Greetings Terrans, I have another Wolf Time update for you this morning – I’ve finished Navigator Fogg, and an un-named cook from one of the sub-plots… Let’s start with Fogg – from the Book of the Astronomican:

“Like most Orkish navigators, Fogg is a psychic. Orks navigate by a crude process of intuition and primitive divination. So long as they stick to relatively short warp-jumps this works well enough. However, there are occasional accidents, like the one which has stranded the Charadonian fleet in the Wheel of Fire.

Fogg has a psychic mastery of 1 and a psi-level of 10. He is able to use the hammerhand, mental blow and steal mind abilities. Fogg has the following weapons and equipment:

Flak armour. Mesh armour. Bolt gun. 2 bolt pistols. 1 vortex grenade.

So, as a proto-Weirdboy, I had the perfect opportunity to include one of my all-time favourite minis from the Ork range – the Warphead Weirdboy from 1991. I added a suitable right arm & left upper arm, and then sculpted on sleeves, a brace of holstered pistols & the right forearm & hand clutching a bomb:

I wish I had done a better job with the left hand – you can’t really see the vortex bomb from a natural viewing angle, but I promise you it’s there:

In terms of painting, I wanted to make Fogg quite flamboyant, so went with bright yellow & purple as the main theme – I love his snazzy yellow boots! His hair got strongly emphasised, as did his crazy eye, complete with subtle glow effect. Other than the slight gripe with the too-subtle vortex grenade, I’m really happy with this guy, and I think he reads well as a crazy-assed psyker!

Now to explain ‘Kulo’s Cook’… There are a number of sub-plots in the final scenario of the Wolf Time campaign, and one of them refers to the cook, (no spoilers!). I wanted to have a few of the sub-plots in my back pocket for when I run the game, and while it isn’t necessary to have a mini to represent the cook, but I thought it would be fun. He doesn’t get named in the scenario, so I’ve christened him ‘Gore-den Ram’s-Eye’:

Ram’s-Eye already had his cleaver, so I just needed to sculpt his chef’s apron & hat, and his right forearm & cooking pot (complete with squig gribble-stew). I didn’t give him a gun, (he’s more of a skulker than a fighter), but I’ll do a bunch of kitchen squigs for him to fight with in-game. I hope I get enough players to warrant using him!

Here’s one last pic of the two together:

And that’s me for today! Just  ‘Captain of the Guard, Rulko’ and Kulo himself to finish :-)

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? All good I hope :-) I’m really excited to be sharing this post with you today – I am finally on the home stretch with the Wolf Time Ork project, and we’re getting to the really really interesting bit… the mythical ‘Guards with power armour & chainswords’! Now, some of you might be wondering what the big deal is – maybe you’re only dipping in to this project recently, or maybe (like me) your memory is more suited to remembering how much damage a Heavy Bolter does in RT* than what you had for breakfast… Either way, I’ll offer a quick recap.

One of the guiding principles of this whole project has been WYSIWYG** – I cut myself some slack with the difference between flak or mesh armour, but I wanted every knife, bolt pistol, grenade, hand flamer etc. correctly represented on every miniature***  I also wanted to use period models as much as humanly possible & avoid the later ‘Ere we Go’ minis with plastic arms… (a couple of these slightly later minis did find their way in for some of the characters, but not too many.)

The problem is that many of the loadouts specified in the campaign pack never existed in miniature form, or were only represented in a couple of models. The Skumbos (bolt pistol & sword) are a good example of the latter condition – there were a couple of minis that suited, but not enough to do a full 25 without chronic duplication. The ‘power armour/bolter/chainsword’ combo is an example of the former… there simply wasn’t a period mini that represented that load out at all. In both cases, my approach has been to attempt to sculpt what I needed – proper Old School :-)

I’ve been showing you the skumbos over the last couple of months – they have loads of sculpted details like pistols, scraps of armour, swords & scabbards etc. All in all, quite a lot of effort… However, the Guards were a whole different level of work – we’re talking 18 full ‘over-sculpts’ of power armour, 3rd party chainswords, bionics, the odd gun-arm… basically this involved hours and hours of sculpting in and around other bits and pieces – hence the excitement in getting some paint on them! Here are the first two squads – Red and Orange:

And here are some closer views in pairs:

That last pair was the squad leaders – they get a hand flamer each as well as the bolter. The orange guy is the only ‘as is’ power armoured mini in the whole group but he still needed his hand flamer sculpted on. Note his chainsword is actually part of his gun-arm.

I also thought it might be fun to compare a Skumbo, a Boy and a Guard as well – I’ve accidentally managed to get quite a pleasing range of sizes:

And one final shot of all 10 Guards together:

So there we are – 10 down, 8 to go. Are they perfect? No, of course not – they are lumpen and misshapen, rough and ready. Some have worked better than others, and some are frankly ridiculous. Was it easy? Hell no – sculpting is bloody difficult and time consuming, but I learned so much through doing this… I think it’s fair to say that while my sculpting is still pretty meh, it did improve a lot through this process, and I’m certainly a lot more confident pushing putty now than I was before.

But the most important question is do they work? Well, I’m hardly in a position to be objective about this, but I really think they do. They look big & heavy, they look well ‘ard, and they look like they warrant a 4+ save… They look like the classic end-of-level uber-henchie, and they look ready to crump some Marines…

In that sense, I think I’m calling these a complete success :-)

*D4 Damage(r) – if you knew this, and if you can’t say D4 Damage without adding the ‘r’ and immediately following with ‘power to the people’ or ‘with the ill behaviour’ then I may actually be in love with you.

**What You See Is What You Get – your model is a true representation of the army list.

***One sneaky Boy is passing his Heavy Bolter off as a regular one… I’m allowing this because the Heavy B is tiny, and because I can’t handle perfection. Sorry Paul.