Dwarfs – Lair of the Lagomorph

Blogomorph no.2

Blogomorph, Roleplaying Games, Warhammer: The Old World

In which we explore Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, get a shield delivery, and betray some Dwarfs.

With Heroes Like These, Does the Empire Even Need Enemies

My regular gaming group and I have recently picked up our long running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WHFRP) campaign after a bit of a hiatus (we like trying new games and coming back to old favourites), and we’ve resumed our long journey through the classic Enemy Within campaign for the game. The campaign was first published between 1986 and 1989 and has been a staple of the game’s lineup since then, being reprinted for multiple editions of the game. The version we’re playing is the version published for the 4th edition of the game which is touted as the Director’s Cut of the adventure. The campaign is long, taking up 5 books (each with a companion book with extra materials for those extra keen) and it has taken us quite a while to get to book 3: Power Behind the Throne. This means we’re approaching the halfway point which is both exciting and daunting; there’s a lot more to go.

The game and the campaign are both tremendous fun, there’s a lot of that early Warhammer comedy in the books which mixed with the game’s lethality makes for a really good balance of tension and comic relief. The stakes are high, and the “heroes” (i.e. the player’s characters) somehow keep achieving great things while looking like they’re one step away from disaster the entire time. I won’t mention any details for fear of spoiling the campaign for others (and please if you’ve played it, stay away from spoilers in the comments, a few of the players do read the blog!).

I’m a big fan of what Cubicle 7 have done with this 4th edition of the game. It has some really neat mechanics such as the Advantage rule, which effectively rewards doing well in fights and gives cumulative bonuses to dice rolls as long as you keep doing well. This might sound a bit unbalanced on paper and it absolutely is, but this is a good thing. It has this great habit of making fights finish fast once a side has the upper hand which is an excellent feature. No toe to toe slog until someone runs out of hit points à la D&D here, just quick brutal battles that keep the story moving.

I can’t compare it too much to the older editions (1st and 2nd) of the game as the only other edition I’ve played was the Fantasy Flight 3rd edition, which was a complete departure from the early system. Instead of the percentile system that 4th went back to, 3rd showered you in cards and components and had you play a sort of board game to keep track of your character. I came across a video of Quinns Quest that describes it as a tabletop World of Warcraft which I suppose is pretty close. It sort of made sense at the time as I picked up new releases and slowly grew the game, but I have to say now looking at that box full of cards and tokens I have no idea where I would even start to try to pick it up again, it is absolutely overwhelming.

*Not pictured are: some more cards, more different kinds of cards, and twenty-ish softcover books.*

The good news is that sea of tokens has since been put to good use in other games; you’ve seen them on the blog used as markers for games of Silver Bayonet and Midgard.

I’ve recently managed to find a sensibly priced copy of the 1st edition of WHFRP, so I look forward to sitting down with that and reading through to see how it all started.

Shields! Shields! Shields!

As I mentioned last post I was waiting for some shields to arrive so I could finish my Dwarf Hammerer unit. These arrived about a day after I put up said post, so I can only conclude that if I want online orders to arrive sooner all I need to do is post more often.

These shields are a nice mix of the models that were around when I started the game which is early 2000s, and they’re just right for these Hammerer models. The delivery unblocked me and I quickly resumed painting the unit.

I did find myself with a dilemma though, how best to hold all these loose shields while painting them? The answer: super glue them to some sprue! This actually worked pretty well as a holder, and I managed to paint both sides of the shields easily enough this way. The shields have a small recessed circle at the back which matches up with prongs on the models. These recesses are where I tacked the shields to the sprue, so any offending gaps in the paint were nicely covered by the glue join once on the model.

So here’s the painted unit! The more eagled eyed amongst you will realise that I have nine models pictured here but only had eight shields on the piece of sprue above. If that’s you, well done you spotted that much faster than I did, as I only realised this when I was glueing the shields to the models and suddenly found myself one short…

In the end I decided the champion could have a fancy new shield instead, so I gave him one of the modern shields with the moulded decorations which I could easily just paint with the gold colour.

*The rune on the shields is the dwarves letter H, for hammerers, or Karak Hirn. It also looks like the number one which is appropriate as hammerers are definitely my number one dwarven unit.*

A discovery I made while painting these models is that paperclips make excellent lid holders for recalcitrant Citadel lids (i.e. ones that keep closing on you). I’ve seen people use those plastic cylinders you get on new brushes to prop pots open, but I always lose mine so it’s not very helpful. What I do always have on hand is paper clips, which I regularly use to unblock dropper bottles (you can see the paint on this one in the photo) and super glue tubes, and as a source of stiff wire for holding components when painting and pinning models.

