WH:TOW - All Aboard the Hype Train

Next Stop Wish List City.

So this is apparently something that the GW design team is really working on... for a far future release.

Wish-listing? Plastic Warmaster scaled Warhammer. Far more suited to the scale that GW wants Warhammer to be, plus visually gorgeous.

More realistic?  Cynical way to rope in the grognards by bringing out a $75 $100 hardback rulebook with all the characters they love and miss.  If it plays like 6th edition, but incorporates 8th edition units, they will have my money!

So we will see.

Bloodreavers - Part 2

The puzzle have been solved!  Just a quick post to show off how my various conversions paid off and allowed me to rank up my Bloodreavers in an effort to make them serve as Chaos Marauders.

Certainly these chaps look a bit Chaotic, what with the arms going every which way...

As you can see from the photo, I numbered the bases with a pen, because they really only fit the one way!  

Most of my conversions are head and left arm swaps, with a few weapon or right arm changes too.  Being plastic, the figures were relatively easy to modify, and I fortunately had a bunch of Chaos bits to draw on for the conversion. 

I will show more of these figures later, but I was just excited that I was able to get it done at all. 

Warhammer Marauders from Bloodreavers

Recently I won an Ebay auction for the 20 Bloodreavers in the Age of Sigmar Starter set.  I had been bidding the same low price for approximately eight months, so I was pretty pleased!

The goal for these figures is to make a Khorne marked marauder regiment for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, which will mean some conversions are needed to get them to rank up.  The models actually fit rather well on 25mm squares, but as they were designed to be skirmishers, they have axes and swords and arms swinging around every which way and it will certainly be a puzzle to get them all into the regiment.

Comparison with my converted Reaper Chaos Champion

Speaking of puzzles, the figures are very cleanly cast (as one would expect from contemporary injection molded figures), but as they are designed with computers for molding, they have what seem to be unusual cut lines. For example the unit champion figure (you get two) has three pieces, body, arm, and unusually, a combined head/arm piece.  Receiving the figures stuffed in a small bag as I did made for a challenging cleaning session, as I tried to match up the various parts.

Comparison with a standard Marauder and between "Franz" and "Jean"

As compared to the older Warhammer Chaos Marauders, you can see that these figures are approximately the same height and mass, however, they are proportioned slightly differently, in that the newer figures have slightly shorter legs, smaller heads and hands, and broader chests... all of which makes them seem slightly more "realistic", at least as much as blood crazed cannibal barbarians can be realistic!

As compared to the older Warhammer Chaos Warriors, you can see that they are again around the same height and mass; however, the Bloodreaver is broader in the shoulder (making allowances for the armor and fur cape), and obviously more chaotic in pose!

Anyway, I will post more pictures when I get the regiment built up, and eventually painted.  With all of that skin, these figures seem suited for a cream colored zenithal highlight...

Chaos Champion

First of a series of photos taken this weekend of various finished miniatures.

Converted from a Reaper Bones figure.  I added the shield and replaced the head with a standard Chaos Warrior head.  I then added the right shoulder pad and sliced off the overly large integral base so that he could go on a more standard slotta. Still needs to have his base finished with some static grass and the like, but I will probably wait until I build up that Chaos battalion I got last year. 

I liked painting the Bones material, and it certainly was easy to modify, as a sharp knife sliced away anything unwanted.

Regarding the photography, I used my wife's new camera for this, and as you can see my results were less than stellar.  I need to try again sometime soon (now that she is around to coach me) and perhaps I can replace these pictures with something a bit more true to color and sharper.

Age of Sigmar II

Well, I got White Dwarf 75, and it appears that all rumors about the new Age of Sigmar game are true.  It does replace Warhammer with some sort of rules light skirmish game, and it does have Sigmar Marines, sorry "Stormcast Eternals" as being the fluff drivers in a new era with a bunch of new worlds.

(Apologies for the hasty cellphone snaps throughout)

So the old world is dead... what is left?  Well, terrible "fluff", new names (Orruks instead of Orcs and so on), and I suspect new models being the only focus going forward. (There are rules for existing models on the website, but it seems likely that only new figures will be featured in the future, and certainly in the new campaign books.)  As someone with 4+ Warhammer armies, it is somewhat depressing, but to be fair, I have not ever played the game anyway, and was likely to stick with 6th edition when I did get around to it, so it is not much of a loss for me ruleswise... only in the demise of my beloved Empire.

