Knights of the Mittel Mark Pt. 2

 I was browsing back through some old posts recently and realized that it has been almost (gulp!) four years since I've added anything to my Oldhammer Empire/Bretonnian army.  Almost 4 years?  Is it really possible that that much time has gone by?  Father Time.  He's a man without pity.  Well, time to get back to adding some things to it and hopefully I can push my army out past 2,000 points by the end of the year.  We'll start with more knights and infantry.

The concept for my Warhammer human army that I dreamed up way back in the day concerned a Lord whose father had lost his barony back in Bretonna, and who had carved out a petty princedom in the Border Princes, on the very edge of the Old World, on the banks of the Black River.

Decades later, his son is doing his best to hold on to his embattled patrimony with the help of a collection of knights who've emigrated to the Border Princes from all over the Old World, bringing their servants and retainers with them.  Each knight is expected to bring a lance of ten retainers and/or mercenaries to battle with him when the Baron calls.  I wanted each knight in the army to have ten infantry somewhere in the collection whose colors matched their knight's livery.  Since this is a frontier army, I wanted a good deal of variation and improvisation to be apparent in the force, however, and although the army has a very feudal/Bretonnian feel so far, I wanted a mix of arms, clothing and equipment to reflect the idea that a number of different Old World races and cultures were represented in its ranks.  This also makes it easier to switch over to the Empire army list whenever I want. I like both army lists, and want to be able to use both without having to have to collect two different armies!

The figures here are a mix of Citadel/Wargames Foundry and Old Glory Medievals...

...with an old Metal Magic fantasy figure thrown in here and there...

I'm not too keen on how these guys turned out, but I guess they'll do for rank and file.  Anyway, I can't spend any more time working on them as I want to get some Syrian archers finished for my Hittite army by the end of this month and time is pressing.

Next I'm going to work on a little clutch of wizards to give the army some powerful character options, then I'll go back to more knights and infantry.  Need some cannon, too.

Marching out to meet the Greenskinned hordes...

Warhammer Ancients Chariot Wars: Syrian Maryannu Chariotry

Over the last few months I've found myself having less and less success at the painting table.  Hobby time seems hard to come by, and when I have some, I'm usually too tired to do much but stare at my rows of little people and monsters.  I've hardly even checked my blog list for a good long while, and shame on me.  Short winter days and long hours at work are probably partly to blame for this fatigue. Then there's my son, who is rapidly approaching his second birthday, and whose tiny form now contains more energy, curiosity and ferocity than that ordinarily possessed by a troop of baboons.  Probably a contributing factor.  I think the baboons would be easier to manage, truth be told.  Well.  Perfect time to take on a new mega project, eh?  Let's get stuck in!  I'm going to try to finish one unit a month for the rest of the year, and then see where I'm at.

First up are these Ral Partha Syrian chariots.  I had four of these pretty little kits but one had parts of the chariot cab missing so I'm not sure what to do with it other than to break up the kit for spares.

 These Syrian gents are petty nobles whose city-states have been conquered by the Hittites and who now lead contingents of levies in support of their overlords.

I considered painting the chariot cabs in a zulu shield type cowhide pattern.  That probably would have been more historically accurate, but in the end I went with solid colors. 

These guys are just the tip of the Syrian levy iceberg.  I have a ton of archers and spear men waiting in line, as well as an Arab/Hyksos contingent.

 Even though they didn't come out quite as nice as I'd like, I still had fun working on these and in trying to get a feel for the period.  And they don't look bad for the first attempt....

 Chariots are impressive models anyway, and in big hordes they look downright sexy.  I look forward to seeing big units swarming around on my tabletop.

The first of many swarms of chariots!  

Rogue Trader: More Space Ork Boys and Happy New Year!

Normal people go to parties and stuff on New Year's eve.  This year I stayed home, drank beer, watched Astro Zombies, and painted Space Orks.  Exciting, huh?  Well, I ain't the hellraisin' kid I used to be.

Two squads armed with plasma gun and heavy plasma gun.  The theory is that one plasma weapon fires while the other holds fire so it can shoot in the next round while the first weapon cools off.  The reality, of course, is that the Orks blaze away cheerfully with both weapons as fast as ever they can.  Fire discipline be damned.

 I vastly prefer the ancient Orks cast as single pieces.  I don't hate the Orks that came later, with the clan backgrounds and the plastic arms and such, but I don't love 'em either.  Something, some splash of color or character got lost in the transition from the original Orks to the later plastic armed, clanny Orks.

 1st Squad...

and 2nd Squad...

 I'm actually making pretty good progress on my Rogue trader Orks!  Usually my chronic scatterbrainedness keeps me from being able to stick to a project for any amount of time, but I'm doing good with my greenskins, here!  The horde so far:  Three 10 Ork plasma gun squads, (whom I refer to fondly as my Blasta Boys, one squad of 10 'Flame boys' armed with flamer and heavy flamer and mounted in a battle wagon as per Afrikorkorps regs, wartrakk, five warbikes and command team.  More to come soon, methinks...

"Oy!  'Appy New Year!"

Flames of War German Grenadier Company 300 pt upgrade: Stug Platoon and 88s

At last!  Some big guns for my tiny Huns! 

