morten tyrannis: finis (2)

 No, no -- really. Honest.

Lord of Poxes

I know I said that I was finished, but even then I acknowledged that Games Workshop had just announced a new model.

I really like this guy, actually. A lot of the 'new' (it's seven years old...) range is way too over the top with the tentacles and the gloop and the smoke. This fellow is a lot more industrial and grounded, while still having a giant silly backpack and a sword the length of two men. Good times.

I painted him up in my usual style - actually, this is probably the last time I'll use the stripey white technique. End of an era. Freshly flayed flesh for the backpack and some stained entrails for his pipes, and there's not much more to say. He was fun to paint!

While his vaguely ronin-implied style made me consider doing some three-dot freehand on his tattered cloak, in the end I decided that he was quite busy enough as it was.

Now that the project is finished for real this time, I'll have to do up a project post at some point. Watch this space.

Project: Folk Horrors

 I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth.
  - Lord Summerisle, in The Wicker Man

sylvan warband

folk horror warband

If there is no longer a fan of Ana Polanšćak on this earth, light a candle for me because I am dead. I kickerstart almost every single line of hers since I first stumbled over her work a few years ago. I've commissioned a few big ghouls from her for my accidental Flesh Eaters Court project. I love her work so so much. Watching her go from strength to strength, a tremendous pillar of the miniature community - it rules. I can't wait to see what she does next.

Of course, actually painting any of her cool miniatures is another thing entirely. I have decision paralysis, combined with 'how do I use these in a game'. A few months ago, I decided that I was sick of leaving these wonderful sculpts in a drawer, so I sat down and assembled two rough warbands that could work in Mordheim just to structure the decision-making process. And now here we are!

After Action Report: The Softness of Gold

..their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord.

   - Ezekiel 7:19

ruins of some now-nameless place

Only a few months after being butchered by Camille's gold-clad enforcers of a soon-to-be-dead king, we have a new edition of Horus Heresy and a new opportunity for the sons of Mortarion to show their mettle. Of course, keeping up with the tradition of me not updating the fucking blog, this battle was back in late August and I have forgotten nearly all of it. Oops.

Death Guard tactical marines deploy

This was the first game of the new edition, hot on the heels of playing exactly two games of the old edition this year. Very excellent timing. That said, Camille and I are het* up about the new edition and both immediately bought a lot of new miniatures for it. I even started painting up a new Centurion, who didn't get finished in time for the game but was polished off that night. That's pretty good.

*ironically

After Action Report: Blade and Rifle

 I'm not sorry. We had it coming.
   - 'Tech Noir', GUNSHIP

look at this insane detail on one of Mangs's survivors

My regular opponent and now game designer Little Mangs of War has been working on a miniatures- and setting-agnostic ruleset, currently dubbed 'Blade and Rifle' while in development. Originally intended as survivors vs AI zombies, he's started playing around with matched play rules. I offered to help him playtest a match a few weeks ago (Sunday 3 August, for those of you tracking how long it takes me to write up after action reports). I only had to bring my own pudgy body; he provided miniatures, terrain, dice (although I did bring my dice and tape measure) and the ALPHA_1 set of the rules.

The rules themselves are a little more complex than, say, Mordheim, but less complex than, say, Infinity. They are incredibly lethal, though, which makes cover essential - Mangs completely coated the board in bushes, abandoned cars, trees, and fences and I think the game would utterly fail to work with any less terrain.

Models roll to climb or shoot/fight, with number of successes counted. Certain actions need certain numbers of successes to work, but failures don't cancel them out. Sometimes fail means increased fatigue or other resources on the sheet are spent; sometimes they mean that the action is 'wasted'. Running or sprinting has other costs as well, such as limiting turning; overwatching holds your action but if nothing then crosses your line of fire, the effect is wasted.

I enjoyed the rules once we got into them, with a few suggestions added (if you run, you should be able to attempt to leap fences or cross small gaps, but with a test - parkour! - or additional penalties ensue). Once we got into it, the rules became smooth and easy to understand.

