Steve, KoW, Despoiler Hell Hounds

 Despoiler Hell Hounds for Kings Of War, proxy for Cavalry Troop of  Vanagur Tundra Wolves.

I was going for a Khorne flesh hound vibe with the colors, I mucked about too long on these 20 little 10mm hell dogs trying to keep color separate between blacked spikes and red charred flesh..  not super thrilled with the how they turned out.  but feel like the paint job came to a point sufficient to serve in a painted table top war. Time to take the lessons learned and  put efforts to other models  

20 Points = 20x(10mm foot figure = 1 point) 

Steve, Gaslands War Rig and Crew

I had the notion it would be cool to have a War Rig in my collection and to try out for a game or two, and more cool if I had some Gasland gang crew that could be added and removed as scenarios needed. 

So I built this War Rig.  

I started with a hot wheels semi-trailer toy and a dollar store military truck mashed together.  Then I layered on the wasteland look with cut pieces of zip ties, plastic card cut from packaging, tooth picks, 3D printed mini gun and front wheels, stuff from the bitz box, skulls (there must always be skulls) and a couple well sacrificed old Gorka Morka Trucks kits. 

The Wasteland Warriors from North Star Figures have tiny bases ill suited to the task of keeping a mini standing on War Rig that would be moved on a game table. Rather than a typical GW style plastic base and I wanted a base that had both a low profile and some weight.   I dug into one of my odds and ends drawers and found some ready to use round metal bases that have a value exactly 10cents each..... Some glue, junk bitz, paint and bingo bongo I had the tiny yet stable bases I needed to stand these crew on the War Rig.

30 Points =  2x War Rig  ((Cab and Trailer)  20mm vehicle = 15 points)

20 points = Wasteland Warriors x5(20mm foot figure = 4 points)

From ByronM - Kingdom Death Good vs Evil on Corsucant

 

This is a submission LONG in the making, I originally primed these up about 4 challenges ago and then never got around to them.  I kept putting them off as I was not quite sure how to deal with 2 of them and didn't want to screw up such expensive models.  Well, this year it was time to bite the bullet and do them anyway, and I think I nailed it on one and screwed the pooch on the other, but you be the judge.

First up the one I think I nailed, and the one I was most worried about, the Watcher.  This enigmatic entity is your saviour and killer in Kingdom Death.  In this bleak world there is no sky, no sun, just endless darkness and evil, when you wake up in the world though you find magic lanterns that keep the darkness and monsters at bay and let you survive.  [SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT KD SPOILERS!] What you don't realize up front is that Watchers provide and power these lanterns as a way to gather groups of humans into settlements.  Then after a while (25 years/games) they come out from their underground lairs to devour the now hopefully highly populated grown up settlement.  Yeah Kingdom Death is an evil evil place.

The Watchers are supposed to both create and devour light (and hopefully I am getting all this lore correct as its pieced all over the books and cards and not clear on purpose) so I wanted to try and paint something both dark and light.  I went with black but didn't want a pure black so it is actually a deep blue then shaded down to black in the crevasses and up to a slightly lighter blue at the highlights.  I then painted his sash in a bone colour to provide some kind of colour contrast (going black/white but not true colours at either side of the spectrum) and lastly painted the lanterns and some OSL light effects from them, but kept them muted on purpose to show that the light is fading around him.  I am super happy with the result, and I am almost NEVER happy with my own painting, which makes it even better!

Next up is the one I don't like how he came out, the Manhunter.  This is another super cheery monster in Kingdom Death who comes to settlements and demands you sacrifice people to him.  If you don't he likes toying with you in the fight breaking arms, legs, and backs as he breaks you down and then hauls you away.  It never says what he does with the people he takes, but it can't be pleasant.

He is dressed pretty mono-chromatically as he is supposed to be wearing leather made from animals and people, so I tried to use various browns, tans, and skin tones to make up some division in his outfit, but I am just not happy with the overall result.  I struggled with thinking about what to do with him for the last few weeks, but just couldn't come up with a solution, so am submitting him as is, as he is at least usable for the game even though he is not great.

Next up are two survivors to add some extra weapon options to my collection of figures.  The female figure is a Savior figure holding what could be a great sword or twilight sword in game, either a very useful option (even though the twilight sword makes you super powerful for about 8 games then kills you).  

The male is just a random fighter with an axe.  I fell in love with this figure due to the fish head he is wearing as a helmet, so I had to make sure it stood out so painted it a bright green and refer to him as the Fisherman. He kinda suffers from the same monochromatic issue that the Manhunter does though with all his leather items, but again, I wasn't sure where to go from there.

 

 

Overall, I really like the Watcher and the Saviour figures and the Manhunter and Fisherman may need a revisit at some point for more contrast of a few colour changes.  If anyone has suggestions, I would love to hear them.

As for points, I am not sure so leave it at your discretion Millsy.  Kingdom Death is a 40mm game, so the 2 heroes are easy (2 @ 7 = 14 points), but I am not sure how you want to count the monsters.  Normally monsters are equal to vehicles, but these don't seem quite big enough to count as 25 points each, but they are also not cavalry, but I think it would be more reasonable points wise to count them as such and 15 points each instead of the 25?  Your call completely.  Whatever you come up with, I also get the bonus 20 points for completing a good vs evil post for the planet of Corsucant.  

