On September 5th we held a 350-point 1-1-1-1 event at one of the local gaming stores. As the event approached, I didn’t think I’d be able to make it. When I wound up with the day free at the last minute I threw together some lists and headed up for some good ole’ fashion heretic burning.
At GenCon I picked up a copy of the Retribution of Scyrah army book and Kaelyssa, Night’s Whisper to play with potential color schemes. At first I was tossing around the idea of starting up a Retribution force – the playstyle looked interesting and it had the “shiny new hawtness” going for it. Then I realized something… I’m already getting a new faction.
After the rush to get my army painted for Hardcore and the disappointment of not being able to play, I decided to take a break from painting Privateer Press miniatures. I’ll come back to them soon enough but I spent the past couple weeks finishing up a handful of models for our weekly roleplaying game.
First up are a couple of Reaper figures that I picked up for two of the players. The first for a hammer-wielding fighter type. As our “knight in shining armor” I went with bright plate armor accentuated with a bright regal blue. The stock figure (Reaper 3324, Stern Kestrelmen) is armed with a sword but I swapped it out for a hammer from the Games Workshop Mordheim Mercenary Sprue.
I thought about accenting his armor with a brass or gold color but the character really isn’t one for embellishment. I’m pleased with him overall, thought he needs a little touch up before his final sealing. I also used Stern here to test the “Advanced Faces” painting guide in issue 23 of No Quarter Magazine. The technique turned out ok for a first attempt but I need to experiment some more before I’m comfortable with it.
Next is our party arcanist. For this figure I went with a bright fantasy-esque fiery theme to match his flavor of magic and his temper. I had initially painted his inner robe yellow but it looked too much like a rain slicker. I repainted it in the gray you see here to try and evoke a little smoke to the robe’s fiery color.
Valdarynn probably needs the most work out of all of these models before getting “finished” – his hands need highlighting and I have to clean up his fire and smooth out his robe. I’ll probably also add a few highlights to his outer garment. The blond hair turned out fairly well though – I used Reaper Master Series Yellowed Bone (similar to GW Bleached Bone) as a base coat and washed with a thinned down mix of a yellow paint and GW Brown Ink, adding a little more ink in for successive washes to do the deeper shadows.
After Valdarynn we have the Mercenary Assassin from Confrontation. I picked this figure up a while ago and was holding on to him until I got inspired enough to paint him. When I dug him up while searching through my bare pewter collection for a good figure for my rouge/assassin type character I figured now was as good of a time as any.
I really wanted this figure to have an overall shadowy feel to him, hence the various grays that were used as the primary colors. Even the browns for the leather were done in a muted tone so as to not stand out. I realized that I needed something to make him pop, though and decided to paint the cloth mask a bright red as an accent. Once I clean up a few areas and paint the lantern on his back, the merc assassin will be ready for his final sealing.
Even though I’m posting my merc sprue soldier last, he’s actually the first of the models I did for my game. We had a few of my older figs that stood in for everyone except the axe wielding hedge mage in our group. Before I knew I was going to be picking up a couple Reaper figs, I dug through my bits box for pieces from the Mordheim Mercenary Sprue to put together this model.
I did a quick 2-day speed painting job to get him finished and on the table as quick as possible. The result wasn’t as high of a quality as my other work. If I knew I was going to be painting new figures for most of the party I would have taken more time but he was already completed and sealed before I made that decision. Still, he’s a solid tabletop-quality piece and works well for us in our RPG campaign.
I’m including the last two characters of the group below, even though they’re not new paint jobs. I painted this first figure back in 2003 to use as a priest-type character, the same type of character it’s getting used for now. This was back before I started cutting the broccoli-bases off my Reaper figures – I hate those things.
The archer is another GW Mercenary Sprue figure I put together for my friend’s archer in an Earthdawn game I ran back in 2004. That same player is playing another bow-wielding character in our current group so it seemed fitting to re-use the same figure. He’s from my pre-basing days, so he’s just on a plain black base. One of these days I’ll go back and add some basing to him.
So that’s it for my current gaming group’s party of characters. We’re trying a few things different this time around with regards to the game itself which are working out for us. I want to talk about them some time in the near future but I’m going to wait until after we get a few more sessions in first.
Any Warmachine player that has encountered a trencher-loaded Cygnar army knows the necessity of having a dozen or so smoke templates. One of the most common solutions I’ve seen is the 3″ cardstock template. Those works great if there is space for the template on the table but sometimes you need to drop smoke on other models.
G’daybloke at Lost Hemisphere has declared this week Repenter Week, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Other authors have been posting their own painted versions of the Repenter, so given it’s already Friday, that’s probably about all I can squeeze in before the end of the week. So let’s fire it up.