Each model got a little sheet. Feedback from me and a few others in our small group has suggested further improvements there - A5 is easier to manage than A4, for instance. Each model is assigned a card from a deck, which is drawn for initiative. This is fun and easy, but meaning that you can't control who necessarily acts in a given moment (like in Bolt Action or Infinity). This gives a feeling of random folks thrown together rather than militaristic discipline, which I like for this game.

Some of my survivors enter the suburbs here. On a 6x4' board, there will be a lot of walking (4") to get to where we're going, but we need to hug cover - weapons have no range limits, just bonuses at closer ranges.

In the Graveyard of Terrain

 The 'paint undercoated shit' project continues...

Garden of Morr

This set has a pretty bad reputation. The Goonhammer article describes several mistakes one can make when painting it - and that guy has an airbrush. Ana has several criticisms in her old series where she modifies the hell out of hers, criticising the tacky skulls everywhere. Neither of these guys really go hard enough on the damn thing.

I've had mine for a few years now. I got it through that monthly magazine for Age of Sigmar (in which I think it's called a Sigmarite Mausoleum or something) and was initially keen. It's a big kit, it's plastic, and it works really well for Mordheim. Ana had also done a tutorial on buildings which I wanted to use (and I did, along with referencing her graveyard series and her tutorial on verdigris).

You can even see where I'd undercoated it in 2021 and played a game of Mordheim around it. Very suitable for my Undead warband.

Unfortunately, while 'yeah, paint all the stonework, then pick out the metal railings, the skulls, and the vines' sounds pretty easy in theory, in practice it fucking sucks. There is a LOT of stonework, and it's incredibly boring and tedious to grind through, even using washes, sponges, and stippling. And there are so many fucking skulls holy fucking shit.

I only really enjoyed the buildings, where I followed Ana's tutorials pretty closely (including a first experiment with her trademark white-and-black splatter effect) to give the grounds a pop of colour. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if the initial colouring on the stones hadn't gone so grey.

Anyway, the damn thing is done. It'll make good terrain for Sun Rot, Hag28, Mordheim, or any other horror skirmish game - or even some historicals, if you don't look at it too closely. All the individual buildings are removable from their bases and the whole thing can be split apart to cover more ground.

I have had a little good weather lately, and managed to undercoat a bunch of guys (and some more plastic Age of Sigmar terrain for Mordheim uses), although I have still failed to undercoat my Praetor...

Project: Imjin War

Those who seek death shall live. Those who seek life shall die.
   - Admiral Yi Sun-sin

Korean 'bushi' for Ronin

Little project, done over I think three evenings. Which is very funny, because I think I bought these like five years ago. Jimmy and I were talking one day about how cool it would be to play Ronin, an Osprey Games blue book for Samurai skirmishes. My interest in samurai-era wargaming is generally muted (although I did watch a bunch of Kurosawa movies last year...) but I've always been interested in the Imjin War - and Ronin includes Koreans!

Most Samurai rulesets don't, by the way, even including Warlord Games recent supplement for Pike & Shotte, Wars of the Samurai. Which is good, in a way, because it means I don't wind up buying an entire Perry Miniatures Korean army only to have nobody to fight.

Anyway, these guys have languished in a box since then, but we were talking about it recently, so I decided to dig them out. I had forgotten that I'd based them on hexes - must have been in an old-school mood.

A brief sunshiney day a few days ago let met get them undercoated, and so these were a nice little bit of 'finishing something off' juice for the brain.

Project: Hag28

 For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.

    - Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown

The Hunt of the Death Hag Mother Skaïth

My friend Jimmy is the artist on one of the latest games to come out of the 28 Movement - Hag 28, written by TM Cibelius and currently on Kickstarter. Each player takes on the role of a Hag, be she of the Wode, Death, Desert, Brine. The Hag collects a Hunt of various creatures, and they battle over the soul of local villages, treasures, ancient arcane whatevers. The tone is a mixture of Terry Pratchett, classic folklore, the folk horror trend, and the 'kitbash whatever the hell you like' ethos of the 28 crowd. 

