Arjen's Rudiger's Bastards and The Old Man (205pts)

Rudiger's Bastards:

14 Thugs with bows and a troll: 140+65=205 points (sorry for all the crappy pictures, I have only my cheap phone to work with)

The Bastards and the Old Man lurking in the back.

This months assignment was hard. I did start on time, the undercoat on these models was grainy but not as bad as some of the others I already did. It had several models I was geared up to paint but also some I dreaded. Another thing was that my hobby time was party taken up with my Christmas present, a box of original od&d little brown booklets and I've been reading and running original 3LBB dungeons and dragons like crazy this month, rolling for opening doors, rolling 3d6 in order, hiring henchmen, counting used torches. It was great! I think you oldhammerers will totally understand my cheating on you with my OSR fix.

First, the Old Man; the senile troll. I love this model, an old Tom Meier Troll from the time Citadel and Ral Partha (Tom Meier) cast each others models. This sculpt is halfway between the D&D troll and the later slightly more goofy cartoony Citadel warhammer trolls. Somehow this copy lost his todger, a pity but I do like him. He will do great duty in my D&D games too.

The Old Man, totally senile, the trick of getting him to engage on the battlefield is telling him his morning cup of tea is stolen by that unit of dwarfs or that those elves are on his lawn again.

Now for the bastards. I had a full 14 unit of battle-master chaos thug archers but I do not think mono-pose models en-masse work well in a chaos army. So I went scrounging my other models, I found a Nurgle champion with rifle (awesome), some Norse archers (should work) an old orc (the emancipated  lanky kind), one of my Melnibonean "elf" archers and a Rogue trader pirate/adventurer with a hand crossbow. Mix in 3 metal Marauder Thug archers (all the same sculpt) and that should break up the monotony a bit.

I am happy with the end-result. although I must admit hating painting the monopose plastics and regrettably the 3 identical nice Marauder Thug archers.

From left to right: Bart, Rudiger, Klaus and El'ahar.

I must say I loved painting the orc archer, Bart, with nice pink flesh, blond hair and white eyes. I have his brother, another orc from the same era, in the other thug unit, Arnie; I'll leave it in the middle whether they are both orcs with a skin mutation, exiled from their orc tribe, or 2 human brothers with a matuation making look like orcs. The fact that they had to be put in 2 different units because they kept fighting each other on the battle field does suggest the former.

Klaus, the unit champion with the chainsword, seems a bit out of his element here. He is originally from Necromunda and got into the wrong type of cultist gangs. When his part of the hive was scheduled to be totally purged by the space marines he was able to escape with his mentor Rudiger, the current unit leader. He finds that the chaos wastes are infinitely preferable to Necromunda hive; it's the fresh air I guess.

Finally, El'ahar, never takes of her helmet; or gloves. The others in the unit don't know why she joined or whether she is a dark-elf, high elf or very skinny creepy mutant, she is a bit of a mystery. In reality she is a bitchy wood elf with a serious puerile anti-authority problem, didn't want to eat her veggies and totally HATES her parents, like really. Misses her morning honey cookies and herbal teas, she way over her head here.

Here's the whole crew I painted for this challenge.

After 3 months I did get a nice bunch of models painted that would do well as a warhammer skirmish, small Dragon Rampant or several Songs of Swords and Heroes warband.

Combine that with the small amount of chaos models I had already painted you get:

a bit blurry but ready to smash your elves, stomp your Dwarves and skin your Skaven.

Wipe the Empire clean, despoil the Brettonian fields, fart in the goblin caves.

Rattle the undead bones, ignore the silly Slan and totally obliterate those fucking Space Marines ( I mean you Ultra Marines) 

Arjen out. Peace!