Power Armoured Beard

Hello folks,

Yesterday we ran a 9000pt-a-side Storm of Magic Warhammer game at the shop. For this we required a number of magical fulcrums. These are conduits of magical power that have a very big impact upon Storm of Magic games, and also work as the objectives. With limited time until the event and not wanting to shell out for the official Games Workshop fulcrums (I do own one already) I decided to make my own.

I used my phone camera to take a lot of these pictures so sorry if some of them are a tad blurry.

Started off with a big block of foam.

Cut down into the basic size/shape needed.

Hot wire cutter. One of the best and most helpful tools GW ever made. They don’t make them anymore unfortunately, and my one is pretty old now. I’m hoping it won’t die on me anytime soon.

Using the hot wire cutter, I carved the foam into shape. I’ve mounted it on a pencil here ready for the gluing stage to cut down a bit on the mess.

I coated the foam in a generous helping of PVA glue and dunked it in some sand. When they were all done I left them over night to dry.

When they were dry I gave them a good solid coat of dark purple paint, then drybrushed with Lilac. Here’s the finished result! Pretty happy with them for 2 days work. I’ll add a post soon of them in the battle itself.

xBevisx

Hello Folks,

I thought I’d just share some photos from our first ever Warhammer tournament at our shop. It was a really fun day, lots of excellent battles and everyone had a great time! Just what you want from a tournament.

Good Evening, mortals.

I have been busy beavering away at my painting table/summoning circle, creating more minions of the Dark Gods. Please enjoy these photos.

Despite this post being called Warriors of Chaos the first 2 photos are clearly of dwarfs. This is something I’ve been doing while at work. I’ve decided that I’ll have 2 armies on the go at the moment. Dwarfs for work, and Chaos at home! I’ve really been enjoying these so far and I can knock them out quite quickly which is a great bonus. Expect to see this army growing soon!

The next photo is the Chaos Warriors I have shown you before. As you can see they have grown somewhat and are sporting Halberds that I ordered from Games Workshop. The Chaos Lord, seen in greater detail in the next photo, has to be placed at the very end of the unit as his massive cloak makes it nearly impossible to rank him up in a unit with the other warriors. If you were wondering, he is from a company called Avatars of War, who make really gorgeous alternative models for some Games Workshop heroes, definitely worth checking out.

After that my first 20 marauders are complete! Albeit with a Chaos Ogre unit filler. Unit fillers are a great concept. Many people choose to make unit fillers in Warhammer Fantasy because it cuts down the amount of models you have to actually produce and can add some flavour or something extra interesting looking to a big block of troops. In my opinion they suit some armies, say Chaos, Orcs & Goblins and Undead more than other races that are a bit more orderly in their approach.

I’ve had a great time making these. In my force of 120 marauders, I will have to paint 36 less marauders than maybe I would’ve normally, and it gives me a chance to go crazy with some conversions. You can see I’m in the process of making some more chaos ogres, and have also started on some chaos spawn. Adding marauder heads onto the chaos spawn bodies ties them in with their unit a bit better, but also makes me chuckle and reminds me a bit of Thrud the Barbarian. If you’ve never heard of him go Google him right now. These spawn kits are very cool and have a huge amount of options to make horrible, tentacled monstrosities!

Finally we have a marauder horseman. I painted him the other day for some different to do and see how the paint scheme works. I’m happy with the result and have 19 more of them to do!

Well, that’s all the time I have for now. Hope you enjoyed the post and see you again soon!

xBevisx

Despite being distracted greatly from my Ogres by Empire, Orcs and more recently Chaos Warriors, I have managed to the keep the painting going at a fair rate.

Here’s the gallery with details on the pictures below:

1-2 Krum DoubleGutt : This is the Brusier I showed you a while back, all painted up now. I’ve just thought while typing this however that I forgot to take a picture of his back. I have added tattoos to the back of all my Ogres that denotes which unit or social standing they belong to within their tribe. I may make this into a future post.

3-4 Baron FatNeck, Gibblet Prophet : Possibly my favourite model in my army at present. I showed you pictures of him before, but since then I asked my friend who is particularly skilled at using Green Stuff to model a massive fat neck/jowl area onto him. I couldn’t be happier with the result. It really emphasises the foul corpulence that Butchers should display. I’m not one for painting bloodstains on my models, I think sometimes it can look quite cheesy, but I felt in this case it was necessary to the character.

5-7 Gnoblars : I am surprised with how happy I am with how these little chaps have turned out so far. I’m really putting minimal effort into painting these as I have so many to do. But once that Badab Black wash covers them everything looks fantastic. I’m still constantly amazed how much better simple models can look with the correct usage of the latest Games Workshop washes. For people new to painting, I really suggest you experiment with these washes. One day I hope to do a step-by-step blog post and show off just how much of difference they make.

The last of the Gnoblar photos is to demonstrate how I’ve magnetised them. In Warhammer the emphasis is on tightly regimented ranks of troops and more often than not you are using movement trays for ease of movement. Problems arise however if you knock the table or have to move the unit up a difficult piece of terrain and all the models fall off their movement tray, and it can be quite time consuming setting them all up again. Some people magnetise the bases to prevent this, so I thought I’d give it a go. I bought some A5 sheets of steel paper and some 2omm square base magnets from Hasslefree Miniatures (a really friendly family business, check them out and support them if you can). I cut the steel paper to the right shape for my movement tray and stuck it down (the sheets I bought had a adhesive side, which was handy) then attached the adhesive magnets to the bottom of the Gnoblars bases and there we have it!

