Collecting Dwarf Slayers...

I never set out to collect Slayers, it's just something I fell in to. A steady diet of Gotrek & Felix novels and the fluff in old White Dwarfs has left me with a certain fondness for the little flame-haired psycopaths, and shortly after reading Zombieslayer I got the idea into my head to paint up a max size unit of Slayers (30, in the old army book). After buying a couple of bundles of miniatures, I started to investigate whether I could make a unit that size without duplicating any poses, which then somehow turned into trying to collect every Slayer variation...

The problem I'm finding, is trying to find a comprehensive listing of all the different sculpts! Stunties.com looked like it had what I wanted, except the pictures won't display on any device I try to view it on... Instead, here's what I've managed to cobble together from various sources, amended with the dorfs I already have:

Marauder Dorfs:

(after a bout of ebaying on Saturday, the last two should be winging their way to me as we speak)

Somehow in my collecting, I have apparently entirely missed the 1993(?) Troll Slayers. Oh, how I miss the days of Mail Order and being able to order particular sculpts (like Daemon Slayer 3 here)

The new sculpts! I had originally thought that there had only been two new sculpts done (the two in rather 'square' poses), but when I bought some as part of a batch on eBay, I realised that the rest on this page that match the style of the previous generation of Slayers are in fact different sculpts! Unfortunately, this leaves still more for me to collect...

Only 3 sculpts released for Mordheim - the Dwarf Pit Fighter (pfft, he's blatantly a Slayer) is a bit of an odd sculpt, but for completionist's sake I need one! I also fancy getting a second copy of the Trollslayer Hired Sword, as he'd probably be a suitable donor body for a Snorri Nosebiter coversion...

£1.50? Honestly, if I had a time machine I'd mostly use it to nip back to Ye Olde Nottingham and buy miniatures. Admit it, you would too.

Here endeth the pictorial segment of this post - as far as I can see, this is the rest:

• blood bowl star player Grim Ironjaw (in the box, ready for action)
• 2 blood bowl slayers (alas, I've not got either yet)
• Ungrim & Garagrim - both acquired, ad having read Road of Skulls I'm further incentivised to paint them! 
• Games Day Slayer on daemon head - owned, and ready for action as a unit filler
• Talisman plastic slayer - Do want! Veeeery portly, but rocks a certain design sensibility that reminds me of simpler times...
• Battle for Skull Pass plastic slayer - owned. A bit blah, but variety is the... well, you know the drill.
• Dwarf Lords of Legend Slayer - owned. A bit un-slayer-y (although admittedly, Ungrim the other Slayer lord wears armour...), but we'll see how he paints up...

And lo, this is all the slayers that I have thus far discovered, and which of them I still need. I'm not particularly familiar with the older dwarf ranges though, and am fairly certain that there are some likely Slayer candidates in the old 'Norse Dwarf' range - if anyone can provide any suggestions (or has any of the sculpts that I'm after) drop us a comment!

In other news, the blog recently passed 40k pageviews:

and here's me without a 40k related post... #missedopportunity :(

Productivity everywhere!

As my wife is currently laid-up in bed, after finishing Road of Skulls this morning, I was inspired to bring hobby productivity to the bedroom and turned the bed effectively into a living graph of what slayer model variations I own:

Road of Skulls was pretty good, and has fired my imagination with inspiration for all sorts of projects, from Path to Glory to some sort of Warhammer Quest-esque Slayer dungeon crawl, and, of course, Gotrek and Felix themselves, who I'm currently cleaning up ready to be based: 

House Stark musters for war!

I know, you're as surprised as I am, I finished painting some miniatures!

My first 8 finished miniatures for the Stark forces for the A Song of Ice and Fire project - a mix of Perry, Gripping Beast and Fireforge bits to get the look I was after (much more rugged than my Lannister troops!) and a Wargames Foundry champion to lead them (from their Baron Wars range, originally a Citadel sculpt iirc). And yes, the chaps in the back rank have the Wolf's head shields that I previously made a one part push mould for:

As my 'knight' miniature (knight in inverted commas, as the Northmen don't have knights per se as the Southern types do, if we're going to get mega nerdy) had a large blank shield, I took this opportunity to try using a waterslide decal for the first time. Ever. I know, it's kind of weird to be this old and have never used a waterslide decal before, but what can I say, I've never really needed to before and kind of shied away from trying them for fear of ruining a paint-job right at the end...

Filled with the spirit of experimentation and adventure, I did a quick bit of internet research and soon settled on making my chap some unknown son of House Cerwyn, and dug out the necessary bits and bobs:

I was originally going to use an axe decal from the Bretonnian Men-at-Arms sheet, but when borrowing a pot of gloss varnish to prepare the shield from Uncle Johnny, he offered me these, which were better (I think) than the ones that I'd originally planned on using.

A quick coat of gloss to prepare the surface, some poking with a wet paintbrush and minute adjustments where the decal split where I had perhaps over-zealously trimmed it, and a touch up with paint (and an application of static grass, it seems, as I forgot to take an 'after' photo at the time) later, we have a chap holding a suitably emblazoned shield:

Huzzah!

These chaps take the tally to:

13 vs 16 = -3

That sweet zero is so close now, I might even reach it! I suppose I should probably sort out some stats and point values for the ASOIAF project soon, so that I can start painting towards playable skirmish warbands rather than my current approach of 'a little bit of this, a little bit of that'...

