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Tag Archives: Inq28

Something old, something new…

26 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by Alex in Daemon Ink, OldHammer, Side projects

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

Conversion, Inq28, Painting, Rogue Trader

nothing borrowed, and fuck all blue!

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I’ve got a bit of a mixed bag to share with you today – a bit of speed painted cannon-fodder, and a couple of intricate minis. First up, the speedy stuff.

I’ve mentioned the rpg/virtual tabletop/inq28/Frostgrave mashup thingy that I’m running with some of my hobby homies – well, a lot of the campaign ideas have been kicking around in my skull for a good few years. It is set on a world called Spero Secundus, and originally, it was going to be a sequence of linked tabletop battles with the outcome of one game influencing the next. Over the years I’ve collected some miniatures with this in mind, and playing through the campaign in virtual has given me the urge to dig them out and get some paint on them!

First up, we have some Rad Waste types – the backstory for these guys is that they are the survivors of Hive Terminus – the hive got nuked about a century ago, and so these guys are the ancestors of the survivors. They exist in the ruins of the hive, or in the surrounding wastes. The minis are Tallarn from GW, but I’ve removed any imperial iconography, and added face shrouds and goggles where practical… In my head they are a cross between Frank Herbert’s Fremen, and folks on Tatooine:

They were painted with mostly washes & contrast paints, and are deliberately drab and plain looking. I wanted them to be quick and easy to replicate, and I think I did a good job there, with the test model being completed in 32 minutes! I did add some bone & flame iconography here and there, with half an idea of having them as serfs to my Legion of the Danmed, but first and foremost, they are Rad Wasters from Spero Secundus.

 

Next up we have some guards for House Malocchio – the ruling house of Hive Sevelli, and governing family for the whole planet. I have already painted members of Hose Malocchio, and so the heraldic colours were already established – this made the design for the guard uniform pretty straight forward. I used GW Mordians for some proper officious pomposity:

Again, I wanted these to be quick and easy to paint, so all the main colours are blocked in with washes, and ‘regular’ paints are just used to tidy up at the end and add the odd quick highlight here and there. The Lt. model got a bit more attention with a spot of gold here and there.

 

So that’s it for the speedy stuff, now for the more intricate work. This next mini is my first ever Inquisitor – a character type that I have successfully avoided over the years! He has been created in response to a new invitational called ‘Daemon Ink’ that Mark @ Heresyofus is getting up and running. Set in a corrupted library world, the setting is dark, mysterious and very Inq28, so I wanted my warband to reflect that vibe to the best of my ability. Mark mentioned that Green is very much the thematic colour for Daemon Ink, so I plan to adopt it widely in my warband – starting with the leader:

He is based on the Deathwatch watch master figure from a few years ago. The character I have in mind is definitely on the radical end of the Inquisitorial spectrum (or ‘pragmatic’ as I prefer to call it), hence the Eldar weaponry. He also had a head swap for an AdMech helm – I really like the crusader vibe this gives him! I also jazzed up his backpack a bit, partly to bring in those candles to give him a more scholarly vibe, but also to change up the silhouette & take him away from the original figure.

Paint-wise, I used gold a lot on this guy – it seemed appropriate for someone of his rank and grandiosity. Most of the gold on the armour got a cool purple wash, but the odd detail & the eldar bits had a slightly warmer sepia wash to make them stand out a bit. The rest of the armour is a very deep green, (a pot of Black Templar contrast paint with a good splodge of Winsor & Newton green ink) – it looks almost black, but the edge highlights bring out the green again I think. The odd recessed area of the armour has been carefully picked out in pure black Indian ink from Winsor & Newton – this has a slight reflective quality which gives a lacquered effect that I really like (it isn’t robust enough for a raised area, but can survive in a recess).

The robe is painted with a different set of greens, so it is tonally different to the armour without moving away from the theme, and I repeated the same trick for the wreath decoration on the armour and the gems. I pushed the concept to the max for the crystalline blade – I’ve never painted one of these before, but I think I did ok, and it was that was a cool thing to research and practice. Finally, a splash of red and some neutral bone completes the palette.

