Mustafa’s OWAC VIII intro post. The Beakies Ride Again!!!

 Evening everyone :)

It was 5:20 am here in Japan and I was just about to leave for the airport, but as I posted this in the wrong blog and only just realised it is now 8pm here in Singapore and I’m now waiting for my return flight to Japan so this’ll be short and sweet (much like me! )

I’ll be doing beakies again this year, but it’ll be a fast moving force of jump pack marines and cavalry, plus a land speeder for a bit of support.

 The plan is to do four squads of marines, 2 squads of 3 cav (forgot to put the 6th guy in the picture), 1 HQ, and the land speeder. Plans may change of course, but this is what I’m hoping to get done.

All of that clocks in at just over 1900 points. Still not decided on a chapter though!

Cheers!

 

Shadespyre's Introduction Post - OWAC VIII - 3rd Edition High Elves of Lothern

Shadespyre Intro Post - OWAC VIII - 3rd Edition High Elves

Introduction Post

It was always likely to be Elves again. For OWAC VI, I painted a rather idiosyncratic Dark Elf army, loosely themed around AD&D Drow and made up almost entirely of ancient pre-slotta miniatures. For OWAC VII, I painted a much more traditional 3rd edition Wood Elf army, consisting mostly of mid to late 80s minis much like those pictured in the Warhammer Armies book. And I added allied contingents from the Zoats and Halfling lists in the same source.

And then once the OWAC had ended, I pushed on and added three more Wood Elf units to the army.

I still have a lot of Elf options open to me, though.

For the second time, I started prepping a force of Rogue Trader Space Elf Raiders for an OWAC. And for the second time, I've let the lack of a clear concept for a colour scheme and the fact that several fellow OWACers have similar plans put me off committing to it. That and the fact that I've had a Big Idea for it which I haven't yet worked out how to implement. So maybe next time?

I considered swapping to Craftworld Eldar (requires too much shopping) or Harlequins (not a force I want to paint to a time limit) or to one of my non-Elvish options. But then I realised that the answer was obviously High Elves. 

Why? Firstly, they are the next entry in the Warhammer Armies book! Secondly, they are also available as an Allies list for Wood Elves, so I can justify using the same basing style and save my creative energy for thinking about other things. And thirdly, I have a collection of mid 80s High Elves which is big enough to make a small army. And fourthly, Aly Morrison sculpted some of the most distinctive Elves that Citadel ever produced, and I love them in all their bonkers glory.

C08 High Elves

Here's one of my many old Citadel Miniatures mini cases, this layer has at least one of each of all the releases in this range. I completed this collection some years ago, and never really considered it to be a potential army until very recently.

It's a lousy picture, so here are some of the catalog entries for them, borrowed as ever from Stuff of Legends. A bit annoying that Citadel repeatedly advertised the same minis even though there are more than 30 in the range, but they give an idea of the furry-hatted, curly-shoed, overly-feathered silliness of them, as well as the intruging selection of maces, axes and fancy polearms alongside the traditional bows and swords. I'd love to know what brought Aly to use this style, which I think draws on Persian and Indian influences, although some of the minis remain very much in the familar pseudo-European look.

This range came out late in 1984. It's a fully pre-slotta range, part of a brief Golden Era of Citadel minis which has words embossed onto the top of the bases (I'm sure I've talked about this before, I'm obsessed with this phase in miniature history.) In common with the C10 Half-Orcs which were released a little earlier, these guys are each assigned AD&D character classes - Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Magic-user and even multiclass combinations - because the D&D player was still the core of their market at this time. Within a year of release, these were replaced by a new slotta-tabbed C08 range, still sculpted by Morrison but back to a more conventional Elven aesthetic.

I know what you're thinking - some of those silly Elves are quite cute, but an army? It's mostly character models, there's no musicians or cavalry or... anything. And you're right. Which is why, as much as I love them, most of these will be staying in their box for this project.

BUT Citadel Miniatures (and Aly) have us covered - either side of Christmas 1984 they released two Elvish Regiments of Renown.

Regiments of Renown

RR13 Lothern City Guard

RR10 Elwing's Elven Guard Cavalry

As you can see from the art, these are very much in tune with the other High Elves, if a little less gaudy for the rank and file models. These are the minis that I'm mostly going to be using for this army. Worth noting that while the cavalry models are still on solid bases, the infantry are among the first releases with slotta tabs.

So, here's a snapshot of the core of my army, all based up ready for undercoating. This consists of a large unit of Lothern City Guard and a full two dozen Elven Guard Cavalry, which I shall split into 3 squadrons. There's also a couple of other minis in there which I will discuss when I come to paint them.

Yes, this is a much smaller project than I've undertaken recently. This is partly because I felt quite burned out after painting 250 Warhammer minis in the last year, and also because I've started playing in a second fortnightly RPG group, which means less time to paint minis each weekend - and of course I will inevitably be painting minis for that game, too. And let's not forget that painting 25 cavalry will feel like painting at least 50 Infantry.

I do have some extra units that I hope to paint alongside these, and don't forget that big box of characters to dip into. Maybe this will even become the push I need to paint the full set of those?

