The Howling Corruption

 I've worked out the basic list for my 2013 army project, utilising as many minitures as I already know as I can.

Originally I had the idea of making it 2,013 points, but that would mean having to buy a LOT of models so I settled on 1,500 which I've more or less hit perfectly.

As before the basic concept is of a Space Wolf army that was corrupted by the malign influence of Nurgle. Where a lot of Nurgle background and imagery goes for the slow stagnation thing, I wanted to have something that more represented disease as an aggressive attacker, and so The Howling Corruption was born.

The fluff background is still somewhat vague, basically involving a Great Company who chased a force of Plague Marines into the Eye of Terror, but even as they defeated their foe the Plagueworld they were on was already working its influence. Centuries later the Howling Corruption emerged from the Eye to wreak havoc upon the Imperium. Lately a detachment of Alpha Legionnaires has joined the Company, but for what purpose?

HQ
Wolf Lord Kol Draugen
Termintor armour, lightning claws, ichor blood, dimensional key, Mark of Nurgle, blight grenades.

Troops
10 Chaos Marines (Grey Hunters)
8 close combat weapons, flamer, plasma gun, champion with lightning claws, Mark of Nurgle, icon of despair.

20 Cultists
8 autoguns, flamer, heavy stubber, champion with shotgun, Mark of Nurgle.

7 Plague Marines
Meltagun, plasma gun, champion with power weapon.

Elites
5 Chosen (Alpha Legion)
Power weapon, power fist, lightning claws, champion with power weapon and gift of mutation, veterans of the Long War.
Rhino with dozer blade, daemonic possession, and dirgecaster.

3 Chaos Terminators (Wolf Guard)
2 powerfists, Champion with combi-plasma and chainfist, Mark of Nurgle.

Fast Attack
5 Raptors (Blood Claws)
Flamer, Champion with lightning claws, Mark of Nurgle

Allied Daemons
7 Plaguebearers

3 Nurgling bases  

So that's my basic army list. I am avoiding thinking about future plans for this, because that's one of the ways in which I get bogged down in theoreticals and never get around to working on the actual army building.

Two-thousand and Thirteen

Well, as some of you will have noticed, the world failed to end on the 21st. We also failed to enter a new age of enlightenment and harmony. So there is still likely to only be war in the grim darkness of the far future.

With this in mind I am planning a project that will see me through the next year. It turns out if I set myself Proper Targets rather than Vague To Do Lists I get shit done (I won NaNoWriMo this year, for example) so I will come up with some Proper Targets for 2013 with the intent of actually finishing a damn army.

I am planning a Chaos Marine army, based loosely on ideas I've had knocking about for a while. The basic concept is a Space Wolf Great Company who have been corrupted by Nurgle. I was originally going to do Khorne Space Wolves, but the problem there is that Khorne Space Wolves are REALLY FUCKING OBVIOUS, and though I lapse once in a while I am a Nurgle worshipper at heart. Oh how I praise Grandfather Nurgle for all the colds I get. No! That wasn't sarcasm! Wait, what's that Nurgling doing? No! Not in my trous- AARRRGGHH!!!

Shinies!

So, got my sub copy of the new White Dwarf yesterday, and I definitely like the new layout... the magazine, apart from a few content changes here and there, hadn't had a really major change since... well, probably since it switched to concentrating solely on GW products in the early 90s.

I am mightily impressed with the new Chaos Marine stuff, and combined with the awesomeness of the Dark Vengeance set (and I will post more about that sometime, given that my previous posting on the subject was 'part 1') my love for both Warhammer 40,000 and Games Workshop is restored.

The Forge World Horus Heresy range is a-ma-zing. Shame the book is so damn expensive, but I'll definitely be buying a few of the models at some point and they'll be getting the Death Guard treatment. Or maybe World Eaters. Can't decide.

And finally there is this (click to zoom):

 Image found on the Bolter and Chainsword Fora

Specifically the dude on the far left... who appears to be a Genestealer Cult Magus.

