Paul D's May contribution - Goblins, lots of goblins to the tune of 400 points of troops.

 Following my decision to assist a friend with his attempt to recreate the large battle shown in the 3rd Edition rule book at this years BOYL, I've gone full on, painting early Citadel goblins, to the point that in my rush I've not taken progress pictures, please forgive me.

 First up, C series Archers, from the following ranges

 

First batch of goblin infantry, from way back when.

 

 

Second batch of infantry with first batch, what maybe of interest to some of you - I've added a few chaos goblins and a few early slotta  figures.

 

Next batch of  goblins

 

 Last group with latter batches of infantry receive a coat of varnish.

 

 All based up and another coat of vanish. A total of eighty figures at roughly five points each gives a healthy total of four hundred points.

 

 Which should take me over the thousand point mark for the challenge.

Catalogue pictures from Stuff of Legends website. 

Now off the paint something other than goblins!😂

 

 

Shadespyre's April Post - Rank and File (IV) - (Name Pending!) Dark Elves Army (828 points)

OWAC VI - Rank and File (IV) - Both Rank and Vile

April

It's been an odd month. I'm well ahead of schedule on painting, so a lot of what I'm posting now was started or even finished back in March. Maybe three or four weeks of the intervening time has been spent on basing and adding heraldry to things that I've already painted - by ironic coincidence, none of that heraldry appears in this month's offerings. I've also lost my ability to take good photos, somehow, and then with the end of the project on the horizon, I dropped one of my more elaborate models and have had to extensively rebuild it. But that's a story for another month.

At the end of March's blog entry, I promised you "my favourite project in the army" and "the unit which almost broke me". Let's start with the latter one.

Waaaaaay back when I first discovered D&D and Citadel Miniatures, one of my favourite things was the Night Elf Patrol, one of the Speciality Set series. According to Stuff of Legends, it was released in October 1982 and replaced by a set of Chaos Warriors in August 1983, which might explain why I found it hard to recollect a full set of them.

Sadly, I also realised why they may have been withdrawn so quickly - many of them are easily broken, meanign that 40 years later I've had to repair a lot of them, but perhaps more significantly many of the castings are of poor quality, with blurry faces and textureless patches of chainmail. It makes me think that the original moulds may have declined quickly, giving an excuse to replace the set? or maybe it was just that these minis are tiny and wee and Citadel wanted the rebranded Dark Elves to be much bigger?

Whatever the reason, recollecting them was not the spark of nostalgic joy that I had hoped for. Painting them only proved worse! I wanted to use a different colour scheme from the rest of the army, both to distinguish them as scouts and a slighly different subrace, and because I was so fed up with purple. After a number of false starts - dark blue, dark green - I settled on a near-black grey just so I could get the damn things painted. A poor end to what I expected to be a highlight of the project.

But here we are, 20 scouts made up mostly of the SS3 Night Elves, with a number of repeats and many repairs. In my Dark-Elves-as-Drow canon, I think these are members of the lower castes of Drow society, a diminished people who live too close to the surface world to have proper influence, but retain some usefulness because of their knowledge of that wider world.  Who better to scout ahead of your majestic Noble raiding party?

You'll notice that the pictures have a wierd yellowish green background - this is actually cream coloured card which I tried after white just stopped working for me! It was fine while the bases were grey, but the white seems to have ruined it? I'll sort out something better when I can, but for now you'll have to suffer it in the name of being able to see any detail at all in these pictures.

Three other things of note are - the second mini in the top row is not a Night Elf or Dark Elf, but a slightly later C09 Elf Hero. Despite the slighter build, his equipment is very much in the style of this boxed set, so I hunted him down and added him to this unit. The middle mini in the middle row is another outsider - he's the Night Elf Lord from the Fantasy Tribes code FTE - Fantasy Evil Leaders. He was definitely designed alongside the others in this set, though. He may even be a resculpt of the mini seen second in the bottom row.

Finally, I was having such a bad time photographing this lot that I didn't even notice that the last member of the group has been hit by snowballs! Obviously a victim of my clumsiness during a big basing session, he's gone on the list of things to correct before the end of the project.

MOVING ALONG THEN...

