Big based undead nasties

Despite chugging through quite a lot of hobby stuff in the past weeks and months, I'm not finding taking photos of stuff any easier or more enjoyable, half the time things don't come out looking very good, the other half I notice that the figures aren't nearly as good as I thought!

Well that's the excuse for my slow updates out of the way, here's some pictures.

I've actually had the first bunch close to completion for a while, they just needed some final details and basing.  Its a unit of Vargheists, new additions to the army this latest version of the book.

The kit allows you to make the winged terrors shown here, or huge ghoul like creatures that really don't float my boat - I'm looking for some werewolves to use instead.  I've gone for a slightly unusual colour scheme, using the new GW paints - the space wolf armour progression I think for the skin and a slightly unusual blue to purple blend for the wing membranes and fur.

Each of the new guys is a completely separate sculpt which makes them all very characterful.  The downside is should you get more than 3, the parts aren't multi-pose or even compatible with different bodies, so without converting you are stuck with the same 3 poses over and again.

This chappy with the extra set of wings is the unit champ, my favourite pose of the 3.  I've found the unit to be an interesting addition to my army, so very useful in most match ups if you can save them from being shot!  I've based them consistently with the rest of my newly coherent undead, although I've added some small bits of shale to break up the larger bases.

Next up are the figures I use as spirit swarms who have been around for a while now.  I really don't like the current standard models, so I've used instead Lord of the Rings army of the dead models.  I've used the metal set that included the king which I don't think is available now, but you do get a lot of plastic warriors in the set now.  I've mounted 3 to a 40mm base (what we called Monster bases back in my day, relatively tame these days that size!) and when formed up they do look like a mob of ghostly warriors which is perfect.

I painted these very easily, I recommend the trick.  Painted over a black undercoat (my standard) I dry brushed the entire lot dark grey.  I then progressed the grey tone lighter and lighter till I used only the slightest amount of near white paint.  Once this was all done, I liberally doused the lot in green wash and ta-da, job done.

Its got nasty, big, pointy teeth...

My local games store 7th Heaven ran a painting/ diorama competition this year with an Easter theme - namely there must be a bunny in there somewhere.  I didn't have very long to ponder my entry or find different figures, so with my homage-o-meter running on full I decided Monty Python's Holy Grail was my best bet here.

So here's the finished entry.  Our valiant Sir Boris is ready to confront the beast at the cave of Caerbannog complete with a little title card in case its not clear to the casual viewer what's going on.

So here's a few more shots at various angles.  The piece is based around an old GW Bretonnian foot knight model I've had for an age.  As a grail knight he seemed to fit the bill nicely.

Facing him is a little bunny I put together in a hurry with green stuff and pro-create (not for any clever reasons, just my green stuff is a bit old so after making a few bits I threw it out and used whatever else I had).  Someone pointed out I could have used the Malifaux Jackalope instead - I wish I had thought of that (and had time!) as I do want to add one to my collection, but this little fella did turn out ok and definitely cuter.

The bunny and the knight are about to duel over a small clutch of Easter eggs as you can see from this shot.

Sir Boris, close up

Sir Boris, with film accurate heraldry!

The beast, ahhh cutey

Defending the eggs

Close up of the combatants

 

The base is made from mounting card with a couple of increasingly small circles of foam board stuck on top. Into this thicker base I was able to cut appropriate sized holes for the miniature's bases.  Next I used bits of cork, slate and sand to add some texture.  All the gaps were filled and smoothed using wood filler.  Lastly I scattered a selection of GW skeleton bones around the site to show just how wide the vicious streak this rabbit has is.

Warhammer Zombies!

Well another week gone and I'm a day late posting, but hopefully this was worth the wait!  I've added some new gadgets to the sidebar - there's an RSS feed which was a specific request - so enjoy.  I've also picked up a few new followers the last few weeks, welcome all - that's doubled my followers to 6!  

I've not played a huge amount of Warhammer for a while, but a couple of my friends decided we should fix this for 2013 with a slow (continental drift slow) grow "tale of 3 gamers".  My friends have limited time for painting, so the plan is to play 500 point games of Warhammer, once a month.  Each month we will increase the army size by 20 points and everything must be painted to be fielded.

