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Sunday, April 30, 2023

Jaeckel's Castle Wittgenstein - Rank and File month - The cannibals

 

Same crapy old models, but different unit: the cannibals of Wittgendorf. 

If most of the villagers suffer from various afflictions, some went a step further along the path of corruption, and turned towards cannibalism. Hidden in the abandoned temple of Sigmar, they have devoured the majority of the corpses in the crypt and in the graveyard. Now, they want more...

The ghoulish villagers are armed with clubs and bones, or any weapon they could find in the graves. In terms of game, I wanted to count them as Fleglers (flagellants), but they may in the end join the other villagers to form a block of useless Landesturm. We'll see...

In terms of miniatures, you'll recognize some villagers of the Citadel C46 range, two flagellants (one F2 Fighter and one MM65 Marauder) and one F4 mercenary, slightly modified using bits and bones from ghouls and zombies sprues. 

In terms of painting, same colors as for the other villagers, except the red tones that I have reserved for the mouth and the hands of the cannibals.

I have also slightly adapted my "rock and moss" bases, picked some bits from these excellent zombies to give a more sinister look to the unit, with dug up graves and bodies removed, either eaten by the villagers or taken by Lady Magritte for her necromantic experiments. 

And now my last regiment for this army...

Butcher (C46)

Bolg (C46)

Simkin (F4)

Tom (C46)


Owd Roger (C46)

Allard (C46)



Bully



 Rear rank:

 


and front rank:




Next month should see some characters painted.

Shadespyre's April Post - Rank and File (IV) - (Name Pending!) Dark Elves Army (828 points)

OWAC VI - Rank and File (IV) - Both Rank and Vile

April

It's been an odd month. I'm well ahead of schedule on painting, so a lot of what I'm posting now was started or even finished back in March. Maybe three or four weeks of the intervening time has been spent on basing and adding heraldry to things that I've already painted - by ironic coincidence, none of that heraldry appears in this month's offerings. I've also lost my ability to take good photos, somehow, and then with the end of the project on the horizon, I dropped one of my more elaborate models and have had to extensively rebuild it. But that's a story for another month.

At the end of March's blog entry, I promised you "my favourite project in the army" and "the unit which almost broke me". Let's start with the latter one.

Waaaaaay back when I first discovered D&D and Citadel Miniatures, one of my favourite things was the Night Elf Patrol, one of the Speciality Set series. According to Stuff of Legends, it was released in October 1982 and replaced by a set of Chaos Warriors in August 1983, which might explain why I found it hard to recollect a full set of them.

Sadly, I also realised why they may have been withdrawn so quickly - many of them are easily broken, meanign that 40 years later I've had to repair a lot of them, but perhaps more significantly many of the castings are of poor quality, with blurry faces and textureless patches of chainmail. It makes me think that the original moulds may have declined quickly, giving an excuse to replace the set? or maybe it was just that these minis are tiny and wee and Citadel wanted the rebranded Dark Elves to be much bigger?

Whatever the reason, recollecting them was not the spark of nostalgic joy that I had hoped for. Painting them only proved worse! I wanted to use a different colour scheme from the rest of the army, both to distinguish them as scouts and a slighly different subrace, and because I was so fed up with purple. After a number of false starts - dark blue, dark green - I settled on a near-black grey just so I could get the damn things painted. A poor end to what I expected to be a highlight of the project.

But here we are, 20 scouts made up mostly of the SS3 Night Elves, with a number of repeats and many repairs. In my Dark-Elves-as-Drow canon, I think these are members of the lower castes of Drow society, a diminished people who live too close to the surface world to have proper influence, but retain some usefulness because of their knowledge of that wider world.  Who better to scout ahead of your majestic Noble raiding party?


You'll notice that the pictures have a wierd yellowish green background - this is actually cream coloured card which I tried after white just stopped working for me! It was fine while the bases were grey, but the white seems to have ruined it? I'll sort out something better when I can, but for now you'll have to suffer it in the name of being able to see any detail at all in these pictures.

