Project Skaven

Ghosts N' Goblins Ride Again

With school winding down I'm making a push to get back into the hobby, kicking it off with a tournament at Coliseum of Comics in Kissimmee. This was the first time I did any playing since the first tournament I went to at CoC last September. .

I brought the Ghosts N' Goblins to do battle with, since they were the nicest looking army that were not outdated by recent books and editions thus could still put on the field as is, without much work. They didn't let me down (off the field anyway) as I got loads of compliments on them

 

My first battle was against a young player named Jonathan and his Warriors of Chaos army.  As an aside, I remembered Jonathan from a couple of weeks ago went Alice and I went up there for boardgame day and they were running a 30 man game of "Are You a Werewolf?"  I think everyone voted to string up poor Jonathan early on (who turned out to be a normal villager) I lasted a while longer before my date with the leafless tree (another innocent villager. We were pretty stupid in our village apparently).  My wife ended up being one of the damn werewolves eating everybody..

On turn 1 the ebon chaos chimera swooped in to draw out the fanatics from the night goblin units and found it bit off more than it could chew.  It backpedaled a little after the initial hits but still got smeared at the beginning of my next turn.

 

The Chaos monster vanquished, the enboldened goblin army marches out to meet the enemy.  Well, some of them anyway.  The night goblins archer unit on the right flank decided they were going to keep trying to pick a fight with the big black orc unit.  Not sure if this should have happened, and this may be just be me getting bit in the tail for deciding to forego the $50 on the latest army book for the tourney since I was using basically the same list as last edition and I had all of the special rules/spells/etc. in the Army Builder printout, but it just said 'closest eligible unit' and I decided to eat the bullet and assume the black orcs met that requirement, being the closest unit to them.  They actually managed to kill four black orcs over two turns of the "Get Em!" result on the Animosity table, and another orc was killed by a fanatic clipping the unit, and this would come back to haunt me.

The goblins on the left flank were getting routed, but the fanatics they disgorged killed off all but one of the mighty dragon ogres, just leaving two warrior units that were weathering multiple rock launcher hits with minimal casualties. The warp beast took some fanatic love too at some point for a wound or two. Things were looking pretty good still till the last dragon ogre and the warp beast charged my black orc unit. All the black orcs and the big boss used a pair of choppas for the fight giving them S5 in the first round with an extra attack. When they attacked the dragon ogre had 2 wounds and the warp beast had 3 or 4.  My crack unit couldn't even put the T4 dragon ogre down, with the BSB and his giant spider helping out.  They managed to do a wound to the dragon ogre and two to the warp beast and then took eight losses, mostly from the dragon ogre who I had put most of my attacks trying to kill. I had a rank, standard, BSB, and War Banner, so I only lost combat by one and was stubborn from having more ranks with the general right there, but I rolled a 9 which I rerolled with the BSB and got an 11, and that was it. That was the last turn, I think, and resulted in a major loss.

My next game was against Tim, a goofy and easygoing young man that reminded me a lot of Scruffyface, otherwise known as the offspring of Brother Francis. (I miss you Scruffyface!). He was using Bretonneans, which was fun for me since I very rarely get to play them.

In the first turn, Tim's courageous Bretonnean knights charge into battle with the Ghosts N' Goblins, despite taking heavy losses from the ghost fanatics. Armored knights were dropping like flies. The fanatics were definitely earning their points.

Then something happened between the movement phase of the top of turn 1 and the close combat phase. Something dreadful.

 



What was in the first picture that wasn't in the second picture.  Here's a hint: it was just to the right of the general's chariot and it had my BSB and black orc boss in it. It's funny because when I went back to look at the pictures the next day I saw something in that first picture that made me laugh. Here it is zoomed in.

 I didn't even realize my catapult had tipped like that, but that was some pretty heavy foreshadowing if ever there was. The first Bretonnean trebuchet shot hit the unit, killing a few black orcs and catching the BSB in the blast radius. BSB failed his ward save and was dealt 3 wounds. The unit had to make a panic test, once again with the general standing right next to them. They fail, then run right off the edge of the board.
Needless to say, the abrupt and unexpected loss of the battle standard bearer and his elite black orc unit in the first turn dramatically shifts the tide of the battle and the unsupported goblins very rapidly find their battle lines collapsing. By the third turn the battle is all but lost and the Goblyn Queen soon finds herself alone against the Bretonnean army. Her and the orc shaman go out in a blaze of glory in a daring suicide charge against the stalwart knights

And now it's game three and The Battle for Last Place begins now with both armies wishing they could be in the saloon and whorehouse on the neighboring battlefield seen in back.