On to more fun things. As you will have seen, I love to find excuses to expensively collect ancient miniatures and include them in my army projects. One of the cool things in the Warhammer Armies book is the proliferation of "Beast Master" options - in the Dark Elf army list these are called Whelp Masters and can be put in charge of ordinary warhounds or deadly Chaos hounds. But what miniatures could I find to use for those?

I scoured ebay to try to find enough of anything to make even a small unit. Oh boy, this got expensive! But I'm happy with the results. Again, I struggled to get good photos of the painted models, so I've included an unpainted picture of each mini so you can see what it looks like (thanks as ever to Stuff of Legends for these.) 

Here we go then, in reverse order of how cool I think they are:

Vicious Mastiffs (C22 Creatures)

Quite simply, a ruddy great dog. I put them on cavalry bases - the official base size in 3rd ed is 25 x 25 mm for warhounds and chaos hounds, so I could actually treat these as two per model. They are painted a very dark brown with squinty evil eyes and pointy teeth, not that the picture shows any of that.

Devil Dogs (Fiend Factory FF10)

These were a necessity, given that I've already leaned into the AD&D Drow skin colour. Devil Dogs are vicious arctic predators originally described in an unofficial adventure I think. They totally fit the them of evil snowy hunting beasts, so I had to have some. Frankly they may be some of the worst miniatures that I've willingly spent money on! They went out of production in early 1982 with the publication of the AD&D Fiend Folio - a somewhat mixed follow up to the Monster Manual with all sorts of odd critters in it - which meant that Citadel lost the rights to use the designs.

Obviously I painted them as per the original description - white with blue eyes. Trust me.

Chaos Hounds  (C22 Creatures)

I know some of you will be very much aware of how hard it is to collect these. The later slotta based ones are much more common, and some of them look almost identical, but you know the rules for this army: all pre-slotta, all Citadel. There were actually four different poses produced, but for months I though I would never get any four of them together, long after giving up on getting one of each. Eventually I got three of the two headed beast, and the one with the scorpion tail - the latter was badly mashed and was patiently rebuilt with pins in every leg.

For a colour scheme, the scorpion tail cries out for the bright Chaos colours of 1990, but I wanted to keep this early 80s, and keep it Dark Elf, avoiding the colours of the four Chaos Gods (which didn't really exist in 1984 anyway). I decided midnight blue was a good colour for the hounds - again, you'll have to trust me that's what the pictures show. Turns out there are actually bloody great big blue scorpions in the real world, so I based the tail on those. 

Weretigers in Beast Form (Fiend Factory FF70)

It's just a tiger, but the front paws are quite hand-like... hang on, something odd has happened to mine!

I cannot explain to you how excited I was when this idea hit me! Displacer Beasts! An iconic AD&D monster! The classic evil pack predators! A pretty simple conversion! I promise you, the whole army project would have been worth it for me just to make these.

Now, some people will tell you that Displacer Beasts have six legs. Descriptions seem to vary - the 2nd Ed D&D Monstrous Compendium has the six-legged variant on the front cover art, but a four-legged one on the page for the monster! As it happens, the pose doesn't lend itself to adding extra legs, so I left them with an adequate four each.

The fathomless black in this picture is actually a dark purplish grey colour, the shade colour for my Dark Elf skin in fact. 

Let's add up those totals:

Army List Additions:

Scores for April:          828 points  40 models

20 x Shadows    (Light Armour, Shield, Repeating Crossbow)          400 points

4 x Whelp Masters (Light Armour)                                                          60 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points   

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

Running Total:              3013 points    155 models   

Coming Next Time:

There's only Leader Month and Wild Card Month to come, so one of those. I'm leaning towards Leaders as that leaves me more time to dream up things to add to Wild Card month. Whichever it is, there's still plenty of fun things to look forward to

Shadespyre Intro Post - OWAC VI - (Currently Untitled) Dark Elf Army

 OWAC VI - Intoduction

This year's army is going to be Dark Elves. 

