Monochromatic flashbacks...

Way back in the day...

...I had an Iron Hands army. It was big, pretty effective on the table, and most of all, it was booooooooring to paint! Black armor, white guns and boltgun metal trim...and other than a few bitz and bobs in various colors, that was pretty much it. Painting it was monotonous as hell!

Still in the very rough initial stage. 

Skipping forward to the present, I started painting a quartet of renegade Iron Hands/Blackshields for 30k and as this post's title says: I'm suffering from monochromatic flashbacks. I'll do my best not to fall asleep whilst painting 'em. When finished these four along with their previously painted sergeant will give me a fire support squad for my little 30k army (and then I'll paint something both entirely different and decidedly more colorful). 

Kill Team League Game 1: The battle for the planet Neverness

o/

Curiously, this combat proved to be much more of a fair fight than it would seem...

The Silver Drakes, and their kill team named 'We're not the Alpha Legion, really!' made their league debut and it wasn't anymore inspiring than was their original battlefield debut. What's worrisome is that bad things come in threes, and this was just round two...

I challenged Screech as he was fielding Tyranids, the arch enemy of my Silver Drakes. We fought the Terror Tactics scenario (in a nutshell, we needed to get our models off of the enemy's table edge). As we set up our forces in the ruins, I was as yet unaware that we were on the planet Neverness, it was only later as I began to roll an inordinate amount of 1's in every shooting phase that our locale became clear...

The Silver Drakes deploy but their enemy is mysteriously absent...not even the sound of crickets! 

Aha! There they are! Skulking behind terrain!

What treachery is this? The Hive fleet has developed cell phone cameras to determine actual lines of sight!?!

Two Termagants vs. 2 primaris marines with bolt rifles, easy peasy right? Not when you're rolling ones...hell, the hitting on a 4+ normally wasn't even handicap I was rolling so badly!

Here ya go, the Silver Drakes chapter in a nutshell.

Due to my woefully in adequate shooting, the Tyranids have closed the gap and engaged in HTH all over the place with essentially no losses! Just a few flesh wounds here and there...

Luckily Screech's die rolling was mediocre, and at the very least I could make armor saves consistently! Meaning this grunt held out for 2 turns or so before coming to his inevitable conclusion...

With the marine on the ground engaged in HTH with a termagant, Demotion tossed a frag grenade on the other two below (with 5 'shots' no less!), the Termagants in turn returned fire!

Many shrubberies perished in this vicious exchange...

My sergeant is swarmed from all directions whilst the grunt above him valiantly flees...advances towards the objective!

Still going... It should be noted that by this point, that fucker with the black chitinous armor had made three, or possibly even four fucking 6+ saves!! What the hell!?! Despite the long drawn out combat, the bugs would eventually be victorious.

My auxiliary grenade launcher gunner, who (1) was able to reroll ones in the shooting phase due to his specialist ability, (2) but never did so as I hadn't bothered to ever actually read that bit despite writing it down 2 weeks before and, (3) despite the above nightmarish situation pictured here, he was the only marine to finished the game completely unscathed.

Somehow, or rather miraculously at game's end (following turn 5 as we forgot to roll for it at the end of turn 4), no models had made it off of either table edge, and we were down 3 models a piece. It was a dead tie. We were even tied on points - 92 each. As bad as I rolled all game, I'm claiming that as a win! Hell, GLORIOUS VICTORY!! is actually more appropriate if I'm honest. 

In the games' aftermath, XP was meagerly doled out, one grunt found his way to the convalescent home where he'll miss the next round. I added a (literally green) new recruit to fill his spot in my roster for said game. 

Also and again somehow...due to our tie, which resulted in the loss of no resources, Screech and I are now tied for 1st place in the league! Because that seems fair...

****

da fuk?

On a different note, has anyone figured out what a 7+ save is exactly? This came up at another table, and was ruled a 6+ for expediency.  Speaking of, here are a few pics from a few other games:

The Deathguard squaring off vs. the Adeptus Mechanicus, lurking in the distance.

The Dark Angels lead by Captain Caliban (?) vs. the Genestealer cult.

And some new models on display in the cases which serve no other purpose than as eye candy:

Painted no doubt in honor of the F-22 wing that got mauled by Hurricane Micheal.

