Green Stuff and Bitz Box ... bibbity bobbity boo

After a three-month hiatus (to deal with a spawn of a very different kind), work on my Beasts of Chaos warband continues apace*.

(*by which I mean: one beastman for every ten that Kraken is able to crank out)

I noted in my last battle report that I needed some Heroes, for flavour as much as combat effectiveness. So next on my painting list is the Beastmen's Big Bad: Morghur the Shadowgrave, Master of Skulls!

Because it's GW: he was never going to be Master of Fibula, was he?

I would like to say I'd thoroughly researched the Beastmen lore, and discovered that Morghur is truly the rotten heart of the herd, representing all that is unnatural and mutating, and the unkillable arch-nemesis of Ariel, Queen of Athel Loren.

All of the above is true, except the reason I went with Morghur was because I accidentally printed off his warscroll, and I didn't want to waste the sheet of A5.

EXT: Ancient Barrow

Been a while since I did one of these!

First Impressions

Instant mould - the power of creation is finally in my hands!

I've been hankering after getting some instant mould for a while now. And one too many sessions fishing Play-Doh out of Junior Stylus' mouth finally convinced me to get the grown-up stuff.

It took me ages to shape the right-angles, but I should have a working Jenga set by Christmas 2017

Just For The Craic

I once heard a tale that Post-It Notes were an accidental invention, created by a scientist who was looking for a super-strong adhesive and instead came up with a removable one (presumably on little squares of yellow paper).

I like to think the same was true of the new Technical Paint, the 'cracked surface' Agrellan Earth.

"Damn it Jenkins! What are we supposed to do with paint that cracks when it dries?"

I also understand that there was a problem with the initial batch of paints, which actually did not to crack. Resulting in a lot of frustrated customers who had to watch paint dry in the normal, smooth way, and not appreciating the irony one bit.

Duly assured that I was buying the right kind of defective paint, I helped myself to a pot. And when the Night Goblins appeared on my assembly line, I took the opportunity to try it out.

EXT: Fencing in the Ruins

Not much to write about the first few photos, really. I'd already got one section of fence, but I decided a few more would be in order. I've got about a foot of fencing now. What else can I say about that?

Mine's A Djinn

Heavens above! For a moment there, I was afraid I wouldn't get all these wizards finished before the fighting started. But this rotund Celestial Wizard puffs in to belatedly join the others, like the chubby kid at the tail-end of cross-country run (ahhh ... school memories).

Shazam!

EXT: Woeful Tree

More custom scenery! With another commission about to hit my paint tray, followed by endless resin minis in October, I wanted to get this out of my imagination and into the games cupboard as swiftly as I could before it became another procrastinated daydream.

All that Arthurian business the other day got me reading bits of Mallory again. There's a fairly well-known bit where Lancelot squares off against some traitor knight who's spent his days bashing up other, more respectable, round tablers and hanging their shields on the tree outside his castle. He's got forty or so on the branches (ring the gong to take a shot at the champion!) when Lance turns up and breaks his streak.

Whosoever pulleth this brass sword from the permafrost is in for a world of hurt.

The Greatest Monarch

Courtesy of General Stylus, I received shipment of various goods over the last months. Chief amongst them?A proper bit of heyday Lost and the Damned kit - a lead palanquin of Nurgle. No rider, though, just the bearers and the board.

Supplied unpainted, of course, but I forgot to take pictures at that stage.

There was also some rather fine resin bases, which was good. I'd run out of 50x50mm ones, which a palanquin requires. So I glued two cavalry sized ones together and then glued the nurgling lines across them at right angles for extra strength.

It's a great sculpt, very lively. Slightly let down by the fact that the two clumps of bearers are identical, though, which is why I mixed their colours up a bit. 

From the Dettol it rises...

Dettol has long been my stripping agent of choice: cheap, clean and safe, and as long as you obey the rule not to bring in soapy water until the model is fully cleaned (otherwise your toothbrush gunks up), your model will be fully restored.

I live again!

(I guess the *other* rule is that you should use an old toothbrush, not your current one, but I hope that's evident).

But I've never really tested its limits. The majority of my restorations have been metal miniatures with water-based paint (often with no base and no varnish - the whole reason they were getting stripped was because the paintjob was rubbish) - and with metal, you could really throw any substance at it, scrub hard as you like, and still get the paint off without damaging the miniature beneath.

But what about plastic? Some of the early paint strippers I used were so strong they would melt away anything that wasn't metal. Dettol seemed to be okay (having tested it on a few slottabases), but would it remove a stubborn paint job, and still leave the model beneath intact?

