Quick Dark Imperium Conversions

So, I’ve mentioned before (in a few places) my plan to use the Primaris Marines from the Dark Imperium set as my new Relictors second company.  Naturally, the Relictors Conclave isn’t going to tell the new guys everything about how their Chapter functions, but I still wanted to make a few small tweaks to some of the higher-ups, something to show just a small hint of... well, you know.

Here’s the Primaris Captain.  One of the first thing that struck me—a running theme I’ve noticed with the Primaris—is that he’s actually designed with a reliquary (a philatory, if you want to be exact) hanging at his waist.  That’s a good start.

I added a few skulls to the base.  It’s a habit I got into with Age of Sigmar models, because it’s an easy way to make characters stand out (and if you’ve been playing this game for a while, odds are you’re not short on skulls). It also helps fill some space, since Primaris are on 40mm bases.

I added more purity seals, because the Relictors love purity seals.  Some on the shoulder, a few on the cape.  I like them because the Chapter has such an overall simple color scheme that it isn’t always clear to some folks that they’re actually painted (I had once had a tournament judge comment on my “primer gray” army). So purity seals also serve to add some color and contrast to each model.

Finally, the biggest tweak, but it’s still kinda subtle.  Using a very sharp knife, I sliced the pommel off the Captain’s power sword and replaced it with a skull.  A deliberately large—perhaps even life-sized—skull.  He also got another purity seal on the back of his hand, as close to the sword as possible.  It doesn’t scream “Chaos weapon,” but it maybe mumbles it under its breath. I may give the blade a red-orange paint job, just to make it a bit more iffy.

Not bad, I think.

Dark Imperium, Week Two

So, spent the weekend putting some of the Dark Imperium models together.  Let’s go over a couple observations and impressions, from the modeling and customizing point of view

First observation... A complaint I had with the DarkVengeance set was that all of the Space Marines were firmly Dark Angels.  All the iconography was sculpted on the models—sometimes quite a bit of it.  It was gorgeous, no question, but it was also a lot of work if you wanted to use them for anything else.  Despite the prominent display of Ultramarines colors and heraldry on the box and promo pics, Dark Imperium avoids that issue, and the Primaris look fantastic without being pinned down to any particular Chapter.  Which is cool, because I plan on using them with my Relictors.

Of course, the flipside to this is that the opposing team is... well, 100% Nurgle.  There’s not a single model here that’s even vaguely something else. Which is great if you have a Death Guard army, or have been wanting one (it is a full army, after all), but otherwise... it’s a bit limiting.

Past that...

Another DV issue was that many of the models (especially the Chaos Chosen) went together in really bizarre ways.  Heads and arms would be a single piece connected by the trim on a shoulderpad.  Legs would be split lengthwise through the kneecap.  It was almost as if GW went out of their way to cut the models in the most bizarre ways possible.

The Dark Imperium models go together in much more basic standard patterns. Heads and arms are separate on a lot of the models—standard connection points, although it’s worth pointing out that the arms tend to be complete-with-shoulder pad, just in case you had clever ideas.  This means there’s a bunch of easy tweaks to do that can customize the army without resorting to cuts or filing or putty. 

The simplest one is head swaps within the set. Many of these models have separate heads, and they all use the standard neck-ball that Space Marines of all types have used for the past... what, almost twenty years?  I swapped the heads of these two Plague Marines and didn’t have to cut or trim a single thing.  

Also, because of that standard socket, most older head would fit on these models, too (and without too much of a scale problem).  Yeah, it wouldn’t make much sense for a Primaris to wear a Mk 7 helmet, but it’d be simple to work a lot more bare heads into the army to give them a less straight-out-of-the-box look.  I bet some of the Space Wolves unhelmeted heads would look good, too.  Or if the Plague Marines look a little too Nurgley for your particular army, it would be easy enough to swap in some regular Chaos Marine heads to bring them down a notch.

Helpful Hint—I’d perhaps avoid heads with bionic implants for Primaris soldiers.  After all, they’ve been in so few battles at this point, how many of them would have lots of replacement parts...?

The PoxWalkers worried me a little.  There’s ten variants (two of each in the set), and they all have pretty extreme horns. Silly as it may sound, they’re so extreme that it actually makes them all very distinctive.  It felt obvious they were repeating poses/models within the squad (to me, anyway). So I shaved off a few of the horns and spikes. It helped break them up a bit, and it also helped to inch the whole squad a little closer to my existing plague zombies.

