Grimdark Future: Chaos vs Marines

I've started to dabble with Grimdark Future. This is a ruleset by One Page Rules, and is available for free here*. GF is a very light alternative for 40K (or other similar games of around platoon- company size). It achieves this by removing nearly all the strategems, rerolls, auras, exceptions, shenanigans, errata, updates, and other special rules that really bog 40K down and prevent it being a casual game. GF remains tense with competition for objectives, and interesting with alternating activations. There are buckets of dice, and units getting destroyed/ routed frequently makes for a quick game! Not to forget it isn't spread across multiple books, and is free.

I lined up my Red Corsairs against my opponent's Space Marines, the Right Hands. The Right Hands all had hand-painted markings on them- respect! We played on a 6'x4' table with three objectives. We chose 1000 points as a smaller game as it was our first with these rules.

Red Corsairs:

• 2x squads of Chaos Marines
• 2x mobs of Cultists
• 1x pack of Possessed Marines

Right Hands:

• 1x Assault Squad
• 1x Infernus (flamethrower) Squad
• 1x Tactical Squad
• 1x Invictor Warsuit

Right Hands Invictor Warsuit

The Right Hands advance on the refinery facilities.
Chaos taint is suspected.

The Warsuit and Assault Squad cover the Marine right.

Here's an overview of what happened. I advanced over a broad front, and my Possessed Marines went loping around from my right. The Right Hands tried to stop them, and did a similar sweep with their Assault Marines on my left.

The Battle. Objectives are numbered.

Right Hands Tactical Squad holds Objective 3

My traitors try to gun them down.

My terrifyingly fast Possessed rip the Right Hands apart.

On my left, cultists face off against Assault Marines...

...and the melee unsurprisingly goes the way of the Astartes.

The Possessed leap onto the Warsuit, and
damage it but cannot take it entirely out.

Final result was a 2:1 win to the Red Corsairs. The cultists were weak and the Warsuit was strong, but the number of bodies gave me an edge. I am going to need to up my anti-armour capabilities...

We're going to try this as a light campaign**, with experience, wounds, and a slow trickle of reinforcements.

The objective markers are Wargames Atlantic Zombies with the bases cut off and limbs reposed. I can see myself making more with era-specific weapons and accoutrements as required. They're on 40mm MDF bases.

*An expanded and still free version of the rules can be found here, and the excellent army builder is here.

** Campaign rules here. They're free as well...

Greyscale Gangster

Angels with Filthy Souls is a highly-quotable 80 second metafilm, created for and shown within the classic Home Alone (1990). Starring Ralph Foody as Johnny and Michael Guido as Snakes, it is an homage to the gangster classic Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). There is a good Vanity Fair article about it here.

This is a free digital figure from Wargames Atlantic. The barrel is a bit delicate, but it was a fun figure to paint. I like the shirt garters! I was heavily influenced by Carmen 'Fun Painty Time' Cerra as I learned about greyscale and value painting. I was lucky to have a black and white source to refer to!

This was a technical task from the Analogue Hobbies Challenge. I started with a black undercoat, drybrushed white. I used a dark grey highlighted with a mid grey, the mid grey highlighted with a light grey, and the light grey highlighted with white. There's room for improvement with the tommy gun and maybe I could pick out the tie pattern, but that was enough for now. I'm not going to start a whole greyscale project- but it would be fun...

Wargames Atlantic Raumjäger

I got the Wargames Atlantic Raumjäger at Cancon 2020. You get 24 figures in the box, and so far I've only painted these eight. There are six sprues of four figures, with options for arms and heads. You have weapon options for an G36/ las hybrid, plasma gun, flamer, SAW, and pistol. There's a radio and some pouches as well. There are some helmet-less heads with Bergmütze-style caps. I made some minor conversions and did a quick paint to get them ready for Five Parsecs.

Raumjäger

Arms from GW GSC Neophytes

Converted to be holding a rifle left-handed

Converted to long barrel

They're quite fine sci-fi troopers. I would like to see some support or command sprues at some stage. I'm not sure if I will paint the rest similarly or not, and I might do some different heads for variety.