New models: Khorne Bezerkers

That is actually 500 points...

So here they are, resplendent in all their glory... the beginnings of my new Khornate Chaos Army. And todays Daily Mirror.

How this came about is that I had some Khorne Bezerkers left over from the Chaos Space Marine Battleforce that I got from Games Workshop way back in 2008. I was missing a few sprues out of it; there were only 4 out of the 8 Bezerkers in the box and as I later found out, no backpacks for them. But I didn't notice until a couple of months after I had it and couldn't really do anything about it. So they remained dormant for a while...

Seriously, don't mess...

Then earlier this year I started collecting Orks, and thought how cool it would be to put Ork arms on Khorne Bezerkers so they could use Ork Swords and Axes instead of the usual Chainswords. Not a bad idea, and from this an army list was drawn, but I was going to need a lot of Orks for that and so far I had ten, so I put it on the back burner for a while.

Now, I've been collecting Orks, and Orcs, for most of the year. I've even gone for some Space Marines. But the Chaos Gods do not lose a Champion lightly, and I kept coming back to the army list I'd drawn up. Looking back, the list I came up with is as near as I ever get to power gaming, although I wouldn't strictly speaking call it that because I'm quite sure my army would go down easily to any half-capable player. But at some point, I was going to have to do this army. It was in my blood...

I really liked all 4 conversions on the Skull Champion.

So I got myself down to Games Workshop and brought myself some Bezerkers. Combined with a Lord and the 4 that I already had, I had a 500 point army right there. It was when I broke them out of the pack that the problems started to arise. I noticed that the Bezerkers had some quite distinctive backpacks that the ones I already had didn't have. I also noticed, when trying to assemble them, that the backpacks don't really fit the model. This is nothing that can't be solved with a modelling knife, and you might expect better from Games Workshop these days, but you have to remember that these models have not substantially changed since at least the late 90s, (the actual sprue says 1994,) and it's going to take more than a minor niggle with the fit of the model to persuade GW to re-design them when, aesthetically at least, these models work as well as they need to. The missing backpacks was easily solved by using some other backpacks I have from my old Chaos Space Marines, including the Champion's backpack which, for lack of knowing which sprue was which when I first got those boxes out, I never used. The other problem was more to do with my Army list, as it happens. I wanted the Skull Champions to have plasma pistols and power weapons; the option is there in the codex but the models come with neither. Enter my conversions...

I didn't really intend to convert much of this army as it is something I wanted to put together reasonably quickly for gaming (goodness knows I need a better army than my current one!) but it's Chaos; you can't not convert Chaos. The most obvious ones are the weapons, where I reverted to my original idea of putting Ork arms on the Bezerkers. Keeping it to the Skull Champions was, in retrospect, an easier option, and fits in with my usual trick of keeping characters in the army (basically whenever there is an option to take a Champion-type character, I always take it because I like the character they bring to the army. Especially Chaos.) Plasma pistols were a little more tricky; I had to find some (hard,) and then convert them so they would fit on the model (a little easier.) I ended up cutting the hands off the Champions and sticking the plasma pistols on whatever remained; it worked but they point the guns a funny way. I think next time I might just glue on the whole arm, if that will work. For one of the Champions I gave him the helmetless head that comes with the Bezerkers, and an Ork Jaw to use as an oversized face mask. Ridiculous, but I like it. The other, I gave a different head, I'm pretty sure it was out of the Possessed set that also came with the Battleforce.

Then I had to paint the things...

Mad as badgers, the lot of them.

I began by using almost an entire pot of Mechrite Red in the Spray Gun. This was not intentional, but the gun became blocked and for some reason I could never get the water/paint balance right again after I'd cleared it. But, the Bezerkers were suitably red. I then drybrushed Blood Red over the armour, again thanking my lucky stars for the Foundation paints as this would have taken a lot longer if Mechrite Red didn't exist. (I would have known, by now, not to paint Blood Red straight on to Black, but I would have taken ages building the colour up from Scab Red up to Red Gore, then Blood Red...)

And that's as much as I'm going to say about that for now. There is more, but as I'm pretty much going to paint the army in the same way, it's ground I'm going to cover in future blogs. No, I'd much rather talk about this beast for the time being...

"I'll thank you not to mention my sense of timing and proportion..."

Anyone recognise this? I worked Games Day 2009, and this was the model that came with the ticket - and any staff who worked there. And yes I KNOW - it's a Warhammer model, not a 40K model. Fact is, I really don't care; the model was sitting in a bag of models awaiting assembly, and to be honest I would much rather see it on the table being used in whatever capacity than get rid of it. Don't get me wrong, I see the value in the model as a collector's item, and I'm pretty sure I could have made a tidy sum for it on Ebay, but that's never what I intend by buying models, or otherwise obtaining them. I want to see them kicking ass, not being stuck in a cabinet! My painting's not that good anyway.

I'd like to draw your attention to the brass, that I painted using a guide found in my most recent edition of White Dwarf (Can't think of the number off-hand; it's talking up Dreadfleet at the moment.) How it works is this: First, paint the brass a mix of Scorched Brown and Shining Gold. Then, layer on a neat layer of Shining Gold. I'm pretty sure at this point you wash it down with Devlan Mud (another one of GW's better ideas.) Then pick out the highlights with Burnished Gold, and finally a very light drybrush of Mythril Silver on the raised areas. I was a bit heavy handed with the silver but other than that I think it worked quite well and certainly added some dept to the brass areas.

