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WFB Empire Army Showcase

February 5, 2018, 9:40 am
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Charlie: Today's post is brought to you by a desire to have a photo of my entire Empire collection, since until today no such photo existed. As concepts for posts go that's verging on the anaemic, but I like seeing photos of other people's armies, so, er, I'll just go ahead and flop mine out on the table for everyone to see.


I call this a collection rather than an army because there are more characters in it than would be practical for use in a single game, even if I were using the whole army. I have six wizards because it's fun to have options, and I have a battle standard bearer for both the Middenheimers and the Hochlanders (although if I'm desperate to use Ms Thiele whilst also having Kurt hanging out with his greatswords, I designed her so that the banner could be removed from her base).

With no characters included, the units weigh in at about 3,500 points (in 8th ed Warhammer Fantasy). There's then 14 characters, but since you'd never take all of them this equates to a usable army of 4,500 points. So far. Am I done with the Empire? Noooooope. There are no monsters in this army, and I don't have any engineers, and I could probably do with more halberdiers, and I don't have a steam tank, and, and... yeah. 

The Middenheim army; spot the sneaky shadow wizard in the background.

The Middenheim army was where my obsession began, about... ten years ago? Ye gods. When 8th edition came along the state troops were bulked out, and the greatswords and mortar were added. I also threw in a few troops from the neighbouring state of Nordland because reasons.

The tiny Nordland contingent. Maybe one day I'll flesh it out.

Then, in 2012, we started the Beard Bunker blog, and with it a new wave of fantasy armies. The notion that I'd paint something other than Empire was obviously preposterous, and so began the Hochland project. Here's how it looks today...

The Hochland army. I really need to enlarge that block of knights.

Weirdly, the two halves of the army follow a very similar format:
  • One block of 30-35 state troops plus 15-man detachment.
  • One block of 20 state troops.
  • A chunk of missile troops.
  • A unit of zippy distracty types (pistoliers/archers)
  • One unit of knights.
  • One unit of elite infantry.
  • Two artillery pieces.

This really isn't by design, and obviously there are differences, but it's only putting them all on the table that's made me realise how much I've repeated myself. Oh well.

I should also offer props to Mark, who lent me bonus lighting. One of the reasons I've not done many wide shots like this before is insufficient illumination. The experience also taught me that if I want to take prettier photos, I need to invest in a sexier camera. My current compact job is only just better than my mobile in most conditions, and sometimes it's worse - the picture of the Hochlanders was taken on my mobile, since that one came out better than my camera's attempt.

Everyone knows you need a tripod and the ability to mess with the exposure, shutter speed etc, but I am both lazy and cheap, and my current camera is designed for ease of use and only gives me access to some but not all of the relevant settings. It's fine for taking shots of individual minis, but struggles at wider angles - just another reason we don't do many battle reports on this blog.

Anyway, self-indulgence over. I'd better go and tidy up the mess I made... 

Mannslieb and Morrslieb were shining with uncommon enthusiasm.

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WFB 8th edition house rules

February 12, 2018, 6:12 am
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Charlie: Today I’m going to run through the Beard Bunker’s house rules for the 8th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. This might be a funny thing to do in the Age of Sigmarines, but there seem to be plenty of lingering souls with a fondness for square bases and regimental strategy.

I’ve been keeping a vague eye on AoS, but the setting still comes across to me like generic fantasy land, and the game’s depth seems, from my cursory understanding, to be like 40K in that synergistic list building is more important than battlefield manoeuvres. That might be unfair of me; anyone reading this is most welcome to correct me in the comments or link to videos that demonstrate otherwise. I fully accept my fallibility!

For now, though, regimental combat still gets my blood pumping. I’ll start with the house rules, then explain my thinking.



Warhammer 8th Edition according to the House of Beard

Movement
  • Infantry charge M+2D3 and advance/flee 2D6.
  • Cavalry/swift striders/M>7” charge M+2D6 and advance/flee 3D6.

Ranged damage
  • All blasts go down by a point of Strength, to a minimum of 2, or lose armour piercing, or decrease the difficulty of a stat test by 1 – whichever is applicable.

Melee
  • Steadfast models halve the Leadership penalty for break tests, rather than ignoring them.

Banished rules
  • No horde rule.
  • No magic trees.

Definitely less intimidating than a 4 page PDF... right?



What was I thinking?

Despite my love of Warhammer Fantasy, it has/had serious problems, many of which were exacerbated by 8thedition. Random charge distances fixed the problem of armies stopping 8½ inches away from each other, but at a cost: the enormous swing on a 2D6” roll often reduced strategic decisions and outmanoeuvring, since regiments could reach out and touch you from up to 16” away. Part of what makes a wargame interesting is limitation; the rigidity of the movement in Battlefleet Gothic is what makes it such a tactically satisfying game. Was 7th edition too restrictive? Probably. Did 8th edition over-compensate? In my view, yes.

8th edition also brought in the horde rule, which to my mind further blandified the gameplay. Hordes were so effective that everyone took them; the added damage output combined with the steadfast rule made them an obvious choice. But this meant that armies started to consist of two or three giant units, which whilst looking impressive were prohibitively expensive to buy, boring to paint, and boring to play with. Since people had a smaller number of bigger, cumbersome units, you were essentially playing a small game of 7th edition but where the combats lasted for aaaaaaages before one side finally collapsed. I often found I was much more tired after playing a game of 8e versus a game of 7e. It was a very grindy edition. The reduction in charge ranges, dropping the horde rule, and nerfing steadfast does, I think, help mitigate some of these issues.

I also nerfed blast weapons because it’s faffy rolling for partial hits, but the lack of partial hits made blasts appallingly overpowered.

Finally, I removed the magic trees because they were asinine.

I’d be curious to hear other people’s 8e house rules; the magic phase is fun but not without its issues, and some ranged units seem to be pointless in a lot of contexts, but I don’t have simple fixes for those as yet.
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He's a very Nauty boy!

February 19, 2018, 3:26 pm
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Mark: As this is the year of finishing things* I decided to pick up two much neglected models I’d started some time ago: my two Gork / Morkanauts.

This is the rather sad state they were in in November.


Forgotten and alone

Adopt a Gorkanaut today.
Bad Bits

A lot of people dislike the Gokanaut / Morkanaut model (hereinafter referred to as a 'Naut) and cite its ungainly gait, dodgy balance and funny looking transport section. 
I’m happy with the general shape of the Gorkanaut. It’s the add-on bits like the extra big shootas, rokkits and force field that I really hate. All in all, It makes the 'Naut look like a McWarmachine.




Honestly, these bits are gopping. They give every appearance of being after-thoughts, added to up-gun the model and sculpted with an eye solely on keeping sprue space down. Compare the big shootas to the ones you get on the battlewagon sprue and you'll see what I mean. 

As per usual, I forgot to take enough photos during construction and painting. You'll have to use your imagination.  

Straight from the get go, I wanted to build these two as specialists. One would have all the stabby / smashy bits. This would be my Borkanaut.
The other would have all the sciencey / dakka bits. This would be my Dorkanaut.  
For future variations, see below**

But first, I had to get round the problem of the dodgy add-on bits. 


The Makings

For the Borkanaut, I added a gunner with a rokkit launcher from the Deff Dredd pack. I used a Warbike’s dakkaguns at the shoulder and mounted the skorcha and a ‘borrowed’ heavy bolter on the saw arm. I wish I’d had the shoulder idea sooner, as I’d have mounted the heavy bolter on the other shoulder for cleaner looking fighting limbs.
I wanted to make the Borkanaut look like it was running forwards with one leg off the floor. To this end, so I reinforced the left leg by inserting a steel rod as a splint through the leg and across the joint to the body.

Sadly, there was still too much flex across the upper leg, so the right leg still touches the floor.

The Dorkanaut was easier. The removal of the legs gave me the opportunity to mount some spare Baneblade sponsons on the side. The rokkits were spares from  from a Taurox. For the force field, I mixed up a Bastion’s lascannon with the included force field bits to make something that looked a little less ‘gaffer taped-on’.
I also replaced one of the claws with a rip saw from a Mega Dredd and changed the exhausts from the stock options to big rig style columnar exhausts. Although, in retrospect, the shroud placement makes no sense (but it looks sort of cool).


The Paintings

In terms of painting, the Dorkanaut would be Bad Moons (yellow) and the Borkanaut would be Blood Axes, which meant camouflage*** . In looking for inspiration for the camouflage, I turned to my favourite video game of all time and borrowed the camo pattern from a Super Pershing. I used the general scheme, but replaced the yellow with grey. 


The T26E4. As slow as my 12 step programme for tank addiction


This meant masking tape.
This turned out to be a massive faff.

Really, a massive faff. 
  
For both ‘Nauts, I wanted to use the hairspray method for chipping. This meant for the camouflage pattern had to be applied over a pre-chipped and sealed basecoat – otherwise the masking tape would rip off the underlying paint layer – not good.

I sprayed base-coats for both models and when I applied the top yellow to the Dorkanaut (Bad Moons Yellow from the 90’s) it went a bit, well, fluorescent. Possibly because the topcoat was on a rather dark yellow base-coat. So to tone this down, I applied a brown filter wash that brought more red tone to the model and helped to reduce the fluorescence. Using the filter also gave me the opportunity to add streaks in the drying wash (simulating rain washing dirt down the Naut) by removing paint in a downwards, irregular pattern with a clean brush.




This worked well on the yellow Dorkanaut. Unfortunately, this the chipping and proceeding weathering steps on the Borkanaut did remove some of the definition of the camoflague and left teh scheme looking a little dead and flat. 

I used weathering powders to help tie the models to their bases - which had been built to resembel ruined city. I applied them by flicking the powders onto areas which had been painted with AK Pigment fixer. I made a conscious effort not to overdo the powder weathering as I wanted these models to look like they were crunching over dry concrete rather than through a soggy swamp.

After this, I forgot to take photos, so here we are, with the finished articles. Not quite what I hoped for, particularly as the Borkanaut looks a little 'flat' but I’m happy enough.

Activate maximum science!


Problems with depth perception can be overcome with more Dakka. 

Problems with anything else can be overcome by hitting it very hard. 

Private Disposable got in the way. 



So that's it. I learnt some new stuff, although I’m still a bit shaky with hairspray chipping. I sometimes find that paint sloughs off in massive sheets, and sometimes it won't come off with an angle grinder. 

I will be doing camo on an Ork vehicle again, as I really like the contradiction. Although next time I'll either use a much simpler vehicle or blu-tack. 

Now to come up with a model for a Blood Axe Warboss.


Will I be making any more? 

No. For two reasons. 

Firstly: Although I like converting things, I don't like having to be forced to do it to get round really cheap and nasty components and an overly busy model. 

Secondly, I can’t remember what I paid for these two (because I bought them some years ago) but the current price point for 'Nauts is a bit silly. A Gorkanaut is only £5 cheaper than the Stompa. Honestly, I'd much rather buy another Stompa - it’s a more satisfying, bigger, and more coherent looking kit Plus the Stompa kit is so much better for conversions and it gives up a huge amount of spare parts. 


TL:DR 

I made this.



*Er, that was last year. (Ed)

** Another would have all the eating utensils, this would be a Forkanaut. A different one would have a falconry on board, which would be my Hawkanaut. One would fire ninja attack pigs, this would be a Po... (That’s enough variations. Ed).

*** I wonder if they know how funny this song is?

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Frostgrave: The warband grows!