Oh, and I almost forgot, this will also be my 4th squirrel point! So far my topics for Squirrel points include:

1. 15mm Eldar
2. 10mm Undead
3. 30k Marines
4. Kingdom Death Monsters and Heroes
   

ByronM - 10mm Kings of War Zombie Horde and Heroes

This week saw the completion of a few pieces that have been in progress for a little while.  They may not look like a lot, but painting that many individuals and trying to keep randomness to the colour patterns was a pain in the backside...

 First up is my promised Horde of Zombies for my 10mm Kings of War Undead project.  These are all once again 3D printed from the excellent sculpts from Forest Dragon, and I wanted to have enough of them to actually look like a horde.  In 28mm scale KoW it would only be 40 zombies on a base to makeup the "horde", to me that is just not enough... So, here is my 136 zombie horde!!!  20 of them are 1/2 zombies though (the tops crawling along) so I will count them as 126 models for points purposes later.  I don't know about you, but to me this actually looks like a horde of zombies.

Painting these was a major pain, as there are only so many colours to use, and I wanted it to look random, and at a small scale subtle colour differences just do not show up.  So I stuck with brown, tan, red, blue, green, and purple and went to town on them.  It took far longer than I expected though as keeping it random looking took a lot of going back and forth between models and strips.

Next up is the Heroes of the Undead army, a vampire count on foot, a mounted female vampire count, and two necromancers. While I would not necessarily call a vampire a hero, they are hero choices in the army list, so even though they are evil, I am claiming them as heroes for the space map Glorantha space, which is my fourth space on the outer ring, so time to move into the middle ring.

I decided to base these heroes on 25mm round bases even though KOW wants them on 20mm squares.  I did this as the placement of heroes in KOW is not super fiddly (essentially if they are beside a unit they are involved in the combat with the unit) and this way they are easy to spot on the table and it makes the army usable in other games like Warmaster or any of the derivatives from it (Hail Ceasar, Pike and Shotte, Black Powder, etc) so that if we ever decide to mod any of those games to a fantasy block based setting we can.

Overall this should count as 126 zombies and 4 characters and 20 bonus points for the planet Glorantha bonus, for a nice round 150 points.  Not a bad start to a Saturday.

ByronM - More 15mm Eldar

Continuing on with my 15mm (20mm) Warhammer 40k project, I have a few more pieces finished this week.

First up is a unit of Fire Dragons, again these are 6mm models scaled up and printed as roughly 20mm scale (25mm to the top of the crests) from the excellent Lord Chronos on Cults. Even though these were meant to be 6mm scale, so much detail is there that I am pretty sure they would look ok even is scaled up to 28mm (they would be missing some detail, but still very usable).

The unit is made up of 9 Fire Dragons and the Excarch.  Once again I kept the character on a different style base so that they are easy to spot at table distance in 15mm.  They are all painted in the traditional very bright yellow and orange paint scheme.

Next up is the transport to go along with them, again a 6mm model scaled up and printed to be huge.  This is done in the same turquise type colour as the other 2 and features twin link bright lances to keep with the Fire Dragon theme of being able to kill any vehicle or monster type unit dead with heavy firepower.

As per the last submission of these models I am claiming the 10 figures as 4 points each and the tank at 15 points due to pure size and scale of this beast (just as big as most 28mm tanks).  That should put it at 55 points, but Millsy, please feel free to adjust or change at your discretion though as I really could care less about the overall points...

ByronM - Death Guard Traitors for Istvaan V

In typical fashion, I had grand visions of planning out my challenge painting projects ahead of time, and in typical fashion, never did...  So after finishing last weeks submission I madly looked at the star map to try to figure out where to go next and what to paint (which is a lovely and cool map by the way, I just never had any real chance to look at it and pre-plan!), and saw that the next stop on my path was:

Istvaan V: Betrayal; Heretical/Heretics or Loyalty/Loyalists

 

Well, that's lucky, as I have a pile of Warhammer 30k Death Guard models from Forge World and have been meaning to get around to paint some more specialty weapons!

So, here is a small squad of 5 Death Guard Heretics with meltaguns suitable for clearing out the loyalist scum that worship the false emperor.

 

These are done in a very grimy style similar to how I did the core of my force a few years ago.  They are painted a bone colour as a base, then washed with a mix of weathering powders in IPA so that it flows well through the recesses, and then wiped off the higher areas with a Q-tip with IPA on it.  I then go back and paint all the details and they are done.  Overall a simple fast and effective method to get these guys looking like they just lived through the bombing and exterminatus protocol that happened on Istvaan V. 

Being a small squad of 5 28mm models this should net me 5 points each (25 points total) plus 20 points for the Istvaan V bonus for 45 total points.  Oh and as my 3rd different themed entry they also net me one additional squirrel point to bring my total there to 3.