 (when the tournament runner was putting buildings down on the table I said "why do they get the saloon and we get stuck with this crapshack??")
My third opponent was a Sylvanian themed Vampire Counts army commanded by a very friendly and fun opponent named Brian (not Scruffyface). The undead take the fight to the Ghosts N' Goblins early, using their vanguard dire wolves and bats to draw out all the ghostly fanatics. This was the only of the three lists I faced that day that really had a good way of dealing with the fanatics.

The Ghosts N' Goblin meet the vampire challenge head on, paring down the grave guard unit to less than half under withering fire from the pumpkin chukkas.

 The next couple turns are pretty much me doing my best to keep Brian from casting Invocation of Nehek to heal his army (and succeeding, with the help of a dispel scroll) while the vampires held their troops back as the fanatics swarmed over the center of the battlefield. The Goblyn Queen used the opportunity to send her trolls and goblins to sieze the two objectives. (actually the trolls failed a stupidity test and ended up stumbling into the objective while shuffling aimlessly forward. Trolls..)

Once most of the fanatics have been vanquished, the vampire counts charge en masse, sending vampire led skeletons into both buildings in an attempt to drive out the Goblyn Queen's forces

 A goblin unit finds itself squished between a unit of black knighst and the fearsome black coach which was fully powered up with the power of arcane sorceries. The knights continued to charge on into the flank of another goblin unit but found themselves destroyed when they are charged in the rear by the Goblyn Queen's black orc bodyguard (who really needed to make up for their pitiful performance in the first two games). The undead ultimately drove the goblins out of one objective while the trolls held the other, killing the attacking vampire with their acidic troll vomit. The battle ended in a hard fought draw

I had a really fun time playing and while I ended up most likely at the bottom of the heap in the standings, I won best painted army and a $25 gift certificate!  I'm excited about WFB again and especially about the 1600 pt league that's going to be starting there at the end of the month.  I think this time I'm going to go with something a little... furrier.

Dark Elf Driders?

Looking for feedback on a possible converstion for dark elf dark riders. 
Okay I'm going to do something different and put the massive introductary wall of text at the end of the post and get right to the pictures I want feedback on.  I just slapped this together - there's been no attempt to cover joints or smooth transitions with green stuff.  I'm just looking to see if this even works, because I don't want to devote more time to something (and destroy more daemonette and spider bodies) if I end up not liking the finished result. 

I need about 250 more points of core to make my dark elf army legal for the 1600 - 2500 point range that pretty much all tournaments and leagues are in. (Right now I have 400 pts of dark elf crossbowmen)
I have a couple of options for doing this without spending lots of money on new boxes since A) I don't have any extra money now, and B) I'm really to work with stuff  I already have and cut down on my unpainted models without getting more stuff.
Option one is to go with the themed base inserts to grow the crossbowmen by another 50 percent, but I don't want to do that for a couple of reasons. One is that so far I've used that trick with Chaos, Beastmen, Undead, Skaven, and Orcs and Goblins (and will be using it with Lizardmen). And it works there I think because it looks good and makes sense to have these guys just moving as a disorganized mob through woods, graveyards, etc, so that while on the one hand it cuts down on how many times I have to buy and paint the same model and allows me to do more creative stuff,, it also looks really good on the field, fits the character of the army, and allows you to see more of the detail of the models not in the front row.  With dark elves (especially dark elf crossbowmen) none of those things really apply. They DO look like they should be in a regimented rank and file unit.  They're only in two ranks anyway, so nothing's really getting lost in the thick of the unit, and their look is so static and uniform, it doesn't really matter if you can't see the detail of the guy in back because he looks exactly the same as the guys in front.
So my other option is to makes me some dark riders, which I think would actually give the list more versitility than another 20 crossbowmen anyway.  I had thought for a long time about doing driders for the dark elves, especially after the skull pass set came out and you got all those nice plastic spider riders.  I also have most of a box of daemonettes that I have only used two of the bodies of, and some dark eldar hellion bits and other stuff.
So let me know what you think of this, becuase again, I only want to proceed with it if it's something that I think I'll want to keep using in the army even if they eventually release plastic dark riders. I'm not going to do that much for just a stop gap measure - I'd rather just suck it up and buy another two boxes of crossbowmen at that point.

Doctor Carnivean's Pact of Infernal Darkness

A bunch of people in Ordo-Ineptus are doing the Pledge, that is posting how many miniatures they paint vs. how many they bought in their signature page.  I'm doing it too, but I never call anything something normal sounding like "the Pledge" when I can call it "Dr. Carnivean's Pact of Infernal Darkness". I'm also going to try and post pics of everything I paint on this thread.