I've had a largely painted set of Warhammer armies for some time, Wood Elves, Skaven and Vampire Counts.  What I haven't done is spruce these up for years, all of them are really inconsistently based and in need of a fix-me-up.  I can't seem to shake my undead fixation, so dispite some misgivings about using them at 500 points I chose them.  For reference my friends are using Goblins and Lizardmen, I'll see if they let me take some shots.

So after the first month, I found that my zombie summoning power was seriously dented by the fact I only had 27 painted.  Here's the shot of them in all their shambolic ruin.  Not based, not finished, this motley crue has been in this state for something like 7 years, from 2 army books previous when zombies were reasonably worth taking.

Operation: Pimp my zombies was kicked off.  I've been sitting on 60 odd GW zombies for ages but recently got some of Mantic's excellent minis (30 to start with) in hope that I'd be inspired to paint a more suitably sized mob.  For the GW mob, some rebasing and choice painting was all that was needed to get them  ready for the table.  My key discovery recently here is the wonder shade Anthonian Camoshade - seriously douse any figure that needs to be a bit drab over a base coat and your rank and file are done (works with skaven and all manner of swamp folk fantastically).  So here we see a GW spruced up and a comedy half zombie from the Mantic sprue - useful where some of my zombies are overreaching themselves a bit!

As there's so many of the damned things I was keen to try some regimental basing for the zombies.  My goblin using friend had a few spare, so here are the results of these experiments.  I've added a gravestone to a couple of them for fun.

I really like the Mantic zombies, so much more dynamic than GW's and a very good price too.

I did add a few more GW zombies to the unit as well as few solo Mantic shamblers.  All of the new additions were base coated in a strong (but unpleasant) skin tone, light greens, greys, light browns and a yellowish variant.  Next loincloths and other assorted clothes were added in darker colours, greens and browns typically.  A fairly liberal coating of dark red was added to assorted viscera and wounds and the teeth picked out.  This is all hit with camoshade and we're largely done.  I've added some brighter red blood to the more dangerous zombies where they've managed to find a meal and made everyone's eyes glow a selection of unpleasant colours using Tausept Ochre as a base, then a bright yellow plus optionally a shade if I wanted a really odd colour, blue or something.

So here's the entire unit of 48 ranked up - the standard and musician are frankly ancient lead GW figures, which while nice, fall over all the time so I need to sort those out.  I could use a banner too.

Here's them again without the flash - not sure there's much new to see but some of the colours show up differently.  The bases are simply sand stuck on with PVA (under and overcoated to stop it coming off) painted dark brown then drybrushed with medium brown.  Finally some some more PVA to glue random clumps of flock were added - I like the idea my undead are attacking over broken earthlands.

To finish, here's a complete army shot of the forces I've previously posted on this blog - essentially my most recent undead additions to my army and all consistently based.   Use the labels on the right to see the detailed posts about my Wight Lord, Skeletons and Ghouls.

The idea is to add to this growing horde by updating my existing collection to a fresher state or paint some of the hordes I have collecting dust (including the other 42 zombies) - or more likely completely new stuff as the evil retailers out there realise that undead are clearly the coolest figures.

Making your own fantasy scenery - Wizard's tower

Despite having a Blue Peter project box that's slowly taking over my entire gaming room, I rarely make scenery from scratch.  There's a lot of companies out there producing excellent stuff at good prices and I also have my Hirst mold that I've covered previously.  However over Easter 2011 my mad scientist friend Steve was visiting and after polishing off a tube of Pringles we came up with a 'make a wizards tower in a weekend' challenge.

The finished article

Well the photo above shows what we managed to make during that weekend.  Pretty pleased with it we were too as it was very much spur of the moment, no planning and frankly Steve is 97% enthusiasm and 3% skill I'm sure he wont mind admitting.  

So after selecting a couple of Pringles tubes as the basis we had to work out what we would do with the general look of the thing.  I have a lot of cardboard lying around so that allowed Steve to get cracking on the shingles for what inevitably had to be a conical roof.  This took a long time to make but looks great now its done.  Each roof is capped with a bit of baking foil.  I liked the idea of some bracing sections to break up the large wall surfaces so some thin card strips were added.

I also have some sheets of plasti-card for occasional conversion and basing jobs on miniatures so this allowed us to come up with the bridge, doors and windows for the double tower construction.  The window and door frames are deliberately wonky and a-symmetric - Steve was in an arty mood!