I had a bit of a hunt through my miniatures collection and my options were pretty much all Elves - one of TWO High Elves projects, one of TWO Wood Elves projects (both of which require much more shopping, I think) and one of (you guessed it) TWO Space Elves projects... and these guys. Other than the Eldar army I had back around 1990, I've never painted an Elf army. And I love Elves! Wood Elves were going to be my next 8th Ed WHFB project... and then they killed the Old World and my enthusiasm with it. (Actually that means that one of the Wood Elves projects is too new for Oldhammer, doesn't it? Anyway, the point stands.)

Of the bunch, the Dark Elves felt less intimidating, somehow. Also I realised that I'd never painted an army in purple, and that just screams Dark Elves to me. As a bonus, as old minis go they are not too hard to collect, in fact I think I ended up with more than even I will ever use.

Obviously, I am limiting myself to proper, old miniatures. These are actually newer than the majority of the Gnolls which came before, but this time I'm being even harder on myself - every miniature will be a pre-slotta era Citadel miniature, with repairs and minimal conversions. There will be a few models (monsters, mainly) which aren't from the Dark Elf range, should we get that far. No sneaky inclusion of Grenadier or Ral Partha minis, no Reaper Dwarves with make-overs, this time!

The Dark Elf ranges themselves are quite compact, not too many choices to make. The "Fantasy Tribes" approach of creating many variations of each miniature was dropped with the new "C" ranges, sadly (though, probably, expediently.)

That timeless classic Regiment of Renown is our only source of standard bearers or musicians at this time, so I shall be leaning heavily on these and a handful of standard bearer conversions - you just can't ignore a broken spear, after all. Mengil will be providing the main melee infantry contingent of my army, too.

Here, then, is the core of my army:

The picture above shows most of the miniatures I'll be definitely painting - actually there's a second unit each of warriors and crossbowmen which are required to make the army "legal", but they are identical miniatures so you're not missing anything much. I'll save a long discussion about the MDF bases for one of the later blog entries, I think.

Are there more miniatures? Haha, OF COURSE there are! But in my accustomed style you will only be seeing those in later months, so we don't all get bored... those of you who are familiar with the range are free to speculate in the meantime. As usual, many of the old miniatures don't really fit the 3rd Edition army lists (being of 1st/2nd ed vintage) so let's see what happens with that, eh?

(Very) Provisional (Core) Army List

This is very much a stop-gap to assure myself that I can easily fulfil the points requirements:

10 x Helldrakes             (Lances, Standard, Musician)                                     516 points

10 x Doomdrakes         (Repeating Crossbows)                                                 430 points

20 x Warriors                (Standard, Musician)                                                    242 points

20 x Warriors                (Standard, Musician)                                                    242 points *     

20 x Witch Elves           (Add Hand Weapons, Poison)                                   280 points

10 x Crossbowmen       (Shield)                                                                            140 points

10 x Crossbowmen       (Shield)                                                                            140 points *

 * not pictured                                                                                   Total            1990 points

Plenty of points even without adding any of the characters. Those are undecided so far, but will include the 5 wizards pictured (including the mounted one) and a Hero in the Helldrakes, at the minimum. 

Errrm, I don't really have a theme for the army, yet. Perhaps something will develop as I go along? Similarly I await inspiration for heraldy and shield designs, perhaps the two will come together? Or perhaps Jaeckal will inspire me again... ;) 

I'm probably going to do wintery bases, I think it'll contrast nicely with the colour scheme, but I'm waiting for some materials to arrive so I can try it out.

Overlord Gift

For this year's Overlord Offering, I have gone back to the "paint it blue and pink" theme and painted up Gnorman The Gnoll (aka Gilbert The Goblin) in an alternative scheme. Have to say, every time I do this the day when I paint a whole unit or even army in these colours comes closer. They do just WORK, don't they?

Stonewall Street's Dwarf Detachment (136.5 points)

Rank & Files #2

Who wants to hear about my moving woes? 

Is that fucking nobody? 

OK. I entered into the OWAC confident I’d match Thansants for output. That’s because unlike some of you I’ve been waiting for him in the pub when he calls and says: “Just finishing off some Orcs and then I’ll set off…”

Me: “Tell me the end of that sentence isn’t: from nearly Scotland…”  

So I painted ten pre-slotta dwarfs. That makes it: A billion points. 

 Nothing I own is currently working. Its twenty dwarfs with a banner, musician and a leader. 

Or something.

I love all my oldhammer friends xxx