mortem tyrannis: against death

Justice shall be delivered, and doom shall stalk a thousand worlds.

Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Naaman and his squad

Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Joab and his six brothers-in-hell

Aspiring Champion-Sergeant Gehazi and six Once-Men

The final part of the Death Guard showcase, the core of the army: infantry. Three squads of seven posthuman nightmares. This the core of the accidental army - I'd always loved the old monopose plastic plague marines and after winning a couple of accidental eBay auctions.... well.

Apparently the pathway to hell has seven steps. Below the cut for more photos and conversation.

mortem tyrannis: neuron plague

The Weeping. Mutterflux. The Slithering Scourge. Neuron Plague. Somnambuphage. It is known by many names, but we all know the result:

urgh.

...

Two mobs of 14 plague zombies. A mixture of the recent Poxwalker miniatures from Games Workshop (some of them mildly converted), classic Necromunda Plague Zombies, and a bunch of weird conversions the ideas for which were largely nicked from Wilhelm.

These were all mostly painted with washes and largely pre-date Contrast paints, being done in bits and pieces over the last couple years.

Below the cut for a big pile of gross disease-ridden thingos.

mortem tyrannis: praise! joy!

Cast aside the bronzed lie of the Emperor, He who brings death, He who takes away your children, murders your cousins, takes your lives and offers you nothing but endless grey for a future.

Throw aside the crushing golden heel of the Empire - come with us, O cousins! O sisters! O daughters and uncles! - come with us into a bright and sticky future.

There will be only peace.

graffiti may be the voice of the people, but oppressors only listen to gunfire

We've seen these lovely scavvies and renegade guard several times in Necromunda, where they form a street gang. In the platoon-to-company scale game of 40K, they form a mob of oozing cultists, prepared to die to defend their saviours-in-white, the sons and servants of Him Who Is King Behind the Mask: The Cult of the Three-Eyed King.

The nucleus of the cult was a handful of models I'd hacked together in about 2004 or so, the last time I'd played Necromunda, using some bits from a friend's Skaven Mordheim gang and a few Cadian guard that I'd bought in the vain hope of starting a new project. They played a few games, got some thoroughly average paint jobs and sat in dust and decrepitude for something like fifteen years until I got back into the hobby hard a couple years ago.

join us! never know pain or hunger again! joy! praise!

I then rescued a couple of them, stripped them and gave them marginally better paint schemes. I've since added to the Cult, and now it stands at a healthy twenty-one figures; three times seven - an auspicious and sacred number to the High Lords of the Warp, They Who Bless and Prosper Us, Yea! E'en Here in the Depths of this Hive.

Why don't we go through them? Meet the family. Hear the whispers. Taste the blessings of the Winged Lord and His Great Servants; let Them feed you...

mortem tyrannis: daemon engines

A tank is one of the oldest expressions of industrial slaughter; small wonder that daemons love to inhabit them.

malicious artillery

possessed tankettes

The showcase of my accidental Death Guard army continues with the warmachines that I've accumulated so far. My partner bought me a trio of the easy-build Myphitic Blight-Haulers a Christmas or two ago; I painted them last year. The Plagueburst Crawler was a decision made once I realised that this army was beginning to actually be an army and therefore needed heavier support than ranks of plague marines and some cultists.

Below the cut we shall see some more photos, O yes.

mortem tyrannis: officers

 I've accidentally put together a fallen Death Guard force.

officer cadre

How do you 'accidentally' put together an entire army? Well, the same way any fall occurs: one step at a time.

At any rate, once I realised that the three squads of plague marines, mobs of cultists, and swarms of zombies basically constituted an army, I gradually put together an officer cadre. I've painted several of these grimy bastards this year as breaks between projects, so I might as well show 'em off.

sorcerer

This is the Forgeworld model Necrosius, although when I went to look him up to link him, it appears he's no longer produced. I intend to use him as a Malignant Plaguecaster (an idiotic name for 'plague-themed sorcerer' but whatever). I think he was the first of the officers I painted, some time last year.