Screech commented that the uniforms weren't historically accurate, as they lacked coffee stains. However as a reservist with no combat experience, I'm figuring that he's not been much closer to a tank than I have.

FIVE! Five painted Silver Drakes!

Ah, ah, ah....

lol, sorry, I just had to.

I present to you, the 1st photo taken on my new iPhone.

Anyways...well it took awhile, but I finally finished the 'batch painting' slog. Hobby time has been at the minimum here of late, so these took a bit longer than I had anticipated. I missed the 1st week of the FLGS' Kill Team league (which luckily you can miss a week of without penalty) so not having them finished really didn't matter (not that there are any points for paint). 

Whilst the numbers are still visible after dirtying up, how visible they'll be on the table top remains to be seen...

Their sergeant and the rest of my Primaris marines will have to wait a bit, as my 40k ADHD won't allow me to paint anymore of them without painting something else first. What? Hell if know...will just have to see what painting whim catches my fancy...

Hive Fleet Ouroboris arrives....

The Silver Drakes' enemy number 1!

Well sorta.

I hear the pitter patter of little feets...erm, claws.

Okay fine, so these little gribblies are the wrong color to be from Ouroboris, however...they are painted decently. Indeed their paint looks good enough to land themselves at the ass end of my painting queue (unless I get some sort of wild hair and feel like repainting up a few at some point). 

I got these for cheap on ebay, along with a fair number of their brethren who are armed with non-Kill Team compatible weaponry (spike rifles and stranglewebs). However if you're wanting some of those, then you can buy them here! 

I don't like their straight tailed, current model brethren at all. Seriously, I can't tell a termagant from a hormagant these days. These minis are just better looking in my opinion, and with 2 Tyranid warriors (which I have yet to purchase) to keep 'em going forward, these'll make for a fun little kill team to run once in awhile. 

SIlver Drakes Kill Team WIP 2

o/

Still fighting on 'dirt' bases...

I'm still plodding along on my Kill Team. With 2/3 having survived their crucial first game, they ought to (hopefully) perform better from here on out. Well, in theory at least.

The glare, the glare!!

Basing aside, they're all painted and the decals were applied with no swearing required (what the hell?). They all have a roman numeral IV (their squad #) on the left front pauldron and chapter icons on both pauldrons. Tactical icons are a moot point as they're Intercessors who don't have a whole hell of a lot of variety to begin with!

Unlike regular 40k games, in Kill Team I need to be able to tell one grunt apart from the next, so I've added individual trooper numbers on their backpacks which will theoretically still be visible once the inking and further layer of dry brushing has been applied. I also added one to Demotion's pack as well (and yes, I think that that will be his name from now on).

In the end, glasses may be required!

The next step is to slather them in ink and let 'em sit over night. With a bit o' luck, they might even be done by my next post.

The Silver Drakes make their battlefield debut!

And it was, in a word: mediocre.

We decided to postpone the start of the league this week as our organizer was unavailable, instead opting for a 4-player carnage/free-for-all. Rather than even read or actually follow that scenario, we just went for kill points, of which we only sorta kept track. 

The following are just some photo highlights of the game:

Here they are, spreading out from my initial deployment. All of my shooting was ineffective, which would become a theme throughout the game.

Two of my adversaries: to the left is Screech in his 'not an Ultramarine fanboi' attire, and Noah who was fielding the store army Smurfs. In front are Screech's Cadians, who are practising their WHFB-esque formation maneuvers...

Chyanne and Jim were playing peanut gallery, Bob's Dark Angels are in the foreground.

Noah's cowardly smurfs (a collective accusation). You see that Sgt. in front? Yeah, that's as far forward as they would move all game! He attempted to persuade us he was using 'cover' to hide his intentions, even going so far as to compare his tactics to be akin to the Raptors fluff but we weren't buying it. Instead it seemed to everyone he was simply hiding in the corner. 

Pretty sure this guy killed a Cadian, but not sure exactly. I know one of my guys bounced a bolt round off of that Cadian Sgt.'s bald head!

Another Silver drake, engaging in an fruitless firefight with the
Dark Angels...