 8.8 cm Flak battery...

 I had no idea of what the hell I was doing with these...just winged it with the camo scheme...

 Nice models, though , and fun to work on.  An extremely effective counter to enemy air support in the game, and also good for picking off tanks, of course!

The Battlefront boxed kit has lots of nice peripherals, including extra crew stands, shown here...

...and prime movers for the guns, even a staff car for the command team.  Also included were a set of trailers for the trucks.  I didn't paint those, since you don't really need them for the game, I'd lost some of the pieces and anyway my patience with modeling non-essentials has its limits...sometimes.

Stug Platoon!  Over the last two or three years the Stug III  has become one of my all time favorite AFVs.  Not as glamorous as say, the Tiger or the Pershing, but a tremendously versatile and survivable fighting machine... 

...one of a very few German AFV's produced from the very beginning of the war to the very end.  The Germans built more Stug IIIs than any other tank-type vehicle. 

One of my Flames of War pet peeves is that Battlefront does not provide stands for most of their vehicle minis like they do for most of their infantry and artillery models.  In 28mm this might not be a big deal, but with 15s it means that your infantry tower over their tank support in a galling sort of way.  In real life, tanks are big and scary, and I feel that they should get the same bases everybody else so they can look appropriately intimidating, so I add bases to all my tanks. 

 The added height won't do my Stugs and Shermans any favors when people are shooting at them on the tabletop but what do I care?  I don't play in tournaments or anything like that anyway.

Grrrr....belching fire and metal, farting blue fumes..the Stugs crawl forward in support of the grenadiers...

The horde so far...Company HQ with anti tank section, 3 Grenadier platoons, Pak 40 platoon, mortar platoon, 88s and Stugs...900 points...almost finished with my company! 







Realm of Chaos: The Legion of Blood Part 1; Flesh Hounds

With wails that curdle the blood and quell even the most valiant heart, the Flesh Hounds thunder through the chaos wastes...

Unstoppable engines of destruction, spirits of wrath encased in sculptures of flesh and bone by the hand of mighty Khorne, they are the vanguard of the awesome Legion of Blood, detailed by Khorne to hunt The Rapturous Legion of Slaanesh throughout eternity.

The Rapturous Legion hides itself in weird corners of the waste, intent on the pursuit of twisted pleasures, but sooner or later the Legion of Blood always finds them...

The howls of the Flesh Hounds announce the arrival of The Legion at the pits of pleasure and the two hosts hurl themselves upon each other in an orgy of ecstatic slaughter...

For a day and a night the legions rend one another asunder.  By the coming of the second dawn nearly all will have been slain...but all, living and dead, champion and demon alike, will be consumed, their essences dispersed, their shades drift away with the morning mists...

...to be clothed, once more in robes of meat and ichor by the hands of Slaanesh and Khorne...

...the Rapturous Legion will be spirited away, rebuilt and set down in some new secluded place of perverted pulchritude...

...And the wolves of Khorne will be set upon their trail once more! 

Rogue Trader: Der Afrikorkorps: Kaptin Rummel's Motor Boyz Part 2 of 2

 Orks on motorcycles.  A great idea on the part of Games Workshop.  Sadly, the concept wasn't as well realized as it could have been.  When I think of Orks on bikes I think of all those goofy, cheesy 60s biker movies that you used to see on Mystery science Theater 3,000.  I think of the doped up rabbit biker sequence from Fritz the Cat. That's the kind of spirit I'd like to see captured in Ork bikers models; crazy, anarchic, violent, stupid, and everybody probably high as kites on God knows what. 

That's what should have been, but the old Rogue Trader biker models didn't really deliver on that, not for me anyway, so I swapped some parts around and puttied and glued until I had something I liked better.  I always hated the Ork bikes with the big cannons on the sides...not really believable at all, and you wouldn't really need 'em to have a scary Orky bike anyway.  In my twisted imagination, I saw Ork Nobs driving one-handed though the smoke and dust of battle,  hurling armfuls of stikk bombs and blazing away with kustom bolters fitted with shoulder stocks to help the Nobs' aim when shooting on the move.  Maybe one would have a grenade launcher he could use to lay smoke to cover the mob's assault.  The WW2 German regalia favored by some of the bikers in these old movies would provide a visual link to the Afrika Korps concept I had already laid down with the other models.  That's what I figured, anyway.

My conversion skills fit neatly into the lame category. So I just did the best I could with my nobz here. 

There wasn't much I could find to add in the way of WW2 German paraphernalia, so they don't fit into Der Afrikorkorps as smoothly as I'd like, but I have plans to add a motorcycle-sidecar combo to the squad as well as a boss nob who will look more the part.  That will help my bikers fit in better. 

Some of the original riders did fit in, but they were much too puny, as was the case with all vehicle crew figures made at that time, so I'm trying to think of other things I can do with them.

"Yeeeehaahhhhhh!"

If I can ever get the bike combination and the Biker Boss Nob done, that'll be it for the Afrikorkorps, I think.  I haven't even laid hands on the models I'll need to make them, so they're still pretty far off in the future.  I want to move on to other Orky stuff now.

"Awright, Boys!  Let's git round 'em!"