Tag: Dark Artisan

A Week With Scenery and Looking Forward to the Weekender

In preparation for our Heresy Weekender, now less than a week away, I have been working on some scenery.
Our good friend at Amera Plastic Mouldings, a rather excellent North East company, gifted us some scenery. We got a Z250 Battlefield Crater Set, a Z230 Redoubt and a Z211 Bombed-Out Building.
So I took a day to get these painted up, they do require cutting off the plastic sheet but that’s nothing major, and once off they took primer nicely and were very quick to get painted up. I mostly used washes and dry bushing, keeping the scheme very simple overall.

I also got painted up a set of Promethium Relay Pipes, again keeping it rather simple, I painted it with Warplock Bronze, Balthasar Gold & Leadbelcher, then washing it with Agrax Earthshade then dry brushing it all with Necron Compound, which I found gives them a nice weathered look.

Other Models I Got Painted

I did manage to get a few more models painted up this week starting with some Corpuscarii Electro-Priests, meaning that for my escalation league March list I need to now paint up 10 Skitarii Rangers, so that’s something for me to start on this week.

The other model I managed to get round to finishing was my Spartan Assault Tank, now I didn’t have the best cast for this and as I bought it online from a third party, I was unable to go to Forgeworld and ask for replacements, but using lots of forum posts I was able to figure out how to best build it. I will say however that putting the tracks on was a right faff on and I am glad that Forgeworld now send it out with them already attached, so when I go to them to purchase  another vehicle in this class I can avoid that palaver.

Annoyingly the round bit of the hinge on one side of the assault ramp broke in transit, so I had to glue the doors shut, but I am glad I got the Ultramarines Land Raider Doors, they really do add something to the model. I still have to decide on what transfers if any I am going to put on the model, but at some point I will be adding the obligatory Heavy Support symbols.

Audio Book

This week I have been listening to Thousand Sons by Graham McNeil, which is frankly an amazing book, although it does fail to explain a few little things, in particular what the Tutelaries are, my own theory is that they are minor daemons of Tzeentch, the perfect sleeper agents ready to help drive the Sons of Magnus into the arms of Tzeentch. The Thousand Sons come across as very arrogant in the book and their downfall feels almost inevitable though out the entire book.

The only real criticism I would have of the book is that you don’t really get to see much of the non-psychic Thousand Sons, the ordinary bolster wielding line troops, and that would have been nice to see. My main Space Marine army are Blood Ravens so I do have a soft spot for crusade and heresy era Thousand Sons fluff.

Am about halfway through it at this point, not sure if I will finish it before the weekender, but who knows.

Gaming

I got in agave this week against Christians Mechanicum army, we took the game quite slowly as we were double checking rules to make sure we are 100% ready for the weekender. It was a very enjoyable game however and I surprised myself by having a humble Assault Squad Sgt with a Power Fist take down a Cerastus Knight-Atrapos, after a good number of its hull points had already been whittled down by the Fellblade of course.

From that game I learnt a lot of things, my Invictarus Suzerains need a transport to get them into combat, I need to remember my FNP rolls and to take advantage of the Interlocking Tactics.

As the game ended at turn 3, as I said we were taking it slow, the game was beginning to turn in Christians favour. He was using the Onslaught detachment so he had two Lords of War, in this case a Knight Errant, which managed to finish off my Fellblade which had been ravaged by the Conversion Beamers of his Myrmidon Destructor. Both warlords were dead, and I still had a full tactical squad in a Storm Eagle, but the high wounds of his units was really pushing my ability to deal with them, so although I had a great start to the game, I think it was going to end up as a loss for me.

My wife picked up a new card game on Saturday in Travelling Man, my FLGS, called Elevensies, now she is a bit of a tea drinking geek and she basically picked up the box, said “ooh its about tea”, and promptly bought it.

So today we gave it a go, and you know what its quite a good game, the idea being to prepare the best morning tea, you get 11 cards, each with either 1 spoon or 2 spoons, the aim is to have the morning tea with the most spoons. You get bonuses for placing down the 1 spoon cards, and you give bonuses to your opponents with 2 spoon cards, its a very tactical game, and for a completely random purchase its a pretty decent addition to my games collection.

Heresy Weekender

So next weekend is our Horus Heresy Weekender, myself and 17 other guys are taking over Moor House Adventure Centre and having ourselves a little narrative campaign, don’t worry there will be lots of photos and updates for it, and it’s also being covered by The Dark Artisan.

I did the first game draw earlier and if you are interested, here are the pairings.

