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!

What’s better than a monkey?

 A monkey in space:

Jokaero are great. Digital weapons in the old Inquisitor rulebook: awesome. The fluff that they’re inveterate tinkers that will if left unattended upgrade your bathtub but it might also be a weapon: awesome. Whilst looking like a space orangutan: awesome!

I caved and bought a finecast version a few years back, as I figured that my chances of scoring a metal one for a reasonable price were firmly somewhere between slim and none. Alas, even with plenty of liquid green stuff, as I was painting I kept finding more and more little bubbles, but c’est la vie. There are a couple on the mysterious apparatus on his back, but I figure maybe they’re special technological holes too advanced for our stupid human brains:

I think I started painting him at some point last year (or possibly the year before!), but after being let down on my Blackstone Fortress Escalation order my enthusiasm cooled somewhat and he got relegated to the boxes in the basement of half painted miniatures sadly awaiting their turn in the sun. Luckily for him though, I couldn’t resist his little face! Looking at the pictures as I’m posting, I wonder if I should have gone a shade lighter on his fur, but I think I’ll leave him as is (as I’m rapidly running out of year!)

Tally:

35 vs 23 = +12

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!

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

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?

This slump, this slump, this slump...

...she's in my head (to intentionally misquote The Presidents of the United States of America...)

So yeah, three and a half months and no updates. I mean, I've only actually cracked out the brushes and paints once in that time, and even then I only managed a couple of layers on a handful of minis before giving up and packing away. I mean, my desk currently looks like this:

I don't know what happened really to kill my desire to paint. It may have started with deciding to replay both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games, which reignited my interest in console gaming (which I hadn't really touched for a few months beforehand), and starting to play Magic again can't have helped. If anything, the main blow may have been my laptop suddenly refusing to connect to the internet (I'm on my young lady's currently), restricting my access to Lead Adventure and the multitude of awesome blogs I follow, meaning I have to come up with my own enthusiasm for the hobby rather than being enervated by everyone else's...

That's not to say I've not been considering several additional projects - Conan is awesome, full stop, and I could recycle generic fantasy monster minis from the dnd project; I've been playing a lot of Dynasty Warriors: Gundam recently, and looking lovingly at HLJ...; I read most of Joe Abercrombie's novels, and started considering how I'd adapt War of the Ring to game it... But for now, I'm trying not to buy any more miniatures for the immediate future (even though em4 have an awesome barbarian with a square-cut fringe...)

Despite saying I'm not buying any more miniatures, more have arrived since the last post:

A lovely Malcadon from Jimchenko, because Necromunda is awesome, and now I have one of each of the four original Spyrers. I mean, come on, even I can paint four miniatures, right?

The winners of the Frothers Cthuldo sculpting competition (as is traditional, something went wrong with the order, but they turned up eventually).

And a whole mess of goodies from Crooked Dice! Which reminds me, I'm sure there was an email saying good things would happen if I placed an order after the 21st of August... and there's the summer special... [right, just one order, that doesn't count right?]

Which brings the tally to:

90 vs 270 = -180! (which has to be bellowed in the style of Bullseye...)

Stupid tally. What started out as a motivational device soon became a rod for my back. But hey, I've started so I'll finish (curse you ridiculously cheap box of many miniatures earlier in the year...)

Thinking about it, I also acquired a copy of Advanced Heroquest (complete) and a copy of Adeptus Mechanicus (with extras) in late May, but I can't be doing with digging them out and counting the miniatures (especially considering one of the extras in the AM box was a box of hundreds of epic-scale Space Marines...) They're more like board games anyway [he lies to himself]... I'll probably sell the copy of AM at some point, all I really wanted was some teeny tiny Space Marines so that one day I could make a 28mm scale GW...

Back to my original point though - the slump. Today I got out the paints, got out the tray of half-painted miniatures, sighed, and put it all away again. Determined to do something hobby-related today though, I decided to dig out the stripping pot. Two and a half hours later, I was left with:

Some Denizen robots and consoles (that will eventually live in a 7tv Evil Genius lair), and some gw bits and bobs - I'm sure Fabius' backpack had previously been stripped, I just wish I knew where it was... And going back to my previous post, what's that? New codex for Sisters of Battle? Guess I was right...

And as is a law of nature, when 8 things come out of something, it makes sense to put 9 in:

Old-school Slayers! One day, I will have a unit of 30 Slayers. This I swear to you now, on my honour. It originally started out as 'I will paint Gotrek and Felix' (don't worry, Gotrek is in the jar too) but these things have a habit of escalating...

I should probably do a post at some point about the contents of my stripping jar, some of the minis have been in there for several years (although I might have to slip some 'cooler' bits in there, since it's mostly gw stuff in there...)

Which is where this post ends. Will our intrepid host get his mojo back? Will he ever finish a project? Will he ever see the top of his desk again?

40k or not to k, that is the question...

Well, browsing through my drawers of miniatures I discovered that where I previously thought I had finished a couple of squads for a Witch hunters 40k army, I'd only actually in fact half-finished them. Having many more pressing and urgent projects requiring my attention, I of course immediately promoted one of these squads up the painting queue:

I think I originally started painting these four or five years ago, and truth be told probably should have stripped them and started from scratch (that way, I could have done something about that mould line across the Sergeant's scalp). A quick spot of paint here and there, a couple of layers on the bases, and boom, squad finished. I can but assume that if I ever manage to finish enough miniatures for this army to be useable in a game, a new version of the codex will finally come out, and nerf it into line with Inquisitors as they appear in the Grey Knights codex (Eversor assassins don't explode?! Arco-Flagellants don't die from running too hard?! Vindicare assassins bring enough ammunition to a firefight?! Oh, wait, I don't mind that last one too much...)

Tally thus far:

90 vs 252 = -162

I'm thinking about picking up some of that Army Painter dip that you hear so much about, which would let me shade a bunch of stuff for the Three Kingdoms project in one fell swoop, kicking the numbers back into respectability; Given that that is a good idea means that it's exceedingly unlikely to happen, far more likely is that I'll start a Game of Thrones miniatures project (guess what I'm currently reading - those chaps on the wall appear in my mind's eye as Rohan plastic warriors) or start the Nikolai Dante Tsar Wars project my mind keeps drifting to - it's far too easy to start skirmish sized projects, you think you'll only need to paint a handful of miniatures and you'll be happily gaming away, but in reality you get distracted by a new shiny project somewhere between buying the miniatures and actually painting them...