Category: 40k
Necromunda 17 – Amanda the Raven
As long as I was on a roll, I finished up another member of my Escher gang this week… my gang leader, Amanda the Raven.
I got impatient with this one, and didn’t really give the shades enough time to really set. Unfortunately this led to some messy drybrushing that I’m not entirely happy with. Instead of a highlighting effect, it’s more of a shoddy mush, but I can’t be bothered to redo it all. Good enough for the tabletop, anyway…
In case anybody’s curious, the miniature is from Bombshell, I think (it’s been a while, haha).
Necromunda 17 – Jane the Whirlwind
Well, I have made good on my promise and finished painting Jane in recognition of her Pitfight win on the 8th.
We’re mostly just talking about some drybrushing and base work at this stage; most of the primary painting effort was done when I posted last week.
I like a lot of things about these Raging Heroes miniatures, but I do have a couple minor complaints. There a lot of low-relief detail that’s hard to pick out until after it’s been painted, and that sword, oof. Super crooked and twisty on arrival. It’s resin, so that’s sorta expected and it was pretty easy to reshape with hot water, but I never really felt like I got it perfect. Even after straightening, it feels a bit shifty.
Necromunda 17 – Mittens
Mittens is complete!
My friend Cadie joined me last night for an evening of painting miniatures. She had some weird little fantasy commissions to work on for another friend of ours, and I took the opportunity to paint Mittens. I got the bulk of it done last night (we painted until about 130) and finished up this morning while my boys did some painting of their own:
They were very excited to join in!
I went with a mixed bag approach, an Ambot that’s been sourced or repaired using multiple donor bots. Unless otherwise specified, any named paints are Vallejo.
The torso and right arm are painted in an Olive Drab that’s a little more military than my original goal, but it’s also a nice subtle core to wrap the more interesting colours around. The left pauldron and right leg are a Heavy Red, and the left limbs are both painted in a construction-themed combination of Deep Yellow and Black. Machine parts and cables are a varied mix of Bronze, Brass, Oily Steel, and some Citadel Warplock Bronze. A few joints are done in a Vermilion Red/Gory Red mix to give them an industrial casing sort of feel.
Overall I’m very happy with how he turned out, and excited to field at least 2 freshly painted models next weekend.
I gave him a bit of wear and tear to finish him up. I’d thought about working some rust pigments into the machine parts and joints and such, but ended up just settling for a bit of Burnt Cadmium Red in those spaces. Full blown rust effects just seemed unnecessary, and not entirely in line with the rest of the work I’d done here (especially since I tend to go a little overboard with the rust weathering, haha).
I *did* add a bit of light gore to go along with the weathering. Nothing too insane, but a bit around the sawblade hands, plus some under the lifted foot. Sorta like he stepped on somebody and now he’s tracking them around. Grin.
I cannot wait plop this guy down on the table next time. Hoping he’ll scare the bejabbers out of somebody,
Necromunda 17 – Jane the Whirlwind and ‘Mittens’ WIP 1
I recently fielded a long-primed but as-yet-unpainted Raging Heroes miniature in a multiplayer Necromunda scenario. I told my friends/opponents that if she came through and won the event, that Jane the Whirlwind would get painted before the next session in a couple weeks. I haven’t painted in a while, so this was a good opportunity to put myself on the hook, and sure enough she triumphed.
So here I am painting her up. I feel super out of practice (I haven’t really painted anything since my Saga vikings a while back) but it feels good.
Evening #1 was mostly just a few base colours, trying to get a feel for where I’d be heading, plus I put some grit down on the base. That particular jar of gritty stuff is getting a bit dry, but I’ve got a fresh one waiting in the wings. At this point I’m already noticing I didn’t clean this miniature up much, but I don’t want to start over. I’ll just have to pay better attention in the future. It would have been easy to get these mold lines off, but I’ve been picking away at this mini over so long that I think I just missed that step.
Evening #2. I’m not entirely sure I like the hair, but again, I don’t dislike it enough to set myself back. At least hree variations on brownish added, plus I blacked the parts I’d potentially be putting metallics on.
Evening #3. Washes, details, metallics, and a nice crackly power sword blade. Hopefully tomorrow I can finish her up and get started painting Mittens.
Right, Mittens. I put an Ambot in my necromunda gang, so that will probably be the next thing to get painted. For now, I spent a couple evenings putting him together before painting up Jane the Whirlwind.
There are a ridiculous number of nooks and crannies in this fellow so I’m sure parts of him won’t get much paint, but hopefully I can make him look pretty cool. Thinking I’ll mix a few colour schemes to suggest some donor parts, and maybe some rust effects. Nothing so intense as my Gaslands cars, just enough to make it look like it’s done some time in the bowels of the underhive.
