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.

#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.

fuck. i'm shit at this

Okay, so, since the last post, I've actually painted a full company (three lances) of battlemechs. This coming Sunday, I'll even have a game with them! I should probably read the rules, actually...

Anyway, this is the list I'm painting towards:

Elements of 3rd Battalion, 1st Canopian Cuirassiers, Magistracy Royal Guards, Magistcracy of Canopus, c.3067-3085

+ RECON LANCE - PV87 +

• Wasp WSP-3L - PV20
• Commando COM-2D - PV17
• Anubis ABS-3MC - PV32
• Locust LCT-1V - PV18

+ CAVALRY LANCE - PV132 +

• Eyleuka EYL-45A - PV40
• Marshal MHL-X1 - PV32
• Wolverine WVR-6R - PV30
• Shadow Hawk SHD-2H - PV30

+ ASSAULT LANCE - PV149 +

• Awesome AWS-8Q - PV39
• Thunderbolt TDR-5S - PV36
• BattleMaster BLR-1G - PV40
• Cyclops CP-10-Z - PV34

+ TOTAL: 368, leaving room for skills and skill upgrades. +

I haven't painted the Marshal MHL-X1 yet, because the weather in Australia is making my heat sinks bleed, if you get me. Plus all the smoke and ash in the air doesn't exactly make me want to go outside and shake up the ol' rattlecan to undercoat him. Meantime, I'll sub in a Catapult CTLT-C1 that I deliberately painted to blend in with the Curaissiers. They have the same PV.

Anyway, here they are!