That was one hellova bike to hide behind! The bonus it conferred to my armor saved him at least twice! 

In an effort to avoid getting shot off of the table, Screech's Cadians bum-rushed the lone Primaris marine who had charged one of his minis the turn previously. The close combat FAIL in this corner would continue for several turns...

At this point, Bob suggested a gentlemen's agreement between us, with the intent to just kill Screech and Noah. I agreed and the foot race to get into range began in earnest!

Lagging far behind and still bitter about his demotion to gunner (and in all honesty, he really just qualifies as a regular grunt), this guy failed to kill anything all game!

Unable to beat the Cadian horde in close combat, the remaining Smurfs charge into the fray to continue with their totally ineffective assault. Speaking of close combat, we have a house rule that so long as your models aren't involved in a HTH combat, you are free to shoot into it. 

However apparently a force field of FAIL was erected around the close combat in back meaning I couldn't roll higher than a 2 to hit any of them! However Bob was unaffected, and Screech's Cadians started to thin out quickly.

This is where the game ended, with my guys bringing up the rear and firing a multitude of bolt rounds into the air (rather than their targets). 

In the end I think Bob won but whatever, we all had fun which is all that matters in a throw-away game. Additionally, I learned that I'm still doing a bunch of stuff wrong. Meaning I ought to read

the friggin rules again...

Silver Drakes Kill Team WIP 1

o/

The enemy is that way!

Despite the sergeant-turned-gunner-turned-I-should-have-left-him-the-hell-alone debacle of my last post, I'm nonetheless pressing on with my kill team, albeit slowly. Stuck as we are here in a seemingly perpetual Appalachian summer, the spring flowers have decided to bloom yet again and my allergies are killing me! Its hard to do...well, anything when you're stopping what you're doing to blow your nose for the umpteenth time (however, if you own stock in the Kleenex company, you're welcome!). 

Anyways, despite all of that I'm creeping along on my Silver Drakes. I first swapped out all of the Ork debris on their bases for Genestealer/human skulls, rocks and stuff. I also did both a head swap and repositioned one arm on my auxiliary grenade launcher gunner mini to give him a more appealing pose. Seriously, some of these easy-build marine poses are kinda lame. 

This guy! This guy still needs blue!

I went to do a touch up priming of the new bits only to find I'm out of green primer, and was down to the last dregs of the brown primer (which resulted in the above minis getting a weird sorta woodland camo-ish base coat). From there I applied the basic leadbelcher and most of the metallic blue, well on three of 'em anyways. I'm hoping to have these either done or at the least a good bit further along in time for the local KT league that kicks off this coming Saturday evening. That's the plan anyways. 

He's leaning a bit towards his back, but overall I think it works.

I added a chainsword, the only thing a KT Intercessor
Sgt. can have that it's 40k counterparts cannot!

As I'm sure you've guessed from the above photos, I've also assembled a new, replacement sergeant for my team. Whilst he looks far more dynamic than my previous sergeant-turned-gunner, that has more to do with his base than anything else. I'll probably paint him last, especially as I'm out of primer for the time being. 

DEMOTION!!

o/

This week was...well, rough. The good news is that we survived and are faring better at the end than we were at the beginning, so there is that. 

So much for that splash of color...

Throughout the course of the majority of it, hobbying was not an option. That said, one day I was perusing the Kill Team rulebook during my lunch break, pondering how to kit out my Silver Drakes (because Intercessors have sooo many options right?), only to find that Intercessor Sergeants cannot have the stalker pattern bolt rifle that mine wields, yay. 

The one guy that I have painted was invalidated before he even got to lead his team. 

Demotion complete!

As such a demotion was in order. Luckily repainting just the helmet was a quick alteration, requiring little time other than for the inking to dry. Hell, that alone took more time than everything else combined. As such, this guy is now a gunner and with his fancy wrist communicator, he'll serve as my team's comms specialist. Given that my Intercessors only hit on a 4+ (before modifiers), his +1 to hit for one friendly model within 6" will no doubt be greatly appreciated by me!

Anyways, hopefully this week will be a lot more like normal, and as such, I'm thinking of doing a bit of batch painting to crank out most of the team in one go. I'll let ya know how that works out on Thursday...