The axes, by the way, are supposed to be a Daemon Weapon - that's how I'm going to use it at any rate. The colour is supposed to be Obsidian, an idea I got from the Skulltaker article way back in White Dwarf 34somethingorother. It didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped but it doesn't look bad. Finally, I was quite pleased with the cloak and particularly the dirt on said cloak. It was first painted black with a bit of grey mixed in, (this actually required two coats as I did it from red,) and highlighted with a bit more grey in the mix. The muck was Khemri Brown drybrushed on with an old drybrush, and the dust was Denheb Stone done in much the same way. I think that looks very effective.

So when are we going to see these on the table? Probably not all that quickly; as it stands now the army relies on a very quick short game and I envisage it being shot to pieces as it tries to slug across the table. A later version of the army list includes Rhinos for everything but right now it's just these guys and I don't much fancy their chances against an Imperial Guard Gun Line. What's next for the army? If I remember rightly, a Chaos Defiler. That'll be interesting, especially as I have yet to buy such a thing; right now I need to finish off those Orcs, paint some pieces of scenery I've been working on, and there's a load of Soldiers of Gondor that would benefit from some attention as well. And that's just the models I've built. Busy, busy! Not planning on getting any games in next week as I'm fairly certain that the only night I'm going to be free will also coincide with the one day I have to be up early for a conference. If I get any painting finished off before, say, the middle of the week after, it will be a miracle. But watch this space, I've worked miracles before...

8/10/2011: Pool

I had a game of pool against Jeff once more, and I'm afraid once more I didn't make it all that easy...

To be fair, he wasn't playing much better, and when I ended up putting the balls guarding the pockets, which was entirely untintentional but I'm not complaining, I doubt he was thanking me for it. It became a battle of attrition really, and as soon as Jeff started potting balls he was on a roll and I hadn't got a hope of catching up. I had one chance before the 8-ball went in to pot 5 of mine, and I ended up leaving him open for another easy win.

Apparently the tables I play on aren't all that good! A good thing that I'm not very good either. It saves me a lot of trouble. Well done Jeff.

5/10/11: Thunderstone

OK this was a bit of a strange set-up:

Dave and I have had a few goes at the Thunderstone series now, and since his Resident Evil game is played in much the same way, we decided for the first time to use Randomiser cards, which as the name suggests randomly determine what Heroes will be available, what monsters they will face, and what items will be available in the village. It was a bit of a funny draw, we had Dwarves, Redblades, Amazons and Clerics for our Heroes, and Ooze, Undead: Doom and Dragons for our enemies. Our weapons seemed quite poorly equipped to deal with them…

Taking inspiration from what I’ve been doing (I don’t quite know why as Dave has won the last 2 games of this,) Dave immediately set to work on building up his magic power. As we only had Clerics who could use magic, he had to concentrate mainly on what items he could buy. He bought all of the Lightstone Gems and used the money from these to buy most of the Fireball spells while keeping his deck fairly small; on paper this meant that he could be rocking a lot of magical power at any given time and he wouldn’t even need to use a hero to do it. We’d made things very difficult for ourselves by drawing three very powerful dragons as the first 3 monsters in the dungeon and we needed an equally powerful attack in order to take any of them down; Dave’s combination of spells and light did him well enough to take an early lead, but I wasn’t out of it yet…

My strategy was to use mainly Dwarves. They’re not wonderful fighters in themselves, but they get a huge bonus to their attack if you give them an edged weapon. We only had one edged weapon in the game – the dagger – but having dwarves gain an extra 4 attack points every time you equipped one turned out to be invaluable in some stages. However, my deck grew so large that I couldn’t count on being able to draw daggers and dwarves in the same hand, so I took to recruiting Redblades instead, who have a larger attack bonus that isn’t affected by weapons in quite the same way. This took a long time to pull off, but when I did, I could sometimes bring more pain to the Dungeon using cards that have attack effects than Dave could ever hope to manage by drawing fireball cards.

Unfortunately it was too little too late for me. We reached the end of the night and Dave had to go home; we counted up the victory points and Dave had almost double the points I had. I’d have needed a miracle just to stay in the game to the end…

Reflecting on it, my strategy was a good one – I just went about it the wrong way around. Redblades always get +2 to their attack whatever happens, whereas Dwarves only get +1 unless you equip them with an edged weapon, which since the only one available was a dagger often made them little more use than the Militia that you start the game with. Granted, the effect of adding the weapon to Dwarves is huge and only a fool would fail to take advantage of it, but if I’d have brought Redblades first, then I could have done some moderate damage without it being contingent on buying extra weapons. I could have then got in some early kills, and bought some more daggers – and finally Dwarves.

Of course, the Randomiser cards make it extremely unlikely that we’ll ever play with exactly that combination again, but at least I know what I should be looking for next time. Also, checking back over the game we did misinterpret some rules with regard to what counts as a hero and what doesn’t, so we’ll have to concentrate a bit harder on that next time. Still, all in all a very enjoyable game and one day I will have my revenge on you, Dave. Oh yes. I will have my revenge…