February 26, 2018, 1:26 pm
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Jeff: Greetings fellow explorers of the City of Chilly Corpse Disposal Facility! We have been making a few more forays into the Frozen City and as a result my warband has grown even more than it was before. Time to share these bad hombres (and have a natter about winter basing at the latter part of this post).


Owing to some well-applied violence and not a little luck in the early stages of the campaign I had wound up with what is colloquially termed All Of The Money. Thus I had much to spend to expand my warband and thought some pricey specialists would do the job. One barbarian, a templar and 2 treasure hunters later and the job was a good 'un. I've taken an inn (the "Ragged Duchess") over as my headquarters so I can have 11 fighters total in the warband and this fills all the slots. There's also the transient member of my warband, the model representing the succession of zombies all called Stinky Pete.


First up we'll take a gander at the magnificent thews of Kordac. Barbarian extraordinaire and former doorman of the Ragged Duchess. When Freya took it over she basically bought him in to the bargain. As far as painting went, this was always going to be about dat skin, bout dat skin no t-shirt... Initially I'd thought to have him tattooed but the sculpting is so nice that I decided to let the impressive musculature speak for itself. I tried to get that slightly pinkish look that cold Caucasian skin goes in the winter. Lots of mucking around with washes getting exactly the tone I wanted.


Next we have Templar-in-name-only Maximillian Eichel. Eichel is a mercenary through and through and when rumours spread of a wealthy wizard chucking money around reached him he had to answer that call. I wanted a really worn, solid look to his armour and weapons. This meant starting from quite a dark metallic tone with a good deal of rust-brown mixed in. Even well cared for metal will develop a patina unless mirror polished constantly so this gives it a lived-in heft. I then worked up the highlight colours leaving only the deepest recesses weathered. Continuing the rough-and-ready look I kept his clothing desaturated and "cheap" dye colours.


Rounding out the warband, we have a pair of treasure hunters. Treasure hunters are awesome in Frostgrave. Good fight stat combined with fast feet make them the ideal choice to grab risky, far-off treasures. Captain burney here is the first of two brothers, Malcolm and Ewan Ross are thieves for hire specialising in crypt breaking and tomb robbing. Two such utterly amoral creatures were the perfect choice for Freya and thus they were hired on the spot. Only thing worth nattering about on the painting of Malcolm is the torchlight. I tried a new method for the OSL, normally I mix the light colour with the base colour beneath. This time I wanted more of a "daylight" look to the torchlight and have it just tint the colour. So I tried many thin layers of yellow ink mixed with matt varnish. It left the painted colours beneath and just imparted a yellow glow. Happy with that.


His brother Ewan is an almost impossible model to photograph as he's bent forward moving stealthily and quickly. Cracking miniature but naff for photography, lets draw a veil over this and head onwards to the smelliest member of the warband.


As if 11 warband members and two summon able demons was insufficient we also have the ability to raise a zombie to join the gang. The zombie is one of the excellent Red Box zombie models (as are Ewan and Malcolm) formerly available in the UK through-Hasslefree but no longer sadly (killed off by the damage done to the pound's standing against the dollar through Brexit). Stinky Pete bears my new favourite "corpse colour", it's a neutral brown like Leather Brown or Burnt Umber mixed with Stone Grey and then toned with glazes of Athonian Camoshade and thinned Blood For The Blood God mixed with black. Works really nicely.


I've had some nice things said about my Frostgrave bases so I thought I'd share the method in not really a review, more of an evangelising of my favourite snow product: Secret Weapon's Crushed Glass snow scatter. Yep, crushed glass. So a few obvious caveats: no, this is not the sort of thing your 12 year old should be using without supervision, yes, this is absolutely nasty for hands, lungs and eyes so take precautions. That being said, like most dangerous things it is awesome at what it does. For best results you'll also want some pourable water effects. Secret Weapon also do one of these for convenience but there's a few companies out there that do it.


Start with the bases textured, painted and dried. I sometimes add a few tufts of grass to my snow basing but I'm keeping these rocky. Get some water effects out on your palette and paint it on to appropriate places on the base for snow to settle. Then dip the bases in the crushed glass like you would for other scatter. I find two dips works best. The first gets the solid glass into the water effects, the second adds a sparkly crust to the outside.


You get a nice realistic frosty tone to the base. If you want slushy snow use more water effects to suspend the glass and it makes lovely melting slush. Now, this is fine and all, but we can take it to the next level and add some more un-melted icy snow on appropriate bits.


For this bit you want both the crushed glass and the more traditional white snow flock - tiny white plastic fibres - this will give a whiter, more opaque tone while maintaining the sparkle of the glass. Get a nice puddle of water effects - I recommend on an already painted bit of palette, this stuff sets like rock and it's easier to clean off the paint and take the snow mix with it.


Now mix roughly 1:1 of glass and flock into the water effects until you get a sort of toothpaste consistency. This can now be picked up and sculpted with either a wooden toothpick or an old brush.


Here, I'm smoothing a layer of snow-mix onto the top of the rock - note sexy nitrile gloves for safety - it gives a nice thick layer of icy looking snow that seems more permanent than the rest.


It's almost impossible to photograph as the reflection from the white and the glass just kill the subtle differences but you can sort of see the effect by the arrow on Stinky Pete's base. You can see the thicker snow next to the frosty stuff alongside.

And that's that! Hopefully that was helpful to someone, let me know your favourite snow techniques, I want to get even better at winterising! All that remains is a little bit of scenery perving at the table that my shiny shiny models got to play on last night:


Mmmm, so chilly, so city. Charlie's collection looks so good with those snowy pines and all those tabletop world buildings. I shall leave you with that on this appropriately frigid night in the UK and wish you all happy treasure hunting!

TTFN
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Frostgrave: Critterwatch Episode One

March 3, 2018, 6:25 am
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Hello everyone! I'm rogue Druid Kri Spackham, we've packed up the studio and come out here to the frozen wasteland of Frostgrave to take a look at the exciting wildlife in this thawing hellhole. Join us as we explore in this year's Critterwatch!

Theme music plays
Lets jump straight to those live cameras as we've seen some incredible action already today! A territorial challenge between a greater frost wyrm and a snow troll! It might look like a back garden in Cardiff but no! It's the heart of the frozen city!

It has snowed a lot lately here... like, not a lot for Canada but tons for Wales
So with that challenge ending in tentative, immobile standoff it's probably worth looking closer at these wonderful creatures and how they've come to live in this overly-chilled wizard-ghetto. Firstly, of course, neither of these are truly natural, they are in fact Not Proper Creatures (NPCs) created by magic and now wandering the city supplementing their diet with adventurers foolish enough to go searching for treasures.

Reaper "Bones" Frost Wyrm

The Frost Wyrm is a particularly magnificent specimen of NPC, many times the length of a human, these critters used to keep the sewers clear of escaped experiments. Since the Accident, it is assumed that they cleared out their own territory and came aboveground for more food. Able to keep pace with the fastest rangers and as dangerous in combat as a barbarian, these things are not to be messed with. They can take damage that would kill two archers and shrug off magic even easier than a full-blood wizard. It's fair to say folks, if you see one of these things, run for it faster than your mates. But look at those beutiful markings. Almost as if it started from a deep sea blue and got highlighted up with a pale blue grey before glazes of turquoise ink intensified the colour. And those eyes! Shining like metallics glazed again with inks. Gorgeous. At a distance...

Heresy Miniatures Snow Troll

And then there's this beauty. Ten feet tall at the shoulder, this vicious snow troll moved in to the city after the Accident, feasting on the frozen flesh of the citizenry and hunting anything dumb enough to come near. An ambush predator, this shaggy beast rolls in the snow to camouflage itself and then huddles, mimicking a drift until prey comes near. Then those massive claws come to play, this guy hits like a templar and is tougher than even the most heavily armoured knight. Mercifully it is slow. You can probably outpace it if you try, you just need to survive the initial assault. It's markings are unremarkable, just a shaggy white coat shading from a deep beige up to an off white with the normal black skin of the polar mammal trying to extract all available solar heat from the short days. The residue of it's last meal - definately not Luke's tauntaun, no, that would be a copyright violation - is smeared around it's mouth and claws.

Yup, Maximillian is hosed
Here we can see a representation of the real scale of these creatures next to a human. As you can see, while the Frost Wyrm is massive it is thin enough to hide when it slithers. The Snow Troll is definately Large. And that's all we have time for folks, the credits are rolling. Push the red stone on your crystal balls to watch Critterwatch Unsprung! See you next time!

Furious waving fades to black...

TTFN.
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The Onefinger Tribe

March 9, 2018, 3:27 am
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Maisey: Way back in 2014...

Excuse me while I have a little dizzy moment as I realise that was FOUR YEARS AGO!!

... ahem...

Right back in the room. Back in 2014 I introduced a little side project as a break from my endless undead army. This was a band of Ogres named the One Finger Tribe: The Protecterors of Ostland and their back story can be found Here- Blood, Sweat, and Flab.

Since then I actually finished the rest of the tribe but had rudely neglected to share them with you. So without further ado I give you, The One Finger Tribe:





Nargutt Onefinger:


Leader of the tribe. Lost 4 fingers on one hand after winning a bet over who could catch a spinning dagger out of the air. Nargutt isn’t the greatest leader, but he is the biggest and strongest, which is enough to keep him in power for now.

Comehere Chickenchaser:


Short of brain power, big on chickens. What he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in violence, an affinity with gut magic, and his now infamous offal and rock stew.

Burping Rhone:



The tribes current Firebelly. Rhone is plagued by chronic gas after his initiation ritual. He’s the friendly sort but finds that no one will sit near him after meals, especially if Comeback has made a beastman vindaloo that night.

Vargol Ironface’s Ironfaces:



Vargol Iron face is the right hand man of Nargutt. When he isn’t helping Nargutt with counting all the way up to 16  he is commanding the Ironfaces. These are the biggest and toughest boys from the tribe and act as Nargutt’s bodyguard. Due to this status they have access to the biggest weapons and first dibs on any armour that they can scrounge up. Vargol only trusts Zorg with is standard depicting the great maw, painted red to be extra angry. Pothead is the Ironfaces bellower, named such for the pot he bent onto his head so he wouldn’t lose it. 

Yarg the Heavy’s Raging Bulls:


Yarg first rose to take over as the Crusher of the Bulls after he accidentally got involved in a Empire led mission to stop a necromancer from bringing back a potent Vampire. Yarg had gotten lost after chasing a Gor herd away from Salkalten. He was sitting down minding his own business when an Empire Captain approached him. Impressed by the shiny armour and very tall feathered helmet he (vaguely) remembered that he was under contract with the Empire and decided to be good and help out the Captain. He smashed a lot of green things. Then smashed a lot of dead things. The captain said that Yarg did good, which made him happy, even after he lost his favourite cow carcass, which had made him sad. Yarg keeps Flappy close by to carry the standard bearing the colours of Ostland, of which Yarg is so very proud. Colin, Yarg’s Bellower, is the cousin (on his mothers side) of Comehere Chickenchaser and tries to keep the simple minded Comehere as close to him as possible. During battle Comehere is normally found in the protective cover of the Raging Bulls.

Deaf Mungo’s Boomsticks:

 
Deaf Mungo is in charge of the tribes various black powder weapons. No two are the same, mostly because they have been stolen from different sources at different times. The Boomsticks tend to keep to themselves within the tribe. Seeing themselves as somewhat superior to the other Ogres, partly because they have figured out how to use guns, but mostly they are usually the first to kill something on the battlefield. Most of the other Ogres claim that they are cheating, but Mungo doesn’t really care what the others say because he just can’t hear them.

