Awash in green blood...

Well I've made little progress modelling wise this week as I've swapped my gw brushes for a roller and have got to work on painting the bedroom

Not bad for freehand eh?

I've finished nearly half the Dwarves and nearly completed the Nurgle sorcerer.  I've lost his hand though!  Had a nice pointing finger one and i've lost it!

I've made him a staff/glave of putrification.  took a while to saw his arm off nearly taking a finger of mine with it!

Oh yeah... My secret weapon has arrived this morning.  Conversion fun for me and horror on my next enemies face :-D

Gaming news... 

I played Kieron again and lost, again... My marauders, warriors and Knights ran away.  I ask you, from peasants too!  I made mistakes and as ever Kieron played well but my dice rolling was appalling and with Kieron managing to make his 5+ ward saves consistently again meant I was well and truly trounced. Read his blog for the report

Will came over for a game at mine and it was a very amusing game with it swinging about several times.

He fielded;

A horde of night gobbos + fanatics & shaman, a horde of orcs + shaman, gobbo archers + shaman & fanatics, a huge spider with a shaman, 2 small units of spider riders, a unit of boar boyz, squig hoppers and 4 bases of snotlings and a pump wagon

I mustered

25 warriors + lvl 2 death sorcerer, 8 knights + lvl 4 Nurgle sorcerer & Hero with bsb, 5 horse, 15 marauders and my shrine

We rolled the pass scenario and set up as so

I gulped a bit at the amount of models facing me and was worried about my flanks as i couldn't deploy to protect them in the narrow space.

Turn 1
I went first and went forward as fast as I could, the horsemen took out 2 spider riders in shoowting then will charged them and I lost 2 to his one but they held.
My magic was ineffective as I rolled low and will could channel more dice than me so dispelled everything.  Wills magic saw him buff a few of his units and hex my horse.

Turn 2
Was mental in short! I went into the squigs with my warriors and everything moved up in support.
Magic I managed to cast a hex spell on the boar boyz reducing their leadership but with a miscast.  I wiped out 10 warriors in the blast and my sorcerer took a wound as well.  I quickly killed the squigs in combat
and wiped them out.
Will took out his comedy animosity die and the gobbo horde went mental shooting forward a free 8 inches toward my warriors releasing fanatics at my knights as he did so.  One bounced off my spawn causing it a wound and killed itself in the process.
The gobbo archers also thought it would be a laugh to have a go at my warriors again shooting forwards a free 8 inches and releasing more fanatics one piling straight through my warriors taking 2 out.
Will then had to charge these units at my warriors with the archers falling short but he supported them with the snotlings into my flank and his boar boyz into the rear.  Things were looking grim for the warriors...
The pump wagon smashed into my shrine causing a wound but suffering two back. The horsemen finally killed the last spider rider

As i took this picture I realised will hadn't taken hits on his boar boyz from the fanatic.  He killed 3 and they ran off!  That hex spell I got off may just have saved my warriors bacon...
In the combat my sorcerer challenged and killed the unit champion, the warriors killing 8 gobbos and leaving one snotling base on 1 wound.  I won the combat thanks to my 2+ armour saves (gods i love rolling that) and 5+ wards.  Sadly the gobbos were steadfast and stayed put.

Turn 3
The knights moved for a position to charge the spider and the marauders up the flank.  The horsemen took one for the team and charged the fanatic in front of the knights killing themselves in the process.  Their names will be forgotten almost immediately...
The warriors continued to mince goblin but still being steadfast they went nowhere.  The gobbo hero faced my sorcerer one on one and died for it.

Turn 4
The warriors finally cleaned up the gobbos and chased them down overrunning into the orc horde flank who had moved up to face the knights.  My marauders charged the archers and the knights failed to charge the spider thanks to a hex spell reducing their movement to 1!

Turn 5
The orc big boss was to afraid of my sorcerer to hit him (he gained fearsome aura after beating his last opponent) My warriors chopped up enough orcs to make them run and they lost a few more boyz as they fled through the spider. The marauders finished off the archers.  The knights failed again to charge thanks to the hex spell
Will moved his spider out of charge range and rallied the orce.  He then managed to cast a nasty big template spell that wiped out 7 knights a few warriors and a marauder!

