Order Minoris

Ordo Malleus Inquisitor Conversion

2012-01-03T10:43:00.000Z

This is something I've been working on on and off for past couple of months. It's an Ordo Malleus Inquisitor for the all Inquisition Grey Knights army I'm planning on doing:

This is easily the most ambitious sculpting I've ever attempted and I've learnt alot about doing it in the process. I'm pleased with the result, and I hope to do a decent paint job on it.

The conversion is based on a WFB Chaos Warrior, with a leg swap to give him a more power armoured look. The head is taken from the Space Marine commander box. The remainder was endless green stuff work.

Two major lessons I learnt from this project:

1- Only ever work on a small part of the model at a time, don't be tempted to do big swathes of it at once or you'll spoil what you've just done.

2- You always need less green stuff that you think you need. Some of the amounts I ended up working with on this model were minuscule.

Hobby Resolutions

2012-01-01T10:37:00.002Z

It's that time of year again, where I can review what I did (or didn't) get done in the hobby year 2011.

This is what my resolutions were last year:

1- Buy less models, and paint the ones I've got -FAILED

2- Finish my Witch Hunters to the 1500 point list I've written (I technically have more than 1500 points worth) - FAILED

3- Finish my Ogre army - FAILED

4- Play some Malifaux - DONE

5- Play 25 games of either 40K or Fantasy - FAILED

6- Get some work done on my 40K Chaos Daemons army - FAILED

So in all in all not that great a result. Must try harder.

So for 2012, I am resolving to:

1- Get Witch Hunters to 1500 points

2- Get Inquisition army to 1500 points

3- Play more games this year than last year

4- Play Blood Bowl on the table top, paint my BB team

5- Play another game of Apocalypse

Blood Bowl Necromantic Team

2011-12-14T11:53:00.003Z

The Blood Bowl Legendary Edition PC game was dirt cheap a few weeks back on Steam, so I took a punt and downloaded it. I'm glad I did, as I'd forgotten what a good game Blood Bowl is!

Anyway, it got me fired up again to do some Blood Bowl mins. I've been playing a Necromantic team on the PC, so I went for the same on the tabletop.

Werewolves, mostly Ork/Orc bitz:

Ghouls and Wights, made from the Vampire Counts range:

And zombies:

Malifaux: Legion Of Sorrows so far

2011-09-10T15:52:00.000+01:00

It's impossible to only own one crew in Malifaux with some many great models. The models in Pandora's crew were some of the those that got me interested in Malifaux in the first place so I definitely wanted those next:

Baby Kade and Candy are tiny figures (Kade especially) so they're not easy to paint at all. I just need to paint Pandora now and they're done to 35SS. In addition to these, I've got Coppelius and Insidious Madness to add (and some Alps for Coppelius to summon).

Sister of Battle at 1000 points list

2011-09-06T16:30:00.003+01:00

I was quite excited when I heard Sisters were getting a new Codex in White Dwarf as I'm a huge fan of the army. They're what I've been playing most in 40K this year of the few days I've been able to play. However, once the thing arrived I was fairly disappointed. Some of my favourite units (Inquisitors for example) were gone, and as I write this GW doesn't seem to making any efforts to bring the cost of the Battle Sisters down at all.

But, since I like the army, I wanted to persevere with it so I sat down and wrote up a list to replace my old 1000 point list:

HQ:
Uriah Jacobus, 5 Death Cult Assassins, 4 Crusaders in a Rhino (260)

Troops:
Battle Sister Squad, Melta gun, heavy flamer, rhino (180)
Battle Sister Squad, MG, Storm Bolter, Rhino (163)

Fast:
6 Seraphim, twin hand flamers, power sword for Superior (130)

Heavy:
Exorcist (135)
Exorcist (135)

From my old list, my old jump pack Canoness is gone (no jump pack available now, plus I don't need her 2 Faith points any more), Inquisitor and retinue are gone, and my small unit Inquisitorial Storm Troopers are also gone. In are the Seraphim, and Jacobus who is pretty much mandatory I think.

I don't want to spend a ton of cash on new units so I'm having to make do with what I've got. Jacobus and his unit I don't own, but I think I can build them from plastics fairly cheaply.

I haven't tried this list yet, so I'll post some feedback once I get to trying it out.

Malifaux: Nicodem Crew completed (for now)

2011-09-06T15:35:00.006+01:00

Two months without a post.... I've just been really pushed for time these last few months, and blogging is one things that has gone by the wayside a little bit.

Anyway, I've not been totally idle on the gaming front. I've played a couple of games of Malifaux with my Nicodem crew (1 draw Vs The Viktorias, 1 loss Vs Lady J), and done some Malifaux painting.

My mindless zombie horde is done now....

...giving me 8 Mindless Zombies in my crew. I can really recommend these models from Studio Miniatures, they're really nicely scuplted.

Malifaux being a game that features alot of counters, I decided to knock up proper ones.

Corpse Counters (probably need more of these really):

Evidence Markers:

Treasure and Claim Markers:

And finally some Shafted markers for my Crooked Men:

I'm just short of some dynamite counters and a supply wagon and I'll have a full set.

Malifaux: More stuff

2011-06-23T10:41:00.003+01:00

I've been pretty neglectful recently of both the blog and the hobby, as I've started a new job at the end of April, and had a third son which as you can imagine has taken up a fair bit of time ;)

I'm on paternity leave for two weeks though so I'm back in the swing of things and putting more work into the Undertaker's Lot.

Flesh Construct:

I'm not a huge fan of the sculpt for this miniature, the head is just silly looking. It is however the single highest Soulstone cost model that Nicodem can summon so I wanted to include him as a nice meat shield.

Canine Remains:

I've just got the two of these so far, I might bump them up to a pack of 4. With the two, I plan on using them as free corpse counters.

Punk Zombies:

Nice models but the swords bend really easily. The flag on Johnny the Rotten as I'm calling him is a bit shaky but it looks OK from a distance (I nicked the idea for this off someone on the Wyrd forums, kudos to them).

Mindless Zombies:

The first two of 4, these are by Studio Miniatures. The zombies are modern ones, but I think I can pass them off as Malifaux zombies. I have zombie mob 4 as I thought it was the most "non-modern" of them but they've got loads of other cool zombies I was tempted by.

Malifaux: Mortimer the Gravedigger

2011-05-07T15:16:00.005+01:00

I'm still plodding along with my crew. Mortimer is now all done, and he got finished surprisingly quickly. I actually finished this model about a fortnight ago, I've just been so busy I've not had time to post him up.

This was an enjoyable model to paint, there's alot of character in the face which I enjoyed painting.

I based up 2 canine remains, a flesh construct, 3 punk zombies and 8 zombies to go in this crew.

Stylish Blogger Award

2011-04-29T17:10:00.002+01:00

Imagine my surprise when I heard from Meatball from My Dice Hate Me that he had been kind enough to nominate my inane ramblings for a Stylish Blogger Award! I was both shocked and pleased, especially as I've not been as on top of things in the world of blogging as I should have been in recent months.

The Stylish Blogger Award given from one blogger to another one might say, is like a pat on the back for a good job. It's definitely a viral, zombie-like spread of good will so it's too good to pass up.

There are four rules for the Stylish Blogger Award:

Thank and link back to the person giving you the award
Share seven things about yourself
Select 10-15 blogs who you think deserve this award
Contact these bloggers and let them know about the award

So first of all, a big thanks to Meatball for choosing my blog. I've been reading his blog (in both his previous and current incarnations) for a long time now, being as he is a fellow Witch Hunter's player. If you don't already, go and check out My Dice Hate Me and click on the Follow button.

So first of all, seven things about me:

I like zombies. Anything to do with zombies really. My favourite non-Romero zombie movies are Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters), Zombieland and Tombs of the Blind Dead.
I have (almost) 3 sons.
The first miniature I ever painted was the dwarf from the Warlock of Firetop Mountain boardgame
Having The Hobbit read to me at school when I was about 8 changed my life
You can follow me on twitter @tigerstyle40k
I've been into miniature wargaming since 1989, but I did stop for 12 years between 1995 and 2007
Apart from minis and zombies, I also like podcasts, music, Lego and sleep.

So here's my list of bloggers to nominate (aside from My Dice Hate Me go and check that out anyway) in no particular order :

1- Standard Template Construct: Roleplayer is a fabulous painter, even if you don't like Space Marines (like me), then check out his work.

2- The Lower Crypt: This is a Malifaux terrain blog, and there's some really great stuff on here. It's a little behind in being updated, but check it out for the awesome terrain.

3- Warpstone Flux: Jabberjabber has been a long time follower and supporter of this blog, and he always impresses me with his regular updates whilst still maintaing high quality.

4- Excommunicate Traitoris: Superb paint jobs focussing on Inquisition armies.

5- The Glorious Works: The guys running this blog provide regular Malifaux oriented posts, which I always enjoy reading.

6- Constantly Risking Obscurity: Consistently excellent and interesting post from Mike, and he's been kind enough to offer advice to me in the past.

7- John's Toy Soliders: Another long time follower, John provides varied and consistent updates, and some nice photos as well.

8- Kantor Base: The Hammer provides excellent 40K coverage and even some Fantasy.

9- Sons of Twilight: 40K and Lego, two of my favourite things.

10- 2 Ton Studios: Wolfy is a friend of mine and a fellow Freeboota so check out his 40K painting blog as well. He's casting some sweet bases as well.

Hope you enjoy reading these blog. If one of these blogs is yours then drop me a comment below to say you've seen it to save me the job of contacting you.

Cheers
Chris

Malifaux: Grave Spirit

2011-04-28T14:55:00.003+01:00

More Malifaux stuff, with still more to come.

This time a Grave Spirit and another try out of OSL:

This totem will link to another model and confer them Armor 2, which reduces the number of wounds inflicted. One of these combined with Nicodem for example (who is already Hard to Wound 1 and can assign hits to nearby zombies) makes him tough to kill.

Malifaux: Crooked Men

2011-04-22T22:05:00.002+01:00

I've started a new job this week, so I haven't had much chance to paint anything for almost a fortnight, but today the kid's were out all day leaving me with several hour painting time.

So... Crooked Men:

The one in the middle is my first ever attempt at OSL:

I've got the idea I think, just need to work on the execution. I'll be giving this another go with my grave spirit I think.

And this one has a really wierd zombie canary in his hand:

This guy has a flat top to his head like Helicopter Zombie for Dawn of the Dead.

Still to come in this crew:

-Mortimer the Gravedigger
-3 Samurai Punk Zombies
-2 Canine Remains
-Grave Spirit
-Flesh Contrust

Malifaux: Vultures

2011-04-08T20:44:00.004+01:00

I've finished the next models in my crew, 2 vulture totems. I'm not I'll ever want to field two (not unless it's a really big game), but when I bought the models second hand I got two of them. They look OK from tabletop distance anyway.

I've had some more models arrive this week for the crew as well: 2 canine remains, 3 punk zombies and a flesh construct. They've been added to my "to paint" list.

The rules manual also arrived on Tuesday. I'm really impressed with it, it makes alot of the areas that the main book is vague on (blast markers and corpses counters are two examples I've struggled with), and it's got a huge section on strategies and schemes. I'm guessing some of this must be taken from "Rising Powers" (which I don't own yet), as there are master specific schemes in there for masters which are only in that book.

Malifaux: Bat rep, Nicodem Vs McMourning (25ss)

2011-04-01T09:49:00.004+01:00

I played my first (almost) full game of Malifaux last night. This was at 25ss. I say it was almost full, we just both used the Slaughter strategy rather than flipping for it, the idea being to keep it simple as I'm still learning the game and my opponent was still learning a new crew.

He was my list:
Nicodem, The Undertaker
Mortimer, The Gravedigger
3 Crooked Men
1 Vulture
Soulstone Cache of 7

And the opposing crew:
Dr Douglas McMourning
Sebastian
Flesh Construct
4 Canine Remains
Soulstone Cache of about 5-6

Deployment was just standard across the board.

I kept back, and castled up my crooked men around Nicodem. Mortimer dug up a corpse counter and Nicodem raised a mindless zombie from it to protect himself. My vulture headed forward and I attempted a Decay through it against the dogs, but I was cheated out of it.

McMouring and his crew headed forward fast, McMourning using his scalpel sling off the Flesh Contrust to catapult himself another 6" of so forward, but wounded the Flesh Construct in the process.

Things were starting to look bad around turn 2 or 3. I was really thinking I was going to get kerb stomped as I was not confident in my own crew's melee abilities, but this point was where it turned round.

My Crooked Men used Shafted to block the route between some terrain. This meant the Flesh Construct had to risk it, so my opponent sent his dogs into clear it, wounding them in the process. I dropped another Shafted on my activation in the same place, so he had to send in another dog. His other surviving dog charged and wounded my third Crooked Man. The FC then killed a Crooked Man. At this point, he had two dogs and a wounded Construct (I'd softed it up as it advanced using Cave In) very close together.

Nicodem then used Decay to kill the dog that had wounded my Crooked Man, leaving him free to Cave In the Flesh Contruct, killing it and using the blasts to kill the two dogs near him.

