Dreadtober (3rd Post)

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lol, how much do you want to bet that the rhino this door came from had a 'Don't Tread On Me' decal on it somewhere? 

This week I picked out the base colors, or rather the rhino door colors on the base (the rest of the base was a foregone conclusion as it will match the rest of the army). The door formerly belonged to a Rhino of the Space Puppies variety. I'm guessing that that vehicle has been removed from their roster. 

Close up of the still clean rhino door.

Painting straight lines for triangles freehand is hard enough. However, trying to it under a crises suit, and with other debris strewn on top of the door's surface was really tough. Luckily the worst sins were covered with decals, and the rest will be with first Agrax Earthshade, and then later with dry brushed on grime.

Sept symbol on the side no living enemy ever sees. 

 As such this mini first needs another layer of matte varnish to better seal the decals followed later by inking. The hardest parts are over with, next comes the fun parts: making it dirty!

Am betting that the decal on the flamer says something obvious like: hot surface. 

Another Sept symbol on the Shield Generator

Dreadtober (2nd Post)

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I'm betting that somewhere on the orange box in that background it says: The cake is a lie!

This week has been the tedious process of base coating all of the OD green surfaces. Following that I added in all of the Mechanicum grey areas. While not exactly a camo pattern per se, there is enough of it to almost evoke the idea of camo, despite the lack of contrast between the two colors.

All of the weapons in close detail.

Given how much grime I tend to apply in terms of both inking and then dry brushing after the fact, I almost have to wonder why I even bother as most of this work will be obscured by the ensuing 'grime'. Oh well, it looked alright on the ol' Piranha in the end, so am figuring it will on this model as well. 

Anyways, she's progressing along alright, I suppose.

Not sure if I like this for the Rhino door on the base or not, thoughts?

Digging thru the ol' bitz box...

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I took a bit of a break from painting to do a bit of destruction disassembly of the vehicle complement that came in the horde that was given to me by Kushial: three Rhinos and a Landraider Redeemer. The redeemer and two of the rhinos are festooned with Black Templar iconography and that stuff just needs to go! I had briefly entertained fielding a small BT force but then had flashbacks of my old, horridly monochromatic Iron Hands army and nixed the idea.  

The central rhino is what you see in pieces above.

It seems that I don't have any plain doors for the Redeemer which pushes it to the back of the line. I do however have quite a few parts for the rhinos and I set about dismantling and rebuilding those instead. Digging thru my still, somewhat vast array of bitz, I found enough weaponry to expand from one to two rhinos with stormbolters, whilst the third will be a razorback with either a twin-heavy bolter or lascannon (not sure which yet).

I picked up some dirt cheap spellcrow replacement rhino doors as well as a rhino front plate aways back. The doors are resin with molded tactical arrows which look rather nice. Wheres the front plate looks a bit more armored than that of the stock rhino version. As such I'll probably use it on whichever Rhino turns into a Razorback. 

Basing bitz, from left-to-right: An Iron Warriors helm, probably from my 3rd ed army (replacing the awkward looking Eldar bit that was there previously), a discarded Coyote helm (recently slathered in orange contrast paint) and combat knife, and lastly a few spare track links. 

Of course any digging in the ol' bitz box for one thing invariably turns up other cool stuff as well. Lots of basing bitz, as well as enough spares to salvage a half dozen scout snipers out of Kushial's horde that needed some help (ugh, scout snipers: the bane of my existence!).

That tail color is what the gryph-hound contrast paint, followed by a light sepia wash looks like over bare plastic. It's not bad really. 

I also found three Space Wolves' wolf tails to use as coyote tails, as per Siph's suggestion. Having so few they'll be limited to squad sergeants and my Lt. Fun Fact: my first ever space marine army way back in 2nd ed was the Space Wolves. I had a 2nd, small Space wolves army since that one probably in 4th ed or thereabouts. SInce then however I've bought none making their bitz few and far between as they so often end up on the bases of my other armies if for no other reason than to taunt Screech and Neverness' armies. 

Anyways I hope to maybe finish up these three marines this week. Hopefully I'll get some white primer and then I'll be able to add a transport or two to their ranks as well. 

I'm blaming the Chucking Monkeys blog for this...

...actually, I'm getting ahead of myself. So lemme back up a bit and explain. 

So, the Primaris marines...yeah those, more of a gorilla in the room than monkeys, but we'll get there. Their fluff is in general hideous, no need to revisit that. Personally i think that the Intercessors look alright though and I gotta cheap squad aways back to bolster my Rainbow Warriors. 

However aesthetically they don't fit. My rainbows are the last dregs of the chapter, adorned in a motley assortment of scavenged and standard issue armor, and all have at least one chapter specific, and time consuming to paint shoulder pauldron. Whereas the Primaris' armor all conforms and being easy-build models, they have generic pauldrons meaning I'd have to come up with something more even more difficult (like free-hand painting) for the chapter iconography. In a word: no.

