Troopers From Different Sides

Still getting far less painting done than I had hoped/intended, but progress is nonetheless being made. We played our first games of Imperial Assault recently, and it was enough to inspire me to get some more Star Wars models done – reinforcements for both the Rebel Alliance and the Empire.

These models are just to round out the campaign in the Imperial Assault box set, and also make a start on the Twin Shadows campaign which we will likely be doing next. In all cases, I used the Sorastro Painting Guides on Youtube, who makes these models booth quick to paint and good to look at on the table.

The basic Rebel Troopers are very iconic, and I kicked myself for not getting them done sooner as we had a mission where they should have appeared – we ended up using the included counters instead, which is really not the way forward.

The Rebel Saboteurs begin to add some aliens into the Rebel force, though I think these guys won’t be showing up until Twin Shadows.

Finally, you cannot go wrong with more Stormtroopers. There is an additional unit added here (which do not seem to be too bad in the actual game, though they die quick enough when the Rebels concentrate on them), but it is the heavy weapons Stormtroopers I am looking forward to using. If they are half as good as the E-Web trooper, the Rebels are going to rue their appearance.

I actually managed to get some more Prospero models put together over the weekend, so they should be appearing soon, and I made a deal with a gaming store who sent me a whole bunch of Imperial Assault models last week – pretty much everything needed to flesh out Twin Shadows.

So, plenty to be getting on with!

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Revisiting Prospero

So, I have been a little distracted from painting of late, but I am easing back into it. With no hint of story-based Battleplans from the new Age of Sigmar (a quick reversal may happen if the next book for the game does indeed contain story-based Battleplans), I have decided to focus efforts on the Prospero campaign from the Horus Heresy.

Now, Forge World have decided to stop producing the paint I was using for the Thousand Sons, which is an issue I will cover in a post in the near future but, as things stood, I decided to put together a couple of ‘spare’ units I had for the Space Wolves.

A Contemptor Dreadnought and a squad of Cataphractii Terminators.

My original plan had been to do both of these as Thousand Sons, but I already have some legion-specific Contemptors for them, and I had originally thought these were Tartaros Terminators. Which they obviously weren’t.

I now have the painting of Heresy-era Space Woofs down to a fine system, and can now rapidly get through these (which bodes well for large forces). This Contemptor now joins the previous Multi-Melta-armed one, and I will likely add a third to make up a Talon of ‘basic’ Contemptors, leaving the prettier Space Wolf specific versions for Venerable Dreadnoughts. It will be a nice way of spotting the real veterans on the battlefield.

The addition of a second Terminator squad works well for the Space Woofs, as I can now fill their Caestus Assault Ram with armoured goodness. Still got my eye on a squad of Varagyr Terminators though.

As I said, I will be covering what i am doing for the Thousand Sons in a post fairly soon, but the upshot of it is that I need to put together another couple of Tactical Squads, so I picked up another Burning of Prospero set. As soon as they are done, I will reveal the Grand Plan…

In the meantime though, I played my first set of games of Star Wars Imperial Assault, and liked it enough to be suitably inspired to paint up some more units. At the moment, i am putting the finishing touches to some more Stormtroopers, along with Rebel Troopers and Saboteurs.

You should see the results a little later this week!

I Have an Issue with Age of Sigmar

Over the past few weeks, I have been steadily coming to a conclusion – I have something of an issue with Age of Sigmar…

Throughout the Realmgate Wars, I was pretty heavily into the game – nearly 2,500 miniatures painted, used in nearly a hundred battles, all following the storyline in the campaign books and Battletomes.

And then, around the turn of 2016/2017, things just stopped.

This first cropped up in Battletomes such as the Kharadron Overlords. In previous books, narrative Battleplans always had a story behind them (that would be the narrative part), that charted the progress of characters, the introduction of new armies, and events occurring within the Mortal Realms. These ‘minor’ characters would pop up in several Battleplans (like Slann Starmaster Zectoka), or at least be linked to others (the Vampire Mistress Cyssandra, a hand maiden of Neferata and whose sisters appeared in other battles).

This all served to create a cohesive background to the Age of Sigmar, giving it a great deal more weight.

When the ‘new wave’ of Battletomes (such as the Kharadron Overlords and Disciples of Tzeentch) started dropping, new Battleplans were included – but they were now absent story. They were instead ‘representative’ of the army, in a ‘this is how they fight’ kind of way.

I could understand this approach. It was a shame, but I could understand it.

People had been asking more from Age of Sigmar, and these Battletomes were a response to that – Matched Play was now a thing, and ‘hobby’ articles had started to appear. All good stuff, but it had been at the expense of the ongoing background story.