Three other things of note are - the second mini in the top row is not a Night Elf or Dark Elf, but a slightly later C09 Elf Hero. Despite the slighter build, his equipment is very much in the style of this boxed set, so I hunted him down and added him to this unit. The middle mini in the middle row is another outsider - he's the Night Elf Lord from the Fantasy Tribes code FTE - Fantasy Evil Leaders. He was definitely designed alongside the others in this set, though. He may even be a resculpt of the mini seen second in the bottom row.

Finally, I was having such a bad time photographing this lot that I didn't even notice that the last member of the group has been hit by snowballs! Obviously a victim of my clumsiness during a big basing session, he's gone on the list of things to correct before the end of the project.

MOVING ALONG THEN...

On to more fun things. As you will have seen, I love to find excuses to expensively collect ancient miniatures and include them in my army projects. One of the cool things in the Warhammer Armies book is the proliferation of "Beast Master" options - in the Dark Elf army list these are called Whelp Masters and can be put in charge of ordinary warhounds or deadly Chaos hounds. But what miniatures could I find to use for those?

I scoured ebay to try to find enough of anything to make even a small unit. Oh boy, this got expensive! But I'm happy with the results. Again, I struggled to get good photos of the painted models, so I've included an unpainted picture of each mini so you can see what it looks like (thanks as ever to Stuff of Legends for these.) 

Here we go then, in reverse order of how cool I think they are:

Vicious Mastiffs (C22 Creatures)



Quite simply, a ruddy great dog. I put them on cavalry bases - the official base size in 3rd ed is 25 x 25 mm for warhounds and chaos hounds, so I could actually treat these as two per model. They are painted a very dark brown with squinty evil eyes and pointy teeth, not that the picture shows any of that.

Devil Dogs (Fiend Factory FF10)





These were a necessity, given that I've already leaned into the AD&D Drow skin colour. Devil Dogs are vicious arctic predators originally described in an unofficial adventure I think. They totally fit the them of evil snowy hunting beasts, so I had to have some. Frankly they may be some of the worst miniatures that I've willingly spent money on! They went out of production in early 1982 with the publication of the AD&D Fiend Folio - a somewhat mixed follow up to the Monster Manual with all sorts of odd critters in it - which meant that Citadel lost the rights to use the designs.

Obviously I painted them as per the original description - white with blue eyes. Trust me.


Chaos Hounds  (C22 Creatures)


I know some of you will be very much aware of how hard it is to collect these. The later slotta based ones are much more common, and some of them look almost identical, but you know the rules for this army: all pre-slotta, all Citadel. There were actually four different poses produced, but for months I though I would never get any four of them together, long after giving up on getting one of each. Eventually I got three of the two headed beast, and the one with the scorpion tail - the latter was badly mashed and was patiently rebuilt with pins in every leg.

For a colour scheme, the scorpion tail cries out for the bright Chaos colours of 1990, but I wanted to keep this early 80s, and keep it Dark Elf, avoiding the colours of the four Chaos Gods (which didn't really exist in 1984 anyway). I decided midnight blue was a good colour for the hounds - again, you'll have to trust me that's what the pictures show. Turns out there are actually bloody great big blue scorpions in the real world, so I based the tail on those. 

Weretigers in Beast Form (Fiend Factory FF70)



It's just a tiger, but the front paws are quite hand-like... hang on, something odd has happened to mine!


I cannot explain to you how excited I was when this idea hit me! Displacer Beasts! An iconic AD&D monster! The classic evil pack predators! A pretty simple conversion! I promise you, the whole army project would have been worth it for me just to make these.

Now, some people will tell you that Displacer Beasts have six legs. Descriptions seem to vary - the 2nd Ed D&D Monstrous Compendium has the six-legged variant on the front cover art, but a four-legged one on the page for the monster! As it happens, the pose doesn't lend itself to adding extra legs, so I left them with an adequate four each.

The fathomless black in this picture is actually a dark purplish grey colour, the shade colour for my Dark Elf skin in fact. 

