As we roll into 2018 I'm taking stock of my army projects, the backlog of painting and what I can look forward to going forward.
Sisters of Battle
My Shadow War: Armageddon kill team is finally finished. I could technically bring the team to ten models, so maybe I'll track down three more Sisters on ebay to round them out. But the slow rate at which I've been able to add models to the team and arm them, there's no rush on that.
I've been working on some extras for the game, namely the Necromunda Barricades and Objectives set I received for Christmas. The ammo boxes are painted, and make perfect loot counters. I also painted the exterminatus device from the 40K objectives kit. I used that as the promethium tank in the Raid scenario. I'll chip away at the rest of those objectives and barricades as time allows.
I also have the Servohaulers set, which I was excited to get my hands on, but have yet to begin assembling. Maybe I'll use that to experiment with painting yellow and weathering before I begin my Imperial Fists. Speaking of which...
Space Marines
I haven't played much of the new Warhammer 40,000 and I'm not sure if that will change with the Malign Portents Campaign coming out for Age of Sigmar. I still want to make a point to paint my Imperial Fist Primaris marines from the starter set sometime this year. I'd also like to add a Redemptor Dreadnought because that looks like a great kit, and I have an idea for converting its arms to resemble the more "boxy" look of the classic dreadnoughts. I'm also sculpting a set of industrial bases for my Skull Forge Scenics range that I'll be using for the basing.
Legions of Nagash
The Malign Portents campaign is coming soon, as is the Legions of Nagash battletome. I think we're still about six months out from any new undead models, and I don't know if what they release will slot into the existing undead range or be a completely new stand-alone army in the same way the Kharadron Overlords were their own separate force apart from the traditional Duardin.
The press release on the Legions of Nagash book said that it will contain warscrolls for every undead model released (so far). Clearly new Death models are coming, but I don't know if they will be in the Legions of Nagash book, or if it will literally only have the models "so far" and the new army will receive its own, separate Battletome. I hope not.
There has also been speculation that none of the Flesh Eater Courts will be in this book. That wouldn't surprise me, as they have their own battletome and allegiance abilities in the General's Handbook. I wonder if the Legions of Nagash is going to incorporate the Soulblight and Nighthaunt allegiances, or it they will remain allegiances that can be used in addition to the new allegiances in the book.
The Maggotkin of Nurgle battletome and its new rules also make me wonder if we will see a new mechanic for summoning. The Nurgle allegiances use a system where the army accumulates points to spend on summoning new units rather than casting spells to summon the units. The summoned models still need to be paid for with the army's reserve points, however. Feculent Gnarlmaw trees add to this pool of summoning points, and more can be brought into play as the game progresses.
Maybe we'll see a similar system for bringing death models into play. Perhaps the Mausoleums or some kind of mass grave can be unearthed on the battlefield, allowing undead troops to be summoned? Something else I've noticed is all the corpse-parts on some of the new Nurgle models, namely the Pusgoyle Blightlords. Perhaps the corpses mean that a new zombie kit is on the way, and the digital corpses are getting double duty across a few kits in the same manner that the spirit hosts appeared on Nagash and the Mortarchs.
I still have my Nighthaunt models waiting to be finished. I haven't had much desire to work on these since the Nighthaunt list is so limiting. It makes me laugh when I see people comparing Nighthaunt lists online, when the only real difference is whether they have more more Spirit Hosts or more Hexwraiths. There just isn't a lot of diversity in the Nighthaunt sub-faction and the limits of what they can ally with only exacerbates the sameness of everyone's armies. Hopefully that will change in the new Battletome. I'd like to finish these models before any new Death models release so I can jump into the new stuff without too much of a backlog. I've decided that the Knight of Shrouds will be my "buy and paint within 48 hours" model for this year's Hobby Bingo.
Skaven
This will be the last hurrah for my Conclave of Corruption. With the new focus on Chaos Nurgle armies, they will be fairly useless when facing them. I've already had a couple games against a Nurgle force, which rendered my Plagueclaws useless (they only wound Nurgle units on a 6). There are a lot of other abilities and tricks that Clan Pestilens uses which either affect Nurgle units on a 6 or not at all. That, paired with the first real attention paid to the Death Grand Alliance in Age of Sigmar's three years, means I'll be turning my focus away from the Skaven and back to my first love.
I still want to finish off the Skaven projects that I've already begun. If you follow me on Twitter, you've seen that the painting of my Pestilens-themed Clanrats has begun. Here's the first 20, waiting for their green robes and a few other details to be finished. 60 more after this...
I've finished converting my Plague Priest equipped with the Bilious Bell. This will check the "convert a model into a totally different unit or character" box on the Hobby Bingo card. I took lots of step-by-step pictures of this guy, so I'll talk about him in a separate post.
