Border Princes – Lair of the Lagomorph

River Trolls

With some leave over the Christmas break I’ve had a bit more time to paint (and game!) and have managed to get through a unit that I’d applied a basecoat to back in September-ish: River Trolls!

I’ve had these models for quite a while. I originally bought them to make Chaos Trolls back in the early 2010s and instead left them unbuilt for 10 years. It’s therefore nice to have them done for this latest project.

The models themselves are quite fun to paint as they have a decent amount of detail, much of which is quite characterful (including the infamous troll vomit!).

For units that are relatively unique in armies (i.e. that I won’t have to paint again) I like to experiment a bit with my painting. In this case I played around with oil washes in a slightly different way than I usually do. Normally I dilute my oils heavily with thinner, apply, blast with the hairdryer for a minute and get wiping the raised areas away with a sponge. I’ve had issues in the past with oil washes looking but not actually being dry by the time I varnish the models and found a few months later that the model has gone a bit tacky. Luckily this is easy to fix with a fresh coat of varnish. Here instead I went for a heavier wash (less diluted) and let it sit for a day or so before touching it. I was a bit worried that would limit my ability to wipe off the excess wash, but those fears were unfounded, and in fact I found it easier to get nice gradients with the wash in this way. To make sure the wash was dry before continuing, I left the models for another day or so, monitoring the areas where the wash had pooled the most. It’s a time consuming process but the results are worth it. Luckily for me I had something else to paint while I was waiting, which I will show later!

I wanted a cold green for these models to match their “riverness”, so I went for a basecoat of Vallejo Game Color (VGC) Heavy Blackgreen, and progressively mixed in more and more Vallejo Model Color (VMC) Pastel Green. The red fins are VMC Mahogany Brown, highlighted with a mix of the same brown and VGC Dead Flesh. The hair/fur is a mix of VMC Dark Sea Grey and VMC Black, highlighted with a mix of VMC Dark Sea Grey and VMC Pastel Green. The teeth/nails were a basecoat of VMC English Uniform, highighted with VGC Dead Flesh. The leather was VMC Chocolate brown, highlighted with a mix of the same and VGC Dead Flesh. All of these received the oil wash discussed above, which was a mix of Abteilung 502 Midnight Blue and Brown Wash oil paints.

Overall I’m very happy with these, nice addition to my Orcs and Goblins army.

As I said in the opening lines, I got some gaming in too this break, with a campaign game for our Border Princes campaign. The campaign was on a bit of a hiatus after the back end of the year got very busy for most of us (including a few weeks where 3 of us were out of the country!). The next match due was my Dwarfs against the Lizardmen, battling over a major crossroads. The game was a lot of fun and as a result I completely forgot to take photos! The outcome was our first draw of the campaign so far, which results in both armies retreating from the area. Here’s the campaign map at the end of Turn 6.

We’re currently planning our moves for the next turn, so hopefully I should have some updates soon.

One thing that happened during the game is I tried out the new engineer rules from the Dwarfs Arcane Journal. These allow you to take a Sapper Engineer, which allows all kinds of things such as entrenching your artillery, and booby trapping the battlefield. I equipped said engineer with a handgun inscribed with some of the new ranged weapon runes also found in the book. He then proceeded to cause more damage single-handedly than most of the other units I had in the game! I decided that meant he deserved a proper model and set about to making one as there is no Sapper Engineer model in the range.

I used an old metal dwarf handgunner (one of the first models I ever bought!) which has a really cool dragon head muzzle on his handgun. This looked appropriate as a runic handgun, and I also liked the practical attire he was wearing. One thing that was missing was anything that screamed “sapper”. The distinguishing mark for a sapper in the Napoleonic era (at least for the French army) was the carrying of a great big axe, but a dwarf carrying an axe just blends in so I went for a spade instead.

I wanted to accentuate the digging aspect so I tried to make it look like he’s taking potshots while digging a trench. Hopefully that comes through!

Fanatics!

Warhammer: The Old World

It’s been almost two months since the last post, probably the biggest gap in a while! It’s been a rather busy period family-wise (lots of birthdays in my family in July/August) and work-wise so I haven’t gotten much painting time lately. I’ve also chosen this period to paint a rather large unit of night goblins for my Orcs and Goblins army, so rather than wait another month to post something I decided to take a break from the big unit and paint up some supporting models, namely these fanatics!

For those of you unfamiliar with these rather fun models, fanatics are Night Goblins that have consumed a concoction of “special” mushrooms that give them the strength and willpower to twirl about while wielding oversized flails. They are hidden in Night Goblin units and get released when enemy units get close.

