Quick and easy Witch Hunters objective marker

This is a quick marker I put together to find a use for the excellent two headed cyber eagle I didn't use when I was converting my Inquisitor Lord:


The eagle is simply mounted on a rock made from milliput which was sanded. This piece could also double as a familiar if I'm short of them (I've got three already so it seems unlikely).

Ruined Fortress Wall Terrain Piece

Another terrain piece completed, this one was quick and easy to do:

This club terrain, so I've made it pretty generic so it could be used for WFB, 40K, LoTR, Mordheim etc. It's made from 2" high density foam which was cut to shape using a hot wire cutter. I then scored into the foam the brick lines using a ball point pen. All that was left was to coat it with sand/PVA, and base it. I've flocked the wall itself in places to make it look like it was more weathered.

To give you an idea of scale, here is a Battle Sister squad advancing through the ruin (complete with Photoshop effects):


As you can see, it's easily big enough to fit a tank behind and block LOS.

Temple of Skulls Completed

The York Garrison Temple of Skulls is now finished, and here it is in all it's glory:




Assembly of the kit is easy, there's 3 skulls and 2 pillars to glue together, most of the piece is a single unit. One thing to watch is there is a massive line where the skulls you've glued on don't quite sit flush with the back half of the skull. I tried to cover mine will green stuff with limited success, but if you take your time a bit and file the GS flat you should be good. The only other work I did on them was to paint the earth bits with a PVA/water/sand mix to give them a bit of texture.

This was one of those paint jobs where I knew how I wanted it to turn out, but I just didn't know how to get there. Roughly it was something like:

1- Painted the whole thing grey (I used household paint, the shade is a bit darker than Codex Grey)
2- Drybrushed the whole thing pale grey (around Fortress Grey shade)
3- I wasn't happy at this point. I drybrushed the earth parts Tausept Ochre, twice
4- To take the highlights down, I washed all the stones of the temple in Gryphonne Sepia. This gave them a weather look
5- Washed the earth parts in Devlan Mud. Now it started to look better
6- Drybrushed the earth parts Tausept Ochre again, followed by a top highlight of Rotting Flesh
7- Painted the star in Brazen Brass, Skull White and Scab Red/Bestial Brown for the pupil.
8- Picked out some of the human skulls in Astronomicon Grey -> Gryphonne Sepia -> Bleached Bone.
9- Added runes to the temple floor. I thought the Chaos followers would decorate the temple a bit so I put some runes on the floor stones. The runes I took partly from Liber Chaotica, partly I just made up:


I went for a seperate stone for each god, and one undivided (top right) and tried to alter the rune style for each god, so the Slaanesh runes (on the left) are mostly sensous curves, whilst the Tzeentch runes (bottom second from left) are complicated and intracate. The runes were done using a 0.5mm pen.

10- Added some flock in cracks, broken tiles etc. I used a green/brown flock to make the grass look like it was struggling to grow.

This is a great terrain piece, and pretty enjoyable to paint up as well, and given it was mostly drybrushed and washed after the first coat, pretty quick

Movember

Me and a few guys from work are growing moustaches this year for Movember to help raise awareness and funds for men's health - specifically prostate cancer.

What many people don't appreciate is that one man dies every hour of prostate cancer in the UK, more than 35,000 men will be diagnosed this year and that prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK. Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved and I am hoping that you will support me.

To donate to my Mo, you can either:

* Click this link http://uk.movember.com/mospace/495257/ and donate online using your credit card, debit card or PayPal account. You can either donate to me (Chris) or donate to my team, either is good.

* Write a cheque payable to The Prostate Cancer Charity - Movember, referencing my Registration Number 495257 and mailing it to: Movember - The Prostate Cancer Charity, First Floor, Cambridge House, Cambridge Grove, London, W6 0LE.

Movember is now in its third year here in the UK and, to date, has achieved some pretty amazing results by working alongside The Prostate Cancer Charity. Check out further details at: http://uk.movemberfoundation.com/research-and-programs.

Thanks for your help everyone, any donations are very gratefully received.

