Gearing up for a tournament

o/

Okay, I have batteries for the camera again, so no more of the wall of text stuff!

Recently I registered for a 40k tourney in Knoxville named the '40k MELTDOWN!' (info for which is here). While fully painted armies are not required, I'm going to try & bring one. However, with a point total of 2250, I'll have to mix my loyalist & renegade Imperial Guard armies, tossing any theme out the window. I thought of putting a little blurb at the top of the army list that ran along the lines of 'Sir, there's something wrong with those militia guys....'

Anyways, to that end I've been working on my Devil Dog/Bane Wolf/Hellhound.

As you see its pretty close, but not done yet. First of all its still clean. No proper tank should be without a good layer of dirt & grime (much less a renegade tank)! It doesn't really show in the photos, but I left the crudely defiled aquila on the armor plate that goes over the fuel tanks. I had intended to just cover it up with some stowage, as that piece of plastic is thin & I didn't want to accidentally punch through it. However I figured leaving what was left of it visible, would be fitting. I painted the remains boltgun metal to look as if its was recently removed, perhaps the slow destruction of the aquila being something to keep the crew entertained when not out in combat. Just looking at it, I think I should paint that pack on the rear hull black to match the others too. I still need to paint the plow, as well as the Bane Wolf & Hellhound nozzles.

Once this tank is finished, I'll have only 6-7 guys to paint, a few of which are already started, so odds are good I'll make my deadline.

Inquisition PDF Update via Ottawa Gamer.

Read it here!

Well THAT clears things up a bit (or at least until the inevitable 'every answer that comes from GW is different' comments start to fly). I'd also like to offer Mitchell @ Ottawa Gamer a special thanks for actually posting the entire thing, including whom he got it from instead of just saying he asked & got that reply.

Eventually I'm sure allies will go away, and my little circus side shows with them, but I'll hold out as long as I can.

Inquisition codex PDF updates (and a little nerd rage)

So, I saw on John's Toy Soldiers that GW has released the PDF updates for the inquisition here (you need to be logged in to download). Minimal fluff, no witch hunter adversaries/lost & the damned, etc, kinda bland like the old BA PDF. However the Ordo Malleus has NO MENTION of allies OR inducted units! While the Ordo Hereticus ONLY has inducted units, and cannot be taken as allies!

So much for my oddball Inquisitors & their accompanying circus side show units! I'll probably be able to do something with the Ordo Hereticus, but the Malleus is effectively dead to me (barring maybe a kill team). I really don't have enough Witch Hunters to field as a stand alone army (and no Murl, I don't want your SoB's) unless its a bare bones setup with a hellova lot of IG or SM inductees to make it battle worthy.

Currently Ranger Smith and his little contingent of the Imperial Forestry Service is in shock, fearful that they've been rendered obsolete!

Personally, as quiet as GW has slid this one out, I'm inclined to ignore it & use my codexes that I spent $20+ EACH for! Rendering a codex obsolete with a new one years later, no problem. Doing it with a PDF...WTF???

The Venerable Commissar Borg.

Sorry, no photos this week, camera batteries died and as its 10pm, I'm not going out for more.

Anyways, while perusing 40karmageddon some time back, I came upon their character creation rules (40karmageddon is a member of the 40kfightclub gaming club, up in Michigan if I recall correctly). Its very reminiscent of the 2nd ed. era WD article which allowed you to make your own chapter masters for DIY SM chapters (ahh the days when WD always had useful content in it...). These aren't something I would bring to the FLGS, rather just to be used on my table at home. i forwarded the character rules to my regular opponents so that they may create their own if they wish.

Liking the format that they've created, i thought i would apply these modifications to some of the older models that I have. Several are converted and as such always fielded with the same wargear, The first of my old favorites to receive this treatment is 'The Venerable Commissar Borg'. The back story/fluff for the character is intended to be 'in universe', however Borg's instead follows the mini's real life history from 2nd ed. on into the present.