I also buckled down and finished converting my first Plague Censor Bearers. They're converted out of Plague Monks, rearranged to hold their staves two-handed. The censor flails were giving me the most trouble because I was afraid that the existing plastic chain on the censors would be too thin and brittle for a conversion.
I wanted to use spare censors from other kits like the Screaming Bell so they would have the smoke trailing off of them. The solution to the chain was to replace it with "rope" made from two lengths of thin floral wire, twisted by putting one end in a power drill, and the other held with a pair of pliers. The ends were clipped to use as a pin which could be inserted into holes in the censor and the post. Thinner wire was then hand-wrapped around the ends to create the connecting ties. The ropes were then bent into shape atop the flail staves.
When these models are finished, the Pestilens conclave of Warlord Skabsis will begin to rival the size of Skryre Lord Skreekits' Lightning Engineer Cult. Quite the power struggle...
'Til next time!
As long as I've been playing Warhammer, I've been writing backstories for my characters and updating the lore as significant events happen in games I've played or in the evolution of the rules. I've collected many of them in this blog over the past years. This post is a compilation of everything so far, with a few updates to reflect the current status of the army and to fill in some of the blanks and flesh out the remaining characters.
My buddy Chris came out to visit last week, and he pitted his Khorne Bloodbound army against my Undead. (And we got to break in my new terrain!) You can see more of Chris's models on his blog: World of Walton'scrafts
We played the Escalation scenario from the General's Handbook. Each of us divided our army into three parts, deployed the first third, and then the rest would arrive in turns two and three. The battlefield was divided diagonally, and we were trying to control three objectives– The mausoleum in the upper right corner, the large monument in the center, and the small shrine in the lower left corner.
A few weeks ago I teased these books on Facebook. My plan for Nagash was to have the nine books breaking open, swirling around him in a tornado of hellfire. I glued each of the book halves in an open position and sculpted pages using Brown Stuff epoxy modeling putty. The single pages in the middle were cut from thin styrene card.
The books were then modeled into the flame trails that I had sculpted over the original spirits. Extra licks of flame were sculpted around each book and on the pages. Fine chain, coated with thin super glue to make it rigid, was used to build up the breaking chains, and thin wire was used for the breaking ties around the books.
Everything was primed black and the flames were sprayed white so the bright color of the fire could be easily achieved.
Here you can see how I had the model broken down for painting. I even made the right hand removable, pinned in place so I could swap between the spirit and the flaming book. I have a spare set of robes and spirits, and I plan to make a second base with a Tomb Kings motif because I am insane. The second base will use the unmodified spirit trails, and I'll swap out the hand so the model will feature either all flames (for the Legion of the Infernal Skull version) or all spirits (for the Tomb Kings version). The body will remain the same between the two and will not be glued into the robes so it can be swapped back and forth.
This thing took forever to paint. But here he is, finished, with all his body parts glued together:
Initially, I wasn't sure how to handle the transition from the fire to the robes. I decided to paint the holes in the cloth as though they were burned away. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.
The hand has a double pin to keep it from spinning. I completely forgot about the spines on the back when modeling the flaming pages. Fortunately, the book just barely clears the spine on the right. That could have been a disaster.
The torso clips into the robes, and the centerpiece of his belt is magnetized.
The base was detailed with unearthed coffins and tombstones. I built the coffins around the skeletons in the flame trails so it would appear as if they were being pulled out of their graves.
And here's the final model in all its glory:
Now to tear apart my hard work and put him on a round base...
'Til next time!
I was hoping to have a few more posts in October, but it turned out to be a month of working on a bunch of different projects here and there. In the end I was trying to finish Nagash in time for Halloween, but didn't quite make it. Maybe by the end of this week. In the meantime, here are some other odds and ends that I have been working on (or am still working on).
Deneghra Commission
This is a commission from a couple months back. The client wanted a conversion using the top half of Deneghra and the bottom half of a Rackham Equanimous Warrior. I attached the two halves and resculpted the midsection and the back of her robes to match the wispy, ethereal nature of the model.
Death Star Helmet
One of my friends asked me to decorate his son's corrective helmet. After a lot of back-and-forth messages about the design, they finally settled on a Star Wars theme, and I suggested the Death Star under construction to match the shape of the partial helmet.
Spirit Hosts
My Vampire Counts queue contains a lot of models with ethereal bits– Spirit hosts, the mount for the Mortis Engine, Hexwraiths, and the supports for the Mortarchs' Dread Abyssal and the Morghasts. I have been struggling to come up with a color scheme that I like and an easy way to paint it. I'm currently experimenting with various washes and shades and plan to post a tutorial when I'm finished.
Nagash
The big guy's body is completed and assembled. His skirt and base are coming along nicely, but it's such a tedious process working around all the fire trails to pick out the books, bones, and basing. It will be a relief when he's finally finished. Here's a peek:
'Til next time!