I had some spare bits from my Hirst molds that were put into use as jutting joists under the roofs and as abutments (I think that's what they are) on the bridge.  We also used a couple of wooden coffee stirrers as braces on the bridge as these are a bit thicker than card and there was no need to bend them.

The towers are mounted on a double layer of packing polystyrene I'd been saving.  Using a hot wire cutter Steve created the rough shapes you see and I then hot glue gunned the two sections together and to a mounting card base.  

My dog photo bombed the original shot, so here he is in full, glorious fluff-o-vision

The hill base also had some slots cut into it to allow some steps to be forced in, leading up to the front door - you'll see them more clearly further down.  Once the main sections were arranged, the entire thing was glued together with a combination of hot glue, PVA and when all else failed cello-tape!  Some loose sand and gravel was added in places to add further variety to the hill.

The hill section was coated in artex to give it texture and hide the polystyrene - this also meant it wouldn't melt when I under-coated it!  Just to be extra sure I also painted this section with my latex primer to give it even more of a sealed coating and further texture.  finally the joins between the tower and the base were hidden using wood filler.  This stuff is great and I have more things I want to show where I've used this in future.

Its black, BLACK!

A quick spray undercoat of black and we are ready to paint.  It could have been white, but black allowed me to be a little slapdash and not worry about every spot.  This is gaming scenery so its going to take knocks  so it only needed to look effective not win any awards.

A front view

So here it is 'completed'.  Well the painting is anyway.  This is going to live in my local gaming store so I am going to let Rob flock it to suit his boards, so some of the brown areas will have a nice green fuzz effect on them shortly.  I'll snap a shot of this once he's sorted that out.

Rear view

As you can see I've picked a slightly strange colour scheme, something Steve and I discussed and agreed on was that this tower belongs to a fairly eccentric mage so purple and light bluey-white it is.

Main door

Here's the front door.  All made out of plasti-card apart from the door knocker which is a spare bit from another kit I'll show at some point in the future.  Wood effect was simply scored into the plastic with a sharp craft knife.

Stairs

Here's the stairs, I can't actually remember what they are made of, but being quite thick its probably balsa or foam card.  Artex provided some texture but they are a bit slap dash!

Walkway between towers

Last shot, so you can see the bridge section has somewhere to place miniatures and Steve even went to the effort to make a pair of wonky doors too.  The gantry has wood effect scored into it too.

Warhammer Campaign - retrospective

Over the last couple of months I've managed to fit a series of games in a light hearted Warhammer campaign.    This series has come to a close, but I'd like to reflect on what I've learnt and what this might mean next for my Warhammer interests.

I've been using (as you may figure from various previous posts on this blog) my Vampire Counts for this campaign and had some fun and mixed success with it.  The rules for the campaign was that we had to take a special characters of approx 500 points, plus 2000 points of regular army.  I toyed between Vlad and Mannfred and in the end went for the spell caster supreme over the melee master - I'll comment on how well this went in each game!  The special character was fixed throughout the series of games, potentially gaining bonuses or penalties depending on how well they performed.  The rest of the army would be changed as you wished from game to game, but if you stuck with a list, you could again potentially gain some bonuses - but also suffer casualties as hang overs from previous fights.

Game 1 vs. Tomb Kings

Ok so it wasn't quite as bad as this picture looks, but it felt like it!  I have to hold my hand up here and say that I've not played with more than 1500 points for a very long time, nor special characters so I was headed into this campaign with no real idea what to expect.  A few weeks prior to this game, I had played Pharoh Rob, resident Tomb Prince at 1500 points and done quite well so I foolishly felt confident and comfortable with what the dry cousins to my army could do.  How wrong was I.?

Turns out very.  Rob elected to take Settra as his general which with some clever positioning meant that all but one of his units was either using the massive WS7 Settra has, or WS5 from the Tomb Princes scattered about.  For a largely WS2 army this was a bit of a problem!  In addition, despite some really favourable charges, Settra and his chariots refused to die (even with multiple killing blows landing) and Mannfred's magic and melee efforts were somewhat lacking.  In the end between Settra and a Sphinx I failed to contain it all looked very grim by the end of the game.

Poor things never stood a chance

What did I learn?  2500 is very different to 1500.  My magic was more opposed/contained than I expected - my low level mages not really getting chance to cast in the face of a level 3 mage on the other side.  Also my many small units approach suffers without the magic tricks I'm used to pulling so I need to think about hordes more.  A reshuffle for match 2 then I think...