Little Karl: 


A Giant that Nargutt had wrestled to the ground in the Middle Mountains just to prove he could. Little Karl has taken to simply following the tribe around and eating Gnoblars.

Flingy Fing:



This precarious contraption was built from parts stolen from the local area by the small number of Gnoblars that have survived the hunger pangs of Little Karl. The Flingy Fing was inspired by watching Vargol throw a handful of cutlery at Deaf Mungo for not listening to Nargutt during one of his ‘Strategy’ meetings. These meetings normally start out with trying to plan where to raid next, then pass through the eating, drinking, and brawling stages before everyone has forgotten what the plan was and just goes back to eating.

And there we have the tribe as it stands. Although, as the threat from chaos in the north has started to subside, Nargutt is thinking about taking a holiday. Somewhere warm down south maybe?

Maisey

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Inquisition Acolytes & painting plans for 2018

March 19, 2018, 4:55 am
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This is a post of two halves orbiting around the theme of “I PAINTED THIS.” Over the last year, I’ve made the shocking discovery that having deadlines results in getting stuff done. Conversely, anything without a deadline was either done slowly or not at all. Fancy that.

Annual hobby progress log & plans for 2018
Lately I’ve been doing the hobby equivalent of spring cleaning: finishing off the last little bits of various projects. Last year was billed as the Year of Finishing, and I’d call it a moderate success. In 2017 I…


Things I didn’t cross off the list included finishing the Cadians I got a while back. Whilst I painted the platoon, I still needed to paint the kasrkin/storm troopers I got off ebay. Well now they’re done, with a head swap to boot. There’s a few things I’d like to add to that army, but they can wait. For now, I’ve painted everything I bought.

The head is from Statuesque Miniatures.


2018 is looking like a mixture of backlog clearance and new stuff:

1. Finish Inquisition & Deathwatch stuff (partially done, as per 2nd half of this post).
2. Complete all half-done Empire bits in time for a huge battle with Maisey in early June, including:
     - General on griffon
     - 20x greatswords
     - 5x outriders
     - 10x crossbowmen
     - 20-30x free company
     - 2-4x knights (so that I no longer have a useless unit of 8!)
     - Engineer
3. Renovate & expand Skazzwuzzle’s Bloo Moons with more goblins and… gasp… orcs! The greenskin stuff is for something I’m running for Jeff & Maisey in late November 2018, and is a pretty huge project. I’ve already got the models, many of them half-painted… but they'll need a lot of love before they get anywhere near my gaming table. Should keep me busy for the second half of the year.

Hopefully with all that I’ll find the time for one or two tiny side-projects. I really want to paint a few primaris marines, because they’re so goddamn pretty, and it would also be nice to finish the Sisyphean task that is the wizard’s tower, which has been on the workbench for… a while.


New acolytes for Inquisitor Drake
Inquisitor Drake is one of those characters where I wrote him as an NPC about a decade ago, and he sort of pootled his way into becoming my player-character in Inq28. I’m OK with his characterisation, but his major failing, for me, is that he has a name which I pulled out of my ass at short notice and am now stuck with. Does he change it by deed poll? Do I retcon it? Or do I just accept Drake’s name even though it suffers from coming off like it’s trying to say “I’m a badass and totes named after some famous British dude with a boat”?

Either way, Inquisitor Badass Name now has some new acolytes. Or rather, he has one new acolyte, and two acolytes who were painted years ago but for some reason never properly based.

Miniature available from Statuesque Miniatures.

This is Nadiya Zelenko. She was an unsanctioned psyker living in seclusion atop a derelict hab stack in Hive Sejanus. Drake’s team got a tip-off and brought her in (why yes, that was an actual mission that we played through, and I told myself if the players did a great job I’d make Nadiya a recurring character).

Drake pulled strings to ensure that following her basic training in the Scholastika Psykana, she was released to his service, as he wanted someone who knew the area, and furthermore was feeling increasingly exposed given the total lack of psykers on his team. Since she’s new, she’s got basic equipment: the ubiquitous body glove, a sidearm, and a battle rifle that means she can stay back from the horror of close quarter combat whilst she hones her martial skills. Having been effectively rescued from a potentially very short life of terror and solitude by Drake’s team, she’s inexperienced but dedicated. Behind her back, others in the team refer to her as an idealist with a rosy view of the Inquisition’s purpose. Drake sees this as a quality more than a flaw, but then, those same people think Drake is an idealist too.


Next up is Acolyte Ashar Lear, which is Alex’s player character in Inq28. Agent Lear is a pariah who has all the indoctrination and enthusiasm the Schola Progenium had to offer, and all the charisma and intelligence of a sea cucumber. She looks forward to the day she becomes a full Inquisitor, but in Alex’s words, “that day will never come, because she’s just not that smart.” She dresses the part, though, and has become lethal in a fight.

The miniature is from Hasslefree. Her melee weapon is sculpted as a chainsword, although Alex was keener on the notion of having a power sword (clearly she hasn’t got on board with the 40K brand of ultraviolence…). Thus, I shaved the resin weapon down until it had an edge.

Ashar Lear
With Inquisitor Badass Name’s warband complete, at least for the time being, here’s a family photo. Yes, I know, the base rims are inconsistent. Charadon Granite doesn’t exist any more and I’m waiting for something similarly off-grey to turn up in the post. That said, putting mid-brown on the others might be a good shout given how much it'll help them blend into a bigger variety of gaming boards.


In terms of how to use these guys in 40K, it’s imperfect, but breaks down like this:
  • Drake: Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor, 5PL
  • Sera Jentiva, death cult assassin (if opponent accepts, am only using 1 assassin with 3 wounds, rather than the 2 assassins with 1 wound you get by default – slightly more durable, but half as killy), 1PL*
  • Ashar Lear, acolyte with power sword and plasma pistol, 1PL
  • Maria “Blue”Ruggieri (the woman in the bodyglove with duel pistols who definitely isn’t hunting werewolves or played by Kate Beckinsale, whose two pistols will have to count as a single bolt pistol), acolyte, 1PL
  • Savant Silvio Mendoza (the nutter with the book and the flamer-staff who really shouldn’t be out in the field but finds it all terribly exciting), acolyte with flamer, 1PL
  • Nadiya Zelenko, acolyte with bolter (closest thing in the list to a high-powered rifle), 1PL
  • 4 Stohlbard Dragoons, count as an astra militarum command squad with plasma gun, 2PL
  • 2x techpriest enginseers, 4PL
  • Valkyrie gunship, 8PL
  • Total power level: 20
  • Command points: 1 (Vanguard detachment, 1 HQ, 6 Elites, 1 flyer).

Is all that worth 20PL? Maybe in conjunction with an actual army. The enginseers will certainly help keep my mechanised guard afloat! The only future plans I have with these Inquisition chaps is the possibility of adding a second Valkyrie and a squad of Inquisition storm troopers. I already have an old metal unit of them painted, but it occurs to me that the overly-ornate tempestus scion models might actually look kind of OK in Drake’s antiquarian colour scheme.

Right. Onwards! To the Deathwatch! There’s nothing like finishing things to get me excited to finish even more things.
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8th ed 40K Battle Report: Hunting Sorcerers

March 26, 2018, 1:00 pm
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Today, Maisey and I bring you our first 40K 8th edition battle report. It will cover the splodes,  who done them, and why they was done. At the end, Maisey's providing a reflective plenary on his tactical learning points.

The backstory (why was the splodes done?)
There wasn't officially any backstory, but my subconscious provided one anyway: Inquisitor Drake  has heard rumours of heretic astartes poking about in some pre-Imperial ruins on Samalut IX. Putting on his brownest trousers, Drake has come to put a stop to... whatever it is they're doing. Upon arrival, he requests assistance from the most mobile Guard units available and heads for the traitors' last known location. He normally likes to plan things meticulously, so this sort of tactical improvisation scares the hell out of him.

The armies (who done the splodes?)
Both forces weigh in at a power level of 70. The Imperial force consists of a mechanised battalion (+3CP) from the Ankran 107th, and a vanguard (+1CP) of Inquisitor Drake and his personal retinue aboard a valkyrie.

Glorious loyalists

The Chaos force is a mixed infantry battalion (+3CP) led by a pair of HERETICS er I mean great and magnificent Thousand Sons sorcerers. Side note: I'm really enjoying playing against Maisey's army. Back in the day playing against Chaos meant playing against another army of 3+ heavy infantry dudes, but this army is much more varied, and that in turn makes the game more interesting for his opponent. And him, I think!

Filthy heretics


The set-up (where was the splodes done?)
We rolled Slay and Secure for the primary objectives. These were three structures on the map potentially containing pre-Imperial archeotech, and a hill with a commanding view, because nothing pleases my beloved Imperium like sticking a flag on a hill.

The fourth objective is just out of shot, in a building off the bottom right.

Maisey split the board diagonally, and grabbed two of the objectives straight away, whilst I concentrated my force on the right flank, claiming one of the buildings and training all my guns on a single squad of traitor astartes, since I know it takes a lot of guns to dig marines out of buildings.

The Thousand Sons' deployment

The Imperial deployment


The battle (how the splodes go?)
I had the first turn, and immediately poured fire into the ten Thousand Sons in the building opposite my deployment zone. The Leman Russ opened up first, and rolled a frankly impolite ten shots. This caused something of a dent, and I thought it'd be easy. More fool me. All three chimeras opened up, the infantry poured frag missiles in, and the valkyrie unloaded its rocket pods. Maisey was rolling 2+ saves against almost everything thanks to a combination of concrete and just being rubric marines. Fortunately, it was Maisey rolling the dice...

Maisey rolls, Tzeentch weeps. He re-rolled three of these with command points and got two more 1s.

By the end of said fusillade, there were still two marines left. The rest were, presumably, buried under a collapsing building. The survivors left in the morale phase, and I can't say I blame them. To be fair, they were probably buried under bits of building too.

The turn only got worse for Maisey when I used two command points to call in an aerial spotter for my wyvern, allowing me to re-roll to hit with my 4D6 shots. This ruined a bunch of his 20 tzaangor and cost him a few more in the morale phase, effectively neutering that unit as well.

My first turn had dealt a meaty blow, and Maisey was genuinely unsure how to proceed with the game. We sat down for a bit to try and figure out if it was even worth continuing, ultimately deciding that he had enough tricks up his sleeve that he might just be able to hold me to a draw.

Having decided to continue, Maisey set about retreating the sorcerer who'd been hanging out with the marines in the (now very sploded) building.

Maisey had so many casualties to clean up that I took the time to dust my valkyrie. #bants #bantelope #bantichrist

Our armies were now pretty much at opposite ends of the map. I advanced with my tanks while Maisey hunkered down, hiding the surviving tzaangor in what cover was available to protect against the wyvern's ongoing bombardment. Seriously, wyverns are outrageously good, to the extent that in our fluffy, laid-back group I think I'll avoid using more than one unless it's a bigger game. They're only S4 AP0, but having 4D6 shots and re-rolling to wound makes them much more reliable than other big guns.

The surviving tzaangor singing in the lead rain. And hiding.
One of Maisey's sorcerers flees, chased by Imperial armour.

It's more fun to describe the second half of the game in prose, since it was pretty cinematic.

