Zombie Summoned Lesser Daemons

"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

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

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

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

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).