Created using the ‘40kfightclub.com’ Character Creation Rules

The Venerable Commissar Borg.............Total: 130pts

Stats, Special Rules & Equipment for a Commissar Lord as per 5th ed. Imperial Guard codex with the following modifications: +1 Toughness (T 4), USR: Eternal Warrior, Carapace Armor, Power Sword

.............................................................................

The history of the Venerable Commissar Borg:

First appearing in an official GW short story, printed in a 2nd ed. ‘Imperial Army’ introduction brochure* (then) Commissar Borg was striding through an Ork ambush of a platoon belonging to unnamed and long forgotten Imperial Army regiment. Uniform immaculately clean, he was defiantly remaining out in the open, snapping off pistol shots and issuing orders as if he were standing on an Imperial parade ground. All the while infantry ran for cover and fired wildly, more or less in panic. (As I recall, the story then followed a grunt who, running blindly through the trees came upon a Gretchin, and bludgeoned it to death with his lasgun before moving on to regroup with his squad. I don’t recall if it was never said who had won the engagement) Anyways…

I was sold! (and bought a Predator tank, the Leman Russ wasn’t yet available)

Purchased in a blister pack at Enterprise 1701 in Orlando, Borg was separated from the other Commissar contained therein who had a lasgun. That Commissar went to my friend Toby to lead the Imperial Army contingent that was allied to his Blood Angels. As I recall he bought the blister first, then convinced me I needed a commissar for my fledgling army. So that I would pay for half of the blister’s cost. He succeeded.

Commissar Borg first served with the Imperial Army out of the old 2nd ed. ‘Black Codex’ and on up through the successive rewrites of the now named ‘Imperial Guard Codex’ . The (now) ‘Venerable Commissar Borg’ has led every Imperial Guard army I’ve ever fielded. Starting with my Imperial Army (affectionately known as ‘the green army guys’ due to my abysmal painting skills at the time), 8th Spiders of Necromunda, Cadian Shock Troops, the Storm Trooper company, Das’ Afrika Korps (Mordian Iron Guard), Ice Warriors of Valhalla, Armageddon Steel Legion (and attached armored company), and currently the 110th Ryza Pioneers (menial battalion). Surviving multiple repaints and several arm and weapon replacements, nothing has stopped the Venerable Commissar Borg from dragging his brutalized carcass from the ‘dead pile’ to fight another day.

As such, I think that there can be no finer description of a tough, old ‘eternal warrior’.

.............................................................................

*All factions at the time (which YES, included Squats) had a little blue folded brochure with short ‘fluff’ story, sample starter army list, a brief description of the game and that particular faction.

3rd Company Colors

o/

(if you're geek enough you'll know that that was a 'hello')

So, given that ebay didn't want them, I figured I'd paint a few Dark Hands tactical marines this week (while ignoring the withering stares of the unpainted Aurora marines) They're pretty easy to paint & given that virtually all that's left is already painted, the army itself is now almost painted. All of my painted tactical marines were sold, so I was able to make some adjustments to the colors of the AoBR marines that I have now. I've never really used company or squad markings in any of my prior marine armies, so I thought I'd give that a shot.

I'd already painted the shoulder trim black and added a black helmet stripe, and after looking at the company colors in the SM codex I determined that these would be members of the 5th company, great! At least until I looked at my tanks and saw that they both had large #3s on them...shit. Apparently @ some point in the past I had decided to make them the 3rd company. Okay fine, what color goes to the 3rd company, lemme see.....red.

Red and Catachan green...oh lovely. :-(

Only having three painted, I could repaint the trim & helmet stripe. However that doesn't alleviate the problem of blood red bordering what is effectively olive drab. At this point I figured that I'd just scrap the company color idea when it occurred to me that red goes best with black. Slowly the light bulb flickered on, and I had an idea. If I paint just the right shoulder pad red, that would display the company color, while not touching any green. Here's how they came out:


Success!

