Warriors of Chaos – Lair of the Lagomorph

Blogomorph No.3

In which we get crafty, get some paint on a chaos model, and do some dwarven engineering.

Figures for the Whole Family

Last weekend saw me do some unusual miniature “painting” with my son. The miniatures were paper and the paints… colouring pencils!

I came across these paper minis a little while back, but only just clicked that they would be great fun to print out and put together with my son. We had a great time colouring, cutting, and glueing them together and ended up with a nice collection of figures and an extremely messy table.

The models are by Zhu Industries over on itch.io for those of you that are interested. I think they look really cool (I really like the art style) and they’re made really well. It’s relatively easy to follow the instructions and all the fold markers are bang on so that you end up with double sided models that are properly aligned.

My son is 6 and has had a few shots at painting “regular” models, but he’s been more engaged in colouring these; I suppose it’s a much more familiar medium for him. It’s not like this is just for kids either, these are very viable alternatives for playing skirmish games if you want to avoid the expense, or don’t have the space for regular models, or just like the look of them. I have to admit even after my son decided he wanted a break a few hours in I still kept on colouring and cutting away…

Black Armour

Last post you saw me betray my Dwarven Battle March army by getting distracted by some very cool new chaos models. I managed to get said distraction painted over the weekend after a bit of colour scheme pondering. I ended up on what I think is quite a menacing look in straight black armour, leaving the trim also black to avoid the more usual chaos all shiny trim look.

The colour scheme pondering I mentioned above was done in the way I usually start (but not always end): looking through books. I quite like flicking through art and design books for inspiration for colour schemes, and while that is not always a successful process, in this case the books delivered.

I started with this very cool Japanese book that is just a massive collection of colour schemes and found a set of colours that piqued my interest. The top one is what caught my eye first, but the second one seemed much more useable as it was a more complete set of colours.

I then turned to art books, and decided to start with a very nice book of Paul Bonner’s art. You might know him from early Warhammer 40k art, or the plentiful gaming art he’s done in the years since. In this case, his cover art for a book in the Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner‘s Trudvang range caught my eye. I quickly realised that it’s pretty much the bottom colour scheme I’d found in the other book! The stars had aligned and I was locked in.

This artwork is just very cool, I found the stark blue/black armour against the red/orange background really striking, and looking a bit deeper the range of browns and other secondary colours really complement the overall feel. It’s not just the colours that grabbed me, the fact the riders’ armour is all one colour, with only reflections highlighting all the details makes them look extremely imposing and threatening which is perfect for the model I was painting. Plus it meant painting black with Vallejo Dark Sea Blue highlights which is my absolute favourite way to paint black (as an example my Darth Vader).

This is not a particularly quick colour scheme to paint as there is a lot of edge highlighting to do which I do find a bit tedious when doing it en masse, but quite satisfying when tackling one model at a time. The model took around 2 hours from start to finish which means I can do one of these in a nice painting session. I think I might do more model by model or small batch painting in the future. It’s definitely slower than batch painting 10 or more models at a time but a lot less of a grind.

On the Painting Building Printing Table

Good news for Dwarf fans, after my brief dally with the forces of evil I’ve jumped back into my Dwarfs. After the Hammerers it’s time to make a dent into the units of Longbeards. I’ve decided to go for smaller batches after my experience with the Chaos Warrior and have picked out 4 as a nice small batch size.

Just like the Hammerers were, these models are sculpted ready to be holding shields so I tapped into my new shield supply and decided to go for these smaller shields. Unlike shields I used last post, these originally came with icons on the sprue which were meant to be glued onto them. As a result, they have some handy locating holes on them, which given I don’t have said icons I needed to cover up.

I decided this might be a job for 3D printing, although I expected it to be a bit of a challenge given the size I’d have to print these at (the shields are 9mm diameter), and the fact I only have a filament printer which isn’t renowned for fine details.

The vector drawing
Extruded into a 3D model
Ready to print!

The design process was quite straightforward in that I knew I needed to play to the strength of a filament printer, which is to print lines. To that end I decided to go for a simple embossed horn shape. I first drew it up in a vector program (Affinity Designer) then exported to SVG and imported into a 3D tool (Tinkercad) and extruded into a 3D shape. I then exported that as an STL and imported it into the slicer software for my 3D printer (BambuStudio).

It took me a few iterations to get something that would print ok. The models are so tiny I got a fair few that just came unstuck during printing so I had to add a raft to the print and even then the whole raft lifted off! Some more refinement required but at least I have some useable prints now.

After my shield counting blunder last post, a few of you may be amazed I’ve done it again and only have 3 shields for four models! Luckily for me one of the four is the champion model who doesn’t carry a shield. Crisis averted.

PLA filament plays pretty well with the plastic glue we use on our models so I was able to use that to glue my new icons down. As an added bonus as it melts the icon a bit it, it smoothes out any rough edges left from the printing or raft removal process, much like you can use plastic glue to smooth out models after sanding or scraping mould lines. The end result is not perfect by any stretch, but I think it should look good after painting. I guess we’ll find out!

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!