On the Painting Building Table

Presumably this means I can now move on to the rest of my Dwarf units. Well there is a spanner in the works; my lovely wife bought me some models for Father’s day (last Sunday in Australia), and now I have fresh new kits staring at me from across the room and that is a hard lure to resist…

*You better believe some of the dwarfs at the back are writing about this outrage in their book of grudges.*

So yes I’m building some very cool new chaos models instead of painting my Dwarfs. The revolving door of shifting interests keeps on turning!

Blogomorph no.1

Blogomorph, Star Wars Legion, Warhammer: The Old World

In which we discover what a blogomorph is, discuss Star Wars Zero Company, and the latest in Warhammer small scale battles: Battle March!

Blogo-what?

You may be wondering what this blogomorph business is about, and quite rightly too! It’s a) my none-too clever portemanteau of blog and lagomorph, and b) my attempt at changing things up a little bit around here. I’ve been wanting to have a space to discuss gaming/modelling topics in a manner lighter than writing full posts about them for a little while now, and tacking these pieces to my normal posts about painting a unit etc hasn’t felt quite right. A good example of this was my attempt a little while back to put in some book reviews at the end of posts (the short lived From the Shelves series). While I enjoyed doing that it felt a bit weird having these posts with two quite distinct themes.

The other side of things I wanted to address was the limitation I’d placed on myself to only post finished things to the blog. While this has driven a lot of progress through my backlog of models, it’s rate limited posts to how fast I can paint. In busy periods this has meant posts dropping to once a month or couple of months in some cases.

Finally, while I quite enjoy writing and would like to do more of it, my post per finished unit format was a bit limiting in itself. There’s only so much you can write about the third unit of goblins you’ve painted in a row.

All of the above has lead me to want to try having two types of posts on the blog: 1. These blogomorph posts, which will be more regular shoot from the hip looks into things that interest me, WIP shots, and such; and 2. In-depth posts where I go deeper into one topic, such as reviewing a full army I’ve just finished, battle reports, full on discussions about games etc. These in-depth/deep dive (undecided on the name as yet), will happen when they happen (i.e. when I have something to talk about!).

The blog is turning 6 tomorrow, which is wild to think about as I did not imagine I would go on for this long. I’ve been enjoying it greatly however and this feels like a good way to welcome 6 more years! I hope you enjoy this experiment, time will tell if it sticks!

Star Wars Zero Company

Zero Company is a new strategy video game that is basically XCOM but Star Wars, and I’ve been enjoying it greatly. I get along well with this genre of turn-based tactical game (it’s effectively the video game version of tabletop skirmish games so perhaps not that surprising). That being said I’ve not played much of the XCOM games themselves which is probably an omission on my part. My favourite entries in this style so far have been the Shadowrun games that were released 10 or so years ago (I recommend them if you like this genre and/or Shadowrun as a setting).

Anyway back to Zero Company. I’ve been enjoying the story so far and the gameplay has been great fun. The battles are tough if you’re not paying attention but not crazy hard which is a nice mix to keep you not too frustrated and interested. A weird (for this genre of game) upside has been the level of the graphics and the character customisation options. The game looks good and you can change a lot of stuff about the characters which has on a few occasions lead me down a rabbit hole of tweaking characters rather than actually playing the game…

For me, a usual side effect of getting into something Star Wars-related is the rising need to paint some Star Wars Legion models. As you start the game, you get to create the leader of Zero Company (called Hawks but that’s pretty much the only fixed thing), and I ended up with a look I quite liked so decided it would be fun to paint a model in that scheme.

The new Rebel Commandos set for Legion has models that are bang on for reproducing my version of Hawks (Fatigues, Twi’lek heads, sniper blaster), so I just assembled this out of the box, no conversion needed.

A quick one-sitting paintjob later and I had successfully expunged my need to paint some Star Wars models (although for how long, we will see…). If you’ve followed the blog for a while you might recognise the basing as matching that of my Imperial army. One of my many project ideas is to make a rebel force that matches those imperials for cool Endor-themed games. That project is now one model strong!

*If you can read my horrendous hand writing you can have all my secrets!*

I’ve started taking note of my recipes in a notebook as that lets me keep proper paint swatches alongside the paint names, which makes keeping track of mixes and finding matches for paints going out of production much easier. That’s the theory at least, let’s see how it works out in practice.

On the Painting Table

Besides the Hawks model above, I’ve been busy painting some Dwarfs for Warhammer. Recently Games Workshop released an updated edition of the Warhammer Old World rules as well as a book called Battle March which has rules for playing small games of Warhammer (500-700 points). It has modified army selection rules to make games of that size interesting as well as a cool set of narrative scenarios which is right up my alley. Battle March armies are very roughly 3-4 small units and a character which makes for a nice self-contained painting project.