I’m not ready to share the fluff for this guy, but rest assured, he will be suitably well storied 😊

 

Next we have this rather exotic member of his warband:

She is a conversion I did a few years ago, but never had the courage to paint – she’s a really complicated figure, and is intimidating as hell! She is based on the Mistweaver Saih from Warhammer Quest, but spliced with the Harlequin Shadowseer mini… yeah… two really detailed and tricky minis 😊

In terms of painting, I kept with the green and gold theme, but looked at the colour wheel to do some more fun stuff. I ended up with a Green/pink & yellow/purple thing going on, which works nicely I think – it’s tight, but allows for splashes of colour across the mini. I brought in a few more colour combos on the masks, but these are small enough to not confuse the overall scheme. I am particularly pleased with the smoke effect, given that it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint it.

the mirror mask was a bit of an experiment as well… I was trying for a ‘ghost in the shell’ type effect with multiple layers of tinted gloss… The skull is quite hard to make out, and I wish I had smoothed out the whole face of the helm rather than leave those metal spikes in place, but hey ho, it’s not too bad, and I like a mini that rewards a closer look 😊

Here’s the two of them together – colours close enough to belong, but without being too uniform I hope…

 

In other news, there’s a new version of some Games Workshop game or other – personally, I’m finding it hard to find any fucks to give about it, but some of the minis look nice… I’ll leave it to better bloggers than me to comment in detail, but so far I’m not planning on getting involved… (that said, I am a sucker for a collector’s edition…)

Otherwise, that’s it from me for this week! I’ll be doing more Spero Secundus mooks over the week & weekend, maybe a Space Marine or some more Inquisitorial henchmen… we’ll see how it goes, but I’ll be back in a week or so. Stay safe 😊

Inq28 style Grim-Bowl team

13 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by Alex in Blood Bowl, Bloodbowl, The Chapel

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Blood Bowl, Inq28, Painting, The Chapel

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I have a fun post for you today, as I have finished a quick project to create a Blood Bowl team. As usual for me, I wanted the minis in my team to do more than one job, so they needed to stand as their own thing as well as work as a BB team. I tried the same trick about 3 years ago when I made and painted a bunch of AdMech servitors that could double as an Undead BB team.

Coincidentally, I’ve gone back almost 3 years for the inspiration behind my latest team, and I revisited some ideas that I’ve been kicking around since I took part in The Chapel project… Long-time followers of this blog might remember that I had a lot of input into the Albino Forest – a setting that was used as part of the Chapel campaign. During the project, I bashed together some grim denizens of the forest, and even put together a short story to introduce some of my ideas. There was something about the concept of the tree-devils in particular that has been tickling away at the back of my mind ever since, and creating a horror-themed Blood Bowl team was the perfect excuse to dip back into my Sylvaneth bitsbox for another journey to the Albino Forest.

I loosely had the idea of using the tree-devil concept to build a Wood Elf team – a very literal interpretation one might say! A starting Wood Elf team can go one of two ways – either 2 Wardancers, a catcher and a bunch of linemen, or a Wardancer, a Treeman, a catcher, and a bunch of linemen… There are a few less common builds that involve fewer re-rolls, more catchers and/or a thrower, and I wanted the flexibility to experiment, so I ended up with the following list:

  • 8 Linemen
  • 2 Catchers & 1 Thrower
  • 2 Wardancers
  • 1 Treeman

The ‘linemen’ are all based on the Dryad mini – a hard-working but basic monopose plastic body with separate arms. I’ve trimmed and matched the arms, and I replaced the heads with skulls & sculpted in vines & tendrils for ‘hair’. The Catchers and Thrower are variations on the theme, just tweaked for a more catchy or throwy pose. Note the slight colouration of the ‘hair’ to denote role:

 

The Wardancers are unconverted Spite Revenants – I love these minis, so there really wasn’t anything I wanted to change! The sharp-eyed among you will notice that there are 3 of them, even though you can only have 2 in a team… I’ll explain the spare in a bit:

 

The Treeman is a re-posed Kurnoth Hunter, (obviously, he is too short to be more than a sapling compared to a real modern Treeman, but he is the perfect size for Blood Bowl). I brought the legs together so that he could fit a standard 32mm base, and I trimmed back the most extravagant branches. Again, I swapped the head, this time bringing in a bestial skull that I liked:

 

And here’s the Wood Elf team assembled in a few different ways:

 