Next turn, Nicodem had what he needed: alot of Corpse Counters. I summoned my Crooked Man back and then raised 6 mindless zombies. Nicodem then used Rigor Mortis to paralyze McMourning. I pretty much managed to keep McMourning paralyzed for the rest of the game, which was just as well, as on the one turn I didn't do it (thanks for a rubbish control hand), he caused carnage, killing Mortimer and a zombie and healing 8 wounds. I eventually killed Sebastian and McMourning resulting in a win, mainly thanks to Bolster Undead making my zombies much tougher.

A great game overall, very tactical and I really had to think about how my crew works, particularly with more of a support caster like Nicodem. I'm not sure how I would have faired in a strategy which required me to move around the board more.

Malifaux: Nicodem

2011-03-31T09:56:00.003+01:00

Over the past couple of weeks, I've really been bitten by the Malifaux bug. I played a demo game with my local Wyrd henchmen and was really blown away by it.

I actually bought a crew second hand before Christmas, so I've finally now been motivated to paint it up. I love all things zombie, so The Resurrectionists, and particularly Nicodem was an obvious choice for me:

I had about 4 attempts at the vultures neck, and I'm still not 100% on it. I might have another go with it. I've got two more vulture totems to paint but I think I'm going to do their necks in more of a flesh tone.

One thing I like about Malifaux are all the cool bases. This particular model has one of the base inserts from Wyrd:

I'm going for a graveyard theme for this crew. What I was attempting on the tomb stone was a marble effect, which I'm reasonably happy with. I looked around on the Interwebs for some info on painting marble and the couple of sites I looked at recommended using a sponge to add the initial texture. I actually used a stippling brush for mine.

-I painted the whole stone Astronomicon Grey

-Washed with Gryphonne Sepia

-Stippled Codex Grey patches

-Stippled Fortress Grey patches to highlight

-Added thin lines of Fortress Grey to marble it.

The miniatures I've got left in this crew are:

-Mortimer

-3 Crooked Men

-2 Vulture totems

-Grave Spirit

-2 Canine Remains

-Shafted markers

-Corpse Counters

I've also hoping to get a game or two in tonight.

Khorne Lord in Terminator Armour

2011-03-27T22:07:00.000+01:00

This was my most generous gift from the UK Bootaz Secret Santa this year. I wanted to give him a paint job befitting his status as a marvellous gift and an eater of worlds. He's going to be my entry for a local painting contest which I've amazingly managed to finish two weeks early.

I think I've managed to nail down painting red now with this one after my earlier attempt on my Kabuki doll. The red was done farily simply:

-Base of two thinned coats of Mechrite Red
-Two washes with Devlan Mud
-Layer of Red Gore, working up through about 4-5 layers to Blood Red
-Blood Red and then adding Fiery Orange for the top end highlights.

I also used weathering powders for the first time to add the black dust to his feet and loin cloth. I used the Forge World ones, as they happen to be the ones I've got. I've used Black Soot on this model to represent dust from the ashen ground and just applied it with a dry brush

I didn't think I'd actually have time to get the model done, hence I went for a fairly basic (ie rubbish) base. In future I'll allow myself more time to do something better with the base. Long term, this will be a gaming piece anyway, so I wouldn't have been able to do anything that flash with it.

RPG Play by Forum

2011-03-24T21:23:00.000Z

I've now played in two Dark Heresy campaigns, one Deathwatch campaign and I'm currently GM'ing another Dark Heresy campaign. Play by forum can be very enjoyable, so I thought I'd share some tips with you based on my experience in case you ever want to run or take part in your own campaign. Obviously to do any of this you'll need a forum of your choice to do it on ;)

PBF takes time: When you're planning your campaign bear in mind it's going to take time. Alot of time. What you'd manage in a session or two face to face is going to take several months most likely. Our first DH campaign (Maggots in the Meat from the Games Master's Kit) ran between July and October to finish was should be doable in a single evening session. Be prepared for it to take time and plan for the long haul.

Get reliable players: When recruiting players or thinking of being a player yourself, think about the first point. Am I willing and able to run or play in this campaign for the amount of time required? Is it likely that real life stuff is going to get in the way of me playing? Obviously if something unexpected happens, or you have to go on holiday or something then these can be handled, but if you're just going to lose interest then don't bother starting.

Post often: One way your campaign will stagnate is if people aren't posting often to keep things moving. A lack of posting is going to slow stuff down, people will lose interest and things will fizzle out. My advice would be to look for people, or plan on posting yourself, who can post every 24 to 48 hours. This sounds like quite a commitment, but if you think of how many people have smart phones these days, it's not too arduous (Tapatalk is your friend by the way if you're forum playing by phone).

Fudge things: Let stuff slide and things happen without rolling to keep things interesting. Unless it's really vital or unavoidable don't let people die, no one wants to lose weeks of work and have to re-roll.

Don't enforce a posting order: Out of combat, things will slow down if you're all waiting on one guy to post. Let people post when they want when not in combat to keep things and the roleplaying flowing.

Don't be waiting on one player: Try and avoid situations where you're waiting on one person to do something or post. If the majority of players have decided on a course of action, go with it rather than waiting for a unanimous decision.

Have everything ready: If you're GM'ing have all your major posts planned out and ready to hand when you need them. Same thing for player character sheets, reference tables, NPC stats and so on. When you've got it to hand you can quickly copy and paste the next part of the post (especially if it's a long one) and you're away. I've found Google docs useful for this, so I carry all my major posts in one document that I can cut and paste from even when I'm using a mobile device like my iPod.

Credit for many of these insights is also due to Aaron from the Mystical Throne who has GM'ed two of the three campaigns I've played in. Many of these tips I learnt from him so go check his site out.

Blog neglect

2011-03-21T21:16:00.003Z

I've been somewhat neglectful of the blog of late due to some real life stuff getting in the way of hobby time.

What I have managed to do since early February...

I got 30 Gnoblars painted up for my Ogre Kingdoms army:

I didn't really enjoy painting these things that much, I'm glad I don't play a horde army...

I went down to Warhammer World and got a big game in with the UK Freebootaz. 5K points per side on the custom made Tau table they've got down there. Farthestgoose on Adeptus Alcoholicus posted a short report on it as well. Those are my Sisters of Battle facing down his dreadnaught. I ended up on the losing side, but it was a great game all round and a good day as it usually is when the Bootaz get together.

Last week, I finally got round to playing Malifaux. Our local Wyrd henchman offered to come down to club night and run a demo so I jumped at the chance to try out my Nicodem crew. To be honest, I'm pretty much hooked on Malifaux now so expect so more stuff on that in future.

I've also been playing in play by forum Dark Heresy but I'll talk about that separately with some tips on what I've learnt. I've been spending a lot of time ready DH books and working on a campaign I'm running via a forum.

Inquisitorial Storm Troopers

2011-02-02T15:28:00.003Z

Finally, after some years, I'm up to date with my Witch Hunters, in that all the models for it are now painted. The last five are here, Inquisitorial Storm Troopers:

These use heads and backpacks from Pig Iron. The heads are actually very similar to the ones pictured in the Codex under the Inquisitorial Storm Troopers.

As a unit, they cost a grand total of 60 points, including the grenade launcher. Being this dirt cheap means I'm happy for them to sit and hold an objective whilst my expensive Battle Sister squads go and do their thing. They won't take much punishment, but then again they don't cost much either.

For my Witch Hunters as a whole, I can probably stretched to 1550 points by tricking out every unit. Really I need to get another unit of Battle Sisters done but the only way that's going to happen is if I buy them in blisters or get them off ebay.

A brace of Exorcists

2011-01-26T13:42:00.002Z

Though I've been lax with blogging this month, I've been pretty busy with hobby.

I went down to Warhammer World last week to play a few games with the UK Freebootaz. We only playing 1000 point games so I took my Witch Hunters, but I was still short on a couple of painted units, namely 2 Exorcists:

The GW one has been sat on my shelf for nearly a year (I got it for Christmas 2009) and was such a sod to put together I went for the Forge World Exorcist for the second one which was much easier if less visually impressive.

Here was the list I took with me:

Canoness, jump pack, bolt pistol, frag grenades, cloak of St. Aspira, Blessed Weapon, Book of St Lucius

Inquisitor Lord with psychic hood and bolter, 3 gun servitors with heavy bolters

10 Battle Sisters inc, a Veteran Sister with Book, Heavy Flamer, Meltagun, Rhino with smoke launchers

10 Battle Sisters inc, a Veteran Sister with Book, Storm Bolter, Meltagun, Rhino with smoke launchers

5 Inquisitorial Storm Troopers with a grenade launcher

Exorcist with searchlight

I played two games with this list both against Space Marines, and to my surprise won both (I'm still not sure whether this was luck or judgement).

The Exorcists absolutely rock, they were instrumental in both games in dealing with TH/SS terminators (I faced 5 in the first game, 7 in the second).

Although I felt a bit cheesy, the Inquisitor Lord's unlimited range psychic hood was very useful in game two as it prevented 7 TH/SS terminator and a librarian from using Gate of Infinity to get across the table at me. He's a must take in this army. I'm not sold yet on the gun servitors, they need a bit more testing.

The 5 ISTs were handy as well as a cheap objective holding unit. They won't stand up to anything much, but they freed up my Battle Sisters to do their job.

All in all, I'm looking forward to running this army again.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T09:00:00.000Z

Happy New Year to you! Traditionally, this is the time of year for making resolutions for the forthcoming year.

Looking back, my resolutions from last year were:

1- Build, paint and play at least 1 game with my new Ogre Kingdoms army DONE Played 4 small games

2- Complete my Witch Hunters army to 1500 points FAILED Failed kind of, partly due to GW withdrawing the basic troop box.

3- Build and paint at least one super heavy DONE Kind of. Painted my Doomsday Device, but I built that in 2010.

4- Play at least 25 games total of either 40K or Fantasy FAILED Only managed 20 games

5- Play in at least one proper tournament DONE Played in both UK Freebootaz tournamnents this year.

6- Paint at least 120 points worth of minis on the lonepilgrim painting point scheme (I did 109 in 2010) DONE I painted 144 points worth.

Here's what I aim to be doing for 2011:

1- Buy less models, and paint the ones I've got
2- Finish my Witch Hunters to the 1500 point list I've written (I technically have more than 1500 points worth)
3- Finish my Ogre army
4- Play some Malifaux
5- Play 25 games of either 40K or Fantasy
6- Get some work done on my 40K Chaos Daemons army

Battle Sisters

2010-12-24T15:37:00.002Z

Another Christmas is over, and I'm back at work now, so it gives me a bit of time to update the blog ;)

I've been fairly busy these past couple of weeks working on a few Battle Sisters. I'm meeting up with some of the other UK Bootaz at Warhammer World in January for a day of gaming, and we're going to be playing 1000 point game. As it's a relatively small points size, I thought I'd get the Witch Hunters out for a spin, so I needed to get some more painted.

I've had this unit sat around primed for months now, but at least they're finished to a table top standard:

The Veteran Sister Superior's book came out pretty well:

I also got enough time to quickly paint their ride:

In the next three weeks, I've got 5 Storm Troopers to paint (and build first), and two Exorcists which may or may not happen.

Urban War Triad Kabuki

2010-12-03T11:10:00.000Z

I've had these Urban War miniatures sitting in their box unpainted and unloved for over year now, so I thought I'd break these out for a forthcoming painting competition on at the club. This year, non-GW models are allowed to enter which I don't think they were last year. The Triad Kabuki figure was my favourite one in the set so I thought I'd have a go at her.

I've been trying to push myself a bit further with my painting recently, which is one of the reasons I chose this. It really wanted to be painted in bold colour, and cried out for some free hand work. I generally suck at painting both red and yellow, but I'm pleased with how they've come out. The picture makes the red look a bit shiny which it actually isn't.

The red was done with a Mechrite Red base, Devlan Mud wash then layers of Red Gore going up to Blood Red. For the yellow I started with Iyanden Dark Sun, followed by Sunburst Yellow with more and more Skull White added.

I know what I can do differently next time to improve it as the paint isn't that smooth in some areas, but overall I'm very pleased.

The base is a resin insert from Fenris Games, one of their city ruins/apocalypse ones. These are nice bases, though there's a couple that might be a bit awkward to position figures on. They're very reasonably prices though, about £4 for 10 shipped.

Freebootaz Open Tournament

2010-12-02T10:30:00.002Z

I played in my first proper tournment last weekend at Maelstrom Games. There was a 1750 point singles on Saturday and a 1500 point doubles on Sunday, so I played at 1750 and helped out with the running on Sunday.

We had 34 players in the singles tournament, and there were some top flight players there including ETC team members.

Here's the list I took, using Codex: Chaos Space Marines:

Daemon Prince, Mark of Nurgle, Wings, Warptime
Daemon Prince, Mark of Nurgle, Wings, Warptime

7 Plague Marines, including a Champion with Power Fist, 2 melta guns, personal icon, rhino
7 Plague Marines, including a Champion with Power Fist, 2 melta guns, personal icon, rhino
7 Plague Marines, including a Champion with Power Fist, 2 flamers, personal icon, rhino
8 Summoned Lesser Daemons
7 Summoned Lesser Daemons

2 Obliterators
2 Obliterators
Vindicator

It's not too far from my usual list really. The problem was I was playing it....