Then there's the Salamanders. I did paint one Primaris marine for them but...originally being a 30k force, with a color scheme as laborious to paint as the Alpha Legionnaires they were supposed to replace...I think I'll just ebay the last of 'em and be done with that failed project.

Yeah I can't paint this good! This was lifted straight from the Chucking Monkeys blog, which is linked below...

Which brings us to Chucking Monkeys, and his beautifully painted Primaris 'scouts'. Actually all of it is beautiful, check out that Ancient! Anyways, the idea of Primaris scouts struck a chord...no doubt harkening back to my Aurora 10th Company debacle of an army. I like the idea of scouts...well, the old scouts, with the WS/BS of 3 (hitting on a 4+ for you 8th ed only noobs out there), and I thought: Why not take the ol' Primaris' down a peg and use 'em as poorly trained scouts? Might make 'em a bit more palatable too (kinda like Space Wolf Blood Claws, just without the pretending to be the ANGRY MAHREENZ!!! part)!

So that's what I set out to do. Great Idea MC, glad you thought of it! Given the 5-6 painted models that I average befor-squirrel!,  I decided to just do a Kill Team of them, and skip 40k proper in its entirety.  

First up I needed a chapter. I figured I'd just make 'em an Ultramarine Ultima Founding chapter, but none in the SM codex caught my interest. I dunno, with each just having a color scheme/name/icon, and fluff blurb, you can tell the GW game designer's hearts weren't really into the primaris marines. Then I pondered making up my own chapter from scratch, and was going to go that route till I found a good halfway point: The Silver Drakes (The warhammer wiki page seems to be far more detailed, until you realize that its just a repost of the generic Primaris fluff). 

The Silver Drakes are a canon chapter who's sole existence is a small blurb on pg. 39 of the Nid codex. They have no colors, chapter icon or anything else known about them. Talk about lazy...sure I'll just use that, write up a blurb of my own which (hopefully) justifies the 2nd rate stat line, come up with my own colors and to top it off, I can use the fallout hobbies decals I had made for my abortive Black Dragons army (which totaled just that one mini...).  

So here ya go, the Silver Drakes in Kill Team:

I won't make any changes to the point values
as those are already nonsensically allotted.

Well that was easy enough to do. Next up, and easy but good looking color scheme. My first test model was kinda meh and after it was finished, I gave it a good once over and summarily submerged it in some simple green. Here's my 2nd try:

In all honesty, the couple-three layers of white on the base felt like the hardest part. Also the aquila color denotes the company, the 7th in this case.

A detail view of his wrist comms.

Much better me thinks, and relatively quick and easy to paint as well! Speaking of the paint recipe (just so I don't forget) is: GW's leadbelcher for the silver, Coat D'arms' enchanted blue for the metallic blue, GW's mechanicus standard grey for the gun, Army Painter strong tone for the wash, GW's bleached bone drybrush as per the norm, and whatever shade of Vallejo's white that I have for the base (its the only white paint I have). The remaining colors for the other little details, bits, and bobs don't really matter for consistency.

I'm hoping that I can manage to paint up the squad before I inevitably get distracted yet again...

You wanted this done when?

...it was the end of 2018 right? lol!

Slowly getting there...

Progress remains slow and waaaaaaay behind schedule, but... it is progressing. The current issue is I've hit a snag. My attempt to make a stencil for the front hull/shoulders crashed in burned horribly. So, I guess it'll be decals then.

...very slowly.

Fallout hobbies whose (awesome) custom decals I've used before, is too expensive for this particular project. I contacted a decal maker who offers custom work, but they never replied back (thanks dick). Following that waste of time, I contacted Fighting Piranha Graphics who responded quickly and forwarded it onto their artist. But I've yet to here back from him due to their backlog. Compounding the issue, they're taking the entire month of February off! Gee, must be nice.

The empty souls stones will be 'ard coated when all is said and done.

Anyways, in the interim I'm puttering along with the dread. The base is done at least. rather than the odd, oval one that came with it, I ordered a round 80mm, Eldar ruins base from a caster in Greece. Kushial despises all forms of vile xenos just as much as the Space Wolves, and myself, Bob, and Neverness, all field Eldar in their various forms. All the base needs is snow (to be applied after the dread is added), and its basically good to go. A fringe benefit of not going with a Space Wolves themed base is I don't need to drizzle any yellow ink onto the snow...

Dreadtober WIP (6): The Multi-Melta

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The multi-melta arm arrived and I quickly set about bringing up  to the point of the rest of my Salamanders' dread. I had hoped to achieve that by this post, but that didn't happen. I got about halfway though...

