Three (very slow) chaos dwarf renegades

My first painted figures of the year...

Progress on these has been painfully slow, at times due to low motivation but mainly because life has been really hectic. I look with envy at people who can say "work's been really busy... here's a platoon I've finished", but that's not something I can manage at the moment.

I'm quite pleased with how The Master turned out, and Marik on the right is a nice simple job, but Pulper on the left is a very busy figure that I'm not totally sure about visually. He looks OK in these pictures but from a tabletop distance he's a bit of a mishmash. He's an iconic figure though that I'm glad to have painted, in fact this whole set has been a favourite of mine since admiring the ones my mate Ed owned back in the day.

A minor milestone is that I now have 5 chaos dwarves, which handly is an average roll of 2d4 for the Realm of Chaos followers table. It's also a convenient number for another project I have in mind.

Next stop is some humans for my chaos warband for BOYL in a month's time - I'll need to be a lot quicker painting those than I managed with these dwarves!

BOYL Sunday

There probably ought to be something here about how belated this post is, but wait until you see my next one...

On my way to the Sunday of BOYL I took a diversion to Warhammer World to pick up a copy of the reprinted 40K, since my old one has the traditional late 80s binding...

It was kind of interesting to see Games Workshop's headquarters, which really brings home how big a company it is. Anyway, I got my hands on the new, much thicker, edition:

Top: original, practically loose-leaf edition. Bottom: thicker and so far pristine!

And then back to Foundry, where I'd arranged to use my accumulated painted chaos force in a 1,000-point-a-side battle against Paul D's orcs and goblins (and goblins). We'd opted for 2nd edition, which remains my favourite edition for nostalgia reasons, although it was interesting to be reminded just how much of what I consider Warhammer hadn't been included by that point (e.g. no beast handlers or minotaurs yet). And to be reminded of the joys of calculating points values down to quarters rather than merely halves.

I'd expected to be outnumbered, but not quite to this extent!

1,000 points buys a lot of goblins and orcs

I started out sending my chaos hounds out on the flank, with a target of the bolt throwers but stopping off via the nearby unit of orcs. I know this isn't the best way to use the hounds, one day I might even remember that! They hit the orcs hard, but not hard enough.

Meanwhile my main force was heading for the enemy centre, in good chaotic tradition. Not unexpectedly the goblins have fanatics waiting for this sort of thing. It turns out that in 2nd edition fanatics don't have quite the impact I'm used to from 3rd edition, so I let disposing of them tie me up rather than ploughing on through.

Oh-oh, fanatics

Part one of Paul's cunning plan was that one of his heroes had a weapon with the Sleep Attack ability. It knocked out the hounds' handler, and deprived of his leadership they routed at their first check. Meanwhile my mortar was killing the odd orc here and there, but overall having very limited impact.

Part two of Paul's cunning plan was a shaman with Zone of Steadfastness. A minor bonus of the zone is that these goblins became immune to psychological effects, but the real point is that it tripled their number of attacks. Even with their low weapon skill that's a lot of fightiness, and they held off the charge of my minotaur and beastmen -

And quite quickly killed the minotaur. Paul was particularly keen that I captured this moment of the battle!

The minotaur falls to the unexpectedly mighty goblins

The goblins versus beastmen battle became the main focal point. The beastmen were slowly whittling them down, but couldn't afford the casualties they took in return. And meanwhile my chaos warriors, having taken a diversion to avoid the fanatics, were very slow in arriving.

By the time they did get to the battle, it was looking like a bit of a lost cause, although in points terms I had the majority of my warband still in action. But this fight was all happening within the Zone.

My beastmen had been very resiliant, passing several rout tests, but eventually the shear numbers of orcs and goblins chewed them up.

I generally find this sort of simple game as a good, relaxing way to spend BOYL Sunday, as everyone tends to be a bit frazzled after a full Saturday. What to start painting for next year and, especially after a lost battle like this, how to play things differently, then tend to occupy the brain on the drive home.

In hindsight I was annoyed with myself for my approach to the second half of the battle (and a bit about the hound deployment). I sometimes wonder if wargaming isn't really the hobby for me!