Eversor Assassin

After neglecting my Witch Hunters for so long, I decide to pick up the brush and start working on them again. I've had this Eversor assassin sat primed on my painting table since summer so he was a prime candidate:



The top photo has come out a bit blurry. Overall I'm reasonably pleased.

The skull helmet he's wearing was done using my new favourite method for painting bone. This was based using Astronomicon Grey. This was followed by a wash of Gryphonne Sepia which turns it into a very pale bone colour (I'm increasingly fond of Gryphonne Sepia). I put a Badab Black wash into the teeth and eye sockets to deepen the shading. Once this was all done, a quick highlight with Bleached Bone and he's done. I would think you could use a similar method for batch painting skeletons, spray them pale grey, wash and then drybrush Bleached Bone.

For the power sword, I did attempt to do some lightning effects on it, as has been shown in the last three White Dwarfs, but it just looked totally crap so I just went for a blue to black fade effect and then gloss varnished the blade. If anyone's got any tips for painting very thin, fine lines I'd love to hear them.

My next terrain project

A Temple of Skulls. This is club terrain, so it'll be used for Fantasy and 40K but it lends itself pretty well to 40K.


I'll post updates as I do them.

New blog: The Standard Template Construct

Just a quick one to tell you about a new blog startup called The Standard Template Construct. It's been started up by Roleplayer from the 40K Radio Freebootaz (I'm a Boota myself as well). Roleplayer is a great painter and hobbyist so expect some good stuff over there. The blog aims to:

"...quickly develop into a one-stop location for up to date hobby news, tips, photos, and articles relating to the three major Games Workshop hobbies, their specialist games, as well as a few other hobby related things."

There's a couple of other Bootaz involved as well so if you've enjoyed the Freebootaz webzine, expect stuff of the same standard. Go and check him out, hopefully he'll be joining the FtW family as well.

Apocalypse lessons learnt

NowI've actually played a game of Apocalypse, I thought I blog a little about some thing I'd try and do if I were running an Apocalypse game. There's a From the Warp collaborative post about Apocalypse which I would refer you to for more on this topic.

So, some things I picked up on:

1- Know who is playing in advance: If you knows who going to turn up, what they're playing and how much stuff they've got in advance, you can decide how to split your teams up, or split into multiple tables.

2- Keep it equal: From the game last weekend, one of the Imperial players had 8000 points of Marines, which was more than his three other teammates put together. This meant he was constantly in-demand in different parts of the board as his army was being shot at, assaulted etc which slowed things down a bit. Conversely, one young player had only a small 1500-2000 point Marine army so alot of times he was left with little to do. If all the players have roughly the same amount of points, everyone sees the same amount of action.

3- Formations and superheavies: Having a 40K army and turning up with it will put you at a disadvantage against someone who has taken time to build formations, or who has super heavies. I thought my 35 Plague Marines would be pretty handy in a fight, until a single destroyer strength template landed and killed 14 of them. On the other hand, facing of against the Imperial army who had two Masters of the Chapter formations (giving them 8 additional strategic assests) put up at a serious handicap. If you can build some formation up, then do it. Similarly try and balance super heavies on both sides if you can. We didn't have any titans on either side in our game, but I suspect these would be quite unbalancing.

4- Enjoy the carnage: Don't get hung up on rules disputes or arguements, just dice off to decide, or let a third party decide. Remember Apocalypse is about having massive battles, having fun and blowing up loads of stuff.

Apocalypse!

On Saturday, I played in York Garrison's Ten4Ten Apocalypse event and it was seriously fun. Just seeing that amount of miniatures and that amount of carnage made it for me. This event was the climax to a campaign which has been running each week for the last couple of months or so.

The teams were around 15K points per side, with 4 players on the Imperial team, and five on the Disorder team.

The Imperial team consisted of a mix of Space Marines, Grey Knights, Black Templars, Guard and Sisters of Battle. They also had 5 Baneblade chassis tanks, and 2 Masters of the Chapter formations.

The Disorder team consisted of a mix of Chaos Space Marines (that was me who acted as team captain), two Ork armies, Space Wolves (evil for this game), and Traitor Guard. We had a Doomsday device, a Baneblade variant and 2 Gargantuan Squiggoths.