Bases

A quick bit about basing. For my pre-slotta Dark Elf army I switched to using MDF bases which I drilled holes for magnets into. I liked how they came out, but there was a surprising amount of prep involved - drilling and sanding every base.

So this time round I ventured into CAD and designed and printed my own bases:

These have a 5mm magnet hole and a 2mm high lip around them, the hope being to conceal the solid bases within them and backfill with basing material. I was able to print these out on my very basic PLA filament printer fairly easily with very few mis-prints. I should probably have put two magnet holes in the cavalry bases, but I think one will be enough to protect against jostling even if I wouldn't dare turn the unit upside down like I can with the infantry.

Army List

I haven't written a full army list yet, but looking at the 3rd ed Warhammer Armies book:

20 Silver Helms @35 points each = 700 points

20 Guard @ 13 points each = 260 points

So I'm going to sail past 1000 points just by adding command options, let alone characters.

I'll be compiling a proper 3rd edition list unit by unit, as I go...

AdamH's Tyranids - If you got the money, honey, we got your disease (575 Points)

If you have ever followed one of my OWAC entries in the past you will know I always try and go out on a bang, well this entry is no different. I’m going to waffle a lot this month and show pictures of unpainted things so if you are not interested in any of that feel free to scroll down to the bright pictures at the bottom of this post.

You may have seen a small clue I left to this month’s entry back in my introduction post, and if you did, well done. This month is my biggest…

WILDCARD!

WAFFLE COMMENCE:

Back when I started planning this challenge it was always in my mind that I wanted to paint one of the original Armorcast Tyranid bio-tanks, so I went a searching around facebook groups to see if I could track one down and as you will see, ended up with more than I expected.

I managed to track down one of the original Malefactors, however the previous owner had converted it to a different pose. While I didn’t necessarily dislike the pose I wanted it to be as close to original as possible. So I started by stripping off the paint to unveil the previous work:

You can see that what they did was cut the arm and flip one of the pieces upside down to give it a different angle. They also cut both arms at the base again to change the angles:

So next I cut along the lines that were originally cut and removed as much of the glue as possible, this revealed that a bit of detail had been stripped away during the conversion:

I pinned the pieces back into their original poses and set about sculpting back the missing detail:

And when undercoated I think I managed to return it to the original pose fairly well don’t you think? Oh yea, also he came with a completely standard brother:

And two friends:

Spot the Termagant included for scale...

So yea, the purchase I made actually included one of each of the bio-tanks, and two of the Malefactors. A little more than I was planning to take on in the OWAC but I don’t like to turn down a challenge!

First up the two you have already seen, two Malefactors:

For those of you that are not in the know, these are the Tyranid troop transports, essentially bio-rhinos so having two of them is actually pretty useful in a list. They are also pretty cheap points-wise. They are not that much faster than the units they transport until they get to “fast” speed but they are nicely armoured so should help to deposit your gribblies into combat relatively unscathed.

Painting for these was done much in the same way as the rest of the army, with the same scheme only not quite as detailed. This is partially due to time restrictions (i.e. I would have never got them all done in time), and the relatively low level of detail on the actual sculpts. Never-the-less I think they look pretty striking and certainly fit in with the rest of the force.

The final missing piece when putting these together was the base. I knew I wanted to tie them into the rest of the army with more than just the colour scheme but no one made a base big enough. So 21^st century technology to the rescue, and one trip to thingiverse later I had the 3d plans for regular sized oval bases and some quick edits and they were scaled to the right dimensions. Even so however they were so big they wouldn’t fit on my printing bed in one go so I had to split them in half, print two and then stick them together. I also made use of the extra space on the base to include some bigger foliage, again the 3d printer to the rescue and I printed some palm tree looking trunks. Again I think they look pretty decent and bring some nice verticality to an otherwise quite squat looking army.

Next up we have the Exocrine, basically a Rhino with a gun for a horn:

As expected, this is similar to a Basilisk only a little stronger. Same range and strength but an extra D6 damage and armour penetration and double the save modifier. Basically, it is a tank killer.

Same scheme and basing style as before, I guess the only new element would be the green to bone transition on the gun. Not sure if it fully works but could be worse I guess.

Something you may have noticed is the slime trail behind each of these models. I built up the base with hot glue to give the look of furrows being driven into the ground and then filled them with red ink and gloss varnish.

Finally, we have the Haruspex:

This chap is a bit of everything, a couple of different medium range weapons, one for troops another for tanks and a close combat weapon for chomping anything silly enough to get close.

I guess the main stand out point of this model is that I tried to carry over the NMM effect onto the claws that I have in other parts of the army. Not sure it works as well on such a big model but it certainly is striking so I don’t hate it.

So wrapping up, my points for this month are as follows:

 

UNIT	EXTRAS	#	TOTAL
Malefactor (80)		2	160
Exocrine (165)		1	165
Haruspex (250)		1	250
TOTAL			575

And that is it, challenge over (for me at least). When I started I wasn’t sure I would be able to get everything done, and as it turned out I actually managed to add a few additions. Everything looks really cohesive, which I am very proud about and I can’t wait to show you all the full shots next month. But until then I hope you have enjoyed seeing me paint this very red force this year and have enjoyed everyone else’s entries just as much as I have.