Worth noting—I tried to make those cuts as smooth as possible, and I saved all the horns and spikes.  We’ll see how the final rules (and squad sizes) shape up for PoxWalkers when that new codex comes out in the hopefully-near future, and then I might move some of the spikes and some old skeleton horns over onto my zombies so they all look good together.

Also, one last thing to consider. All the Primaris Marines wear Mk X armor.  Every one of them.  Which really means the only difference between the troops, the sergeants, and the lieutenants is the paint jobs.  Want to give all those guys helmets?  Just trade with friends and give that guy a red helmet.  Want to use that unhelmeted Lieutenant as another sergeant?  Done!  Silly as it may sound, the uniformity gives us a bit more space to mix and match

Is there a lot of room for making this model  into that? Well, we may need to see the full Primaris book before knowing that for sure.  But there’s definitely lots of conversion and cutomizing possibilities within this set.

Next time, I may show off a few of them.

Counting the Hours...

            Tick-tock, tick-tock...

             I’ve got to admit, I have high hopes for this new edition.  No idea if they’ll be met, but I have high hopes.

            I don’t know about you, but the past few editions have been... well, a bit of a letdown for me.  Honestly, at times it felt like someone at GW really had it out for me. 

            Chaos had become a mess on so many levels (although the Traitor Legions book did help with that a bit).  That pretty much put the Alpha Legion, my largest army, out to pasture.  But at least I still had my beloved Relictors!

            Well, until someone declared them Excommunicate Traitoris in the fluff.  Stupid Inquisition...  Yeah, that doesn’t affect day-to-day games, but it still just felt like getting kicked when you were already down.  Imagine if it had been the Space Wolves.  Or the Blood Angels.

            Heck, I never even finished my Dark Eldar army.  They came out, sold a ton of models, and then the entire army took a hit to their saving throws with the new edition.  I already have an army that runs around with thin armor.  But at least the Catachans get real tanks...

            Plus, the game itself had become so bogged down.  Pages and pages and pages of rules, rolling dice again and again and again for what should be simple results, units that were so randomized they were effectively useless.

            And let’s not forget—the whole reason I started this page was because GW effectively priced me out of the game.  I needed to find newer, cheaper ways to play that didn’t involve models which had practically doubled in price.  Paperhammer was, if I may be so bold, Emperor-sent at a time when I didn’t have a lot of good things going on in my life.

            If it weren’t for my friends at the Atomic Warlords, I’ve got to be honest.  I probably would’ve dropped this game a year or five back.

            Anyway...
            I have high hopes for this weekend.  I really want this game to be fun again.

            What about you? What are you hoping for?

Gaming on the Cheap

It’s the new year, so I thought I’d post a few quick thoughts about this geeky blog and... well, what I feel like I’m doing here.

Yeah, I know.  I don’t do much here.  Very funny.

Anyway, on one level, this page is pretty straightforward.  Miniature wargaming can be an expensive hobby.  Bare-bones entry level can be over a hundred dollars, and that’s not even talking glue, paint, or time. A few years back I hit a long stretch of poverty—not imagined-poverty or slight-belt-tightening, but actual how-do-we-pay-rent-this-month poverty?  It was a really bleak time, made more so because my absolute favorite hobby went from a big part of my life to completely unaffordable in about a month.

Then I found Paperhammer.  It’s like finding the light of the Emperor, just... cheaper.  I’d worked in the film industry for a bunch of years as a prop guy, so I had some passable art/craft skills.  I dug around online (using the internet at the library) and found templates for Rhinos, Land Raiders, Baneblades, Monoliths... even Titans.  And there are some great templates out there.  Almost identical to the company models once they’re painted.  Suddenly 40K was affordable again!  The big expense was white glue and paper for the printer.

Alas, while I’ve managed to claw my way back into the middle class, I know there are still some folks who haven’t.  Worse yet, Games Workshop’s prices have skyrocketed over the past few years.  Thirty dollars per figure?  Fifty dollars for bare-basic tanks?  I remember when $150 would pretty much get you a solid army—and that wasn’t so long ago.  Now it’s a lucky thing if that same $150 can round out your Heavy Support choices. 

So being able to build a lot of these models on the cheap means keeping the game open and available to a lot more folks.  That’s a good thing.  And I’m glad to share my tips and experience with you.  Read another way, I’ve screwed up so you don’t have to.

