Terrain is everything - 40k Hex Tower 1.

Having created the '40K outpost that got bigger 'I started to add more items using the same architectural asthetic. Here's the initial sketch, it was for a tall thin tower of a similar height to the 40kOTGB. It reminded me of the Tower of Orthanc from Lord of the Rings

The tower would mainly be used as a scout outpost. Not entirely sure how the lookout would get up there but a lift might allow them to get the top because a spiral staircase would struggle, but what the hey!
Lot's of issues with the buttresses twisting so it's not entirely plumb straight but this is the best angle. View it from another side and it's the leaning tower of Pizza.

Here is is, pretty much finished on a CD base. Still to colour the door and buttress supports. In game terms it's a bit of a 'red herring' trying to maintain unit coherency is a nightmare. I allow anyone in the lookout to be in coherency with the rest of the unit at the foot of the building. Presumably the enhance comms equipment inside allows this. However, it pretty much means your unit is static. Of course if you just have one las-cannon perched at the top this may be ideal, though in real terms, not so much...

.pdf templates are available here.

Epic Space Marines part 5. - Ultramarines part 1. Land Raiders

Here we go with the first of quite a few eked out posts on my Epic Ultramarines. First a 10 man squad of Land Raiders. Somehow I can't imagine the current version of the Land Raider looking quite so iconic in Epic scale. The paint style is overly exagerated, much like my firend Jay's Ultramarines from around that time. I removed the tiny door viewports so I could have a flat surface to add the number decals. Each unit of three with a separate identifying colour, white, yellow, green and black for the command tank.

More coming up!

New Blood Angels gubbins

Not that we didn't know this stuff was coming but I just saw GW announced this 40 minutes ago via their new facebook page and wondered if I could get the Youtube embed to work...

Hoshi Komi - oriental gaming fusion

When I first started gaming many of my Citadel Miniatures were Ninjas. I say 'my' but what I mean is my brothers. I said to him one day while walking home from school I'd quite like to try Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know where the idea came from. It just popped fully formed into my head, it may have been inspired by the Warlock of Firetop Mountain books I don't know.

He actually found someone in his year at school who was into role-playing and it was a Ninja based game. I was too young and he certainly didn't want me hanging around with his new mate so he went and played a game with him. I remember interrogating him ruthlessly on his return  about what it was like. So he bought a load of Ninjas and I still have many of them today, hey, I could dig them out and photograph them.

Anyhoo BloodBowl introduced it's Star Player's and one I had to have was Hoshi Komi, you can see him in all his toxic lead glory below.

Actually there's a french website with loads of info on him here and some painted shots too. This guy was cool, aside from Frank N'Stein, the coolest star player there was. But what was the coolest thing about him? His Ninja claws, his pose or his Ninja mask and armour? Well it ain't his Ninja mask because that isn't a Ninja mask, it's a Kendo helmet [known as a 'men'], it's a Kendo chest protector [known as a 'do] and part of a Kendo groin protector [known as a 'tare'].

Funny thing is over the course of my initial gaming affliction we went from GW battles to role-playing aand eventually Live Role Playing, something I actually did with my brothers Ninja-gaming friend. When I went to University I stumbled across a poster in the local Post Office window advertising a local Kendo club. I popped down the next Tuesday hoping to gain new skills to use in LARPing. Call it destiny, fate, whatever but it was their last night in that venue. From then on they'd be in a school a couple of miles away and if I hadn't have gone then I'd never have got a lift to future practices and probably never checked it out.

Over the course of the next four years I went regularly every Tuesday. I continued to paint my figures, made a chainmail vest for LARPing, by hand, from scratch but as time went on those hobbies lost traction. I had no one to game with and role playing wasn't real, Kendo was. When I came home from University without transport to the local Kendo club in Liverpool I stopped practicing. For nine years I gave it up, along with those other hobbies. Practical reasons - transport, children, cost and more pathetic reasons - laziness and fear stopped me from going. When I did return, in part due to threats from my wife to throw away my Kendo armour I realised those nine years were a complete and utter waste, what had I been missing?

Four years on I'm still going. I still love it but a number of persistent injuries impacted my enjoyment levels. Particularly last year when I took a few months off. At those times my 'addictive' aspects went looking for new obsessions and thats when 40k caught me at my weakest ;) Anyway I'm carrying on through the pain and there's big things coming up next year for our club which is why I mentioned pressures on my time. You may even have seen some of this if you checked out my Blogger profile and saw my other blog for the Liverpool Kendo Club. 