I love the idea, and I love even more the idea of supporting my friends... plus, I have all these horror miniatures I've bought over the years burning a hole in my backlog. So I bashed up a gang and got very lucky a few days ago with some weather clear enough for priming and here we go.

    Hunt of Mother Skaïth

    Mother Skaïth
    Death Hag
    Hex: Death is No Excuse
    Hex: Evil Eye
    Weapon: Basher (wand)

    Terror/Spawn
    Weapon: Basher (or maybe a Poker) (staff)
    Damn Spooky; Make your Entrails your Extrails
    Pretties: 9

    OR if Spawn
    Hex: Nightmare
    Mutation: Where There's a Whip, There's a Way

    Mercenary (x2)
    Heavy armour; Scarred veteran
    Weapon: Chopper (sword & knives or axe)
    Pretties: 4 (each)

    Goblins (x4)
    Ramshackle weapon: Choppers (scratchy claws and rocks)
    My Handiwork
    Mutation: Vicious OR Where There's a Whip, There's a Way
    Pretties: 2 (each)

The above is a 25 Pretty warband based on the 2.0 playtest rules. I think some of the models can be flexible, depending on what's more fun to play with. The Hex Death is No Excuse is a little redundant with the Whip mutation, and similarly with the My Handiwork trait, so we'll see how they interact in a game.

On to the miniatures!

Old World Army Challenge: VI: Necromunda: Failure Redeemed

 How many subtitles can I fit into a blog post?

ladies doing it for themselves

2023 was the last time I attempted the Old World Army Challenge. I was excited - the first year we were doing Specialist Games, I had all this old Necromunda and Gorkamorka metal to paint up; it was going to be good. Alas, I succumbed to the way of all flesh and only managed to get two gangs painted up - my Skavvies, Smilin' Jack and the Bitter Dregs, and my beloved Pit Slaves, Helreach United Miners, Fabricators, Haulers Local Θ-26/20.

All I managed to get done of the third gang, the March gang, was the four juves. Alas, alack, and other a-words that mean: dangit.

Still, this year is seeing me finishing a couple projects up, and then I was out of undercoated things for those projects, just as winter bit in and it got too cold and wet for spraypainting. I scavenged for some undercoated things to paint - with some success so far - and remembered the Escher gang. Let's fucking go.

The Gleaming Falls Ghasts  

 

Leader: bolter, laspistol, twin knives (170 creds)

Heavy: heavy stubber, stub gun,* sword (200 creds)

Juve: autopistol (40 creds)

Juve: stub gun, sword (45 creds)

Juve: autopistol, club (50 creds)

Juve: stub gun, pick (45 creds)

Ganger: autogun, stub gun (80 creds)

Ganger: shotgun, autopistol (85 creds)

Ganger: bolt pistol, sword, frag grenades (110 creds)

Ganger: plasma pistol, pick (85 creds)

Ganger: twin swords, stub gun* (80 creds)

Ganger: autopistol, sword (75 creds)

Ganger: autogun, stub gun* (80 creds)

Ganger: autogun, stub gun* (80 creds)

Ganger: lasgun, laspistol* (90 creds)

Ganger: laspistol, flail (75 creds)

Ganger: shotgun, sword (80 creds)

Ganger: autogun, sword (80 creds)

 

TOTAL: 1,550 credits 

*or some other kind of pistol; it's in a holster. 

This is enough for a starting gang and a half! I'm only missing three of the original sculpts (the other leader, heavy with a plasma cannon, and the chainsword and autopistol ganger). If I see the other three on eBay or something, I'll have to pick them up.

I went with a relatively classic look, because the original style of the Escher --- well, first of all it, it can't be beat anyway, but it's also one of reasons I got into Necromunda in the first place. Punk glamour in all the right ways, black leathers and bright yellows, with a variety of hair colour that never goes away.