The cheapest available multi-melta arm was a Space Wolf one because-who the hell likes those guys anyways right? Right.

Luckily the Salamanders' artificers took to the arm right away, scraping off the imagery of the Emperor's misguided children and the laughable trinket dangling from the weapon's muzzle.

Once cleansed of the offending legion iconography, its was assembled...

...primed, and then base coated. 

Hopefully by my next post it'll be fully painted, but either way I ought to have enough time to finish the dread by month's end.

Originality in 40k

Yeah, good luck with that...

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I was talking about custom space marine color schemes the other day with my buddy Sam. He had come up with a 'new' color scheme for his Kill Team marines, Purple and gold. Like the Hawk Lords I asked? and his shoulders just slumped. lol, no worries dude, finding an original color scheme in this game is nigh impossible. I mean hell, that's also the pre-heresy Emperor's Children colors...but whatever. So I just told him to go with what he liked and don't worry about it.

Not only is this an inconclusive list of Space Marine chapters (wait, where are the Smurfs?!), but its also an inconclusive list of the marines I've fielded over the years (which includes those missing Smurfs, the Storm Wardens...etc.).

Speaking of, I've also been searching for a chapter to use for my newly acquired 40k space marines for Kill Team ($20 for a NIB tac squad, why yes thank you!). However it seems like I'm just looking at the same old, same old, and/or rehashing something I've run before. In looking online for a bit of inspiration, I mis-read the name of the Angels Revenant and me being me I just ran with it, coming up with the following:

The Angels Irrelevant 

In keeping with their chapter name, this enigmatic chapter of Adeptus Astartes is all but unknown. An official search into the Imperial Archives of Terra, instigated by the Ordo Hereticus revealed little to nothing. It would seem that the the adepts responsible simply couldn't be bothered to record anything for posterity. No chapter lineage, founding date, home world, fleet and/or unit strength, only the rare and scattered reports of an unknown Astartes chapter engaging in small unit surgical assaults (indeed, they were the same such reports which lead to this investigation in the first place). The knowledge that there is more known of the so-called Legion of the Damned than there is of the Angels Irrelevant alarms Ordo Hereticus to no end… 

The only troop types thus far encountered have been Tactical and Scout marines, and never numbering more than a dozen or so individuals at any one time. Leading investigators to assume that their total Chapter strength to be less than one company. 

The name 'Angels Irrelevant' is only known due to a single, garbled vox intercept of inter-squad communications, believed to be rallying their battle brothers to prevail upon the enemy.

Livery is black and dark grayish-blue armor with a dull silver Aquilas. Tactical Arrows are displayed on the helmet and presumably display the company color. Scouts wear black armor with dark grayish-blue fatigues, but neither tactical marines nor Scouts show any other insignia aside from their chest plate Aquilas. 

Gee, that sounds familiar...

Curiously, a few tactical marines have been seen wearing Deathwatch heraldry. However inquiries into the matter sent to the Ordo Xenos have been ignored by the highest levels of the Ordo.

So will I use that? I'm so indecisive (like you couldn't already tell...), all I can say is: maybe. Then again I have a bunch of cool, custom decals that would work for the Black or Star Dragons so maybe I'll choose one of them instead. 

Or, maybe something all together different...who the fuck knows at this point.

An axe to grind...

o/

I arrived at the FLGS on Saturday with the intent to play Battletech against Rob. Table was set up, and all was ready to go when...I realized I  had forgotten my record sheets and thus couldn't play.

Shit.

No doubt my forces were shot down on orbital entry and the Battletech toys went back into the box. Rob wasn't sure if he'd make it or not, so luckily I had my Storm Wardens handy as a back up. Conveniently, Neverness was on hand with his Space Wolves to challenge me to a game. Nothing like a good ol' grudge match vs. one of my favorite adversaries! Camera in hand he took all of the photos below, however wasn't in the mood for a battle report, thus I shall do so in my usual method (i.e.: a bunch of photos, with random commentary in the captions).

The Best photo of the night!

 Neverness' Space wolves were lead by none other than the infamous Sven Axe-Grinder, Bearer of the famed Pink Feather Boa, and leader of his so-called 'Great' Company. In opposition to these nefarious foes I had Captain 'I Killed Draigo!' and the Storm Warden's 4th Battle Company, as well as a squad of scouts from the 10th Company. Relic Scenario (as always it seems...) and the good old fashioned across the board deployment. I won the roll to set up first and the first round was under night fighting conditions.

The Field of battle, some unknown desert hell...appropriately enough, the A/C was lacking and it was quite hot in the room.

The Space Wolves' deployment.

The old fogies blend rather well with this piece of terrain.