This seemed like a great excuse to paint up some small armies so I trawled through my collection of unpainted models and decided it was time to get paint on some of my old Dwarfs. I’m lucky enough to have quite a few of the middlehammer-era (think 2000s) Dwarfs and it’s a shame they’re still just bare metal, so this seemed like a great excuse to rectify that without being overwhelmed by needing to paint a full army.

*The upside of these WIP shots is I kind of need to keep my desk clean or the shame will end me, which is great for productivity!*

I’ve pretty much finished the Hammerer unit, but have hit a hurdle: I don’t have era-appropriate shields in my bitz box (the horror!). I’ve since found some on ebay so that problem will be solved once they arrive but it’s been a bit of a hit to motivation (which is ridiculous, as you can see I have two units of longbeards and a character I could paint while I wait).

I’ve had some good luck 3D printing bases for my Midgard models so I thought I’d try to make some for these models. I have buckets of 20mm square bases in my stash, but severely lack the 25mm the current rules ask of these models. They came out pretty good and I’m relatively confident the layer lines will be hard to see once the base rim is painted.

I’m hoping these Dwarfs will make for a nice first “Deep Dive” post when I have the whole army painted up.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for joining me in this blogsperiment, I hope you enjoy the format, it’s been fun to write and I think it hits what I’m after for these which is a nice bonus.

Playing Warhammer with Midgard Heroic Battles

Midgard Heroic Battles, Warhammer: The Old World

I’ve been talking a decent amount about Midgard Heroic Battles over the last few posts, and that’s unlikely to change as I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the game. Part of what’s made it fun for me has been the flexibility and general simplicity of the ruleset. It’s meant that for the last few weeks, units that I haven’t put on the battlefield for years have been taking part in some really fun games.

While most games we’ve played so far have been Lord of the Rings themed, we’ve been wondering if the rules would work well for games in the Warhammer setting. While we enjoy the new Warhammer the Old World rules, they’re quite complex and don’t necessarily make for a beginner friendly game. We have a few friends in our gaming group that are not wargamers (board games and roleplaying games are their usual fare), and haven’t really been interested in playing Warhammer before. They have however been enjoying the games of Midgard we’ve been playing, and have been happy to play more, which is great news for me!

This week I had a few of those friends over and we played a big game involving four armies: a loose alliance of Skaven and Undead against Dwarves and Bretonnians. Two of the players were wargaming novices, one is relatively new, and one is an enfranchised wargamer. I was running the game as a games master. Despite the lack of experience of most of the players, and the relatively large size of the game, we comfortably got through the game in an evening which is a testament to the rules.

The scenario I set up was as follows: the Skaven and Undead armies needed to hold onto a warpstone meteor while the Dwarf/Bretonnian alliance needed to get them clear of it. To spice things up some, I placed four isolated trees on the board (i.e. not on the forest bases), and after turn one revealed them to actually be treemen who were generally opposed to the idea of big battles being fought in their forests and went after whatever unit was closest. Despite this extra chaos the game was extremely close and ended with both sides within a single reputation point of each other (reputation tracks your force morale, if it’s at or below 0 at the end of the turn, you lose the game). The Skaven/Undead forces won the day, but it really could have gone either way.

Overall, the game was a success I’d say, all the players enjoyed themselves, the game was fun, and it generally felt like playing Warhammer without the big rules overhead. What was missing however was some of that Warhammer atmosphere that is generated by things such as wizards miscasting and Skaven wargear blowing up. Midgard as a low-fantasy/historical wargame does not really cater for this out of the box, but it is easy enough to add some house rules to capture this, and I’ll be doing that going forwards.

After this successful foray into playing Warhammer with Midgard, I’ve been excited about the possibilities. As I said in the opener, Midgard is a very flexible game system, and looks to be able to cater for some of the more esoteric things that can be found in the Warhammer setting and are not catered for in the normal Warhammer rules. With that in mind I’ve been reading through the late 80s/early 90s Realm of Chaos books which are probably about as esoteric as Warhammer gets (I’m sure I’ll be shown something more esoteric in the comments!), and having a great time imagining what that could look like in a game of Midgard.

Needless to say some of this energy was redirected towards miniature painting, and in this case towards this Chaos Sorcerer that I found in a case while scrounging for Chaos models for my Midgard/Realm of Chaos plans.

This is a really cool model that was released for Games Day 2010, and that I bought back then. It’s therefore been undercoated in a case for 15 years, and I was well past time I got some paint on him!

I had some fun with the skin (especially the parts with the extra limbs!). I’ve been trying to work on painting darker skin tones and I’d picked up some of the Duncan Rhodes/Two Thin Coats paints made for this purpose (Druid Flesh and Bard Skin). I really like how they worked, although I did feel they needed a touch of extra warmth so I glazed some Citadel Contrast Wyldwood over the top which did the trick.