Inquisitor Drake was feeling cautiously optimistic. Even though it took all the army's guns, they had eradicated the entire squad of traitor marines, and the only other enemy in sight was a fleeing sorcerer. Worried the traitor might inflict horrendous casualties on the guardsmen, Drake voxed, "leave this one to us, Major. By all means send your tanks to cover us, but keep your distance. The enemy is a psyker."

Major Kahurangi voxed his assent, and then told Chimera One to close with all speed anyway, reasoning that fancy hexes and other such nonsense were no match for heavy weapons.

As the valkyrie gunship flew up behind the sorcerer, Drake slid the cabin door open. Hot summer air blasted into the passenger cabin. Beneath them, the roof of the largest derelict building. It looked solid enough. Down on the ground just beyond it, the astartes sorcerer was running for the cover of the treeline. Drake thumped the cockpit door twice. The pilot understood his signal, and held position over the roof. "Everyone off!" Drake yelled, engaging his rappelling clamp and beginning his descent.

In the valkyrie's cockpit, the pilot's eyes widened. There were more of the enemy waiting on the other side of the building. Much more. A fleshy parody of a dreadnought was bringing a twin lascannon and missile rack to bear on the valkyrie, and next to it, a multi-legged daemon-engine snarled as it raised two giant plasma guns. "Inquisitor! Beware!" he voxed, desperately lining up the gunship's weaponry on the dreadnought. The cabin's pict feed showed that fully half the team was currently on the rappelling cables or on the roof. If the valkyrie moved, it would be disastrous.

The valkyrie finds the rest of the bad guys.

The enemy started firing before the team had finished disembarking. Drake looked up in horror as the valkyrie was struck by multiple energy weapons. Half the nose melted off, killing the copilot and raining globs of molten ore onto the roof. Two dragoons - Holgersen and Gulbrandsen - were only halfway down the line when the port wing was carved off by an enemy las weapon. They cried out in panic as the valkyrie went into a spin. Drake and his team instinctively ducked as the burning valkyrie spun overhead and arced away into the trees, pulling both screaming dragoons into the fireball of its landing. Drake, appalled, knew he had no time to waste. Already he was up, sprinting to the edge of the roof to get a shot at the enemy psyker before it reached the safety of its allies.

The survivors of the crash.

In the periphery of his vision, Drake saw his team come up alongside him. They'd kept their wits despite the ambush and the crash, and unloaded their guns into the fleeing sorcerer.

Puuuuuurge the heretic!

The heretic's red cloak and turquoise armour was bathed in plasma, blessed promethium, and heavy caliber rounds. Incredibly, the battered astartes stayed on its feet and turned toward them. It was the first traitor astartes Drake had seen, and even though it was badly wounded, it was terrifying. A nimbus of blue light was forming at the tip of its force staff. 

There was a loud crash to the right. Chimera One burst through a crumbling wall and engaged the Sorcerer. Heavy bolt rounds slammed into weakened armour. Multilaser fire flashed against gold-trimmed plate.

The blue light faded, and the giant fell.

"Sorry Inquisitor, you told us not to do that," Major Kahurangi voxed.

Drake didn't get the time to vox his gratitude. A shockwave passed over them from the other end of the roof; Drake and his warband turned to see five traitors in terminator plate appear out of thin air. Trooper Rolvsson jumped in front of Drake, and was shredded by bolter rounds. Agent Jentiva ran for cover, a trail of bolter rounds pulverising the low wall behind her. Techpriest Donat's power armour was struck my missiles and lost power, pinning him down under its own weight. In the terror of the moment, Drake forgot entirely about projecting authority and gravitas, and voxed a single word: "Help!"

Seeing the bulky silhouettes materialise on the roof from the cupola of his chimera, Major Kahurangi swore loudly, then ordered every man and woman under his command to open fire on the terminators. For the second time, the eastern end of the building was subjected to an intense barrage.

The terminators ignored it.

Clambering down through the ruins as bullets and laser beams struck their armour, the terminators began to dig where the rubric marines had fallen. The wyvern's quad mortar showered them in shrapnel, and still they dug, pulling away shattered slabs of precast concrete. Several terminators were injured by Drake's team as they fired their plasma weapons into them, but the traitors kept at it. Eventually a turquoise gauntlet, almost grey with concrete dust, pushed through the rubble clutching something in its hand. Drake's optics zoomed in and snapped off a succession of picts. Non-imperial tech. Purpose unclear. The sorcerer leading the terminators held the device in its massive gauntlet, and looked up at Drake one last time before vanishing.

Over on the other side of the building, Major Kahurangi watched as the enemy gathered around their hitherto-concealed leader. Kahurangi ordered his gunner, and the crew of Chimera One, to open fire. It was too late. A glimmering blue portal expanded and engulfed the rest of the enemy and suddenly they were gone, leaving no sound but the cries of the injured Inquisition agents on the roof.

Drake could look at the picts later; in this moment he was concerned only for his injured colleagues. Ashar Lear was sat up against the low wall, her face pinched. It took Drake a moment to realise her right arm was missing from the elbow down. The wound had instantly cauterised  when her overcharged plasma pistol had ruptured.

To one side of the roof, trees burned in aviation fuel from the gunship crash. To the other side, pale-faced guardsmen approached the building, clearly nervous but keen to provide assistance.

With the injured being seen to by Kahurangi's medic, Drake oversaw the excavation of the ruins the Thousand Sons had sacrificed so much for. Slowly, they pulled eight giant suits of armour from the rubble.

They were empty.

He had no idea what the pre-Imperial device was or what happened to the traitor marines inside the suits of power armour, but he intended to find out.

So there you have it; the game ended in a draw with Maisey's terminators teleporting onto the objective at the eleventh hour and weathering the storm, whilst his home objective was still covered in cultists and I held the other two points. Sure, the terminators only had the squad leader in play by the end of my shooting phase, but with the Thousand Sons rules for capturing objectives, one marine can still get the job done. Even if he only just passed his morale check. Seriously, if he'd rolled a 6 on his morale check or failed any one of the many invulnerable saves caused by plasma and melta weapons, I would have won. I'll get you next time, Maisey!

Sadly, there aren't any photos of the final showdown on the roof because we were way too engrossed, and then way too keen to tidy up. You would've thought six years of blogging might have instilled better habits in us, but noooooo. I did, however, take a photo of another of Maisey's dice rolls, this time for cultists enduring another bombardment from the wyvern.

He needed 3s. Of course he needed 3s.

Maisey seems to have done something appalling to Lady Luck's mum in a past life. Speaking of Maisey, I'll hand the baton to him for the post-game tactical assessment...

Maisey: With every game you play there is always an opportunity to learn something. This doesn’t mean you actually do, but there is a chance. Sitting down after a game and discussing what went well, what didn’t go well, and what was one’s favourite or funniest moment (It’s always hilarious when I roll more 1’s than is statistically plausible). Being that this is the first game using the new codex with a lot of new units (yay for shiny new model syndrome) and still with a relatively new rule set it’s important to learn as much as possible. So below I’ve listed out my thoughts on the game. 

The Bad

1) Deployment - I left Rubric Marines far too exposed out on one flank with no real support, or at least, I didn’t leave Charlie with a distraction unit to fire at first. I hadn’t really defined my area of control very well. I looked at the objectives and stuck a unit with each. This isn’t really enough, especially when facing that much armour. A much better idea would be to sit back and let Charlie feed me tanks.

2) I left Tzaangor far too exposed from the outset. They where poised for an (obvious) advance up my right flank to push towards an objective. They had very little cover and no real support. Tzaangor are fast, and are best used as a counter charge unit. I could have broken the big unit into smaller units and increased the number of targets Charlie had to pick from. I think I was seeing them as both disposable and indispensable at the same time. Which is stupid.

3) The Sorcerers are good support units, but in this case I hadn’t changed their psychic powers to fit the job they are doing. Admittedly this was the first time with the new codex and I went from having 3 powers available to having 18. So it was a case of learning what is going to be useful in which situation.


The Good

1) The cultists did their job well. They had good cover and there was so many of them that Charlie’s artillery couldn’t make a dent. Especially when the wyvern was merrily blow Tzaangor into Mutant McNuggets™. But They are a cheap unit used right, this time.

2) Timing of the Terminators was basically spot on. Charlie hadn’t yet got enough units around the objective to stop me from beaming straight on top of it. While it did leave them facing a lot of fire power, they are tough enough and Charlie’s Leman Russ was distracted by the demon engines, and the pesky Valkyrie had been shot down by that point (note from Charlie: I'm also particularly enjoying that we get to choose when reserves come down; it feels so much more tactical. I did the same thing with my storm troopers, dropping them onto the roof to help the Inquisition in the final gunfight with the terminators).

3) Placing the demon engines together in the centre managed to keep some good lines of sight. They had their shining moment when the Valkyrie appeared overhead and got promptly shot in the face. Which posed the question, what takes a Valkyrie to Valhalla when it dies?


The Lessons

1) Kill the wyvern, quickly. I don’t have much that can shoot further than 24”, the Thousand Sons are a very midrange firefight type of army. They are at their most dangerous at 12”. I need to remember this and draw my opponent in closer. Especially when my opponent can easily out range me. So need to work out a way of tying down the long range stuff. Or finding better ways of hiding from them (which is hard since the wyvern doesn’t need line of sight and being Cadian can re-roll hits of a 1).

2) Focusing your fire can take down units quickly. Even if that means firing your whole army at one unit. As turn one proved if you focus enough fire you can take down the hardest of units in one turn. This goes both ways.

3) The Thousand Sons, or at least my Thousand Sons, are a big foot slogger army. In fact, everything has at least 2 legs, sometimes 3 or 4. That doesn’t mean that moving quickly is off the table. The Tzaangor are fast, and with a boost to their advance rolls they can get places really quickly. Also keeping a Sorcerer to hand with Warp-time to give units a second movement phase can make even the slowest units zippy in the right situation. With the new codex there are a couple of sneaky tricks for moving units around. The stratagem Webway Infiltration lets you deploy a unit in the web way (suck it Eldar!). This allows you to deep strike units that normally couldn’t even dream of doing so (a deep striking forgefiend? Yes please!). There is also a relic, the dark matter crystal, which allows you to redeploy a unit anywhere on the board at the end of the movement phase. Let’s not forget the classic deep striking terminators on to the objective at the last moment gambit. So lots of options for being a sneaky bar steward.
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Loyalty For Hire

April 1, 2018, 5:00 pm
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This week I've managed to get finished a few extra henchmen for my Frost Grave war band. As you progress in Frost Grave you are able to hire additional minions to help with either finding of new treasures and artifacts or to fend off other wizards and their war bands.

For my additions we have some hapless adventurers who are only in it for the money.
 

First up we have a Ranger. She's the nice outdoorsy type and enjoys walks in the woods, archery, and rustic haberdashery. Rangers have a good mix of speed, improved health, and ranged abilities. 
 

 Next we have added a thief to the war band. He/She (I honestly can't tell the gender from the model) is a fully paid up member of the thieves guild, and thus is contractually obliged to wear nothing but black. Thieves are slightly faster than you average pleb, but they don't have much more going for them. Their main advantage is they are cheap to hire.

 Last but no means least we have our dedicated treasure hunter. Equipped with a torch for checking the dimmest of corners and he has plenty of satchels strapped about his person to stash all his loot.