After some work of course... So, Blood Red is a notoriously transparent color, and really won't cover Catachan green well. I often use scorched brown under red, so I painted a shoulder scorched brown & then blood red. Ya know, blood red doesn't cover scorched brown too well either. In fact, it takes about four coats. Actually, now that I think of it, I use Terracotta as an intermediate color between the scorched brown and blood red. However at this point I had a new dilemma, I had taken a simple paint job and added in half a dozen coats of paint for a friggin shoulder pad.

Digging through the paint box I came across the Tallarn Flesh foundation paint. One coat of that covered the green, and one coat of red covered that as well as 4-5 coats of red covered the brown. So my idea was saved. Squad numbers were easy enough, just put it on the nice and large tactical arrow on the shoulder pad.

So all in all I think they came out well without being too complicated. The red also brightens them up a bit.

Taking stock of what's left.

Howdy folks!

Well as I've stated aways back, I was selling the majority of my Dark Hands Space Marine army (barring a few select models) to try and recoup some unexpected truck repairs. Well, so much for that idea. Unpainted, primed, no problem, it sold easily. Whereas as painted? No one wants it. I'm not going to practically give away well painted models, virtually all of which are sporting Forgeworld stuff. I guess that's the price to pay for playing an obscure chapter. Dark Hands are an official, GW canon chapter, but apparently the need to let some minis swim in some simple green for a few days devalues them (considerably i.e.: to less than half retail price which were my starting bid prices).

So to hell with it, I'm keeping what's left! After taking stock of the ebay survivors here's what I have:

HQ:
Lysander (last man standing, he's in charge)

Elite:
(5) termies with assault cannon & 2 chainfists
(1) Venerable Dreadnought with multi-melta (oddly, this mini usually pays for itself in spades as a standard dread, and dies in turn 2 when a venerable)


Need a wider sheet of paper to hide the foil in my light box.

Troops:
(20) AoBR tac Marines (actually i only had 10 left, but picked up a squad cheap on ebay to make the army usable)

Fast attack:
zilch (didn't have much to begin with)

Heavy Support:
(1) Predator destructor (got an honorable mention in a golden demon with this some years back, it was NOT on the auction block as a result)
(1) Landraider Crusader (the only model my Mom ever bought for gaming, 40k is not a popular hobby with the family, so it kinda has sentimental value, also was not for sale)
(1) Forgeworld Vindicator (this was going to fall to Chaos with my Blood Eagles, not any more i guess)



The lone tac marine is the only one that's painted, though another half dozen or so are base coated. Aside from the tac marines & landraider though, i now basically have a fully painted army that rolls in around the 1500pt mark, which is about half of the points in Dark Hands i had when I started selling.

There's still a lot of other random bits & bobs around here, i suppose I'll clean that stuff out to sell instead.

Double Duty?

So, with my resurrection of the CSM army, last week I was handed a bag of 'chaos stuff'. Sifting though the wreckage contained therein (and removing the junk), I found 2 usable CSMs, half a dozen or so metal Plague Marines, a bunch of CSM mutated arms (good for depicting Fabius' enhanced marines), and 2 old chaos cultists. Of the two cultists, 1 had its arm clipped off & replaced with a Skaven tail. It has potential, but needs more than just one tail. The other cultist had a similar conversion, except with several tails.

On square bases & brandishing a sword, this second mini caught my interest. I switched it to a round base, and removed the blade. The hand guard for the pommel was large, square & fit perfectly with an old IG autopistol from 2nd. ed. Something had been (crudely) trimmed off the tentacle side of the mini,, so i trimmed it further and used an 'impurity' seal to cover the worst of it. Added some paint and ended up with this:





Came out pretty good I thought. I gave his exposed skin a coating of ard' coat to get a slimy/sweaty appearance.

My ORIGINAL intent was to use this mini as the overseer/minder for my rogue psyker battle squad. I don't (yet) have a psyker squad for my loyalist IG, but was thinking of using a Mordian Sgt. suitably painted as a junior Commissar for the overseer/minder role. However junior commissars are probably a bit scarce among the ranks of renegades. So whomever is saddled with the duty of herding a bunch of untrained/rogue psykers would be a bit over exposed to the influence of the warp. The psykers themselves probably burn out quickly, while the minder would live on (although at this point in his mutations, spawndom should be a concern).

but then...

