Wargames Gallery: Soul Grinder Line of Sight

My Soul Grinder seems to enjoy clambering on top of wrecked vehicles to obtain a better line of sight to further targets. Here, the Tau are being beaten back by the tide of daemons -- the Great Unclean One (background) did the wrecking job on the tank and is setting off to contest an objective, whilst the bloodletters lurk menacingly to the right (and off picture) to mop up the remaining units.

Group Photo: 1500 points of Mixed Daemons

Following on from my army list posted yesterday, here's the big group photo of my mixed daemons horde!

At the front and centre are the Herald of Tzeentch on a Chariot with a bunch of screamers.

To the left of them are the Khorne contingent: a Herald riding a Juggernaut surrounded by bloodletters with wicked lava-like hellblades.

To the right, are the putrid Nurgle elements: a Great Unclean One surrounded by plaguebearers.

At the back and centre, we have a large Soul Grinder, lurking in the same way that skyscrapers don't.

To the left are more Tzeentch elements: this time a squad of pink horrors with the Changeling.

To the right are the Slaanesh daemonettes cavorting around a daemon prince.

Army List: 1500 points of Mixed Daemons

This is the mixed daemons army list that I've been playing around with recently. It consists of all four of the major powers in (approaching) equal quantities. I've taken it to tournaments and had reasonable results with it. It's not supposed to be "killer" or "top tier", but it is competitive without being overwhelming to newbies. It is somewhat changed from my usual "friendly" style list. I've linked to my random tactical thoughts on a couple of the choices that I've made, for reference. Comments welcome!

HQ:
Great Unclean One of Nurgle, Cloud of flies (165 points)
Herald of Tzeentch on a Chariot, with Bolt of Tzeentch (95 points)
Herald of Khorne on Juggernaut (105 points)

TROOPS:
11 bloodletters of Khorne (176 points)
11 plaguebearers of Nurgle, icon of chaos, instrument of chaos (195 points)
11 daemonettes of Slaanesh, transfixing gaze (159 points)
9 pink horrors of Tzeentch, chaos icon, bolt, The Changeling (195 points)

FAST ATTACK:
5 screamers of Tzeentch (80 points)

HEAVY SUPPORT:
Daemon prince with flight and iron hide (170 points)
Soul grinder of chaos with phlegm (160 points)

Total = 1498 points.

Footnote: My preferred first wave of deep-strikers are the Herald of Tzeentch, the plaguebearers of Nurgle, the daemonettes of Slaanesh, the soul grinder and the screamers of Tzeentch.

Chariot of Tzeentch, Part III -- Painted

Chariot of Tzeentch, Part II -- Herald and Disk

For the actual herald and his disk, I wanted something that was in keeping with the older Realms of Chaos stuff -- a disk that was more like a circular flying creature than a screamer or a floating (unintelligent) platform. To create my vision, I used a standard 40mm circular base and got to work with a whole load of milliput (greenstuff).As can be seen, the disk has a mouth sculpted at the front (pure greenstuff) coupled with a pair of peering eyes either side of it sourced from circular globes that come as part of the chaos spawn boxed set. At the sides of the disk, I added a couple of protrubers: a pair of horns from the chaos spawn set and a metal pair of Keeper of Secrets horns that come with one of the alternate heads on the Keeper.

The herald itself is a standard pink horror of Tzeentch. The arms of the horror have all been drilled and pinned however. For the outer arms, I decided that I wanted them to be spread to either side of the miniature: they are ultimately going to be holding some reins that will attach to the screamers on the decorative base of the whole chariot.
Although the other arms were all standard, I did add one additional arm that comes out of the pink horror's mouth! This arm is a pointing arm and adds to the chaotic (random) appearance of the daemon. Additionally, when I paint the chariot, this arm is going to be blue, to be in keeping with my earlier miniatures colour scheme.

The final additions consisted of placing a rune of Tzeentch in the centre of the disk near to where the herald is standing; adding some swirls (with a crafting tool) around the rune and stretching to the outside of the disk; and adding a magnet to the underside of the disk (buried in the milliput) to help with both balance (i.e. low centre of gravity) and attaching chains that the herald will use to "drive" the chariot with. I'll show the painted result of this conversion soon.