I try not to meta-game either in army selection or during the battle itself, but to both me and my battlefield alter ego it was fairly apparent that even that number of orcs and goblins shouldn't be all that worrying to a combat-centric chaos force such as this. The shaman was clearly the main threat on the field. Once the trap of the Zone was sprung I should have thrown everything at trying to kill him, certainly my mage's powers and perhaps my un-engaged warriors. But equally I should, contrary to the normal approach for a chaos force, have tried to widen out the battle and not have everything fighting in the Zone.

Still, well done to Paul: his minions' plan was a good one, whereas I didn't really have much of a plan!

A chaotic milestone

No one would ever call a chaos force balanced, but one of their distinct weaknesses is a vulnerability to missiles and especially war machines. Hence I thought it wise to invest in these guys -

 And yes I'm calling that 3 figures on my tally for the year, via the Predator Rule. 

They did me proud in a game last Thursday, when one of their two hits for the evening, helped by some failed rout and panic tests, reduced the Brettonian left flank to this -

The sight of an uncrewed cannon - warms my twisted and corrupted heart

I'm also rather pleased (after a little less than 5 years!) to have hit the milestone of 1000 points of painted chaos -

Still lots more to do - I'd like to be able to field a reasonable number of points without my beloved chaos warriors, and I've some rather nice figures in my queue which I'd like to get painted, but before that I'm probably going on a little diversion...

Still painting slowly

The less said about last year the better (12 figures painted in the year) and so far it seems I'm still on the one-a-month level... I'm a bit scared to start a new countdown to this year's BOYL, or set any kind of target for that matter, but I'm hoping the output improves somewhat.

I got this chap as part of a lot and he had gone straight into my spares box, but given the time pressure (he had to be ready for last week's game) I couldn't turn down the saving of having a standard ready-built rather than my previous conversion plan.

On the plus side I think I'm getting towards a basing scheme for my chaos types, inspired by Whiskey Priest's orks and the cover of the first Citadel Compendium. It still needs some work but given that I've been all over the place on bases up to now it's nice to have a firm plan in mind.

I'm not so pleased with how the banner turned out - the design is taken from the detail of an Ian Miller drawing, but whereas his looks like some mad alien thing mine's more like an angry bloke with big hair. Ah well, a problem for another day - I'm calling him done!

Beastmaster complete, challenge failed

2 weeks until BOYL '17, 24 figures still to paint. Perhaps time to admit defeat?

My beastmaster is complete -

He's an Alternative Armies Dogman Elite, so arguably not proper Oldhammer, but then his hounds aren't very Oldhammer either. Apart from his mohican I was aiming for "ordinary" - his hounds should be the interesting part of his unit - and I think he's turned out quite well.

Unfortunately that's going to be the only unit of the warband that I finish before BOYL. While I'm sure there are some who would make good use of the remaining two and a bit weeks to churn out another unit or two, given that we move house on the Friday of BOYL there won't be much miniature painting in my near future!

I'm not sure what I'll be aiming to paint after BOYL, it probably depends what the wargaming options are in my new part of the world. I'm keen to carry on with my plans for this warband, but it might be one more project that ends up on the shelf...

Modern-ish chaos hounds

9 weeks until BOYL '17, 25 figures still to paint

My painting has slightly fallen off a cliff for the last couple of months due to the pressures of real life. I'm starting to have to face up to not meeting this challenge, but I'll get a few more churned out at least!

I had a bit of a hunt around for chaos hounds when I decided to add some to my warband. Naturally my first thought was of the classic chaos hounds, which have been nicely showcased on vonkortez's blog, but not having been a chaos player back in the day I'm not emotionally attached to them and by modern standards they're a bit on the small side.

As an alternative the hellhounds from Heresy Miniatures looked rather nice and I was on the verge of ordering some of them when a batch of 1999 chaos hounds came up on eBay.

I'm mostly pretty pleased with how these came out, especially the scorpion tailed one, where for once the colours I ended up with were about what I had in my mind's eye. The green and grey one isn't quite as planned, but I'm still fairly happy with it.

The colour schemes are meant to reflect a creature being formed without quite understanding how actual creatures work, and for the same reason I've gone for blue on the fleshy parts. They still need basing (as with the rest of the force) and a handler - coming soon!