Turn 6.

I charged the orcs and once again failed to charge the spider with my knights thanks to the hex spell.  The orcs fled off the table and I chased them down off the board.  The warriors now having gone the entire distance off the pass taking 4 units out in the process.  GRRRRR!

Will failed to get off his nasty spell this go

Turn 7 (oops we lost count in all the fun)

My marauders killed off the snotling bolt thrower and over ran into the spider the spawn couldn't close and my knights decided to watch again as they couldn't be arsed to moved very far...

In Wills turn predictably the marauders did nothing against the spider and fled.  Just for a laugh he decided to charge my shrine but we drew as neither could hurt one another.  Maybe the spider realizing my shrine as a large monster and attempting to mate with it instead.  It ended as so and a victory for me :)

Thoughts on magic
My magic this game was pathetic thanks to will having the same number of dispel dice as me or more thanks to his channeling abilities.  I got off that one spell which admittedly was useful but only worked thanks to irresistible force!
It didn't do a lot against Kieron either only really getting one good spell off.  The question is do I discard it entirely and take more warriors instead?
At near 300pts alone my level 4 sorcerer did nothing all game.  Should I just go with a lvl 2 wizard with a dispel scroll for defense?
Also with me having to challenge with them they often get beaten in combat and while I try and equip them with protection this makes them more expensive and means I can't take more stuff to enhance their magical abilities.
With my magic being quite short ranged I can't really keep them from combat in a bodyguard unit and even if i did this just puts more points into them.
Thoughts please?

At em lads!

I've been going at a fair pace this week and have painted up the Marauders.

I've again avoided a uniform as they aren't soldiers but a group of warriors out for fun and plunder.  I haven't put in as many colours as the warriors as they are less dedicated to the gods than the warriors and so wouldn't choose one deity over the other but there are some who have chosen to show such an allegiance.
I'm also planning on adding a few tattoos in the unit as well if i get time when i'm feeling particularly steady handed.

SB shield has fallen off somewhere.  I've paid more attention to them this time around as Kieron is right it does make a difference

I've painted up a test Dwarf as well.  These will be uniformed as they have chosen to worship the chaos gods and are a standing army.  They will hopefully tie in ok with the mostly black theme and the same gold embellishments.
I reckon they will stand out but that's fine by me as they are only allied to the manling army and not a part of the horde

On another note I can't get my sorcerers cloak how I want it.  Blending light colours is hard!  Hope to be done by next update...

October Targets & Report

My target for this month will be these little fellows...

That I got for my Birthday :-)  I have had a bit of a fancy for the squat ones since I was little myself and I really love these models.  Plus it will allow me to blast the crap out of annoyingly overgrown budgies & pegassi  knights rather than have them run all over the board after them.

As well as these i'll get my marauders painted up, the ogres with hopefully a 3rd model and a secret weapon if I get chance and the parts from ebay arrive in time.  Oh and a Nurgle sorcerer

Here is a quick synopsis of my battle against Dan's combat driven High Elves.  I was dreading this game as my experience against Anuerin has been to expect to take a lot of damage...

We rolled the dawn mission so had to set up strangely to how we wanted.  It didn't work out to badly for him but my 1000pt unit of knights and lord were out on the left facing nowt but a 5 man squad of light horse!

Turns 1 & 2 saw us edge closer to each other neither of us wanting to take damage from the ruins in the middle.  High elf archery proved ineffective thanks to both my chosen and warrior unit being blessed with an extra 1+ to their armour saves :-D  Also only 2 level 2 wizards faced me with defensive spells meaning I didn't take any damage from magic.
Unfortunately my rolls for the winds were poor so I couldn't enjoy a dominant magic phase but my newly established Nurgle sorcerer took a wound from each of the Elven mages.

