Sage advice

And now for something completely different…

The same chum that I challenged to paint a 500 point Warhammer army, having finished that (as he only had to paint 18 miniatures, whereas I’m 40 odd in and only about halfway finished) messaged me asking if I’d heard of Inq28. I tried getting something similar off the ground a couple of years back with little success, but am always game for a new project, so popped some paint onto this mini that had been languishing in the painting queue for a few years:

It’s one of my favourite of all the miniatures released for 40k, as it’s such a simple yet characterful miniature, as well as being a non-combatant, which is rare enough in and off itself!

With him painted, the Tally moves to:

10 vs 10 = +0

And let’s me take this family photo of all my completed Inquisitorail henchmen so far:

My chum also sent me a link to Acolyte, a fan made rule set that uses the Kill Team rules with a heavy sprinkling of Rangers of Shadow Deep to make a campaign based game. While I love everything about that, in it’s intended form it’s about an Inquisitor’s acolyte and some generic mooks getting into scrapes, whereas I’m after something that lets you use some of the more interesting things, so I’m going to adapt it a bit:

The plan is to expand the variety of henchmen that can be taken, whilst also leaving them generic enough that they can be used to represent a variety of character archetypes - so, you’d have mostly generic henchmen:

Canid - dog!

Frateris - a close quarters mook, that can represent zealots, mutants etc (maybe I should write some mutation rules?)

Militia - same as the Frateris, but for shooting, for making guardsmen, gangers etc

Combat servitor - does what it says on the tin, but can also be used to make pit slaves etc

Sage - you’d select when creating whether it would be a savant (non combatant that gets bonuses to completing mission objectives) or a chirurgeon (medic!)

Familiar - cherubim etc - not sure if this should be a character or a piece of equipment though truth be told…

As well as a limited number (two?) of specialists:

Sororitas: choose whether they’re close combat or ranged (with accordingly different skills, stats etc) on creation to make repentia or sisters

Arco flagellant: can represent chrono gladiators etc

Xenos - basically just choose one from another kill team! Open to abuse, but don’t play with the sort of person that would do that rather than using it because they want to put something cool in their warband…

Assassin - death cult ftw!

Gunner - militia, but with a special weapon

Which is pretty much all I have so far. Most stat lines are adapted from other stuff in Kill Team, although I need to work something out for the Sage. I’m tempted to add more, like mechanicus and daemonhosts and rogue traders and all the other cool stuff from the old rulebook, but I think that might be overkill for this level of play - essentially an inquisitors favoured pupil being sent on errands with a few of masters resources. On the other hand, my co-conspirator has built a model to represent a blank, so I should probably work out a way to make that work!

I’m the baby...

 ...gotta love me (brief side note - how disappointing is it that Dinosaurs isn’t on U.K. Disney Plus after them advertising it for a month?)

Finished this little chap:

That had been sat almost finished on my painting tile since the end of last year when I frantically tried (and failed) to get my painted total up to 52 for the year to tick that off the Challenge. Speaking of which, this is definitely something old, as I’m fairly certain it’s been waiting a lick of paint longer than this blog has been around, and that’s been ten years...

I wanted the skin to look plasticky, like one of those terrifying baby dolls that my daughter is so fond of, and I think it reads as that rather than just looking like I chose the wrong base colour and didn’t highlight it enough! 

Doing the text on the dragging scroll was also stressful fun, squiring away with a micron pen after scruffily trying to make it look like I could freehand an illuminated letter!

Now, before we get to discussing the Tally, I need to confess that despite my plans to keep the Tally in the black this year, I have in fact not managed to paint enough miniatures to offset the number that I have received.

I got a box of lovely scenic bits from Zealot miniatures that you’ll be seeing soon (and may have seen some of IG you follow me on Instagram and squint a bit at some of my WIP pics, as well as a box from Northstar where I took advantage of their subscriber only offer last month. They warned that’s it would take a few weeks before orders got despatched, to which I thought ‘well that’s fine, better in fact, as it gives me time to paint up a buffer to protect the Tally’. Then January sort of flashed past and this box of 10 miniatures arrived (although in my defence unthought it was only going to be 7 minis - the pack of vultures that had three birds in its picture actually came as a blister of six, although one of them will have a new home as soon as I can safely drop it off to the pal that tempted me with Rangers of a shade Deep in the first place).

