Clan Eshin Attacks!

Ach!  This warband of Clan Eshin have somehow slithered across The Black River in a ramshackle collection of leaky tubs and now those who did not drown in the crossing have taken this Outpost in abrupt surprize attack!  

Witness them exulting in their vile victory!  Note a couple of Assassins lurking around each flank.

The Baron Von Refn will be furious, but before his Knights and Rangers can arrive to mete out justice, the vile Ratman infiltrators will doubtless have burnt the little strongpoint and slipped back over The Black River, returning to safety of their fortress in The Flea Fells.

Night of the Long Knives!  Here a troop of Gutter Runners, led by an Assassin, wave their stabbing blades above their tick-ridden scalps in triumph!

Here is one of the Gutter Runners that initially scaled the walls of the outpost, taking the sleepy human sentries by surprize!

Gutter Runners are scouts, who can deploy hidden onto the board before the game begins.  This makes them excellent for surprize flank and rear attacks, or for denying key terrain to the enemy.

Another crew of Gutter Runners prepares a whithering volley of sling-stars to support their mates.

 

Skaven have few missile troops and depend on being able to close with the enemy very quickly and in large numbers.  These Gutter Runners make excellent pests, however, being able to launch swift surprize attacks against vulnerable points in the enemy line or just holing up in a building or copse and infuriating an enemy with a hail of nuisance missiles.
                                                                                                                                              "Kill-Kill!  Kill-Kill!"

A little extra muscle travels with the Gutter Runners in the form of this band of Night Runners.  Night Runners are not infiltrators, at least not as far as I can tell, but they are +1 shock elite (so +1 weapon skill) and do benefit from the +1 strength bonus that all Clan Eshin troops get for using poisoned attacks, which makes them okay.  They are still Skaven, though, and won't win any great battles on their own,  They can be considered 'elite' only in the context of their own army, and not anybody else's.  The effectiveness of the Clan Eshin troops is hobbled by the fact that they can only be deployed in very limited numbers, no more than 10 Rats per unit, not counting characters. I have painted up all the 3rd edition Clan Eshin troops army list allows, plus 4 extra assassins because...?  I just like them, I guess.

I confess I chose to field the Night Runners mainly because the image of the Clan Eshin "Dagger Standard", caught my fancy.  I think it looks pretty solid as a regimental standard.  I also wanted a good gig for the two types of trooper models I used in the unit, as they look a bit chunky, scarred and mean compared to their Clan Rat Brethren.

                                                                   "Victory is ours!"

For the first time ever, I think I was rather happy with my attempt at doing some shield designs free-hand.  Not brilliant, but I think they look ok.

 I still need another Clan Rat regiment to meet the army list requirements.  The models are all sitting in a zip lock bag in a cardboard box near my feet as I type this and glaring at me rather accusingly.  All right, all right, boys.  I'll get around to you soon.

Evil and His Phantom Servants

"EVIL came out rather well..."

 

...It certainly did.  These are 3d printed figures by the mighty Big Mr. Tong.  I have been sending him a good deal of money since I discovered his awesome old school metal 40k figures.  He keeps coming out with more and more wonderful pop culture candy for old bastards like me whose tastes are rooted in the 70s and 80s.

I have vivid memories of watching Time Bandits for the first time at my friend Pete's house when we were both in grammar school. It's still one of my all time favorites today.

Evil's wraith-like automaton servants provided one of the films innumerable powerful images.  But like so many other images and characters in the film, they had no real explanation.  Gilliam never bothers to provide is with sidebar Exposition as to how and why the Wraiths or the Sea Giant or Mr. and Mrs. Ogre came into being.  What the hell were they all about?  They had no mythological relatives that I could think of.  They came straight out of Gilliam's imagination and he sold them to us so expertly that I immediately believed in all of them and loved them.

Well, some of these creatures of my childhood are now lurking amoungst the terrain on The Big Board, much to my delight.  Here Evil leads his minions through some terrain I recently built with broken pieces of toys and tools that I found laying around in my driveway and barn.

I haven't made up any rules for them yet, but I am sure I will find a role for them of some kind in my Rogue Trader games.

                         "Reeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!"

         Evil prepares to turn you into a swine!

Tom Meier's Colonial Wars-Boer Kommando!

I've been working on this army for a couple of years, slowly working through it at my typical glacial pace, and constantly deciding that I needed to add more units which just stretched the process even longer, but it is now complete and ready to be deployed onto the big board!

The army is structured to be played with The Men Who Would Be Kings, with everything in units of 12 models. I originally intended to just paint 3 troops of 12 mounted infantrymen each, which is what the rulebook suggests for a Boer Field Force.  But as I closed in on finishing the horsemen, I decided I really wanted to paint dismounted figures too, in case I wanted to have them hop down and take cover somewhere.  This would also give the army larger scope for rule sets like The Sword and the Flame.  So that took a lot more time, and by the time I was finishing those guys, I had decided that I wanted to paint a Commandant for the force, just for kicks, and at that point it seemed like I might as well go ahead and paint up some artillery as well.  Still, the army felt a little small to me.  I felt like I wanted to paint another squadron of mounted and foot, but was not excited about diving back into painting more of these, so I prevaricated.  Until...