We had an independent GM overseeing things, and the GM was in charge of objectives. He placed three fixed objectives on the table after deployment. Each side also had a number of secret objectives to complete. For our team, we had to destroy 3 Land Raiders, destroy a Baneblade in close combat, and take the entrance to a bunker which was on the table. For the Imperial team they had to destroy 3 Basilisks, kill a gargantuan squiggoth in assault, and take a landing pad in our deployment zone. Now, killing 3 Basilisks is easier than killing three Land Raiders, but bear in mind the Basilisks were right at the back of our deployment zone. Finally, each army had a general character which was an objective for one side or the other depending on whether it was alive or dead (both ended the game alive in fact). We used 4th Edition objective holding rules.

The final quirk was that there was a load of Inquisitor games running simulatenously. Depending on who won these, there would be bonus strategic assests awarded to either side. The GM was also free to award assests as required.

This was the table we played over, which was 3 6'x4' tables:



It was possibly a little small for the points we had, as some players arrived late after we'd already starting to setup, although the small size meant we were on top of each quickly so the carnage could begin as swiftly as possible.

We bid 18 minutes to setup, and ended up setting up first and assumed we'd get the first turn. Unfortunately, the Imperial side stole the initiative which left us on the Disorder side on the back foot given we looked to have a truck load less models on the table, and we had setup assuming we'd be going first. The table looked awesome after deployment:

A marine's eye view:



Ultramarines, Black Templar, Guard and Sisters hold the Imperial right flank, faced with the evil Space Wolves and my Chaos Space Marines. You can see the heavy concentration of Imperial armour as well. The bunker we were trying to take is at the end of the road. In the centre, a general BT/GK and Marine advance continues. There was a particularly brutal unit of 10 terminator with Lightning Claws, a terminator Librarian, terminator Chaplain, and a Chapter master here:


Orks and Grey Knights clash in the centre of the board during Disorder turn 1. On the left is a squiggoth with a Rhino hull howdah. The Grey Knights had a Captain in their unit, and destroyed the Orks and the squiggoth easily. The following turn they were annhilated by Orks, Guard and a Defiler:


One of the Imperial secret objectives was to destroy three Basiliks on the Disorder side, a task made much easier by the unexpected gain of the Flank March assest from the Inquisitor game. This meant we had a load of Grey Knights and BT terminators supported by Marine terminators suddenly appear at the rear of our army and minced the Basilisks. Later in the game, Orks led by Gazghkull Thraka, arrived and extracted their revenge.


The combat was fierce around the central objective of the board. This was about turn 3. The Imperials had clear control of this objective by the end of the game after I'd fed 7 Plague Marines, 5 Chaos terminators, a Chaos Sorcerer and 20 Lesser Daemons into the meat grinder.


One of the static objectives was only held by a handful of Grey Knights by the late turns of the game, who were forced to face their nemesis, a Daemon Prince of Nurgle supported by Ork boyz. This objective was finally held by Disorder despite some hairy moments in the last turn:


Serious carnage by the start of turn 5. The game ended after this turn:


Death on a massive scale. By the end of the game, I still had 2 Daemon Princes (one of whom was hiding as he was the general), my Doomsday device and one Plague Marine from a 3300 point army.

We used a number of amusing assests which the GM sprung on us. On the Disorder side we got the Rok 'em Boyz assest from Apocalypse Reloaded. This is where the Ork hulks in space starting throwing meteors down. These scatter D6 feet which was entertaining. They always scatter unless you roll a hit and a 1 which I managed to do with the first one (we got 3). They're a 10" balst destroyer hit when they land. One took a structure point off an Imperial super heavy, one destroyed a Land Raider, a squiggoth, some other infantry, and the last one killed 12 of my newly arrived Plague Marines.

The Doomsday device proved pretty amusing as well, it was a turn highlight to see what it would do. I activated it first turn (making an outrageous demand of course), and then rolled a 6 which meant it started firing straight away. Over 5 turns I got 4 Apocalyptic Barrage(4), S8, AP3 shots and 4 S10, AP1 10" blasts. I could have done with it going super nova towards the end of the game as the only things near it were Imperials. For some reason, no one shot at the thing for the whole game despite it being a very obvious target.