Then my wife picked me up the latest copy of Wargames Illustrated. With its accompanying sprue of Hoplites:

Which I’d added to the shipping list mostly for the solo Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago scenario, but between that sprue and the 2013 Salute mini of Jason of Argonaut fame I could probably knock together a little Greek mythology warband of some sort, a temptation I’m currently resisting (although that hasn’t stopped me idly browsing the Foundry website!)

Tally:

2 vs 19 = -17

Hmm, not where is planned to be, but not irredeemable!

So what’s next? As my wife has been working on a print, I’ve been sat with her at the table and took the opportunity to get some drybrushing done on a couple of scenery bits I’ve made, which may or may not be the subject of the next blog post...

Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (1/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

Wailing Death...

Another miniature finished in the race to the end of the year!

A Howling Banshee, the first Eldar model I have ever painted. A couple of years back, I started musing over building an Ordo Xenos warband for Inq28, as it wasn’t something I’d ever really thought about before (all my previous plans having involved those mainstays in the Ordos Hereticus and occasionally Malleus), and started imagining a group with a Kroot tracker, an Eldar Ranger, maybe even a Rogue Trader as I’d never thought about converting one of those... then Blackstone Fortress came out, which had basically everything I’d been thinking of. Not to be dissuaded though, I mulled on it some more, and decided I fancied painting a Howling Banshee...

This was over a year ago now that she dropped through my letterbox, according to my Timehop app last week, but now I’ve finished her! I’d originally planned on going with the traditional bone coloured armour scheme, but whilst procrastinating experimenting with techniques I went over the grey under coated miniature with Tamiya Accent Colour Panel Liner (as you may have seen if you follow me on Instagram), and was so struck by the effect that I decided to go with a grey scheme instead!

She even got a tiny freehand (well, freehand Micron pen) version of the Howling Banshees rune on her forehead. Ooh, these pictures are the first on the blog using my wife’s new photo booth, and looked amazing when I was taking them, but not looking so hot on my iPad as I write this post...

As opposed to this shot, taken at the same time with the same settings, which looks a lot more vibrant and closer to the actual miniature. Eh, there’s still things for me to learn I guess!

In the latter stages of the paint job, I began to wonder whether she’d really be an appropriate crew member for an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor, being that she is basically the enemy from their point of view, and wondered if she might be more suitable in the employ of an Ordo Malleus type, maybe having been sent by a Craftworld to act as a bodyguard for an Inquisitor that the seers have predicted will foil some machination of Slaanesh... Wherever she ends up going, I like the image of this totally alien... well, alien, standing silently, unmoving behind the Inquisitor during more diplomatic encounters, but being unleashed as a shock weapon during combat and absolutely terrifying enemies with her acrobatics and combat prowess...

Finishing her brings the Tally to:

36 vs 27 = +9

So, if I can finish and post 16 miniatures in the next 23 days, I hit my one a week challenge target. Don’t hold your breath, but stranger things have happened..

Drums! Drums! Wait, wrong Animal...

Another deep cut from the depths of the painting queue - Animal from the Schaeffer's Last Chancers set:

I picked him up on eBay a while ago to use as an Inquisitorial henchman, because I think he is one of the most characterful miniatures that GW has ever released!

He's a little bit of a rough sculpt (I tried to paint the eyes, honestly I did), but no less charming for it. You might struggle to see it given how awful my photography is tonight, but I've tried to give a heat damaged effect to the melta gun muzzle with purple and blue washes, followed by a drybrush of black at the very tip to make it look a little sooty. The rest of his gear got some weathering too, as I figure he's pretty much just chucked in a box between missions, and rattles around something fierce, rather than sitting polishing his shackles in a sumptuous bedroom somewhere.

He has an Auspex too (which I forgot to get a picture of), which seems like an odd piece of equipment to assign to an almost feral convict.

As he's been in the painting queue for so long, I get to cross another thing from the Challenge!

2018 Challenge:

• Finish something years old
• Finish something pre-blog old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Paint something from the stripping pot
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Build a wargames board
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Open Star Wars Imperial Assault and paint all the miniatures from it
• Paint all the miniatures needed to replace the tokens in the Imperial Assault Core Game
•  Paint a complete box of miniatures (either a full regiment or starter)
•  Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted)
• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics
• Finish a member of the Nextwave team
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

Yes, I basecoated him, and then largely kept him in a variety of boxes for 8 years or so. Done now, so to steal a phrase from the Inquisitor rulebook 'The ends justify the means'.