With hindsight, I'd change the list around to drop the Vindicator and take a unit of Chosen instead. Normally I won't run without Chosen in a rhino, but I've only got 3 rhinos in my collection so I had to leave them out. The Vindicator pretty much did nothing in every game.

I had 4 good games, and everyone I played was very nice and sporting. The tournament scenarios were a little unusual, and some favoured certain armies over others.

Game 1:
The was called "Head Hunter" and was kind of like kill points but you had to kill all the squad leaders in certain sections of the FOC. I was drawn against a Space Wolves player, running Logan, rune priest, scouts, 10 Wolf Guard, 3 small Grey Hunter units and 3 packs of Long Fangs. I got stuffed. I had some pretty rotten luck, losing both Daemon Princes to deep strike problems, gifting him 5 battle points, but I also played pretty badly as well. I lost.

Game 2:
The was objective based, but your deployment was at one end of the table and the objectives were at the other. I drew Eldar, probably the last army you want to play in this mission. You could only deploy HQ and Fast Attack at the start, and since I didn't have any FA I reserved everything. This meant my Lesser Daemon were destroyed as there weren't any icon deployed when they arrived. 200 points and 2 troop choices gone. I didn't play so badly in this one, and I contested all the objectives expect the big one at the other end of the table and it was relatively close on victory points. Still a defeat though.

Game 3:
This was a loot counter mission where you had to pick them up and get them back to your deployment zone. I played one of the guys from the Claws and Fists blog, who was running a Vulkan list. He easily took the game on battle points, getting 3 loot counters to my one (I was carrying the fifth one but didn't get it back in time), but we were in about 10 victory points of each other so we were drawn on that part.

Game 4:
The pairing had been random to this point, but in the final round they were seeded, where first played second etc. Unsurprisingly, I was on the bottom table. This was mission was "Retrieve the Spy", where you had a spy hidden in your opponents army which you had to reveal by destroying the unit and get him off your table edge. I was up against a fellow UK Freeboota so I knew were going to have a laugh, and he was playing Chaos. We both revealed the spy but neither of us got him off the table edge (he just died too easily). There were also two objectives as well. I did better in this one, taking an objective and killing a load of stuff.

Overall, 3 losses and 1 win put me 25th out of 34, but I had 4 good games of 40K so you can't get better than that. My stated aim was not to finish last and I did manage that. Next time, I'll be striving to finish in the top half.

Display Board

2010-11-23T11:10:00.001Z

I'm playing in a Warhammer 40K tournament at Maelstrom Games this weekend, where I'll be using by Chaos Space Marines. As part of the tournie, there is a "Best Painted Army" contest, which is being done in a beauty pagent style on Saturday lunch time. I really don't expect to win that, but to give myself the best chance of doing so, I needed to make a display board.

My main aim was to keep it cheap, so basically it was built with stuff I already had lying around. It's not fancy, it's not got anything cool like magnet to hold miniatures, and it's really too heavy to be lugging around to transport miniatures on, but it'll do the job for the painting contest.

It's been made to keep in with the ash waste/moonscape style basing I decide to use on both my CSMs and Witch Hunters.

To give you an idea of size and how it fits with the basing style, here's it with some minis on it:

I did a dry run at the weekend with my CSMs, but I'm not going to show you that as I'm sure some of the guys who will be playing at the weekend will be reading this and I don't want to reveal my list yet (mind you I don't think it'll help me much ;).

Construction of the board was done using stuff I found lying around the house.

-Base of MDF left over from when we had a new kitchen last year
-Bit of broken cork sheet (about 5mm think) I found in the loft
-2" foam offcuts left over from a club terrain project
-Cork bark hills (the previous owner of my house had a model railway in the loft and he left some bits behind)
-Lots of filler (the kind of stuff you use for filling in holes in walls eg Polyfilla), sand, gravel

Construction and painting was probably a couple of hours in total, though spread over several days.

Step 1: Cut two 2" foam triangles to go into the corners, PVA them on to the board. Hot wire cutters are ideal for cutting foam, but I didn't have any so I used a box saw. Use a sanding block to smooth off any rough patches.
Step 2: Glue cork bark to the front of the foam
Step 3: Glue bit of broken up cork sheet to the base to create an uneven surface
Step 4: Mix filler with sand and gravel, spread liberally over the base. Hands work to do the spreading, but I found a lolly stick to be better.
Step 5: Use filler mix to blend cork bark into the foam hills
Step 6: Leave this to dry for several days
Step 7: Mix PVA with a bit of water and paint liberally. I gave it a couple of coats to ensure all the sand and gravel is well stuck down. Make sure you cover the foam well with this mix if you're going to spray prime it.
Step 8: Prime it black
Step 9: Paint it black with household emulsion. I bought a couple of black tester pots for this which I finally found in Homebase. Black doesn't seem to be that popular for household walls...
Step 10: Drybrush dark grey using household emulsion (this was from B&Q and is called Soft Black).
Step 11: Mix some white emulsion with the grey, keep drybrushing until you are happy.

Obviously my intention was to create an ash waste theme, but the same technique can be applied to any surface. For example:

-Churned mud: Build in the same way, painting using dark brown with lighter drybrushes. You could use gloss varnish or water effects to create pool of water.
-Grass: Leave off the broken cork sheet, and leave out the gravel from the filler mix. Paint light brown and flock to taste.
-Snow: Depending on what effect you were after, you could do it as churned mud and add snow effects after. Alternatively, you go less rough like the grass method, paint the board pale grey with white highlights and then add you're preffered snow effects.

Cheap and easy wet palette

2010-11-10T15:35:00.000Z

For my Ogre Tyrant, I made the first use of my wet palette. I'd had the stuff on my desk for a couple of months, but to be honest I haven't painted much since mid-September. I'm really glad I did though as it definitely helped me layer paint much smoother, and I could use the paint for several days without wasting it.

Here's what I made mine from:

-Sponge cloths for washing up with (99p for 6)
-Plastic box with lid (I bought 5 for 99p)
-Baking Parchment (found in the kitchen)

To make the palette:
-Cut the sponge to fit into the base of the plastic box
-Cut a piece of parchment to fit into the box, it'll need to be small enough to go flat onto the sponge
-Wet the sponge. From my messing about it need to be fairly wet, not dripping, but pretty wet.
-Wet the parchment and slap it on top of the sponge, making sure it's flat to the sponge

...and that's it.

The paint will stay workable for days. Looking at mine now, there's paint on there which I put on it three days ago and it's still wet and workable.

Total cost, probably £2 which will give you enough material to build 5 completely seperate palettes.

Ogre Tyrant

2010-11-07T15:17:00.005Z

I've just put the finishing touches on my Ogre Tyrant/Bruiser this afternoon:

I'm well pleased with this one. The green stuff fur I scuplted has painted up pretty well (work in progress here). The purple gut plate is to represent a Gut Maw, where his gut plate eats enemy characters and sends them straight to the Great Maw.

Something that really helped with painting this miniatures, and why I didn't do it earlier I don't know, was using a wet palette. It helped alot with layering the cloak, the flesh and the metal. I'll probably post something on how I made the palette in a few days.

First Dark Heresy campaign draws to a close

2010-10-07T13:13:00.001+01:00

I'm just coming to the end of my first Dark Heresy campaign which I played in via a forum (looking back it's coming towards 4 months since we started), and I've very much enjoyed it. The game was GM'ed by Brother Aaron (check out his site, the Mystical Throne) and it all went very well.

Play by forum isn't easy, and as you can probably imagine, it's fairly slow paced. The GM wisely abandoned posting order when not in combat which helped the game flow on more quickly, but you definitely need a group who are going to checking the forum regualrly for it to work. By regularly, I mean every day. That said we still lost two players from our starting six, so we drafted in a replacement and shared the other character between us.

The adventure was "Maggots in the Meat" from the GM's kit which was a fairly straightforward mission which I think worked pretty well for play by forum as there didn't seem to be too much investigation work to get stuck on. The final combat was pretty tough though. Our party was fairly combat heavy: 2 guardsmen, 1 assassin, 1 cleric, 1 techpriest and 1 scum (me). If you're interested you can download a read full transcript of the game here.

My character, Sham, is now rank 2, so he's taken +5 Fel, Inquiry, Peer (Underworld) and Common Lore (Underworld) to keep in with his hive scum theme. He was pretty handy in combat, but can't take much damage. We acquired some armour in the last game which helped, and I've also changed his main weapon from a shotgun to an autogun. The shotgun only has a two round clip, and takes two full turns to reload, whereas a Full Auto burst from an autogun is pretty nasty.

His next mission is already a foot and should be starting in the next week or two. Our next campaign is entitled "The Lost", and we'll be keeping 3 of the current team together.

In similar news, I'll also be playing in a play by forum Death Watch campaign using the free download intro rules which should be interesting. I'm playing Brother Gregor of the Storm Wardens chapter.

Completed Obliterators

2010-10-04T21:05:00.004+01:00

I had a marvellous time at Warhammer World last week, but the I still haven't got the pictures off my camera yet so I'll post them up when I can.

In the meantime, I finished my Obliterators the night before I went (I was up until a ridiculous time finishing them off):

I really didn't want to go to WHW without a fully painted army, so I blew threw these oblitz pretty quickly. I might redo the yellow pustule on the guy on the right, it depends on whether I have time or not.

I did also pick up some of the Forgeworld weathering powders (and some other FW stuff as well) which I've played about with on a rhino, but I'm still experimenting so I'll post something once I'm happier with the results.

Just packing my stuff...

2010-09-28T19:38:00.001+01:00

I'm just in the process of getting my minis sorted, my rulebook, dice and so on together. Why? I'm going to Warhammer World tomorrow! It'll be the first time I've been down there so I'm looking forward to it immensly.

I'll be sure to post up some pictures when I get back.

Re-basing

2010-09-24T07:45:00.000+01:00

I hit a bit of a problem with a two current Daemon Prince models. One of them is a scratch build and the other is a conversion of the Necron Nightbringer. When I put them together, I put them both on 40mm bases, as the old metal undivided Daemon Prince was on a 40mm base. Since then of course, GW have bought out the new plastic Daemon Prince, who is on a 60mm dreadnought size base (as was the old metal Nurgle DP in fact). For the tournament I'm playing in, I hadn't really thought too much about it, but I double checked with the TO and he ruled that any model must be on the same base size as the current GW model meaning a 60mm base for Daemon Princes. Probably if I'd just turned up with them on 40mm bases, I don't think anyone would have complained, but I don't want any accusations of cheese or cheating.

This gave me a problem. The two models were very solidly pinned, glued and green stuffed to the current bases and getting them off those bases would probably have damaged the models so I needed a solution. I was looking on ebay for new 60mm bases when I came across these:

These are 60mm plywood discs, and I got 24 of them for £3 or so (bearing in mind a GW base of the same size if £2.50 for one) courtesy of Fenris Games. The good part about these is that they are only 1.5mm thick.

Because the plywood bases a quite thin, I was able to mount the models on top of them without removing them from the current bases. Once they were stuck on there, I built up the rest of the base with milliput, sand, stones etc and painted them:

This saved me a whole load of hassle, money and potential damage to the models.

Completed Chaos Rhino

2010-09-21T08:33:00.000+01:00

As I've been drawing up my 1750 point list for the tournament, it's clear I was short of one thing: transports. In fun games, I'm not all that bothered if a couple of units of Plague Marines have to walk but for the tournament they need to punch in a bit more and get to where I need them more quickly. Being skint the first thing I did was get on ebay to track down a rhino as cheaply as possible. I managed to pick up a mark one Rhino for £2.70 which was good, but it needed some work doing (it was missing side doors for example). No problem for me, I was going to Nurgle the thing anyway:

I actually think the top part (which was metal) in from an old vindicator or something as it doesn't have the two hatches the old rhino used to have. Taking the chassis, it was a case of just raiding the bitz box and repairing the thing. I've got so many bitz from Chaos vehicles it was fairly easy. The spikes on the front are from the Vampire Counts corpse cart, as it the body on a rope on the side.

Painting was my usual Catachan Green, washes (green, then brown and purple on the rotting parts), then drybrushing to add the highlighting.

One drawback of the mark one is that it is slightly smaller than the current rhino. This sort of cuts two ways. On the plus side it's slightly easier to hide it, but on the downside, it's harder to hide troops behind it.

Gun Servitors

2010-09-19T09:27:00.001+01:00

These guys have been sat on the "To Do" shelf for months now (looking back the WIP was posted in March), so I slapped some paint on them for a break from green stuffing obliterators.

This one was a fairly quick paint job, but it'll do. I'm pleased with how the face has come out on the guy on the right. The scuplt really gives him that mindless servitor look.

Battle Report: Chaos Space Marines Vs Blood Angels

2010-09-17T14:29:00.000+01:00

I got my first game against the new Blood Angels Codex (I know it's been out for a while, but I've mostly been playing Fantasy) on Wednesday night. The games was at 1350 points, annhiliation with the spearhead deployment.