Anyway, the final result was a draw as we ran out of time at the end of turn 5. Had some dice rolls not gone our way, the Imperials would have won it at the end, and a sixth turn would have seen them take it I think. We both completed two of our secret objectives (both the destroying/killing things ones), and held one static objective each.

The overall campain result was a victory for the forces of Disorder, as we held more planets than the Imperials.

I'll probably post some more things I learnt from the game later in the week.

Witch Hunter Army Progress So Far

I've been neglecting my Witch Hunters army these past couple of months whilst I concentrated on getting my Chaos Marines up to Apocalypse scale. As the modelling and conversion work is now done of those CSM's, I thought I'd take stock of where I was with my Witch Hunters. I've been working on this army for waaaay too long and it's not even a legal list yet. I'm aiming to get it to a legal status after Christmas. The things which have radically slowed me down are:

1- I paint really slowly
2- Sisters of Battle seem to take an age to paint, especially with the colour scheme I chose
3- The army costs a fortune. One Battle Sister squad in a Rhino is £40, and it doesn't even give me the special weapons I wanted

Here's some pictures of the army in it's current state:



I reckon it's probably about 1000 points or maybe a bit less (this is the list I'm working towards though I've done more models than I need for the list).


Canoness Sister Katherine the Pious and 2 squads of Seraphim.

Battle Sister squad and Rhino (here's some detail on the VSS conversion), along with a priest and Death Cult Assasin. There's an unpainted Eversor lurking in the background.


Inquisitor Lord Titus Flavian and retinue.

I'm planning on adding another Battle Sister squad in a Rhino and an Exorcist post Christmas which will mean I'm only another BSS squad and Exorcist (and 3 Sisters with Heavy Flamers) short.

I was reading a good post over on Santa Cruz Warhammer earlier in the week about using Photoshop on pictures, so I followed some of the steps just for an experiment:


Just a test, but it looks quite cool. There's lots more effects available in Photoshop for me to play with in future.

WIP Nurgle Doomsday Device

This is the complete build of my Doomsday Device for this weekends Apocalypse game. As you can see it's not painted yet, and probably won't be before then.

There's not much guidance on the Doomsday Device datasheet as to how big one of these things acutally is or even what it might look like. I guessed it must be pretty sizable, given it's a super heavy, AV14 all round and has 3 structure points. You can see I've included a Plague Marine to give you an idea of the magnitude:


Pretty monstrous. I wanted to give the idea of a giant cauldron of pus and filth which would erupt is a geyser of unplesantness once it was activated. I thought a cauldron on it's own would be too small so I've made it into a big cauldron on top of a Nurgly tower. The materials used are a sweet jar, a washing liquid ball, a ton of GS and milliput, some bitz, guitar wire and cocktail sticks.

I've got as far as undercoating it, though the undercoat looks like it needs a touch up in places:


Hopefully, it going to cause some serious devastation in the Apocalypse game.

My Must Have Unit: Chaos Chosen

Ron over at From the Warp is putting together one of his excellent collabrative posts, drawing on the collective wisdom of the FtW bloggers. This time it's about which unit you never leave home without. For me, that unit is Chaos Chosen.

Chaos Chosen are an elite choice for the Chaos Space Marine list. They have pretty much a standard Chaos Marine profile, with the exception that they are Ld 10. Each is armed in the standard way for CSMs (bolter, bolt pistol, CCW, frag grenades and krak grenades), and a single Chosen marine costs 18 points base, which is 3 more than a basic CSM marine. So what are the big things that makes Chosen so useful?

1- They can Infiltrate, giving them setup flexbility and the outflank ability
2- They can have up to 5 special weapons

These two points means that Chosen can really put out a large amount of damage to an unsuspecting opponent.

I run mine in a unit of 7 with the Icon of Nurgle, though this is more for fluff reasons that maximum efficiency. I arm them with 3 flamers, and two melta guns, and put them in a Rhino. I normally outflank with them. The weapon load out I use, for me, this gives them a real diversity to deal with anything that they come across. It means they can pop a battlewagon one turn, and then jump out and roast a mob of boyz with their flamers for example. I normally keep them in the Rhino for as long as possible as they can fire both melta guns from the fire points (check the CSM FAQ, you can fire two people from the fire points) and only take them out of the rhino if they need to flame some stuff, or the rhino gets destroyed. Using the fire points means I can threaten armour at up to 18" down each table edge, forcing my opponent into the centre. All in all this unit has never let me down yet.