Chariot of Tzeentch, Part I -- Assembling the Base

Over the next few posts, I'll be writing up my scratch-built Herald of Tzeentch on a chariot that I built a while back and took to a recent tournament with me. For the chariot of Tzeentch, I wanted to build a convincing looking pink horror being pulled along on a disk by a pair of screamers. To this end, I started to build a base for the herald from scratch.
For the base, I simply used a thick rectangular cut of black plasticard and added a layer of textured (white) plasticard on top. From therein, it was a case of thinking about how the chariot might be constructed. I knew that I wanted to have two screamers on the base, so I thought about some ruins. My previous work with the Hirst Arts range came in handy here: I cast several pillars from their range and added them to three corners of the build. On one of these pillars, I wanted to rest a screamer. On the rear pair (as pictured above), I wanted to (somehow!) rest the disk and herald.

The second screamer was going to be a problem though. In the end, I elected simply to drill in to the plasticard base and insert a flying base stand for the second screamer to rest upon. That way, I could take the screamer off for transport and also use it on a different flying base as an individual screamer as required.

For the rest of the base, I scattered around a large number of debris items and fine, small grit to be suggestive of some ancient temple ruins.
The second picture shows how the screamers fit in with the base in the grand scheme of things. They rest toward the front of the rectangular base, with one balancing on the intact pillar.

In the next part, I'll detail the herald itself and how I solved where it would fit in to the scenic base I'd built. If I'd have been thinking more clearly about this, I might have build the herald FIRST, rather than the scenic base...

About a Soul Grinder's Legs

A number of my miniatures have long since been painted and my blog is now a little behind in chronicling my progress on them. Nonetheless, I wanted to show what happened when I started to paint the legs of my Soul Grinder. In the previous part, I showed how I was going about painting this miniature in a Khorne style -- reds, blacks and brass colours. For the legs of the machine beast, I wanted to continue in this theme, but add in some suggestions of fire. So using red as the basis for the open field on the legs and "thighs" (if I can call them that), I painted on top some small streaks of oranges and yellows to suggest something with a magma-like quality. Not too dissimilar to the theme of my bloodletter's hellblades on the whole.

The rim of the open fields was painted in a subdued golden colour (with a metallic paint) and the other black parts from the undercoat were drybrushed in boltgun metal and silver colours. I'm tempted to got over a few of the harder edges of the metallic parts with a fine white line to suggest some glinting in the starlight.

Other details included the piping in green, the chaos star on the knee joint in a cream colour and the further fleshy parts in a style similar to the main torso of the soul grinder. I'll get the (whole) finished product blogged about in the near future.

Painting Prize!

This weekend, I was at GenCon Oz for the Warhammer 40,000 tournament. And, I'm totally thrilled to say that I won the painting prize!!!! The competition was VERY tight (1 point was all that was in it). There were some absolutely awesome armies there in my opinion, which is why I was so pleased to get the prize as although I figured I was in with a shot, I wasn't certain I'd win at all.

Overall, I came 7th. Brief run down of the primary mission results:
Game 1: vs. Marines, draw
Game 2: vs. Tau, major win
Game 3: vs. Dark Eldar, major win
Game 4: vs. Chaos Marines, major loss
Game 5: vs. Marines, minor loss

I'll post more on this tournament once I get my photos more organized.

Off to GenCon Oz!

Well, I'm headed to GenCon Oz this weekend for a big tournament of Warhammer 40,000. I'm taking daemons with me and don't expect to win much! (wish me luck!) But I'm at least hoping to get some feedback on my painting and meet some new people there. It should be fun!

I'll post what I got up to at the tournament at a later date (once I've had chance to digest everything) ... in the mean time, I've scheduled some other posts.

GenCon Oz

Gen Con Oz is taking place in a little over 24 days from now in Brisbane, Queensland.
Announced on the discussion forums is the tournament for 40k -- based on the old Grand Tournament system. Some interesting snippets that I garnered from reading through the rules:

40 per cent of the tournament result is on battle outcomes
20 per cent on sportsmanship
20 per cent on force composition
20 per cent on painting

There's also a handicap system that's going to be used as well! Sounds like it pays to not go in for an over the top force under those rules.

The missions have also been posted in advance as well. That's fore-planning!

Wow. I'm really tempted by this tournament! It could be a good deal of fun! Mixed Daemons, or Death Guard...?

Daemon Prince of Nurgle Project - Part III: The Finished Product

It's done! It's here! The completed paint job on the winged Daemon Prince of Nurgle. It was a big job, but I'm very satisfied.

