the pale olympics - now with 34% completeness!

manipul leprosius inbound!

manipul leprosius - chosen terminators of nurgle

leprosius lues - chosen of nurgle

reaper assault cannon!

the verdigris in these pics actually shows up brighter here than in real life.

i had a lot of fun adding the demonic eye here.

i'm pretty happy with the unit as a whole, but i may go back and add a wee bit of detail work. primarily with leprosius lues' flesh - tone it down from the light purple to more of a dead flesh gray.

as always commments are welcome!

i can't stop watching...

it's like the history channel's swamp people meets miniature wargaming! 

i'm just waiting to see if romeo tries to "blowed it up real good!"

that being said, i kinda want these cases for my little mens now. check out battlefoam's line of cases here.

update: 
i actually got to check out the case from the video at gencon! it's a bit scratched up and dusty (yay fire dust!), but i didn't see any damage that wasn't cosmetic, and there was absolutely none inside the case.

the pale olympics - manipul cholerus update

howdy all! here we are the day before gencon 2012, and while pretty much everyone i know is headed to indianapolis, i'm staying here in chicago and working on some nurgle.

i've been getting a lot done on my new death guard army, and i've (aside for the basing) completed the first squad. here are some images:

manipul cholerus

cholerus lues - plague champion of nurgle 

chaos icon bearer for manipul cholerus

icon close up - lots of verdigris and rust work, and only slightly out of focus

one of two of the plasmagun toting plague marines.

close up of the verdigris effects on the plasmagun

close up of the verdigris effect on the helmet

the paint scheme uses a lot of dramatic layering with washes and shades to balance out the hard step between some of the colors. you'll also notice a lot of rust and verdigris. that's been fun to play with as well. 

i definitely like the idea of rot, decrepitude, and decay affecting the materials that would make up the armor and weapons. i'm also playing with visually representing suppuration of wounds (draining pus and gunk, yay!)

comments welcome!

all your base are belong to ironheart artisans.

so i'm futzing around on facebook; scrolling through the news feed to see what everyone has been doing over the past 30 minutes or so.

as i scroll past the feed from dropzone games, i notice that they "like" ironheart artisans, and there's this interesting picture of their movement tray for mantic games' kings of war (a miniature wargame that i have yet to try, but scares me spitless because everyone i know and trust loves it, and i need a new miniature wargame like i need a hole in my head).

ironheart artisans' fmf (fast movment force) system

from left to right, they show just how easy it is to prime, basecoat, drybrush, detail, and flock it to get it ready to play.

according to ironheart artisans' facebook page they "create high quality and innovative products for the gaming community". i'm sure that this idea started either around a game table with a couple of guys noticing that moving all the models in a kings of war game took too long, or just after the game over a pint at the pub. 

it's this kind of creativity and game support logistics that makes me happy. these guys have found a niche and are filling it, much like battlefoam, galeforce nine, army painter, and even forge world. i'm hoping that they'll be just as successful. 

this 10 model movement tray is their first product, but with internet retail and crowdsourced funding, i expect that we'll start to see ironheart artisans produce a lot of game support products for a lot of different games, and some way to order it online.

update:
doing a bit more fb scrolling i notice this on dropzone games' fb page:

so there is a 2x5 (10 model) tray, and a 4x5 (20 model tray) currently in production. 

base prep image property of ironheart artisans
packaged fmf image property of dropzone games

change up. not just for baseball anymore...

this summer has been rollicking along, and it's actually been quite a good one for my little mens. lots of hobbying with friends (and on my own). more than has been done in quite some time. it's nice to return to painting and playing with toy soldiers.

back on the 20th of july, i posted an article about the pale olympics entitled spf geek. in it, myself and several others set some hobby goals to achieve during the month of august.  

well, here are the results so far:

ulceratio taint - chaos space marine sorcerer

manipul cholerus

cholerus lues - plague champion of nurgle

the summonati pestis - a herald of nurgle and attendant plaguebearers

one of the summonati pestis

manipul leprosius

additionally, there are two other plaguemarine squads: manipul ulceratio, a 6 marine escort for ulceratio taint, and manipul bubonicus, another 7 marine squad. you'll notice that with the exception of the terminators, i'm trying to keep the squad sizes to 7. hail nurgle!