On another level, though... The hobby part of this game doesn’t just mean buying the boxed set, putting it together with company glue, and painting it with company paints. In fact, there was a time when said company encouraged creativity and offered tips to players who couldn’t afford to drop a lot of money.  Making terrain out of cardboard and styrofoam used to be a regular feature in White Dwarf  articles.  Black Gobbo ran a great piece (remember Black Gobbo?) showing how to mix parts from a Basilisk and a Leman Russ to create  a very passable Salamander and Destroyer.  Heck, I remember when the Ogre line was first introduced for Fantasy, White Dwarf ran a whole article about how to convert Hero characters from basic ogres (just in case you couldn’t afford the big metal models.

(I’ll touch on this again in a few weeks)

Thing is, I like making my own models and scenery pieces.  I enjoy it.  I’m proud of the fact that I turned three Tony’s Pizza boxes into a very solid Imperial Knight and some bargain-store Halloween decorations into multi-use scenery.  I like being able to turn some random pieces I dug out of my local gaming store’s bitz bins into a unique and impressive Captain for my Relictors or a character for an Age of Sigmar game.

So, that’s that this is all about.  For me, anyway.  Making the game accessible to a lot more people and giving those people a chance to do something a lot more personal and unique with the units in their army.

If any of that interests you... thanks for being here. 

I’ll try to be semi-interesting.

Space Marine Captain

Staying on the Space Marine bandwagon for one more week with a project I’ve been playing with for a while.

As I’ve mentioned before, my big loyalist army is, ironically, the Relictors.  I’ve got over 3500 points, plus some in-the-works things.  Like most Space Marine players, I’ve also entertained the idea of building up an entire chapter (or as much of a chapter as the Relictors have left these days).  One of the easy targets, so to speak, is special characters, and (also like most Marine players) I’ve often toyed with the idea of building the ten company captains... each with a unique twist that lets them fit into the Relictors army.

   

Maybe a year or so back I was digging through the bits bins at my local store and found the back half of the Captain from the Assault on Black Reach set.  It was a bit banged up and had a few connection holes plugged, but overall it was in very good shape.  You may recall this model had a front half that included his head, chestplate, tabard, left arm, and bolter.  Without that piece this figure was a little... well, bare.

However...

As it turns out, a regular Space Marine chestplate fits where the bulk of that piece normally would.  Fits perfectly, in fact.  It even merges with the collar to form a standard head-socket.  All I needed to do was shave down the pins on the back of the chestplate.  I went with a Mk. 8 because I feel like the stylized aquilla makes the wings very prominent.  And wings are good, as I’ll get to in a minute...

This still left a big hole in the... well, the codpiece region.  And this isn’t really a standard component in any version of Marine model I’ve dealt with.  What is standard, though, are various pieces to cover this region.  Tabards, cingulums, pteruges, purity seals, and so on.  I dug around in my space marine jar and found one of the short tabards with a purity seal on either side.  It’s not a perfect fit, but with a tiny bit of filing to give the right leg some room, it works pretty well.  I also glued the captain onto his base at this point.

Now...this is going to be fourth company Captain Daedalus, the Master of the Fleet (see, wings are good).  According to most fluff, this means he should be armed with a thunder hammer, a symbol of the massive firepower he can call down.  But he is a Relictors captain—a high ranking one, too—so there should be a bit of a Chaos influence in his weaponry.  There’s a good chance he’s part of the Conclave, after all.

I have a pile of parts from the old Fantasy Chaos Warriors, the really old ones that were kind of like cartoony, armored hunchbacks.  One of the hands has a warhammer, but it’s single-sided and has kind of a short handle.  So I tried to think of a cool way to combine two of them into a Chaos thunder hammer.  Here’s what I came up with.

On one of them, I cut the whole gauntlet off the arm and then the back spike off the warhammer.  Then I cut the hammer-head off the other piece and glued it in place.  It took a few moments of scraping and wiggling to make it sit just right.

Helpful Hint—Whenever I’m doing conversions with little pieces like this, I always try to clean all the mold lines before I cut.  Trying to do it after the fact with tiny bits is nigh- impossible and always causes problems.

Once the hammer head itself was good, I cut off the haft of the de-hammered warhammer and added it to my weapon-in-progress.  I needed to shave the base of the w-i-p flat and also do the same with the addition.  The leftover spike made for a nice touch at the base of the thunder hammer.

Helpful Hint—Weapons are almost always going to be focal points, so they’re going to get looked at a lot.  Take as much time as they need.  In this case, I knew the shaft of the hammer had to be straight, so I spent almost ten minutes checking it from every angle.

