Back again with more forest spirits, this time Tree Kin, smaller than Treemen, but bigger than Dryads!
I’ve had half of these models for quite a long time now, as part of the wood elf army I put together around 2007. The other half I recently inherited from a friend who generously gave me his. Both sets needed some care after years of neglect, but nothing a trip in the stripping bath and some fresh glue couldn’t fix! My models were built as is, but he’d done some cool conversions on his to spice them up a bit (there only being 3 variants, it’s nice to have some extra variety in a unit of 6!).
I painted these in the same manner as my Dryads and Treemen, hitting them with the airbrush in random patches of greens, browns, and blues, then highlighting them as guided by this eclectic mix. See those posts for more detail on this.
These models are covered in little critters (called spites!), which were quite fun to pick out in various colours. I decided to stick to a blueish/greenish range for these to make them relate to each other while still having some variation.
As I’ll be moving on to the elvish side of the army now, I thought it would be fun to have a family portrait of all the forest spirits I’ve painted so far.
I won’t be able to run all 4 treemen till I paint a lot more models for the army, but I’m planning to run one in the first thousand points. I suppose I can rotate them between games for now! As I said above I’ll start painting elves next, and have some archers ready to start painting now. Presumably those will for the focus of the next post unless I get distracted which is always a possibility!
The Old World release has had me going around in circles reading, getting excited about an army, army list writing, model building, model painting, rinse and repeat for another army. So I’ve started a lot of things but not finished much! One thing that I have realised doing this is that I really enjoyed painting those Treemen last post and wanted to paint some more foresty units!
So I broke out some dryads from the foam cage of an army case, rebased them on the new base size and got to painting them! Much like the treemen, this was rather free-form painting, starting with an airbrushed basecoat of a patchy mix of browns, greens, and blues and going from there.
This has turned out to be a rather fun way to paint, and gives rather nice results for these rather organic models. I think this would work quite well for something like Tyrannids in Warhammer 40,000.
I think the shots from the rear show the patchy nature of the paint work well, being flatter and less obscured with detail.
One thing I do need to figure out is how I’m going to paint the elvish section of the army. This works well for all the forest spirits, but I’ll need to try out something for the non-tree people!
Regardless of how I decide to do the elves, I’m pretty committed at this stage to paint up a small force of Wood Elves for the Old World. In fact I’m leaning towards choosing them as my army for our Border Princes campaign. I’m finding the new rules don’t suit how I’d like to run my Dwarves at 1000 points (But look excellent for running them in bigger games!) so that may cause me to pivot to a different army.
On a different note, I painted this mischievous Christmas goblin for a friend a couple of weeks ago and finally managed to meet up to hand it over so I figured it was time to post up some pictures!
A rather fun model to paint!
I’m most of the way through some more Wood Elf models (still Forest Spirits!) so expect a post on them soon!
One of the things that has me excited about the new Warhammer ruleset is that the armies are self-contained in the main army books, so I can start planning out all sorts of armies without having to wait for them to be re-released for the game. Given that I have a decent collection of models that will be useable in it, I’ve decided I’ll have the most fun if I work on models for the Old World in general rather than painting one army after another. This means picking up what I feel like painting most and getting it done! Last week we had Tomb Kings, this week Wood Elves!
After the base sizes for the new game were announced for models, I had a hunt through my collection for models staying on the same base size that I could paint while I wait for my Tomb Kings starter set. I came across these treemen which have been sitting undercoated in a case for close ten years, and I decided they deserved some paint after their long entombment! These actually belonged to my wife when she had a period of interest in tabletop gaming (as a result of which we met!), and I’ve inherited them since.
We have 3 variants here, 2 treemen, a treeman ancient, and the named character Durthu. I’ve taken photos of each side of each, and put them into a slideshow for each model so you should be able to scroll sideways though them.
Treemen
Treeman Ancient
Durthu
From a painting perspective, these models were painted in a rather freeform manner (apart from Durthu which had much more of a plan, detailed below). I first took to them with the airbrush and put on random patches of greens, browns, blues, greys. I then started highlighting the models, roughly following the patchy undercoat. This required a lot of mixing, as the patches of airbrushed paint blended into each other. So no paint recipes here, each area was done on its own and the ratios based on whatever made sense there. I think this gave a really naturalistic look to these models as trees are far from uniform in nature, being covered in all kinds of mosses, lichen, mud, etc.
