Squad Challenge, Deadcember Pt. 1, and OWAC5 Intro

After the mid-year slack, I'm back. It seems.

 

 

For as long as I've been participating in the Old World Army Challenge (since the second one) I have also participated in a smaller challenge at the end of the year. I'm not sure of the origin. A warm-up for the January start of the OWAC? Something to keep our skills honed in the "off season"? A chance to fill in a small gap from the challenge army? Paint a small group that isn't large enough to fit the full army challenge? Not sure. I suppose I could just ask.

At any rate, the Squad Challenge is a challenge to get a squad/regiment/team of 10 figures painted in two months. Last year I painted dwarfs. I don't even remember if I completed the challenge. The year before it was half-orcs since it coincided with Orctober. This year I painted a group of sci-fi "supporting characters" in hope of further building my pool of figures for some Five Parsecs and/or other gaming. (Hopefully soon.)

These are my ten challenge figures, plus two wurms that got added along the way.

Four miscellaneous characters, three bots, two spaven, and on Fimm-In-Spaaaaace. And the space wurms.

Additionally, I painted two super simple/fast groups of antagonists. Spiders From Mars (cheap and easy until I get some actual alien "bugs") and Astro-Zombies. The former want to break up the band, while the latter want to exterminate the whole human race. ;)

A good bit of progress after a few slow months!

 

Overlapping the Squad Challenge is Deadcember -- The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. The Astro-Zombies sort of fit that theme. 

 

On to the deadicated Deadcember painting, however, I painted these wraiths that I had intended to work on last December. They're Reaper Bones figures with most of the bendy-weapons replaced.

 

I also just painted my first test figure for a potential sidequest project I've been thinking about -- Althammer skirmishes in the New World. If I can muster the patience to assemble the remaining five skeletons from Warlord, I will paint those and the big bad guy (figure from Lucid Eye.)

Looking forward to 2022, I will once again be participating in the Old World Army Challenge! For OWAV5 I will be painting.... more undead! My Introduction Post is up on the site, with more details and photos.

Spoiler: I painted the Overlord Offering for Iannick. :)

Giants to Sea Elves

Richard aka "Orclord" of Stuff of Legends posted an updated photo of some of his giant collection on a few Oldhammer FB groups and it got me thinking about the fact that I've been meaning to do the same thing. End of "Big April" seems like a good time to do it. My own collection is not nearly as large, and I don't have any where good to photograph them all, but for what it's worth...

(click to enlarge)

FWIW, the unpainted giants I still need to work on are: the Mantic giant, the Otherworld giant, and three Reaper Bones giants.



Also, following up on a request for a close-ups of the victim who is about to become lunch for the Heresy giant:

Speaking of giants... not getting any more painted this April, but prepping the next giant(s). I'm debating a head-swap on the Mantic giant -- still undecided.

I've also started prepping minis for the last two months of the Old World Army Challenge. The next two months are going to be horribly busy at work, and I will be doing a bit of travel. So finding time for painting will be challenging.

Since this photo a couple days ago, I've got the separ unit, champion, and the rest of the chariot prepped & primed. Plus I sculpted a new top for the wand on the elf witch, and primed here as well. Just the wardancers to clean & prime now.

Here's the broken wand, with a bit of wire on top to give me something to sculpt on. The idea will be to give it an oyster shell, with the globe in the other hand being a pearl.

(More) Bog Corpses

Painted a few more bog corpse zombies so I'd have enough to use as zombies for Shadow Deep. (I previously painted some as a test last year.)  I think I've got everything I need now -- just need to actually play!

Mantic Giant

My Mantic giant arrived today. It's the only thing I got from the KS. I showed great restraint.

A quick dry fit to check the size compared to some of my other giants. I happen to have the Otherworld giant on my desk, still awaiting assembly. I think they will be pretty close in size when assembled, though proportioned somewhat differently (as just about every giant seems to be.)

And another quick check against a couple of the finished giants. I think the Mantic, Otherworld, Warploque, and Ultraforge giants will be of similar size when they're all complete.

I will need to get a new group photo when those two and the Heresy giant are done. But for reference, below are a couple of previous group shots.

Bog Corpses

Finished ten test subjects. The lighting in the photos doesn't do them justice, unfortunately. I was going to leave the eyes dark, but thought they needed something to contrast with the rest of the dark color scheme. Again, going back to Mr. Saturday's minis, I liked the glowing eyes, so swiped that idea, but I wanted a fiery look to mine. Minis are built from Mantic zombie & ghoul bits.

The inspiration comes from the real world bog bodies (pic By Commander-pirx at de.wikipedia - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11778254). Some of the bodies that have been recovered are suspected of being disposed of intentionally, for a variety of proposed reasons.

At any rate, back to my Fomorians... I will present the background in a better format later, but the gist is to twist the GW Fimir story a bit and not really related (as far as I can tell) to the mythological Fomorians.