The gauntlet was just a bit too short to connect to that elbow piece.  I cut a piece of 1/4 square plastic and trimmed the corners with my hobby knife until it was more or less round (it’s barely going to be visible).  I glued it onto the “cuff” of the gauntlet and it gave the arm that little bit of length it needed to look right.

I debated for a while what to do with the other hand.  The “traditional” Master of the Fleet just has his hammer, so I went through my bits looking for a good empty hand.  I thought about giving him a ranged weapon of some sort.  In the end, I settled on a storm shield.  I know the shield is generally a symbol of the Master of the Fortress (second company) but there’s nothing that says the Master of the Fleet can’t have one (and it is a pretty classic combination).  Besides, if anyone’s going to be a little off from tradition, it’d probably be the Relictors...

The shield is also from the Fantasy Chaos Warriors.  I shaved off a few of the studs and spikes so I could drop a few purity seals on it.  I want to almost conceal the chaos nature of the shield.  I cut off an old bolter arm just above the elbow and this all went together perfectly.

All of my Relictors wear their helmets.  There isn’t a bare head in the entire army.  It’s a simple, subtle theme that helps imply they’re hiding something.  Even my scouts have balaclavas and goggles.  So I wanted to give Daedalus an ornate-looking helmet.  I’d recently come into one of the new Sternguard sets, and I briefly considered giving him the helmet with the big Roman crest.  However, because of the large aquilla “collar” on the back of the model it didn’t sit right, and that was before I even put the crest on.  Instead I went with one of the Mk. VI “Corvus” helmets (the beakies).  The Sternguard one even had a matching aquilla on it.

As a final touch, I added a few more purity seals (Relictors can never have too many purity seals).  I also dug around and found one of the Crux pendants from the Terminator set.  Hooked to his belt, it’s a symbol of his history and also helps hide a tiny gap between the tabard and the torso.

And there you have it.  Relictors Captain Daedalus of the Fourth Company, Master of the Fleet, and member of the Conclave.  He may get an iron halo or some other backpack icon, but other than that I think he’s ready to go out on the battlefield.

Snap Marines

Everyone’s talking about Space Marines right now, so I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon...

Pretty much since the dawn of Warhammer 40,000, there have been snap together Space Marines.  When I started playing, back during third edition, Games Workshop was actually selling fire squads to get rid of old stock.  Anyone else remember that little box?

They’ve still got snap-together Marines today, of course, and they’re almost indistinguishable from the regular ones.  About the only bad thing about them is the fact that they are pretty much solidly one pose.  There’s not much you can do except maybe add on a few more purity seals or a pouch here or there.  This also means you’re pretty much screwed if you lose or damage part of the Marine.

I’m guessing that’s why I keep finding some of these guys in the bitz bins.  Usually they’re missing the front hands-bolter piece, and sometimes their backpack, too.  I tend to grab them if they’re not too chewed up or overpainted.  It’s easy to replace backpacks, but the bolters are a little more work and would eat up a lot more resources.  And just the other day I realized an easy fix for them.

Y’see, there’s only so many ways to hold a bolter, especially when the model has it close to their chest.  As it turns out, a lot of the Space Marine Scout poses mirror the regular Marine poses.  And since I modeled my Scouts with either shotguns or pistol/ccw combos, I have a bunch of these pieces with a bolter and two hands on it.

All I had to do was check a few to get a close match and then cut off the arm at the wrist.  That’s it.  It took about three minutes per Marine and I didn’t use anything more complicated than my hobby knife and some glue.  This would work with the snap Marines right out of the box, too, if you wanted to customize them a bit.  Once they’re painted, they’ll blend right in with the rest of my Relictors.

Ironclad Dreadnaught

So, I wanted to toss up something quick as my current project (a trio of Necron Crypteks) isn’t quite done yet.  I thought about putting up a Kroot article I’d scribbled out a while ago.  Then I dug around and found some photos of this nice little piece I did a year or so back.

Like most people who play Warhammer 40K, I like dreadnaughts.  I love the fluff.  I love the models.  I even love the rules.  Loyalist.  Venerable.  Chaos.  Cults.  Grey Knights.  Dreadnaughts are just cool. When the new Space Marine codex introduced the Ironclad Dreadnaught, I thought it was pretty interesting.  Alas, as I’ve mentioned before, since becoming a full-time writer the cash flow isn’t what it used to be (though it’s better than it was when I started).  I didn’t think it was worth springing for a model which wasn’t really that different from a baseline dreadnaught.