When I just tried digging up a link to my write-ups on the color scheme for my Warmachine/Hordes armies, I found an article for The Vermillion Menofix but I didn’t see one for my Legion force. So to remedy that I snagged this off another forum and have copied it here to my blog.
Looking over my Legion of Everblight models, it didn’t take long for me to decide to go with a color scheme that matched their background in the frozen mountains to the north. I immediately decided to have a cool blue be a dominant color and worked from there, eventually coming up with a ‘bone-and-blue’ scheme shown below. I won this warpack in a drawing the day of release and I began assembling the models relatively soon thereafter. The paint job was chosen to be unique at the time, but it turned out that since I started a number of people have had the same idea and my models were by no means the first ones done with this scheme.
Many of the techniques I started using on my Legion models were relatively simple and there were a great deal of large expanses to do but still… for some reason I felt drained after painting these up and had to take a break for a bit before picking the brush back up. I don’t think I’ve ever painted a miniature (or group of miniatures) that took as much out of me as the Legion of Everblight Warpack did. Read More “Hordes: Frostfang Brood”
I’m back in St. Louis and still recovering from GenCon. A lot of the announcements and previews at the Privateer Press booth have already hit the various forums so there’s no need to talk about those again. Josh, Jason, and I recorded a lot of interviews over the weekend which we’ll be posting as we get them cleaned up.
It was a blast meeting and talking to fellow Warmachine players from across the country like the SOBs. We recorded Episode 50 of the Iron Agenda in the Wabash room late Friday during open play and I think by the end of the episode we had cycled 11 people behind the microphones.
The downside of the Con this year was getting sick, missing the last Hardcore of MkI, and now I’m fighting off some sort of cold/sinus infection. Still I had a great weekend and am already looking forward to next year.
We’ll be talking about the news surrounding Privateer Press, their Next Big Thing, the Retribution, and more here and on the podcast in the near future, so keep an eye open.
After four years and 200 episodes, the Podthralls have announced that they are hanging up their microphones. They’ve been a fixture in the online Warmachine community for four years and it’s sad to see them go. Best of luck, and thanks for all the hours of entertainment you provided to your fellow Warmachine players.
Most of the hosts of Fell Calls can still be heard on the Thac0 Podcast, a show about general geekery and geek-related entertainment.
It’s been over half a year since I started my Protectorate of Menoth character warjacks. Working on them quickly degraded from fun to tedious but a couple weeks ago I finally forced myself to sit down and make some actual progress. I’ll finally have them – and Typhon – competed within the next couple days.
First up is the Fire of Salvation. One of my biggest complaints of the Guardian warjack is the engraved metallic shoulder plates. When I saw the Fire of Salvation shared that design I was disappointed – I just don’t like the way it looks. I thought about greenstuffing over them and smoothing them out but decided against it at the last minute.
My other issue was with the fire that was sculpted on the top of the mace. I’m not a big fan of painted fire, so I got rid of it, but that left the mace looking like it was missing something. After digging through my bits box I decided that since the Fire was Kreoss’ jack I’d take a cue from that warcaster’s epic form. I found an old Temple Flameguard spear and clipped the head to attach to the top of the Fire’s mace, making it look like it was designed to share aesthetics with its master’s weapon.
I still need to do a little work on the Fire. On top of a little cleanup, his rivets and the Menofixes on his shoulder need painting. I also have to decide what to do with the “orbs” attached to his collar above his head. Then it’ll be time for sealing.
I’ve also made a lot of progress on the Blessing of Vengeance, who is closer to completion than the Fire is. The only real change I made to Blessing was to leave off the banners which affix to the bolts on his shoulders. I’m not a big banner fan, so I tossed them in my bits box with the banners for my Seneschals, Avatar, Guardian, Harbinger, and Epic Kreoss. Sense any trends there?
I’m not completely happy with the posing on this model. His spear doesn’t hang below his base but I can see it potentially being obnoxious on the table. I’m not sure how much I can reposition it without breaking the small pistons that attach his wrist to his forearm though.
Last up is Typhon, who I took a little break from for a while. He’s mostly complete now but I’m not happy with him yet. His mouths just don’t look right and I’m contemplating repainting the stretched skin areas around the bone circle at his cheeks blue like his flesh as opposed to red like his gums.
I’m looking into a new photography set up so I can get caught up on documenting my finished works, so hopefully I’ll have some better lit shots of these models soon.
With the release of Incubi, I shelved my Raptors for a bit while I concentrated on the small-based Nyss troops. My Raptors sat mostly unplayed until the recent Veto tournament where I dug them out to use as substitutes when needed. It’s hard to imagine but I had almost forgotten how good they are. Almost.
Overview
The Raptors are one of the most versatile and dangerous weapons in the Legion of Everblight’s arsenal. They are a quintessential flanking force capable of striking and escaping long before an enemy force can pin them down.