Suffice to say I see Kendo as some kind of weird gaming extension, I doubt anyone else will. But, it's the closest I'll get to being on a battlefield, actually that's not entirely true I went to the Gathering in Derby. 3,000 LARPers and I stood in the front of a massed rank of tower shields facing a huge opposing force, I quickly found a nice spot at the back of the formation! Kendo can be the physical embodiment of some of the battles we play out, just so long as you're not getting your dice and tape measure out in the middle of class! It's a total challenge, many aspects to master and a learning curve like no other, after eight years I can be as clueless as the day I started. At least I'm glad it's not the only hobby I brought back into my life.

Anyway Hoshi Komi's a cool figure, I have one 'cooking' in some Dettol, a purchase from my old friend BiG Pete, he's even got bits of Middenheim Marauder paint bonded to the lead still!

'nids part 13. More Prime!

It's a good few weeks back now that this guy arrived in the post after I won him on ebay. £2.49 including postage, bargain! So you can guess he's going to form another Tyranid Prime. As you may recall [well you will if you click on the link] I had plenty of original Tyranid Warrior torsos, but a severe lack of legs. So anyway when I decided a second Prime with Deathspitter, bonesword and lashwhip would be more effective for my Son's weaponised Warriors I had to get another one. The bonus, well I can actually document the conversion process for you, something I could only describe previously.

I may even get some more and convert them up on ebay for sale, they're easy enough to do, although I did stab my thumb with the scalpel, it's not like I was even doing anyting daft, still we'll learn. Further pics to follow, of the Prime, not my bleeding thumb!

Red Planet basing

I've always had problems with painting realistic bases. Some have worked others I've been ultimately disappointed by and there's nothing worse than having a cool looking model spoiled by a shoddy base. When I was painting my Empire WFB army in uni I only put model railway gravel down. I remember distinctly congratulating myself for this decision because they looked neat and didn't require any extra painting, figures painted, gravel on, job done [I must photograph those figures...].

Of course doing a red planet means that I could have got red oxide model railway gravel to do the same. They also come in a variety of grades, small, medium and large. Having a mix is really useful as discussed when  I bought myself that bag of sharp sand. In the end cost won and having painted the, slightly thinned] £1 Vermillion acrylic art paint on the sand I fretted about how I was going to make it work. Lets bring my old 'friends' - my Son's Rippers to illustrate my concerns

As you can see the Vermillion matched perfectly our Red Planet terrain base map. The slightly thinned paint allowing the natural tones of the sand and lava stones to show through. I'd also fretted about the base edges as the pigment in the Vermillion was quite thin, successive coats, even on a white undercoat didn't work. I asked the manager in my local GW store if I could try some Mechrite Red on the edge and I was blown away. If I'd have left the Vermillion it would have been patchy in places and would have blended near invisibly with the board but the darker Mechrite makes them stand out so much and yet still works because it's tonally similar to the boards shadows, as you can see. At any rate most GW basses are green with a brown border so having the sides a different colour clearly works or they wouldn't have been doing it this way since I was a lad. The finish was certainly an improvement, so I bought a pot there and then [good sales technique on behalf of the manager there].

So all my bases were now Vermillion and Mechrite red but that little voice was telling me leaving it plain was not good. I needed to add shading and highlights regardless of how long this may take. The other voice was telling me to leave well enough alone before I messed them all up. I cut some strips of hardboard and added sand and tried four or five different versions to get to my happy place. Bearing in mind I was dealing with the same issues with hills and craters for the rest of the scenery, this was a major deal breaker. Eventually I ended up with a recipe I was happy with. More importantly I reasoned that although the Vermillion matched my print out I may not always be using that for our battlefield. If I have to paint one then surely that will match the base so it's better to match something I can control in the future instead of something I may discard.

My recipe ended up so simple I'm quite surprised it took me so long to get it right. After the Vermillion I used a Badab Black wash, I'd tried, Devlan Mud and also thinned Chaos Black, and thinned Chestnut Brown craft paint [cheaper than the washes] and decided Badab Black worked best and as I hadn't used it much in the rest of the army I had more than the Devlan Mud left so it was not the cheapest option but the second best. A quick dry brush with the Vermilion brought back some of the colour, then adding some bronzed flesh and a very light drybrush on some of the bigger stones and edges lifted the texture just that little bit.

Finally, the masterstroke was some Bonewhite stones. Picking out the odd one scattered here and there really made the base 'pop'. In some ways I now find the bases even more interesting to look at than the model! That may be completely wrong but I love looking at all the texture. It's not extremely difficult to do either, the graded sharp sand pretty much presents which little stone to make Bonewhite and all you need is a bit of patience and a steady hand and job done. Admittedly I then had to go back and touch up all the little mistakes my drybrushing made but overall, after many hours I was ecstatic with the results and satisfied I'd ignored the lazy little voice.