And then, as often happens, inspiration struck.

I had a right arm/ shoulder/ weapons mount that had once been a spare assault cannon arm.  I’d shaved off the assault cannon to use on a revamped Terminator and saved the rest of it for... well, bitz.  It struck me that it wouldn’t take much to mount some other weapon there.  Or multiple weapons.

I had a basic dreadnaught I wasn’t using.  Back when I was in the film industry and had money to burn, I’d toyed with the idea of building a dreadnaught-centric Iron Hands army (I did mention I loved dreadnaughts).  But the idea died and the dreads all got repurposed to other armies when I consolidated a lot of stuff.  This would also work fine with a Black Reach dreadnaught if you can dig one up.  They’re usually around twenty-five bucks or so, but be quick—time is running out for that set.

STC data from Dakka Dakka

I dug through my Space Marine stuff and found some of the very old bolter sprues.  Some of you long-time players might remember them.  Each sprue came with three sets of bolters, combat knives, backpacks, and shoulder pads.  Those bolters are pretty blocky and archaic by the standards of today’s models.  However, they also don’t have any venting or grips on the barrel that clearly make them hand-held weapons, which makes them perfect add-ons for a project like this.

Helpful Hint—It’s amazing how much of this old stuff you can find for pennies if you look around.  If your local store has a bitz bin, spend some time sifting through it.  Or check ebay a few times—there’s always somebody who thinks this stuff is worthless.

I took six bolters and cut them down right at the aquilla.  I used the sharpest blade I had and took my time.  These needed to be straight cuts so the guns would all sit right.  I filed them a bit, too, just to make sure they were all square and the same length.

Rather than wrestle with them and the “shoulder” piece, I took a piece of plasticard and cut it down to a clean 1/2” x 3/8” rectangle.  This would serve as my hurricane base, and also be an extra little bit of detail.  I tried the bolters a few different times to find the best arrangement (allowing for minor variances) and then glued them on in sets of two.

Helpful Hint—Whenever I do a project like this, I start at the top and work down.  Most of the time this model’s going to be seen from above, so it’s most important that everything lines up there.  If I run out of space or horribly misjudge something, the mistake ends up lower down and hidden from 90% of lookers.

I let the assembly dry so the bolters would be on solid and then drilled out the barrels with my pin vise.  Then I filed down the plane where the assault cannon had been (or the multi-melta, depending on your dreadnaught) and glued the hurricane bolter in place.  It fit perfectly, and once it’s painted it’ll look perfect.  A purity seal near the join also helps draw the eye and distracts a bit.

The chainfist was even easier.  I used a left arm with a dreadnaught close combat weapon, but I didn’t attach the “claws” that go on the end.  I took my file to the end of the little peg/ piston at the end of the arm.  

The big chainblades are just the head of an ‘uge choppa from the Ork Nob set.  My girlfriend plays Orks, too, so there are plenty of Orky bits in our home, even at our budget level.  I cut it off the handle, carefully trimmed down a few of the cruder details, and then glued it onto the peg.  It was that simple.  This guy’s geared up for close firefights and assaults, so I decided to give him a heavy flamer.  Another purity seal pulls attention away from the join, just in case (plus, the Relictors love purity seals).

Last but not least, I did break down on one thing.  I wanted to add the assault launchers because I like the look of them, and I also like the idea of a charging dreadnaught with grenades.  I played around with how to scratch-build them for a little bit, then realized I could get them (and more purity seals) in a little bundle from Battlewagon Bits for four dollars.  I was weak.  You can probably find them even cheaper if you shop around.

And voila--  Veteran-Brother Amontillado of the Relictors.  Bonus points if you get the reference.  A perfectly acceptable Ironclad, even with his bare-bones paint job.  That’s a $45+ model that I just made for about thirty bucks.

Oh, one last thing.  If you want to pop over to Atomic Warlords you can read the tragic account of our attempt to reenact the second War for Armageddon during our annual Memorial Day/ Carnage Asada Apocalypse game.  There’s also some nice pics of some of my Ork scenery and my Skullhamma (during its brief time on the field...).

Next time, Crypteks.

Unyielding Spectres - follow-up

Okay, after several days hunched over my keyboard, I decided to take a break by hunching over some little toy soldiers. I really wanted to give this a try and create a ghastly green squad to help my Relictors out now and then. Why? Two good reasons.