After that depressing stuff, lets move on to the cool part about this post, which is the Sigmar marine included with the White Dwarf.  This is the first time since 5th Edition 40k that I have gotten a figure with the magazine (that time it was a Terminator and an Ork).  Indeed this is the newest GW figure that I have, since most of my kits are older.  I must say it was very sharply molded.  It may not be evident from pictures, but the figure is not a "press fit" one, in that the head, shield, and chest pieces need to be glued for permanency.  In the picture below I super glued the shield arm but left everything else loose. Interestingly, the pauldrons are split down the middle, even down the middle of the Sigmar symbol.  The fit is so tight though, that at least on the right side (the one with the symbol) you would never notice.

40mm base

The conversion potential of this figure, and indeed the others from this set is pretty good... if you are looking to make true scale marines that is. When the first rumor pictures started circulating, I thought that maybe these guys would be useful for inquisitors, but as you can see from the slightly blurry picture below, they are very large.  Fortunately they will work nicely as a true scale marine, with some judicious clipping, and marine arms. Mainly, I think that using marine arms, pauldrons, backpack, head, and a chest plate will be sufficient to do the job.

He is a large fellow

bit of a perspective issue here, but the head seems to fit nicely...

Originally I thought that I would convert the Sigmar Marine into another Deathwatch marine, but I decided that I did not want to wait for a bitz order.  Now I have a selection of Chaos bitz on one hand and some imperial ones on the other, trying to decide which way to go...

Age of Sigmar

You have probably already seen these pictures from a White Dwarf leak, but if not...

New Sigmarites

By the power of giant feet and giant shoulder pads, I am Sigmar!

New Chaos

Yo dawg, I heard you like muscles...

Supposedly the contents of the Age of Sigmar (Aos) boxed set that may or may not be the 9th edition of Warhammer. [there is some talk that this is really a separate skirmish only game, and that "real" 9th edition will come later]

Have to say that I am not terribly impressed... the technical quality is surely there, but blech.  This is not what I want in Warhammer.  There was talk of this having rules similar to LotR, which would be good, but then again it would be even less like traditional Warhammer Fantasy than this looks like.

023 Sells Army

ZeroTwentyThree is selling his WHFB Marienburg (Empire) army. While this is undoubtedly a great tragedy for him, it should be a great opportunity for someone else [or rather two chances, since he is selling humans in one lot, and weirdos in another].

Dwarfs

Long ago I painted up a regiment of dwarfs for use as a Dogs of War regiment in my Empire army.  Correspondingly, they had some puff and slash arms, and a few other "Empire" features.  I decided that I liked dwarfs enough to get more, and as was my habit at the time, bought some (many).

With the latest release from Games Workshop being the Dwarfs, I felt inspired, and had a rummage through my various boxes and bit bins and discovered that I have well over 2000 points worth of Dwarfs unbuilt, and of course unpainted.  These are mostly 5th edition metal and 6th edition plastics, with a few newer pieces courtesy of the 7th edition starter box, Battle at Skull Pass.  Really, All I lack are rare pieces, such as a flame cannon or a gyrocopter, but neither of those are particularly expensive if I wanted to add them.

I do not have any pictures of my first regiment at hand, but I do have pictures of my converted lord carried on a shield, which I built in 2008, and in a rare move for me, painted very quickly.

Magnetized so he can walk as well.

Hopefully my next dwarfs will be painted sooner than 6 years from now!

Dark Elves II

This weekend I got the new White Dwarf magazine at the FLGS, and I have been fairly avidly paging through it when I have the time.  This issue is featuring the redone Dark Elves.  Specifically, there are new kits for the basic Dark Elf warrior, Witch Elves, Hydra, and the Cauldron of Blood.  Naturally each of those has alternate builds, yielding three types of warrior, two types of witch elves, a hydra or a new monster, a cauldron of blood, or a showcase vehicle for a Medusa type monster.   These kits join the earlier, and quite excellent corsairs and cold one knights, and the line will be added to next month with a chariot kit, dark rider kit, and a Executioner/Black Guard kit.

Now, as I mentioned in the last post about Dark Elves, I have long wanted a Dark Elf army, and while I am not about to rush out and get one (with several more remaining in boxes and on sprues, I think that my wife might kill me), I do like to list build and fantasize about such things, so I put together a "reasonable" list, and priced it out.  Let me preface this by saying that "reasonable" in my mind is heavy on infantry and other basic units, and is over 2000 points.  If it gets close to 100 or more figures, I think that is reasonable.  Anyway, for my "reasonable" army I got to to approximately 115 figures... and over $600.  For a plastic army. Yeah, nothing reasonable about that.

Picture from GW

Breaking down my imaginary, and now no longer reasonable list, I find that part of the problem is that Witch Elves are $0.50 a point (in the US, ~$0.46 in the UK and undoubtedly more elsewhere).  This is not helped by 40 regular warriors at $35 for a box of ten. (10 monopose fixed head figures too btw, which is a significant step back for humanoid figures).  Without a battalion box, there is no option to get core troops for less.