January 15th
These were all painted for the House on Blackbark Ridge game I had planned on doing this past Saturday but had to postpone.  These were all of the player character models, and were all painted in a marathon session from about 3:30PM to 12:30AM

Minja the Swift - this character is a weretiger.  I went with an Indian theme for her and did the tiger colors for the clothing because I figured 'why not?'  The miniature was a Reaper female monk. I took the staff out of her right hand and made the dagger

Malvina - red mage of Hazlan. Was a Reaper mage from the Pathfinder line.  I chopped up her head and gave her a bald look so I could do the tattooed head that wizards of Hazlan have.

 

Camilla Bertrand - alchemist and scholar. She was originally a Reaper huckster from the Deadlands line. I sculpted the bag and the right side of the skirt (she had been showing some leg) and added the pistol where she had been holding cards. Would like to go back and touch up the pistol at some point.

Solange - basically a voodoo queen type. Started with Reaper's zombie master and she was almost completely nude so I had to sculpt some clothes on her - the shirt and skirt are both sculpted. I like the way she came out, though I'd like to go back touch up the braceletes and necklaces sometime.   I was running out of time at that point.

Ellywick Littlelaughs - Originally a Reaper female gnome thief. The only modification I did was giving her cloth instead the chainmail the mini originally had.

Sister Jocelyn - Nun with a bullwhip. Need I say more?  Been watching American Horror Story and wanted to do a nun character. Started with a Reaper battle nun that had swords in each hand. Cut off the swords and added the whip put a holy symbol in the other hand, then gave her the full skirt. Her robes were the very last thing I painted at 12:30 am and I just wanted to be done!  I'm definitely doing a touch up before the game.

 

Aldea Darkmoor - The only one I didn't have to modify at all. She was a female anti-paladin from Reaper.

January 27th

January 28th

February 3rd

 

February 4th

 

 Little background here, since the Beast has been stalking about my campaign world for the better part of 20 years now.

I created the character for a Ravenloft scenario I wrote for the Dire Consequences gaming convention way back in 1996. The scenario was called "The Beast of Blackbark Ridge" and involved a killer who always struck on nights of the full moon in the Blackbark Ridge community. The inspiration for the look had come from a story in Batman comics where the Scarecrow was sending gift wrapped boxes to random citizens of Gotham (it was around the holidays). The boxes contained a death's head mask, which was coated with one of his chemicals that basically made the person go nuts. They would then don the mask and start committing random acts of violence.

At the end of the scenario I wrote, the Beast is revealed to be a supernatural monster acting as copycat killer by donning the clothing and mask used by the original killer, who had been dead for years. He is destroyed at the end of the story. The nice thing about masked killers in horror stories is that anyone else can pick up the mask and continue on where the last guy left off, so the Beast has continued to pop up here and there in my stories over the years since.

In 2002, when I started using miniatures in my campaigns, I made a mini for the Beast by converting a Heroclix Joker figure.


 

It was servicable at the time, but I was never really happy with it, and so had intended for his latest appearance in the House on Blackbark Ridge game I was working on to sculpt a new one from scratch, since my sculpting projects had become more ambitious in the decade since I last took a crack at him.

Here's the finished product.



 I'm pretty happy with how he came out. I gave him a maroon shirt and yellow gloves (nod to Stephen King's Storm of the Century) to give him a little color. The one downside to me sculpting from scratch is that, while I can get exactly the look I want, there isn't a whole lot I can do with the painting, because I'm just not near as talented at sculpting as the people who do it for a living, and so the details just aren't there. With stuff like the Masters of the Universe guys I've been working on, that classic He-Man musculature and the fur loincloths leave some pretty good opportunities for painting them up nice, but here there just wasn't a lot of that, so ultimately I had to kind of make a choice between having the exact look for the mini that I have in my head, or having the kind of paint job I can do with a Malifaux or GW mini.
Still, like I said, I'm happy with how he came out, and who knows, in another ten years, perhaps the Beast will rise once again in newer, better sculpted incarnation

 

March 2nd

More denizens of the House on Blackbark Ridge have been completed.  When creating the backstory for a haunted house in any kind of gaming medium, in order to have a lot of undead inhabitants with which to torment the heroes, you always have to have the obligatory procession of dumbasses who decide to live in the house after the first half dozen residents have been met horrible ends.  And so with that, let the pants on head parade begin!