These models are older metal versions that I’ve had for quite a while now, so nice to get some paint on them. They are painted much like the rest of the army, although with more black cloth! For the recipes, check the first post on the army, which featured a Night Goblin perched atop an Orc Warboss!

That’s it for painting updates, but some campaigning happened since the last update on that so here is where things stand.

We had a win each for the Beastmen and Ogres in Turn 5, with the Ogres capturing the Beastmen’s home territory as a result of the first battle, but the beasts held their own in the second battle, scattering the Ogre army back to its own home territory.

The moves for turn 6 have been planned and we have one battle this round: my Dwarfs against the Lizardmen encroaching on my territory from the south!

Here’s hoping I can get through this busy period soon and resume more frequent posting!

Goblin Wolf Riders – Part 1

Warhammer: The Old World

Back this week with more models for my Orcs and Goblins army: some Goblin Wolf Riders!

These are classic models (late 90s I believe!), which have been re-released as part of the current set of Warhammer Old World releases. This might be laziness on GW’s part, but I’m loving the fact you can buy some of these models without having to go through exorbitant eBay prices! These are the models that were current when I started the hobby, and couldn’t afford them at the time so this is very much an exercise in nostalgia for me!

I really enjoyed painting these, the goblin riders are so characterful and the old style “big” detailing is a joy to paint. For the wolves I tried something a little bit different. I really wanted a nice gradient on the furs so I basecoated them using the airbrush, starting with a cream colour all over then doing narrower and narrower bands of darker browns over their backs. I chickened out of doing highlights over this gradient so I decided to use oils to shade the furs so I could wipe them off of the raised areas. You can see the effect in the photo below.

I think that worked out pretty well, it’s not quite as clean as properly highlighting things, but it is much more expedient which is exactly what I’m after when painting army models. I have a second unit of these to paint up for the army, so I’ll be reusing the technique although I will be changing the colours to have some grey wolves for those.

For the Goblins themselves, I reused the recipes I laid out last post for the Warboss, so check that out if you’re interested!

Now I promised a couple of posts ago to post some photos of the first games of our Border Princes campaign and promptly forgot to include them in the last post, so here they are, better late than never!

If you remember the last update, my Dwarfs were attacking the Fortress at the center of the map, defended by the Bretonnian force I’d painted up for this purpose. As I was the attacker, one of the other players stepped in to play the defenders and we had a siege game!

The initial setup: two blocks of dwarf infantry pushing the siege tower and ranged units on the hill. On the defending side the walls are occupied by archers and men-at-arms, and surprising the attackers the unit of knights deployed outside the walls!

*The defenders look on as the attacking forces assemble.*

*The knights form up … outside the gates!*

The cannons started shooting the gates, failing to do much and one of them misfired even with the engineer there to give it a re-roll! Luckily it only had to skip a turn, losing a war machine this early in the game would have been dreadful! The Siege tower was pushed forward by the dwarf infantry. On the defending side the knights advanced, resolved to chop that siege tower to scrapwood with their axes! On the walls the archers started shooting at the siege tower and managed to inflict some damage to it (presumably some critical ropes cut!). The following turn the knights managed to close in on the tower and almost destroyed it in combat!

*The knights close in on the siege tower… and start hacking!*

The dwarfs did not take kindly to this attempt to cut down their handywork and retaliated, closing in on the knights. The Demon Slayer and his rune axe made short work of the knights, but the damage was done, the siege tower on a single wound was more of a liability than anything else at this stag. The dwarfs abandoned it, taking a page out of the Knight’s book and deciding to use their own axes on the fortress gate.

Under a hail of arrows the Dwarfs approached the gatehouse and got to work hacking down the gates. The cannons had finally started doing some damage to the gates and the rune axe of the Demon Slayer crashed through the wood of the gates soon enough.

Once inside the walls, a desperate melee started between the Dwarfs and the Men-at-arms led by the Baron started. The combat was inconclusive, but the last turn had arrived and the Dwarfs won the day, having taken the gatehouse and slain the knights for no full units of their own lost (although as you can see above those archers did a lot of work on those units!).

This battle resolves turn 4 and the map above shows the state of things as the turn ends.

The players made their moves for turn 5, and we have two battles lined up for this turn! Both feature the Ogres and the Beastmen, with the Ogres attempting to seize the starting location of the Beastmen, and the Beastmen trying to take the river section off the Ogres.

The defense of the Beastmen home territory has already been fought, although unfortunately I did not get to take many photos.