The/my Fomorians are ancient, and slow to reproduce. This is due, in part, to the fact that they multiply through ritual sacrifice and primal magics of the elements of earth and water, flesh and blood... More stolen ideas, partially from the background for the goblins in Crucible. Essentially they make a sacrifice, toss it into the bog, and hope that when they come back in a few days the body & spirit have transformed into a new Fomorian. The magic is as unreliable as it is ancient. Failed sacrifices are not a complete loss, however. Many Dirach & Meargh are able to animate (more on that later) these failed sacrifices in times of need, which have been ritually disposed of in the bogs around the Fomirian settlements.

In terms of gaming & rules... without getting into the details, my ideas are sort of undeady, but closer to what are usually classified as ghouls rather than zombies. But not really either of those. Ghouls are going to be my starting point in terms of most gaming rules, though.

Marshing On...

I didn't expect to paint the trolls so quickly, so I didn't really have any further plans for the Month of Marsh. So I'm going to jump ahead to something that has been way down low on my list of priorities but came to mind for several reasons...

Animated bog corpses. I've quickly assembled ten for a quick test paint.

I've seen something similar done before (see Mr. Saturday...) Mine will be a bit different in appearance and background.

They should be quick to paint. They can fit with my Fomorians and (possibly) with my undead. I've also realized that I could use more lightweight rank & file for the Fomorians, without resorting to the Shearl idea from the WFB Fimir. As much as I am looking forward to seeing my half-orcs on the gaming table (I've become fond of those minis!) I would have preferred a couple of small units of bog corpses for KoW this weekend.

So I think it will be bog corpses for the remainder of Marsh. Unless I decide to unleash the paint on... Goremaw!

Warriors, Beastmen, Audio Books, and Kings of War

I've been working on a few figures for other people recently.

More beastmen. I hadn't paid too much attention to the Citadel beastmen since the old RoC days, but these and the other two I painted recently are pretty nice figures.

I still have a few minor touch-ups on these medieval/fantasy warriors, and then on to six more to go with them.

Audio Books

I've discovered LibriVox. Public domain audio books. About once a week I commute to & from an aviation museum I do some work for. It's a little over an hour drive and I have listened to a few audio books before (The Silmarillion, and a lengthy interview with Robert Anton Wilson) but mostly listen to music. But now that I've downloaded an audio library, classical history it is!

I'm currently listening to Xenophon's Anabasis, which I am enjoying quite a bit. I've read/studied a lot of Roman history, but have only touched on Greek history before. So this is new to me. I have Thucydides' Peloponnesian War and Herodotus' Histories lined up next.

With this in mind, the obvious question is: when do I start painting Greeks & Persians, right?

Kings of War

I read over the first edition of Kings of War when it came out and was unimpressed. I glanced at the second edition when it came out but didn't give it much attention. But with the suicidal implosion of WFB, a lot of people have been moving on to other games, and KoW seems to be a popular one. One of my old gaming groups is among the converts, and I've been invited to play a few times (again, recently.) I've now given the free rules a read-through, and looked at a few of the free army lists. I've still got some mixed opinions

Pros & Cons: It's nice that the rules seem streamlined & simplified, but I do wonder if that was taken too far. It seems to lose a bit of depth. On the other hand, that also does make the rules pretty clear from what I can tell. Maybe not so much arguing over the rulebook as with WFB? One of the complaints I've read about from people who seem to primarily play WFB is that they don't like the fact that you don't pull off individual figures, but I think that's missing the point that the game is dealing with units as a whole, rather than individuals. That's something that a lot of other games do, as well, and I think it frees a set of rules from a lot of the oddities that stuck with WFB over the years. (So that's counts as a "pro" from me.)

At any rate, I'm willing to give it a shot, provided I can actually make it out for a few games.

A Few Bones More

Slow going, but I did just a few more skeletons. The photo makes them look a bit darker, but they look like they fit with the previous skeletons in real life.

Skeletons and Undeadish Ogres

I finished up five more bases of Mantic skeletons, and finally based the undeadish ogres (Golgfag v.2.)

King of Old and a Swarm

I counted up my Mantic skeletons and discovered I will be one base short of having a nice round number of units. So I painted up an old Citadel figure to use with them, as a leader type figure, along with one of the "emerging" skeletons from the Mantic sprues.

I also dug out an old (already painted) set of swarms to accompany the undead.

Mantic Skeletons - First Set

Painted up my first group of Mantic skeletons. They are a mix of the regular ones and the Revenants, which I thought look too similar to the regular skeletons to warrant use as some other troop type.

They are OK models for the price. I'm not a huge fan of Mantic's figures in general. But I was more optimistic with the undead after seeing photos online. Once I got them in person, and now after I painted them I am less impressed. Some of the detail is very shallow and just doesn't show up with the paint. Some of the poses are a bit awkward (a few of them reminded me of the Warlord Celts,) including the way some of them were holding their weapons. I'm not really a fan of the "expressive" (cartoon-y?) skulls, either. They're not horrible figures. And they might look better in mass numbers. I'm just not a huge fan so far.

They're also a lot smaller than I expected. They look OK next to the ancient Germans I'm using as "undeadish" and should scale up OK with Perry WotR figures that will end up on the opposite side of the battlefield. But they really look miniscule next to GW and other fantasy figures. This wasn't entirely unexpected, but the difference is more noticeable than I had thought it would be. (At least on the painting/photo table -- I'll have to see how they look on the gaming table.)