In other news, Uncle Johnny gave me some random GW sprues (from 1998, if the tab on them is to be believed) that he thought would come in handy with conversions for the ASOIAF project, that I'd never seen before:

Has anyone come across these before, and know what they are?

For the first time...

...ever, I think, I pre-ordered a miniature from Games Workshop and picked it up on day of release:

The lovely new plastic Dwarf Dragon Slayer, paid for with credit from cancelling my White Dwarf subscription:

He's a nicely dynamic sculpt, that looks like it will a pleasure to paint once I clear some space in the painting queue! Although I will admit, I'm fairly intrigued as to whether GW will remove the maximum unit size restriction for Slayers, meaning that  my target of eventually having a unit of 30 painted Slayers will become somewhat arbitrary...

Today's pickup brings the tally to:

5 vs 16 = -11

Silence will fall...

Well, technically it already fell, when they handwaved away the Silence in an altogether brief paragraph of retcon during the Christmas episode of Doctor Who that I had originally prepped and undercoated these miniatures for:

(But only just got around to painting)

Bendy plastic miniatures that originally came free on the front of the Doctor Who Adventures magazine, they're not bad in terms of scale and detail, if a little bit Smooth Criminal (especially the chap at the back, that I thought I'd successfully managed to reposition but apparently he's returned to his original slant):

In other news, while finding that gif (click it if it doesn't move on your browser) I discovered that the secret to the lean wasn't mad skills, it was in fact special shoes. Illusions shattered.

This does, however, take the tally to:

5 vs 15 = -10

I've got until April and Salute to build up a bit of a buffer and see if maybe this year will be the year that I don't spend the entire year in the red... (well, it's in black, but with a little minus sign in front of it... you know what I mean.)

White Dwarf no more...

So, as you may or may not have seen in my previous post, after actually seeing the new White Dwarf magazines in hand, I cancelled my subscription. In another blog post, that I realise as I'm typing that is still at the as yet unpublished draft stage, I mentioned what I think is the crux of my issue with modern White Dwarf - there's nothing really in it any more! In the golden age of WD, there's be conversions and scenarios and all sorts of exciting articles that would actually make me want to get out my brushes or my modelling tools and do something hobby related, whereas in recent years it's become a showcase for nicely painted miniatures.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a nicely painted little man, but I have the internet (where I even get to choose what sort of exquisitely painted little man it is I get to look at!). I'm not a display piece painter, so it's not going to fire me up and inspire me to greater heights of painterly achievement like it might the next guy... 

It's really just that WD became something to glance through when it arrived, then maybe pick up again once or twice to dig deeper into an article that was actually interesting (ooh, no I did not in fact know that interesting fact about the development of the imagery and iconography of Space Marines, or wow they really are struggling to find new ways to say that John Blanche sometimes uses *gasp* parts bases or paints that aren't GW!). Alas, when I saw the new mags, I saw that Warhammer Visions is literally just pictures of nicely painted miniatures (lovely, but I flick through those pages looking for some meat and find myself half way through the thick mag...), and White Dwarf Weekly is £2.40 for 30 odd pages of rules... Most of which I don't care for (honestly, when did I last actually play a game? I want to, but hey...) and I just can't justify that any more. I know, it's only the first one, they might start actually writing interesting articles again one day, but for now I'm out, I quit White Dwarf.

As it was a Christmas present, I got to choose some toys with the credit, and (after much grumbling about the lack of things I want actually being in stock) I came away with a preorder for the new plastic Dragon Slayer (because I have a box of slayers waiting for their day in the sun, and he looks pretty snazzy), some technical paints (because hey everyone needs more paint right?) a pot of what is supposedly the same paint as Fortress Grey (we'll see) and a box of Spess Mehreens, because I actually quite enjoyed painting my test nerdmarine, and might see about painting up a whole squad (and thought a box of tactical marines would give me the most options for adding some variety to the push-fit marines I have from old starter sets and donor parts to salvage old miniatures that are missing various limbs that I'd acquired over the years when buying job lots on eBay that I've recently dug out of my bits box...) - the theory being, if I can paint a whole squad, I can paint two, add a character and boom there's a playable force (but we all know how those plans work out...)

I mean, I'd have bought the bits I need for a Path to Glory Slaanesh warband or some LOTR ruffians to convert for ASOIAF if they'd had them in stock, but alas. 

This little bundle of goodies unfortunately takes the tally further in the wrong direction, down to:

1 vs 15 = -14

And since it's Super Bowl Sunday tomorrow, I don't expect to get a whole lot of hobby done in the foreseeable future...

Hey there wait a minute mister postman...

So, it's February 1st, the day my year long subscription to White Dwarf starts (that my wife bought me for Christmas) - I was originally concerned that despite getting a subscription to White Dwarf I'm not actually going to be getting White Dwarf (as apparently GW have decided that I want 'Warhammer Visions' instead, without consulting me) but now I'm more concerned that nothing at all has actually turned up...

Edit, a phone call later: apparently I don't have a subscription, despite paperwork and receipts to the contrary. Looks like the redshirt in store fucked up. My wife is more pissed than I am, and I quote: "I've been buying you this for more years than that guy's worked for Games Workshop!"  Let's pop in and see if he's working today...

Edit part deux: turns out it wasn't a redshirt, it was the manager. And apparently it was a mistake centrally, they've been dispatched, but not yet arrived (despite today being the 'big launch' day). Having actually looked at the new magazines though, we've cancelled my subscription, which is taking some time...

It's a pity, as my wife always gets me a subscription for Christmas, but c'est la vie...