So I've got one final Bloodbowl model to show off. What would a Dwarf team be with out a Death Roller? Not a fun team, that's what!

So of course, I had to get a Death Roller. The second iteration has always been my favorite, even though it lacks the classic look of the original and the dynamism of the most recent incarnation. But it was the first Death Roller I was exposed to, and as Dwarfs are my first love (Warhammerly speaking), I fondly remember oohing and ahhing over it in the pages of White Dwarf...somewhere around the 180 range.

This model was a ton of fun to paint. The driver was painted the same as the rest of the Dwarfs on the team. For the Death Roller itself, I left it metallic, mostly brass. I started with a base of Hashut Copper, washed with Army Painter Strong Tone Ink, and then highlighted with Runelord Brass, Sycorax Bronze, and then Stormhost Silver. I applied some green washes to simulate weathering, but that muted the colors too much, making it look like dirty steel. So I applied a few glazes of chestnut ink to bring back out the reds.

The Steels were painted with Ironbreaker highlighted with Stormhost Silver and washed with thinned Typhus Corrosion.

The copper lines were the old hex pot copper (no idea what the name was) and highlighted, but I forget how. The Dwarf icons were Stormhost Silver washed with P3 armor wash.

The weathering on the roller was done by painting streaks Ammo of Mig Streaking Grime and Light Rush Wash, Dark Earth pigments mixed with enamel thinner, Typhus Corrosion. After this was dry, I feathered out the enamel streaks. Then I lightly drybrushed the spikes with Stormhost Silver. After that I applied streaks of tamiya clear red, to simulate blood, and put some clumps of mud in random places on the roller. I ended up overdoing it a little because I didn't apply each of the enamel based products separately with varnish in-between. What ended up happening is some of the effects got too blended together, leading to the rust look being too widespread across the roller and somewhat drowning out the dirt and the grime.

As I've previously mentioned, I began working on a "modern" chaos army way back in 7th ed. Warhammer. At that time in my life, I was still struggling with the balance between playing Warhammer for fun and playing Warhammer to win and I still cared about army lists. So when I saw that the mark of Nurgle granted a +1 to hit and a -1 to be hit, I had to have a unit. It only took me eight or so years to finish the ten of them!

The final three warriors were painted pretty similar to the other seven. The armor was painted based with Knarloc Green (or whatever the current version is called). I then shaded this by mixing in Necron Abyss. After the shade, I highlighted by mixing in bleached bone. I tried to mix up the leathers amongst all ten of the unit, but these three were done largely the same for speed purposes. The belts were Vallejo English Uniform Brown highlighted up with Vallejo Buff. The gloves and boots were a mix of scorched brown and bestial brown highlighted up by mixing in deathclaw brown.

The nice thing about painting Nurgle stuff is that metallics are a lot easier. The steel was painted chainmail and washed with Ammo by Mig streaking grime and light rush wash. Then stippled with various red browns and oranges to simulate rust. Rust spots were also applied to the armor in the same manner. The brass was painted Vallejo Brassy Brass, washed with Devlan Mud and then oxidized with Nihlakh Oxide.

I'm pretty happy with the way these came out. And they look great with the rest of the unit as well (Special thanks to Urion for painting the banner for me!)

So back in my original blog post on my Bloodbowl team, I mentioned that I had a few previously, and very poorly, models that were to be stripped and repainted. Well, they're done! As an initial matter, these pictures were taken with my terrible cell phone camera (and heavily corrected in photoshop) so they may be a bit pixelly.

First up are the two remaining Longbeards and the single remaining Blitzer. Each of these was a duplicate model of one I'd already painted. I made sure to paint their beards differently and I mixed up the gloves as well. Other than that, pretty standard.


The other model I had to repaint was the Bloodbowl Star Player Grim Ironjaw. I don't really feel that the pictures do him justice as I think he's one of the better models I've ever done. The blend on his belly is way smoother in person, I promise!

Because Ironjaw is a star player, I didn't want to paint his trousers in the same read and white color scheme as the rest of the team; I figured he's mercenary and wears what he wants. However, I also wanted to stick with my original theme so I chose yellow and blue for the colors as these are the colors of the most common away kit of Arsenal Football Club. I also made sure the make the yellow and blue quite bright. I kind of view slayers as the "Guidos" of the Warhammer world--very flashy and ostentatious. As a result, no muted earth tones for him!

Finally, I went back and painted identifiers on all the Bloodbowl models. You can see the rune in the last picture for Grim Ironjaw. I didn't want to use imperial numbers for the Dwarfs and the dwarfen numeral system is pretty much just tick marks, so I instead opted to use the Dwarf alphabet. He probably didn't need one, but the rest of the team did, so I can identify who has what skills and so on.

