The Dark Omnissiah Cometh

It seems I have had the technological touch of death recently.  Various electronics have been going down based on their proximity to me, one of which includes my laptop.  Sadly, that came at a time in which I was dragging my feet about backing up my files, so I lost a lot of my pictures, my data, and a few other bits and bobs.  Between that, the holiday season, and an upcoming move, I think it is time for Elfen Stuff Up to go dark for a while.  See you in a few months hopefully and thanks for reading.

Homemade Special

One of my biggest draws about Fantasy/40K/Pathfinder/every game ever is the possibility of an on the field avatar.  Not THE Avatar, but, rather, an idea of a character given tiny form.

With this thread of thought in mind, I and a couple of friends decided to give the homemade design process a run during our weekly gaming session.  Each of us plays the same army fairly regularly at this point.  In making a set of special characters, we though we could put an interesting twist on our standard games.  Not only would it mix up the way units interact and provide some uniqueness, but it would help us structure a narrative around the games.

Antisthenes leading his merry band

So this is what I came up with:

Antisthenes, Master of the Host   200 Points
WS  BS   S   T   W    I    A   Ld    Sv
5      5      4    4    3   5    3   10     3+

Wargear:  Bolt Pistol, Frag and Krak Grenades,
Sigil of Corruption, Gift of Mutation

Warlord Trait:  Black Crusader

Word Bearers vs. Death Wing

Special Rules:  Beseech the Dark Gods, Zealot, Demagogue,
Champion of Chaos, Magister of Rituals

Magister of Rituals:  An army that includes Antisthenes
can count one squad of Possessed Marines as Scoring.

Chaos Artefact:  The Accursed Crozius
S: +2   AP:  4  Special Rules:  Melee, Daemon Weapon, Legion

Legion:  On a turn in which the Daemon Weapon adds attacks,
roll a D3:  1: Re-roll Hits and Wounds.  2: AP2.  3: +2 A and I.

My Word Bearers have been wishing for a Dark Apostle worth being "the guy."  Someone who you look at and think, "Yeah, he'd lead a legion of psychotic zealots."  The standard Dark Apostle is a decent buy in terms of being a force multiplier, but in reality, he is only his special rules and wargear.  You take him for the Zealot rule and hope the Sigil of Corruption keeps your investment safe.  I understand him being a second to the Chaos Lord, but not really as the face of the franchise.  For the Word Bearers, something a little different makes sense. 

I'll pass on trying to take this objective.

I kicked off with most of the basic Chaos Lord statistics.  I reduced the weapon skill by one, reasoning that even if he were going to be "teh awesome", he still wouldn't necessarily be the master of blades.  I added the Dark Apostle special rules, a Warlord Trait, and went for a very minor force org adjustment.  Finally, I thought, "Time to come up with a daemon weapon."  While raking my mother-in-law's leaves, it occurred to me to make an artefact that reflected the Daemonkin table of the Possessed.  Obviously, this can be very random, but so it goes.  In his first three games of service, he's had positive results.  In the first game, he mostly did mop up duty.  A Daemon Prince on his last wound, plus a wounded enemy special character formed an auspicious pair of pelts to start with.  The second game saw him hit a timely roll against some Assault Terminators and roll a squad by himself.  The third game, against the same Deathwing army, he rolled the dreaded one.  In the end, he accounted for a total of two terminators.  He has yet to die, which, frankly, is quite surprising to me.  There have been a lot of Thunder Hammers floating around lately.  We'll see what the future brings for him.

Hobby Update: Spousal Perspectives, Death Company and More

I imagine that many men who play Warhammer or something like it have had something similar to the following conversation with their wives:

Wife:  I like that your army men are on the kitchen counter.  They're cute.

Me:  ...Um, they're the Death Company of the Blood Angels Chapter.

Wife:  They're still cute.

Can a unit with the Rage USR be cute?

Anyway, these past couple weeks have been good as far as painting progress.  Actually, quite good.  I managed to finish up the aforementioned Death Company.  I painted the entirety of three Banshees for some Daemons.  I airbrushed the first coat of green on a Coven Throne.  I finally finished remodelling my Defiler.  I primed a bunch of basic Chaos Space Marines.  Progress!

Of the ten models in the squad, one of them has been done for quite some time.  The remaining nine have sat with varying stages of colors finished.  At one point, all the actual Marines were finished, but the jump packs were still totally black.  Motivating yourself to bang out nine jump packs can be quite a task, but I managed to sit down and knock out three batches while watching football.

It's probably a little cliche, but I am feeling good about how they turned out.  OK, it's very cliche.  But once I slapped a layer of Dullcote on them, they lost a lot of the shiny black gloss color that tends to bleed through because of the crappy primer I use.  Prior to that, I was pretty nervous.  The varnish does tend to even things out, but it's definitely never a matte finish. So, happy surprises.  The other reason I like these guys is they include my first attempt at doing lots of highlighting.  In some cases, I may have gone a little overboard, but the orange really pops coming off the red, and the dark gray looks really good on the black armor without making them look like they're supposed to be gray.

Some of you who tend to focus on the play side of things may be wondering about the squad and its loadout of weapons.  Technically, Death Company can't take a meltagun, nor do they have a unit champion option, and seriously, where the heck are the power weapons?  Well, the squad was put together during fifth edition, when Allies weren't a thing.  This unit was intended to be a Skyclaw squad originally, but with the advent of sixth edition, I reached a point where I could conceivably include them as Death Company.  I'd love to do that.  What I'd really love to do is add five more dudes with power weapons and Infernus Pistols so I can do both, but we'll see what comes.

I plan on using them as Flamers.