First up (not in chronological order, but the order in which they got painted) are Ares the Ram and his band of thieves who had the awesome idea to have their hideout in a place everyone thought was haunted because, hey, it worked for the thieves in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

 

Or at least it did until this happened..

 

But to be fair that happened because the Sheriff of Nottingham, having just had to act opposite the guy from Moonlighting in Die Hard, was not going to be intimidated by something as mundane as a haunted forest.

Your "ghosts" are no more substantial than your British accent, Locksley

 

So anyway, in this case unfortunately for the thieves, the house actually did turn out to be haunted, and they all went crazy and killed each other, and now they roam the halls as flesh eating ghouls.

 

I was going to represent them with a few of the many zombies I have in my horde, but then seeing Tim's Nurgle pics got me in the mood to make some new zombies, so I dove into my bitz box last week, using parts from the zombie kit along with some ghoul and empire stuff to make these guys.  It occured to me while I was building them that the zombie kit is the first modular plastic kit GW put out for WFB and the oldest still in print (I think it came out in 1998). The other two that came out that year were the clanrats and chaos warriors, and both of those have been retired. After that I think the next oldest are the Empire free company that were recycled from the Mordheim boxed set. Both are probably still around just because they're such great kits with so many uses.

Since these guys all slaughtered one another, I want to have the cause of death incorporated into the models, to show how violently they died. I went for the gruesome and borderline absurd, with huge warhammers sticking out of people's heads and a guy with long spears sticking out of his chest. I was thinking about the movie Stardust where the princes were all killing each other off and then their ghosts were walking around with axes in their heads and stuff.

 

April 13th

 

Finished my insert bases for the black ork unit in my Ghost's N Goblins army

 

And here's the full unit with the two characters that are going to be in there.

 

May 21st

Wow, it's been over a month since I've actually finished anything, and really over two months since I've finished something that was an actual miniature rather than a scenic element on a base.  I know I have been doing a lot of painting though, it's just been that I'm kind of painting a bunch of stuff at once and these are the first that actually got to a completed stage.

Anyway, here they are, the Skaven poison wind globadiers.

I've been working on rat ogres and a huge plague monk unit at the same time, and I'm hoping at least one of those two units is completed by next week.



Invitation to Swamplight City

 

Nestled  between the tropical gulf waters and the natural beauty of the Everglades, Swamplight City is one of the fastest growing cities in America, seeing a population increase of over 700 % in the past fifty years. 

Much of the new downtown area was wetland as recently as the 1960s, using the same innovative planning and engineering that was used to build the Walt Disney World resort, with several of Walt Disney’s own ‘imagineers’ being involved in the design stages of the city center project.  As a result, Swamplight City is a modern marvel, living up to its reputation as the ‘Jewel of the Everglades’.

And the “crown in the jewel” of Swamplight City is the Crey Plaza corporate park, a ring of gleaming skyscrapers of beautiful architectural design that act as the regional offices of several of the world’s largest companies, including the Crey Corporation and Stark Industries.  You might not know it while standing in the beautifully landscaped garden area between them and gazing up at these impressive monoliths, but you are actually standing on the third floor, with massive parking and transportation facilities located beneath your feet.

The Crey Plaza overlooks Swamplight City’s beautiful Lake Park, and from the side of the plateau, a waterfall cascades into the western end of the lake 24/7. Lake Park is a wonderful place for a picnic, and you can always find families, tourists, and students from the adjacent Swamplight City University campus walking or lounging about. Swamplight City is also home to an expansive monorail system, only the second city in the United States to incorporate one into its public transportation system.

All of the ground breaking architecture and engineering of the city center is not to take away from the city’s older sections, as they are wonderful places to explore, with numerous shopping and dining opportunities to meet anyone’s fancy.

And while a gleaming jewel like this might attract ne’er do wells, our city is defended by the Protectors, Swamplight City’s own super hero group, who have stopped hundreds of crimes in the past five years and put dozens of super criminals in jail. Tourists with keen eyes might spot one of them flying by overhead on their Pegasus sleds as they patrol the city, ever on the lookout for evil doers or citizens in need.

Swamplight City is home to another team, and even though they don’t have any super powers, the Florida Pythons have taken the NFL by storm since they joined the league as the newest expansion team, making it to the AFC championship game last season for the first time in franchise history.

You can’t talk of a coastal Florida community without mentioning the beaches, and Swamplight city’s beaches and the resorts that sit along the strip are first rate.  And with ferries departing daily to Key West and Miami, Swamplight City is the perfect hub for a vacation full of adventure!