Genestealer. Cult. Magus.

Genestealer.

Cult.

Magus.

It's possible I'm quite excited about this...  when I was first getting into 40k way back in the mists of time the Genestealer Cults were second only to Orks on the awesomeness scale, and if there's a new version of that army coming out I will certainly be very pleased.

Cheerio!

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Vengeance part 1 - the Opening

Yesterday I went out and bought the new 40k boxed game... now that I have a Real Job I can afford such extravagances. Kind of.

It has the distinction of being one of the few, possibly the only now that I think about it, GW boxed games where I have actually wanted both sets of figures... I've always liked Dark Angels, even back in the days when it was apparently okay for GW staff to be bigoted twats who would tell anyone who collected DA that they're gay because the name of the chapter was inspired by a poem about a man's struggle to hide his homosexuality (this is actually true, but the actual homosexuality has nothing to do with it... it's all about hiding a dark secret from a higher authority). Ah, I've waited a long time to get that one off my chest. Anyway on with the contents.

First a look at the books and sprues and stuff 'artistically' arranged in the box.



The box comes loaded with four big sprues crammed with miniatures, a miniature full colour rulebook, a glossy 'How to Play', two quick reference sheets, a glossy character sheet for Interrogator-Chaplain Seraphicus, some templates, two range rulers, and a bunch of dice.

The Chaplain himself is a pretty cool model, and is presented in much the same way as the recent Warhammer character releases. Like those, however, it is a very specifically posed model and isn't really compatible (except maybe the head) with any other kit so even though it's plastic the convertability is pretty limited.



I have other closeups of other sprues on my Flickr, but I cannot be arsed with putting them up here, so I won't. :P

Overall I'm very impressed with the level of detail on what are some pretty basic models. I especially like the Chaos Marines (which I'll be painting up as Alpha Legion) which seem to have found an excellent middle ground between the old Chaos Renegades and the more recent plastic Chaos Marines. There is also an obvious influence taken from Adrian Smith's excellent Chaos Marine artwork.

The only let down in my opinion is the amount of duplicated models, this isn't such a big deal with the Dark Angels which are supposed to be kind of uniform but for the Chaos Marines and Cultists (especially the cultists) it is really quite jarring... I am doing my best with head and weapon swaps, and adding accessories, to make each model as unique as possible but I, for one, would have been happier with having the books be less shiny if it had meant getting a greater variety of models.

I am currently sticking the models together (by which I mean I am hunting for my spare hobby knife as I broke the other one... and I don't mean the blade, but the actual handle), and there'll be a followup post when I've finished that.

Citadel Spray Gun - First Impressions

Well. So far I don't really like it.

It covers well and covers evenly, when it works properly, which seems to be less than 50% of the time spent holding the trigger down.

The paint nozzle is built according to the Eddie Izzard theory of toaster and shower turnybuttonthings, in that the correct position for the nozzle to be set to seems to be very small and finding it is mostly a matter of trial and error. The propellant gets really cold, really fast which means it doesn't spreay properly. The paint pot keeps falling out of the gun while I'm using it, meaning a one-handed job... wait, that came out wrong... meaning a task which should require only one hand suddenly needs two hands to be accomplished.

I'm going to perservere with it because without it (or something similar) I will never, ever get 40 skeletons and 80 zombies paitned. Also I shall search the intertubes for tips on how to use it properly because one thing's for sure simply following the instructions in the GW Offical YooToob Video(tm) is not sufficient.

Liquid Green Stuff and the New Citadel Paints

Today, as a birthday present from my best beloved, I got some of the new Citadel paints and some Liquid Green Stuff.

New Paints 
I made sure to get a few different types to get the best impression of the new range as I could. I didn't get any glazes as I don't have any projects that require them at the moment.

Base
Pretty much the Foundation paints they released a couple of years ago but with a much bigger range of colours available. Lots of pigment and can stand being thinned down a lot before you start losing coverage.