One, it fits the established fluff (and even some of their original rules) that pretty much no one will ally themselves with the Relictors (bar the occasional radical Inquisitor). The rule has gone away, but I’m one of those weirdoes who believes in making an army that matches their history. So while even the Legion of the Damned might forsake the Relictors, the recently-annihilated Squad Marle might come back to fight another war with their battle-brothers.

Two is that it fits so well with the idea of the Relictors themselves. Veteran brother-Sergeant Marle had meditated, purified himself, and been anointed with all the proper seals and oils before he took up the warp-twisting weapon known as the Axe of Tchar. Who could have foreseen the twisted fate that would befall him and leave him and his men as warp-bound spirits?

See? Sounds good, doesn’t it?

So, these first two models were already blue from a half-hearted attempt at an Ultramarines army. I painted them with a solid coat of goblin green. That got a heavy drybrush of scorpion green on top of it, and then a lighter drybrush of bilious green. I did about a 60/40 mix of bilious green and skull white for the next layer of drybrushing, and finished them off with a very light dusting of skull white. I tried to avoid the shoulder pads for most of the drybrushing, except for the trim. Since Relictors are a dark gray with black shoulder pads, I wanted the pads on these spectral Relictors to be darker, too.

Just before the skull white, I also gave the multi-melta barrels a light drybrush of sunburst yellow. It helps them stand out amidst all the green. I might give the plasma gun something similar.

Anyway, there's a cheap way to do a “counts as” Legion of the Damned. I’m going to try to do those Defiler weapons sometime in the next week or two. Still hoping to be back up and running full time just after Thanksgiving.

Unyielding Spectres

Okay, I know I said I wasn’t going to post anything else while I was working on the book (which is 2/3 done, for those of you who care), but I had this idea last night. It isn’t paperhammer, but it is pretty cheap...

So, maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always thought the Legion of the Damned was one of the cooler elements in Space Marine lore. I mean, in an army of superhuman warriors, they’re the ones everyone points at and says “Whoa, who are those guys?” If you’ve been a long-time player, you’ve probably seen a good half-dozen versions of the skull-and-fire army list, including the Apocalypse datasheet.

They got yet another one in the new Space Marine Codex, and this time they got new figures as well. Absolutely beautiful figures. How could you not love either of those sergeants? I mean, I’ve got a lot of my old figures and I love ‘em, don’t get me wrong. But the new ones with the slightly-different proportions just have a real punch to them, y’know?

Alas, these days all those figures are way out of my price range. Even if you go through someone like the Warstore who’ll give you a discount, you’re looking at about $45 dollars for a bare-bones (no pun intended) five man squad. Get an assault and/ or a heavy weapon and you could be looking at close to $100 for a ten man squad of angry spectral warfare.

So, being poor and clever, I started mulling over it in the back of my mind.

Just recently, it so happens, I was browsing through some old White Dwarf issues from five or six years back. Y’know, when it was fun and exciting to read each month. Anyway, some of you may remember there was a gentle push for “counts as” models to make people experiment with the modeling aspect of the hobby. A lot of examples of this showed up in White Dwarf.

Now, I don’t play Warhammer Fantasy, but I admit there are some gorgeous models and I do like seeing what people do with them. What caught my eye was a run of people doing very offbeat things with undead armies. There were two articles, in fact, about guys who’d made armies using non-human undead, going off the logic that in this world people had to use something besides human corpses. One gent (in WD # 289) had used Dwarves as his Spirit Host by painting the models head-to-toe in ghostly pale blue. Another had made an undead Orc army (WD #309) and used two goblins with bagpipes to represent his Banshee, painted a bright, almost phosphorescent green..

The kicker, though, was a little deeper in WD #309. There was an article on Kill Team (remember Kill Team?) and how to add a “level boss” style nemesis to your game. Unbound demons, mutant monstrosities, warrior constructs, and at the very end of the article... apparitions. A set of rules for bringing the ghost of an Imperial saint or martyr into Kill Team. Their example was a Space Marine sergeant decked out with a few nice bits and painted in that same ghostly green style.

So last night it hit me (as I’m sure it’s already hit you). The Legion of the Damned are suspected of being ghosts anyway. What about just painting a squad of regular Marines as glowing green or blue ghosts and using them as a “counts as” Legion of the Damned?