But at least that's a further 69 points with paint on.

Pigfaced Tom from Pantheon of Chaos

19 weeks until BOYL '17, 27 figures still to paint

My miniatures from the Pantheon of Chaos Kickstarter arrived last week and since I have a couple of them in mind for my BOYL warband I thought I'd get to work on the first of them.

Tom is a bit on the short side compared to the others, and compared to the other beastmen I've painted recently, but still fits in nicely with the group. There's some lovely detail on him as well, perhaps too much and it amused me that my interpretation of his various lumps and bumps differed slightly from the painted version over on the Knightmare Games website.

In fact those images helped me make sense of the miniature, although once undercoated the detail made a lot more sense.

He's clearly intended to be carrying a shield but I didn't want to hide the figure away behind a board, so instead I see him as ready to take his axe in both hands and start hewing.

I really must tackle my basing scheme at some point, I'm putting that off for now and so storing up a big job for later...

Ulfhdhnar, you shall go to the BOYL

21 weeks until BOYL '17, 29 figures still to paint

Having first undercoated this chap aiming to take him to BOYL '13, and then having him queued up to be the last figure I painted in January I'm sort of pleased to have him as the first figure completed for March. But a bit concerned about that lost month and the way my schedule is stacking up!

I'm also only sort of pleased with how he turned out: overall happy with him and I think the limited colour palette worked quite well, but the colours aren't quite what I had planned. The gloves were intended to be paler and the armour brighter - I still need to get the hang of the visual outcome of shading. But good enough for the table, and almost certainly better than if I'd painted him four years ago.

Beastmen across the eras

26 weeks until BOYL '17, 30 figures still to paint

I tried quite hard to resist eBay as a source of beastmen, and have hopefully found enough currently-available models from a variety of manufacturers to make up over half my unit. But I had to conclude that my tastes have been heavily influenced by Games Workshop beastmen, and that even some of their more modern ones are actually rather good.

With my broo from the beginning of the month I'm covering quite a range of years, from Citadel's very earliest up to a plastic(!) figure which I understand kids these days would call an ungor. One of the challenges I face with assembling this group is scale creep over the years balanced against a very valid question of just how uniform should a bunch of mutants be? In the end it comes down to a matter of my probably odd and definitely arbitrary taste, but for me the larger contemporaries of the ungor (gors?) are too bulky whereas the pestigor in the middle is a wonderfully mutated model and, while big, in keeping generally with his companions.

I might have to revisit all of this when I get the remaining models I'm currently planning on using in my hands, and see how they sit together in practice.

I'm going for a generic chaos warband rather than this new-fangled Realm of Chaos notion of power-specific forces and so far am enjoying mixing and matching the colour scheme. I don't really have a theme other than "drab with highlights" - for the cow-beastman I was going for a two-tone look and am happy with how he turned out, except for the design on his shield which I feel is a bit clumsy. The pox-ridden chap I deliberately gave an un-Nurgle highlight colour, and the ungor (whose scheme is lifted from one of the beastmen in Bryan Ansell's Warhammer Armies force) I again wanted to give a suitably contrasting shield. I'm quite please with how that came out as well - I'm just hoping this plan keeps working as the unit gets larger.

I need to speed up a bit as well...!

1.3% of a Snickit challenge

30 weeks until BOYL '17, 33 figures still to paint

I was aiming to have a few more figures painted over my Christmas break but it's good to at least get my "Broo with Sword and Shield" into the completed column. Or even the needs-basing-and-varnishing column.

I'm pretty pleased with how he's turned out, or at least I was until the photographs showed up some problems. I'm a bit concerned about the amount of time I spent on him though - I seem to spend disproportionate amount of time faffing over relatively minor parts of the model and reworking areas. I'm hoping that'll improve with practise, it will need to if I'm going to get anywhere near completing the challenge.

And he certainly looks a lot better than he did the last time he had paint on, many years ago.

Orctober 2 of 4... and on to my next project

I finally finished my second Orctober orc -

He's been partially undercoated for the last 20 years so it's good to have him painted!