The sculpt is great, with ritual bone skewering him, rotting pauldrons and a cool glaive-staff. I've given his back banner runes in the Dark Tongue and an old-school check pattern, but the paint scheme is otherwise the streaky white with yellow details that I use army wide.

surgeon

Plague Surgeon. I put this guy on a 32mm base without thinking; the Death Guard officers are all on 40mm bases, as they are huge. I don't like that officers are weirdly bigger than the regular soldiers, but it works okay in a chaos army so I'm happy to ignore it here. I should get him a base extender though.

This sculpt is also lovely, with a screaming daemon in one pauldron, all the tools of a healer and then a sick rotting sword, which I've painted up like corrupted bone. I also let him keep the white robe of a real doctor so that he didn't get mistaken for his yellow-robed magician pal, above.

brewer

Foul Blightspawn. I picked up this model and the Biologus Putrifier below in the second-hand section at CanCon 2020, intending for them to serve as painting palate cleansers. They are actually quite detailed and intricate sculpts, which proved a bit frustrating to paint. I eventually came to love them, as my Death Guard painting style really is a lot of fun.

alchemist. grenadier.

Biologus Putrifier. He has so very many vials and bottles, which made me put off painting him, but the design is actually cool as shit. He's an insect-faced parody of an angel, with the wings replaced with racks of alchemical nightmares. It's a great concept and very neatly fits into the concept of Chaos Space Marines being 'fallen' Angels of Death (with the obvious caveat that in rebelling against the fascist Imperium, they aren't so much evil as just completely fucked). I also wrote a lil' passage on the original instagram post for this guy:

"..and then descended the seventh part of a seventh part of the Great Horror; and in its vanguard were seven fiends, each cast in its own aspect of the Decay That Wastes Hope... and then the fourth was shaped like unto an angel of Order, but corrupted. In place of wings, it bore branches of bone, hung upon which were vials and alchemy, the rotted fruits of evil. In place of a halo, it bore a half-crown of broken bronze. In place of a face..."

-From the Seventh Prophecy of Šeru’a-eṭirat.

bannerman

Noxious Blightbringer. Mildly converted from the really excellent Blightkings kit for Age of Sigmar as the only way to get one of these bell-ringing maniacs is in the 8th edition starter box, Dark Imperium, and the resellers on ebay charge a surprising amount for them. Mostly I just love the conceit that his guts have been replaced by the dark gods with another, smaller bell. Hilarious.

I gave him an old marine right arm, replaced one leg with power armour, and gave him a Heresy-era Death Guard helmet to make sure he reads as a fallen space marine. I think it works. 

archivist

Tallyman. I joked on instagram that once I realised that Games Workshop had released a fat archivist model that I needed to buy one, so that I could have #representation on the tabletop. Because I am also an overweight archivist, you see. Do you get it?

(admittedly, I lack tentacles or an abacus made of tiny skulls)

He was fun to paint, especially adding some spare scrolls and book pieces to his base to make it look like he's standing in a ransacked, filth-soaked library. Note that his right arm is red, indicating that he was once a Dusk Raider.

captain

Chaos Lord. This creature has been fighting the Long War for many ages of man. Short even among his brethren in 1991, he is now completely dwarfed by the giant-sized modern sculpts of the other officers, as you saw in the first image. That's fine with me, as he's clearly been blessed by the deities and demi-deities of Plague and Despair: face of a Plaguebearer; Nurgling infestation; rotting skin; hooved feet; and fewer fingers, at the very least. Being made shorter is just one more way he is #blessed.

I agonised over how to paint the Nurgling, but eventually decided on the classic yellowish green, making him deliberately cartoony to contrast to the marginally more subdued murky greens and dirty creams of his armour.

He also has a red right hand. How low you have fallen, O son of Albia.

See more photos of all these grim gentlemen below this here cut.

Those Who Trade: Animals

 Here, at the end of all things the Colony 87 miniatures.

Julius Samarkan and his living goods behind some electro-barriers

This is it, folks! The last Colony 87 miniatures! Crooked Dice have also grouped some cyberpunk miniatures and added to the range since the Third Wave Kickstarter, but these are moving into a different aesthetic, so I didn't pick them up. I'm happy to say that this is more-or-less the whole range and move into new directions. For one thing, all my new civilians need somewhere to live...

For the final post, we have alien pet merchant Julius Samarkan and most of the Colony 87/Crooked Dice animals (except for the space cat from yesterday). These were a lot of fun to paint, although obviously a little fiddly in some cases. I don't think I'll keep them all as Samarkan's, but use them to liven up tables.