It almost works better, in a way, because now you can customize them to your army. There’s tons of history where Space Marines are getting annihilated by company (Ultramarines 1st) or by chapter (Astral Knights), and it wouldn’t take long to find a group of spirits who would be coming to your army’s rescue. Heck, you may have something from your own personal gaming history to fall back on (like when Gillian’s Tyranids wiped out my Relictors last Labor Day).

The best part? You can buy a regular ten-man tactical squad for about $35 dollars, depending on where you shop. That’s a third of the price of buying ten Legion of the Damned models. Still too much? Go to Battlewagon Bits or the Bitz Barn and buy the tactical squad from the Black Reach set. A few less posing options, but now you’re only paying about twenty dollars for a ten man squad of vengeful wraiths. That’s almost 80% less than the LotD figures.

And 80% off is pretty cheap.

I might try one of these this week. I’ll post a picture here if it comes out kind of nice.

Daemonhosts

Sorry for the long delay in posting anything. Dealing with a bunch of real-world crap, plus I’ve been busy painting Tyranids for the annual Memorial Day Apocalypse game my friends and I have. Yes, I’m finally going to field my Tyranid army. It only took eleven years.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure the geeky blog here didn’t get neglected too much, so I thought I’d look at a money-saving project I did a few years back. As I’ve mentioned, one of my main armies is the Relictors and they grew out of a radical Daemonhunters force I built. One of the mainstays of any radical force is, of course, the Daemonhosts.

None of the GW Daemonhost models really did it for me, though. As it happened, I had a few frames worth of Warhammer Fantasy zombie parts, and I thought I’d be able to piece together something more dynamic and appealing. So I gathered up some stuff and went to work on M’ndragora and Deminos.

The image of someone in full stocks and chains was firm in my mind, so I decided to go with that for M’ndragora. I picked over the zombie bitz until I had a body and limbs in a good, dynamic pose (keeping in mind that he was going to be floating in the air). His head is the bound-and-stitched one from the old Chaos mutations sprue, which seemed very appropriate. One of his feet is actually the bare foot and calf one zombie hand is using for a club. The stocks help hide the join.

The stocks themselves are just strips of plastic. I cut them to size and marked where they lined up with the arm, neck, and legs. Then I carved them out with an XActo blade and smoothed the holes with a file. I glued them around the body, and then also added a trim piece to the front and back.

Helpful Hint-- This project is a great example of why you should always hang on to scraps of plastic. It may seem silly to hang onto a 1”x 1/2” piece, but on 40K scale that’s gigantic. It could be a door big enough for a Space Marine to fit through. Both of these models were built with leftover scrap from other projects.

M’ndragora is pretty much done at this point, but the details helped make the model. The purity seal came from some Space Marines. I shamefully admit all the locks were a special purchase back when you could buy individual bitz from GW. They’re from the Cherubael figure for the Inquisitor game. Not cheap at all. Although on this scale it wouldn’t be hard to do very passable ones from green stuff.

Helpful Hint--If you ever need chains for 40K, go hit your local 99 Cents Store, Big Lots, or similar place. Go look at all the jewelry for pre-teen girls. It’s the stuff that’s kind of stylish but still very cheap. Sift through a few and you’ll find some that are perfect chains. I got about twenty inches worth of the chain for these models for two dollars.

Deminos took a bit more work. I got the two straightest zombie arms and then used putty to make them look good stretched out perpendicular from his body. His head is the same Chaos mutations one again. I had to cut and pose the legs with a little putty so they’d be side-by-side and crossed at the ankles. And, yeah, that’s the same bare foot again, too.

The cross is double-thick plastic to give it some real heft. You can’t tell in the picture but there are a few notches cut into it to help make it look like scarred metal. There’s also an Imperial eagle from the tank sprue (back when the Imperial tank sprue had a lot more cool stuff on it) on the back that lines up with his shoulders.

I used up another five or six inches of the chain here for detail. I had to try wrapping it a few different ways before I found one that looked symmetrical and binding but also left the eagle exposed in the back. Those big bolts and hex-hunts are off some Ork hubcaps. The padlock is one last one from the Cherubael bitz.

It’s worth mentioning that after getting Deminos assembled I had this sudden religious crisis. After all, in the age of the Imperium wouldn’t this poor sap be nailed to a large capital ‘I’ or something shaped like an eagle? Peace of mind came from my friend Marcus, who pointed out that the cross was a convenient shape people were getting nailed to long before the rise of Christianity and probably still were 40,000 years in the future.