The model has a lot of nice little details on it which were great fun to paint, the small hand holding the key to the book being my favourite.

I’m sure we’ll see this Sorcerer lead a Midgard contingent at some stage!

River Trolls

Warhammer: The Old World

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!

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.

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!

Grombrindal, the White Dwarf

Warhammer: The Old World

Small update again this week, with another model for my dwarfs! This time we have the White Dwarf himself, Grombrindal!

This is a pretty fun model, with his helmet serving as an impromptu ale flask, and quite the expression fixed on his face. This is one of the many Grombrindal models released over the years, of which I have a couple more. This one is one of the more useable in regular games of Warhammer however, being a single model on foot rather than a mini scene. I’ll use him as a Thane in the campaign games, and will have to look around see if they ever made any rules to represent the actual character in games!

I’d never seen the back of this model before and the large mullet I found there was quite the discovery!

This was a bit of a speed paint as it was done over the course of a single day, but I’m pretty happy with how he turned out and he’s happily sitting next to the rest of my dwarfs in the cabinet.

I’ve now had a nice little break from blocks of infantry, with the last few posts focussing on terrain and characters, but break over and I’m back to painting ranked models!

A Damsel

Warhammer: The Old World

Back relatively quickly this time with some more progress for the Border Princes campaign in the form of a character model (hence the speedy update!).

This model is a classic Brettonian Damsel model, one of my favourite Warhammer models ever, and I loved painting it. This sculpt is very detailed and fine, and after admiring it in the pages of Games Workshop publications for so many years it was a pleasure to see it in person.

When I started painting it I quickly gravitated towards this red hair/green dress combo, having pictured Merida from the animated movie Brave and deciding that would be a good look for this model.

I tried to take special care around the face, having found my usual face army painting process resulting in rather rough masculine faces that would not suit this model. I ended up working my way down rather than up as I would usually do. I started with GW’s Kislev Flesh as a base coat (this is my usual final highlight for caucasian skin tones), and glazed reds in she shadows and on the cheeks to shade and give a bit of life to the model. I used Vallejo Scarlet Red and GW Contrast Volupus Pink in turn, both very watered down for some very thin glazing.

The rest of the model was done much faster, with the hair done with a mix of red and yellow GW contrast paints to start with and then layered with regular acrylics (to the extent that almost none of the contrast shows through).

For the dress I wanted a slightly satiny look, so I highlighted my green basecoat by mixing in some pale blue a couple of times and placed some fairly harsh highlights to give that shiny material look.

Overall given the time taken I’m very happy with the result!

Another small piece of additional work went into printing and painting up some movement trays for my painted dwarfs units, which you can see below:

Three Years Already!

September marks three years since I’ve started this blog (which feels crazy to me, can hardly believe it’s been that long). This post will also mark 120 posts on the blog which is not bad going!

To celebrate and mark the occasion I decided that my trusty header that had served me well all this time needed an overhaul.

I spent some time this afternoon putting together a collection of stuff I though looked neat and photographing it to use as a backdrop for the header. I then set about sorting out the text, and ended up with something that definitely has a Stranger Things crossed with Warhammer vibe, but there are worse influences out there!

I’ve also decided to make this a little bit more official and finally get a proper domain for the blog: http://lairofthelagomorph.com. I’m treating this as a bit of a reward for myself for having stuck to this blogging thing for 3 years, here’s to many more!

Slayers!

Warhammer: The Old World

It’s been a bit of a while between updates, painting this unit was slow for a couple of reasons: as I mentioned last time around I’m back in the office mostly which has cut down on my painting time, but more importantly I took my time on these!

This is one of my “holy grail” units, Troll slayers! Dwarves were my introduction to Warhammer, and I spent a lot of time over the years looking at the models in the pages of my army book (all I could do, 14 year old me definitely could not afford full units of metal models!). I got my hands on a lot of metal dwarf models a couple of months ago off a friend that was wanting to sell them off, and I’ve been greatly looking forward to painting them.

Troll Slayers can have multiple “Champion” type models and I decided to include two in the unit. The leftmost model in the photo above is the one that came with the models I just bought, and the rightmost is a model I’ve had since those early days, finally getting painted. Both very cool sculpts.

I had a bit of fun with the banner, the runes on the left scrolls spell out I KO TROL. The book has a horn symbol on it as a call back to this army’s origin: Karak Hirn – The Horn Hold.

I also had a lot of fun painting the troll head mounted on the banner. The blue makes for a nice contrast with all that orange!

These Troll Slayers mark a bit of a milestone for my Dwarfs, they take the army up to 1000pts which is the size we settled on for this campaign. So here’s a photo of everything I’ve painted so far for them! I’ll likely paint up some more models (I own plenty more now!) for the army, but it’s ready to go as it is and I’ll focus on the other factions for now.