Abracamagna

"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts..."

1. The Pledge

Despite my previous adventures in magnetism, attaching detachable elements to my chariots proved to be a very different prospect than gluing a couple of magnets to plastic bases and letting them stick to rubber steel.

To begin with, I had to attach N42 magnets (3mm) directly to the models. This meant drilling a hollow into their feet - or both feet, in the case of the spear-wielding bosses (bigger and more unstable, in the best orky tradition)

"The magician shows you something ordinary. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't."

Since the hole was too large for my slow and steady hand drill, I had to use a power drill and hope for the best (i.e. make a new foot from greenstuff when I drilled too far).

After drilling the model's feet, I glued the magnets in there. They stuck out a bit, as there wasn't enough foot to contain a whole magnet, but that suited me, as I reckoned it would be stronger to 'peg' into the hole anyway.

Unboxing Day

So everyone's seen the Hobbit by now, I expect? Yes? No? Well, we can talk about my hurt feelings over that particular damp squib another time. This here's a gaming blog, not the graveyard I intend to bury Peter Jackson in.

Games Workshop, ever keen to leap on a marketing bandwagon (within a fairly narrowly defined lane of traffic, to be fair), have seized on the forthcoming trilogy to release a bunch of new models. And I, being ever keen to throw used money off a fiscal cliff, fell for the preorder offer and got this box here: -

The limited edition has indeed escaped from goblin town.
Unlike the reputations of the cast... no dammit I'm not getting into that here. 

It came in the post while I was out yelling 'Merry Christmas' repeatedly in Stockholm. That all went well, by the by, although the cost of providing endless Christmas cheer on stage was that I more or less forgot that real Christmas was actually happening at the same time, and was a bit too tired to fully appreciate all the sparkly lights and excellent hams that happen in Sweden.

But now I'm back home, surrounded by cribs and swaddling clothes that have nothing to do with the Nativity and everything to do with our lives this year coming, what better to postpone the assembly of the new cot than the glueing together of a plastic Sylvester McCoy?

This model of the 7th Doctor even has his spiky but loveable sidekick Ace tucked under one arm.
Wait, no, that's a hedgehog.

Made to Marauder

I'm aiming to put the big marauder units together fairly quickly. The plan is to have two. One will have with shields and a mark of Tzeentch, the other will sort of have flails and a mark of Khorne. I'm doing the first one at the moment, although I'll probably shuffle a few models around later. 

Here's the ten I've done so far, using spares from the Chaos Warrior set: -

The first two ranks of the Tzeentchian Shield Wall

All ten of these have a conversion somewhere about their person. Most of these are small things, like a different head or the inclusion of a larger, spikier weapon or shield than real Vikings tended to use. 

Shield walls are much easier to form when your shield is as tall as you are.

These two may yet turn to Khorne.
Especially if my wife notices the horns on the left-hand helmet, that's a definite authenticity breach.

Form a Disorderly Line

As suspected, they aren't a brilliant match in terms of scale, so a unit may well look a bit uneven. But they certainly make the champions look vastly more impressive! In a unit that contains a few GW marauders here and there, I think it should work fine. These Marauders might be quite new to the path of corruption, only just starting to get twisted. I just need plenty of gribbly bits, spikes, stakes and mutations to give that look. I'm thinking almost cultist chic rather than full bondage marauder, maybe.

Therefore, straight to work! This guy has a spider for a head, courtesy of a Warhammer Quest  monster...

...And this hooded worshipper has a head and axe from a Reaper mini plus a spare Pink Horror arm.  

Nogg's Banner of Butchery

The most fearsome of all the giants who roamed the Badlands. Nogg had killed and eaten every creature who crossed his path, up to and including a lizardman carnosaur, whose flensed jawbone he wore as a trophy.

Nogg finally met his end when he stumbled across the incipient Waaagh! Bonekrunk. The Savage Orc warboss decided that he had enjoyed their headbutting contest so much, he would immortalise the titan on top of his battle standard, inspiring his boys to greater and bloodier deeds.

Quick severed head count: 11

Just a brief work-in-progress update (well, brief for you - try drilling the holes and see how you feel). My new battle standard bearer now has a battle standard.

The giant's head is one of two from the Metal Giant v2 (the first one is still atop the giant's shoulders). The way this one was sculpted - eyes half-closed, mouth half-open, tongue protruding, general expression of agony and surprise - he was just asking to be impaled on a spike.

I added some more banner effects - the tails from the wolf boyz banner (extended in the middle, so they would fit either side), and capped with the banner heads from two Savage Orc standard.