So no Dark elf army is in the offing, although I might keep an eye out for bitz that I like.

Dark Elves

In the Warhammer world, the Dark Elves have been a popular, but poorly supported army for a while now, where the basic troops never seemed to match up to the artwork.  The Dark Elves army book for 8th edition is coming out next month, so as sure as rain, "leaked" pictures are appearing on the Internet.  Pleasingly, the core troops have been reworked, but of course a WHFB army needs to have a few... unusual elements, such as this:

And since Witch elves were never easy to rank up, GW needed to make them more difficult.

You say witch elves, I say death cultists

 I would be more excited by the figures, were it not for the very costly rumored prices.  WHFB is a great game, but building up armies is getting to be pretty expensive, particularly when a basic regiment costs up to $120.  So I probably will not be building a new army (particularly since I already have several in various stages of completeness).

Nurgle Plague Drones

Like most GW watchers, I saw the tiny scanned pictures from the latest White Dwarf, and scoffed at most of the forthcoming Daemon figures.  They seemed uniformly terrible, and certainly overpriced.  What a difference a clear picture makes:

Instead of this:

Now with mangy elephant trunks!

Now I must have them.  I fancy mounting chaos knights on them, or making them scary alien mega-bugs or something.  I do not even know, but I know I love them, and loath only that they cost so very much ($60 for the box, which has WHFB options as well)

And with an ogre head, and some ork arms in the front, they could be some sort of horrid creature to fight in Inq28 too...

Terrain from the past

When I first started reading about Warhammer 40k online, I somehow stumbled on to Terragenesis, back when it was run by Gary James as a sort of proto-blog. He had all sorts of great projects, and in particular a Gothic church that caught my fancy.  I decided to build something similar, when I turned my hand to terrain creation.

I created this as a sort of Sisters of Battle Chapel, since they had just come out at the time of its construction, and my then girl friend was interested in them.  Construction was common cardboard with drywall spackle over it, details with thinner card and from various wood bits.  Paint was common craft acrylics.  As a piece of terrain it was not very useful, since it was not accessible, and therefore became merely a large piece of LOS blocking terrain.

Sisters of Battle Chapel



Here you can see the damage wrought by time and exposure to the spackle

This cottage was one of two made to tie in with the chapel.  As you can see, it had an interior, which made it marginally more useful than the chapel.  Again it was constructed from cardboard and spackle, although in this case it had half timber work done with various bits of wood.

 

These last two buildings were part of a set of three that I made for an art project at school (and designed with an eye to using them for 40k).  As I recall, we were supposed to design a memorial, and this was to be a memorial to "bombed out cities ruined by airpower" or some such, where the buildings would be constructed in a pit, and then the viewer would see them from above as if they were in a bomber. Sounds very "art class" no?

 

Besides the stated goal of the project, my goal was to get some useful terrain out of of this expenditure of effort.  So I had three building ruins, roughly the right size for miniatures to fit in and fire out of the windows, and away I went.  Construction was foam core and PVA glue, supported with pins while the glue dried.  However, as with all school projects, I started it far far too late at night, and had to rush the production, most particularly the painting stage, as you can see here. 

Unfortunately, all of these buildings were packed up after I moved out of my apartment, and then languished in my parents' attic for a decade.  They recently cleared everything out, and the box of terrain came home with me.  I was going to toss it all out, but my son kept them to play with in the garden, where they have been suffering the effects of exposure for a few months.  Once it starts raining again, they are headed for the trash.  A pity, but they have not aged well, and I find them shockingly bad now.

Landsknecht Painting Guide

The Empire in the Warhammer world is set up as a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire in the late 1500's, and correspondingly its soldiers look like Landsknechts.  Games Workshop has drifted away from this focus slightly in the last decade, and correspondingly my interest in the new units of the army has declined.  Fortunately, I have enough troops to make a [sizable] army using the earlier 5th and 6th edition plastics, and do not need to resort to the newer pajama-men-with-poor-dental-work-and-bric-a-brac that now pass for proud soldiers of the Empire.

Unfortunately, Landsknechts can be pretty hard to paint, as they had no "uniform" colors in the standard sense, and just went with whatever looked good, wore layered clothes with ribbon sleeves, and otherwise made it hard for the poor contemporary painter.

Enter this Landsknecht painting guide that I found via link on TMP. Very useful that, and will be particularly useful for mercenary units and individual character figures that do not correspond to the Empire state armies.

Ebay score

I am currently working on a night goblin regiment (painting at work during lunch!), and as you might know, every night goblin regiment needs some lurking fanatics to keep away the heavy cavalry.  Not being a fan of the current (costly) plastic fanatics, I looked over to Ebay, and happened to find this:

 

Seven old lead fanatics, which I put in a super low bid for and won! (winning bid was less than shipping)  They got to me very quickly, and are now enjoying a bath in some Simple Green.