 Not a massive amount to say about the painting here. I'm pretty happy with how the ranger's wolf skin turn out. It appears that googling reference material really helps. Also I attempted to do some glowing lighting stuff from the treasure hunters torch. I think it looks OK, but you can judge for yourselves. Treasure hunters are good in a scrap, faster than the average, and better health than your regular troops.

All these models I picked up from Hasslefree. Hasslefree is a great source of realistic, or at least not totally ridiculous, fantasy minis. It is pretty much my go to if I need need human fantasy models.



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Think Pink

April 8, 2018, 5:00 pm
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This week I have mostly been painting pink. Lots of pink. So much so that my paint palette looks like Barbie has killed and skinned a Unicorn on it (Unicorns have pink blood right?). This isn't because of some weird gender reveal plot for a baby we don't have (and not planning to have). No, this is because I managed to acquire yet more minions for my growing Tzeentch Chaos army. What self respecting Sorcerer wouldn't have mastered the art of summoning demons out of the warp? Not mine that's for sure.



I do have to admit that my paint collection is very limited in the number of pinks it contains. So limited that I didn't have any. Not knowing the paint range very well I simply ordered most of them and set about learning how to paint pink. My first comment on this is that it's hard. Not hard as in technically hard like trying to play Bach on the spoons, but hard like pushing a rock up a hill, repeatedly. I did try a simple basecoat/wash/drybrush/wash/highlight type method. It looked rubbish, so out with the power spray and back to the drawing board. I ended up doing four stages of neat layering to get the pink right. Each stage took at least two thin coats, often three, to get a good strong colour there. I was thinking about doing more but I might have to rethink that plan, or wait long enough that I forget the pain.



I will say that I really do like the models in the kit. Lots of arm and accessory options. Enough to be able to use the kit multiple times without getting too many that look the same. This is something that is sadly lacking in the Tzaangor models. There are a few poses within the Tzaangor kit that just stand out too much. The Horrors have enough interchangeable options that it shouldn't be a problem if I decided to add more later.


Another reason why I'm happy to have these running around is it gives me another tactical option. In fact they are fairly flexible. Sure they are only toughness 3 but they have an assault 2, 18" range, a 4+ invulnerable save, and can be summoned on to the board at will. Which, as Em found out when she tried to flank me with her Eldar, can create nice surprises for your opponent and give you some more tactical flexiblity. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, they are also collectively a psyker, so one more slice of Smite Spam to go into the sandwich of screw you that is my psychic phase!



It is nice to have one of the classic Tzeentch units in the army. Sure all the new Tzaangor are nice and it's great having so many options available to you but having Horrors and Rubric Marines stomping around together feels delightfully old school.



So, what is next for the Thousand Sons and their Tzeentch allies? Well, I know that I want to do a little re-organisation and swap out the regular cultist unit for some more Tzaangor (or similar). Those regular cultists are going to get expanded by using some of the Necromunda models and made into a little patrol detachment all of their own with a Dark Apostle and some armoured support. Speaking of which, I do have some plans to add some serious anti-armour punch in the form of a very converted Predator. 

But before all of that I've got a large cemetery's worth of skeletons to paint...








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Ultra-basic vehicle weathering tips

April 16, 2018, 1:06 pm
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Warhammer 40K's eighth edition still has me gripped firmly by the Jacobs, so I've been farting through Astra Militarum Imperial Guard units like a champ. The thing about Imperial Guard armies is that they tend toward the numerous, so as previous posts have explained, the main objective for this army is that they should be quick and easy to paint.

At a friend's request, I'm going to go over how I weather my tanks. This is basic stuff, so if you're after something more advanced, I suggest you read Mark's post on the subject. Now, here's one I prepared earlier:

Capt. Dewi Kusuma's Executioner, No. 2 squadron's command tank.

Like I say, basic. It's never going to win an award, but it can sit on a table without me wanting to report myself to the commissar. Here's how it's done...

Step one: basecoat
Seriously, just flat colours. The lenses/periscopes etc will get done post-weathering. I did use a wash on the tarpaulin and the heavy bolter's covering, but that's it.

Le basecoat.


Step two: foamy
Take a bit of foam - I used some from a GW carry case - stick a corner in some silver paint, wipe off the excess so it's not goopy but still fairly loaded, then gently dab it anywhere you want the tank's paint to have chipped. You can see from the image below how loaded my foam was, and after that, you can see the finished stage.

Le spong.

Le dings.

Step three: mud
Technically this is two stages. First, slather the Citadel Technical paint Typhus Corrosion over the tracks. Thickly. Then dab it liberally around the bottom of the track units. Then with much less on your brush, work it into recesses and other bits of the tank as you please. After that, lightly drybrush a mid-brown (I used Vallejo Game Colour Earth) higher up the track units and on other parts of the model to represent dust and dried mud.

Le squelch.

That's it! Weathering done. At this point I'll go in and paint the lenses, but that's got naff all to do with weathering, so hear endeth the lesson.

Finally, here's the Chimera with its unit: Suspiciously Bald Squad 3. They've transferred into the 107th Ankran Mechanised from off-world, and they're rather cliquey. Probably nice chaps, even if they keep misspelling 'forearms' as 'four arms.'

Le heretiques chauve.

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Why do we do what we do?

April 23, 2018, 1:56 am
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... or a short essay on my motivations for starting a collection.

A little while ago Em restarted her long abandoned pending Wood Elf project. For the last few weeks the army book has been laying around the house, and an increasing number of plastic tree-like bits have been spreading across our hobby space. During a painting binge one evening (I'm currently attempting to paint 70 skeletons in a single batch and incidentally is the main reason why I don't have anything new to show you all) I innocently said...

"I really like the Wood Elf models, but I wouldn't collect any"

To which Em said...

"Well, what does make you want to collect something?"

I was instantly plunged into a massive existential conundrum focused around why I make the hobby choices that I do. I think I might have replied at the time with something along the lines of 'erm... the blue one's?!'.

I didn't draw this, Charle M Schulz did. This is his work that I've borrowed, because it's funny.

However, the question hasn't left me and I've going to try and share my thoughts with you. Hopefully you lot will have some answers as well.

Looking back over the projects that I've done in the past. Nearly all of them fit into the categories below:

Concept: A lot of my smaller projects have always been a conceptual thing. Where I have a really strong core idea that I cannot shake. With these projects all over considerations go out the window. Stuff like tactics and balanced forces or ease of painting are all forgotten. Examples of these include my completely robed Dark Angel successor chapter. My totally not baby blue Space Wolves, and my complete Empire army was spawned from one of our role play sessions (I really did think it would be a really great idea to build the town watch in 28mm). These nearly always are smaller projects, sometimes even just a few models, such as my Dark Eldar that never made it passed 10 models.

Maybe I should have continued with the evil pixies...
Consistency: I really like it when I can get a consistent look around the range of models. I'm not really taking about painting here, but what models are available to me. For example in my Bolt Action 8th army project I really limited my army selection purely based on what I could get from the same miniture company so that the sculpts and styling are the same/similar. I could have included for more effective units but this would have meant going to a different source, which would have looked odd. Whilst we're about the 8th Army, this one also falls into the Concept catagory as I was only picking units that where present at the Siege of Tobruk.

Not the most effective tank ever created but historically accurate, even down to the unit markings
 Composition: I really seem to like armies that has a small core of shiny elites/ruling class and a huge pile of faceless minions surrounding them. All of my big armies have had this pattern, the Undead (Small core of super elite vampires and their literally faceless hordes), the Thousand Sons (Small group of super powerful space wizards with their literally faceless hordes), the Imperial Guard (haughty commanders and their figurativelly faceless hordes of infantry). I think this is because of three reasons. 1) I find it hard to play effectively with a small elite army. I struggle to get the best out of elite armies, but when I have lines of troops and guns and vehicles I know I still have options when I get something wrong.  2) I enjoying getting my General Melchett on and sweeping whole units off the table with a dust pan and brush (Baaaaaa). 3) I'm really crap at remembering character names, so if there are only three characters worth remembering then all the better.

Get this man some more zombies!
Convenience: Sometimes it's purely because it's easier. Oh, what's that I've aquired 17 billion goblins, I guess I'm doing a goblin army then! Seriously through, sometimes I've made selection choices simply because I can get that model at the same time as ordering the rest of the army. I have actually gone back and changed lists because I would have had to order a certain model from a different website, with more waiting, more delivery charges, a second day of hanging around waiting for the post/going to the delivery office to pick them up etc.

A full Ravenwing bike squadron courtesy of the old Battleforce boxed set.
So there are my reasons, as you can see it's mostly about asthetics and what I want to paint rather than things that will be tactically useful. I honestly can't put units in just because they are killy if I don't like them. I'll also totally hamstring myself just to stay true to the concept. I am Authentic!

I'd be interested to hear everyone else's thoughts on why they collect what they collect. Go on, post a comment and tell us why!

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The Chittering Horde

May 1, 2018, 1:15 pm
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Hello again, and welcome to an army showcase for my Skaven. I've written it in two parts. Part one will consist of rambling, mostly inspired by Maisey’s discourse about why we do what we do. Part two will be the actual point of this post – which is for me to show some rats.

  

Part One - What makes you tick? 



In the last blog post, Maisey examined what it was that made him go down the hobby routes that he did, which got me thinking about the hobby choices I’ve made. So I thought I'd pontificate on this for a bit.


I have two armies; Skaven for Warhamster and Orks for 40K. In both cases, I started small with the intention of creating a defined nuclear army and then got totally carried away.
My time is limited, so it is likely that I will stick with these two armies for the foreseeable future.



What was it that made me go mad on just one army for each system?
Well its not that Skaven and Orks are the only armies I would everconsider buying and building.

Indeed, there are armies that I could quite happily (with time) get involved in. These include but are not limited to: Dark Eldar, Empire, Ad Mech, Chaos Dwarves and Astra Mili-Copyright-Friendly-tarum.

On the flip-side, there are some I will just never get on-board with, including Space Marines, High Elves, Eldar, Lizardmen & (modern concept) Grey Knights.



So why is that?

Well. I think there are three key areas of appeal for a gamer / army collector. I have assembled these into a handy Venn Diagram.



Lizardmen not doing it for me.




And I think this needs a little more explanation, and much of this will be important to a lesser or greater extent depending on who you are. However, this is what is right for me.





Models
I like an army to have a good range of contemporaneous models with a consistent design language and interchangeable parts. The army must look right, make sense, convey an element of danger or cool and be visually interesting to look at. The range must allow me to make it my own through conversion or customisation and mustn’t be too derpy.

Caption: "Did someone say too derpy?"
Inner Caption: Christ Mark, you're a grown man. 

Fluff
There has to be an emotional hook for an army, and it doesn’t need to be the same for each player of the same army. This hook could be pride and loss (Dwarves), desperate battles against overwhelming odds (Space Marines) or it could be the concept of existential horror (Tyranids).


Whatever the hook is; If its done well it should make me curious about the army, engage with the politics or motivations of the army and allow me to ‘believe’ the army on a more intuitive level. The best fluff will not only give you information about the army in particular but will inspire and give you the latitude to go in new directions or create new things with that army.


I don’t think you need to necessarily sympathise with your army, as long as you understand its motivations. I mean; what sort of backstabbing, morally vacuous, treacherous weasel could sympathise with the Skaven?

Insert politician of choice here. 
                                               

Playstyle

Finally, there’s the question of how the army plays. This is a lot more personal than the other two as it links into balance. Now personally, I don’t care too much whether an army wrecks face or not, as long as it isn’t completely useless. Others will have a much harsher view of this as they’ll be looking for armies that can cut it at the bleeding edge of ÜberKäse.