Things looked up with the release of the Blightwar box set. Included within this set was a new chapter in the Age of Sigmar story, along with three connected Battleplans – best of all, they had a solid story behind them.

Granted, instead of the 4-5 pages of story Battleplans in the past had featured, these only had one page a piece. But, you know what? That was fine by me. Bit of a shame we were not seeing more, but I understood that space was needed for other areas of the game, and it seemed the best of both worlds. Matched players got their bits and pieces, we Narrative gamers got our storyline.

I’ll ignore the fact that this major Blightwar does not seem to have been revisited in other books since…

Then Malign Portents appeared, an advance on the storyline as significant as any chapter in the Realmgate Wars. And, it looked pretty funky – Nagash getting up to new tricks, with the forces of Destruction, Chaos and Order marching off to stop him. Couldn’t wait.

But there is very, very little story here.

A couple of handfuls of pages cover the scope of the battles taking place and, while there are Narrative Battleplans in the book, they have no story attached to them.

Well, you say, simply make up your own stories for them. Sure, I could do that. But I could also do it for the Matched Play Battleplans the book also includes. I could have been doing that all along – but without the story being put front and centre, Age of Sigmar loses a lot.

I have a suspicion that (miniatures aside which are, of course, up to GW’s usual climbing standards) things are being done for a price, and GW is no longer justifying big hardbacks for something as trivial as story. Malign Portents is an 80 page book – 80 pages to introduce a major new plot development. The Realmgate Wars books (five of them) were each around 300 pages.

This is a big difference.

It is not as if I can delve into the Black Library to support the narrative behind the game – after a strong start with the Realmgate Wars, fictional support for Age of Sigmar all but disappeared for well over a year, and it has been fairly lacklustre since. They are now recycling short stories from their older compilations as digital releases and, aside from that, there have been precious few substantial books.

A year ago, I was worried about having to make a choice between a revived Age of Sigmar storyline and new Warhammer 40,000 campaigns. I had thought that GW had retarded work on Age of Sigmar to prepare for the new edition of 40k (which might well have been the case), and there were certainly major wars in the new rulebook that would make for great narrative campaigns – the Konor campaign they ran was a great start, and one we engaged in. For all five battles…

After that, nothing. I have a nasty feeling that the majority of feedback GW received on both games revolved around one term – Tournament Play. Even if people never went to tournaments, they wanted everything ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ and woe betide either game if their opponent received any special advantage.

So, where do I go from here?

Well, absent a new range of campaign books from GW (and I would, at this stage, happily accept such things from Forge World, regardless of the inevitable high cost), I might well be going into a state of semi-hibernation.

You will still see new armies being painted and posted here (I have a hankering to do a Daughters of Khaine force), and I am still slowly plugging away at Heresy-era armies for a Prospero campaign (the Forge World book for that is more than adequate for the kind of games I am after). I did consider the new Star Wars Legion, but I have certain philosophical issues with the way FFG are approaching that kind of game.

For now, I think I will carry on painting up some more Crypt Ghouls and get round to doing my Kharadron ships – after that… I’ll see where my fancy takes me.

I just don’t think the Sigmar narrative is going to be part of it for a fair while.

Vermin on the Field

This update is a bit of a cheat, as I actually completed these additions to the Skavenblight Scramblers earlier this year, but have only just got round to photographing them.

These six models are basically the additional resin casts from Forge World that you can use to bulk out your Skaven team. Will a tad on the pricey side (it is Forge World, after all), they do serve to break up the ‘samey’ variation among the plastic set.

You also get access to two Skaven star players, starting off with Hakflem Skuttlespike, a mean-as-hell two-headed four-armed blitzer. However, may favourite has to be the Fat Rat, Glart Smashrip – there is just so much character in this model.

Rounding the additions to the team off are the four rats from the booster pack, with two Gutter Runners (always useful in a Skaven team), a Thrower and another Blitzer.

Still haven’t played the new Blood Bowl beyond the XBox, but the teams are now filling out nicely!

On the painting table now (and for the foreseeable future) is everything I had put together, based and undercoated for the Christmas Project but did not get round to  – going to be taking it at an easy pace, kicking off with some more Crypt Ghouls and the first of the Kharadron ships. After that… maybe a new army?

 

Legio Custodes

Well, it has been a while since I posted here – not since December, I think!

In a nutshell, I managed to get very badly distracted by Elite: Dangerous, and if you want to catch up on those adventures, you can take a quick trip to Cosmic Flipper Tours.

However, while the speed is nowhere near my usual supersonic self, I have managed to put paint to brush and get the odd little batch of miniatures out over the past couple of weeks, and first out of the gate were additions to the Legio Custodes force:

I had been toying with the idea of doing an Adeptus Custodes army with the release of the new Codex, but I decided against it for now – just sticking the the Heresy-era Custodes is likely to take a fair bit of my painting time. Another squad or two would go down well, plus I have already acquired some Dreadnoughts and (Heresy-era) jetbikes that should join the painting queue at some point (it is a very long queue, as I still have all the models I was intending to get done over the Christmas break…).