Game 2 vs. Bretonnians

Nice axe?

Before this game, I decide to lose some smaller units, make a horde out of my ghouls and skeleton spearmen and give my lesser Vampire a nice choppy axe.  Feeling these minor improvements were enough, onwards.

Another army I've not played in an age is Bretonnians.  Poor Dan suffered a barrage of questions before the game started as to what on earth his various knights did these days and how lance formation worked.  With this roughly worked out in my head I set up with various shenanigans planned for my spirit swarms, bats and so on to mess with the Knights movement.  Dan had 3 large Knight formations, a small questing knight line and King Louen - surely I could contain this!  Alas turn one Mannfred disappeared into a vortex of chaos having cast but a single spell (I can't even remember which).  Punching a huge hole in my plans to bolster my own forces and hinder the foe, I attempted to make the best of things and get ready for the inevitable charges.  Sadly my lesser Vampire failed to take control of my horde and very quickly my force was falling to bits.  My small units evaporated in the blink of an eye (have you ever looked at their leadership?  Its really, really bad) and even the Varghulf wasn't long for the world.  Long and painful combats developed across the board but fairly quickly I was losing far more undead than I could possibly replace with a lowly Vampire and necromancer.  In the end I lost my entire force, to around half the Knights (plus memorably the Hippogriff).  

What did I learn?  Quite honestly I'm not sure I could have done much more with losing my general like that.  Mannfred is key to my army's performance, with the campaign's focus on the special characters and the extra burden a Vampire general must carry so without him from such an early point it was only a matter of time.  Overall I was quite happy with how I did things given what I had, but it was like trying to hold grains of sand.

Game 3 vs. Empire

Feeling luck was against me last game, not my choices I stuck with exactly the same army list and moved on to a new foe.

I'll take em all on

Howard is fairly new to Warhammer and suffering a terrible losing streak at the moment.  With this being my first game against him I wasn't sure whether this meant if I lost I should hang my dice up for good or it was some sort of initiation ceremony.  I've played Empire a LOT over the last, ooo, 14 years but haven't faced the new book before.  Howard had opted largely for a gun line so I new it would be a magic vs shooting game.  Some early over committed cavalry from Howard saw some quick losses for him.  I tempted fate with my dire wolves to see what a hellblaster was like (and if I could fluke a misfire from it).  Turns out hellblasters got good again - I avoided it from then on.  Howard attempted to blast my ghouls from the table with pretty much every gun he could bring to bear and I countered with summoning spells at every turn.  In the end I destroyed his army utterly with only very minor losses (thanks for a blinding game from Mannfred this time).  

What did I learn?  When things go well with magic, my army hits like a landslide.  To be fair there wasn't a lot of elite melee troops in this army, the few knights I faced were hit by the sort of combined charge you only see as an example in a rule to explain how different unit types work...

Game 4 vs. Chaos Daemons

After the success against Empire, I stuck once again to the winning list and marched into a Storm of Chaos battle vs. Will.  My extra 500 points went towards a pair of dragons, a little one and its slightly larger cousin.

Rainbow warriors

So Daemon are, wait for it, an army I haven't faced in an age.  In fact I have never played them as their own army list, only as part of the oh-so-ancient Chaos army (which included beastmen, warriors of chaos and daemons in one huge, all powerful melting pot).  As you might expect, Will was faced with a deluge of questions as to what on earth was on the table, let alone what it did.  On top of this, although I had read the rules this was my first Storm of Magic game so I really didn't know what was going to happen.

Will had a Slannesh/Tzeentch army which with cataclysm spells topped out at 32 different cards - plus the Blue Scribes tricks to boot!  I managed a mere 23 (Mannfred bringing the lion's share) and wondered if we'd ever get our of the magic phase.

As it turned out, my Vampire counts were more than a match for the Daemons in close combat and the multiple monstrous threats I had at my disposal more than outclassed the magic advantage Will hoped to use.  The dragons burned, trampled and ate many a demon.  My ghouls obliterated flamers and horrors.  Even humble skeletons outfought demonettes (with some support from my new favourite thing in the game, Vargheists).  A convincing victory for me, especially once a dragon ate the Blue Scribes and Will couldn't regain a fulcrum or find a way to knock Mannfred or his apprentice necromancer of their own.