For me, I like armies that have a lot of different options, allow you to field many different units and have a random (especially a comedically random) element. This fits both the Skaven and the Orks very well indeed. I’m fervently hoping that the upcoming Ork Codex has expanded rules for the Shokk Attack Gun – It doesn’t need the eight pages of rules it originally had, but it needs more than what it has now.




TLDR, why Skaven?


They have good models, which I can convert. They are twisty, treacherous little bastards who love to plot against their own allies and will always be the cause of their own downfall. If you can take the odd mishap* and snigger in gleeful delight when one of your dirty trick does pay off**, they are the army for you.
  

Part Two - Build a better mantrap!

(Jesus, finally)




This is the complete army. I think it tots up to around 4,000 points in total and has around 400 models (of which most are clan rats) in it.




The Concept


In short, the grand general, Lord Voltik is a megalomaniacal evil scientist with a proclivity for metallurgy. His raison d’etre is the development of a new type of steel for his army that will allow his Warlord Clan to deominate the region and bring him (by force and stabbing and forceful stabbing) up to the table at the Council of Thirteen. As such, the army has a bias towards Clan Skyre tech. Plague monks are not represented because (insert handwavey fluff reason here) the plague monk models are crap.

The army is going to be red, because I like red. Analyse that Freud.



The Core


240 Rats. We're going to need a bigger room 101.

There are a lot of Clanrats in this army, which I see as only right and proper. A horde army should be a horde of filthy shod, otherwise it’s not a horde army.

I’ve tried to differentiate certain units with the use of standards and dress markers at the corners. The Stormvermin have banners at the corners – an idea I got from the film ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ between fits of Orlando Bloom induced narcolepsy. This is to make them look more Leet.
The furnace guard are Lord Voltik’s usual unit and are corner marked by braziers and a brazier standard instead of a banner.

 
The Best of the Shod. 
Furnace Guard
The Conquered were given to me by Maisey. They started life with Green armour and dirty white robes (Deathwing Skaven?), which I retained and mixed in with my red robed and rust armoured rats. Over time, the green rats have ended up in different units – the clan that Voltik conquered have been integrated into the rest of the army.

The Conquered. Grotty in green.




The Characters


The main characters are split into the Warlock Engineers and their hired help – the Warlords.

Voltik is the brains of the outfit whilst the Warlords (Voltik and Ektrikk) provide the fighting experience and the competence. Then Sh!twhiskers comes along and ruins everything.




Lord Voltik, with his assistants, Chudders and Fronkers. 

The Warlords, Skivvit Backbreaker and Ektrikk.  
L to R: Sh!twhisker's apprentice; Blevvy.  Sh!twhisker's familiar; Lord Provost Percival Cholmondely Fetheringston-Warner IV. Finally, and least; Sh!twhiskers.
Why no-one within the clan has yet killed Sh!twhiskers is not certain. Certainly, he would be more use dead than alive in most of the battles in which he has fought. It might be because he knows the secret for brewing Skavenbrew or it might be because his indescribably irritating familiar, Lord Provost Percival Cholmondely Fetheringston-Warner IV might end up latching on to someone else in the event of Sh!twhisker’s death - which no one else could tolerate.



'Chatty'*** the assassin. 


The Contraptions

Guaranteed to kill anything they hit. Sometimes this is even the enemy

The plagueclaw catapult has been converted to be more mechanical and now runs off a steam piston rather than a heavy weight. The warp lightning cannon has had minor conversion work to look a little less flimsy.

These contraptions are guaranteedto let you down when you most need them to work properly. Invariably, this is Sh!twhisker’s fault.




The Monsters

Master Moulder: Doc Choppit.





The rat ogres are conversions from the Island of Blood boxed set as the older rat ogres are awful models and the wolf rats are pretty much stock, with the exception of a couple of head swaps.


Note for Polish readers: I didn’t realise Łódźwas a place until I ended up going there for work a couple of years after I painted the Wolf Rats. Sorry. The city centre is pretty, and I saw absolutely no gigantic killer rat/wolf animals whilst I was there.


What's Next? 

Well, the death of regimental Warhammer has damped my enthusiasm a bit, but I still have plans and these include:


- Expanding Doc Choppit's  menagerie and experimental creatures. 
- Adding more artillery
- Adding a battle standard bearer. 
- Making some good scenery.
- Recruiting a competent wizard
- Secret plans
- More secret plans
- Cunning and secret plans
- World Domination












* Like losing 17 Clanrats in your magic phase to a miscasting Sh!twhiskers then losing another 32 Clanrats in your shooting phase to your own weapon teams. If you can't take a joke, don't play Skaven.

** Like when your opponent loses half his elite troops in turn 1. Snhhk snhhk snhhk snhhk! If you can't take a joke, don't play against Skaven. 

*** A name given to him by Sh!twhiskers. Sh!twhiskers is devoid of many talents which he believes he possesses. Humour is just one of them. 



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Kairic Acolytes

May 7, 2018, 11:10 am
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Welcome to another edition of Maisey doesn't stick to the damn plan. In this episode Maisey abandons his plans to get the last of his unfinished undead models complete before starting anything new. 

Maisey will now stop talking in the third person. 

Yep, I totally stopped working on the last of the skeleton units. In fairness I was trying to do a batch of 68 skeletons and a character. Which is a pretty large batch of models (unless you play Skaven). Once I had finished painting the skeletons I took a pause before beginning the basing, which was a fatal mistake. 


At some point during this pause someone made the decision to start talking about doing a narrative PVP 40k campaign. This campaign would see the Thousand Sons, Craftworld Iyanden, and the Imperial Guard thrown together in a 'yet to be revealed to the players' situation. So I got a little excited and tore into the box of Kairic Acolytes that I had been saving for later.
Kairic Acolytes? Yes Kairic Acolytes are an Age of Sigmar kit but I liked them so much I thought 'to hell with it, lets have them count as Tzaangor!' So I did. I briefly thought about using them as cultists, but they are some what larger than your regular murderous fanatic. I mean seriously, check out the photo below. These dudes are basically the size of a naked Space Marine. If a Rubric Marine could actually take off his armour I mean.
This is a fairly obvious case of scale creep. The Rubric Marine stands eye to eye with a Primaris Marine and the Kairic Acolytes might actually be the same height, if they had shoes on. The poor cultist on the left is actually pretty hench but compared to everything else in Tzeentch's menagerie he's seems pretty tiny. I didn't include a Tzaangor in the shot but they are somewhat taller still than the Rubric Marine. Well, maybe not the Rubric Marine's hat.

Now for the painting. Most of it was the same colour palette used elsewhere, the bright red and white fabrics and the teal armour plates. Only difference with these guys is the lack of gold. The major part of the painting was the skin which I have attempted to represent a range of skin tones commonly found in northern Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East. I'm not sure I've been successful, but that's more down to my poor painting skills than anything else. I did spend sometime searching for good reference material and tried to replicate that using what paints appeared to be closest. You can find the detailed reference Here.

Things I like about these models. All the little Tzeentchy details scattered about the model. They are physically impressive without looking ridiculous. The masks are a wonderful addition, not least of all because it means I didn't need to paint faces! Things that I don't like about these models. I think they could have made them smaller, but with the same proportions, just scale them down a little. Whilst they are a multi-part kit, they are part of the current trend of essentially really nice mono-pose models. Sure you can tweak little details, like the heads and shields being interchangeable, but this still doesn't stop there being duplicates within a single kit.

So, what is next on the painting table? Well I have a Tzaangor Shaman that I picked up, partly because it's a cool model and would sit well with the large pile of Tzaangor I now own. It was also because I was a couple of power levels short of reaching POWER LEVEL 100 (sorry, that needed capital letters) and the Shaman seemed like the most effective unit for the power. Also on the paint station is the beginnings of a converted Soul Grinder. Which is being converted into a Tzeentchy Defiler. Which means sculpting battle cannons and other shooty things onto the daemon's arms.

Let's see if I manage to finish those before getting distracted by something else!


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Iyanden Craftworld vs Blood Angels photo gallery

May 13, 2018, 11:58 am
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Hi folks, recently Em and I got the chance to throw down (I don't get to play her nearly enough) and busted out our respective Iyanden Eldar and my Blood Angels. Thinking that the yellow vs the red would make for an attractive game I brought my camera. Here's the results. Enjoy!

Blood Angels deploy amongst the gantries.

Iyanden take the township and seemingly hunker down and prepare to repel borders

Lovely windrider jetbikes, first time I'd seen them in the flesh. So much better than last edition

Em's shiny new fire prism sneaks in to take aim at my blameless tanks.

The Dark Reapers lock and load atop the tower.

Blood Angels bikers, acting as outriders for the tanks advance on the flank.

The Fire Prism advances up the ramp to get up the right angle. Seconds later a Razorback was aflame.

Guardians spot the incoming bikers and ask the Wraithguard to deal with it.

The Wraithguard round the corner and ready their D-Scythes...

... and a commander who hasn't faced them before sends his men into the teeth of it! Fail!

The Wave Serpent emerges from cover to line up bright lance shots on the armour.

An enraged Chaplain Raziel leads his men into battle...

...and slaughters them to a man. Next stop, the Farseer...

I'm afraid that's it, later game photos were thinner on the ground. It really looked like a Blood Angels victory at one point, but Em pulled it out of the fire and annihiliated the entire leading edge of the army. Congrats to her! Can't wait to face them again, and soon! I shall have my crimson vengeance.

TTFN
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Showcase: Mechanised Imperial Guard

May 21, 2018, 12:32 am
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It’s unclear how it happened but suddenly, I seem to have finished my mechanised guard force. The plan was to make a 25-man mechanised infantry platoon with a tank or two in support. This somehow morphed into a 35-man platoon, some storm troopers, a squadronof tanks, and a super-heavy tank. The whole thing has a power level of 115.

Oops.

To draw a line under said project, this post has some pictures of the whole thing, plus the models I’ve added since my last post.

First up is the tank I’ve wanted ever since I first faced an enemy super-heavy: the shadowsword. I’ve yet to use it in a game, as I can’t bring myself to deploy it in a regular-sized battle. I strongly suspect it’ll get borked –anything capable of one-shotting a land raider may as well have a giant bullseye painted on it – but who cares? Not me, for I now own the finest self-propelled phallic metaphor.


In case you’re wondering, yes, the aerial is magnetised such that it’ll pop off if someone accidentally swipes it with their hand. The only other customisation is that I replaced the super-heavy smoke launchers with regular ones, since the big ones in the kit somehow make the tank look smaller.

My enthusiasm for painting tanks in general and the shadowsword in particular was enjoyably maintained by reading Guy Haley’s imaginatively titled novels Baneblade and Shadowsword. They were, to my considerable surprise, very enjoyable reads despite titles that make them sound like Add-On Sale: the Novelisation.


Since shadowswords are essentially titan snipers, I named this one Furiosa after Charlize Theron’s character in Max Max: Fury Road, because… er… she snipes a dude. Once. And also because I love that film to an unreasonable degree.

Painting was done exactly like the other tanks in the army, which means the weathering is doing all the heavy lifting. I felt bad doing a simple job on such a beautiful kit, but ultimately wanted it to look consistent with the rest of the force. Man, I love this tank. I particularly love how it has, you know, actual suspension.


One of my favourite details of the kit: the Mechanicum shrine. Just the right amount of Imperial bling for an otherwise rugged-looking vehicle.