This was an extremely fun way to paint and I’ll definitely replicate that on the rest of the forest spirit models in the army.
Durthu as I mentioned above had a much more deliberate plan in his painting, driven by my experiences walking in the local bush land here in Perth. It’s rather common to come across burnt bush around here, either from bushfires, or burn offs done to reduce the impact of future bushfires. The forests end up black after these events, but nature here is built to live through these events, and when rain comes life springs anew from the ashes, revealing what I think its a pretty amazing sight: bright green new growth surrounded by pitch black burnt forest. Here are some photos I’ve taken of what I’ve seen here.
Having grown up near temperate European forests, I find this quite an amazing sight and have always wanted to paint a model that tries to replicate the effect. That’s what I tried to go for on Durthu, his main trunk is blackened by fire, but bright new leaves are coming up.
Dwarfs were the first Warhammer models I bought, but Wood Elves were my first “proper” (i.e. built to a decent size) army for Warhammer. I have a lot of models for that army, although most are in a dire state so I’m excited to repair and repaint them and get them back on the table with the new ruleset.
I’m using these new rules to indulge my love of painting whatever I feel like at any given time so I’m not sure what I’ll be painting next! Potentially some more terrain for the Border Princes campaign, we’ll see when I sit down at the painting table next!
As I mentioned in my last post my friend and I had planned a gaming day to play through a scenario of our own devising, pitting my Skaven against his Wood Elves in a game of Warhammer Fantasy. Well the day has come and the scenario fought out! I took a bunch of photos during the game with the hope of pulling together a battle report, and while they’re not amazing I think they do a decent job of capturing what happened during the game!
First up here’s the scenario:
Here are the armies, first up the Skaven:
And the Wood Elves:
The board was set up according to the instructions in the scenario:
If you’re familiar with Warhammer Fantasy you’ll note that is quite a dense table, but as the Wood Elves would do most of the moving around that shouldn’t cause too many issues.
Deployment
Here was the state of things after the deployment of both armies:
I’ve initialised the units as it’s a bit hard to see what everything is in those top down photos!
Thanquol started the game perched atop the warpstone, ready to use its power to blast away any elves straying too close.
While the rest of the Wood Elves were confined to the board edges, the Waywatchers scouted ahead and found a good position to start raining arrows down on unsuspecting Skaven from.
The Highborn knew that taking out the Warp-Lightning Cannon was critical and positioned himself and his dragon as close to it as possible.
Wood Elf Turn 1
The wood elves spent their first turn approaching the Skaven, with most notably the dragon swooping down next to the Warp-Lightning Cannon ready to unleash it’s poison breath on the unsuspecting ratmen. You’ll also notice some of the woods moving around, the result of the Wood Elves making good use of their tree singing magic.
Those missile troops that hadn’t marched fired arrows, with the Waywatchers making short work of the Warpfire Thrower. The dragon breathed poison gas at the war machine to no effect, but some Skaven from the neighbouring regiment collapsed.
Skaven Turn 1
The start of this turn was rather horrid for the Skaven, with the presence of the dragon terrifying the crew of the Warp-Lightning Cannon to such an extent that they cut and ran straight down one of the burrow holes! I had great hopes for the cannon and it never even got to fire!
The clan rat regiment closest to the dragon turned to face it, and the Warlock Engineer and Thanquol blasted all they had at the dragon in the hopes of preventing it from rampaging through the tightly clustered Skaven army. The barrage of magic grievously wounded the highborn leaving him on a single wound, but the dragon was miraculously untouched, its tough hide impervious to the warp lightning. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, Thanquol used the Skitterleap spell to teleport behind the dragon, where it could not charge him in the next turn!
Thanquol also commanded Boneripper to move to intercept the dragon in the hopes that it could at least provide a bit of a road bump!
Wood Elf Turn 2
The dragon charged Boneripper and the closest tunnel entrance in the hopes of collapsing it and crushing the rat ogre, while the rest of the army closed in further. The Glade Guard on the right of the table discovered the hard way that the Storm Vermin were equipped with a banner that magically shielded them from shooting and the rain of arrows fired at them failed to achieve anything.