Both Daemonhosts got mounted on modified flying bases so they’d be hovering high above the ground. It’s also great to see them looming over an enemy squad.

As I’ve said before, painting is not my strong suit, so here’s the quick version of what I did. Their skin is Ice Blue, drybrushed down to Bleached Bone to accent the fact that this is a dead body animated by the forces of Chaos. Their clothes and binding straps are Red Gore so they tie into the rest of the Daemonhunters force. The padlocks and aquilla are Tin Bitz drybrushed with Shining Gold (to show how sanctified and pure they are).

That’s M’ndragora and Deminos (although it’s worth noting M’ndragora fell off his base while I was getting these “beauty shots,” so here he’s just stuck on a flying base with some earthquake putty). Not the most inexpensive things I’ve ever shown off here at the Grim Cheapness, but still far cheaper than the thirty-odd dollars it would cost you for two GW Daemonhost figures.

Starting Out

I got into Warhammer 40,000 a little over ten years ago, in kind of an ass-backwards kind of way. My best friend, his wife-to-be, and a few other mutual friends all played, and I knew it as "the sci-fi toy soldier game." I thought a lot of the models were really gorgeous, but the game... well, the game was a bit ridiculous.

Y'see, because they were deep in the Armageddon world-wide campaign when I first tried learning about the game, I was suffering from a grave misconception. As I understood it, you painted up your little guys, battled, and when someone died you put them up on the shelf and never used that model again. You even emailed your results to England, so everyone would know you could never use that model again.

What kind of a stupid, money-sucking game was this? I mean, it explained why Marcus needed so many of the little soldiers, and always seemed to be painting new ones. But still... all that work on a model and then you never use it again?

Anyway, about the time I started to figure out my mistake, Games Workshop decided to sell off a bunch of their older, snap-together plastic models in cheap little packs (very similar to the ones they're marketing again these days). One was the "alien attack" box which came with four old-style genestealers and four of the smaller, old termagants. I thought a few of the 'stealers would look cool around my computer. Than I bought another box. And a third. Soon I had about thirty-odd genestealers and a pile of termagants, too. So I started learning the rules, and... hooked.

The Tyranids fell aside. To be honest, I have still never fielded my Tyranid army, which continues to get more than a few laughs from my friends. Looking at the early Chaos Marine codex, the Alpha Legion soon became my true love (years before the rest of you hopped on the bandwagon because of Dawn of War or Dan Abnett's Legion), and remains my largest army to this day. Like most people's first Chaos army, it split off and I ended up with a usable army for all four of the major cults as well, including a Thousand Sons force I still use and a Death Guard army I'm quite proud of. Then there was an all-bike White Scars army. A good-sized Ork Waaagh with a faint Star Trek theme called Da TekBoyz. A White Dwarf article convinced me to start a Kroot Mercenary army. When Codex:Daemonhunters came out it not only gave me a nice little radical force, but also spawned my new loyalist army, the Relictors, who now stand as my second favorite-army behind the Alpha Legion.

What can I say? I like the gray areas.

Alas, it wasn't all that long after this point in my career as a 40K general (and warboss and hive mind and shaper...) that I decided to give up my day job and become a full-time writer. And unless your name is Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or Richard Castle, being a full time writer doesn't pay as well as most people think. It wasn't a completely ridiculous decision--I had been making a fair degree of money at it--but it still meant about a 70% pay cut, so a lot of my disposable income was... well, disposed of. Warhammer 40,000 went from being the thing I could drop a sixty or seventy bucks a month on to the thing I might get to drop sixty bucks a year on. In all of last year, I bought the new Imperial Guard codex. That's it.

So I started getting good at customizing. I couldn't afford new Terminators for the Relictors, but a bit of plasticard, a sharp knife, and a spare assault cannon from a plastic dreadnaught still gave me a bigger, bulkier Terminator. Daemonhosts? Scratch-built those, too. It made sense that the cult legions would till have older Rhinos, so those got shifted around and converted as well.

Also in 2009, however, I stumbled across an article at The Golden Bolter about Paperhammer. It included links to about a hundred templates for vehicles and scenery, ranging from simple cardstock Rhinos to elaborate Titans of all classes.

And y'know what? I'm still having fun with Warhammer 40,000, even on a tight budget. So here's a random record of all the stuff I've been building on the cheap, along with a few helpful tips on stuff I wish I'd known from the start. Like instructions for some of these templates...

If I can save someone else a few bucks along the way, and get them a kick-ass new Warhound Titan... my work here is done.