The other two orcs that were originally in my queue for last month are going to have to wait though, as it's time I turned my attention to Snickit's challenge. I've been vacillating between dwarves and chaos but, at least at the moment, I've come down on the side of the latter - and not just because my prospective chaos force contains about 50% less figures than the dwarves...

Between Macrocosm's Kickstarter and Bood's production of some fantastic figures it seems the style of dwarves I prefer is finally available without resorting to eBay, but I can't quite bring myself to embark on a completely new army, especially with my SAGA vikings needing finishing. Instead a chaos force seems to offer more possibilities when matched up with what I have painted already, and if allied to my orcs means that I'll be able to field a reasonably large force at a point in the forseeable future.

My initial thought was to go with a variation of my Gulgan's Raiders plan, but a couple of things are holding me back from that. Having looked around a fair bit I'm still not sold on a source of currently available thugs, especially not archers. More to the point though I'm still hooked on my first sight of chaos warriors in the 2nd Edition bestiary all those years ago and, despite now appreciating rather more their tactical limitations, I want to create a force centred around them.

First up though are the beastmen, specifically this old broo that needs a lot of attention -

The sword was missing when I first acquired him from my mate Greg an awfully long time ago, but I must admit the butchery to the base (and most of a hoof) is due to my own teenage efforts. Hopefully I'll get at least him finished before BOYL '17...

Stone thrower wot won it

At BOYL I was introduced to a fellow Oldhammerer called Nick and we got together yesterday for a game of 3rd edition - 1000 points of orcs versus beastmen. Scenarios being important we raided Dragon Rampant for inspiration and opted for the Crystal Gale: 10 crystals placed around the table to add a treasure hunting element to the fighting.

The somewhat blurry photo above shows the initial setup - centaurs, beastmen, more beastmen, a troll with its shaman minder (or is that the other way around?) and a pack of chaos hounds facing (also left to right) some archers, warriors (in mid-move), savage orcs, shaman, elite orcs (also in mid-move), a stone thrower and some boar riders.

As Nick had observed he was fairly outnumbered, but I wasn't feeling too sympathetic at that point as his beastman general had 6 personal attributes - all beneficial ones at that - and I was feeling a bit concerned about facing him. To balance things out his shaman had an attribute of Stupidity, hence his delegation to troll duty.

The game left me with four main impressions: a good evening was had rolling dice, which is certainly the most important thing; those dice are probably more significant to the outcome of the battle than any generalship short of horrendous errors; 1000 points is about right for a short game (somewhat over two hours plus the table setup, attribute generation and so on) and war machines are still overpowered in 3rd ed.

Speaking of dice, Nick's centaurs swept into my archers fairly early on - and after a shocking initial round spent most of the game battling them. By contrast the chaos hounds, with very similar stats, made short work of the boar riders on my right flank and in the picture above are about to kill off my stone thrower crew.

The crew by that point had more than earned their keep. Their three shots of the evening (when they weren't busy animositying) had hit the shaman and troll (killing both, although the troll regenerated) and the general's unit twice - sending him routing off the table with a couple of his surviving beastmen. I was fortunate that due to the long minimum range of the stone thrower their failed animosity rolls couldn't inflict similar damage on my own units!

Definitely the dice were on my side, so I'm no doubt due the opposite result one evening soon. I was however left with the feeling that I should do a version of my 1000 point force with no war machines.

My final blurry picture of the evening shows the dispositions when time ran out. Nick was 4-3 ahead on the crystal collection front but depleted in terms of forces.

Which brings my to my final impression of 3rd ed - you can quite quickly get to the point where the result seems clear, but actually getting from there to a definitive end can take a long time. So it's quite handy sometimes to be stopped by the clock.

Starting a Norse force

It's a long story, or perhaps merely a convoluted justification for starting yet another project...

No one at my local club plays Warhammer, except for when I can entice other Oldhammerers along. I'm going to try and rectify that (our games in the past have attracted some interest) but in the meantime I'm likely to be playing SAGA, Dux Brittaniarum, maybe Hobgoblin and hopefully Frostgrave at some point.

So plan A is to have some painted wizards that I don't feel need the Dettol treatment and 6 points worth of SAGA vikings. That gets me set for SAGA and Frostgrave, with some chaps also usable towards some Dux Saxons. It also gives me the excuse I've been looking for for about 25 years to get some of the Citadel Norse (now from Foundry).