Tally

3 vs 0 = +3

Yeld - yellow gold?

And lo, comes the final member of my Spyrer team, the bewinged Yeld:

Dark bodysuit, as befits a model that has the ability to camouflage himself in the darkness of the underhive, contrasted with gleaming gold and silver pinions, because hey we're the rich kids on safari, so we're going to flash the cash.

I imagine that the wings feature some sort of holo projector across the surface, which would blur the edges and make the individual's silhouette harder to make out. Well, that's how I justify to myself painting them as such bright metal! (rule of cool wins again).

Midway through painting, I was googling to look at other people's painted Yeld looking for colour inspiration for his weaponry, when I realised that what I had painted as his bald head and a very prominent brow should perhaps have been a metal skullcap:

I quite liked it though, and decided to leave it as is (picturing him as the slightly older, sees himself as wiser self-appointed leader of the group), but when painting the lenses on his cybernetic eye I coincidentally painted them red and green, inspiration struck and I knew that I had to give him a wobbly freehand spider tattoo on his head:

Spider Jerusalem, in case you aren't familiar with the source of inspiration, explaining democracy:

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

45 vs 40 = +5

and actually completes a playable force for a game system, in a shocking and out of character turn of events:

(I really need to stick a weight under each of their bases to make them a little more stable...)

Can I use this momentous milestone to justify ordering myself the new Necromunda? Probably not, this close to Christmas, I should probably wait and see what Santa brings to avoid raising the ire of the wife...

Given that Games Workshop seem to be planning to update all of the existing main gangs, as well as adding some new ones, I'm intrigued to see what a redesign of the Spyrers with 20 additional years of technology and experience would look like...

Malcado, Malcadon't, it's all the same to me...

Thirdly comes my favourite of the Spyrer Hunting Rigs, the Malcadon. Because if you're a scion of the noble houses killing for thrills in the Underhive, you're obviously going to choose the suit which is a cross between Spider-Man and the Predator. The other types can seem a little silly when looked at with real world sensibilities ('I'm agile and hope you shoot me with energy weapons!' 'I'm punchy!' 'I'm kinda a birdman'), whereas the Malcadon is genuinely threatening and unnerving - you could imagine him stalking his prey through the decrepit gantries and vents, unseen until the very last moment when he drops onto his prey, seen only for an instant before there is the flash of steel (and I seem to recall there being a short story in Inferno magazine back in the day that went pretty much like this).

Unlike the other Spyrers, who got a dazzling selection of brightly coloured suits and greeblies (as they're basically marching into the Underhive with loudspeakers blaring 'we're here to murder you in these high tech killsuits'), the Malcadon got a much more muted selection - reddish purple bodysuit (as I thought 'what colour best describes murder'), and the pipes and tubes of his web spinners and helmet were painted in muted greys and blues, which makes it look almost carapace-like (as I imagine that having a chap that looks very much like some sort of technologically advanced murder beetle drop on you from above would be even more terrifying to the average Necromundan resident)

The only 'bright' points on the model are the pistons on his legs and his claws (which are still a much darker metal than his companions) and the three red dot lights around his eye...

Side note - the Malcadon is the Spyrer that didn't come in the original large box of miniatures, and was donated by my buddy Jimchenko who remembered that he had a broken model when he found out about my acquisition of the other three. A quick repair to reattach an arm and six years later we have a painted miniature ;)

Other side note: I've been considering picking up another Malcadon, as in the Community Edition of the Necromunda rules Spyrer teams have to consist of 5 members, but I'm just not as much of a fan of the other Malcadon sculpt as I am of this one...

Tally

44 vs 40 = +4

Honestly, the main thing holding me back from ordering the new Necromunda at this point is that it would plummet the Tally back into the negative, and so close to the end of the year I'd be unlikely to get it back into the black... So for now I'm just stocking up on Pringles and bottlecaps and considering making some terrain...

Orrus you sure about that? Wow, I'm really losing my touch with these punny titles...

As hinted at in my last post, it's not just a single Spyrer I've been working on;

Next we have the bruiser of the group, the Orrus:

Honestly, I can't remember how I got to the decision to go whitegrey and green as a colourscheme. He looks a little like he wouldn't be out of place fighting mid-90's Spider-man.