So lets bring back my old friend - Broodlord in a Body Warmer so you can see the difference, not to mention the highlighted talons versus plain black ones. I think it was the right decision in both instances. Hope you give Red Planet basing a go.

Showdown at the old GW

We popped on down to our local GW on Sunday to see if we could get a game. There's a new manager [again!] and so times have changed, WFB from 11 - 12:30 then 40k until 2:30. So my son and I got to hang around the store for an hour and a half before we could play. I suppose that's not too bad if it weren't for the fact no one came to play Fantasy so the sole gaming table was left empty and unused for those 90 minutes! 

Moving on the game was seize ground and most of the kids were in the Beginner's having gone through around 5 managers we can always seem to get a game regardless of the 6-8 months of playing at the store. We were allowed a HQ, 2 troops and a Fast Attack. As we'd left the Gargoyles behind we were allowed a third troops so we had

• Hive Tyrant, Lash Whip, Bonesword and H Venom Cannon
• 10 X Devourer Termagants
• Tervigon
• 3 Tyranid Warriors, Scything Talons, Death Spitters and Barbed Strangler

My son's choices, I tried to get him to leave the Warriors behind but he was adamant [we could have had a 20 squad of Genestealers!]. We lined up with two players, both with Necrons! Against three lost of Space Marines. Directly opposite was a 5 man assault squad, a command squad of some description, a 5 man tactical squad and a 10 man tactical squad along with their owner, a young chap who'd been banned from the store for 15 minutes for saying 'god-damn' [twice!]

It was about half way through the game that I remembered to take some photos with my phone, which aren't too bad considering it's an old Sony Ericsson W810i. Of course this is going to introduce you to some other members of the Hive Fleet so far, I really should do an army list. So what had happened up until this point. We went first and everyone moved forward, the Tervigon spawned 9 Termagants on the first turn, getting 1 and two 4's so pooping out for the remainder of the game. The nine new-borns moved up to that dry-stone wall on the right of the picture below, just in range to capture the wounded marine objective you can see behind the Tervigon. Everyone else barreled up the hill. The HVC fired and hit but didn't do any damage.

My son's  Space Marine opponent jumped his Assault squad into contesting the objective and that was pretty much it. My son's turn and the Dev-gaunts were in this position and fired on the Assault squad. 30 shots and there was better than the 50:50 result and the wounds were better than average again. If I recall there were 11 wounds! So the opponent rolls and makes six saving throws, bye-bye assault squad.

Now the assault you see below is a turn later, his command squad ended up far forward, my son ran those warriors up the hill for 2 inches nowhere near enough to get into combat although I suggested he fired instead he had his way [as he should]. There's three Termagants [from the original 9, some lost to bolter fire, though 1 out of 5 perished in a frag explosion, the rest saved due to the wall] in combat and the Tervigon has taken two wounds. Three of his command squad have been obliterated, through assault and shooting etc. His team mate decided to burn those bikes over. 

Continuing on not much happened, the those in assault traded ineffective slaps on each other but without the extra attacks on the charge and the Tervigon's low Initiative nothing much happened. A frag missile did deviate from the Dev-gaunts into the back of the Tervigon but it's monstrous girth protected it.

"What's that coming over the hill? Is it a Dev-gaunt? Is it a Dev-gaunt?" That's right the Dev-gaunts crest the hill and can you spot the difference? Mmm where did those bikes go? They were eaten by Devourers! Just behind the Hive Tyrant the Warriors charge forward hoping to break the deadlock in this assault.

At this point, later in the turn,  the Hive Tyrants HVC has taken out two from that Tactical squad in the background the Warriors came in and combined they mopped up the rest of the command squad leaving the 10 man squad at the back and those three next on the menu and the objective in our hands.

At this point we had to leave but I think my son did really well. We were unlucky with the Tervigon in the first turn but he only lost 6 Termagants, 2 wounds on their mother and a wound on a Warrior in the game. The Dev-gaunts get MVP for the Assault Squad and bikes, it's amazing what just 10 of these can do. The Hive Tyrant did chuff all but I could imagine there would have been very little left of the opposition if we'd have played on and got the big hitters into play. Goodness knows how the Necrons got on, I don't think they suffered many losses, it's awfully difficult to keep these kids on track especially when you've got a deadline for when you're going to leave and they haven't even brought their Codex!