Turns 3&4 saw the crunch happen. My knights went into the chariot and light horse, the warriors into the erm, white cloaked wimps while out on the right my marauder horse took out another unit of light Elven horse and bounced off the archers!

Unsurprisingly my knights whooped ass on the left without even being hit by the puny Elves and were charged by the mage!  It was that or flee off the board so...
The silver helms went into my shrine and the Elven general found himself charging the chosen alone as the sea guard decided extra hard chosen with 3 attacks each weren't a good choice of opponent and only inched towards them.
The General easily slew my Chosen champion in the challenge but the unit held firm.
Amazingly the shrine only took two wounds thanks to its high toughness and managed to kill enough elves in return to win the combat! In the magic phase I had managed to reduce their leadership by three thanks to grandfather Nurgle.  This helped as they failed the leadership test and fled through the spearmen losing more men as they did so!

Turn 5&6 saw my warriors finish off the white cloaked punies and decide that the bristling weapons of the spearmen didn't look that dangerous and were feeling pretty safe with a 2+ armour save and 5+ ward after.
Lots of elven dice later saw one warrior go down and with 19 attacks back and 10 elves fall they decided to let it only to be run down by the warriors.  The warriors then massacred the small archer unit
The white cloaks never rallied and ran from the battle.

The Elven general managed to slay my sorcerer in single combat but then the unit finished him off and reformed to face the sluggish sea guard who had again failed to charge to their generals aid.

Evil Lord Bashmash of the Triothi tribe decided it was such a lovely day and to add to his pressed butterfly collection so sent his knights out with delicate nets to catch some for him as he composed a sweet haiku on the beauty of the woods in front of him

So at the end I lost my Maruader horse and both sorcerers to the entire Elven army except the sea guard and a small unit of archers cowering behind them.

Lessons learnt from this battle:

1 - Rolling for extra armour on two units is amazingly useful.  Both units shrugged off all sorts of punishment

2 - Me gusta mucho Nurgle magic.  It can help me or hinder my opponent and is so simple to use

3 - Seeing rolls for bad charge distances is funny if its not me

4 - I was very lucky this battle as everything went in my favour.  I had good magic capabilities and neutralized the Elven spells that did get off with the right items.

I know my opponent made mistakes here and he was hindered by small units and bad luck but I do think I am getting to grips with my army now and how I want it to work.  Making armour saves also helps!

Who's next? ;-)

End of September

Wow this month has gone quickly! I thought I still had tomorrow to go so queue quick end post!

I won my game tonight and will post a battle report tomorrow.

The sorcerer

I am going to re-do the cloak as I want to blend it but I need to get around to painting in the daylight as I've found bulbs really distort the colour.  I also need to finish the base but can't find the flock!

I'm really quite chuffed with how he turned out but boy i find delicate models hard to paint.  They really show up my lack of painting skills with fine detail.  With all my other models so far I've barely had to use anything other than a standard brush but this guy was pretty much fine detail all the way!

I decided to add the skeleton familiar too as without him I thought the model was to emty.

Some extras.  Since seeing the new mournfang cavalry I couldn't help but think of them as potential Thunder Wolves so I bought some when they were on sale and am having a go.

Another thing this gave me was the opportunity to convert two chaos ogres so I did :)  Will get another one at some point for a nice supporting unit...

I think once they are snow based I can hide the fact that I didn't completely manage to successfully sort out the cavalry legs...

Sorry you will have to scroll down to see my other models this month but target met with a few extras as well :)

Chariots of... er... Dire?

I didn't manage to get a game in this week but I have one arranged for next week against an ogre army... Should be interesting. Methinks i'll forgo shields with my main warrior unit for extra hand weapons and hopefully chop up enough ogres before they hit back hard and negate my armour anyways...

I've finished my chariots

And assembled my marauder unit. I really don't like the heads from the boxed set with these. They are to cartoony for me so I've used the heads from the horseman set as they look a lot meaner and a lot less comic.
I've used as many spare armour parts as I could and modeled a few bits of green to make each model different. Just switching hands with the weapons as well makes a big difference to a unit.
I wanted to make the champion bigger than the rest in some way so I gave him a warriors cloak. I like to think he isn't far off going on his quest to find his chaos armour and joining the ranks of the warriors. Him as well as using some helmets and shields from the warriors tie the unit in with the warriors.