*The battle was fought in a heavily wooded board, with the beast’s herdstone as the primary objective.*

*Things got very heated up in the area surrounding the herdstorne as both armies maneuvered to capture it.*

*Despite a desperate attempt by the beasts to reclaim their herdstone the Ogres won the day.*

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this longer than usual post! Plenty of gaming action in the coming months as this campaign gets played out, and I hope to be able to photograph most of it!

Siege Preparations

Warhammer: The Old World

As I mentioned last week, we’re preparing for a siege game as the opening battle in our Border Princes campaign. Last week’s post covered the last of the defenders, and this week’s will cover the preparations I made to the attacking force: my Dwarfs!

As you can see in the photo above I decided that I needed more firepower! I painted two extra cannons this week to breach the gates of the fortifications, which is one of the main objectives of the scenario.

I painted the two cannons different colours to add a bit of variation to the models, considering this is the third of this cannon model I have in the army now. I picture dwarfs as being more artisanal craftspeople and therefore making the cannons as they see fit rather than follow a set pattern.

Of course the crews also being one piece models there is no variation in them, so once again I used colour to differentiate them, mostly through the beards but also by changing the colour of some of the clothes.

While the cannons attempt to breach the walls, I have another way to cross the walls: a siege tower!

I built this a while back and haven’t had the need until now to paint it. This siege game is the perfect excuse to get it finished and on the table!

The tower itself is built out of balsa wood, with the wheels from the Skaven warp lightning cannon kit. The ladders are 3D prints I did a long time ago for the This Is Not A Test games we were playing back in 2021. They ended up fitting rather nicely here!

I kept the tower rather faction agnostic so that it can be used for any siege game, it is probably less well constructed than Dwarfs would like, but much better constructed than Orcs could manage!

The platform at the front of course pivots, ready to come crashing down on some battlements and disgorge its occupants! I’m planning on filling it with dwarf Troll Slayers, so the above shot is probably a preview of the game to come!

The game is tomorrow and I’ll endeavour to take some photos that I’ll post here.

Knights of Malko – Part 1

Warhammer: The Old World

The walls of Malko need manning, for vengeful dwarfs are about! If you’ve been following the last year or so of posts on the blog you’ll know that I’ve been painting models and terrain for a Warhammer campaign set in the Border Princes region of the Old World. One of the armies I painted for this campaign is a small force of Bretonnians, not as a player controlled faction, but rather to act as a roadblock to players attempting to take the central map section: the town of Malko.

Alongside the new set of rules for Warhammer Old World an army list covering Bretonnian Exiles was released, which was both timely and very useful for adding flavour to this small army. The army list however requires the inclusion of a regiment of Knights of the Realm, either mounted or on foot. Horses not being particularly useful atop castle walls, I decided to opt for the foot version. With the new plastic foot knights kit being released a few weeks back (Australia has been getting delayed releases for all Old World stock unfortunately), I set about remedying my lack of knights.

These new knights are very cool models (Those axes are monstrous though! Talk about heroic scale!), and were a) fun to put together, and b) fun to paint! They are quite tall compared to older models, and my poor general is definitely “petit” next to them.

The box art for these and the transfer sheet that came with the box are geared towards the uniform look that Games Workshop have been proposing for Bretonnians in this era of the Old World, where the knights wear the livery of their lord. I opted for the old style rainbow knights where the knights wear their own colours, and regiments look like bowls of skittles. I was helped along there by having an old Bretonnian transfer sheet which had a lot of different heraldry.

Needless to say there was no batch painting these, I painted them one by one which was rather fun and a lot less monotonous than usual unit paint although it was a lot slower. You might notice that there are two main bodies in the photos above (barring the command models that is). There are five distinct bodies in the kit, which are repeated four times for a total twenty knights. I’ve only painted half the box so far (enough for the campaign army, the other half will come when I take the army to 1000pts), and to avoid repeating colours on the same bodies I made sure I painted the knights with the same bodies next to each other. This makes these first ten a bit samey, but hopefully as a unit it’s not too noticeable.

If you remember I opened this post with a mention of Dwarfs being about? This was not merely flavour, but a true representation of what is happening in the campaign. That’s right the campaign has finally started after all this preparation (just about a year’s worth!).

I’ve been recording the player’s moves on a digital version of the map that I drew way back in April 2023.

There are five of us, using the following factions (clockwise from top left): Dwarfs (green), Ogres (magenta), Beastmen (red), Orcs and Goblins (black), and Lizardmen (teal).