Painting.
Undercoat = black.
Base coats: dwarf flesh for the outer skin and wings; ultramarine blue for the innards and inner portions of the claw arms; gold for the mechanical parts; graveyard earth for the horns, claws and teeth.
Inking: a liberal amount of chestnut over the skin areas; blue for the innards; black and brown mixtures for the claws, horns and other regions.
Overcoats: drybrushing progressively lighter tan and leathery colours on the skin and wings; cream colours for the teeth and claws.
Highlights: Assorted creams, tending toward pure white, on various areas.

Basing.
Following the previous debate about the size of the base, the miniature is based upon a 60mm base from back 2 basix. Check out how far the wings extend over the edge of the base - outrageous!!

Daemon Prince of Nurgle Project - Part II: The Build

The daemon prince has started to seriously take shape now and is all but ready for painting. The assembly went reasonably smoothly. As with all Forge World pieces, I started off by getting an old toothbrush and gently scrubbed away the remains of the dirt and mold lubricant to ensure that the model was clean before starting any work on it.

After removal from the sprues, the flashes of mold spill-over were removed with a hobby knife and the stumps of the sprue that were left on the miniature were carefully filed away.

The dragon wings were not too hard to file down by comparison. However, the stubs of the wings where they connect to the dragon's body needed to be removed in order that the wings connected to the body of the plague ogryn smoothly.
An enlargement of a join area is shown below:To actually connect the wings on to the body required some solid pinning. Both the wings and the shoulders of the body were drilled quite deeply and a long section of a paper clip was used to hold them in place. With a little glue and much milliput (= green stuff), the wings were soon connected to the body. The milliput required some work to get it looking reasonably correct for the connection. One thing that I've not done is make the wings more decayed and Nurgle-looking. I think I'm going to keep them as is, but paint them in appropriate dull browns and greens.

Choices

I'm torn. Death Guard or Mixed Daemons for GT2009? I think the answer is that I'll be working on both this year. Therefore, I don't have to make up my mind about GT2009 until a much later date (indeed, the date for GT2009 locally is much later than I'd anticipated at New Year). I'm going to experiment and simply enjoy assembling and painting both armies concurrently.

I'll post example army lists at a later date for criticism and feedback.

I think I'm going to have a few games with both Death Guard and Daemons over the coming months and see which I end up liking better. As such, I'm probably not going to post more on GT2009 until much closer to the time.

Narrowing it down

In my first post of the New Year, I was thinking about which army I wanted to take to GT2009. I narrowed it down from 5 to 4 quite rapidly. Today, I'm going to narrow it down to two.

Adam's article on which army to choose a few days back made for very interesting reading for me (thanks mate!). I'm ticking all the three main boxes with my choices - I like them, I believe they're competitive, and I enjoy painting them.

So, I had two Daemons choices and two Chaos Space Marine choices. I think it's fair to eliminate at least two. Looking at the Chaos Marine choices first, I had thought about generic marines and Death Guard. Generic Chaos Space Marines might(?!) be the best troops in the game at the moment. But with apologies to the Warp Hornets, I think I've had enough of them for the time being. If I'm going to take Chaos Marines, then I'm going to take Death Guard. They're themed, they offer a plethora of conversion opportunities and they look good on the battlefield. Death Guard are also more challenging to master given their higher points cost per model; and I like that - they're like Death Wing in that respect. (side topic: I'd be interested in hearing from Death Guard and Death Wing players as to how they go about tackling horde armies... orks, tyranids and so forth).

For the daemons, I was deciding between a mixed list versus a mono-Nurgle Epidemius list. The downside for the Nurglesque list is the (dollar) cost involved - i.e. I'd probably have to purchase a good load more plaguebearers. Plus, I really don't have a good feeling as to what is a solid build, or what might constitute an obvious concession. Do Beasts of Nurgle have a place? Or are points better spent on more daemon princes, plaguebearers and nurglings? Probably the latter, but that's only a knee-jerk reaction. To crystallize that thought: I don't have the gaming experience with a mono-Nurgle list yet. Whereas I do with mixed daemons.

Mono-Nurgle is still on my list of army builds that I want to create and play with, though. I'll be working on it more during the year and maybe next year too.

So, my choice for GT2009 is now between Death Guard and mixed daemons.

(Aside, it looks like GT2009 will be in mid-September if held at GenCon Oz, Qld, like last year - so I've got more time on my hands than I previously thought... perhaps Epidemius isn't totally ruled out?!? Hmmmm, choices choices....).

Daemon Prince of Nurgle Project - Part I: The Plan

Dear Santa,

Thank you very much for the goodies that you gave me this Christmas. I promise to cook more for me wife in return.