The thought occurred to me that this mini would make for a good renegade stand in for Guardsman Marbo. All I needed was a satchel charge...


Like this one!

I used the spare scout marine heavy bolter ammo clip pouch, and walla! Guardsman Marbo! Yet the bit is unobtrusive enough to still be used as the psyker squad minder.

Thus pulling double duty when Marbo isn't in use.

Carnage for 3 Battle Report, sorta...

Well once again there was an odd man out at the FLGS this past weekend, so it was a perfect time to tryout my 5th ed Carnage scenario. Here it is again, with a few clarifications as were discussed in the comments of my last post.



I one the die roll and took the short board edge with BA to my left & Mech IG to the right.

Turn 1 I split my forces in 3 groups, one for the BA, one to hold the middle & the last to attack the IG. On the left a rhino full of enhanced marines w/icon of Khorne lunged forward in a rhino, with a twin-AC & ML dread following. The rhino popped smoke while the dread unloaded with everything & killed a bunch of trees. My demonically possessed Vindicator shot @ the BA also with no results whereas my possessed predator connected with an IG exterminator but failed to do any harm. On the right, Fabius in a rhino with his enhanced Marines went full distance & popped smoke, my sorcerer & E-marines ran for all they worth towards the IG while my 2nd dread w/twin heavy bolter killed 1 guardsman in the HQ sq. With failures all around my E-marines with Nurgle icon loaded the Culture Club's greatest hits into the vox array (my objective) and preceded to broadcast on all frequencies @ high volume.

The BA were second & split their forces similarly to me. Mephiston on psychic wings flew at my center, while a Librarian dread moved to intercept my approaching rhino. Using his scout moves, a Baal pred (untouched by my ineffective shooting)speared towards my objective & flame stormed 3 of my E marines. While on his left another Baal using similar moves opened up on a Chimera w/twin Ass cannon to no effect. A pursuing Land speeder similarly missed. A 2nd BA dread ran up the middle towards the IG while the rest repositioned in the middle, to guard a big rock (the BA objective, which elicited DA in disguise jeers & comments)

The IG caught between 2 rapidly advancing armies, did what IG do best by hunkering down & opening up with everything while their astropath(the IG objective) desperately called in for an evac, air strike or ANYTHING! Despite another vast expenditure of ammo, little more was done aside breaking the twin ass cannon from a Baal pred.

Turn 2, my twin-AC & ML dread fire frenzied while the other Blood Raged, and in between the 2 was a Baal. While the Blood frenzied dread ran an impressive 12", the fire frenzy dread blew the Baal to pieces. My vindicator fired on Mephiston missing him entirely (my predator also missed with all guns, demons make for abysmal gunners it seems). The Khorne E-marines disembarked after their rhino made an impressive power slide peppering a BA tac squad, though not felling any of them. although my lesser demons did arrive to assist & charged into said tac sq. with 1 casualty a piece. On the other side right flank continued to advance at speed but that meant no shooting.

The BA turn 2, Mephiston watched in horror as the librarian dread charged the Khorne E-marine squad inflicting just one kill while receiving a shaken result. It was pretty sad really. He did make good progress toward the IG with the BA dread popping a sentinel, and an assault sq. w/Priest dropping into my deployment zone & popping my pred with an inferno pistol. Mephiston cast the str. 10 spell, charged my vindicator rolled LOTS of 2s to hit, and only managed to shake the vindicator (to the amusement of its demon crew).

Turn 2 IG was much the same, hunkered down & guns blazing resulting in many, many stunned results to the BA vehicles, and immobilizing Fabius' rhino.

