhette.

 

 The final small character of this warband is based on the work of artist Alexandre Eudier. I can only encourage you to check out his work, especially the Imaginary Tribes series which inspired this mini. The designs of the wooden masks, based on 21st century objects is kind of a brilliant questionning of colonialism. While I'm talking about this model, let's touch on the painting in this project. The whole warband is painted with a super limited palette, which was largely determined by what was in grabbing distance at the time. I feel like cream and orange was a great combo to tie everyone together. Each model has its own unique elements, like the camo on this figure, but the pair of central color makes it feel like a ragtag group forced to wear some sort of uniform after the fact. 

And here we come to one of the main reasons I was excited to tackle Elijah's prompt. The first thing I talked about on this blog was a Maschinen Krieger Garage kit (that's coming back soon). A huge part of the appeal of that world to me is that organic retro look to the machines. The suit here is a 1/35 Fireball from Hasegawa. The scale difference with the rest of the warband worked out quite well to sell the idea of a larger mech suit. Because the base kit is quite simple, I needed to do a decent bit of cutting and sculpting to repose it. The right hand was resculpted to hold the axe, most of the cabling was remade with greenstuff and the soft joints were done with tamiya quick type. The model was textured with a quick pass of liquid greenstuff. It's not my favorite option but I was out of my usual tubes. The paintjob here is one of my favorites I've done in a long time. Brush painting mechs is seen as a bit weird to gunpla builders but it seems quite a bit more common for Ma.K kits. And I can understand why. The organic shapes make these a pleasure to paint, from the basecoat to the freehands and decals. Speaking of decals, that's one area that gave me a lot of trouble, and I really would like to practice with them more in the future.

Let's close out the warband tour with the tank. Again this project was the perfect occasion to do more armor modelling, so I couldn't pass up a tank. There are some cut corners on this model, as it is absolutely massive and I was definitely too ambitious with the scope of the gift. I'm still pleased with the final look ! But I want my next tank to take a little more time. I think the conversion carries the model on this one, the big fantasy gun strapped to the front of the cathedral is a cool look. The base kit is a KV2 from bolt action, it was my first time building from that range and it was... ok. The fit is not great without some work, the hull fell apart a couple times on me, simply because the surface area for glue was quite small. But mostly, the tracks were designed by Satan, covered in mold lines and with dreadfully visible gaps. The tower is a scenery piece from Adeptus Titanicus, and the mirror gun is from the Luminark kit. 

Now, I was of course also the recipient of a secret santa present. The prompt I gave out was something along the lines of "chaos, square based, Not like evil chaos really". That's right, I was deviously trying to farm my secret santa for progress in my old world chaos army. I'm pleased to say this was a huge succes, as my santa, Dustbunny (who just started their instagram, go check it out) provided three wonderful kitbashes, as well as a cast of one of their minis, which I plan on kitbashing with in the future.

 

I just finished painting these, and plan on using them as a Sorcerer, a Beast unit filler and a Troll respectively. 

I had a blast making the warband and painting my gift this year. Painting for other people, or painting other people's work feels quite special and it's something I enjoy more every time I do it. I've been lucky to have a bunch of models I was gifted or I traded for as part of my big chaos pile, and I want to keep that ball rolling in 2026. Big thanks to Gage for organizing this event every year, and to everyone who participated. If you want to see all the cool stuff people got, feel free to go look at the gallery in the IRWT discord. 

See you next time !