So remember that spare Wardancer? Well, as I was building the minis I was debating whether to swap out the heads or not, but I felt that the Spite heads had a really nice vampiric look to them, and I decided to keep them. I also watched Dracula over Christmas, (superb TV btw!), and putting two and two together, I thought I’d check out Vampire teams in Blood Bowl. Turns out that they are really simple teams to build, as there are only 2 types of player – Vamps and Thralls. The only real decision is how many Vamps to include in your team… They are excellent individual players, and mathematically, you can take up to 6, but you would be mad to do so… Vamps roll for Bloodlust every turn they try to activate, with a 1 in 6 chance of failing. If they fail, you either burn a re-roll and hope for the best, feed on a Thrall, (stunning said Thrall), or bugger off to feast on the crowd… Basically, Vamp teams need to balance the number of Vamps with statistics, the number of re-rolls, and the number of Thralls available to snack on.

Most starting rosters suggest 2 Vamps, 10 Thralls, 5 rerolls, but you can reasonably push your luck with 3 Vamps/10 Thralls/4RRs. That’s why I did a spare Wardancer folks – so I can run the three as Vampires, and use the Dryads as Thralls:

 

And here’s one final pic of the lot together, and a reminder that these minis are not just a pair of Blood Bowl teams, but are a horror-inspired warband in their own right:

 

I have a feeling that I may return to the Albino Forest setting again and again… The thing is, the Albino Forest of my imagination is a wonderful and terrible place. It is not a single group of trees, but rather a multi-dimensional network of flora that spans time and space. It exists in patches across the 40k universe, but can also be found in the Mortal Realms of AoS, or the Old World. It is a place that can be visited in the worlds of Frostgrave, Erehwon, and Shadow Deep… You can find it on Toril, on Midkemia, and on Middle Earth… If you’re lucky, you can even find it in right here on our world, in our time – just ask Wudugast!

Go outside, visit an ancient and deserted piece of woodland in Autumn or Winter, and let the small hairs on the back of your neck guide you… you might just find yourself in a small part of the Albino Forest, where the normal laws of nature are twisted and the dead do not rest easy…

See you on the other side ;-)

 

Adask; my Stylites Skull-Jacker

27 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by Alex in The Chapel

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

Conversion, Inq28, Painting, Stylites

So, the cat is out of the bag! Earlier this week, my fellow hobby-bro Mark over on Heresyofus broke the news about a little project that we’ve been working on – Stylites – a free game that accompanies some rather excellent terrain he is producing. We co-developed & wrote up the rules for a compact little ‘push your luck’ game, set in the insane Chapel, a setting that Mark has been developing in his own little corner of the grim-dark 41st Millennium. If you haven’t read Mark’s post, I suggest you do so immediately – it contains all the background, rules links, and a sweet competition for all you lovely folks to get involved with! Go on, read it now, I’ll wait…

…

…

Done? Ok, good. Exciting stuff, right? So a few weeks ago, I teased this chap & invited folks to guess what he’s all about:

 

Wudugast was spot on with his guesswork at the time, (he is clearly a warlock btw), but by now I hope that even the non-psykers among you will have figured out this is my Skull-Jacker. Those with really good memories may even remember Adask from my Ostium Guides short story from way back in March last year… TL;DR – Adask has a shit time trekking through the Albino Forest & ends up being stranded at The Chapel… Funnily enough, back then someone asked if the protagonist from that story was going to show up in the wider Chapel project at some point… That idea stuck with me, so I had Adask in mind when I build & painted my ‘Jacker.  Guess who asked that question btw… yep, it was Wudugast.  See? He’s is totally a warlock!

Anyway, here he is folks – Adask the Skull-Jacker, all painted up & ready to jack some skulls y’awl!

 

I’m really very pleased with the build and colour palette – he was great fun to paint! I was striving for ‘functional’ rather than militaristic, and, while there are no weapons, there is enough going on with the mini to suggest a very utilitarian existence. All the sticky-outy bits make him tricky to photograph, but I hope you’ll excuse the odd blurry limb here & there ;-)  I may go back and dirty him up a little at some point, but I’m happy with him as-is for now.

So, what’s next? Well, I’ll be expanding on my original Ostium Guides short story in due course, and moving the tale along to discover what happened to Adask after his abandonment at The Chapel. I’m also finishing up the four penitents that I teased earlier in the week… They are almost there, and should be ready for a photo-shoot game on Sunday… Exciting times! :-)

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