Speaking of tanks, it felt only right to chuck in a third Leman Russ battle tank to complete the squadron. My desperation to increase my anti-tank firepower led to a pair of multi-melta sponsons, and weirdly the look of sponsons is growing on me, even if trying to fit all the crew in there would be… challenging. The battle cannon is another true calibre conversion, as per the first tank I made for this army.

In case you're wondering, the stowage cage was improvised with a paperclip.

Next up we have Commissar Isaiah Lachlan. Tempting as it was to freehand a cornetto on the pages of his book (just one cornetto, mind) I restrained myself. One shouldn't sully the Uplifting Primer in such a fashion. Suffice to say he’s an enthusiastic orator who the men and women of the 3rd Company find more amusing than inspiring.

It must be said this model was an absolute joy to paint. Not too busy, not too plain, but just right. As usual when painting black, I mixed bone rather than grey into the black basecoat since it gives a softer, more natural colour.


The last model to get done for this force is Techpriest Enginseer Porphyrio Vacca. This was a lot harder to paint than the commissar, primarily because I’m out of practice with painting decent metals and the sculpt is extremely detailed. I’m happy with how the red cassock came out, but the metal’s pretty scrappy in places. Even so, it’s nice to have a couple of detailed paintjobs in a force full of otherwise basic dudes.


Finally, because I am a turbo-nerd, and because I like the characters in my army to have a sense of personality, I gave them a page on theBeard Bunker’s Cetus wiki– that’s the wiki for the Bunker’s own little corner of the Segmentum Pacificus where we set our games. It describes all the characters in the army so that when we play story-driven campaigns, everything’s ready to go.

No, really. A wiki page. I'm that keen.

The thing about 40K armies, and guard armies in particular, is that one could always add more. Maybe I will someday, but for now this’ll do.


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Getcha Motor Running... Blood Angels Style.

May 27, 2018, 10:28 am
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Greetings Bunker Dwellers! A post like this needs musical accompanyment and I know a classic. So with the musical accompanyment sorted, lets get the gang together:



Eagle-eyed readers will have seen these chaps make their debut in the Iyanden vs Blood Angels picdump from a couple of weeks ago. Sadly they got their shiny model syndrome rubbed right off owing to my rather underestimating what Wraithguard D-Scythes could do. Eep. But now they can get their due with shiny pictures.


Long term readers - and those that followed me over from Pirate Viking Painting where the majority of my Blood Angels lived - will remember that my head-canon for the Blood Angels is a little different to the studio norm. I'm running the 3rd as a classic Tactical Company with occasional BAngel flair. This squad is one of those oddities. They are actually the 6th Tactical squad mounted on bikes in order to be outriders for the armoured column. I always thought they made more sense as a mobile tactical squad than fast attack. Bolters, a heavy weapon, special weapons, a sergeant. Just because they go fast doesn't mean that they're not a fairly normal Tactical squad. So Sgt Gadreel (seen above with the chainsword) just gets the hogs and rides out.


Bike squadrons can take a couple of special weapons and I liked the idea of using the fuel from the bikes to run flamers. Hence I converted some flamers into the Ravenwing bike farings (very appropriate for the Blood Angels I thought) and added the cut down cannisters from redeemer sponsons on the back as auxilliary fuel supply. In order to remember that they still had twin-bolters I modelled each with a bolter of their own in order to stay "legal". As though the Bunker cares all that much for such trifles.


In much the same way as Land Speeders, Attack Bikes are the perfect platform for multimeltas. They move fast, get in close and thus can take advantage of that close range damage boost. Especially now you can split fire it makes little sense to take the heavy bolter. Anything that will shrug off almost forty bolter shots is not going to be terribly troubled by a few more at a marginally higher strength. So instead Squad Gadreel gets some anti-tank punch.


As I'd nicked the Ravenwing fairings I also had a bunch of the nifty pannier boxes. I liked the look so on they went too (the ones without obvious DAngel imagery anyway). You can't quite see but the screens are painted to look as though they have ground scanning radar advising the rider as to the contours of the terrain.

While I've found painting these to be quite the trial (there is a LOT of painting in bikes) the finished effect is wonderful. I love the way they look on the table and the image of them riding alongside the tanks when contact is made and then them speeding off to repel assault is glorious. While I might have sworn off painting any more space marine bikes... scout bikes don't count... might need some of those...

TTFN
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Apocawhoops

June 4, 2018, 3:35 am
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Mark wanted to celebrate the completion of his Dorkanaut and Borkanaut, and I recently finished my mechanised guard army, so we took a random day off work and threw down a big game of 40K. Power level 300ish, 6'x6'... everything looked peachy.

It would go disastrously wrong.

Everything started out fine. We set up the terrain, trying to strike a balance between having plenty of scenery but also enough space to fit our stuff on the board. If nothing else, I was very excited to fit a 6'x6' board in the house. Admittedly that's not really big enough for 300PL, and squeezing a 6'x6' into my gaming room is about as spatially optimistic as shoving Dwayne Johnson into a 1969 Mini Cooper.


Since one side was still looking a bit sparse we chucked in some bonus trees, and then since the Imperial army was tanks and mounted infantry Mark picked the ruins for his deployment zone so his lootas had something to hide in.

But when we finished deployment, it became apparent that No Man's Land was in fact a yawning chasm of joy. "How bad could it be?" we wondered.

Then the Imperial force opened fire.



The shadowsord Furiosa casually atomised the Borkanaut in one shot, which I guess is kind of the point of the shadowsword, but still. Mark kept an admirably stiff upper lip as shiny new model syndrome sank its teeth in. Next, the Dorkanaut and the stompa Big Yellur took a pounding from the rest of the tanks. Finally, the lootas were taken out by massed artillery.

It was effectively over before Mark even had a turn.

The sweet taste of victory only satisfies when one has had a real fight, and neither of us were happy about how this had gone. We spitballed various ways of changing the game so that we'd both get a decent scrap. In the end we decided to recycle the dead pile from turn one and have them walk on my left flank.

Where'd they come from?!

Mark gamely pushed on with 'da plan' (run forward shouting Waaaagh!). Warboss Nazgit disembarked from the crippled Big Yellur with his ladz to make a desperate dash across No Man's Land. The ladz charged off towards the enemy tanks hollering with glee. Nazgit, however, rolled a 1 for his advance move, leaving him all alone and bereft of his meat shield; the meat shield who were now improvising a reggae drum solo by ineffectually banging their choppas on the hull of a demolisher.

Nazgit's meat shield gets ready to abandon the boss.

The Imperial army weathered the mild drizzle of the ork shooting phase. Big Yellur was the only unit that achieved much of note, but even though some vehicles were damaged during ork turn 1, none were actually destroyed.

And then Imperial turn 2 happened.

How Mark stayed polite and chipper I don't know; he deserves some sort of award (not a medal, mind... at this point he probably feels he's had enough metal thrown at him). Either way, the flank attack was blunted by the leftmost tank squadron and the infantry on the landing pad, while the swarm of killa kans was whittled down by massed battlecannon fire. Then, finally, there came the shot that ended the game after a round and a half...

A full armoured column of Imperial tanks had concentrated their fire on the greenskin titan, and whilst it had slowed down it was somehow still on its feet and advancing towards them. Inside the turret of her tank, Sergeant Uraba looked through the viewfinder and tried not to panic. Even in her tank, she could feel its footfalls reverberate through the ground. Three storeys tall and blackened by the ordnance that had detonated on its hull, it was now surrounded by a cloud of dark smoke. The cloud was lit from within by the molten grooves cut into its hull by lascannons. Still, it walked. To its right was another heavy walker, almost as large.

Her crew were looking to her for guidance, and all she could think of was the family she'd left behind on Ankrah. If she wanted to see them again, she had to survive another seven years. That would be hard to do in a penal colony, and harder still if the orks conquered Samalut. Cowardice would just get her killed.

A momentary gap in the smoke revealed an opening in its hull. 'Hurlan!' she barked at the gunner, 'Three five two mark nine eight, wait for my signal.' Hurlan did as he was told, and the barrel altered its angle slightly. Timing was key; at this range there was almost no flight time to consider, it was more a matter of timing the rise and fall of the lumbering walker with the shot. The hole was obscured by smoke again, but she tracked the movement of the walker by the glow of the cooling lascannon impacts. 'Fire!'

The tank rocked back on its tracks. Uraba put her eyes back on the viewfinder just in time to see the titan stumble, then explode. A ten metre chunk of its hull was catapulted into the damaged heavy walker next to it, and struck its magazine. A second explosion tore the heavy walker apart as well, shredding the nearby orks and damaging their vehicles. In front of the wrecked titan, a lone huge ork was picking himself up and screaming in frustration at the mangled, blown-out bowl of metal. Too slowly, the ork saw the largest remaining chunk of the titan's hull was about to topple onto him. It accelerated as it fell, and too late, he tried to get out the way. The ground shook once more at the impact.

The ork horde made a noise which Uraba would later describe as being the sound a crowd makes in a carnivora when their favourite gladiator loses. Whether the noise was for the titan, or the large ork, or both... it didn't matter. The enemy were fleeing.

Major Kahurangi's voice came in over the vox. 'I don't know who fired Logan's magic bullet but you're a bloody legend. All units, forward!'

Up and down the line, tank exhausts snorted and roared as they surged toward the fleeing xenos.

Nowt left but two smoking craters...

Yep, that's right, the stompa exploded, which finished off the Dorkanaut, which also exploded, which killed a whole bunch of orks, damaged a megadread, and took out Warboss Nazgit. The surviving orks would be coming in piecemeal, and stood little chance of achieving anything. At this point, Mark threw in the towel, and quite frankly, fair enough. Given how ridiculously the game went, I think it might be one of the most sporting efforts I've ever seen, since most mortal gamers would have had a face like a slapped arse. Kudos, sir. Kudos.

Learning points
First, orks need a codex! The stompa seems underpowered for its cost, and ork shooting is meant to be haphazard not pointless. It's a relief to hear they're getting a book soon.

Second, we needed more line of sight blocking terrain in the middle. I was able to just stand still and unload. Whilst this left my inner Guard fanboy rigid with nerd glee, it wasn't a challenging game for me and it certainly wasn't a fun game for Mark.

Third, if you do have scenery, make sure it doesn't force a melee army to be so far back that they'll need three turns to reach you. Neither of us had played enough 8th edition 40K at this size to know how destructive the Imperial shooting phase would be, but I'm experienced enough at apocalypse games that I should've known the way we set things up would make for a one-sided fight.

Hopefully this cautionary tale has been of either use or amusement to you. Do share if you've had similarly ridiculous apocalypse mishaps. I can't wait to play another, more challenging game since both Mark and I took enormous amounts of pleasure from seeing all our toys on the table.
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Tzeentch Defiler Conversion

June 11, 2018, 7:13 am
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I really wanted to add a Defiler to my Thousand Sons, it is a good thematic fit with what I have already and carries a wide range of weapons options. What I didn't like was the model so much. Specifically the box that made up the main torso. It really doesn't really do it for me. So I decided to be brave and go for the conversion.


I started with the Soul Grinder model as the basis of the conversion as the daemon thing fits so well with the rest of the daemon engines I have already.





The main thing I needed was to pick the weapons. The battle cannon was a given, adding a Twin Lascannon was an easy pick given the lack of anti-tank else where in the army. The heavy flamers are always a great option.