The BA army was something similar to:
-Mephiston
-5 Sanguinary Guard, with +1 Attack banner
-5 Assault troops with jump packs, power fist, infernus pistol
-5 Death Company with jump packs, power fist
-10 Tactical Marines in a Rhino, melta gun, missile launcher
-5 Scouts
-5 Devastators with 4 heavy weapons

I was playing a couple of different options with my list. I took Wind of Chaos on my Daemon Prince instead of my usual Warptime, took 2 squads of 2 Obliterators, and a small unit of Lesser Daemons. I was trying some stuff out to crystalize what I'm planning for a forthcoming tournament.

I had some decent luck right at the start. I got to pick the table quarter, and chose one with some high buildings for my Oblitz to go in. I also opted to go second and then stole the initiative.

It was a good game and I emerged the winner with 6 kill points Vs 3 kill points. Mephiston was pretty scary, but his lack of an Inv save hurts him. He lost 1 wound to a perils of the warp, one to a power fist, one to a melta and the final one to a bolt pistol (!). He'd chewed up a whole squad of Plague Marines before this, and was just out of range to chew up my Daemon Prince, though the Sanguinary Guard managed to do that anyway.

With regard to my list tweaks, Wind of Chaos I only got to use once and I really could have got more use out of Warptime. With Warptime I'm pretty sure my Daemon Prince could have annhilated the Sanguinary Guard in combat and then taken on Mephiston, so I'm going to take that in future.

Oblitz are definitely in. They're excellently flexible, and took out a rhino, 3 devastators and 4 Death Company before they ran out of targets.

Summoned Lesser Daemons I've used before and like them alot. They're useful to bolster your lines where they're needed, in this game that was to support the Plague Marine squad who were taking out the tactical marines, and they're the cheapest thing I've got to hold objectives.

I just need to get a few games in with the list at 1750 points before November now.

Nurgle Obliterators WIP

2010-09-16T07:14:00.000+01:00

I've got a 1750 point tournament coming up in November, so I've been putting some work in on my Chaos Space Marines. The heavy support choices that I currently have I didn't really fit in with what I wanted to do. One Defiler is pretty much toast, so I initially thought of going with 3 of them but financially I just didn't want to do it. In the end I decided to go with some Obliterators, four in fact.

I really don't like the official model that much. It's expensive, and not that nice, plus I hear they are a pain to build. What I decided to do was get some AoBR and convert them.

A terminator is slightly smaller than an obliterator, I've tried to bulk them up a bit so they're now more of less the same size. The rest of the conversion was bitz and green stuff. These ones will be next on the painting table.

Back in the saddle again

2010-09-13T07:05:00.002+01:00

A month seems to have gone by since my last post, which is pretty lax of me. It's not that I haven't been doing anything, quite the contrary, plus I've been really busy at work and at home.

I'll be posting up some stuff I'm doing and have completed these past couple of weeks over the next few days. I've got a 40K tournament coming up at the end of November, so alot of my focus has been around getting my Chaos Space Marines into shape for that.

One pretty cool thing I got to was last Thursday. I was down in London with work, and it just so happened there was a Black Library event on at Forbidden Planet in London. There was a good collection of authors there: James Swallow, Sandy Mitchell. Nick Kyme, Graham McNeill, Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett.

I managed to get Titanicus signed by Mr Abnett himself:

Ogre Ironguts

2010-08-10T17:06:00.005+01:00

I've got my next unit finished now in my Ogre army: a unit of Ironguts.

The faces were harder to paint on these ones, due to the more restricted poses of the miniatures (the arms in front of the face, the helmets etc). The banner was done in much the same way as the banner on the Ogre Bulls I completed a couple of weeks ago.

I've resolved to push myself a little bit more with each paint job, to try something new each time, maybe some freehand, or wet blending, so that's going to be my resolution for future units. I was going to freehand a bit more on the banner, but I didn't get chance.

Next up: build my giant (I built 6 more Bulls last week as well), then I've got a couple of 40K projects I need to get done soon, namely 6 Obliterator conversions from AoBR terminators, and a new Rhino. I managed to pick up a classic Mark I Rhino on ebay which needs a bit of attention but I should be able to turn it into a suitably Nurgle vehicle.

Touched by the hand of celebrity (sort of)

2010-07-28T09:15:00.000+01:00

I was skimming through my FaceBook feed this morning, when I see a post from the day before yesterday on the My Battalion page:

http://mybattalion.com/content/artic...-by-tigerstyle

That looks familiar, I thought...

The admins at My Battalion had picked out my Ogres to feature on the hobby page! I was quite excited, sad but true.

And it was picked on my birthday as well :D

Battle Report: Chaos Space Marines Vs Imperial Guard

2010-07-27T16:16:00.001+01:00

I had been planning on playing 8th Edition Fantasy at club night last week, but I couldn't find anyone with a small army so I ended up playing 40K instead. I haven't played 40K for a while so it was a nice change.

I was playing an Imperial Guard player, who's army had more heavy weapons than I've ever seen in one army. He must have had about 20 or so heavy weapons teams, plus 3 Leman Russ (one ordinary, one exterminator and one punisher), plus some veterans. There were so many gun teams in fact, I'm not wholly sure how he?d managed to get them all in, but then again, I don?t know the IG codex that well. Anyway, it was Annhilation with Dawn of War deployment.

In my list, it was more or less my usual 1500 point list, except that I dropped the Defiler and Vindicator in favour of 2 squads of 2 Obliterators. This was one of the driving forces for me for the game, as I've got a tournament coming up in November so I thought I give them a try and see what the fuss was about.

My plan was fairly simple: get close and kill IG in assault. This is exactly what I did. My units suffered a bit on the way over there, but once I got there I was able to tear units apart. IG have nothing really against a unit of Plague Marines up close, even two of the Leman Russ were of limit use. The Punisher cannon was pretty useless against T5, FnP Plague Marines. Even my Rhino got in on the act and tank shocked 3 heavy bolter teams off the table. So the end result was a win for me by tabling him in turn 6.

The obliterators worked fairly well, while they didn't kill much they felt pretty threatening throughout the whole game. I had lost three of them by the end, but not one had died to enemy fire. No, my dreadnought had gone into a fire frenzy twice and killed three of them. The game helped me with some thoughts around what will we be in my tournament list (Obliterators) and what won't be (Dreadnoughts, of which I had thought about taking three).

Ogre Butcher

2010-07-20T20:41:00.004+01:00

I've not had much time to devoted to painting recently, but I've just managed to get my Ogre Butcher finished:

The Halfling Cookbook:

The apron wasn't very smooth, I'm weak at smooth green stuff. With hindsight, I should have used milliput as that's much easier to get smooth.

The blood sprays on the apron were done with a mix of scab red and chaos black. I then thinned that down, and dipped an old toothbrush in it. I then used the stiff bristlles of the toothbrush to flick the paint over the model, mainly the apron and the cleavers. After than I added some more blobs of paint by stippling Scab Red and then Red Gore to highlight some of the larger blobs.

Ironguts are on the table next.

Ogre Bulls: Finished

2010-07-04T21:10:00.004+01:00

Just found a spare half an hour this weeks to finish off the bases, to complete my first fully painted unit for my Ogre Kingdoms army: 4 Bulls with additional hand weapons.

The colour selection for the minis was a bit of a gamble, as I hand't painted any test models before hand to try it out like I'd done for previous armies. I knew I wanted to do snow bases, and knew that I wanted to keep to a fairly muted, cold palette for the unit as I plan for them to be from the high peaks of the Mountains of Mourn. I quite like the colour selection, but I'm not sure on the banner background for a future colour, I think it needs more contrast.

Mostly the unit was done with GW foundation paints, with Adeptus Battlegrey and Astronomicon Grey for the skin, Fenris Grey, highlighted up to Shadow Grey for the trousers.

Generally speaking, I'm pretty rubbish at painting faces, but the size and level of detail on the Ogres meant it was quite easy to do. I'm particularly pleased with the Bellower.

The standard was a bit of a gamble as well, as I hadn't planned out any kind of army or tribe symbols so after much deliberating I went for the symbol of the Great Maw. I figured I could always paint over it if it went wrong. I started but drawing around a 1 penny piece with a pencil to give me a circle to work to, then I drew in the teeth part with the same pencil. Once that was done I painted them in with Mechrite Red, highlighted with Blood Red and touched over any stray pencil lines or red paint with the grey.

The bases were done using GW snow, something I hadn't used before. I toyed with painting parts of the base white first and then snow covering those, but in the end I decided a more natural effect would be to do the snow in a couple of layers. I think next time I'll texture the base a bit more first with some milliput to provide lumps and bumps and then add the snow in a couple of layers.

With 8th Ed just around the corner, this unit will probably get bulked out to 5 models and have a character added to give it two ranks of 3 Ogres. I envisage using my Butcher in this unit, so that's what is going under the brush next.

Precinct Omega Podcast

2010-07-02T10:41:00.002+01:00

If you're after a new podcast to listen to, then I can thoroughly recommended the Precinct Omega hobbycast. It's five episodes old, and I'm really enjoying it, it's a change from the usual podcast fair as it focuses purely on hobby stuff for all different types of miniature painting. Robey from Precinct Omega studios is a great painter so the information is very good (he used to go to my local club before he moved down south), so check out his podcast here, or search for precinctomega on iTunes.

Morbus Legion

2010-06-30T10:30:00.000+01:00

I got a new case last week (A Father's Day present), so I had to unpack my whole army from the crappy boxes I used to keep them in and re-pack them in the new case. I don't think I've ever had them all out in one place before, so I took some pictures before they all went back in the box.

Troops, including 35 Plague Marines and 44 Lesser Daemons and a couple of rides:

HQ choices, 2 Daemon Princes, a Sorcerer, and the only non-Nurgle model in the army:

My Elites, terminators, dread, and Chosen:

Heavy Support, Defiler, Vindicator and Doomsday Device:

Anyway, they're back in the box now until the next Apocalypse game!

Battle Report: Ogres Vs Dark Elves

2010-06-27T11:12:00.001+01:00

I played two 1000 point games last week, both against the same player who was running Dark Elves. I can sum both games up in a short phrase: I got mashed.

Here's my list:

Brusier, Heavy Armour, Great Weapon, 2 Gnoblar Thiefstones, Fistful of Laurels
Buther, Bangstick and Dispell scroll

4 Ironguts, Standard with Look-out Gnoblar and a Bellower
4 Bulls, additional HW, Standard with Look-out Gnoblar and a Bellower

2 Leadbelchers
2 Leadbelchers

The Dark Elves were all mounted, led by a lvl 2 magic user. He had two units of Dark Ridesr, a unit of Cold One Knights and a repeater bolt thrower. In the first game he include a unit of Shades with an Assassin. For the second game he swapped the shades and assassins for a hero on a manticore (which was brutal).

Dark Elves are a tough list, they had a fair amount shooting and fast moving cavalry which meant it was hard for me to get into combat with them. I killed the Cold Ones in both games, since they were the only unit he had that really wanted to get close to me. The shades and assassins also got killed to some decent magic from the Butcher (bang stick and bone cruncher). Other than that he took me apart with shooting and magic.

With 8th Edition around the corner, I suppose alot of things I took away from these games will change in 8th. One thing that will be better is ranked Ogres, since they are monstrous infantry the second rank get up to 3 attacks each, plus the Stomp attack. So with 6 Ogres with no upgrades you're getting 18 S4 attacks, plus Bull Charge (at S5), plus the Stomp attacks. Add in the rank and the standard and you're potentially getting some decent combat res.

Probably what I will do is expand my Bulls to a 5 Ogre unit and add a character to it, or put it at 6, and throw 2 characters in with my Ironguts.

In the new White Dwarf, Phil Kelly has picked an Ogre list for 8th Edition. He's got a 6 wide horde unit of 15 Bulls, which is clearly going to be pretty nasty. The drawback is going to be that it's massive (so hard to manoever), it's 575 points, and Ld 7. I suppose if you stuck your general and BSB in there you'll be testing on his Ld with a re-roll but it's a lot of points to risk panicking of the board on turn 1.

What won't change in 8th is the Gut Magic miscast table will still be brutal.

Ogre Character from Avatars of War

2010-06-25T20:30:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post, Avatars of War have got a new (to me anyway) Ogre character out:

He looks like a perfect Tyrant or Bruiser. I've got an AoW Chaos Warrior sat primed on my painting table and the quality of the minis is really good, and the sculpts are great.

2nd Birthday

2010-06-24T09:24:00.002+01:00

Today (24th June) marks the second birthday of this blog, and honestly, it doesn't feel like two years ago since I started this. So thanks for reading, and hopefully I can't getting back to some more regular updates in the coming months!

Shoot 'em in the head

2010-06-23T10:16:00.001+01:00

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth - Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Here's what I spent the last couple of weeks doing the second half of: a Plague of Zombies.

I did the first 20 of these a few months back, over the last couple of weeks I've done the other 24 of them and the Plague Lord to lead them.