We’re up to turn four now, I’ve included the moves for turns one though four below.

Turn four is still in progress, because as you can see my Dwarfs have attacked Malko, and we need to play out that game, which was dependent on me getting these very knights painted. The campaign has been on hold since that happened, but now the knights are done we can resume!

I’m looking forwards to seeing these knights on the table, although I won’t be controilling them as one of the other campaign players will be playing them as my Dwarfs try to get into the city! Should be fun, and I’ll try to remember to take some photos of the game for the next post!

The Geistenmunden Hills

Terrain, Warhammer: The Old World

It’s been a fair while between posts, over a month in fact! Over this period I’ve been on holidays and busy with work so haven’t had much time to get things painted, but I’ve still been chipping away in the background. Here’s something I’ve been working on for a little while: a set of terrain for the Geistenmunden Hills area of the Border Princes campaign map.

As you can see from the illustration, this is going to require some barrows! Luckily for me back over the Christmas break I’d ordered some terrain from https://www.fogoumodels.co.uk/ including a set of resin barrow entrances (well not so lucky, I ordered these for this very purpose!).

There are some other bits and bobs there that I’ll get to painting at some stage. Overall the quality of these models is excellent, the stone textures are really nice. I’d been waiting for an excuse to order from them for a while, and this was it!

Entrances are all well and good, but they need some burial mounds attached to them, and that’s what I busied myself at next. I took some photos of the process so I thought I’d make this post a bit of a tutorial.

I started by cutting some rough shapes out of MDF for the bases and matching smaller shapes out of insulation foam to make the main shape of the hills. I also cut a notch out of each of the hills to make the tunnels behind the entrances. You can see said notch in the smallest hill at the top of the pile. I then covered the undersides of my foam shapes with PVA glue and glued them down, and weighed them down with some small weights.

Next step was to put a roof on my hills. For this I used foamcore cut to match the hills. I also glued this down with PVA glue, but before I did this I painted my “tunnels” with some dark brown paint as I wasn’t going to be able to get to these once the entrances were glued on.

Once the glue was dry (read a few months later!) I carved my hills using a snap blade/retractable blade knife, with a special focus on making sure the entrances lined up neatly with my hills. For the big hill the entrance was taller than my foam assembly so I added some cork pieces to create a gradient to match the entrance. I used masking tape to patch any gaps, and glued the entrances down to the MDF using super glue (watch the foam doing this, super glue melts it!).

Following on from this I used Sculptamold (plaster with paper fiber mixed in) to cover the foam forms and blending in the entrances, taking care not to cover them up. This added some variation to the shapes and smoothed everything down, making them look much more like hills.

That’s it for the build side of things, now onto painting!

I don’t really have photos of the painting process apart from this one. I’m finding terrain has been a good fun way to get my son to join into the hobby side of things. He’s 3 and miniatures are a bit too small, but he’s fine getting some paint down on larger objects (including himself)!

Once the base colours were down, I gave the entrances a few drybrushes of greys and some green and brown washes to add a bit of colour in there. Once that was done I covered them using the flock mix I’ve been playing with for a while, a mix of Woodland Scenics foams and GW static grass.

Here are the finished barrows:

The Geistmunden Hills scenario calls for a piece of terrain to sit in the center of the board, and they suggest amongst other things a stone circle. This appealed to me, and I used some pine bark I had lying around to make an altar of sorts surrounded by standing stones. I painted these to match the stone of the barrows.

Overall here’s how these all fit on a 6ft x 4ft board:

These were lots of fun to put together, and I’m excited to use them in games. The motivation for these was this Warhammer campaign, but I can easily see using these for historicals or Middle-Earth games.

Until next time!

Dwarf Warriors

Warhammer: The Old World

After all these diversions painting Wood Elves, I’m back in the realm of trusty axes with some more Dwarfs!

These are the old Battle for Skull Pass starter set models, which are quite basic one piece models (hence the flat poses!). The upside of this is detail on them is limited and they’re quite fast to paint.

Painting-wise there is nothing groundbreaking on these, still using the same recipe as the unit of Miners that kicked this all off. It’s quite a fast scheme and looks fine on the table!

A big part of the drive to get these models painted was to make this army legal under the newest ruleset. I was a bit light on core units, so a small block of warriors filled that void nicely.

You may notice these are on a spaced out movement tray, while my previous units were close together. The new edition of the game has dwarfs sitting on 25mm bases rather than the classic 20mm, so rather than rebasing all these, I knocked up some movement trays in tinkercad that add the missing 5mm around the models and printed them on my filament printer. I did this for all my current units, which means it’s a good time for an army photo!