Let's add up those totals:

Army List Additions:

Scores for April:          828 points  40 models

20 x Shadows    (Light Armour, Shield, Repeating Crossbow)          400 points

4 x Whelp Masters (Light Armour)                                                          60 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points   

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

4 x Chaos Hounds                                                                                        92 points

Running Total:              3013 points    155 models   


Coming Next Time:

There's only Leader Month and Wild Card Month to come, so one of those. I'm leaning towards Leaders as that leaves me more time to dream up things to add to Wild Card month. Whichever it is, there's still plenty of fun things to look forward to


Mariano´s Wood Elves - "Wildwood Rangers"

 Rank and File month #IV

Family pic

Fourth month complimented!!!


When Warhammer 8th edition was released I wasn´t very much interested on the rules/play/etc, and I even lost interest on the army books  (background/histories/etc) but one thing catched my attention, a new unit of elves with great axes!!! So I decided to convert some wood elves with spears in order to get some Wildwood rangers. The transformation was really easy, just swiched the top of the spears for the top of the White Lion axes...

Can we call it involution????


As it was impossible to fit all the in a unit, I had to paint a plastic sprite to have enough space for the champion of the unit. To make up for this, I added two extra sorcerers to this month list to complete the minimum of ten infatery miniatures (2x1 offer).

Current situation of the counting list:

5 Treekins --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 models

10 Waywatchers -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 models

10 Scouts ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 models

9 Wildwood rangers ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 models

2 Sorcerers ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 models


Time to show you some pics:










Hope you like them...

The end is quite close and now it is possible I will have some extra time so maybe, just maybe, I´m going to change my list adding a surprise I wasnt sure I will be able to paint it in this challenge. But for next month expect something big, green and with wings for the Leader month.

Have a nice month (of painting).

Paul M's High Elf Host - Rank and File Month Four - Archers of Lothern




As promised April saw a return to the stormy island city of Lothern for my fourth and final rank and file month, and also my final unit of archers.

Last year I decided to make my own proxy Lothern Seaguard unit from plastic monopose archers and spearmen, some brass rod, and lots and lots of milliput for press moulded shields. I must confess that by the end of the unit build I hated them and didn't want to look at them, but the colour scheme I chose really livened them up and I ended up painting a mage in the same colours... then two bolt throwers... then a Hero on a Griffon...

I had a third and final unit of 22 archers undercoated and waiting for OWAC VI so it made sense for me to add to this contingent within my grand host and give myself a chance to revisit the colour scheme with its bright turquoise (VMC Sea Green and Blue-Green) and mixed blue-green armour (just army painter blue tone and green tone applied carefully in patches and stripes over Citadel Leadbelcher)


The command figures are a bit of a mix as you can see. The musician is the old metal Lothern Seaguard command. I kept back the one bow and quiver I had with this design for use in this unit as it felt more 'archery' to me. However I should really have waited and taken a press mould of it so I could use a copy for the leader who instead makes do wit ha left over press moulded bow and quiver from last year.  The leader is another repurposed bolt thrower crewman, who I think make good archer unit leaders if you are running low on actual champions...

Or you have damaged champions, as in this case (missing sword), who then lend themselves to being converted into standard bearers. The standard is made from a bit of brass rod and a plastic spiky gem bit from the plastic HE mage kit combined with foil from a wine bottle for the banner. 

As you can see here while the style of the banner is more in keeping with the Lothern Seaguard from last year, the runes on the banner are the same as for the other two 'citizen levy' archer units in my army; Minaith meaning: "Skill in arms, spirituality, the Lost Way" and Senlui meaning: "Swiftness, accuracy"

Total for the month:

22 High Elf Archers (including Standard and Musician) - 240pts

And here they are alongside the rest of the Lothern contingent from OVAC V:


I also managed a very quick brush up of two Yvresse themed Bolt Throwers to better match the recently refurbished archers from February this year.


That's it for April. May should be leader month, but I basically have everything left in my HE collection on my painting table right now so in the true traditions of the OWAC it could still be a wild card and a rush to the finish line with the leaders in June.

Onwards to another month of OWACing! You know you'll miss it once it's gone!


John Bentleys April Dwarf Host - Rangers x10 with 3 trees

 Lost in the woods the Rangers finally emerge ready to engage in battle. 

Unit of 10 Rangers with 3 trees