Not a lot to say about him other than that, really (except can you see how I snuck Arcane Blue onto him?) - I was oddly unmotivated to paint this miniature, and he was sat with only his flesh painted whilst the other miniatures that I was working on simulataneously approached varying stages of completion, but once I threw myself into painting his armour I started to enjoy him some more! I went for a much cleaner style that my usual, which was very odd - almost like panel lining a model tank painting dark shade in between each armour panel and then sharpening the edges with the highlight colour, rather than my usual approach of slap it on and then scrub around some highlights in a slightly slapdash fashion!

I'm also not sure why I wasn't more inspired to paint him, as my most enduring mental image of the Orrus is from the Kal Jerico comic, where they look like an absolute badass:

I mean, until he gets taken out with a lascannon:

Although at the same time I guess that if it takes incredibly rare and expensive anti-tank weaponry to take you out, that's still fairly respectable...

Tally:

43 vs 40 = +3

I'm starting to consider getting the new Necromunda, and thinking of it as buying a bunch of models that I can use with old Necromunda that also happens to come with a free Necromunda themed board game that I could also play if I wanted to... 

I can't think of a pun that fits Jakara into it... Jakara be kidding me? No. Dammit.

So, as you probably can't help but have noticed if you have internet access, Games Workshop have recently re-released a version of the pinnacle of skirmish wargaming, Necromunda. It's probably not just nostalgia talking, it was genuinely the best thing ever.

Rather than rushing out and snapping up a copy of the new game that would most likely just end up atop the precariously stacked pile of games that I will one day get round to painting and playing (I'm looking at you copy of Officio Assassinorum Execution Force) I thought I'd dig through my pile of half-finished projects and finish something up from the last time I decided to journey to Necromunda.

Six years ago, I bought a box of secondhand miniatures on a well-known gaming forum, that I dutifully stripped and set about repainting. I was halfway through typing 'a selection of which you've seen posted', but a quick snoop through my posts reveals it looks like I've not actually finished a single one of the 95 miniatures that were in that box... 

One of the reasons that I bought the box were that I saw that it contained three different Necromunda Spyrers, a gang that I had always coveted as a youth, and one of which is the first to get finished and posted, the Jakara:

I was somewhat conflicted over whether to give her pink hair, as such punky affectations tend to be reserved for gangers, but 'rule of cool' won out in the end. The bone and blue colour scheme was chosen by me sitting down with a post-it note and scribbling out pairs of colours that I misremembered seeing the Studio models painted as in old issues of White Dwarf.

The mirror shield got painted as shiny and single toned, again due to my vague recollections - me remembering that it was called a 'mirror shield' and assuming that the surface was, well, a mirror, whereas actual descriptions of it have a number of different nodules that store energy rather than just reflecting it straight back...

I had a play with trying out a crackling energy / alien technology effect on the blade (having finally cracked open my pot of P3 Arcane Blue, which is such a lovely colour that you will be seeing it creep in somewhere on the next few posts), which looks a bit crap, admittedly, but I kind of like it anyway...

All of her tubes and equipment were painted as shiny as new, figuring that this is her on her first jaunt into the Underhive, and the little chambers on her backpack were again painted with Arcane Blue with white squiggles, to look like containment cells for captured energy waiting to be unleashed back against her foes!

Finishing her brings the Tally to:

42 vs 40 = +2

Death doesn't stalk the Underhive alone though...

Only in death does duty end...

...and even then that's not a given, as if you're suitably pious you might get a small anti-grav device attached to your cleaned skull so that you might be able to bip around looking menacing near an inquisitor, and if you're doubly lucky you might even get a laspistol grafted on, to ineffectually highlight to the enemies of Mankind your exact location so that their vengeance might be swift and terrible.

So, I finished a couple of servo skulls! They're a bit silly, but so quintessentially grimdark I couldn't resist. There's two, despite the fact that warbands can only take one in inquisimunda, but I guess it gives me the option of taking one with a small gun or one with a pair of crafty manipulators. It shouldn't matter that only one has a weapon, because we should be all about narrative over power gaming. I'm not competitive. No sir. 

Tally:

39 vs 40 = -1 

Necromunda is going up on pre-order soon, so I think I might have to have a bit of a clear-out and list some unused projects on eBay! Why would you do this so close to Christmas GW, don't you know we have families to buy presents for?