So that decision made I had to work out how I was going to model the weapons to the Soul Grinder body. Raiding my bits box turned up a couple of Lascannon barrels and some heavy flamers. I think they are from a Leman Russ/Deomlisher kit but don't quote me on that.


The Battle Cannon was a little harder. I initially want to have the Cannon from the Imperial Knight kit attached to the left arm. However it's a little too big and I couldn't figure a way of attach it securely to the arm. So I hit up some bits sites and ended up with the cannon from an Imperial Guard Taurox. It's smaller size made it easier to work with.

Below is some in progress shots from the work bench. 



The body needed some gap filling. 



The claws needed some work. The Soul Grinder uses one of the Defilers claws as the right arm. Which got butchered and had a couple of Lascannons grafted on to them. So I had to improvise and fit the claws to the legs from the Soul Grinder.



 Both the Lascannons and the Battle Cannon needed some work to blend them in. This was the biggest challenge for me. I'm in no way a sculptor or very experienced with green stuff. So getting the new weapons to blend was hard, but for most of it I just tried to follow the style of the existing muscle lines. The white stuff is Tamiya Plasto Putty. It's doesn't sculpt in the same way as green stuff does but it sands down and polishes smooth. It great for gap filling and for structural work underneath.


Now for some bonus material. A Tzaangor Shaman and what my cabinet currently looks like.






















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Big Model Nerves -or- Just Do It!

June 17, 2018, 3:30 pm
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Abstract: I painted a thing, a thing I'd been procrastinating over for ages, because I was afraid I'd mess it up. The theme of today's post is: 






The thing is a Warpfire dragon – a mixed resin and plastic dragon kit from Forge World’s overlooked and ultimately abandoned Warhammer Forge project. I bought this for my Skaven as a potential ally, a plot point and as a way of getting rid of Charlie’s annoying in-universe stone elemental; about three years ago. This thing, to be precise

I built, based and primed it, and then immediately got an attack of the nerves and it got shelved for three years as I sorted out house and baby stuff.

Three years later, and for various reasons, I found I had time to properly look at it again. But I still had the same problem in that I couldn’t work out how to paint it without borking it right up.

Like this, but more dragony, and less likely to give small children nightmares.

However, I girded my loins, screwed my courage to the sticking place, set my heart to the killing position, verbed my cliché and had a damn good go.

As usual, I forgot to take enough photos or break the process down into enough stages to sensibly follow or understand. So I’m going to explore some aspects of how to go about tackling your own big model nerves, or as Nike say: Just get a load of Cambodian Children to Do It for a pittance.

In addition, I got a couple of the other Bunker denizens to contribute their ‘Big Model Nerves stories’ and explain how they tackled a project that they initially were worried about also messing right up’.


My Dragon


In general terms, I worked with a mix of Army Painter’s hardened carapace (Dark grey stone colour) and GW’s Camo green for the entire model. This gave me a base to work up from. For colour choice I wanted a muted, desaturated green as the colour for the flesh rather than a more highly saturated (Dork Angels style) green. Both these paint choices worked together to give me the darker tones without altering the general hue of the paint.

Initial colours sprayed
I made mixes of these two colours with successively less hardened carapace. I airbrushed the base and next layer before switching to brushes for the more visible layers of the body. For the wings - which I wanted to have a much more gradated effect - I airbrushed all the way to the top colour, as the opacity of the spray allows for much smoother gradation of colour. I also went  beyond the top colour (Camo Green) and mixed a little GW Averland Sunset with Camo Green for the final highlights, which I tried to apply sparingly.

Building up the wing colour
The harder tissue parts of the dragon (head crest, neck, elbow and knee scales) got painted up in a much more saturated tone to help differentiate the hard bone/scale from the softer general flesh. For the head, this meant drybrushing through a more saturated green and building up these layers with a more strident yellow - In my case, 25 year old Bad Moons yellow. Hey, it still works. 

I decided to paint the spines in closer style to the Monstrous Arcanunum artwork which started off as a dark red base rising to a bright yellow. This gave the model a touch of contrast, welcome in a big and predominantly unicoloured model.

For permanence, I finished the model off with a coat of Vallejo gloss, then matt Varnish, allowing plenty (24 hours) of drying time between coats. 

Raaargh!


And this is the finished product and overall, I’m chuffed. It:

1       Is finished
2       Is the largest non-scenery and non-vehicle unit that I’ve ever painted.
3       Actually, looks pretty good for my general level of skill

Whilst its far from perfect, its pretty good for me, and that's about the best anyone can say for a model. In retrospect, I should have picked out the chest bellow things in a different colour but, never mind. 

I dealt with my big model nerves by starting with things that were easy – doing simple base coating on the model broke the psychological seal and gave me the confidence to progress to the wing and body colour build up. Once I’d finished those steps, I’d painted 70% of the model and the end point became visible.



More Raaargh!



Emma’s Ghorgon


"My Beastmen army was starting to feel pretty solid, with several big units of grimy Gor and Bestigor, lots of Warhounds and a unit of Minotaurs. 

The next logical step was to add some characters or big monsters. I procrastinated for as long as possible but eventually was sat face to face with a big, black primed Ghorgon staring back at me. 

I hate centerpiece models and characters and would much rather batch my way through dozens of uniform infantry models - probably because I enjoy painting more as a chance to enter a therapeutic day-dreamy state, with repetitive stages that allow my brain to switch off from the world. Characters and big monsters require lots of DECISIONS. I hate decisions. 

Anyway, I was on my own with none of my usual painting advisory board available to answer questions, and no Duncan tutorial to look up. I hunted down a suitable bovine reference picture which I stuck pretty close to (a Hereford Bull) and after a few ups and downs, was very happy with the final result - one big ginger cow that looks good stomping across the gaming board, chomping on the occasional hapless Empire peon. 

To be honest, I really overdid the Agrax wash at the end and should probably have highlighted him back up a little but my whole Beastmen army has this issue and I like to just pretend it’s a subtle layer of goat excrement they wear to protect from the mozzies."

Angry Moo!




Dealing with Big Model Nerves


So if you’re facing your own version of Big Model Nerves, here are some pointers from me:

Use source material


Get some source material. If the internet doesn’t provide, there is usually some in whatever rule book the model comes out of and there is often a real-world equivalent of the fantasy thing. Certainly, Emma used a picture of a bull to get the facial colouring for her Ghorgon looking realistic and right for the context.

I realised that I didn’t want to paint my dragon in the same way as the illustration in the Monstrous Arcanum – I don’t think I could have pulled off the extreme colour changes, but I did take inspiration from it when painting the red based spines.

Warpfire Dragon from Monstrous Arcanum (ISBN: 978-1-907964-91-6)
Image owned by Games Workshop. Reproduced for illustration under fair dealing terms.

 I also took inspiration from two other models that others had already painted:

1. Link to original

This gave me the idea for the de-saturated skin tone

2. Link to original
And this one gave me the idea for the colour gradation on the wings – albeit in a less saturated tone.

Break it down


Any big model will consist of different areas that may need to be painted in different ways. In the case of my dragon, I approached the wings, body, spines, scales, head and base as different sections. When working on a section, I tended to work solidly on that section until it was complete and then move on. That way, I could concentrate on one thing at a time and not worry too much about a lot of different things all at once. As long as you keep your colours across the model broadly consistent, this shouldn’t affect the overall tone of unity of the model too much.

I scheduled sections in terms of size and how likely they were to run over onto already completed sections. Hence, I started with the wings as I knew the airbrush overspray would be likely to mess up detail already completed on the body or head, whereas brush work carried out on the body was less likely to overspill onto the wings.

Give it time


Models like this do take more time than your standard Space Marine / Skaven / Ork / shod unit of choice, mostly because you’ll likely need to stop and think about what you’re going to need to do next.

Acknowledge this and leave yourself time to do them so that you don’t feel pressurised into completing them and avoiding the temptation to rush into mistakes or decisions you regret.

Start on the bits you know how to do


If you can’t think where to start, think about what you do know how to do and maybe start there. Certainly, most big projects will need some form of basecoat. Once you’ve got that on, it’ll help to show up where to go next or hopw to proceed. Certainly, painting over a black primer coat will (if nothing else) at least make the topography of the model more visible. Also, If you can make a little bit of the model look good, it’ll make you feel much more enthused about the project as a whole.

A common recommendation for characters is to start with the face and work out, which is how I paint my in-scale character models

Have a practice first


If you want to use a new technique on a big or expensive model, make sure that you’ve had a practice with that technique on  something disposable first. Certainly, I practice many of the new things that I want to try out on Splodge the Ork first.

Splodge the experimental painting Ork. 

Poor Splodge has been the test bed for a host of weathering techniques, high gloss armour, new paint colours and camouflage patterns. If it goes wrong on splodge, it doesn’t matter. It’ll just get painted over eventually, but it does mean that I know where I stand with a technique before I commit paint to an extensive model.

Indeed, my Panther was the test bed for a lot of weathering techniques I applied to two much more expensive GW ‘Nauts.

Test bed for Borkanaut 
  

Get help


By which I don’t mean: pay someone to paint it.

What I’m referring to is tuition. If you’re a relative starter, its well worth getting a local GW (or hobby shop employee) to teach you the very basics of painting including brush direction, watering paints, layering, highlighting, etc. This may sound too basic for many of you, but I spent two years painting stuff before I got this sort of tuition and it made a massive difference to how I paint. If you’ve never been shown these skills, it might be worth making sure that you have them.

For those of you with more experience or mad skillz, there are a variety of commission painters, Golden Daemon winners and other professional painters who would be willing to sit down with you and show you how to improve (unless, you’re already Angel Giraldez). Whilst these services won’t be free, money spent on improving skills will pay back for a very long time. Alternatively, find a friend who paints better than you do and ask them what they do.

 Give it a go!

Finally, the most important advice I can give is to give it a go. Nearly everybody learns by doing. You could read a hundred how-to-paint-a-dragon articles on the Internet or in White Dwarf and you’d still be no nearer to completing your dragon.

Sometimes, starting is the biggest part of finishing, and what you may find with your big model is that as you progress, you'll see more of a way through and the nerves will turn to satisfaction as you see the finished effect start to emerge. 

And, if it all does go hideously wrong, there are a variety of materials (Dettol, Fairy power spray, Vallejo airbrush flow improver, etc…) that will safely remove acrylic paint from resin or plastic models and even more materials that will remove acrylic paint from tin or lead models.  

However, you're much more likely to find that it goes pretty well, and you'll be the proud owner of something you're really chuffed with. 


As Above, So Below. 



Although most of this article has been on the topic of painting stuff, it applies equally to making stuff too: 

Charlie’s Kasrkin


"The Kasrkin models were great, fit in really well with Cadians and thankfully lacked the bling trim on the otherwise sexy Tempestus Scions kit. The Kasrkin sergeant was fine as he was, but I like to make things somewhat unique, and since I'd never seen a gender-swapping face-change on this mini I thought I'd give it a bash. The only thing stopping me was fear; this is an out of print mini, and wouldn't be easy to replace if, after ripping this dude's head off, my replacement looked comically out of place.

Ultimately my enthusiasm for uniqueness won out, and a messy clipper-based decapitation was performed in da konversion klinic. Thankfully the nerd gods smiled upon me; I'm really happy with how the head from Statuesque Miniatures sits on the GW sculpt, and it only needed me to sculpt a greenstuff collar to make it look like it belonged"




Finally, Finally.


I made a Warhammer pub*. Here it is: 




*And a hideous non-sequitur


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