8 Orge Bulls : Here is the front rank of a regular Bull unit, with a unit champion in the centre and a bellower (counts as musician) on the right of the picture. You’ll have to excuse the unfinished bases on a couple of them!

9 Standard Bearer : Really love the skull adorning the top of this banner.

10-17 Ironguts : The great-weapons these guys wield are just so cool. They also come with enemy shields that they’ve pilfered in order to use as makeshift armour which is a nice addition and makes them look even more interesting.

Hope you enjoyed today’s pictures. Doing this has also spawned a few ideas for future posts so stay tuned.

Hello one and all. Today I’ll be bringing you up to scratch with my tales of Fantasy Battling. So far I played about 10 games with my Ogre Kingdoms army, a couple at 1000 points, but mostly at the 1500 point level. They’ve all be great fun and with varying levels of difficulty. With the exceptions of a couple of games, they’ve been quite close and the victory could’ve gone either way.

My opponents so far have been:

Dwarves: Good fun to play against so far. My friend whose army this is tends to play a quite static style, choosing to blast my army to bits from long range with cannons, crossbows and rifles. This is generally quite effective, but in both games I’ve played, when I get into his army lines things get a bit messy. My high strength and fact that ogre clubs give him a -1 armour modifier mean his armour saves take a bit of a knocking.
Also being quite an anti-magic themed army, it’s hard to get any spells off with my butcher without them getting dispelled. Sometimes I leave the Butcher at home and take a second Bruiser instead.

Bretonnians: I got truly brutalised in this battle. How shameful for my Ogres to get trampled to oblivion by poncey knights! A couple of factors that contributed to this is their high armour value that even with all my negative modifiers applied still held true (Apparently riding round on heavily barded warhorses makes it harder for me to bash them to pieces! Go figure), they kept summoning this hard as nails character called the Green Knight, who even if you do manage to kill can still be re-summoned the next turn and on top of all this they were benefitting from a piece of terrain that granted them extra attacks and the chance to reroll failed hits! Ouch.

Night Goblins: Had two very good games against two different goblin players. One of the players also fielded a giant and unit of three river trolls *tries not to think of their horrific vomit attack*. You need to get into the goblins faces as quickly as possible because they can plink a crap tonne of poisoned arrows at you (Remember that scene from 300 “Our arrows will block out the Sun”?), and their magic is rather nasty as well. That’s where the Ogre item Rune Maw comes in handy.
“Oh you’ve fired a very nasty spell at my rock hard unit have you? Well I’ll just use this magic banner to redirect the spell to my unit of useless Gnoblars, thank you very much”
I discovered that my Gorgers had a nice effect on the goblin army. This will take a bit of explaining. Goblins can pay to have fanatics hidden in their units. Fanatics are basically bat-shit-insane, doped up goblins that grab a massive ball and chain and start spinning towards the enemy. They have no control over their movement (direction or speed) and can even smash through their own friendly units. And when they hit a unit, it hurts. So fanatics are only revealed from the front of a unit when an enemy is within a certain range. Now Gorgers have the ability to appear from any board edge they choose. Mine turned up behind a unit of goblins, which forced them to launch their fanatics out the front and therefore saved my Bull units a horrible surprise when they charged.

Warriors of Chaos: Again two games with two different players, though their armies weren’t all that different. First of all I like Chaos Hounds (Chaos Puppies), they aren’t tough and have a lame leadership stat. It makes me chuckle to scare them off the board with my Butcher before they even get into combat. Marauders (lightly armoured Viking plebs) can put up a fairly alright fight, usually due to the large numbers of them. I tend to try and annoy/soften them up with Gnoblars. The Chaos Warriors themselves are the ones you want to look out for. Rock hard, good initiative and armour saves. My units tend to fair a lot better with the Butcher’s buffs on them than if they went in unprepared. Possible future army for me.

Empire: I faced an Empire gun line for the game I had against them, so came off pretty similar to Dwarves. Couple of things didn’t help my game. I kept forgetting that all my ogres cause fear which could’ve possibly changed the outcome of a few close combat tussles, but the most annoying thing was my Butcher miscasting which caused him to explode and took him out the game. I’ll no doubt be building a Empire army as well at some point as I already have loads of models laying around from the time I tried getting into Warhammer years ago.

Vampires: Great fun game this was. My friends Corpse Cart summoning hordes of zombies to survive as his Vampire Lord stomped across the battlefield. My Gnoblars are now officially zombie apocalypse experts. Our magic phases were epic battles of cunning and willpower, both of us cleverly hedging our power and dispel dice against each other. My Ironguts also had a fun old time charging into a unit of Grave Guard and pulverising their dry old bones into dust. I have discovered that I really don’t like fighting Spirit Hosts though, as you can’t actually hurt them unless you have magic weapons. This I did not find out until I charged head long into them with one of my Bull units.

Ogre Kingdoms: That’s right. My last game was versus my friends Ogre army. The Battle of the Guttplates as it were. And what a brutal exchange it was, very close the whole way through. I had some bad magic phases, he had buffed a bunch of units with his Butcher, things were looking bad for me. Luckily a unit of my Leadbelchers spotted his Butcher out all by himself, stormed across the battlefield and fired their debris-filled cannons at him. The Butcher fell in heap of bloody offal, the power of the Great Maw leaked from his remains and all the armie’s buffs dropped giving me a fighting chance. After many combats the enemies superior Tyrant led his force to victory but what a excellent battle it had been.

I have a lot more of my Ogre army painted now, so I’ll hopefully take some pictures of them tonight and upload them sometime this week. See you then!