Anyway, below the cut!

Those Animals: Gyrinx

 Psychic feline-analogues from beyond the stars.

or, put another way: space kitties!

If I'm going to paint cats, I'm always going to call them Gyrinx. I know that the original Rogue Trader bestiary described them as orange, but that text is more what we traditionally call guidelines anyway, right? (For some great ones, by the way, check out Sho3box).

The kitten on the left is one of the handful of remaining Colony 87 sculpts (although Crooked Dice may have just put him in; I don't think he was part of Jon's brief). The other two are from Bad Squiddo Games, part of her Vikings range. I got them originally for my wood elves, but they don't work as hunting cats. They do work as weird alien cats, though.

Those Animals: Neo-Camels

 No desert setting is complete without them.

Pash Grolin brings a train of goods into town from the wasteland

Nothing like a good set of science fiction animals which are just regular animals with a weird skin colour. Put them next to some lobotomized cyborgs and it feels like Rogue Trader country. 

In my defence, I thought the coat was going to come out much yellower than it did; this is Aggaros Dunes applied straight over white. It's a great colour, but way more naturalistic than I expected.

Pink faces are fun, though.

These guys come from Copplestone Castings and are a real treat. I might pick up the Baggage Yaks and add them to the train.

More photos under the cut, but for once no more rambling.

Those Who Trade: Eldar

 Not the eldest.

Eldar trading contingent

Some really old-school sculpts here! The fellow with all the tubes is the Dark Elf Space Trooper from the March 1987 flyer; one of the very first Rogue Trader sculpts. It's a weird sculpt and pretty rare, but not as popular as the cool Piscean Warrior, so I was able to get it for a pretty reasonable price from an ebay oldhammer trader.

The master is the Eldar Trader from the famous Rogue Trader Adventurers from a few years later. Rogue Heresy has been going through the lot over the past few years; check out his take on the Eldar Trader here (he also did the Dark Elf, here). Others include Sho3box and Dale Hurst. 

It took me a while to decide on what to do with these two. The Dark Elf almost wound up part of my Dark Eldar project, the Kabal of the Sun Betrayed, but after deciding that the Slann traders would get an armed bodyguard, it made the most sense here.

Anyway, more photos below the cut.

Those Who Trade: Hospitality

Known for their hospitality, the O. tyrannus.

Narthoks, water vendor and bartender

Philip Hynes, the sculptor behind Bears Head Miniatures regularly does Kickstarters to fund the next production round of his sculpts. A little while ago, he ran one such campaign for Narthoks the Excellent, a terrifying criminal mastermind and adversary for fantasy RPGs. In the course of the campaign, a limited edition bartender version came up, who I bought for my planned civilian project.

Here he is! Look at his smug face.

Those Who Fly: Aliens

Short one today.

Freeman Liste and his navigator, Zee

I put these posts together around themed sets, but today's set consists of a single miniature: Freeman Liste.

Those Who Trade: Slann

 Space frogs: in space.

ready to drop some fresh tracks

I love Slann. Slann are easily one of the best parts of the #oldhammer movement. They exemplify that period of weird Warhammer, where things were sometimes just a little dumb but were stranger and more outside the norm of speculative fiction. Frogs who once ruled a mighty and magical empire, now collapsed into decadence and primitivism.* I especially love space Slann, because you get all that in space.

One of the things that first drew me to the Colony 87 range was the fact that it included a Slann. Jon called him an 'Amphiran', but we all knew what he was. When Crooked Dice took over the range, they included a new one. They knew what was up. Space frogs, man.

Those Who Work: More

 The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

by the sweat on their brow is an empire built

A few months ago, most of these weren't even on my list for this civilian project.  I had vaguely conceived of the water carrier (a Wave One Colony 87 sculpt) as a merchant, so I painted him with the last group, but after the paint hit the miniature, I realised that he was a labourer, not the capitalist.

The dwarf sculpt came in with a Kickstarter delivery, and I already have a duplicate of the sculpt earmarked for my Squats project, so he got folded into the project. I then managed to acquire the Bob Olley servitor sculpts from eBay, and before I knew it I had another four workers to go with the last two groups. 

Under the cut for more photos and conversation about the paint schemes.