As a side note, I intended to post a picture of this directly from my phone, but was not able to post MMS messages to blogger, so here is one from Ebay.

Pro Gloria Miniatures

I probably would have noticed these figures earlier if I had been to the Warhammer Empire forum lately, but a new company (to me at least) called Pro Gloria, has just released some lovely HRE civilian figures, sculpted by Paul Hicks!

Very exciting, and not too expensive either, at €5.95 per pack.  There are currently four packs, and hopefully there will be many many more. These figures will be excellent as NPCs for WHFRP, or for Mordheim type skirmish games.  As an aside, the paint job on these is by Andrew Taylor, and just look at that herald... he has a double eagle under his arms... amazing.

Sometime in the future, I need to get these figures.

Skaven for sale

Blog follower ZeroTwentyThree is regretfully selling off his Skaven.  Do take a look, he seems be a great painter, and needs the money.

Games Workshop News

As you are probably aware, Games Workshop(GW) produces a game based on the Lord of the Rings (LotR) movies, and later got the licence for pretty much all Third Age related material. The release of the LotR movies, and the resulting boxed games and figures for the game was a HUGE boost to GW's business, and has resulted in the LotR game becoming one of the "core" systems pushed by GW. It has even spawned a mass battle version of the game, which I have not played, but which is supposed to be pretty good.

Now, GW has signed an agreement to make games based on the two new Hobbit movies. This should be good for the company, and seems pretty exciting to me as well. A Hobbit based version of the basic LotR game would be great, more interest in the Battle of Five Armies would be great, and figures would be great too! [maybe they will even re-release the Bo5A metal figures!?] So a pretty exciting, if not unexpected announcement.

Also, the Warhammer Orcs and Goblins are getting a new book soon, and in GW language, that means new models, and specifically, new plastic kits. This seems to mean mostly savage orcs, which interest me not at all, but the Skulkers and huge spider could be interesting.

Unfortunately, there are no new common or forest goblins on foot, which is what I was really looking for. Maybe those will come out in the "second wave".

Giant!

This past weekend I was able to take advantage of some free time, and photograph my GW giant. The giant was a surprise gift from my wife, who recalled me saying that every army could use one, and quite rightly, deduced that it would be a good purchase. The giant is not only useful for several armies, but also fun to put together due to the huge number of bitz one can choose from to adorn him. Many hands, heads, and feet and even more decorative items are included. Particularly fun are a hand grabbing a screaming man, a man running away from the giant, and a dead cow to sling from his belt. Quite allot of kit for $45.

It would, however, be good if the legs went together a little bit better (I had to use some putty to finish them off), and if there was another leg set option in the box, as a second giant is likely to look exactly the same as the first, even with the huge number of bitz. For $45 you would expect a slightly better fit, and a few more pose options, but this is GW we are talking about, so we got more skullz instead.

Since the giant is very large, it is a bit harder to photograph using standard miniature techniques. So please bear with the photos if they are cropped strangely etc.

First is an overview of the body:

From Miniatures

I painted his legs to look as if they were made from flags/tents etc, since that seems like a likely source of material for pants that large. The striped cloth was a pain to paint, and I am not sure that the results were worth it, since even the most careful painting ran afoul of the difficult folds in the cloth. The checked cloth looks passable in this small picture, but not up close.

Next, is a closeup of the shields on his arms:



I used these to indicate both his general allegiance to DOW/Empire forces, and also to make his arms a bit more armored.

This final picture is a closeup of his upper torso and face.

The skin paint job is not that good, and is actually my third attempt. My first was obliterated by a too heavy ink job, and the second was too blotchy. This third is not quite as good as the first, but gets the job done.

If I ever do another giant, I expect to spend some time reworking the legs, and probably will go with a chaos oriented giant, so that I can have one "good" giant and one "bad" giant. Cloven hooves, mangled hands, and a horned head will adorn the next one, while he will be armed with herdstone and a screaming man. Probably not likely in the foreseeable future, so do not hold your breath.

Anyway, that is my giant. Next time, WFRP miniatures.

Glorious Weißenland

From Miniatures

Above is my WHFB Weißenland army circa early 2007. Sad to say, not much progress made since this picture was taken. I have completed a 10 knight regiment of the Black Griffon, I have just started painting the next full regiment for the army (32 spears) and have painted a number of NPC types to populate the WHFRP version of this world, but no real progress. Around 1000 points depicted.

1. Archer detachment, 2. Captain and swordsmen, 3.Wizard, 4.FreeCompany, 5. Huntsmen, 6. Cannon, 7. Crossbows, 8. Knights