Dwarven Cannon

With my newly refound ability to paint, I’ve been looking for things to paint (which I’m not short of) and where better to direct that energy than at a new project rather than work towards finishing one of the many existing ones I have!

I got a book in the mail last week I’ve been looking for for a while, and said book triggered a flurry of conversation between my regular gaming partner and I about campaigns in the Warhammer world. The book in question is The General’s Compendium, a book published during the 6th edition of the game which contains a lot of ideas for what we now call narrative games, including a whole three ways to run wargaming campaigns. I read the book cover to cover over the last few days, and I really want to run a campaign now!

One of the map-based campaign systems in the book has the factions involved in the campaign have “banners” on the map, each representing an army. Rather than tracking army composition, the players just pick a game size they want for the campaign and each time enemy banners meet on the map, a game of Warhammer is played at the size specified at the start. The players are free to alter their army lists between games, that being rationalised away by reinforcements and units being shuffled between banners.

The details are still fuzzy, but the leading idea for our campaign is to each have a number of factions under our control. As we are just two and that will be a lot of games and a lot of painting, we decided to keep the point size for the banners to 1000 points. The opportunity to paint multiple small armies is one that I very much welcome, and here’s the start of that:

This cannon and its crew are models from the Battle For Skull Pass starter set which was released for the 7th edition of the game. I’ve had these dwarves for quite a long time now, and in fact dwarves were my first ever Warhammer models way back when (over 20 years ago)! It’s one of my biggest Warhammer regrets to not actually have a painted dwarf army considering how long I’ve owned some of these models. Time to fix that!

I decided to go with the Karak Hirn colour scheme (i.e. green), as that was the studio army that was done up in the army book back then, and I have fond memories of looking at those pages back in the day. It’s also the scheme that I used for that first box of Dwarf Warriors I got at the time.

Most of the painting was done using contrast paints as a base coat, with the exception of the green tunics which these models acted as a testing grounds for. I wanted to make sure I matched the green of the studio paint job back then, and luckily for me the army book had a nice guide on how to paint it … with 20 year old paints. Luckily I was able to match the paints with some in my collection, and it’s quite simply Vallejo Heavy Black Green as a base coat followed by successive highlights of that same colour with more and more Scale75 Sherwood Green. I’ll do up a proper painting guide when I paint up the first block unit and have finalised how all of this is going to look.

Anyhow that’s it for this update, these models were very quick to paint, upside of their relative lack of detail due to being ~15 year old single piece plastic models. I have plenty more from that starter set to get through, so expect some more stiffly posed dwarves to grace these pages soon!