Juxtaposing the sorcerors and the vikings gave me another idea. In the good old days the WFB Norse were basically vikings with a side order of werewolves and some colonising of Lustria. In modern-ish Warhammer they seem to have lost a lot of that flavour and become basically chaos followers in fur - I don't want to go all the way down that road (and close the door on the Magnificent Sven) but it seems to me that, with the chaos gates pretty much on their doorstep, at least some would take the path to chaos. I thought at first if mixing some Norse in with my Citadel mercenaries and some Wars of the Roses (i.e. Empire) infantry to create a renegade / outlaw / wanderer chaos warband. But then I decided it'd be much more flavourful - and so much more work - to create separate Empire-themed and Norse-themed warbands.

Of course I can't have my more exotic beastmen (rhinos, slugs, lizards) in a Norscan chaos force - I need to stock up on beastmen more suited to the climate. So hopefully boars, bears and wolves can be added to the standard goat and dog types.

Or maybe I'll be side-tracked again before I get much beyond the viking warband...

Next project - Gulgan's Raiders

The first half of this month was hectic on the real life front, meaning I barely had time to pick up a paint brush. I did though have time to keep up with what's going on elsewhere in the Oldhammer community, and think about the next project that I could fail to find time to paint...

With hobgoblins being very much a current theme - mine should even make it to the front of the paint queue next month, just in time for Orctober - Gaj's chaos thurauder post sparked my imagination. A lightweight chaos force would be a good substitute for the human side of the Dolgan Raiders scenario from the second Citadel Journal and tick a couple of boxes for me. Not only could I use the first Warhammer scenario I ever played for my Newhammer project, but I'd also have some extra options for my combined orcs and chaos force.

I'll concede that this isn't exactly original, but to me using lots of chaos thugs - as my ally Leromides did in our chaos and orcs versus undead game at BOYL - is a bit of a revelation. To me the whole point of a chaos force is getting to field these chaps -

The models are cool, and they're excellent fighters, but as an embittered orc commander the best thing about them is the lack of animosity, and rock-solid personal characteristics (in wargame terms, at least...). I also have to admit the high points cost is quite attractive when you're trying to assemble an army in the quickest possible time!

But, before I talk myself out of it, may I present ... Gulgan's Raiders.

Guldan - chaos warrior (double handed weapon, protection rune)*

12 beastmen (light armour, shield)†
Steffen - beastmen champion (light armour, shield)

18 thugs (light armour, bow)
Jurgen - chaos marauder (light armour, shield)

Chaos centaur

3 chaos hounds
Tarak - beastman minor hero (light armour)

Nikolai - human level 2 wizard (5 spells)

As near as I can make out these come within a point or two of the original forces.

* I'm curious why rune weapons were removed between 2nd and 3rd editions (although you could see the case for ditching the Greater Death Rune!). In 3rd edition terms think of this as a cool but expensive way of equipping Guldan in light armour...

† Perhaps these should be thugs as well, but having played lots of WFRP I just can't have a chaos raiders force without beastmen. Plus I've some that I'm itching to paint...

I'm not sure tactically how good the beastmen will be in a fight, given the loss of Static Combat Resolution so beloved by the theorycrafters in moving from a 20 strong unit to only 12. It's also interesting to me to note that none of the units in the Dolgan Raiders scenario nor the later Blood on the Snow have standards - it makes sense in the context of the scenario especially for the former, but I'd not realised until now how much they only became ubiquitous in 3rd edition.

To represent these chaps on the table I nearly have enough beastmen, but only a couple of genuine thug miniatures plus a couple more good proxies for the archers. Instead I plan a mixture of Foundry's Men at Arms and Viking archers, plus some of Warlord Games' Germanic archers for the slightly wilder look.

I'm not sure what to do about the chaos hounds - at some point in the distant past I acquired some AD&D blink dogs for reasons that now escape me, but I'm a bit reluctant to use them as conversion fodder for some reason. So Warlord's mastiff pack might well be the answer there as well.

But first I must concentrate on my previous paint queue, before growing the lead pile!