Shade
A revamp of the previous Washes, again with a greater variety of colours. Don't need too much thinning unlike some of the heavier washes and inks and pool well in the recesses without making them too dark.

Layer
This is the straight up replacement for the Citadel Colour range, some of which has been in service for around 25 years. Well-formulated and give good clean coverage.

Dry
Drybrushing paint! It's like a sort of pigment sludge; very thick and you don't need much to load a drybrush. Takes a lot of wastage out of drybrushing as it removes the requirement to get as much paint on a brush as possible and then wipe most of it away.

Overall
The new range seems like much more of a deliberate attempt at creating a coherent set of paints for use with Citadel Miniatures, where there's always a suitable lighter or darker colour to use during the painting process rather than having to bugger about mixing Skull White into whatever colour and never getting it to look the same twice. As much as I liked the 'old' paints, some of them were absolutely dire and the range did mostly feel like an exercise in giving acrylic paints exciting names rather than producing a minimum-fuss-maximum-results set of products.

Skeletons
To test the new paints vs. the older ones I painted up a couple of skeleton spearmen, both using colours and techniques prescribed by Games Workshop for getting a fast and decent-looking finish.

Old Paints

Bone: base coat of Deneb Stone, wash of Ogryn Flesh, drybrush of Bleached Bone & Skull White.
Spearhead: base coat of Tin Bitz, dry brush of Dwarf Bronze, edged with Burnished Gold.

New Paints

Bone: base coat of Zandri Dust, wash of Seraphim Sepia, drybrush of Terminatus Stone.
Spearhead: base coat of Screaming Bell, wash of Reikland Fleshshade, layer of Hashut Copper, drybrush of  Golden Griffon.




As you can see the skeleton painted with the new paints is a lot more natural-looking and less grey, with a much smoother paint coverage. This is the first time in 20 years of doing this that I have been able to paint a bone colour I am ompletely satisfied with.

Liquid Green Stuff
This really is rather special. It's a non-toxic, water soluble version of the Green Stuff epoxy putty used by modellers the world over. It is designed to deal with all the cracks and gaps that are near inevitable when putting together a multi-part model kit, and it does its job very well. Just look at the before and after shots of this Ork Mekaniak that I had managed to put together with a big gap in the shoulder.





The simple conclusion here is that I really like the new range of paints as over the next 12 months or so will be gradually replacing all the paints I currently own with new ones.

Western Erithas

So... due to spending an awful lot of time lately running a Pathfinder campaign I am going to include more  RPG-related stuff in this blog. The first such post is this map what I made using Campaign Cartographer 3 of the area the campaign is so far operating in.




I'm quite pleased with this, really.

Cursed Realms of the Winterdemons...

Just a quick post about the plans for my Vampire Counts army. I'm going for a winter theme, with off-white/cream and blue-grey being the main colours.

This choice of theme and colour scheme is for three reasons:

1. Off-white and blue-grey are colours I know I can paint well and paint quickly.
2. Everybody does 'goth' undead with their blacks and purples and reds and stuff. They probably write poetry about it too and give their characters mysterious and sexy sounding names.
3. Winter is trve and kvlt and stuff. And is just my favourite season in general. Also, it's actually winter right now.

I'm most of the way through basecoating my Grave Guard and have some Cairn Wraiths to start on too. I'm also going to use the Konrad von Carstein model as my general (as I already have it, though I'm tempted to order the Sartosan Vampire instead), except he'll be a regular vampire and will have enamelled blue-white armour. Will I actually go through with all this and finally end up with a finished army? Only time will tell.

Cold, Cold Heart

And here is a stage-by-stage pictoral of my Tomb Banshee, whom I have named Miss Havisham

Hello!

It's been a while. Following my last post I haven't touched any miniatures at all save for tidying them up.

But this evening I am painting! Hurrah! One of the older metal Tomb Banshees to be precise. Pics will follow when it's done. :)