These are some close up example of them (I might do a banner for the guy in the middle eventually). For each group of 10-12, I probably spent around 2-3 hours on them, so they're not great but they look good as whole. The skin was basically done by drybrushing three shades of green from the foundation range over black.

Game-wise, these zombies have a triple usage:
-Summoned Lesser Daemons in a standard game using the Chaos Space Marines
-Plaguebearers in my (still WIP) Chaos Daemons army
-A Plague of Zombies in an Apocalypse game

The Plague of Zombies needs a Plague Master to lead it:

The picture didn't come out that well, but you get the idea. This model was converted from the Necromancer from the Corpse Cart model, with a head and weapon swap. I got a bit stuck for ideas on the scythe handle so it looks a bit flat. I might try some wood grain on it if I get chance.

In praise of Gryphonne Sepia

2010-06-21T10:13:00.003+01:00

Everyone loves Devlan Mud. Slap some Devlan Mud on a mini, instant depth for a table top mini. I love Devlan Mud myself.

But, there's one other colour in the wash set that I love nearly as much, one that is a bit in the shadow of the mighty Devlan Mud: Gryphonne Sepia. This is a colour I've been using more and more, often to tint or shade much lighter bases colours.

Let me share some examples using some of the minis I've done over the past year (these have all been on the blog before).

Firstly, Gryphonne Sepia to shade parchment:

The Sage was done with a Dheneb Stone base, washed with Sepia and then a highlight of Dheneb Stone. The Familiars had similar but I think I used Kommando Khaki as a base for them. Quick and easy, this is also good for things like purity seals.

I also use the Sepia for pallid skin tones:

On the subject of painting skin tones, check out the Precinct Omega podcast episode 3 (in fact check out all of them) which has an excellent section on painting differing types of skin tones.

I also use Gryphonne Sepia for bone or horn as well if I want something quick. This is what I used on the horns and claws for my Nurgle Dreadnought:

...and my Eversor (bit of a small pic, but it was the only one I had to hand):

I've also used it to quickly do the skull work on terrain as well. Both of these were done over a base of Astronomicon Grey and the Sepia tints it nicely.

Finally, I've also used Gryphonne Sepia to tint silver to give a pale gold. This is an idea I stole from the Painting Corps, and used on my Inquisitor's power sword handle:

Along with Liche Purple and Dheneb Stone, I'd rank Gryphonne Sepia as one of my favourite colours to work with.

Dark Heresy Campaign

2010-06-19T09:50:00.001+01:00

A couple of months back, I managed to pick up the Dark Heresy core rulebook on ebay at a pretty reasonable price. It was all the cooler as it was signed by GW artist Karl Kopinski, as it was Karl's wife that was selling it.

So I've been wanting to try it out, but normally on club nights I prefer to play 40K or Fantasy rather than anything else.

Having said that, I've actually rolled up a character this week, as I'm hoping to play in an online Dark Heresy campaign via the Freebootaz forums.

I decided to play a Scum character, as I've always liked the Underhive ganger type of character so that's what I went for. I haven't really done much roleplaying for the last 15 years, last time I played was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition I think.

I've written up a background for the character, it's a bit cliched, but I'm still learning and I couldn't think of a really unique angle. I originally wanted him to be a master forger, but I think for that I'd really need to play an Adept which I didn't particularly want to. Instead I went for a more classic Hive ganger by the name of Sil "Sham" Drust, complete with tattoos and ultraviolence. I kind of imagined him a bit like Joe Peschi in Good Fellas: violently underpredictable. Being a Scum class means he get pretty high Fel scores to start with and some Fel based skills, so I think he's probably pretty charming until you either cross him, or you don't give him what he wants, then the ultra-violence starts.

I'll share some updates for how Sham progresses once the campaign get going a bit more

Battle Report: Ogres Vs Bretonnians

2010-06-17T15:48:00.003+01:00

Firstly, apologies for the lack of updates to the blog. Over the last few weeks, I've been working really hard so I haven't had much time for hobby. What I have had time for has been cleaning, assembling and priming models, none of which are very exciting blog topics.

Anyway, I did get a game in last night, my third game of Fantasy. I've only got 1000 points of Ogres, so a club mate was good enough to lend me some extra models. I grabbed some models from his case which I approximated to be around 2000 points (I think, it was in that area anyway), so this was going to be the largest game I've played on my own. I was lining up against Bretonnians (hi Ryan if you're reading this!), and I didn't have much chance of winning from the kick off, mainly because my opponent is a far better general than me, but the game was a good chance for me to learn some basic stuff and have a laugh.

So the result was pretty inevitable. The Bretonnian army wasn't the usual one you picture when you think of that army, as it had a load of peasant bowmen, a trebuchet, a couple of big infantry blocks, all support by a unit of Knights led the general and 3 Pegasus knights. I was worried about getting too shot up so I deployed behind some terrain for a good half of my army, which did protect me from shooting but prevented me from getting anywhere. I'd probably have been better just deploying the whole army infront of his gun line and running at him, and taking whatever he was throwing at me.

I have to say, in this game, I could not roll a dice to save my life. I rolled 2s and 3s to run away from combat, I miscast on two dice twice and then my Butcher's lost all their spells for the whole game, my Tyrant was held for two rounds of combat with a unit peasant bowmen as I could only kill one per turn. Rubbish. To be fair, the best luck in the world probably wouldn't have saved me from my tactical errors.

For my character loadout, I tried the Daemon killer scars on my Tyrant (meaning he caused terror), but it didn't pay off that well. On the Butchers, the bangstick was the only thing which actually managed to kill any knights so that worked well.

Good game though. Roll on 8th Edition, just placed my order from Maelstrom Games for it yesterday.

Spearhead

2010-05-26T14:38:00.000+01:00

The new White Dwarf arrived this morning, complete with the new spearhead rules.

Here's the headline points on Spearhead:

-Force org chart is unchanged in terms of what you can take, but it adds in the ability to take spearhead formations in addition to the usual slots. There are no compulsory slots.

-Spearhead formations seem to be like apocalypse formations in that they cost some points plus models, there's one provided in WD which consists of 3 tanks or walkers gives all the models the Tank Hunter special rule for an additional 60 points on top of the model cost. More formations will be on the website, and there will be super-heavy spearheads

-Game is played from short edge to short edge

-3 new missions: Breakthrough (VP for being in the opponents half), lightning war (3 objectives), vital ground (objectives but one is nominated as the vital objective so gives 3 VPs)

-Random game length as usual

-Troops, tanks, walkers and spearhead units are scoring

-3 new deployment methods: Counter attack (deploy in a wedge shape formation), cauldron (bit like pitched battle) and Escalation (bit like Dawn of War, in you deploy one spearhead or three non-spearhead units and everything else is in reserve).

Second time with the Ogres

2010-05-20T13:53:00.002+01:00

I got game 2 in with the Ogres this week, again doubling up with another player like last week like last week. We were taking on Skaven this time, with a magic heavy list (11 power dice and 7 warp tokens). We got stomped flat.

Both these games have really helped me get a little insight into the army strengths and weaknesses. Psychology really hurt us alot in this game with a unit of 7 Bulls and a Butcher panicking off the table on turn 1 (a good demonstration of why the MSU style list would have helped), plus my Bruiser and 4 Ironguts losing a combat against a unit of giant rats, failing their break test (even with a reroll) and being run down.

I'll be back again next week with the big guys.

First time out for the Ogres

2010-05-13T21:11:00.007+01:00

I took my newly assembled Ogres out to club night last for their first game. Now, I haven't played Fantasy since 2nd Edition so I wasn't exactly expecting to win. I'd put together a 1000 point list out of the Bruiser, Butcher, Bulls, Ironguts and Leadbelchers I'd made out of the battalion box.

I teamed up with another Ogre player who had about 1400 points worth of troops, and we squared off against Tomb Kings. I made some pretty elimentary mistakes thanks to my inexperience and lack of knowledge, but we actually ended up winning the game, surprisingly.

Having played 40K exclusively for so long, adjusting my mindset to a game where you don't have a 360 degree field of vision took me a couple of turns to get used to; along with getting used to a game which is won and lost in deployment and the movement phase but I enjoyed it alot, I'm really looking forward to 8th Edition.

Just playing this one game really helped me to develop ideas about what is good and bad in the list I'd built, and how Ogres are played, built and deployed. Probably over the next couple of months, I'll be adding a couple more units to bring me up to 1500 points. I'll probably pick up another box of Bulls and possibly a gorger or a giant (I love the giant model).

Ogre Characters WIP Part II

2010-05-08T20:52:00.004+01:00

Following on from yesterday's Bruiser, here's my more or less done Butcher:

Again, kit bashed from the Ogre Battalion box. The apron didn't quite come out how I'd envisaged, I realised after I'd done it that it should be lower on his chest.

One part I like is his Halfling Cookbook:

What could be a better cook book than a real, live Halfling to carry round with you?

Ogre Characters WIP Part 1

2010-05-07T21:55:00.006+01:00

Having completed my last lot of primed 40K miniatures last week, I thought it was time I got to work on the Ogre Battalion box set I got for Christmas. I'm in two minds as to whether I'm actually going to play any games of Fantasy before 8th Edition, given I don't know the 7th Edition rules that well, I think I might as well just wait and learn the new rules along with everyone else.

Anyway, my Ogre army is about 1000 points or a little over, and I've got 4 Bulls, 4 Ironguts, 4 Leadbelchers and 30 Gnoblars built. They just need a final clean-up, gap filling and basing.

For the characters, I'm converting a spare Bull into a Bruiser and a second Bull into a Butcher. The Butcher is still not completed, but here's the Bruiser:

This was mostly kit bashed from the contents of the Battalion box, plus a couple of Ork shoulders I found in my bitz box. I tried to build him so he could be reasonably interpreted as having a few different magic items depending on how I field him (Gut Maw, Greedy Fist, Greyback Pelt etc). After I'd put him together, I glanced at the cover of the army book and realised I'd subconciously built something similar to the Ogre Tyrant on the cover....

The cloak is from a Chaos Terminator Lord with fur added using green stuff to make him stand out more from the average Bull:

I'm quite pleased with the effect of the fur, and hopefully it will look convincing when it's painted up.

It's pretty simple to do:

-Lay greenstuff over the area you want to make furry. It's need to be reasonably thick to take the marks you're going to put in it, so maybe 2mm or so.
-Smooth it out, it doesn't need to be prefect just flatter. I used the round end of the standard GW sculpting tool.
-Using something pointed, work around the fur in a line pulling the green stuff downwards to look like fur. I used this tool for this part:

It's basically a pointy blade on a stick, but use whatever you've got which is similar.
-At the edges of the fur, pull the GS apart a little as you mark it to look more fur like.

I'm looking forward to painting this one. I'll share picture of the Butcher when he's done.

Finally up to date with Plague Marines

2010-04-26T12:08:00.004+01:00

I got my fifth and final (for the time being) squad of Plague Marines finished last night, bringing my grand total to 35 Marines, for a total points value of just over 1000 points.

I made a bit of an error with these ones, as for 5 of them I used to cheap single pose Chaos Space Marines, which meant they were much harder to convert and ultimately didn't save me that much over a proper box (plus I'd have got bitz from that).

The Champion and icon bearer standard marine kits, with the other 5 being the single pose ones. This squad is likely going to end up as a second string squad who will more than likely only see any action in an Apocalypse game.

Speaking of Apocalypse, probably the next thing I'm going to do is expand my zombie collection so I can have a full Plague of Zombies. I've got 20 done already with another 25 on sprues, which I just need to order some round bases for. The formation requires a Chaos Lord to go with it, so I think I'll paint up the Necromancer which goes with the VC Corpse Cart to act as the Plague Lord. Once they're done, I'm hoping for another superheavy, either a Nurgle Plague Tower or Plaguereaper depending on how much time I have.

Wave Assault

2010-04-22T20:36:00.002+01:00

It was Wednesday night club night last night, and I got a game in playing a mission from the new Battle Missions book last night. I had been a bit skeptical about the book before, but I was definitely wrong, and this game was really fun.

I was playing my usual Chaos Space Marines, and was playing against Orks. We rolled of the for mission at random and ended up with the Wave Assault mission, which is a Tyranid mission. The Orks took the role of the Tyranids as the attackers in waves, I acted in defense.

The mission is objective based, with 4 objectives on the board which are in fixed position dictated by the book, and the attackers (Nids normally, Orks in our case), come in three waves in each of the first three turns. The units in each wave are decided on by the player, but it's random as to which wave you get. The attacker does get to choose which board edges (their side, or either of the two short edges) they come on from and each wave comes on completely, ie. they aren't in reserve as such.

Tactically, it was a challenge to decide how to deploy, and I made an error at the start. I spread myself out a little too thinly to cover the objectives with my three scoring units. This meant when the second wave of 3 loads of Ork Trukk boyz and a Warboss came on in turn 2, they could get a charge in and destroy one of the units, and then go on to roll over another one, whilst the rest of my army was too far away to help.