  • Table 1. Jens Träff – World Eaters vs Arran Morgan – Salamanders
  • Table 2. Gareth Wilson – Night Lords vs Oliver Anderson – White Scars
  • Table 3. Philip Sanderson – Solar Auxilia & World Eaters vs Richard Slee – Ultramarines & Imperial Fists
  • Table 4. Graham Mills – Iron Warriors vs Martin Swaffield – Raven Guard
  • Table 5. Aidan Connor – Sons of Horus & Mechanicum vs Chris Mills – Imperial Fists
  • Table 6. Christian Preston – Mechanicum vs Adam Sellars – Raven Guard
  • Table 7. Mark Pears – World Eaters vs Graham Campbell – Salamanders
  • Table 8. Connor Mark Pears – Mechanicum vs Michael Botterill – Ultramarines
  • Table 9. Steven Henry – Sons of Horus vs Harry Scarr – Mechanicum

Don’t worry I fully intend to keep people up to date with how the weekender goes with plenty of updates both here and on Facebook.

So until then have fun guys.

Building up the AdMech and a Battle Report

OK so here is my first hobby post in a long time, but here goes!

At my local gaming club, the Durham Raiders, we are running a little escalation league for Warhammer 40,000, you start at 500pts, then 850pts, followed by 1250pts, and finally 1850pts. we are doing this in order to encourage people who got a new army for Christmas, or might have a long term project that has sat on the shelf for a while unstarted.

I fall into the later category, when the Skitarii and later the Cult Mechanicus armies hit the shelves, I ended up buying a load of units for each, I had always wanted an Adeptus Mechanicus army, but like many things it got put on the shelf, though they did get further than most of my stalled projects in that they got built and primed, well all bar the Kastelan Robots which are still sealed in the box on my shelf.

And so they sat unloved in a box with just a few units getting painted, specifically the Kataphron Destroyers which ended up being used as allies to my Space Wolves in a cheesetastic list so that I got some Grav weapons in my list, and being the cheapskate I am, I just used the Magos Dominus with Rad-Cleanser from Forgeworld, from my on-again, off-again Mechanicum army for The Horus Heresy, rather than go out and buy the admittedly quite nice Tech-Priest Dominus in plastic.

So for the first month, I present my army!

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So we have here a Tech-Priest Dominus, and two units of three Kataphron Destroyers, one with Heavy Grav-Cannons and Cognis Flamers and one with Plasma Culverins and Phosphor Blasters, and these all together come in at 470pts.

Played three games with them, one against Tyranids in which I was quite quickly beaten mostly by a flying Hive Tyrant and a Carnifex all on their own which was fairly brutal. My second game was against Dark Eldar, in which I pretty much dominated the game, despite losing the three Grav Kataphron Destroyers in turn two, I ended up tearing apart my opponents Archon, Kalibite Warriors, Raider and Venom in the following two turns.

My last game was one where they really shone, I fought against Space Marines, for which the army contained a Chapter Master, Sternguard Squad, Drop Pod, and two squads of Scouts, one with Sniper Rifles, again I lost two Kataphron Destroyers quite quickly, this time the Plasma ones, but after that my Grav Destroyers just rolled around the board sweeping up the rest of his army. I really felt bad about it, but there came a moment when he had an objective, I had none and we had to roll to continue the game, had it ended there I would have lost, but thankfully for my, the game continued which allowed me to clear the objective of that last troublesome Scout squad and claim victory for myself by tabling him.

So the games went well, and I still get the feeling that Cult Mechanicus is very much a glass hammer of an army, when it hits well, it hurts my opponents badly, but when it takes a lot of fire, it can struggle to stay in the game.

Moving Forwards to 850pts

For the next stage I am adding a unit each of Fulgurite Electro-Priests and Corpuscarii Electro-Priests as well as add a detachment of Skitarii with a unit of Vanguard and a unit of Rangers.

So onward with the painting and this week I started with getting the Fulgurite Electro-Priests painted up whilst I watched The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime.

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I am not going to even pretend to be a great painter, or even a good painter, but I am rather pleased with these. And if you look in the background you can see the next unit, some Vanguard in various stages of completion. I had already completed 5 of the Vanguard in June last year and figured it would be easy enough to work on these and bring them up to full strength, so that is what I did, and I am pleased to say that I finished them tonight.

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This unit of Vanguard have been equipped with an Enhanced Data Tether, Plasma Caliver and Arc Rifle, whilst the Vanguard Alpha has an Arc Maul and a Phosphor Blast Pistol. I know its not an optimal set-up, but I liked the way the bits looked on the models and for me that is quite important.

So that’s where I am at the moment, sitting on the painting tray right now I have an Ultramarines Storm Eagle, something I want to finish off for the Horus Heresy Weekender I am putting on in 3 weeks time, for which there are still two tickets available if anyone fancies coming along to it, you can find info on the event Facebook page here, or on the Folkvangr Events website here.

Oh and my Ultramarines were featured on a battle report by the Dark Artisan yesterday, which you can view below.

I picked the scenario for this one, purposefully giving myself a huge disadvantage, but it fitted the fluff of our game, and that’s something which I love, I don’t play Horus Heresy to win, I play it for fluffy narrative games, and this was a particularly good one.

Until Next Time

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