I have mounted a sorcerer to stick him in with either my knights or marauder horse as this will get him close enough to use the shorter ranged death magic.
He's from the chaos manticore boxed set and works well on a horse. The cloak gives him a lot of motion.

What's better than cheap hammering? Getting paid to make your models! Well ok i'm not being paid but I have nearly made my money back this month on the models i've bought.
I bought the manticore model for £25 and sold the manticore and lord parts on ebay for near £30.
I also sold Astoraths wings and backpack for £15. The whole model cost me £10.50!
All i need now is to sell the marauder heads I haven't used for a couple of million and i'll be rich :D

I have done some other extras which i'll show next time around along with my finished sorcerer.  On that tantalizing note I shall say ttfn...

Gaming news

2 Battles this week and victory in both!

Anuerin has written a report against the elves here so i won't repeat it...

The cheesy elf set up to sit back and shoot and had the cheek to complain that elves aren't good at anything so he had to do this!  Hang on a second though...  Hit first in combat (check) with re-rolls (check) can shoot and hit on 3s in a rank of spears and shoot as a charge reaction and still use all ranks (check)  uses extra dice in magic phase because "i'm an elf" (check) bolt thrower doesn't allow armour saves (check) Boo bloody hoo!


I was disappointed when he announced he had changed his magic law and lack of silver helms as I had armed my sorcerer with an item allowing him to steal spells so was ready to give him a taste of his own medicine and Okams razor him into the floor!  Ah well...

Wayne played his Vampire counts and I faced:
Big unit og grave guard
Big unit of Ghouls
Big unit of skellies
A Vargulf
5 Blood knights
2 Corpse carts
10 dire wolves
A vampire Lord (ulp)
Each unit had a vampire and or necromancer in it

I took
25 warriors
10 knights with my death sorcerer mounted up
16 marauders with an exalted hero for extra punch
10 chosen with my fire sorcerer
2 10*warhounds
5 marauder horse
Warshrine
Chariot

Unfortunately battery was to low on phone for pics but here a quick report.  And even though I can produce really nice graphics here are 5 second paint maps :D

Turn 1

We basically marched towards each other as neither had any missile fire.  Magic was limited for me due to the amount of magic users in his army and his vampire being able to add 5 to his dispel dice!
Basically my warriors faced up against his skellies, marauders v ghouls, knights v grave guard and everything else flit about the flanks with Waynes skirmish units.
His Direwolves charged my marauder horse and 3 died to their axes before 4 more bit the dust in combat to no losses.  Being in range of the general though the wolves held in the combat
Annoyingly (and predictably) Wayne raised a unit of zombies right before my knights.

Turn 2

The knights charged the fresh unit of zombies and the marauders went into the ghouls. My hounds also stupidly charged the vargulf and failed to wounds due to being terrified and were promptly broken and fled but not charged down.
I did manage to get off a crucial magic roll to toughen up my marauders allowing them to wound the ghouls easier but they were hitting WS 7 ghouls as the vampire lord kindly lent them his WS stats for the round!
Having the hero in there really helped though as he killed off the necromancer and the overkill points helped the marauders win the combat causing 4 more to crumple.
The knights predictably killed the zombies and my horsemen killed off the Direwolves
In Waynes turn the skellies failed a charge on the warriors.

Turn 3

My warriors went into the skellies hewing them down with ease taking no damage in return due to +1 armour from the warshrine. The knights into ANOTHER unit of zombies...  The maruaders continued to whittle down the ghouls but were losing number fast themselves and the vampire lord had a blood thirsty look in his eyes...
In waynes turn the blood knights went into my chariot and smashed it apart and the vargulf came closer to my lines from the flank after chasing down the hounds.  The grave guard attempted a charge at the horsemen who fled taken the unit out of the game for all purposes.