For this mission, I should have castled up a little closer together and looked to defend three of the objectives and leave the other. That would have meant my harder hitting stuff would have been better able to support my scoring units. As it was I'd lost two of my scoring units by turn 3 which meant it was looking dicey.

Towards the end, I castled up a bit around the centre of the board where two objectives are close together and tried to protect my surviving scoring unit of Plague Marines but against the tide of remaining Orks. I was only holding on for a draw rather than a win. Had the game ended on turn 5, it would have been a draw as all the objectives were contested. Unfortunately it went to an extra turn, and my Vindicator which was contesting one of the objectives was destroyed, giving a win to the Orks.

I'm definitely looking forward to playing some more missions from the Battle Missions book.

Completed Imperial Ruin

2010-04-20T20:18:00.005+01:00

Last night, I got some time to finish this piece of terrain (I've been on holiday hence the lack of blog updates). It's a club piece to add to the terrain collection.

Clearly, it's built from one of the standard GW kits which I really like. They're quick and easy to build which is great if you want to get a lot of terrain together quickly (like when you've got to build terrain for a club tournament), and there's a fantastic amount of detail on them if you want to go to town on painting them. The drawback is that everyone can have them, which makes your terrain less unique and special.

I prefer to base the GW buildings on hardboard for stability. I've heard differing opinions on this, with some people saying they don't need it. I for one am always knocking stuff over when gaming, so the extra stability from the base is great for that.

They're based on hardboard which I got from B&Q for about £2 for a massive sheet. I cut the shape out with a jigsaw and slope off the edges with a stanley knife and sandpaper. After that, slap on all purpose filler for a bit of texture and add sand/rubble etc to taste. I tend to use brown for the bases on these, as they need to blend in with a number of different coloured boards at the club.

White Dwarf UK365 Contents

2010-04-19T22:16:00.002+01:00

White Dwarf arrived in the post today, unusually early, so here's a quick run down on what's in the issue:

-Cover War of the Ring Battlehosts
-New releases: Mostly War of the Ring, with some nice Ruins of Osgiliath terrain. Also the new Fantasy River Trolls and Boar Boyz.
-Design Notes on War of the Ring Battlehosts
-War of the Ring scenarios, then a short piece about painting the Ruins of Osgiliath terrain piece.
-War of the Ring Winged Nazgul conversions showing all 9 Ringwraiths
-Battle report is War of the Ring: Mordor Vs Gondor
-Fantasy article on Orcs and Goblins. Just an advert for the army really.
-40K Historical Scenario with Blood Angels Vs Tyranids
-Fantasy article on army composition. This one follow the series showing different types of army builds.
-Standard Bearer, only skimmed this, seems to be about terrain.
-Painting Masters: Golden Daemon.
-'Eavy Metal Masterclass: Black Orc Big Boss on a boar
-Next Month: Warhammer 40K Spearhead

Plenty in this issue if you play War of the Ring.

Battle Report: Witch Hunters Vs Space Wolves

2010-04-04T12:34:00.001+01:00

I got a game in on Thursday night, and for the first time I played my Witch Hunters army.

The list was a little cobbled together, and I managed to get 1200 points together:

Canoness, Jump Pack, Cloak of St Aspira, Blessed Weapon, Frag Grenades, Bolt Pistol, Litanies of Faith

Inquistor Lord, Divine Pronoucement, Psychic Hood, Bolter
3 Gun Servitors, Heavy Bolters
Acolyte
Chirugeon

Eversor Assasin

10 Battle Sisters, VSS with Book of St Lucius, Heavy Flamer, Meltagun, Rhino with Smoke Launchers
10 Battle Sisters, VSS with Book of St Lucius, Storm Bolter, Meltagun, Rhino with Smoke Launchers

9 Seraphim, VSS with melta bombs, 2 twin hand flamers

Exorcist

My opponent was playing Space Wolves, so it was always going to be a difficult battle. His list was something like:

15 Blood Claws, Wolf Guard with power fist, Wolf Priest

10 Grey Hunters, Wolf Guard with power fist and combi-melta, one melta gun, rhino
10 Grey Hunters, Wolf Guard with power fist and combi-melta, one melta gun, rhino

6 (might have been 5) Long Fangs with missile launchers
5 Long Fangs with heavy bolters

We played Annhilation with the Spearhead deployment. He chose his quarter and chose one with a lot of cover and set his Long Fangs up in a ruin where they could see pretty much the whole battle field. My quarter had very little cover in it.

Overall, I got absolutely smashed. My Canoness and Seraphim were good, they managed to tar pit his Blood Claws and a Grey Hunter squad for three turns before their martyrdom.

The Battle Sisters I just wasted on nothing really, and the Exorcist was totally useless thanks for diabolical rolling on my part, and some poor target selection.

The Inquisitor was not much use either, the lack of synergy between his psychic power (18" range) and the heavy bolters (36" range) was clear. Back to the drawing board with him, I need to balance my desire to have a cool Inquisitor character and his usefulness in games.

Don't get me wrong, it was a fun game and a learning experience. I didn't play that well, and had some poor rolls when I really needed them (Exorcist and a melta gun failing to even scratch the paint work on a Rhino for example), so the result was an absolute tonking.

Plague Marine Squad

2010-04-02T12:29:00.003+01:00

I built this squad for an Apocalypse game last year, and I've only just got around to painting the thing. I use them as Plague Marines, taking my inspiration from the Blind Dead movies.

In that Apocalyse game, they walked onto the table, and then a scattering asteriod thrown by Orks in space killed all of them instantly....

The paint job was more functional than fancy, but they look OK on the table.

The heads on the these are from Pig Iron Industries, and I'd definitely use them again. I don't think I'd use them again for Chaos Marines though, as the size of the heads are a little too small for marines. If I ever get round to that Traitor Guard army, these will be on those models.

WIP Gun Servitors

2010-03-30T15:48:00.005+01:00

I'm hoping to acutally get a game in with my Witch Hunters this week, but I was short of two gun servitors for the list I wanted to use.

Last night, I went on a bitz box raid and threw together some bitz to make some cheap and easy gun servitors:

They're still WIP, as I'm going to add some tubes and other gubbins with green stuff later. These were a fairly easy kit bash using bitz from the Empire flagellant sprues, Immolator and zombie sprues, plus a few other bitz I found.

Easy stuff, plus it saves a few quid on paying the price of the GW servitors.

Completed Doomsday Device of Nurgle

2010-03-25T21:09:00.001Z

Towards the end of last year I built a Doomsday Device (WIP pictures and some info on what I was trying to do with the model) for a club apocalypse game. You can read about that game in the battle report, but generally the Doomsday Device was pretty awesome thanks for my lucky rolling to activate it on turn 1 and then not roll for it to blow up....

Anyway, for that game, I wanted a super heavy done quickly and cheaply and that's where this came in. I hadn't really been planning on painting it this week, it just kind of happened. I started on it so I was actually do something whilst waiting for a wash to dry on some Plague Marines I'm just working on.

In the event the painting didn't take that long, mainly because I pretty much drybrushed the thing.

(Spawn shown for scale)

The whole thing was drybrushed with the three shades of green in the foundation range, with the darkest first. I then stippled some browns to break it up and bit, then gave the whole thing a light Bleached Bone drybrush.

The boils where done with Warlock Purple, then Tentacle Pink.

Metal was done using my standard rust method which I've used before (details in my post on my Nurgle Dread).

I'm hoping to play in an Apocalypse game with the UK Freebootaz over summer, so inevitably the Doomsday Device will be coming out then.

Busy building

2010-03-23T14:50:00.003Z

As you might have guessed from the lack of posts around here recently, I've been working away alot.

I've been spending a stupid amount of time sat by myself in hotel rooms thanks to the great job I have (I'm just living the dream)....

It has meant that, whilst I don't get to see my wife and kids very much, I do get to build miniatures. I don't much like painting in hotel rooms as most of the time the light is too poor to do anything, but building and converting minis is fine. I've built an Immolator, plus 24 Ogre Gnoblars. I also put together a SoB Exorcist I got for Christmas last week. It's one of those old skool kits where you get metal parts to attach to a plastic part (the Exorcist I'm using is the standard GW one).

Basically the kit is the Immolator, plus the metal work for the pipe organ and decor. In keeping with all SoB models, there's a ridiculous amount of flash to clean off the thing. Helpfully, GW don't include the instructions in the box on how to build it, presumably they expect you to pray to the Emporer or use His holy tarot in order to work out how to do it.

Constructing the Immolator was easy, it's a Rhino with a couple of extra bitz for the doors and the top. It's the big bag of metal work which is more difficult. Fortunately I found this guide on Dakka Dakka.

Very useful, it takes you through the process, including pictures.

One tip if you're building one of these, get some decent superglue. There's no way I'd attempt to build this with GW superglue. Second tip, be prepared to bend, file and cajole the thing to fit, and once you get it together, be prepared to fill the massive gaps in the metal.

I also managed to get a copy of the Dark Heresy Core rulebook on ebay quite cheaply (alot cheaper than the recommended anyway), so I'm in the process of reading that and hopefully getting a session in for it.

Bought a new Codex

2010-03-03T09:53:00.001Z

You know when you really shouldn't be thinking about starting a new army, because you're strapped for time, resources, and cash, but then you go and buy a new Codex?

Well, I picked up the Chaos Daemons Codex yesterday.

My current Witch Hunters force is on hold slightly anyway at around 1200 points, since GW have witdrawn the basic Battle Sister box set, so I've got to have something else to do to go along with my CSMs....

Since I've already got two Nurgle Daemon Princes all done, plus 40 Plague Zombies (20 painted, 20 boxed) to use as counts-as Plague Bearers, I've got the start of a force already. A great daemon I could also double up for use in my CSM army aswell.

Now to read the Codex and start thinking about some lists. I really wish GW would hurry up and release some plastic Plaguebearers.

Nurgle Daemon Prince: Completed

2010-03-01T16:43:00.003Z

It's generally pretty rare that I get to paint much at the weekend, but yesterday was an exception. I got about 3 hours to my self, a perfect opportunity to finish my second Nurgle Daemon Prince:

I've blogged before on the stippling method I used for the wings, and I'm quite pleased with them. In addition to the method I used in the post, I also added a wash of Devlan Mud close to the finger part.

I'm also quite pleased with the layering on the cloth at the bottom of the body (it looks a bit better in reality, a bit more defined):

I got some Liquitex Flow-Aid and Slow-Dri before Christmas and they were really useful for the cloth, and I used the slow-dri to keep the paint wet on the palette for longers whilst I applied it to the model (you could use a wet palette to better affect as well).

What I'm not happy with yet are the eyes. I don't much like for the conversion of them, the intentionally uneven nature of them doesn't look that great, plus the colour choice is wrong. I tried yellow on them first and that didn't look right either. I possible might break out the green stuff again and change it around.

Battle Report: 500 point tournament

2010-02-23T11:56:00.002Z

Following on from my post yesterday about the list I used, here's some details on how I went in my three games. The tournament was held at Maelstrom Games in Mansfield, and it's a really great gaming venue which will be even better when the whole area is open:

Game 1: Vs Space Marines

I was facing off here against two 10 man tactical squads, with heavy bolters and melta guns and one Rhino, led by a librarian with Might of the Ancients and Gate of Infinity.
This one was a table quarter's scenario, and the Space Marine ability to combat squad meant he was able to hold two quarters and contest a third. I only held one quarter by the end of the game but I scored an extra point for getting more victory points (a minor victory). This was mainly due to a good round of shooting from my Rhino and it's occupant destroying a whole combat squad and a librarian. Overall, a draw but a reasonable start.

Game 2: Vs Imperial Guard

In this game, I faced off against a Company Command Squad with an Autocannon and grenade launcher, and couple of veteran squads, one with Harken and two armoured sentinels.
The was the King of the Hill mission from 4th edition, so we had to capture the centre of the table. I got my marines onto the objective quite quickly and then had to whether the fire from the IG army. My Lord started well, breaking a veteran squad and then killing the command squad in assault. From this good start for me, the IG pulled it back round. My ability to destroy either of his armoured sentinels was gone thanks to a Get's Hot! roll on my plasma gun so I was relying on krak grenades. This meant the IG could get in close to the objective with his Sentinel and a scoring unit to contest. The other sentinel charged my Lord in assault as I'd taken the bait and got near it and slowly wore him down. The IG won this one on victory points, so a very narrow loss.

This was the final battle around the central objective:

Game 3: Vs Imperial Guard

I had a strong game in this one. The mission was capture and control, so I parked a Marine squad on my objective. The second squad in a rhino and the Lord advanced down my left. Harken then appeared on that flank right next to them with a veteran squad and destroyed the Rhino with a demo charge, and then charged the occupants and the Lord in combat. The IG were rapidly destroyed by the Lord's Daemon Weapon. That squad then advanced on his objective, destroying another veteran squad in assault. His Chimera advanced on my objective, but I got a lucky roll and blew it up with my plasma gun. The game ended with me holding both objectives (for full battle points), and a massacre result in victory points.

Overall, I managed to finish in first place, which was a real surprise to me. I had a blast in this, and I'll definitely want to play in some more tournaments in future.