Having all this painted up gives me far more than I need for the campaign which means I’m good to go on that front which is very exciting!

I should have some terrain for the campaign done up soon, so I’d expect that to be the next post!

Bolt Thrower

Warhammer: The Old World

I’ve been on a small holiday this weekend, taking Friday off work and going up to Broome for a few days, which made for a lovely break. As an aside I really recommend going there if you ever get the chance, it’s quite an amazing location. I got back tonight and found I had the urge to get back into some painting so I finished off some reinforcements for my Dwarfs!

I’d actually started painting these a couple of weeks back and had the mostly finished by the time we left for Broome so there wasn’t much to do to get them finished up, but still nice to be able to to call them done!

This is a metal model from the range refresh Dwarfs got in late 6th edition Warhammer, which dates it to around 2005 I think. It’s a nice model, and I really like the crew although the bolt thrower itself was a bit fiddly to put together as multipart metal models tend to be.

There are some fun details on the, models such as the bolt held up by the middle crewman which has a rune from the game – Flakkson’s Rune of Seeking – carved into its tip (bonus to hit against flying creatures for those of you that are wondering!).

Painting-wise, these models are much like the rest of the Dwarf army, that is they follow the scheme I presented back in May.

It’s nice to add some more models to my Dwarf army, which I will be growing over time as I get through painting up the collection I purchased a while back. I do really enjoy painting Dwarfs, which is a good thing as I have quite a few more to paint!

The Warrens

Terrain, Warhammer: The Old World

It’s been a little while between updates, work has been rather busy and painting time has suffered as a result, but I’ve still been busy in the background! Quite a few models started over the last month, and unfortunately not many finished! Hopefully they will grace these pages soon, but for now here’s something I started this weekend and finished up early this week.

If you remember the map I drew for the Border Princes campaign, you might remember an area called “The Warrens”, that had a scattering of tall stones pictured in the area. This area has a special scenario associated with it (aptly named Rock Labyrinth!) that requires the board to be covered in rocky outcrops. This makes movement very difficult for ranked up regiments as you might imagine, and the scenario allows normally ranked units to fight in skirmish formation to ease their passage through the board.

The scenario consequently requires a great many rocks to be placed on the battlefield, many more than I had access to in my terrain collection so I decided to make up a batch for it.

These rocks are carved blocks of polystyrene, roughed up with a large wire brush and covered in homemade texture paint (mix of PVA glue, paint, sand, and bicarb soda). This texturing stage I did with my 3-year-old son who greatly enjoyed himself (He somehow got some on his back despite my best efforts to cover him with an apron!).

The goal was to have enough of these to play the Rock Labyrinth scenario on a 4ft by 4ft board, appropriate for the game size we’ll be playing during the campaign. The photo above shows them on a board of that size. It looks pretty cramped which is just right, mission accomplished there I’d say!

Turns out these rocks make for some fun backdrops for miniature photography so I couldn’t resist posing some models amongst them.

Here’s some proper dwarven terrain!

These were really fun to make, if a bit messy (I had the vacuum running while I was carving and still got polystyrene balls everywhere!). I look forward to playing some games using them, and I’m sure you’ll see them in the background of miniature shots in the near future.

Paladin

Warhammer: The Old World

Back this time around with another character model, and in this case it’s the model that takes me to 500 points of Bretonnians! This rounds out my small defenders of Malko force, a small army that will defend the central town in our Border Princes campaign.

This model is (I think!) an old Questing Knight, which I’m using as a Paladin with the Virtue of Empathy (fights on foot with the peasants!). I really like this model and wanted to save it for last for this small force of defenders of Malko.

In my last post I showed a boar’s head on the men-at-arm’s banner, representing their lord’s heraldry. This model is said lord so he of course needed a boar’s head on his shield. I think the version I painted on his shield is an improvement over what I had on the banner which is the right way around!

Just like for the Damsel I went with a richer green for this model, to make him stand out from the peasant soldiers which have a much more earthy green. The yellow is also more saturated on him than on the other models in the army for the same reason.

As he marks a milestone for the army (and in fact all I need to paint for the campaign), it’s time for a group photo!

It’s nice to see them all together, and this now means I have the minimum I need for the campaign across the three armies (1000pts of Dwarfs and Vampire counts and the 500 points of Bretonnians). This of course doesn’t preclude me adding more to them, but now the blocker to the campaign shifts to the terrain we need for the locations on the map, so I might spend more time on terrain in the short term.