First up with this little lot was a new squad – not optimised at all, as I bought it already built on eBay – as you really need at least two squads for the 7th edition rules. Painting-wise, they are a mirror of the first squad, and both were painted using the Burning of Prospero guide (an essential purchase for any Heresy-era project, I would say).

For the first squad, I had hived off the squad leader as a Shield-Captain hero but, with new models now available, I figured that was quite lazy. So, instead, I painted up this chap, Tribune Ixion Hale, one of the Warhammer World exclusive models.

I have left the best until last, of course, the first bit of heavy metal for the Legio – the Caladius Grav-Tank, complete with Accelerator Cannon.

I added a couple of transfers from the Forge World sheet, but did not want to go overboard on them as this vehicle has clean lines. Despite a bit more gun metal work, the Caladius did not really take much longer than the squad to get painted up – most of it was drying time.

More models are already on the painting table, and I am going to try to do at least a little every week so, fingers crossed, posts here will become a regular thing once more!

Death Guard Armour

For a good portion of this year, I have been watching eBay like a hawk for Nurgle-suitable vehicles for my expanding Death Guard. After all, Plague Marines sometimes need to go places in a hurry and everyone likes a big tank, so Rhinos and Land Raiders were the way forward. I didn’t want to do any conversions myself (I would not be up to the job), so I was looking for some pre-modified vehicles – and, eventually, I found them!

These were not desperately expensive, though they were a little more than I usually like to pay (still cheaper than retail!), but I was prepared to go an extra mile for the right looking tanks. And I think the seller did an admirable job here.

He started with a simple base of Chaos Rhino and Land Raider, Chaos’d them up with the spikes and chains, then plastered what I presume is modelling putty over them – you will see a fair few such vehicles on eBay, but few are as nicely done as this.

You will note that most of the fleshy areas have blisters, which I painted a nasty yellow, but the others have great gaping wounds, which I chose to interpret as the blisters having burst – so great gobs of Nurgle’s Rot is dripping out of them.

Nasty!

In terms of painting, these were like most vehicles – really fast, really easy. The green is a simple base of Castellan, drybrushed with Ogryn Camo and Nurgling Green, the same as the Plague Marines themselves, but with no wash. Then you just do the metal and brass work, and the tanks are basically done,with just the fleshy bits needing doing.

I even desecrated the Adeptus Mechanicus cog at the back because, well, the Death Guard will not stand for that.

With the exception of Mortarion and the new Easy to Build kits, I thought I was about done with Nurgle for a while, but now we are getting previews of a new wave of Nurgle daemons early in the New Year, with pictures of a new Great Unclean One.

Looks like I will stick with Nurgle for a bit longer!

Thanquol & Boneripper

Continuing the ratty theme (and I still have some Blood Bowl Skaven to polish off) is a model that has been sitting on ‘waiting to be painted’ shelf for more than a year now – Thanquol and Boneripper!

These guys have a very handy painting guide done by Duncan on Warhammer TV and I (more or less) followed his instructions to the letter. And, despite the size of the model, it is… pretty simple to do, actually. Boneripper’s skin covers most of the surface area, then the metal and brass bitz. After that, you really just have the armour plates, pipework, and Thanquol himself (who is mostly robes and fur anyway).

The big question for me, however, was what GW was planning to do with this great beastie, in terms of the Age of Sigmar storyline.

You see, a lot of the characters from the World That Was were transported to the Age of Sigmar by various powers (mostly Chaos). So, Valkia is still a thing, because she is still Khorne’s consort. Lord Kroak is still a thing because he is, well, functionally immortal.

Other characters became generic heroes (you can usually tell which ones because they are resin and not Chaos…), such as the Bonesplitterz Prophet or Seraphon Astrolith Bearer. Other resin models were simply retired or allowed to wither.

And that is fine. But what about Thanquol?

I cannot see the Horned Rat expending any effort whatsoever to bring him forward to the Mortal Realms, and there is no way GW will abandon a big plastic kit like this. So, will he become a generic Grey Seer on Big Beastie? Doesn’t feel right, somehow. His packaging is no help, as while it is in Sigmar-style, it in fact has not been updated since the Warhammer End Times.

So, can we expect to see a return of the fan favourite Thanquol, hatching his plans across the Mortal Realms, or is he now an ex-Thanquol?

Maybe we will see him return in the next round of campaign books, or the ones after… either way, he is now painted and I am ready for whatever plot twists come our way!