...In May I made my annual trip to Enfilade, and on the first afternoon I found these fellows sitting in a little cardboard box at the bring and buy for I think 30 bucks.  They were all very nicely painted, in a style which blended right in with the guys I already had, and the numbers added up perfectly with my existing force.  A little bit of Serendipity, there.  They were mounted on nice rectangular steel bases, so I had to re-base them to get them to fit in, but that was little stuff. These boys, then, became my fourth squadron.  My friends saw me paying for them and said "Don't you already have those guys?"  I said "Yes, but now I have more of them."

The figures are all Ral Partha Colonials sculpted by Tom Meier in the 1970s.  I spent a sizable portion of  of my childhood gazing wistfully at Tom's figures in the Old Ral Partha and Wargames West catalogs, and wishing I could afford to purchase mass armies of them.  Well now I have a number of those colonial armies and this is my first one to be finished.  Total is 48 foot, 48 mounted and 2 guns.  None of the Ral Partha Colonial lines had a great deal of depth to them.  Tom's entire Boer range included 2 mounted men, 4 advancing on foot poses, 2 firing on foot poses, a mounted commandant and a Staadtsartillerie figure.  Above are the 2 mounted trooper poses.  

The advancing foot figures:  2 basic poses with slight variations.

The 2 dismounted firers.  The only really noticeable difference is the hat.

These 3 figures were all included in the Mounted Volunteers pack in the Zulu War line, but they can just about pass as Boers if we choose to ignore the fact the fellow on the right is a bit more rotund looking than your average Boer fighter.  A sprinkling of them does add a bit of variety.

The Commandant/Feldcornet figure.

The State Artilleryman figure, representing a member of the corps of technical specialists created after the first Boer War,  and who were all the standing army the Boers had in the second.  

Both of the above figures were painted by their previous owner.

These were painted by me.  I can hardly tell the difference.

My son seems to think my army's artillery park is much too small.  'Depressing', he calls it.  Well, I don't think it's quite that.

 

                           Quite a little horde...

The Boer riders thunder forth to drive the British from the veldt....

Transvaal War British coming next!

Epic Ork Reinforcements!

I added 2000 points to my Epic 40k Ork horde.  It was a bit of a struggle, but I got it done, and overall I'm pretty pleased with the results.

My intent was always to make the Evil Suns the heart of my epic Ork horde, so the first 2000 points were all Evil Suns.  Having completed that half of the horde, I needed to select two more company cards to structure the rest of the army around.  The Ork army company cards are all structured around the traditional Ork clans.  Perhaps stupidly, I chose the Bad Moons and the Death Skulls, or Deff Skullz, to be more grammatically correct, because I thought that the blue of the Skullz and the yellow of the Moons would go with the red of the Suns to create an esthetically pleasing force based around the primary colors.  I found a way to make the points work, so i went with it.

The first contingent, Da Deff Skullz.  The Skullz have fewer infantry than the other clans in the army, but they have good equipment.

To the standard company card, with it's 15 Boyz  and 4 nobz stands, I decided to add 3 support cards, 1 of Mad Boyz, 1 of Bone Breaka tanks, and 1 of Stompas.

Da Boss Nob...Grrr!

Da mighty Stompas!  They cost 250 points, which is a lot... but they are tough, and once I had them painted up, I thought they looked great.  Now that I'm thinking about it, tho9ugh, I think one needs a set of horns to match the standard.

The Deff Skullz Mad Boyz skirmish ahead of the Stompas.  Mad Boyz are free, and not good for much.  They just sort of wander around, do random stuff, and maybe absorb some fire that the enemy would be wise to expend on more important things.  I should have had some with the first half of the army, but I never got round to painting them and they didn't really fit in with the entirely mechanized theme of the Evil Sunz.  But I have them now.

Da Bone Breakas storm forward, clearing the way for the boyz with grinding rollers and searing bolts of laser fire.

Mad Boyz on the loose!

Deff Skull Nobz storm forward ahead of da boyz...

The Bad Moons clan prepares for the assault...

My concept for the Bad Moons clan was a massive swarm of infantry that would be as big and hard to stop as I could make it.  With that in mind, I gave the Moonies 5 support cards:  1 extra boyz, 1 extra nobz, 1 mad boyz and 2 Weird Boy towers.

The extra boyz and nobz would give the mob more numbers and as such the ability to absorb more punishment.

The Weird Boy towers.  Each has confined within it an Ork sorcerer who can provide the horde with berserker Ork Waagghh insanity, and smite the enemy with bolts of psychic energy emitted from their tortured brain pans.

Waaarrrgghh!

'Uuurrggaarrgghhh!   Bleaaahhh!!  Bleaarrrggghhh!!!!'

                                        
'Raaarrrgghh! Bleaaagghhh!!! Respect us, we're mentally divergent!'  Aaarrrggghhh!'  The Mad Boyz are just there to be annoying and mental and get in the way.  (Of the enemy, hopefully, not of their friends.)

                 The horde lines up for battle!

                           The horde attacks!!!

                      'Wwwwwaaaaaarrrgghhh!'

          'Bleaaarrrgghhh!!!'  Da warboss leads the horde toward the sound of the guns.

The horde drawn up and ready to take down the Ultramarines!