Malifaux: Nicodem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.