With three games under it's belt, the short comings of my final list were clear (I should really have playtested it, but I didn't get time).

It's main problem was I only had one way of destroying armour of any kind: one plasma gun. That meant that in game 2, I was really struggling to take on the armoured sentinels after the loss of the PG. The second problem with it was it only has two scoring units, meaning that at most I was going to hold two objectives. This cost me in game 1. On the plus side, the rhinos with havoc launchers worked well causing quite a lot of casualties, and making my army quite mobile.

500 point Chaos Space Marine tournament list

2010-02-22T11:43:00.005Z

Yesterday I played in the first UK Freebootaz Open Tournament. I played in the one day 500 point tournament, which had list restrictions similar to the Adepticon combat patrol rules:

Only ONE HQ allowed
2-3 Troops
0-1 Elites
0-1 Fast Attack
0-1 Heavy Support
Maximum of 3+ armour save
Maximum Armour Value of 33 on any individual vehicle (front + side +rear)
Maximum of 2 Psychic Powers
Monstrous Creatures are NOT allowed

I spent an age throwing lists together before I finally settled on this one:

Chaos Lord, Mark of Slaanesh, Wings, Daemon Weapon, Melta Bombs

7 Chaos Space Marines, one flamer, Icon of Chaos Glory, Rhino with Havoc Launcher
7 Chaos Space Marines, one plasma gun, Rhino with Havoc Launcher

Total: 500 points

My thinking for this was that the Lord would be there to hit things hard in CC, plus use his instant death causing Daemon Weapon to deal with multi-wound models like Nobz or Tyranid Warriors. He'd be supported in this by the flamer squad who I gave an icon to as I thought they'd be getting into combat more often and might need the re-roll. The other squad was an objective holder. The two rhino would use their havoc launchers as long range support to thin out units.

The tournament was a mixture of different scenarios, including the table quarters and king of the hill missions from 4th edition.

I'm just writing up some details for the battle reports, so stay tuned.

WIP: Wings in Progress

2010-02-17T17:18:00.002Z

This is a WIP shot of one of the wings from my Nurgle Daemon Prince (here's some earlier WIP shots of him during the conversion phase). The wings are fairly heavily cut down ones from the LoTR balrog.

The "fingers" are just basecoated currently, I'll be highlighting them a little lighter when I get chance. I really happy with the way the wing membrane has come out, as this was a little experiment using stippling, something I've never tried before.

I wanted the wings to have a mottled, organic feel to them so I thought stippling would look a little more natural than trying to blend the two colour together.

The wing was basecoated with Kommando Khaki in several thin coats as on such a large, visible area I wanted the paint to be as smooth as possible. Next, a wash with Devlan Mud to try and pick out the ridges in the wing folds. At this point I was unsure of where to go with it, and it was then I hit upon the stippling idea.

I used an old small drybrush to do this, but GW do make a nylon stippling brush. Really, it just needs to be a relatively stiff brush. Beware than doing this will ruin brushes as you'll end up splaying the bristles out

I started by stippling the area close the wing fingers with Bestial Brown, so this was the lighter of the two browns. Once this was done, I then repeated the process with Scorched Earth, this time going even closer to the finger. When stippling, take off most of the paint before you put it on the model, otherwise it'll just blob on to it, not stipple.

The final step was a quick drybrush of the whole wing with Kommando Khaki to pick up the ridges of the skin.

The final result looks pretty pleasing for me, I'll definitely try this again. This could be a good way of adding textures to any organic surface, for example a Tyranid carapace.

Chaos Lord of Slaanesh

2010-02-16T07:16:00.000Z

I just got some time to finish up this miniature last night. I planning on running this guy in the tournament at the weekend:

Chaos Lord, Mark of Slaanesh, Daemon Weapon, Wings, Melta Bombs

I had originally planned to use him as a Sorcerer but I decided against that plan. I've gone with daemon weapon as it gives +D6 attacks (provided you don't roll a one), and the Slaanesh version inflicts Instant Death. This combined with the wings and melta bombs mean I'm going to be using him to take down tough, multi-wound models (Nobz, Tyranid Warriors, though no monstrous creatures are allowed in the tournie), plus use his melta bombs to destroy any light armour that I come across.

In terms of painting, I really struggled with this. I find the pastel pinks and blues difficult to paint. The snake tail blending is a little rough, and the shoulders are a bit too blue really. I'm quite pleased with the wings, they look OK.

15th already....

2010-02-15T14:47:00.002Z

Blimey, it's got to the 15th of the month and I've managed a sum total of zero posts...

Work and home have been pretty manic so far this month so not much hobbying has been done. I've managed to paint for about an hour but that's it really.

This is going to have to change this week, as I've got a tournament coming up this week (UK Freebootaz Open). I'm playing in the one day 500 point tournament, which follows similar list restrictions to the Adepticon combat patrol rules. I'm going to be playing Chaos Space Marines, but the list I'm going to be using isn't actually painted fully yet. Between now and the weekend I need to finish off a new Slaanesh Chaos Lord (formerly a Sorcerer then I changed my mind and just went for a Lord with wings) and magnetize two Havoc Launchers to two rhinos. Painting this Slaanesh Lord has reminded me why I've always failed with painting Slaanesh stuff before: I suck at it.

Administratum Building

2010-01-29T11:12:00.000Z

I've been working hard on club terrain pieces I've completed in the last week or so, and this is the first and largest of them:

The boxes at the front were from the club collection and are made of plaster, so I'm not sure how hard wearing they'll be.

I used a couple of ideas from White Dwarf on this (who says it's useless...).

One of them was from a terrain masterclass from a couple of months ago showing the Warhammer coaching inn. In that muddy hoof prints had been added, which I thought was a great idea. For this piece I wanted to give it the feel that it had been used as a temporary refuge by a small group of people, so I added some muddy foot prints behind the barricade:

This was easy to do. After I'd spread filler over the base, I took a disembodied Space Marine foot and stamped prints into it. To paint it, it was done with Calthan Brown, washed with Brown Ink (not Devlan Mud, I wanted the sheen of the ink) and then drybrushed with the household paint I'd used for the rest of the base.

Here's some of the side detail, shown as Battle Sisters from the Order of the Wounded Heart advance cautiously past it:

Painting lichen on terrain

2010-01-27T11:04:00.005Z

I'm working on few weathered terrain pieces at the moment (basically it's another ruined wall piece) and as part of the weathering I've added some lichen to the rocks.

Here's a picture I took to use as reference:

...and here's the effect in miniature:

I'm pretty pleased with the outcome for is, and it's easy to do:

1- Use PVA glue to stick sand where you want the lichen to be
2- Paint the rock with whatever colour you want, I used grey (about Codex Grey) and then drybrushed with light grey (about Fortress Grey). Make sure you include the sand in your drybrushing
3- Drybrush the lichen with whatever colour you want it to end up as. In my picture above I used Gretchin Green.

Easy, and it adds instant age. Here's the complete terrain piece:

I've also knocked up some bases for these trees, nothing too special with these:

Battle Report: Chaos Vs Chaos

2010-01-21T17:13:00.003Z

I played a game last night at the club, helping one of the other club members warm up for a forthcoming tournament. I've played him a few times before, and it's always a good game. He runs an all Nurgle Chaos Space Marines army which is pretty similar to my own.

It was an 1800 point battle, capture and control with the dawn of war setup.

His list:
DP, MoN, wings, warptime
DP, MoN, wings, Nurgle's Rot

4 Terminators, 3 combi-meltas, reaper AC, chainfist

7 Plague Marines, AC with PF, 2 melta guns, rhino
7 Plague Marines, AC with PF, 2 melta guns, rhino
7 Plague Marines, AC with PF, 2 plasma guns, rhino

3 Obliterators
Defiler with one extra CCW
Defiler with one extra CCW

My list was the usual mish mash of stuff, manly built around stuff I either like or find entertaining. As it was a larger points value I threw in a couple of other units than my usual list. I took:

DP, MoN, wings, Warptime
Sorcerer, MoS, Lash of Submission

Dreadnought with multi-melta
6 Chosen, Icon of Chaos Glory, 3 flamers, 2 meltas, rhino

7 Plague Marines, AC with PF, flamer, melta, rhino, personal icon
7 Plague Marines, AC with PF, flamer, plasma gun, personal icon
7 Plague Marines, AC with PF, flamer, plasma gun, personal icon
17 summoned lesser daemons

Defiler
Vindicator

I threw in the lesser daemons and lash sorcerer to try them out really and see how they did, as I'm thinking with using them in a tournament myself.

He won the roll to go first, and chose to go second. I deployed my lash sorcerer and a squad of PMs in cover on my objective. He deployed the Nurgle's Rot DP and some PM's on his objective.

Turn one I rolled everything else on (Chosen were outflanking), but there was no shooting as I couldn't see anything. He rolled on two rhinos with PM's and the obliterators in the centre along with the warptime DP, and the two Defilers opposite my objective. The obliterators started the game by blowing up the vindicator with their lascannons despite my smoke launchers.

Mid-turns, I started to come around from this set back. My Defiler dropped a battle cannon blast on the Obliterators and instant killed two of them, effectively neutralizing them in the game. My Chosen arrived on the flank near to his objective and summoned the lesser daemons, before jumping out and shooting a wound of a DP on his objective . My opponent responded by moving his Rhinos full of Plague Marines towards his objective in support. This was a mistake as effectively there was no pressure on my objective. In the centre my dreadnought and Defiler advanced towards his objective.

On the other flank, he killed 4 Plague Marines with a battle cannon shot, whilst my Daemon Prince ripped apart one of his Defilers. Meanwhile, the 4 terminators arrived to try and destroy my defiler with their combi-meltas in the rear of the thing. They failed and were destroyed in the following turn by the Plague Marines.

In the late game, my Daemon Prince rolled the other Defiler over and then moved on towards his objective, killing the last Obliterator on the way. My lesser daemons and Chosen were attacked by both his Daemon Princes. The lesser daemons showed their worth by killing one of the Daemon Princes (mainly due to him failing three out of four 3+ saves), and tieing the other one up for several turns. My Defiler got bogged down in combat with 2 units of Plague Marines, whilst he can kill them quite well, he only has a few attacks.

The game ended in a draw on turn 5. If it had gone to turn 6 I think I could have won it, as I had my Defiler, dread and Daemon Prince closing in on his objective. However, it was not to be and a throughly enjoyable game ended in a draw.

Looking at my list, I know well enough it's not exactly tuned to the highest degree, but it's got units I like. Of the two new units, the lash sorcerer was pretty useless as for most of the game their were no non-vehicle units in range so he was wasted. My lesser daemons did well, I think the daemon bomb of 17 turning up at once caused a big enough distraction to drag two very scary units into a protracted combat.

No prizes for guessing what I'm working on

2010-01-19T12:53:00.002Z

Here's my painting desk as of last night:

Guess what I'm working on currently...

The club hosting one of the heats for the a regional tournament. We need ten tables doing, and really we've got enough terrain already to cover all ten. We've had these Cities of Death buildings sitting around for a good while already built (thanks for a kind donation) so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to get them based up and painted.

They're pretty standard stuff really. The paint scheme will be more of an adandoned outpost scheme rather than a ruined city as most of our tables are grass so it'll fit in with them a bit better.

The only one I've gone a bit further on is the large one in the foreground. I wanted this one to look a bit more like it had been used as a base camp or something like that. It's got a wall of crates on one side (providing cover for models), I've also added a ladder. The white area on the ground is going to be mud where people were standing looking over the barricade. I've stamped foot prints into the filler to create a churned up mud effect. Hopefully it'll look more muddy once it's painted.

Goodbye Inquisition?

2010-01-14T15:44:00.002Z

Bell of Lost Souls was reporting earlier this week that Daemonhunters and Witch Hunters were being pulled from GW shelves and inventory. I've spent a long time working on my Witch Hunters army (even though its still small), so this is potentially either sad news or great news.

The Inquisition armies are some of my favourite in 40K, as I think they have great background and some great miniatures. I can't really comment too much on DH minis, as I'm more of a WH man, but the majority of WH miniatures have been direct only for quite some time, so maybe this withdrawal from the shops is just a continuation of that. Most of the minis still seem to be on the GW site (at least the UK site), but I can not longer see the Battle Sister squad box which was the mainstay purchase for a WH army.

What's the reason for this? A few spring to mind:

1-Inquisition armies are finished, gone the way of the Squat and the Zoat.

2-Inquisition armies are getting a new Codex. This is possible, the Codex are some of the older ones, but there's been few rumours about a new Codex for Inquisition armies whereas Dark Eldar are strongly rumoured for this year. I guess if one is coming, then it'll be post DE so perhaps late '10 to 2011. Another possible I suppose is a "get you by" list like Warriors of Chaos got after Daemons came out, or Blood Angels. Not a perfect solution but better than the first one.

3-It's just part of GW changing the inventory round, and nothing to worry about.

4-Inquisition could go over to be Forge World army, meaning it'll be even more expensive and potentially tournament limiting.

Whatever the reason, I really hope it isn't the first one of these scenarios....

