Phase I Week 2

I don't have as much actual painting progress this week as I would like to have shown, but I made some incremental steps:

Grey Knights Terminator character:

I originally got this model as a blister and started converting him for a chaos model that I had an idea for. But the model just wasn't working--I filed off most of the GK iconography, but he still just looked like a GK with his iconography filed off, and not like a chaos lord. So now that I'm using GK terminators, I refitted him for Imperial duty again.

So this guy has a greenstuff tabard and some extra gubbins to cover up the bits that were filed off. After I remembered a Black Gobbo article here that explained how to make greenstuff rope, I put in the obligatory bookmarks on his chest-book. It turned out to be ridiculously easy to sculpt rope from greenstuff, by the way.


These are the inquisitorial stormtroopers that I have cleaned and assembled so far. Not too impressive yet, but it's the kind of boring yet meticulous work that it's hard to get motivated on.

So since I don't have much painting to show this week, I'm taking Jarrett's suggestion and including the tentative version of the first army list in this blog update:

HQ:
-Inquisitor lord with inquisitorial firebase (3 gun servitors, 2 mystics, 2 sages, 3 familiars, 1 acolyte), psychic hood, null rod, psycannon
-GK Terminator captain/master with psycannon and retinue of 2 GK terminators, one with psycannon.

Elites:
-GK Terminator unit, 3 strong, with brother captain and 2 psycannons
-Culexus assassin
-Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor with incinerator (rides with stormtroopers)

Troops:
-Inquisitorial stormtroopers X8 with 2 Grenade Launchers
-Inquisitorial stormtroopers X6 with 2 flamers in a rhino
-Inquisitorial stormtroopers X6 with plasma & melta in a rhino
-Ash Waste Armored fist squad with autocannon, plasma & chimera
-Ash Waste Armored fist squad with autocannon, flamer & chimera

Heavy:
-Leman Russ MBT, hull HG & no sponsons
-GK dread with lascannon/ML
-GK dread with assault cannon, incinerator

Fast:
-Sentinel w/ heavy flamer & improved comms
-~6 Ash waste roughriders (on IG jetbikes) with hunting lances

That's probably more than 1850, but it's what I'm currently planning to paint. Some stuff will be tweaked in or out.

That's it for this week, except the teaser photo below. Now that I know how insanely easy it is to sculpt rope, I can fix up the look of the harness on my Ash Waste "demolizard charge" test model.

Phase I: Ash Waste Daemonhunters

The first phase of painting up my Ash Waste Guard army is going to be painting them as the inducted guard units in a daemonhunters army. There are two reasons for this convolution:

(1) I have 2 boxes of Cadian Kasrkins that I won at two different tournaments (Adepticon and the WM Cities of Death). It's obviously kismet that I should have to use these guys, and they'd make awesome inquisitorial stormtroopers.

(2) The Warmongers are having a Cities of Death campaign "Galaxy of War!" in November and I want to play guard, but the majority of the guard models won't be ready by then.

So a daemonhunter list will let me field an 1850 list using some of my key guard models as inducted guard. So here's what's new this week.

HQ: Lord Inquisitor Tireseus and retinue
The configuration of this squad is based on Alex "Kyoto" McLaren's tactical doctrine of the Inquisition fire base. The unit pictured above consists of Inquisitor Lord Tireseus, one veteran guardsman with heavy bolter, one mystic, and three servo skulls. The unit is fairly minimal at this point, but I have plans to add two more gun servitors (one with plasma cannon) another mystic, one or two sages, and a couple of acolytes--all according to Kyoto doctrine.


Inquisitor Lord Tireseus is modeled 90% from a fantasy chaos warrior with the chaosy bits cut off. His psycannon is a boltgun modified with bitz of an IG missile launcher.


Tireseus's mystic is a fantasy empire flagellant (plastic) with bitz from the fantasy empire wizard sprues and a 40K auspex. The flagellant sprues are the ones that inspired me to finally fulfill my dream of modeling inquisitorial henchmen. See the idea is that this guy is blind, but he rings the bell when he sees deepstrikers coming through the warp...

A gun "servitor" in the form of a Catachan guardsman holding a chaos heavy bolter. The original plan was to use the Catachan models as the basis for converted servitors, and I may still go through with that, but this guy came out pretty mean-looking.

HQ2 and Elite 1: Grey Knight Terminators

The Daemonhunter list allows you to take a GK terminator unit either as the retinue to a hero, or as an elite unit. My plan is to take one of each--the foreground unit of 3 is an HQ brother-captain IC with a 2-terminator retinue, and the background unit is an Elite 3-terminator unit including a brother captain upgrade. Because of the wonkiness of the rules, even though these units are otherwise identical, the brother-captain in the HQ unit counts as an independent character. Go figure.