Those Who Trade

Even a failing colony has a middle class.

get yer $small_good here

It feels like everyone else has entered a quarantine work-from-home hellscape that, while stressful, has at least allowed a lot more time to paint. In contrast, I have had a lot less time to paint or do basically any kind of hobby work.

It doesn't help that I have a new contract, which involves supervising my old team for the next twelve months and a lot more tedious meetings.

Anyway, I have finished these four members of Colony 87's limited middle class. Why don't we pop below the cut for a longer conversation...

Hear Ye! Fracas on the Fringes

 Out by the eastern gatehouses, some new bloods had come into town. The east gate's a shambles, see, an' it's easy to come in. Plenty of wyrdstone about, too, bein' as it's so close to the Pit. You'd think it'd all be scooped up by now, but the thing about a good entry means that there're always loads o' bands tryin' their luck...

skirmishin'

Mordheim! The City of the Damned! The Pit! The Maw-that-Ended-Ostermark! I haven't played in its grubby little environs in decades, but the two chums I played with at the end of August were very keen to have a jaunt down its storied streets, so we organised a match-up. I brought my Undead warband, while Mangs brought some mercenary scum; Jim had been putting together some horrible Beastmen.

The Crowgor's Herd

Kessler's Killers

Servants of the True Emperor

We played Treasure Hunt from the 2002 Annual to get us familiar with the rules. Below the cut for a pile of photos!

+ + + Gangs Grapple in Ghast Grove + + +

The hivequakes that have been causing the dustshowers in sector C8N-J017 have continued intermittently over the last few months. In the bowels of the sump, the shifting carcass of Hive Primus has caused microfractures to appear in the skin of the hive, allowing groups of wastelanders through. Unlike the nomads of the ash wastes, these snivelling bandits are scarcely more than rad-burned scavvies, stunted and sickly in the healthy phosphorescence of the hive.

Wastelanders by Jim

Their creepy witch, Moonchild, leads a tiny handful of the Wastelanders into the Underhive proper, sniffing out a local grove of Ghast-quality sporicles. Unfortunately for these interlopes into the outlands, the grove is sought after by several of the local gangs, including the Nightshade Crew of House Escher.

Nightshade Crew by Mangs

Of course, the grove is also infested with the skavvies that serve the Three-Eyed King. Glory to Him in Yellow! He infuses and blesses us! Hail!

Cult of the Three-Eyed King in Yellow by me
(missing Žuta!)

We played the mission Ghast Harvest. Being a straightforward 'loot the containers' scenario, this didn't really need much modification for three players beyond rotating priority among all three of us.

We randomly rolled up our gangers and got to work...

Oceanic Union ships at Star Ranger

 A short note today, friends.

Strike Force Wollondilly

The excellent Dean Gundberg, who manages the spaceship wargaming hub Star Ranger, contacted me a few weeks ago to use the photos of my Oceanic Union spaceships for his ship stats page. How could I not? Star Ranger is the first place to go for rules on Full Thrust ships that aren't part of the core books or from other fictional settings, as well as a generally neat place for starship combat games.

If you want to see my ships on the Oceanic Union Defence Force page, go here to see them.

Other Full Thrust resources are available on Star Ranger here.

Thanks again, Dean. A real pleasure to help out.

Gnome more Gnomes to paint

..lamented Alexgnomander, as he reached the limits of the gnome world.

i cast 'summon terrible wordplay'! ahaha

My project for the Old World Army Challenge is complete! OWAC is such a blast every year - I can't wait for 2021, which will see a different group of short, hirsute warriors...

Those Who Fly

Space. The #grimdark frontier.

two pilots and a navigator walk into a bar...

Thistle has meant that even when I am home and my partner is not, I am not able to get as much work done as I actually want. It's worth it, but a little frustrating. Now that the gnome project is wrapping up, I can concentrate on other projects. Although, having said that, I think I've started... three new ones this week? Don't look at me.

#maydur

Just some friendly Adeptus. Nothing to see here. Move along, citizen.

group shot came out a bit shadowy. appropriate.

I got into Warhammer in the late 90s. Like many of us from that era, I spent a percentage of my limited resources poring over White Dwarf each month. Many of those images and articles are burned into my memory, taking up space that I could otherwise use to learn Russian or Korean, develop project management skills, or figure out how to join gaming groups in my thirties.