Slaanesh Chaos Sorcerer WIP

2010-01-08T10:38:00.002Z

Ever since I saw Christian Byrne's snake bodied Slaanesh Lord in WD a while ago, I wanted to do one myself. As a change from painting Nurgle stuff and as I want to use it in a future tournament, I thought I'd put a Slaanesh model together and so it was a perfect opportunity to do the worm/snake body.

The worm body looks a bit fat in place, so I'll sand some of that off to make it a bit smoother. I'm not sure what detail (if any) to add to the worm body though, whether I should leave it smooth or put some scales on it or something. The whip is taken from a VC corpse cart and goes pretty well with the Lash of Submission power he will ineviatbly be using.

Wrecked vehicle marker

2010-01-05T21:07:00.004Z

Ever since I saw these over at Santa Cruz Warhammer I wanted to make one. Over Christmas I got a few of the little electric candle things required for it as they were on sale for Christmas decorations, each one cost me 50p. You can read the method for yourself over on Santa Cruz Warhammer, but I definitely recommend making one of these, they're super cheap, super easy and super quick to make. What could be cooler than flickering lights on your tanks?

Here's a slight grainy picture of it in action:

Simple Battle Sister Conversions

2010-01-05T20:34:00.004Z

One of the major drawbacks of playing Witch Hunters is that Sisters of Battle are a) expensive b) metal and c) have fairly limited poses. This means that conversion possibilities are fairly limited with the basic Battle Sister boxed set, but there are a few things I've been doing to add some conversions in, add a small amount of variety and, most importantly, save some cash.

The basic BSS box comes with 7 standard sisters, one with a flamer, one with a storm bolter and a veteran sister superior armed with a plasma pistol and a chainsword/eviscerator. My army list requires one with a melta gun, one with a heavy flamer and one veteran with a bolter and the Book of St Lucius which is not what the box comes with.

Firstly, here's a simple conversion of a flamer sister into a meltagun toting sister:

This is actually a conversion I've done before, only this time I decided to leave off the tubing underneath the gun. It's just a case of removing the flame cannister from underneath the gun and filing off the flamer tubing round the barrel. Once that's done, just bulk out the nozzle with green stuff and you're done.

Continuing with the special weapon theme, here's a sister armed with a heavy flamer:

This pose is about the only one where it's possible to do weapon swaps without destroying the whole model. I've swapped her bolter for a heavy flamer taken from an Immolator and cut down a bit. I've added some tanks to her back (from a Cadian) and linked the heavy flamer and the tanks using guitar string. It's not the best conversion, as the heavy flamer is a little over balanced, but as this one is going to save me £9 (the price of one, yes one, sister with a heavy flamer) I can live with it.

Finally, here's my VSS:

This one is a simpe weapon swap from the plasma pistol to a bolter, and replacing the other hand with a hand holding a book. The book I used is taken from an Empire priest (I'd previously used the priest model as an Inquisitorial acolyte) which is handy as the hand on the book is a left hand. Alternatively, the canoness model comes with a hand holding a book, though its a right hand so a little work will be needed to move the thumb over.

All in all, these conversion save me some cash (though I've now lost an ordinary sister to be the heavy flamer sister), and add some variation to my squads.

New Year's Hobby Resolutions

2010-01-01T10:50:00.000Z

Happy New Year to you! I'm sure there will be lots of resolutions floating about the blogosphere at this time of year so here's mine to add to the noise:

1- Build, paint and play at least 1 game with my new Ogre Kingdoms army
2- Complete my Witch Hunters army to 1500 points
3- Build and paint at least one super heavy
4- Play at least 25 games total of either 40K or Fantasy
5- Play in at least one proper tournament
6- Paint at least 120 points worth of minis on the lonepilgrim painting point scheme (I did 109 this year)

Hopefully I can manage at least half of these before 2011 rolls around.

Zombie Summoned Lesser Daemons

2009-12-29T19:58:00.006Z

"The Plague Marines marched relentlessly on, ignoring the hail of fire. Behind them came a shuffling army of corpses. Summoned from the grave to do the bidding of Father Nurgle, the Plague Zombies shambled towards the enemy lines, hungry for the flesh of the living."

-Account of the battle for Hive Primus, Eads, taken for the forbidden tome "The Ascension of Morbus the Foul"

I just put the finishing touches to the last of my zombies last night. There's actually 20 of them in total (to be used as two units of 10), but only the first half are in the photo.

For each group of 10, I just speed painted through them and I didn't want to spend too long getting 20 of them finished. Once they were build and primed, probably each batch of 10 took about 2 hours from start to finish. I did the bulk of the skin in green by just drybrushing Orkhide Shade and Gretchin Green straight over the black undercoat. From there it was just a case of painting the clothes (mostly greys, blacks and the occasional blue) and other bits, a wash and drybrush on them. Individually they pretty ordinary but they look quite good as a unit.

Whilst the latest Chaos Codex lost some of it's flavour (like Legion variants, proper daemons etc), at least with summoned lesser daemons you can get some of it back. As there's no official model for them you can interpret them how you wish and to fit in with the feel of your army. They could be done as sleeper cell commandos for an Alpha Legion army, or fanatical cultists for a Word Bearers army for example.

Game-wise the unit essentially has the stat line of a marine, but with 2 attacks and a 5+ invulnerable save. They are armed with a single close combat weapon. Summoned daemons must arrived by deepstriking with 6" of an icon, but (and here's the cool part) they can assault on the turn they arrive. This means you can threaten anything within 14" of an icon if you take the correct number of them. A unit of at least 8 is ideal, a 8 means that when you place the first model and surround it with the next one (6 in a circle), the 8th model must go in a second ring touching the first. The edge of this 8th models base is now 8" from the icon and can charge 6". This could be a nasty surprise for someone.

Hectic month

2009-12-29T10:45:00.002Z

As you can tell from the paucity of posts on the blog, December has been a pretty hectic month, with work, preparing for Christmas, kids, family etc etc. In fact I haven't picked up a paint brush or a dice for about 3 weeks (though I did manage 2 games of Pandemic).

I just need to put some finishing touches to the last of 20 zombies I'm using as summoned lesser daemons for my CSMs (pics hopefully later this week). Santa was very kind to me this year, so I've not got the following in painting queue:

1 SoB Excorcist
1 Immolator
10 Battle Sisters
1 Ogre Kingdoms Battalion (6 Bulls, 4 Ironguts, 4 Leadbelchers, 24 gnobblars)

This is on top of the load of stuff that is sat undercoated waiting for finishing.

I was planning on 2010 (at least the early part) being Fantasy focussed, but I may be playing in a 500 point 40K tournament in February which I'll need to prepare for. I am possibly going to play Witch Hunters in that tournie, so I'll need to get ready for that both painting and gaming wise.

Normal blogging service will be resumed soon hopefully.

White Dwarf UK 361 contents

2009-12-11T21:03:00.003Z

The new White Dwarf arrived today, so here's a run down on it:

-Cover: Tyranids
-New releases: Nids and Legion of the Damned
-Nids Codex design notes
-Skaven scenarios by Jeremy Vetock (13 of these obviously)
-Legion of the Damned background, with some example lists which include the Legion of the Damned
-LoTR tactica on the armies of Evil men
-Battle report is Tyranids vs Salamanders (with a surprising result)
-Army masters is Colin Grayson's Skaven (some example of these models were in last months Blanchitsu)
-Jervis is back with a beard and a new Standard Bearer article
-'Eavy metal masterclass on Legion of the Damned
-Army workshop on Tyranids. There's also a pic of two Centigors which look like new models for the forthcoming Beastmen book.
-Modelling workshop on how the huge Bastion in the battle report was built
-Next month: Plastic Fell Beast, Beastmen.

The back cover is nice, with the Eldar Phoneix lords surrounded by a huge horde of 'Nids.

New year, New Army

2009-12-07T07:18:00.004Z

After Christmas, I'm starting an all new army. In fact, an all new games system. As you can probably guess from the picture, I'm starting a Fantasy Ogre Kingdoms army. Having never played Fantasy before, this should be interesting. I chose Ogre's simply because they are my favourite miniatures in the Fantasy range, and I'm well aware they are considered to be a little underpowered.

If anyone has any blog links for good Fantasy blogs, and Ogre's in particular then please let me know in the comments.

Of course, I'm not neglecting my 40K armies. I'm aiming for 2010 to be the year of the Witch Hunters. I'm getting some more Sisters for Christmas so I should have about 1200 points of force org legal troops after Christmas so I'll hopefully get some games in.

Quick and easy Witch Hunters objective marker

2009-12-02T20:22:00.000Z

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

2009-11-29T20:17:00.003Z

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

2009-11-26T23:23:00.004Z

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

2009-11-20T11:28:00.001Z

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

2009-11-15T21:05:00.003Z

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

2009-11-13T15:28:00.001Z

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

2009-11-12T12:19:00.002Z

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

2009-11-11T11:00:00.000Z

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!

2009-11-09T10:05:00.011Z

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

2009-11-05T12:35:00.000Z

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

2009-11-03T12:23:00.004Z

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

2009-10-29T20:14:00.003Z

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

2009-10-22T16:41:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-18T21:23:00.007+01:00

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

2009-10-16T12:11:00.000+01:00

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):

Boardgame Overview: Pandemic

2009-10-14T10:35:00.003+01:00

Last weekend, I was in HMV with some vouchers to spend. Now HMV is not what you'd describe as game store (besides video games), the only games they really have are Simpsons Monopoly, Scene It, things of that ilk. Not much to tempt a more serious gamer, but for some reason they had several copies of Pandemic in stock, so I spent my vouchers on picking this up (also got The Batman Series 1 on DVD for my son, he really like that series and to be honest so do I).

Pandemic is a board game from Z Man Games and as it's name suggests it's about disease, or rather the prevention of it. The game is for 2 to 4 people, and each person takes on the role of a certain specialist within a disease control team. As you're all in the same team, the play is pure cooperative, which makes it a nice game to introduce non-gamers to as you can easily help them along.

As members of the disease control team, you need to travel the world balancing your play between curing diseases in individual cities, and finding cures for diseases. There's 4 diseases to cure and that's the win condition. The board is a world map you move your pieces around on:

Each turn you get four actions which can be things like moving to a different city, finding a cure, building a research station and so on. Each turn in the game, the diseases spread represented by little wooden cubes of various colours.

The fundamental mechanic in the game is card management. The player cards in the bottom left have the name of a city on it, and each city has a different colour. You use these cards for a couple of things: to move to other cities by discarding a card of that city, or the city you're in, and to discover cures. To discover a cure, you normally need 5 cards of that colour, then move to a research station and spend an action to discover a cure.

Each player takes on a different role, and each role has various abilities. For example: the Scientist only needs 4 cards of one colour to discover a cure; the Medic can remove all blocks of one colour in a city when he performs the Cure action (you normally only remove one block of a colour). By working together and playing to the strengths of each role is the key to winning.

The game is easy to play and understand, and being a coop game it's easy to teach. I've played it a couple of times with my non-gaming wife and she's picked it up quickly as the mechanics are simple (unlike when she played Last Night on Earth) and is enjoying it. The game plays quickly, last night's game was done in 40 minutes including setup time.

So I'd recommend Pandemic if you're after a quick, entertaining game to play. It'd be an ideal game at Christmas as although the age is recommended as 10+ I think younger players could easily grasp this.

Pure Fun Battle

2009-10-12T11:50:00.000+01:00

I played a couple of quick 750 point games this past week, which were just intended to be pure fun games. My opponent had lent his army to someone else who just wanted to try out 40K, so he just pulled out the only stuff he had left in his army case which turned out to be Marneus Calgar and 10 Terminators including a sergeant, an assault cannon and a heavy flamer. I was short of an opponent so he agreed to play me with these models.

I quickly toted up 750 points of Nurgle Chaos Space Marines, and it was probably the list I'd take regardless of the opponent:

Daemon Prince, Wings, MoN, Warptime
7 Plague Marines, including a Champion with a power fist, one melta gun, one flamer
7 Plague Marines, including a Champion with a power fist, one melta gun, one plasma gun
Vindicator

There was no mission, we just decided to run eat other and beat each other to a bloody pulp until there was only one of us left standing.

We actually played through the game twice. In game one, the Vindicator wore down the approaching marines, before they got into assault. Once there the daemon prince and Calgar slugged it out until Calgar was dead.

Second run through, I played more aggresively and got a second turn charge in on the terminators with my flying Daemon Prince who subsequently died (power fists make him cry). Calgar managed to advance close to me and destroy a Plague Marine squad before the other squad gunned him down.

A couple of fun throw away games, and we had a good laugh playing them at some epic luck like Calgar making three invulnerable saves in one throw, and epic fail such as Calgar's orbital bombardment scattering 10" of my Vindicator, hitting two Plague Marines and then rolling double one to wound.

Apocalypse prep has slowed over the last few days, as I'm having a new kitchen fitted so I've been staying with my in-laws and therefore away from my minis. I've done most of the GS on my new Daemon Prince, and he's looking good. Unfortunately, the pinning on his waist is poor and so I need to redo that.