During the ensuing close combat, Boneripper was torn apart by the dragon, and the tunnel collapsed.
Skaven Turn 2
Once again the terror caused by the proximity of the dragon took its toll, with the clan rat regiment closest to it also turning tail and fleeing down one of the passages. Unfortunately for me that regiment was sheltering the Warlock Engineer and unbeknownst to my opponent was also hiding the Assassin! In one fell swoop I’d just lost a regiment and two heroes, ouch!
It did mean I got to use one of the scenario special rules and bring back on a fresh regiment of clan rats from the leftmost tunnel to block the dryads that were threatening it. Thanquol was more successful this time, finally killing the Highborn with magic, but still failing to wound the dragon.
Wood Elf Turn 3
The new riderless dragon charged the clan rats facing it, while the dryads charged the newly emerged clan rats below. The Waywathers rushed forwards to collapse the leftmost tunnel. On the right side of the battlefield the Wood Elves were much more weary, staying well clear of the Stormvermin. At the top, the Treeman turned to face Thanquol, ready to deal with him.
In what turned out to be a very eventful combat phase, the dryads defeated the clan rats and sent them running down the tunnel just in time for the Waywatchers to collapse that tunnel on top of them.
In the other combat however, clearly disturbed by the loss of its rider the dragon failed to do much damage to the clan rats and was forced to flee from the horde that faced it. As it turned to run, the rats saw their opportunity and dragged it down by sheer weight of numbers! Finally the dragon that had done so much damage was gone!
Skaven Turn 3
The Stormvermin finally managed to find a target, and rushed to meet the dryads that were trying to get around them.
Meanwhile another fresh unit of clan rats emerged from the last tunnel remaining open to close the way to the glade guard that were threatening it.
Thanquol moved back close to the meteor to be able to draw on its power, and using it managed to destroy the Waywatcher unit. In the combat phase, the Stormvermin broke and ran down the Dryads, ensuring they could no longer try to collapse tunnels but unfortunately that pursuit moved them very far from the tunnel, making it very unlikely they could get back in time to protect it from the other approaching Wood Elf units!
Wood Elf Turn 4
The Wardancers charged the clan rats closest to them, while the remaining dryads advanced towards the last tunnel entrance. The Glade Guard were checked by the clan rats that had just appeared in front of them and resolved to just stand and shoot them. The tree man came towards Thanquol, ready to unleash its roots on the unsuspecting Skaven.
Unfortunately for Thanquol, the Treeman’s strangle-root attack was successful and inflicted enough wounds on Thanquol to kill him outright! Gone was the chance of a Major Victory for the Skaven!
As consolation however the clan rats in combat with the Wardancers beat them and run them down after forcing them to flee! That clan rat unit had now slain a mighty dragon and a troupe of elite fighters!
Skaven Turn 4
At this stage of the game I realised that I had no way of stopping the Treeman from reaching the last tunnel entrance on its next turn. My units were either too far away or facing the wrong way! I therefore decided to risk a few charges and take the noble way out, which with hindsight was clearly not very Skaven of me!
The unit of clan rats facing the Glade Guard made short work of them, but the other clan rats after the attrition of fighting the dragon and the Wardancers succumbed to the Dryads. With that, the game was well and truly over!
Wood Elves Turn 5
In their turn 5, the Treeman and the Dryads advanced on the last tunnel and collapsed it, achieving a major victory for the Wood Elves with a turn to spare!
Conclusion
This game was a ton of fun to play. It was the culmination many months of planning and work from the two of us to prepare the scenario, the terrain, and of course painting the armies! Getting to finally play it after all of that was extremely rewarding. While the Wood Elves ended up with a convincing victory over the Skaven, it was pretty close for most of the game, with the requirement to close all three tunnels and kill Thanquol looking far out of reach for a fair few turns. The scenario then seemed to work quite well which was uncertain going in as we’d done no play testing.
We enjoyed ourselves so much that we’ve already started planning the next one! If you made it this far I hope you enjoyed reading this, and by all means send me suggestions on how I could improve this format. I’d like to make more of these in the future and do them as well as I can.
Lair of the Lagomorph 