To give myself some guidelines, I decided to follow the original colour scheme a little - if a sculpt was painted with blue hair originally, she got blue hair - but all the hair had to be different. I also tried to keep roughly on theme with the loincloths, but wanted everyone to be unique, so those got played with more.

Also: pink gun casing. Because hell yeah, but also because I want to use pink more often. Shoutout to Stahly at Tale of Painters for doing it first and better.

After Action Report: Sheepherding in Cist

12 Маиуса 7533 года от сотворения мира

Любимая моя,

Пишу тебе после битвы...

the would-be shepherds meet

Reduced to squeezing slugs for nourishment, our two forces pushed into this slime-green valley, filled with towering pustules, gleaming with noisome sludge, and hungry, open-mawed pools, shifting in trackless swamps. Триста Тридцать Третий Репки Родины, the mighty 333rd Turnips of the Motherland, clashed against the snivelling dirt-eaters of Jimmy's Earl of Slough Feegle's Regiment of Foot.

After literal years of having turnip on the mind, Jim and I coincidentally finished big piles of terrain in the same month and managed to organise a game! Of course, that was two fucking months ago, because my brain then immediately froze on writing the after action report. I gotta work on this.

Those Who Were Undercoated

 Winter has come, and I am once again unprepared.

Undercoated Family photo

It's too cold to undercoat any of the projects that I want to concentrate on, so I've dug up a handful of already-undercoated models from projects I stalled on - most from years ago - and done a little brushwork on them. Not included here are three models finished from my Age of Sigmar Flesh Eater Courts, because I'm going to do a big project post for those when the whole army is finished. I also have the original Escher gang that I didn't finish for the last Old World Army Challenge I was in, but I haven't been able to do much on those yet.

I'm also working on some terrain, and I'm prepping a bunch of miniatures for when the weather warms up so that I undercoat tons at once. I really ought to plan these things better. Maybe next year...

Project: It's Still About Turnips

 There were worse things than crucifixion. There were teeth.
   - Stephen King, The Strand

action shot of the teeth swamp
(in a forthcoming battle report)

Having finished the Death Guard a few months ago, I decided that the next project would be making some terrain for Turnip 28. I've got mountains of terrain-making supplies, but it's something that gives me a lot of anxiety, being so far out of my wheelhouse. I've been planning terrain for the desert board that my Mantis Warriors would fight over for half a decade, accumulated tons of stuff for it, and am frightened like a little baby.

Turnip provides a way to do this kind of work in a fun, relaxing way, knowing that it's okay to screw up -- that's what the mud is for! Of course, it's still taken me like four years to turn teeth and horrible fingers into actual stuff that goes on a board. In that time, the 'swamp teeth' aesthetic has turned into one of the cornerstones of the Turnip 28 vibe. You see it everywhere - well, fuckers, I had the idea very early! Probably not first, but very very early! I'm just chicken!

cyclopean shepherd stands atop a sunken house
(in a forthcoming battle report)

Anyway, the time finally came to bite the bullet. I snuffled through the rulebook and scenario pamphlet that Max has put together and put together a list of core terrain and a few would-like-to-haves. Some of those haven't eventuated (I wanted to build a sunken windmill and a few terrace houses), but I now have a core list of pieces, which will cover the generic scenarios and some of the weirdo ones:

Impassable Terrain (6x6")

Rotting Fish

Drowned Tower

Defensible Terrain (6 x 6")

Sunken House

Ruin

Dangerous Terrain (9x 9")

Finger Forest

Tooth Pits (in three pieces)

Tooth Bog

Normal Swamps but with Weird Guys (in three pieces)

Walls/Cover (6x1")

Regular wattle fences x2

Tooth walls x2

a pus sheep hangs out at the edge of a tooth wall
from - that's right, a forthcoming battle report

As is traditional, I will go through these in the order I actually finished them. As is not traditional, I'll include a bit more discussion on how I made them and include some WIP photos as we go - so this is going to be a long post!