Steve - 10mm characters and terrain for Kings of War

 This week I competed the last  of the minis I needed to have a fully painted 2000pt Despoiler force for Kings of War, with a few extra minis to have some options to change between games.  A magus conclave for ranged attacks, and a couple mounted commanders and a spell slinger I can attach to regiments.

I play a lightly bent version of KoW with 10 mm minis rather than 28 mm minis on base, and I use Depoilers as proxies for units from the rule book's Varangur army list. Same rules and points as the real KoW rules, but a different look on the game table.

For the Magus conclave, which serve as an artillery unit, I roughly applied a base layer of spackle in an effort to create the impression that the five mages were collectively summoning up a swirling mass of chaotic energy from which each turn one among them could channel a magically lobbed ranged attack.  (So I am hoping this pieces does not look like five guys in bath robs standing on a badly mowed lawn.)

I also completed the first of the 10mm terrain I am working on to enable me to host a KoW game upon a wargame table kitted out to look more like a combat among the ruins within the lost wooded scrub lands, rather than a battle upon the endless blasted barren plains (which is the kindest theme I can think of to describe the shameful horror of a naked game table top).

Both terrain pieces feature some spare bits and bobs ByronM gifted me, and both pieces  make use of old CDs for the base bottoms.  I reimagined a slightly miss-printed castle corner tower into a lone tower a top a jutting mound, and I fashioned some extras from a bag of tiny trees into a wooded hill.  

The tower is 6 inches high and a CD is 5 inches wide, so I am thinking the two terrain pieces combined neatly fill a 6x6 inch cube. 


10mm figures - proxies for Kings of War
Despoiler Lord On Steed (Mounted) 2x2pts = 4pts
Despoiler Mage (Foot Figure)    = 1 pt
Magus Conclave  (Foot Figure) 5x1pt = 5 pts 
Tower and wooded hill (Terrain) 6x6inch = 20pts
Total 30 points

ByronM: 10mm Kings of War Salamander (Lizardmen) Army

 

One of my goals for this years challenge is to finish a second Kings of War (KOW) army in 10mm scale so that I can indoctrinate welcome new players to this wonderful game in this great scale.  I had always wanted to paint up a Lizardman army for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but never got around to it, and ended up giving the figures to my son Riley to paint.  So when I saw the amazing files for some10mm sculpts from "Forest Dragon" I just had to jump on board and pick them up as my second KOW army, and got to work printing out an armies worth of them.

I have kept them all based to 28mm standard base sizes using my own Northern Lights Terrain Kings of War Bases that have a notch in the leading edge to help pick out the center point of each base of figured (which is important in the rule system).  This means that a unit that in 28mm scale would be based with about 18-20 figures on the base ends up having 45-90 figures on the base.  The actual number of figures never really matters in KOW (as long as it looks correct or cool), just the base size.

 

 

This first submission for the army has most of the core units, with mainly specialty units to come in a future submission.  I did this because I find it way easier to bang out the rank and file while motivation on a project if high, and then get to the reward of specialty / cool figures to paint later on in a project.  As it turns out, this core block of painting is actually 1020 points total (in game terms, don't worry, not painting points!) so with it I am actually already 1/2 done this project!

So with that I have 2 horde sized units of Tyrants.  These are massive 15-20' tall lizards that swing clubs the size of full grown trees to smash their way through the enemies.  They hit hard but do not have much in the way or armour or defences.  In 28mm scale there would be 6 per base, but here I did 13 per base to give a look of unordered giants lumbering forward in rough formation.  I also painted them in 4 different shades to provide a mixed look rather than the standard single skin tone that GW always did their lizardmen armies in.  I did keep predominately to the traditional blue skin tone as I find it looks really sharp, but mixed in some pale blues and greens as well for variation.

Next up are 2 regiment sized units of Salamader Primes, the core of the army as they are both effective on the attack and have sturdy defensive abilities to take a hit.  In 28mm scale there would be 20 per base for these units, but in 10mm scale I put 60 on one base and 75 on the other base and really like how packed they look (especially the 75 model base).  I kept some variation of colour with these as well, using 3 different shades of Scale 75 Instant Color paint (Replenish Blue, Paralyze Blue, and Magic Blue) and find that the slight variation makes them look more realistic to me.

 

 

Lastly a pair of regiment sized units of Skink Ghekkotah Hunters with blowpipes.  These are smaller troops so end up on a smaller base.  Since they have the Pathfinder and Stealthy rules I kept them spaced out more on the base and much closer to the actual model count that they would have had in 28mm scale, but I did add a champion to each base and a few Salamaders to the back of the units with two-handed weapons as minders/tenders.  The smaller lizards are a bit flighty with lower moral than their larger brethren so I pictured having a few larger lizards with them as support, but hanging back to the rear of the unit as they are not able to sneak around as much so follow as a reserve.  They play ZERO effect in game terms and I just put them there for looks cool factor and fluff.

 

 

All of these were super fast to paint with the Scale75 instant colours, and are not great individually, but I think they look pretty damn good when all ranked up. So while more could be done to them, I am leaving them as is and moving on.

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 - 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.

ByronM - MiniHammer / Mini Kings of War and Hagglethorn Hollow Wizards Tower

 It's been a while since my last post as it has been a while since I got anything painted (due to summer and being outside more) but with the end of the month looming it was time to get something finished.  This is a test piece for a project I have been thinking of for at least the last year or two (maybe more), that is doing Kings of War (or Warhammer Fantasy Battle) in a smaller scale to get the right look and feel of massed troop combat. 

Sorry for the slightly glossy nature of the building, I ran out of dullcote clear cote so had to use a satin until I get more dull and it shows a bit glossy on flat surfaces.  I will go over it again later to dull it down!

I wanted to do a smaller scale as I always hated WFB due to having to take models off, and like KOW because you don't have to, but felt both lack a little in the looks department as they are meant to represent mass combat but at 28mm scale you really do not get that look with 20 guys in a unit.  I always felt it would look better in a smaller scale.

This then is the first test unit for doing just that, taking KOW down to 10mm scale where I plan on using the same size bases as 28mm KOW but using smaller figures.  I am still working out if I want to actually use the same size bases and just scale down the terrain but still play on a 6x4 table or potentially going to 1/2 size bases and playing on a 3x2 table, but this will help give me an idea of how it will look.

The first army I am doing is the Undead, featuring skeletons, vampires, ghouls, ghosts, hounds, and more...  But I am likely to do a second army as well over the winter as I like having 2 factions for every game I play so that I can sucker in additional victims to my hobby teach friends how to play!

Another huge upside for going to a smaller figure size is painting time!  Painting even a 20 man unit is 28mm scale is at least a weeks work (probably a couple hours every night for a total of 12-30 hours total), where as I painted both the unit and the tower in less than 3 hours.  Painting small figures is more about the impression of the whole unit rather than each figure having to be well done.  In fact, these were printed yesterday during the day, then primed and painted last night!  Because, you know I don't have enough unpainted figures already, I have to print more...

Also both the unit and the terrain is 3d printed!  The figures are from The Forest Dragon and printed out amazingly well and once you own the files cost less than $0.50 per stand of 6 guys to print!  The building is a scaled down building from a kickstarter that I backed called Hagglethorn Hollow that had an amazing set of buildings meant to print at larger scale but that work amazing printed smaller.

Now to convince Mike and Steve and others to join in on the fun and get some additional armies done up locally!  I already have my friend Curt convinced to join in from Regina and you can follow his blog Analogue Hobbies for his posts there.