Tanks for the scenery

Managed to finish off some terrain recently.

yeah take that space sharks

not affiliated with any raiders, at dusk or dawn

More photos of each under the cut...

Terrain: Planning

..right, let's try that again. Last post, I rambled on about how great homemade terrain was and shared a handful of examples of the sort of thing I meant. I mentioned how Star Wars: Legion and Infinity were showing up Warhammer 40K as speculative fiction wargames, by remembering that colours other than black, grey, or stained orange exist. I completely failed to mention why I was rambling about terrain.

Same photo as last time; some pieces I bodged together in 2019.

I've always wanted to have a set of terrain to match my armies. I wanted a green and verdant fantasy board for my Warhammer Empire (and when I get around to sprucing them up, I'll do just that), back in the day. These days, I don't play any fantasy games (despite having about four army projects. yeesh.), but I have managed to amass quite the pile of Mantis Warriors.  I've given them ochre desert bases, and I'd like to start accumulating a set of desert terrain to go with them.

How do I do that?

On Terrain

A hundred years ago, there was a great series of DIY terrain articles in White Dwarf. I forget the name and even the year the articles came out, but if you ask anybody who has been in the hobby since the late '90s, they'll remember them: a bunch of articles on Lizardmen jungle terrain, including a small village, a pond, some ruined temples on the edge of hills, and a giant castle to wrap the whole thing up.

The articles a smooth, easy to read, easy to follow and were at least one clear factor in my hoard of polystyrene nonsense that I collected in the last months of high school and early university, before a succession of moves meant that I scattered them to the four winds.

Now that I'm back in the hobby (and have been for about two years now!), I want to figure out how and what to build to get a similar end result...

A few pieces I finished in 2019, made from... stuff.

+ + + Border Skirmish with Outlaw Mutants! + + +

The underhive creaks, a stirring of dust trickling through seventeen layers of ancient civilization, abandoned factora, desecrated shrines to petty military-industrial divinities. Soon, this borderzone just past Dust Falls will become a scene of blood and death. For now, a three-spined rat grooms itself under the dust shower...

The cohort of scavvy muties that call themselves the Cult of the Three-Eyed King face down Dust Falls United Metalworkers on a scrappy borderlevel of Hive Primus, as a chance meeting between Herne and the Goliath Shin goes pretty much as you'd expect...

Herne, lit by the glare of some fading Solar-esque™ floodlights

Kill Team: Renegade

Kill Team: Renegade, Mantis Warriors chapter. circa 910-930.M41

Over the past couple of years, I've slowly assembled a small handful of Rogue Trader-era marine sculpts that I really liked with the intention of making a little Mantis Warriors kill team. I'd picked up the chap with the shuriken catapult and the brother in customised armour already. I knew I wanted the flamer warrior with one arm bare, and from there it was a matter of deciding to get two more to round the squad to a game-legal five.

The advent of Kill Team also means that I can use this squad as a hardcore team of veterans, where their customised colour patterns and lack of orthodox armour makes more sense. I'm hoping to expand the team, using a combination of miniatures already existing in my Mantis Warriors 'Winds of the Desert' army and converting a couple more with meta-friendly storm shields so that I can use them in the local 'scene'.

Anyway, let's go through the team and look at the inspiration behind their unorthodox armour patterns...

Gnome-uary

The first month of the Old World Army Challenge is up! Go thither to see more of my gnomes and check out the other entrants! They are much better painters than I!

vincit omnia sanguis

When Games Workshop announced the new Sisters of Battle project, I was cautiously excited. One of my best mates in high school had collected them back in the late 90s, and I'd always liked the miniatures. As the sculpts started to be revealed, my caution gave way to regular excitement. I decided to get the boxed set on release! Yeah!

Which was lucky, as it turned out that you had about a twenty minute window to decide if you wanted it, when it was released. Bloody hell.

shiny

 It has since turned out that the monoposey nature of the original boxed set was giving way to more genuinely multipart models, although I haven't gotten the new kits yet (they release next week, after all). This is good, because while these are good sculpts, I don't want every single flamer sister to be standing on a smouldering daemon, you know?

In the meantime, though, I had to figure out how I was going to paint them. So! The first few months of 2020 have been a combination of new sisters and my Old World Army Challenge gnomes. I can't show you those (you have to follow the Challenge blog!), but I can show you my sisters.

War as business: Warhammer 40,000 Squats

A while back, I was feeling a bit down and bought myself a Squat tricycle on ebay for too much money. Since then, I've fallen down a rabbit hole mining pit of space dwarf purchases, and collected the better part of an army worth.

Given that 8th edition doesn't even have rules for the recent Necromunda Squat releases (let alone these 25+ year-old models), this is the furthest I could get from a practical decision. Even in the world of hobby wargaming, spending money collecting an army's worth of figures that you can't actually play with is a bit... niche.

Space Dwarfs plastic kit box art, Paul Bonner(?).
© Games Workshop 1989

After Action Report: Pirate Raid on Borgan's Rift

Borgan's Rift is a backwater. Formerly a major trading hub in the Periphery, centuries of piracy and neglect have left it with few major industries; aside from the wineries of Magliss Spirits, nominally the planet's owners, the planet holds little of value.

In the waning years of the FedCom civil war, the Magistcracy of Canopus gave permission to the Capellans to patrol the planet, turning it into a warzone. As the months rolled into years, the Magistcracy has spent some funding to redevelop the world, establishing a provincial military academy and other 'Mech facilities. Unfortunately, the collapse of the Second Star League has led to instability across the region, even if there have yet to be any major attacks on Canopian worlds.

Over the last few months, there have been increasing reports of pirate units bearing no unifying insignia. Canopian intelligence has succesfully tracked at least a half-company worth of light and medium 'Mechs to the scratchy foothills north of Old Port Town, an old smugglers' haven.

Colonel Lane Meisel of the 1st Canopian Cuirassiers dispatches a company of the 3rd Battalion to put down the pirates in force...

Rocky foothills north of Old Port Town.

+ + Shoot-out near Fungapipe Forest + +

Local Orlock gun-runners the Harrier Bois had a run in with abhuman huntpack Undergangan out in the scrap-fields west of Fungapipe Forest.

Scrap-fields. Note the pipe-spawned fungal forest on the skinward side.

Remember Doc Renegade's? "A Renegade Doc at Renegade Prices!"? Well, here's part of him.

Coming soon...

 © Matt Smith 2015. Used without permission.
http://matt-illustration.squarespace.com/

..to The Old World Army Challenge 2020.