Mittens feels like a pet’s name while referencing his ‘hands’; it was just a funny idea at first but it’s grown on me significantly. I’ll keep you posted!
Necromunda – Statuesque ‘Eschers’
The very day I was leaving town to visit a friend of mine, what should arrive in the mail? My Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago Nickstarter, courtesy of Bad Squiddo Games. F:GA will make a larger appearance in some future posts, no doubt, but the reason I went with Bad Squiddo was to add in a few additional miniatures, including a couple of Statuesque miniatures for use with my very unofficial Escher gang.
Rosa the machinegunner was first to get built upon my return to the frozen North, and of course I opted to do some pinning. Her joints varied from a light ball/socket treatment to flat pairs, and I don’t like to take chances. Plus I generally enjoy pinning. That said, Rosa is not a big model (Statuesque is a true scale sort of deal), so we went with staples. Having a smaller bit has been wonderful in terms of being able to pin truescale miniatures without putting them at huge risk (some of my Infinity miniatures are almost more pin than model at some joints).
Fortunately the staples have some give to them (just like the copper wire I use for bigger pinning jobs) so the opposed angles of the arm and wrist didn’t prevent this from working at all. That said, I was definitely wishing I’d thought the angles through a little more before starting.
Yep, those are standard office staples. Should give you an indication of how thin those limbs are.
I’m definitely pleased with the end result. Rosa is a mini I looked at ages ago when I first started looking into Necromunda, but looking at only a couple of miniatures direct from Statuesque meant shipping was going to hurt a little too much too justify. Not that it was outrageously high, but split across only a couple of minis it just didn’t go far enough for me.
I also picked up a second Statuesque mini for use as an Escher juve:
I’ve got lots of gangers and quite a number of heavy options, but I’m pretty short on appropriate juve miniatures, so I’m looking to increase my options there. I also picked a up a couple of girls hauling guns and teddy bears from Hasslefree, but no doubt they’ll make an appearance later.
Shadow War – Steel Legion WIP
Started painting my kill team for Shadow War: Armageddon a week or two ago. The goal was to get one of these guys into shape for the Science Fiction / Modern painting competition, but I just didn’t sink the time in this month, so my Caledonian Volunteer will be taking on that role. My partially painted kill team *did* see some Shadow War action this past weekend, though. Sergeant Jaeger Hel led Hel’s Half-Acre into Von Stravo Spire on Saturday and faced off against some Tau.
I didn’t take a single picture.
The Tau had a few missions under their belts already, but the previous one had gone south, so I was facing a field-promoted leader. They had a few tricks, but I outranged them by a significant margin and was able to use that to my advantage. My sniper and a lasgun Veteran were able to knock the Tau rail rifles out of commission within the first couple of turns, and the only guy I had go down to enemy fire rolled a 1 in the recovery phase and got back up with a flash wound. My favorite moment in the game was probably when one of my Specialists managed to hit the enemy leader with a krak grenade from his launcher, only to roll a 1 to wound. Lucky guy.
I captured one of the rail-riflemen, and earned 200 monies to spend on recruiting/rearming, so I hired a new guy and kitted him out.
I spent the full 200, so this guy is as ready as he can be for whatever comes his way.
‘Til next time.
Welcome to the Wayback! Gorkamorka Season One
As promised, here is my unfinished Gorkamorka post…
In case you’re unaware of this, the Wayback is the name I’ve given to the local shop’s series of Specialist Games campaigns. A very friendly long time miniatures gamer runs the campaigns for about six sessions each, painting up appropriate miniatures as prizing. The Mordheim winner went home with a Necromunda gang, and I took home a Gorkamorka mob for my performance in Necromunda. Well, it’s Gorkamorka time, and there’s a dwarf warband on the line for use in the upcoming Mordheim campaign.
Our first Gorkamorka session was a couple weeks ago, and my first experience with the system was a blast. I played two games. The first was a basic ‘ grab the scrap’ sorta deal.
…
And that’s as far as I got. It was a lot of fun, I won the dwarf warband for Mordheim, and here are all the pictures I can find…
Also from Session 1
My Greazebukkitz getting wrecked by Da Deadly Vipas; you can see a Mad Gitz vehicle in the background...
I was up against the Vipas often, as my work schedule meant I was usually only there for the second half of the evening...
Necromunda: Arachnophobia!
Our seventh and final session of Necromunda ‘season one’ was a relatively cooperative mission co-starring a whole mess of giant spiders. We discovered that our various missing gang members had been snatched by spiders, and set out to rescue them. There were only three of us this weekend, and we each selected five gang members to field.
… ugh…
It’s been weeks since I started this post. Let’s see what I can come up with at this point.