So I've seen a lot of other bloggers doing an end of the year review for 2016 and I wanted to get in on that action. However, I wanted to do something a bit different. Where a lot of other bloggers have shown everything they painted or focused on stuff that was painted but did not feature on their blog, I wanted to showcase the stuff I started but didn't finish, since virtually everything I painted in 2016 has been shown off here (or it will be over the course of my next few blog posts!).

First up, is a Chaos Lord for my modern-hammer chaos army. I've named this chap the Lord of Worms and he's born aloft by a horde of Nurglings. As you can see, the Nurglings are pretty much done and the bulk of the lord is converted. He needs some more work though, as I have a lot planned for him.


The fact that this model isn't finished yet makes me sad. I converted it as a test model for Dark Future about two or three years ago. This year, I put the base coat down. Next I have to apply chipping medium and then the paint. Part of the problem is I can't decide what color I want the top coat to be!
Although this is a GW kit, it's intended for use in Frostgrave. The throne and platform are finished and I've done the gap filling on the two gargoyles on the side, but haven't sanded them flat yet. Once that is done, it's ready for paint!

So with the Kingdom Death Kickstarter this year, it reminded me that I still haven't touched my stuff from the original Kingdom Death Kickstarter! So I decided to start working on the Adam model that with my pledge. At this point he's mostly built. I've got a slight gap on one of the wrists to finish and I need to prep his spear and shield and he'll be ready for paint as well.

And finally (and I apologize for the lighting, resin is hard to photograph with my crappy phone), a townhouse from Table Top World. As you can see, the bottom level is complete. I want to add some stucco textures to the upper levels and I have to figure out how best to attach the porch piece so that I can use the inside of the building.

So there you go, hopefully I'll finish these projects in 2017!

I've got a short post-christmas blog post today. I figure lousy of you are off enjoying family and presents and too busy to read my boring blog!

So I've managed to avoid having to buy to many models for Frostgrave, and that is one of the things I like about the game--I already have everything I need. But when the Forgotten Pacts Nickstarter was started I couldn't help but sign up for the Plastic Barbarians. At this point, anyone who's interested in them has seen the sprues already, so I won't bore people with pictures of that.

My verdict is that these models are great. The scale is perfect, they aren't mammoth like GW stuff, but they have enough exaggeration that they are easy to paint in a way that true 25mm models can lack. This is especially true with the eyes; I find true 25mm models have impossible to paint eyes!

I've also read a lot of people that say that the official Frostgrave models don't scale well with heroic scale models. But, at least with the barbarians, I don't find this to be true at all. I thought they fit in quite well. A tad bit smaller, but nothing that makes them stick out. I think the aforementioned exaggerations help a lot with that.

The aesthetics of the barbarians are one of my favorite part of the models, they look like barbarians, but not like cartoons. That's the problem I have with the plastic Chaos Marauders, they look like professional wrestler characters, not actual barbarians. Sure, these models probably would be out of place in a historical game as they don't appear to be patterned after any particular historical peoples. But whomever they're modeled after, these guys look weathered and hard lived. I was pretty amazed at how much character and expression they have in their faces. You can tell they've lived hard lives and those hardships have etched their faces.

It's not just their faces that are well sculpted, most everything is. These models look like they're wearing clothes that have been repaired, scavenged, and make-shift. The weapons are menacing. The posing of the bodies is excellent. There is only one problem I found with the sculpting: the fur. The fur is very shallow. And that made it difficult to paint. But now that I know to expect that, I can compensate when I paint more.

As far as the sprues are concerned, these are great too. They come with tons of options including missle weapons, two-handed weapons, hand weapons, shields, and more heads than you can ever use. The only downside is that you get 4 of the same sprue of five bodies. But with all the options previously mentioned, that's not a bid deal. They also come off their integral bases really, really easily. I think it took less than a minute with my razor saw to remove them and with no damage to the shoes. However, I did find one problem with the sprue as well. As can be seen in the picture below, the weapons that require both hands were very difficult to line up right. I've gotten used to the recent Games Workshop plastics, where many of these types of arms are a single piece with both arms attached to the weapon and they slide perfectly on. As you can see below, the bottom of the axe haft isn't really in his left hand--it just kind of sits below his hand.

That said, those were the only two things I didn't like about these models. They are excellent. I know if I wanted to do an Oldhammer Norse army, I would uses these as my basis.

But enough rambling, It's time for a quick picture. I do want to apologize for the paint job below, I'm not particularly proud of it, or even happy with it. I was trying to get the model done quickly and it was time to replace my brush but I wanted to get just a little more out of it. As such, the tip wasn't as fine as it should have been and a lot of the model looks spotchy and dirty almost as if parts had been drybrushed.



And now for the Zombie I mentioned in the title. Way back on my old warseer thread, I posted a picture of my Frostgrave warband with a zombie that had no snow on its base as I had forgotten to base him with the rest of the warband. Well no longer! He is now fully based!