Trying to prove that I can paint colors other than just red, I also painted a trio of Banshees for my Fear Daemons army.  My original intention was to try to do these girls in their entirety with an airbrush, or as close as possible to it.  That didn't happen.  I went all paintbrush.  Unfortunately, I had some serious issues with getting any kind of paint flow through the airbrush.  Turns out, I tried a little too hard to keep the pots clean and created some Q-tip blockage.  Whoops.  So I got that fixed, but not in time to work on these ones.

The models were originally from the Coven Throne kit.  I clipped off the tails after applying the paint, so I'd have something extra to grasp while I painted.  It was a pretty straightforward process.  The models got multiple layers of the same shades of green that I've used on some previous monsters, with lots of dark greens blending into much yellower versions. I've added some of the lighter colors towards the top of the models, which is a departure from the way I painted their big brother, the Nightbringer.  I tried to make those lighter colors more prevalent, but I think the extra layers could do with some more glazing to try to smooth it out.  I also might try to matte up the black some.

Briefly, I'd also like to touch on my Defiler.  Not in a dirty way.  A few weeks ago, I went a little nuts and ripped off all the legs and arms, plus I pulled the torso(?) from the chassis(?).  I'm not sure what to call what on a daemon engine.  Then I went even further off the deep end, magnetizing just about everything.  The result?  A defiler that was more transportable since I could take it apart and put it in a Rhino slot in my carry case, plus I could also easily represent the vehicle being immobilized, destroyed, or losing weaponry.  Success!  Except that the weight of the model was too great, so the Defiler just slid down to its base as the magnets would rotate.  Failure!  Because of that, I pretty much just left the thing at home.

Now he's a walker, instead of a sitter

After some practical thought about problem, I decided to go as simple as possible and glued some ordinary sprue to the Defiler's ball and socket joints.  This prevents the magnets from rotating, holding the legs in an appropriate pose.  It doesn't look pretty right now, nor will it when it is finished, but there's enough going on that I don't think it'll matter if I stick to dark colors in those sections.  Plus I'd much rather have a functional model at this point.

Hobby Goals
-Airbrush the Coven Throne by Wednesday
-Mechrite Red on the Chaos Marines by Saturday
-Silver on the Possessed by Sunday

Tournament Recap

This weekend, two friends and I ran a tournament at the local shop.  We were blessed to have a long lead time and a lot of publicity going in, based mostly on the fact that the owner of the store put up a pretty substantial sum for the grand prize.  You can find an independent review of the tourney here.

Overall, things went extremely well.  We had a full house of 24 people, even with a $20 entry fee.  Between that, the grand prize, and some prize support donated by some sponsors, our total prize pool broke a thousand dollars.  That allowed us to put out some substantial awards, beyond just Best General/Painted, to the point where ten different people got to walk away with something to show for their efforts.  Of course, the downside to having a full house turns out to be that the game store just barely has the space to support twelve tables.  We were pretty much bumping back sides for most of the day.

The missions we ran were a variation of standard book missions.  We ran, in order, Big Guns Never Tire, The Scouring, and The Emperor's Will, all with slight variations.  Every mission included a Kill Point component added in, however, there was a cap to the number of points available depending on the mission.  Big Guns was fixed at four objectives.  Beyond that, it was fairly straightforward.  The second mission, The Scouring, saw more changes implemented.  Rather than random values, we went for a pair of four pointers, with four more two pointers.  That fixed my biggest gripe with the design of the mission. Finally, for The Emperor's Will, we doubled the value of the objectives.

This all seemed fairly simple to us, however, we ran into a pretty common problem for TO's.  No one read the $%&# missions.  Somehow, despite me explaining it to what felt like every table in the first round, I was still explaining how to score the mission in the third.  I have been in tournaments where the mission packet gives a whole page of instructions to a single mission.  In this case, there was never more than a paragraph.  So, as always, simpler is always better for players.  The one thing that keeps getting pounded into my head from tournament to tournament is that most people won't take the extra time to digest the words you write down.  Make it as simple as possible.

It's always interesting to look at a tournament and try to understand why people chose to take certain things like armies, units, etc... According to the web, only certain things are "good."  Yet, I can't remember a single codex being extremely well represented.  Looking back at my notes, there still isn't anything that makes an impression.  There are a dash of Space Marines, a pair of Necrons, some Imperial Guard.  The IG also showed up as allies in a number of forces, but not in more than two or three armies.  Really, the only thing that was common was the Aegis Defense Line, which was pretty much ubiquitous as a fixture throughout the top tables.

The armies that ended up on tables included Sisters of Battle, which ended up taking Best General, plus Chaos Marines and Space Marines, all of which went undefeated.  On those very same tables were Black Templars, Space Wolves, and Tyranids.  So, not much of a consistent thread there.  I chalk that up to a couple things.  First, a high percentage of the guys were just locals who showed up with their favorite things.  Second, the top players were top players.  Apparently, we had four of the top ten players in the country as per one of the national rankings sites.  A lot of them really seemed to want to win with something that would be a challenge, which led to armies that I would consider unique.

The Sisters absolutely brought the thunder, tabling all three of their opponents.  It turns out rending Heavy Bolters are nasty.  Who knew?   The Black Templars player ended up taking Best Overall.  Despite the one loss, he scored a ton of battle points, had the second highest paint score, and maxed out his sportsmanship.  He ended up with a score just two-tenths of a point higher overall then the undefeated Space Marines player.  Adding in the results after the final round was about as crazy as Excel can get. 

Overall, it was a great tournament.  Everybody had mostly good things to say, and I think everyone had a good time.  I know I did and would love to continue running tournaments given the chance.