There were cocoons scattered all over the battlefield; some of these contained the gangers that went missing during the previous session (Hurricane Amy, for example), others contained random civilians whose families would pay to have them back, and the remainder contained dried husks. (We couldn’t save everybody, grin.)
There were several spiders on the battlefield when we started, and every spider death caused a random roll resulting in 0-2 additional spiders. I had a rough start, rolling terribly and losing both my leader Brynja Spearhavok and Calamity Jane Winchester, who went to her rescue.
I thought I was a goner, but my dice picked up, and the rest of my crew started to shine. Helkat had her best game ever, going several rounds in a row with the heavy stubber’s sustained fire, making a ridiculous number of successful ammo rolls and landing a huge number of wounding hits (six, I think, over the course of the entire game)!
Jailbird and Eva Destruction rounded out the crew and both performed admirably. At the end of the evening, the Saxon Violets scored well, and finished second in the overall campaign.
First prize was a Gorkamorka mob, and since the first place player had one already, he claimed a Necromunda hired gun instead and passed the mob on to me!
That's a Nob, a trukk with a Spanner and a Gunner, several Boyz, a Slaver and a couple Grots...
Gorkamorka is the next old school campaign being run in the shop, so I’ll have to make an extra effort to get out and play, now that I have this super sweet mob.
Necromunda – the Saxon Violets vs the Knuckle Dusters
Last Saturday my Saxon Violets faced off against an Orlock gang for the first time, and they did really well. It was a relatively quick game due to the girls’ effectiveness, but lots of fun, and they are now sitting at a *very* close 3rd in the campaign. I doubt I’ll make 1st (I’d probably need to draw the first place gang as an opponent, beat them, *and* take out 2 heavies completely), but 2nd is definitely a possibility.
I went first. Just about everybody ran forward and into what cover they could find on my first turn. Helkat unleashed some heavy stubber fire on an Orlock heavy, pinning him.
Helena 'Helkat' Katzenjammer.
Brynja Spearhavok, the Violets’ leader, deployed via vents in a position where she could provide backup to Eva Destruction without her stupidity being too much of a liability, Eva vented in near a group of three juves in the hopes of using her flamer in the early game, and Hurricane Amy vented into a position where she could hopefully assault either the Orlock heavy or his backup.
'Hurricane' Amy Reynolds; formerly Amy the juve.
The Orlocks took some shots, but the Violets stood their ground. At the end of their turn, their heavy got back up, and they *also* vented into the battlefield, one ganger arriving in cover about 9″ from Bettie Rage, and the leader arriving along with a backup ganger behind Calamity and Skitterbritches. Both also had a good LOF on Jailbird, Maybelline, and Patricia.
Jael 'Jailbird' Nightingale, and Patricia and Maybelline the juves.
On the beginning of my turn – the turn that Hurricane would *finally* have charged somebody and engaged in close combat – the random campaign event resulted in an unidentified monster abducting her. Arrrgh!
As if lashing out in frustration, the Saxon Violets turned up the heat. Bettie Rage sprinted the 9″ needed to charge that vented Orlock and went completely bonkers on him!
Bettie Rage; formerly Beth the juve.
7 hits, 7 wounds; we was very much out. Helkat fired once more on the Orlock heavy, and this time succeeded in taking him out. Jailbird attempted an autogun shot on the leader’s backup, but he was behind a ton of cover that prevented her from making the shot. Skitterbritches tried next, with a much cleaner shot. The ganger was down, but not out. Calamity (who needs a bio, as she’s been a very solid contributor lately) was able to take out the leader of the Knuckle Dusters with a well-placed boltgun round.
'Calamity' Jane Winchester
Eva was getting up in the faces of several juves by the end of the turn, so my second turn ended with one ganger taken out by a mysterious attacker, and three out (plus one down) for the other gang.
The Knuckle Dusters voluntarily bottled, and the Saxon Violets claimed their Mine Workings for their own!
In other news, Patricia became a specialist… can you say ‘new mini’!?
Plasma gun!
Necromunda: Meet the Saxon Violets! Helena ‘Helkat’ Katzenjammer
Name: Helena ‘Helkat’ Katzenjammer
Rank: Heavy
Primary Weapon(s): Heavy Stubber
Current Miniature: One Shot Blondie, by Raging Heroes.
Why she’s featured: I painted her tonight.
Notes: I am thus far not very good with Helkat. I leave her out in the open, I forget she can’t move *and* shoot, I set her up poorly… Hopefully I can get the hang of her soon. She has avoided getting taken out, but hasn’t been doing nearly enough to earn her cut.
As per usual, I am hoping that being painted will make all the difference for her, and am looking forward to the next session in a couple weeks (I was unable to attend tonight).
rats east 