Back in November, I pledged for the Rogue Stars Nickstarter. It seemed like a game I'd enjoy; it's a Science Fiction skirmish games, about 5 models per side, and it's largely setting agnostic. Plus, Mark Copplestone sculpted the models (or at least most of them). Why not try it?



My thought was I could apply a reasonably light weight set of rules to the Warhammer 40k background and play small games with my kids. The author, Andrea Sfiligoi, is known for doing some good rulesets.

The Nickstarter closed on December 4, 2016. But since I live on another continent, I wasn't expecting it right away. In fact, I sort of forgot about it. Then, while riding the train home on Monday the 19th, I saw Whiskey Priest's review. It is not kind. I was scared. Did I waste my money? And as I arrived home, there was a box in my mailbox from Northstar. So I would have a chance to check it out for myself almost immediately after reading some negative things about it.

So here are my thoughts.

To me, this seems like a roleplaying game, disguised as a skirmish game, but without any roleplaying. Make sense? Of course not. Let me try to explain.

Rogue Stars is, ostensibly, a skirmish game for two players of up to 5 models each. Everything is based on a D20. Roll higher than a difficulty and you pass an action, roll lower and you fail the action. Pretty simple in concept.

But, the game is reliant on "themes." When designing your squad, you pick a theme. That theme is very reminiscent of roleplaying. It's not picking an army or a race. If you want to play miners, for example, you can have a space orc, a space elf, a space dwarf, a space rat, and a human all working together. What's important is that they are miners, not who they fight for or what their species is. And this theme is used to help you tell the story of the mission. And the rules contain eight pages on setting up your mission (the book is only 64 pages, so that is one-eighth of the entire book). The rules clearly want you to have a story as those eight pages help you describe every aspect of the mission: what the purpose is, where it occurs, what the weather is like, etc.

This, however, is where it loses the roleplaying. Almost all eight of those pages are charts. And much of the 56 other pages are also charts. And what little text there is is boring. Like really boring. There is no fun in the explanation. It's very clinical and sterile. It feels like you're reading a textbook, not a game that is supposed to be fun.

Now, after complaining about all the charts (so many charts...), I don't think it is as bad as others have made it out. I suspect most of the charts are easily memorized after a few games as they seem largely to be specialized rules. For example, many relate to he effects of weapons or armor. Once you've modeled your squad, you will largely use the same weapons and same armor. I think this will hold true for the special actions as well--most players will likely find they are shooting at the same range most of the time or attempting the same combat moves based on their weapons most of the time.

I also really like it's initiative system. Basically the starting player keeps going until he or she wants to let the other player have a turn. Now, there are plenty of reasons to do this. Each action accumulates stress, which makes it harder to do more actions. And failing an attempt at an action gives the opponent free actions that occur first. But passing the initiative removes all the stress from your models. I think this is an interesting take on the I Go-You Go system.

In addition, I think it was nice that the weapons and armor rules cover almost every thing from classic science fiction games and stories. Except the Space Marine's trusty bolter. I can't figure out what to classify that as. Molecular Slugthrower, maybe?

But, to circle back around, this is where the presentation hurts the game. All those charts I mentioned? They're actually pretty simple. They just list modifiers to your difficulty rolls. And most of them do not stack. For example, a called shot to the head has one difficulty modifier while a rapid fire burst has another. Clearly, you're not doing both at once. The only place where they stack is either range based modifiers or modifiers from different charts. So a long range called shot to the head with a primitive needle gun would have several modifiers from several charts. But those would 1) likely be few and far between and 2) easy to skip while learning the rules. So these charts look far more imposing than they really are.

All this said, there is one thing I really, really, really do not like about Rogue Stars. You have to keep track of hit locations. I hate that in wargames. It adds unnecessary complexity and book keeping. My seven year old isn't going to be able to keep track of which mercenary has lost the use of his right arm and which has lost their left leg. He just wants to know if his guys are dead yet or if they can shoot now.

So I originally wrote this review and finished with a recommendation against picking this game up unless you like lots of bookkeeping. But then I slept on it. After thinking some more about it, I don't know that I still agree with my original conclusion. I don't think this game is any more complicated than, say, (the original) Confrontation...it is just presented in a way that makes it look that way. I think it's not a bad system. And limited to 4-6 models per side, there isn't too much complexity to keep track of. The only house rule I'll add is dealing with hit locations. So all in all, I probably would recommend this game, at least to read.

I painted this cultist at the same time as the other genestealer cultists. But being an oldhammer model, I felt he deserved his own blog post. He's not quite the same as the modern plastics either, since he lacks the jade chest piece, instead having the the segmented armor all over. He also has the oldhammer proportions that make these models so classic (and so  much more fun to paint). Not much else to say, other than enjoy this excellent Jes Goodwin sculpt!