Turn 3 saw both my dreads engage in a wild west shoot out, as they both Fire frenzied & were 6" apart and staring at each other. While the win heavy bolter blazed away, the twin AC & missile launcher scored 4 penetrating & 1 glancing hits followed up by a nice Yahtzee roll of all 1s for damage! The Khorne e-marines & Librarian dred were doing nothing to each other while my Khorne rhino rammed a BA rhino resulting in sore necks for all drivers. my vindicator sped away from Mephiston shooting the BA assault marines in my back field killing 3 with my nurgle squad felling another (with the Culture club not fazing the BA, they opted for the ultimate act of terror and switched the vox array to a Bluegrass station!) Meanwhile the sorcerer & squad opened up & gutted the IG HQ while Fabius & friends charged & destroyed the IG Exterminator.

BA turn 3, a 2nd squad of assault marines dropped down into point blank range of the IG scaring the hell out of them, there was little movement on the BA side as vehicles were stunned everywhere. Mephiston did little, still embarrassed by his failure to hurt the vindicator, nor did the Assault marines take it down. The librarian dread however found its wits & cleaned house vs. my Khorne E-marines, felling all but the champion (who with his powerfist destroyed the dread).

IG turn three saw almost EVERYTHING open up on the BA assault squad in their midst, killing six (all praise be to cover!)While the Demolisher stunned the BA dread that was running straight at it (again lots of cover saves there).

Turn 4-the shop was closing. :-(

We got a late start & were fielding 2k all around, WAS too much for this scenario. In 4th ed. we used to run this @ 1500pts, and I'd say that should be the point limit. While due to time limits the game was inconclusive, we all agreed that the BA were in the best position to win. My charge into BA territory was seriously blunted, while I had Mephiston & assault marines into my deployment zone (helped by my dreads trying to kill each other). Whereas the IG was about to get hammered from both directions by by BA and my Enhanced marines (though considering the distance, one of my E-marine squads was likely to fear the full weight of fire from that demolisher had the BA dread not taken it down.

It was a good test for my updated Carnage scenario though.

5th. ed. 40k Carnage scenario for 3 players

Hello all,

Not too much on the modeling front this week. Most of my time was used cutting & then grinding down the excess metal from the head of a Cawdor mini to add to a sentinel driver to go with my kill team mentioned in the previous post. I think it'll work, however after cleaning up all the pewter shrapnel & dust, a bodiless Cawdor head didn't strike me as all that photo-worthy.

I have been thinking about the old 'Carnage' scenario though. We used to play it a lot. For a while we didn't have a FLGS to play at, and when the guys came to the house to play, I only have one table. So we played Carnage. We modified the deployment as we often only had 3 players, with one deployed on a short board edge. Usually that player had the advantage over the other two who, staring directly at each other, would get the Ork mentality and charge straight at each other. With the army on the short table edge just hunkering down and sniping. (One notable exception was with 2 IG armies on the long table edges with mortar squads vs. FW heavy mortar lobbing counter-battery fire back and forth for several turns, don't recall whose mortars won that one.)

5th ed. eliminated victory point scenarios, and Carnage was a casualty as well. However of late at the FLGS, we've often had an odd player out. Sometimes there's time for a second game so they can play, sometimes not. In general the FLGS's owner's son opts out of playing, but that means he hasn't played on Saturday night in close to a month now.

That's crap.

So...this week I thought about updating the ol' 3-player Carnage for 5th ed.



So that's what I came up with. More or less the same 3 player deployment as we used before, but the 'Capture & Control' scenario will eliminate the potential of a tie. Not to mention trying to keep track of who got what kill points, are there half kill points, etc. isn't a concern. I often forget the big yellow 'cheese die' turn counter on the table, so writing down who killed what simply won't happen, consistently anyways. Another thing is that in order to capture an objective, you have to advance on it and with out flankers potentially coming out of everyone's back field, there's no one deployment zone that offers any particular advantage. I'm sure that some people won't like the idea of out flankers in their backfield, however locally we have six, count them SIX Space Wolf armies (with their infernal scouts) in our group. So that's more or less a normal possibility anyways.

So, if we have another odd guy out this Saturday I'll see if they want to give this a try. 40k shouldn't be spectator sport/hobby.