Probably worth it, to be fair.

White Dwarf #224, August 1998, p.53.
Image © Games Workshop. Used without permission.

One of the images that I always vaguely remembered was Ed Spettigue's (mostly) Tallarn Imperial Guard army from White Dwarf #224. He'd gone with a striking white-and-bone scheme, including on his Sisters of Battle, assassins, and the Mordian Iron Guard he used for heavy weapons. It was cool as hell.

When it came to painting the handful of metal assassins I'd somehow acquired, I was stuck on a painting scheme. I also wasn't sure if I wanted to base them to match my Mantis Warriors, or the industrial setting of the Death Guard, or maybe do some generic basing - maybe even do something weird, like spaceship tiles or something. I then remembered Spettigue's Tallarn, and some thing clicked into place.

While my collection of White Dwarfs was apparently stolen from my father's garage a few years ago, that's not as much of a problem in the age of the internet as you might think, and I was able to dig up a copy. I took a slightly different approach, but am still pleased to have a pack of assassins that aren't the usual black-on-black.

Welcome to my Gno-May-n, as it were

(sorry)

May-n characters for the army

My May entry for the Old World Army Challenge is up! Check it out, and check out the other competitors. There are some seriously amazing painters in the group.

Those Who Play

Despite the bright colours, this might be the most grimdark set yet.

Children shouldn't have any place on a battlefield, especially not in the kind of warzones that Warhammer 40,000 describes. It's a bit bleak for tabletop gaming. At the same time, these were really fun models to paint. I imagine that they'll add a certain amount of charm to the townscape once I get around to some buildings and other terrain.

In the meantime, let's not dwell on the implications.

Those Who Work

The lifeblood of Empire.

♪ ♫ one of these is not like the others ♪

The end of the world has sapped a bit of my motivation, I'm afraid. The fact that I am horrific on my brushes doesn't help, and my usual small detail brush is getting a bit bristly, meaning that it's even more difficult to get any work done.

Also, we got a kitten.

Thistle

Still, I spent the past few days getting started on my Old World Army Challenge Project gnomes and doing these working-class folks as a palate cleanser. (I then ran out of white undercoat, so getting the gnomes done might be a bit of a challenge!)

Three of them are from the Colony 87 range, the same as the majority of my civilians. The lady with all the gear is from Crooked Dice's Paranormal Exterminators range, although I just picked her up cheap in an order from Bad Squiddo a couple years ago just because she looked like fun.

For more photos, we go below the cut...

Those Who Work: Droids

Robots are workers too! Synth rights!

these aren't produced by no STC I seen

A while ago, I was invited into an old school gaming group on Facebook, basically a treasure trove of people with way more talent than I have painting extremely cool shit, but without the seventeen mechadendrites and three-different-browns palette of the INQ28 crowd. (Who, to be clear are also a treasure trove of people with way more talent than I have. I can like two things.)

One of the admins of the group had made these little droids, and just after I joined he was selling the last few from his limited run. I hadn't yet figured out how I was going to do terrain and civilians, but I definitely had to have them.

I then picked up the Jackobot, from Citadel's long lost Paranoia range. A few other #oldhammer types have also painted up this model, and I struggled with how to do a colour scheme for him for a while. A mishap with undercoating meant that he had a kind of blotchy, uneven undercoat, which presented a perfect opportunity to practice chipping and weathering.

Under the cut, we have many, many more photos.

Gnome-pril

Febru-gnome

March of the Gnomes

I haven't mentioned here, but the Old World Army Challenge is still going strong! My gnomes now consist of several regiments of infantry, some fox-riding cavalry, and an artillery battery.

Gnome-pril

Check out the project as a whole and see the absolutely stunning array of talent on display. The rest of the folks are bloody incredible.

Project: (Rogue) Traders

..an infinite deal of nothing...

Full Thrust civilian spacecraft 

Miniature games need objectives, and spaceship miniature games more so than most! Otherwise why are your trillion-dollar warships shooting space lasers at each other in the vast emptiness of space? So I got together some of Ground Zero Games's selection of civilian craft and painted them up.

Like the other Full Thrust things I've shared, these are 'finished', although I may expand on them in future, especially if I get any other fleets...

Merchant shipping

Old closeup photos below the cut!