What did I learn?  Even in Storm of Magic you can have too many spells.  The monster/pact/magic item bonus points were key for me and next to useless for Will (he took some Vampires and Ghouls) so spending them wisely is important.  The fulcrums are at the end of the game, the only thing that matters, so big undead blocking units are great for this.

In summary.

An epic post there!  I'm learning a lot about Warhammer 8th at the moment, especially at the higher points values.  I'm looking forward to more games, but still a bit stuck as to how to beat the Tomb Kings with my current choices - I may have to look into mixing up my characters and considering the other new book additions.  I am keen to avoid too much power gaming so don't want to build death star units which means clever play and favourable match ups.  I just need to work out what they might be!

My final list was something like:

Mannfred Von Carstein
Vampire Count with Enchanted Shield and Ogre Blade
Necromancer (Level 2) with Master of the Dead

40 Skeletons with spears
20 Skeletons with spears
40 Ghouls
27 Grave Guard
20 Zombies
3 Vargheists
1 Varghulf
5 Dire Wolves
2 Fellbats
1 Spirit Swarm

Who doesn't like Jason and the Argonauts?

I love that film, had it on a VHS video for years as a kid and as a result, once I was introduced to the game of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, I had to get some skeleton warriors.

I've documented some of the skeletons I field in my army on my previous blog, you can see these here and here.  While these figures are good enough for tabletop use, I've been sitting on some nicer figures for years and with the rules rewarding skeletons without spears for a couple of editions I had no excuse really.

Back when GW sold lead figures, there was a huge range of skeletons to pick from.  I picked out 3 armed with scimitars and wearing chain mail that I could order in bulk and make a unit.  Here's the 3 poses (I have each 7 times) standing around on a temple.  I've used some spare shield details (the cross bones) from the spear regiment and a bag of plain shields to try to make the unit WYSIWYG.

Warhammer rewards a unit that's well led, so I usually have (from left to right) a musician, standard and champion in every one that is allowed to do so.  Again these are all metal figures, I think these are tin as they are a bit more recent than the core of the unit.  The banner was painted based on a design I Googled - it really should be a magical when when I use the unit in game!  The champion looks rather grand as he is from a time when skeleton units were led by Wights - still no mistaking which one he is.

Here's the full unit ranked up, on a matching movement tray.  You may be able to make out the same guys waving their swords around over and again.  With the new edition of Warhammer encouraging the use of wider and deeper units, this presents a bit of a problem for me as I don't know if I'll find any skeletons that match the aesthetic of these guys.  The closest I've found so far is Foundry's and Reaper's but I'm not sure I like them enough.  

Here's the unit ranked up including my Wight King from my previous post.  He fits in quite nicely, but has a darker, more gritty feel to him, which is fine as he's a lot older and nastier.

I might try mixing these in with Mantic skeletons.  You'll see how they look and the first one I've painted in this previous blog entry on my brother's site.

A fresh start

After a long break from blogging, I decided I would start keeping notes of what I get up to again in my various hobbies.  As inspiration strikes and my experience of using this blog editor grows I hope it'll look a bit nicer, but for now its all sorts of orange.

My previous blog exists under a profile that isn't very handy for me to get into, so I may revisit the chapters in there one day.  This is quite fortunate really as the title was disproved some time ago on my brother's blog, that I contributed to from time to time.

So to open the proceedings I present a recently painted miniature.  With the Warhammer Fantasy Battle's Vampire Counts army getting a new army book and a bunch of new figures I interrupted what I was working on to get this figure ready for battle.

This is the new plastic Wight King produced by Games Workshop.  The colour scheme is a blatant copy of the original, but as my army is green and red this suited me very well indeed!

Fear my strange floaty cloak!

I've made the sword have a slight blue glow to it, he's got killing blow after all.

I had the opportunity to use the new liquid greenstuff on this figure to tidy up his shoulder pads, you can see on the cloak a slight line I should have also filled.

From this angle you would also see a gap in his helmet and cloak if the greenstuff hadn't been applied.  Great stuff this liquid greenstuff, recommend it highly - its non-toxic too (unlike the real stuff).

Alas in his first game he proved less than pivotal - I'm sure I'll find a use for him in future.  Despite the changes to the book, vampires seem better than ever as heroes and lords, but more on that another time I think.