the entire list currently weighs in at 1355 points and looks like this:

ulceratio taint and manipul ulceratio (csm bodyguard) -csm sorcerer of nurgle and plaguemarines x6

manipul cholerus - plaguemarine squad (7 models)

manipul bubonicus - plaguemarine squad (7 models)

manipul leprosius - csm chosen terminators of nurgle (5 models)

summonati pestis - herald of nurgle (allied demon hq) and 6 plaguebearers (allied demon troops)

of course, some of you may be wondering what the heck happened to my commitment to completing my khador force to 50 points. the simple answer is games day. 

i have been pondering a death guard/nurgle army for quite some time. i had also been thinking of starting a new army for 6th edition, and at games day, i had the opportunity to pick up many of the forgeworld nurgle csm upgrade packs that i wanted (looking back, i probably should have picked up the dreadnoughts too).

these three events taken separately probably would not have been enough to move me off my original target, but games day is wonderfully notorious about reinvigorating folks' enthusiasm about the games workshop hobby. so here i am halfway through the month and not even a quarter of the way through my target. 

so the big question now is: "will he finish in time?" 

and the big answer is: "maybe?"

i should have manipul cholerus and the summonati pestis finished this week (save for the basing which i'll do at the very end for everything), and the other two squads primed and basecoated as well. next up though is the manipul leprosius. i'm very much looking forward to painting some terminators. august is a long month, but i'm nowhere near halfway done on this force. this one may come down to the wire!

hail nurgle!

++poot++

jack in. make the run. cash out.

i'm not much for collectible card games. sure, i played magic: the gathering, way back in the early 90's (hell. just about everyone in the pacific northwest did), and i had a nice collection of wotc's release of netrunner but never found anyone that played it, so eventually i gave away my cards and moved on to miniature wargames and euro-style board games.

flash forward to earlier this spring, and fantasy flight games' (ffg) announcement of android: netrunner.

ffg has really got the living card game format locked down, and the fact that netrunner is an asymmetrical competition between 'runner and megacorps, removing the collectible part and replacing it with a deckbuilding strategy, means that everyone at least starts on a level playing field.

today, ffg released a .pdf of the rules and it's chock fulla sexy. the rules seem to be clearly written with lots of examples of play, and there's just enough fluffy text to drape a nice cyberpunk context across the entire game.

you can download a .pdf of the game rules and the tournament rules here.

android: netrunner image property of fantasy flight games

gd gw games day

so it's been a few years since i attended games workshop's games day here in chicago, and as i stepped through the doors of the donald e. stephens convention center i was carrying a pretty big chip on my shoulder and quite a bit of cynicism, not to mention a man-purse with a sandwich, a sigg bottle full of water, and a flask of jim beam in case of emergencies.

my initial experience upon entry didn't do much to change my attitude. there was a long line to purchase tickets, and i was at the tail-end charlie of said line. i had made a trip out to the battle bunker in downers grove to purchase a ticket the week before, but was told that games workshop didn't send out paper tickets this year. instead you made your purchase at a gw store up to two weeks before, and the tix were mailed to you.

i was told that this kept costs down since it was "too expensive to print up a bunch of tickets that might not get sold", an excuse that had the distinctive aroma of finely aged bullshit. after all, games workshop should have historic data regarding games day attendance versus tickets sold at each store locally.

and the idea that mailing all of those tickets was cheaper than printing them? it just doesn't make sense to my simple little mind.

unfortunately for my inner curmudgeon, that's the extent of the bad experiences.

games day 2012 was, in my opinion, pretty chaosgodsdamned good.

i got to see a lot of old friends (shout out to duane z., a little mens reader. great to see you man!).

i checked out the golden demon entries (and they were all amazing). dave taylor's procession of morr was stunning, and i would've voted for it even if he had not paid me (it's the chicago way.)

fantasy flight games was there playtesting/demoing relic their spin on a 40k version of talisman, only with much more engine under the hood!

sat in on some really great seminars (thanks to travis, tanya, rob, and norm!).

and, like a good games day should, it put the hook in my mouth, and the fire in my belly. i've been toying around with doing a new army for 6th edition of 40k, and i made my first purchases late in the day once the line at the forge world table was gone. 2 packs of death guard conversion sets, the death guard terminator conversion set, and the nurgle csm sorceror.

yep. i've forsworn my soul to papa nurgle. insert fart/poop joke here.

i've even gotten busy putting some together and priming it up...

so all-in-all, games day accomplished its mission. it got me excited about the games workshop hobby again.

well played games day. well played, indeed.