The Storm Wardens' Deployment. Its a touch out of focus, perhaps Neverness had a tremble of fear?

Combat Squads a plenty! (completed paint jobs and backpacks, not so much...)

First Blood! A rhino falls to what would become my generally mediocre heavy weapons fire.

Once again, Neverness' hunter killer missile falls a little short...

Sven and his termies drop podded into my back field with the intent on attacking my devastators. However my 'Chaplain' dread would have none of that and charged the accursed foe, engaging in what would be an EPIC combat!

2 beleaguered combat squats with characters in tow, advance on the relic, whilst the rhinoless Grey Hunters do the same.

Captain I killed Draigo! singlehandedly charges the Grey Hunters while his former tactical combat squad secures the relic!

The Grey Hunters, fairing poorly in close combat, are joined by the Terminator Rune Priest! Soon my Librarian would also join into the fray!

With my Dreadnought having dispatched his Termie escort, Sven is joined by the not-so-Lone Wolf and his dog!

Another Rhino dies and Neverness is clearly quaking with fear as this photo is taken!

TREACHERY!!! Claiming his weapon is useless (he had a frostblade, not actually a powerfist) Sven flees the righteous combat with my dreadnought who cannot pursue, as the Lone Wolf holds him in place!

Having left the librarians to settle their differences (mine would be victorious to only be gunned down soon thereafter) Captain I Killed Draigo! went on to harass the vindicator, taking 2 hull points front it. He however failed to clear the crater and soon became one himself...

My Dreadnought, finally overcome by powerfist hits and krak grenades falls, whilst the Lone Wolf moves into the Storm Wardens' rear areas. The treacherous Sven Axe-Grinder can be seen skulking in the ruins after having dispatched two combat squads of Devastators.

The Space Wolf mad dash for the relic on turn 6 is thwarted by an equally depleted combat squad of Storm Wardens!

While no photographic evidence exists of their endeavors, these two Long fangs are all that remain after dispatching the Scouts in HTH combat. The Scouts distracted the Fangs for a full three turns, killing a few, and even stunning the Whirlwind for a turn via a thrown krak grenade. They were clearly a thorn in Neverness' side!

With no turn 7 the Relic is never claimed as the brawl mere inches away never came to conclusion!

Whew, that was a fun one! The close games are always the best games, and the last minute charge and combat kept the relic out of either side' hands. Without the relic, we totaled things up and I had First Blood, whilst Neverness had Slay the Warlord and line breaker, thus victory was his. Until...I recalled that his Lone Wolf didn't in fact die, thus granting me another victory point changing the end result to be a tie! Denied victory, there shall be no sagas written about the treacherous actions of Sven Axe-Grinder this day!!!

Huzzah!

Da Green Tide!

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Last Saturday, da' boyz left all of their trukks and wagons (of various descriptions) at home and decided to go foot slogging for a change. They came upon a beleaguered force of Beastman IG who were in the process of getting exterminated by the  Space Wolves. Orks being Orks, they decided to get stuck in!

1500 points, Orks with Beastman IG allies vs. 'Cheesy Broken Space Wolves' (...snicker...), Dawn of war deployment and Da' Emprah's Will scenario. The Wolves stuck their objective up high, as they had no intention of defending it, and rather were just coming for mine. Neverness was without an opponent, so volunteered to serve as our combat cameraman.

(...and thus what follows is my usual, half-assed attempt at a battle report...)

Da' Boyz and Beastmen, assembling for war!

Da puppies. Note: the Iron Priests have sorely neglected that one rhino, its actually covered in rust!

Da Eleet Grot Mountin Duvishun guards da objective while da uvvers deploy.

Da puppies deployment.

Beastmen also have MOAR DAKKA!!!

Beastmen, advancing to their doom...

OI! Dat wunz mine! Not that a Kan vs. a dread is a fair fight even at long range...

Da Bloo Kans pop open da rusty box!

...and at this point, our combat cameraman appears to have been killed in the crossfire as there are no more photos and he was no longer on the premises.  Basically it was the usual slug fest in which virtually all of both armies were wiped out (and the Wolves did succeed in their beastman extermination campaign).

At the end, Screech's wolves were down to about 7 or 8 models, my boyz numbered maybe a dozen or so, but they held an objective handing me the victory (4VPs to 3). At one point, Screech had my objective, and came off of it to help finish off the remnants of my 30 strong slugga mob, however his dice then said (and I quote) 'Fuck you buddy, you should have stayed on the objective' and his game went all to hell from there on. Two squads of Wolves crumpled like tinfoil leaving da boyz with a win!

Much as it pains me to say it, the Green Tide (per teh interwebz' collective opinion) does work a lot better than my beloved trukk mounted speed freaks. Hopefully the new codex will remedy that...somehow.