Remarkably, it looks quite promising. Even more remarkably, he doesn't fall over.

The First (Savage) Cut

Conversions aren't really my forté (or indeed, any moderately priced hotel group), but my pile of Savage Orcs did need some work doing to them before I could start on the real work of painting.

No easy snips with plastic here.
Real men work with lead and pewter.

There were three main issues to address:

• Too many character and command group models. They're all smashing, but repetition is going to dilute the impact of them.
• I have a couple of chariots and no designated charioteers.
• I want my unit of Big 'Uns to have two hand weapons, and no such models exist. (I know we can wink at such things - and will have to for most of them - but I'd like to make the effort to show them).

Out with a very battered pair of clippers, a fairly useless GW-issue saw, an pin vice that has been with me from the beginning, and my trusty 30amp fuse wire!

A problem of Brobdingrabian Proportions

So here was my problem, right - I know damn well that many of the opponents my O&G mob will be up against over the next few days have a nice selection of monstrous infantry available to them. Not just the Ogres - although they're clearly the worst offenders - but horrors like the infamous Black Coach of the Vampire Counts, Skaven Rat Ogres or the jolly inclusion of Kroxigor amongst the otherwise worthless Lizardmen skinks.

Drawing on the 'ready to play' list Gen. Leofa kindly provided me, I couldn't really see anything that I could field to deal with them, other than a solid defensive line of goblins to cover my pre-emptive retreat, of course. So I panicked, pulled out all my teeth and hired this chap.



Allo. I'm ungry.

This is Brob. He'll be playing as an aggressive midfielder, flexibly moving between defense and offense as the moment requires. Had I been thinking in advance, I'd have taken more pictures of him as a work in progress - he's one of Gen. Kas's stable, and more usually runs with the Ogres, hence the tattoo of the Great Maw on his midriff.

Lead For Sale

Seeing as my entire army for the MuffBoot is going to be a loaner, I figured I should give something back to the community. Figures, namely. See what I did there?

You cannot prevent what does not possess a Euclidian base.

I had a hunt through my several score bags, boxes, trunks, lumber rooms and shipping containers of miniatures to see if there was anything around that might be of use to anyone else. On the whole, there isn't, as none of us have a chaos army. I'd have a plethora of spawn, sorcerors and lords if so.

But here and there are a couple that might give you some additional options for your line-up. Just let me know if any of these tickle your fancy, I'll bring them over with me. Due to my confounded basing policy, they would probably need a last minute 'blu-tack and a plastic square' treatment to fit into ranks, but I'm sure none of us are so anal that we'd make that a preventative issue. Right?


In no particular order, here's a few heroes for the job mart, starting with a trio of wanna-be Empire Priests: -

Pikes – they're like a spear, man

“SPARTANS! TONIGHT WE DINE IN … where have we got vouchers for? Pizza Express?
TONIGHT WE DINE IN PIZZA EXPRESS!”

The Alcatani Fellowship, the poor man’s pikemen of Tilea. A natty combination of classic Greek helmets, late-medieval body armour and rather skinny jeans.

"What are we - the anti-aircraft part of the regiment?"

Despite their status as cannon-fodder (their stats were comparable to Goblins) – or perhaps because of it – there is a really impressive variety of models. Including command models, I counted 20 different versions.

Congreave’s Patent #37 Automated Spitfyre

“An harquebus that shall contain balls or pellets of lead, all of which shall go off one after another, having once given fire, so that with one harquebus one may kill ten thieves or other enemies without recharging it.”

Sir Francis Walsingham
(who knew a thing or two about killing large numbers of people)

“Forsooth brother, I wouldst put a cap in thine ass.”

Movement Trays: Slap That Base

An army’s got move around… something The Wehrmacht should have considered in 1941 when looking at their invasion plans and trying to calculate the number of Little Chef restaurants on the road to Moscow.

My methods of getting warriors to the business end of the Battle Board has been an ongoing evolution:

1. Assemble a 20-strong regiment and give them a gentle push from behind.
(That lasted about one battle. I was an impressionable 13 year-old and White Dwarf never showed any trays in their battle report pictures. Let me tell you: turning corners was no fun.)

2. Cut up pieces of hardboard and balance them upon it.
(A long-standing and versatile solution that caused much plummeting of models when they were carried around.)
(All right, it was my Dad that did all the cutting.)

3. Purchase resin-moulded movement trays from Terrain Warehouse.
(This was before Games Workshop released their cheaper, plastic modular trays, but the resin ones are sturdier – which is good for metal armies. And already made to fit – which is good for the lazy hobbyist).