Turn 4

Things got interesting this round...  In my turn the ghouls got whittled down to one while I had 3 marauders standing and the hero.  I charged my hounds into the side of the grave guard to stop them going into my knights who were having to wade through yet another unit of summoned zombies!  The hounds fled but took the grave guard way out wide.
My warriors continued to knock down skellies but they had 4 left at the end of the turn still grinning in their faces.
His vampire finally went into the flank of the maruaders... My chosen got charged by the blood knights, vargulf and corpse cart.
Magic phase before combat.  In an attempt to replenish the ghoul unit wayes casts his raising spell on two dice.  Wayne (i roll 6's for fun) Poppleton true to his name rolls two sixes on them.  I laugh evilly as he rolls on the miscast table.  "Oh not to bad" says he "at least he doesn't die from it". "Erm," i reply, "Well... actually, expecting you to have shed loads of magic and hopefully a miscast I took an infernal puppet allowing me to subtract 2 from that roll meaning you now have to roll a d6, under a 4 and your general is dust.  roll of a 2 later and my gods laugh as a new play thing enters their realm!
And to add insult to injury the spell resurrects only one ghoul who dies in the resultant S10 blast anyways leaving only my hero standing next to a mound of his comrades and a pair of smoking pointy boots!

The vargulf can't survive the death of his leader and in the chosen combat they chop up the knights and cart due to being not only armed with 2 weapons but also being granted an extra attack by the gods!  Waynes face was a picture as I rolled buckets of dice at WS6 initiative 5!  Mwhahahaha.

After that disastrous round we called it a day as the only viable unit Wayne had left were his grave guard way out on the flank and I had my two big blocks left virtually unscathed

Seems I can win a straight out march forward and kill battle then.. Though I was lucky a few times especially as 2 hounds survived the grave guard to run away making them chase them right out on the flank.  My marauders were hero's against the ghouls as they really should have died.  I know the Vampire dying helped but i think i still would have won as the left flank was mine anyways and yeah more units would have been raised against me but nothing that would really hurt.

All in all a good week of battles!

Conversion clinic...

First off in gaming news I lost miserably to Kierons Bretonnians last week.  Full battle report is here 

To sum it up Kieron completely outplayed me and combined with poor magic and Kieron making an amazing amount of 5+ saves meant I got trodden into the ground.  Was as ever though a good game with Kieron letting me off mistakes as i'm still learning

Learning points from this were:

Chariots are to slow for a supporting unit.  If I'd had a quicker unit they could have covered my knights rear meaning they would have won their combat by not getting hit by the men at arms.
Don't be afraid to take a flank charge from a weaker unit if it means advancing onto the main army.  Turning to face my warriors against the Knights Errant meant they were taken out of the game and didn't make their points back
Don't chase flying units, its pointless.  Shoot the feckers (buy something that shoots)  It was like whacky races with my War Shrine and the pegasii
Sacrifice some virgins before battle to make sure my gods give me some luck!  (Though where i'll find some in Rotherham is a bit of a problem.. ;-) )

Onto modelling where i'm having a much nicer time.  First off here is my death sorcerer.  I am chuffed to bits with this model.  It was a great model to start with.  I love working with finecast, its so nice as long as you're careful

I snipped off all the blood angels iconography, re-positioned his arms having to break them into two, made his power axe not powered and remove his other hand from it.  I need to find a left hand that fits as he is a tad smaller than warriors and other space marines annoyingly.  Anyone know of one holding a skull or open handed?
I also want to add a bit more decoration to his axe

I've used the cloak from the chaos manticore sorcerer.  I tried making my own but wasn't happy with the results.  I added the icon and skulls as it looked to plain otherwise and as the model is so detailed i felt it needed something else.  I am going to print some transfers to add more detail to it once painted

I've finished the undivided chariot, just need to do the riders and finish the base

Khornate chariot on the way as well

And my marauders are being built.  Decided to go hand weapon and shield in the end.  Then I could go beardy and give them the mark of Tzeench too and get two 5+ saves.  It worked for Kieron!

Let me know any thoughts and ideas please!  'Til then...