Greetings Terrans, I have more Sludgy goodness to share with you folks today. For those that don’t know, Sludge is a wargame created by Sean Sutter, (available in Blaster vol. 4), and comes with a really appealing setting which mixes Blackpowder, medieval and steampunk vibes into one nightmarish dystopian reality… It is also miniature agnostic, so for me, was a great excuse to go and get some Perry Miniatures – a range that I have been itching to have a look at for a long time!

So I started out with the ‘PN1’ Prussian Line Infantry from the Napoleonic range… that’s a whopping 46 minis for £22 – less than 50p per mini!! The set includes 40 muskets including officer, standard and drummer, plus 6 bonus Jaegers. I was quite happy with the general vibe of the Prussians, but I wanted to tie them in more tightly with the concept of the Toymaker Kinge, and so wanted them to look horrifically like automatons… (or, even more horrifically, like they might NOT completely be automatons…).

I picked up some robot heads somewhere (Spellcrow I think?), and ended up with these creatures – I’m very pleased with the Cyberman vibe:

Yellow epilates & cuffs

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Blue epilates & cuffs

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So let’s talk about the models… Well, they are really very good for 50p! They are ‘proper plastic’ for a start, so very amenable to converting and so on. They are truescale, so won’t look great spliced with GW minis – you can see that the more heroically scaled automaton heads come up a smidge large, but I can get away with it in the context of this project I think. If I’m being hyper-critical, the detailing is a bit of a faff to pick out here and there, but really nothing too terrible when you consider the price!

The painting was suitably sludgy & mucky – very quick work with Contrast paints, shading and drybrushing being very much the order of the day! I also went to town with the texture & technical paint, plus plenty of grass tufts to hide any wonky bits… I wanted these poor machines to look almost derelict – the Toymaker Kinge cares not if they break as a result of enacting his will!

So that’s all on this project for the tie being – off to Dublin on Thursday for a weekend playing Ghost Archipelago so supper excited about that!! Catch you droogs on the flip side :-)

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? So as you can probably tell from the title, I’ve been dabbling around on the Sludge band waggon recently – in fact my Fembruary minis were all painted with Sludge in mind. I have since painted the rest of the Black Crab minis to join the sorceress in my new army.

First up,

First up, my Army Commander plus Battle Standard:

As I painted these two, something about the amputated stump on the standard bearer, and especially the prosthetic leg on the Commander started the idea of a self-styled king who was actually a tinkering engineer type – think like the toy maker in the original Bladerunner, or like something out of the Otherlands books…The idea of the Toymaker Kinge was born – a depraved genius who travels through the decaying world of Sludge, scavenging ancient technologies and materials, recruiting followers where he can, or building clockwerke versions where he can’t. The Toymaker Kinge is equally fascinated with the machinery of the flesh, and will happily amputate, mutilate and augment followers in the pursuit of knowledge, and is even rumoured to be skilled enough to bring the dead back to a semblance of life with the aid of machinery.

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Next is the Kinge’s Bodyguard:

While both appear organic, they are actually examples of the Toymaker’s genius with creating clockwerke followers. However, rumours abound that they are not entirely machine, and that there is a grisly organic component to the bodyguards… Whatever the truth, they are unflinching in their defence of the Kinge.

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Next is this creepy trio, known as ‘The Triad’ (‘chaplain’ & body guard):

The true origin and nature of The Triad is known only to the Toymaker himself, but while they never talk, eat or sleep, the unmistakable smell of rotten flesh follows them wherever they go. Whatever the truth, they excel at driving the Kinge’s other mechanical followers to greater efforts in executing their orders.

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Finally my first unit – The Cursed (Arcanists):

The Cursed truly are the most pitiful of the Toymaker Kinge’s followers so far. These creatures were encountered during the Kinge’s travels through the world of Sludge, and were captured & pressed in to service purely because of their unnatural ability to use forbidden magiks to manipulate reality to give the Kinge’s troops a vital edge in combat. Tortured into obedience, The Cursed are a truly disturbing sight on the battlefield.

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Anyway, that’s it for now – next up it’ll be time to add some troops to this army!