Anyway the rationale for taking such small units is that you can get 2 psycannons per unit (one as a squad option, one as bro-captain wargear) for just a shade under 200 points. Because they can always move and shoot 36", this allows them to stand off and use the shrouding to minimize return fire while still being able to lay down psycannon shots out to maximum range. This is a doctrine I gleaned off of Dakka--if anybody knows who deserves credit for coming up with this one, let me know.

Elite 2: Culexus Assassin


The least popular assassin suffers from the tactical problem that he can be shot at by anybody who can see him (and can pass the required leadership test). So he's challenging to use.

But he's cheap and he's annoying. He's most valuable, I think, as a distractor who hides in the back of the opponent's army and makes everybody leadership 7. So you have to send somebody to get him--and then he makes them leadership 7 and they fail their Ld test to shoot or assault him, and so forth. Also he has a very interesting bag of tricks to pull on harlequin squads...

Troop 1: Inducted IG Armored Fist Squad
It's really just 10 Dust Devils with a flamer guy and an autocannon all assembled in front of the only painted chimera, but it feels like an accomplishment to actually be able to put the unit together.

Next week, more painted guys.

Could Use a Hand Here

So the biggest problem with converting my 11-man Necromunda Gang to a 90+ man IG regiment is getting them to look like WYSIWYG guard army. The picture above is a bog-standard Necromunda Ash Waste Ganger with no paint or modeling done on him yet. You might notice that he has no hands. The hands come on a separate sprue:


The sprue on the right is the necromunda hand weapon sprue. It has hands holding one-handed guns and knives. The center sprue is the necromunda longarm sprue, which has longarms, but no hands. The left sprue is the ash waste ganger weapon sprue, which has the double-bladed knife and various really cool-looking longarms, but no hands. For a Necromunda gang, it's not a problem: you just throw single-handed weapons onto the empty wrists with superglue. But for an IG army, it's more of a challenge. So I came up with a few solutions:


My early efforts involved sawing the arms off of models, which I don't do anymore. But since I had some guys with no arms from failed experiments, I made them into rocket launcher guys using Steel Legion rocket launcher arms.

In the foreground is the best solution to the need for special weapons as longarms in particular. The pistol grip on a plasma (or melta) gun allows one of the standard models to wield it true-grit-style in his right hand. Probably most of the special weapons will get this treatment.

The slung-rifle solution pictured above is another idea that seems to be working. On the left is the unmodified model. The center is a model with a plastic (kroot) backpack and the rifle attached next to it. On the right is the same model with the rifle slung directly to the soldier's back with greenstuff and primed. With the addition of straps, these solutions look feasible and allow me to put whatever into the hands of the models and be WYSIWYG.

The guys above are demonstrating three different solutions to the hand problem. The green-colored right hands are Panzergrenadier hands from the Tamiya kits pictured in the background. Each of these kits costs only a couple of bucks and comes with dozens of green plastic hands that are a bit large, but feasible if you paint 'em as gloves. The open grip of the Tamiya hands, unlike the GW models, allows you to put pretty much anything into them and get creative.

These Tamiya kits also come with backpacks and ammo packs and messcans that can be used with the slung-rifle models to hide the fact that the rifle is just basically stuck to the back of the model., and make the nomads look more nomadic.

The model on the left has a plastic Cadian lasgun in his left hand--the right hand gripping the handgrip of the lasgun has been cut away and replaced with a handless handgrip. The model on the right has a beastman left hand with the double horn--an idea lifted from the original Troll magazine ad for this army that looked really cool.

Finally, a full 2/7 of the Ash Waste models already have autoguns or Nomad longrifles posed a high carry. So these guys just need cleaning and painting, and they're good to go.

The Dust Devils

The Dust Devils, pictured above, had a good run in the short buy enjoyable Warmonger Necromunda Campaign I. They lost Torque, their leader, to flamer fire in the very first game, but actually benefited in the long run as his successor, Piston (Far left, rear) took over and led the gang on several successful missions.

Highlights in the group above: you'll notice the heavy stubber heavy in the center rear row, the nomad long rifle (range 48, str4) in the rear row, and the center front guy, Camshaft, whose horrible scars, incurred in another flamer incident, are faintly visible.

The double-bladed knife, which counts as a sword in Necromunda rules, turned out to be a really good hand-to-hand weapon, and I had pretty much given up using knives by the end of the campaign. Overall the ash nomads are a good gang, their lack of access to flamers balanced out by their worse-than-usual ammo rolls.

The biggest advantage of playing the Dust Devils first as a Necromunda gang, though, is that it gave me the chance to work out the specifics of the color scheme and the modeling obstacles surrounding these models. By the end of the campaign, I was finally ready to start painting up this gang as a fullsized IG army.