In the Emperor's name get back here so that I can show you the business end of this Eviscerator heretic!

So, there's a bit of a long-winded explanation for why this guy got painted. And why it took... 8 years maybe?

One of the guys at work has recently discovered Warhammer (40K to be precise), and knowing I am a big nerd wants to play some sort of game. Me being me, I've already bounced from the idea of playing Kill Team (which I'm assuming is what used to be 40k in 40 minutes), to Shadow War Armageddon (new! Also unavailable) to Inquisimunda (because it's basically Necromunda with waaay more options). I figure I probably know a couple of adults that I could probably also rope in to some skirmish scale wargaming...

Which brings me to this figure. Fired up with my current enthusiasm for Inq28/Inquisimunda, I thought I'd finish painting a conversion that was originally built for the Witch Hunters army that was last briefly mentioned on the blog 6 years ago:

A zealot with an Eviscerator - he was built so long ago that he was the last model in a blister of Empire Flagellants that I bought along with a Mordheim Witch Hunters boxed set. Off of the shelf in a Games Workshop. That long ago.

It's a fairly straightforward weapon swap - off came his flail, and on went the blade from a space marine chainsword (as it's big enough to look like an oversized Eviscerator on a normal human, and the handle of the flail is long enough to look like a two-handed grip). I figure his awkward stance is him swinging his chainsaw like Leatherface at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in his enthusiastic religious fervor.

I mostly basecoated him, then many years passed until the events of the first paragraph of this post.

Fun painting facts:

• his ragged robe was my perhaps first experiment in painting using washes over a light basecoat. I haven't really used the technique since. Maybe I should give it another shot?
• I added some blood effects on his feet (as I'm assuming that the battlefields of the forty-first millennium are mostly broken glass) using Blood for the Blood God. I do love some glossy blood effect.
• I went with orange for his shoulderpad to try and make him look less fantasy - I'd originally planned to have it in the colour of the inquisitor he'd accompany, but as I haven't decided who that's going to be I went for an industrial orange and went to town on the weathering!

It's a fairly interesting little sculpt - I love the string of bells hanging from his waist, but I'm not sure where I stand on the book on his chest and parchment on his side - rather than being blank for you to add your own squiggles for writing, they come with sculpted indentation detail - with careful use of dark washes I was able to pick them out so that they looked passable, but it's fairly unusual (as if you look closely you can see the indents...)

Lastly, the blade. Oh hazard stripes, thou art a pain to do evenly. Thank goodness for a soft pencil and carefully marking out where you want the stripes to start and end rather than trying to freehand it!

Also, a goodly amount of weathering helps add to the whole effect. I briefly considered going hog wild with blood splatter, but I'm glad I held back as I think it would have been easy to go too far and ruin it...

He was actually painted about two and a half weeks ago, but a number of factors have combined to mean it's taken me this long to get him posted - I miss the Blogger app, it's a pain having to drag out my wife's laptop to edit posts; also I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4, as I ordered the Witcher 3 and want to finish Fallout of before starting another game that will take me multiple years to complete (and yes, I'm the sort of OCD nerd that is also reading the Witcher novels before playing the game); also, I've been working on a bunch of scatter terrain pieces in the hopes of being able to play some games at some point...

Tally:

29 vs 40 = -11

So what's next? Some more Inquisimunda models, hopefully - I've a few stock models built that I'll try and get based up when I'm basing the scenery (which you may have already seen progress pics of over on Instagram), and then hopefully I can then move onto finishing some conversions that I've had in various states of half-completion for the best part of a decade - weirdly, despite my prediliction for the more Radical aspects of the Inquisition, a number of figures that I have would probably suit a more Puritan band (this Zealot, for example...)

Look what came!

Although work continues apace on getting my Nerdmarines to the state of a playable gaming force, a nostalgia driven ebay purchase arrived today:

And led me to have a root around and dig out a Baggie of miniatures from my unfinished Witch Hinters army:

I say nostalgia driven, but that's technically not true - I had the rulebook many years ago, when it was first released, but never got to actually play a game, and ended up selling it as part of the great midlife crisis purge I had when I was 15 (oh, foolish youth, if only past Olly hadn't sold his copy of Necromunda complete with Outlanders and his bits box for something paltry like twenty quid...)

So, I wonder if anyone fancies some inq28?