ByronM - Kings of War Undead Army in 10mm - Part 1 (212 Points)

 

I used to love Warmaster and Fantasy Battle, but over time got tired of the look of Warmaster being 2 thin rows of models or removing individual models in Fantasy Battle. So, I went looking for something else and came across Kings of War.  Its an awesome simple and fast fantasy mass battle game that focuses more on units and positioning rather than individual heroes.  It's a fun game but at 28mm it just always looked wrong to me, as it is almost impossible to get the look of a mass battle game in 28mm on a 6x4 or even 8x4 table.  So, a couple friends and I decided, why not do it in 10mm, its cheap (as you can 3d print everything), super fast to paint (to a simple tabletop standard), and looks great ranked up!

I have to start by saying sorry for the image quality on these, I just for the life of me could not get good pictures of these. The camera just wouldn't focus correctly on them and kept washing out all the colours, and Photoshop decided to blow up on me as well, so until I sort that out I had no way to correct the colours or clean them up.

 

All of these models are from the excellent collection offered by Forest Dragon, and the detail is amazing! All the bases are from my company (Northern Lights Terrain) and are the standard Kings of War base sizes as if the units were standard 28mm scale.  I chose to do this as it allowed the game to play exactly the same as if it was being played with 28mm figures, and allowed a lot of space to pack on models to a base.

First up is the really cool looking Vampire Count on Undead Dragon.  He will obviously be my army commander.

 

 

 

Next up, a unit of Vampire Knights.  This is a hard hitting but small unit, only counting as a troop sized unit in KoW.  There are 40 heavily armoured Vampires packed onto that 100mm x 40mm base.

 

 

Next is a big regiment of Skeletons.  While I painted up a ton for the base (64 of them on there!), once I started ranking them up I realized I could have done another 20 or so to completely pack the base, but it still looks good with so many ranks and a bit of space at the front, so I left it.

 

Then come the wraiths, which I tried to paint up as eerie glowing green ghosts.  Not sure it worked, but I am OK with them as they offer a bit of a counter point to the purple I chose for the main colour of the rest of the army.  This is a regiment sized unit of them (100mm x 80mm) and has 60 of them on the base. 

 

As a side note, while printing 10mm strips is cheap and effective, re-basing them once done is NOT.  I learned that leason the hard way.  I had done a unit of these wraiths as a test unit over the summer for this project, and I had wanted to base everything green to blend with many of my play mats.  It looked horrible with green ghosts on a green base, so I figured no problem, pop them off and re-base to grey when I got to the army in the painting challenge... NOPE, every single strip broke when trying to get them off the old base (weapons broke, wraiths broke of the strip, and the strip broke in multiple places)... So had to print and paint all new models...   Oh well at least they paint fast.

Lastly, a unit of Black Coaches, which I based up on a 125mm x 100mm Cavalry Regiment size base and am using them as Revenant Cavalry since Black Coaches do not exist in KoW but I still wanted to use them.  Initially the horses were just painted as undead horses but the models lacked enough contrast, so I switched them over spectral horses to add some more colour.  I think it worked out ok.

As for points, these add up pretty damn fast, which I honestly didn't expect given how fast they paint up.  But there are 164 infantry models for 164 points, then the dragon and rider for 4, and 4 Black Coaches at 6 points each for a total of 24.

I am also claiming these as my entry for the Babylon 5 planet as "low budget fun" as doing an army this way is super cheap and a ton of fun to paint as it is so quick.  So that adds 20 more points to the total, for a grand total of 212 points!

Lastly, this is my second different theme, so my second point in the Squirrel side contest.

Steve Gaslands, The Muck Truck

 Late for December 2021, early for January 2022...  "The Muck Truck" for Gaslands.

I spent a chunk of time on this truck, trying out some different paint techniques, with the intent of this 'smaller' truck informing how I will paint the War Rig..  Spent a lot of time mucking about with different paint passes, to create look to mix a patched up dusty  beater, and an old barrel leaking gooey wet oil.

Unlike my previous Gaslands vehicles, I wanted this truck to obviously use "drop" weapons and be a rust bucket.   This is the first time I started with a brown base coast and built up the color with different shades of brown and orange stippled on with sponge.  Several passes of dry brushed browns and metals, a wash with Agrax Earth Shade and another pass with 20+ year old Citadel orange Ink eventually got me where I wanted for the rust look...   For the oil, after a few failed paint efforts, I eventually landed on a mix of black and green craft paint mixed with Modge Podge,  followed-up with a clear glaze coat on the 'oil'.

I cut 3 small drop template from the box of scrap plastics I have diverted from my recycling bin to the crafting supplies.  A black craft paint mixed with some sand painted,  then some watered down green craft paint dripped from a couple feet above to get some splash effect on the oils surface. 

In the end I am please with the results, and taught myself a couple new tricks for future projects.  Faster ways to get where I got for sure. My first road to rust was a ride down winding paths.

15 points = x1 Gaslands Truck (20mm vehicle = 15 points)

20 Points = Challenge Points, (Babylon5: Operatic; Low Budget Fun)