---

I was a very lucky boy for Christmas: my wife gave me the plague ogryns of Nurgle set from Forge World. I'm intending on converting one of them in to a Daemon Prince of Nurgle to lead forth plague marines on their never-ending quest to sow the seeds of fear amongst the mortal realms. Either that, or be a unique heavy support choice in a daemons cohort. Or even a Herald of Nurgle at a stretch of the imagination and use of the "counts as" rule.

Here's the picture of the bits directly from Forge World. Also included are a massive pair of dragon wings. Yep - this is going to be a flying Daemon Prince of Nurgle.

The plan is broadly straight forward: assemble the plague ogryn as normal. Then attach the dragon wings to its back. I need to figure out where on the back to attach the wings - perhaps about the shoulders, or slightly back from them. The rear of the torso is detailed with various Nurglesque sculptings, so I don't want to obscure too much of them either. I'll have to have a think.

I am also tempted to make the wings themselves look more Nurglesque. This could be achieved through the use of greenstuff as well as a hobby knife to put some holes in the wings and generally make them more tattered looking and pus ridden. On the other hand, they look grand as is and a decent pain job could render them suitable looking for Nurgle regardless.

More posts on this project as it progresses!

Forward Planning

Happy New Year! Warpstone Flux is back. Over the vacation, I got in a good few games (mostly with codex: daemons), got a few miniatures from Santa (via my wife!), and entered a conversion contest (with the reconsitituted Keeper of Secrets) (didn't win, but had a good showing!). More on those topics at a later point in time perhaps.

It's now 2009, and I think I need to consider what army (or armies?) I'm going to be working on this year. Ideally, I want to build up to GT2009 ... which I'm guessing will be around the end of June or start of July locally. The points cost I'm aiming for is 1500.

The choices - and the dilemma - that I have in front of me are:
(1) Generic Chaos Space Marines (with or without vehicles; with or without daemons; with or without Cult Troops Squads).
(2) Death Guard (with or without vehicles; with or without daemons).
(3) Daemons (mixed, or most combinations of the Big Four).
(4) Nurgle Daemons (an Epidemius focused army list).

There is a fifth choice as well:
(5) something new. I've no idea what that could be, but I suspect either tyranids or genestealer-ork hybrids (using codex: orks). Undoubtably, genestealer-ork hybrids appeal to me greatly since they're an uncommon idea.

Options 1 and 2 give me a lot of flexibility. It means I probably won't have to paint up all that many models (beyond what I decide to paint-strip) or purchase many new ones either. They are what I'm used to and what I enjoy playing. A revised mechanized (i.e. >3 vehicles) Death Guard list is something I'm edging toward as I had a very enjoyable GT2008 with them. I do wonder if they stack up favourably in the modern metagame though, but that is of less concern to me.

Option 3 will require some more painting compared to the previous options, but similarly I'm used to playing daemons, I have a reasonable feel for them, and I probably won't have to purchase too many more.

Option 4 might be interesting and is something I've not done before. It is probably the only mono-chaos power list I'm in a decent position to create without a good outlay of more cash. I have the model for Epidemius, but I'd need to purchase some more plaguebearers in all likelihood.

Option 5 honestly fills me with dread. How many orks (or tyranids) would I need to purchase and paint over 6 months? Probably too many. I think I'm happy just making up a few ork hybrids from the bits box for small (200 odd point) skirmishes. So, I'm going to safely rule out option 5 right here and now. Perhaps it is something for GT2010 or later this year, perhaps not. At least writing this posting up has helped me eliminate that thought, if nothing else. However, as and when I model a new ork hybrid (or complete a small squad of them), I will post the results here.

Resolutions.
I'm going to aim to write a minimum of 1 post per fortnight on my progress to GT2009 for the next 5 months or so.

For other posts, my resolution is to maintain my usual level of postings on painting, conversions, tactics, FtW group articles, and other w40k related items as in 2008. The (non-exclusive) focus will still be on Chaos in its myriad forms. Of course, some weeks are going to be less intense than others, but my resolution is to aim for a long-term average of 3 postings per week, at minimum.

One of my other aims for Warpstone Flux in 2009 is to follow up on the "Daemons of Lesser Powers" series and move toward scripting a minidex on lesser powers and gaming on daemon-worlds.

Is there anything else that readers would like to see from Warpstone Flux in 2009 that is not covered by the above? Or would you like more of a particular type of posting (tactics?; monstrous creature conversions?; etc?).
As always, your opinions & feedback are welcome! (Please remember to be polite as minors read this blog regularly!)