Hear Ye! Disturbance in the Dömplatz

Last weekend saw a frightful disturbance in the shattered ruins of the Dömplatz, in southern Mordheim. The cathedral square - already shattered by a multitude of meteorites from the Comet - was invaded by two warbands of nightmarish creatures, squabbling to secure the shattered square.

the Dömplatz

Long-since denuded of the obvious wyrdstone shards, the surviving buildings around the Dömplatz  were rumoured to hold stashes of the cursed rock. The great cathedral that once dominated the south-western corner had been obliterated by the Comet; the font still retained an eerie green glow that even the monstrous avoided. Instead, the warbands sought to secure the two towers in the north-west and west, the graveyard to the south-east, Shallya's abandoned shrine in the east, and the eerie tower of Morr that loomed in the north-east, the memento mori carved into its stonework now laced with terrible new meaning.

Servants of the True Emperor

Pijavic ‘the Impious’ von Carstein and his band of cretins, murderers and shambling horrors sought to secure at least the graveyard and the abandoned tower of Morr. The first would allow Jakob Karg new sources for his grotesque sorcery. The latter amused the vicious little sycophant.

The Crowgor's Herd

The Crowgor sought to despoil the places sacred to Man, to feast on the bones in vault and scrawl the nightmarish sigils of his people across the high vaults of the Mannish gods. Also, he bore grudges against the grey-limbed humans after last time.

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!

#justiceforgary

A full year ago, when I started this blog,* I talked about the Servants of the True Emperor, a Mordheim warband that I had just finished. At the time, I said I was done, and I meant it. I mean, as much as anyone ever 'finishes' any project, of course.

That said, there was one of the Gary Morley ghoul sculpts that I really wanted to paint, but hadn't managed to get a hold of him:

Ghoul #12.
Citadel Annual 1995/96, p. 265. © Games Workshop.

His fat little belly, his weird tusks, his giant skull to crush you with. What a handsome boy.

Anyway, I painted him for #deadcember. It's the only undead I'm probably going to paint this month, as it's too hot and smokey to do any real project work:

out wiv some friends

Like his friends, he was painted using Ana Polanšćak's recipe for ghoul skin, with his earrings in bronze and his nipple ring in bone (that last is a bit hard to see in the photos). The sculpt has some fascinating details compared to the others - he's wearing jewellery for a start, but he's also carrying an actual weapon instead of just some old bones and his teeth are far more pronounced, to the point where he has tusks.

I read the weapon and accoutrements as indications that he's retained more sapience than the other devolved ghouls, who are little more than beasts, while the tusks may mean that he was half-orc before his degeneration - or he's touched by Chaos.

In Mordheim, if the band gets That Lad's Got Talent, he looks like the lad with the talent to me.

Reckon I'll call him Gary...

+ + +

*Yes, right before my computer perished and I basically abandoned this blog, I know, I know. I said I was sorry.

Project: Servants of the True Emperor

A few weeks ago, I started a project for 'deadcember'. Today, I finished it. That's a pretty auspicious start to a new blog!

rrr... mmrr..nrr.

Deadcember is one of those slightly silly hobby challenge things that people do. Orctober is probably the most obvious one; Serftember is another. I think my favourite is the Month of Marsh, which I first heard about via ZeroTwentyThree. I'd had my Mordheim undead miniatures lying around for the better part of the last two decades, and I'd never gotten around to painting them, so #deadcember offered a perfect opportunity to do it.

What really kicked me into gear was the work that some of the guys in the AOS28 community were doing. While I've never gotten into Age of Sigmar (a subject for a different time), the AOS28 are just incredible. The movement generates really evocative dark fantasy, sometimes quite intimate and detailed and always with an incredible aesthetic.

Steam trading card: Decay of Society

Alexander Wirnberg of Echoes of Imperium fame has recently been starting a project called Mordheim 2019. Slightly later than the original game's timeframe of 1999, with Mordheim having festered for twenty years and the Empire's anarchic civil war allowing corruption to blister across the continent, Wirnberg's project features the kind of horrible, intricate detail that you'd expect. He takes the weirdness vein already running through Mordheim and turns the dial up to eleven. It's fucking great.

My project was more humble...