The subject of Chosen came up recently on the Freebootaz forum, so I'll repeat some of the other points raised there (and mainly credit HotPanda for his input). There seems to be plenty of variation in special weapons preferences, with some preferring 5 flamers, some preferring the high firepower of 5 plasma guns. A good point was made about the synergy between Chosen and summoned daemons. A forward infiltrating unit of Chosen with a cheap icon can make a useful point to summon lesser daemons down so that the daemons can be in assault very quickly as you can infiltrate close to the enemy. Similarly, an infiltrating or outflanking unit of Chosen with a Champion with no gear can make a good and cheap entry point for a summoned greater daemon.

Just some ideas here then for the use of Chosen. There's plenty more, like 4 pairs of lightning claws and the Mark of Khorne for example.

WIP Nurgle Troops

Some more WIP shots. First up is my next completed Plague Marine squads, done in my Blind Dead Plague Monk army style:



They're made from standard Chaos Space Marines and green stuff. I've used the Renegade Milita heads on these from Pig Iron Industries and they're a little on the small side for the bloated bodies. I had to bulk out the heads using GS which is covered by the hoods.

These last ones are nothing special, just 20 zombies I'm going to use as summoned lesser daemons:

What could be cooler than having your army summon a zombie army to the battle field? :)

WIP Nurgle Daemon Prince

Things have been pretty manic this last couple of weeks as I've been living with my in-laws whilst we were having some home improvement stuff done. I've managed to get a bit of modelling work in, so I thought I'd share some pictures.

First up, this is my all new Nurgle Daemon Prince:



He's still a little WIP, so I need to smooth out some of the green stuff around his waist. It's really there as I had alot of trouble pinning the top half to the bottom half (I cocked it up somewhere along the process) so the GS on the waist is just giving that joint more support.

As you can see from the first shot, he's got a pretty majestic wing span. The wings are from the LOTR balrog, and those things are huge. They were a little too big for the skinny Nightbringer body, so I used my dremel to reduce them a little. I cut off a big chunk around the base of the wings, the part which joins to the body, and carved away some of the wing membranes to reduce them down and make the wing look a little more spiky. The wings are still pretty big, but they do look like they'd actually be able to lift his body if this were life size.

The arms are taken from the chaos spawn kit, and I was going for an insectoid look for him. My original plan had been to retain the scythe arm the Nightbringer comes with, but with that on, he still looked too much like the Nightbringer and that was what I was trying to avoid. After rooting through my bitz box and trying out various combinations with blu-tac I went for the insect legs.

The face and eyes are still WIP, I might flatten the eyes out. The eyes are intentionally two different sizes, and I was going for the fly-like compound eye effect. The mouth tube has come out slightly differently than I had originally envisioned, but I'm reasonably pleased with it. He kind of looks like the Imperial Spy from Star Wars...

...which is a look I quite like :)

The remaining steps are to neaten up the waist GS, smooth the eyes or make them into more rounded domes, and then he's ready to be painted.

Smog 1888

I was browsing through the Maelstrom Games online store yesterday looking at Malifaux stuff (love the miniatures, I'm pretty interested in that one). Anyway, Maelstrom are carrying a new miniature range called Smog 1888 from SmartMax who I think are a French company. There's a big chunk of fluff beind the minis which you can read on the website, but basically it's set in an alternate Victorian London where magic and other wierd stuff are prevalent. Looking at the background it put me in mind a bit on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the books, not the film).

The miniatures are really nice looking miniatures, I've shared a few here, though you can see lots more on the SmartMax store. The one downside to these from a 40K alternative perspective is that they are 54mm in scale. Check them out if you're interested.

Shamrock the Great and his prestigious cabinet:

Mei Lung and the Opium dragon:


Dr Proteus Treves:


Jeremiah Crow (my personal favourite):