Painted Mulg The Ancient

This is Mulg the Ancient, a character (i.e. unique) Warbeast to go with my growing Trollbloods army for Hordes. Mulg is a fantastic beatstick, especially with Rage and Stone Strength applied. Indeed, Mulg probably could simply walk into Mordor… at least if he went fast enough to ever get there. As a result of this lack of threat range I’ve generally used Mulg as a second wave to sweep up whatever kills my front line. He also has a few tricks like being able to dispel incoming magic (quite rare in Hordes as far as I can tell) and can regenerate lost hit points at the start of a turn for free. Mulg costs a lot of points but I’ve always found him worth it, either in terms of his actual damage output or the effort required to kill him before he smites important stuff with his Runed Club.

As befits one of my Trollbloods, Mulg has blue skin and red… stuff on him. In Mulg’s case, the line between hair and random rocky outgrowths is blurred further by apparently having an actual boulder sprouting from his back. The official Privateer Press version of the paint scheme differentiates that from the hairy stuff and colours it like rock, but I felt that was too silly (or perhaps not silly enough) so I doubled down and did it all in red. I’m not a huge lover of Mulg’s sculpt; the tiny legs and huge arms/body of other Trollbloods is overly exaggerated here and despite being on a 50mm base his club sticks out in a way that it quite annoying for gaming purposes. He’s also made of metal which means the miniature weighs much more than the other Trollblood Warbeasts and meant that I had to pin just about every join during assembly. As is typical of Privateer Press sculpts, there were some substantial gaps to fill once I was done. So after all that I was pleased that the painting same out quite nicely.

Next on the painting table: Barathrum

Painted Krielstone Bearer and Stone Scribes

These are the Krielstone Bearer and Stone Scribes, part of my Trollbloods force for Hordes. They’re a staple of ‘brick’ lists (i.e. ones that like to keep the core elements close together) in Trollbloods as they provide an armour bonus within a certain area. This makes the already resilient Warbeasts in particular a bit of a pain to deal with efficiently. Needless to say, this puts them high on the target list for anyone who can get past the wall of Warbeasts that I usually have the Krielstone Bearer hiding behind. The rest of the unit, the Stone Scribes, are pretty much ablative wounds for the Krielstone Bearer since they can pick up the Krielstone if they’re close enough when he dies. Otherwise, I just use them for getting in the way.

I like the sculpts on these guys, though it would be hard to guess that the Krielstone Bearer belongs with the Stone Scribes since they have almost no common visual identifiers. I picked green for the robe colour on this unit and otherwise they’re largely painted the same as my other Trollblood units. I tried to mix up the colours on the skin, metals the clothing/belts/etc so that none of the unit are actually identical.

I dedicate this post to Azazel’s Unit-ed October Community Challenge.

It’s hard not to think of the Krielstone Bearer as Obelix. I did have a brief try at glowing runes on the Krielstone but after a couple of goes of them looking awful I decided just to stick with boring old non-magical stone.

The Stone Scribes are much more interesting to paint than the Krielstone Bearer, so in some ways it’s a bit of a shame that they’re quite dull in game terms.

Next on the painting table: Mulg the Ancient

Painted Dronbot Remotes (Clipper and Fugazi)

Here are two more remotes for my Infinity army, the Druze Bayram Security. Just like the Peacemaker, these are both ‘brought in’ from the PanOceania faction, which has the side-effect of making the miniatures frustratingly hard to find on a web catalogue for a new Infinity player like me (because they’re categorised under ‘PanOceania’ rather than ‘Non-Aligned Armies’). The Clipper (left in the photos) has a Missile Launcher which means that I really love to use it in the active turn. Being a remote, it can have various Supportware used on it by my Hackers to improve its accuracy and rather unusually for a remote it can also be part of a Fire Team. This makes it a really horrid piece to face when I can set the engagement. As a result, I’ve mainly lost it to camouflaged snipers gunning it down from halfway across the board in my reactive turn. The Fugazi (on the right) has some cool sensor equipment that I’ve never used well but I don’t mind because it’s really cheap and brings and Regular Order along. So if it does nothing but sit still and occasionally Flash Pulse some fools then I’m quite happy.

Nothing of note to say about the painting here; I just copied the Peacemaker as closely as I could manage. Trying to get straight lines along the green to white boundary gives me a new appreciation for all the talented painters out there who can do freehand.

Next on the painting table: Krielstone Bearer and Stone Scribes

Harlequins family photo

Here are a couple of photos of my complete Harlequin family so far. I’m pretty sure that this is not even a legal force in 8th ed Warhammer 40,000, so if I want to take them out to play with others then I’ll need to collect some more. I’m not sure whether that’s likely to happen any time soon so I have plenty of time to consider how to continue the paint scheme with any future miniatures.

Overall I am very happy with the coherent look of the force when they’re all together like this. It’s quite satisfying to finally complete a project.

Painted Harlequin Starweaver

This is the last part of my current Harlequin collection to get a paint job, the Starweaver. This miniature is one of the reasons that I bought Harlequins in the first place; I’m just a huge fan of vehicle sculpts with riders hanging off the side. The main function of the Starweaver appears to be transporting the Harlequin Troupes around without having them shot by small-arms on their way across the board. In practice what happens to me is that the Starweaver is blown up by anti-materiel weapons, then small-arms kill off all the now-disembarked riders. Probably this is more an indication of how good I am at Warhammer 40,000 than any indictment of the Harlequins in general or the Starweaver in particular.

The paint scheme was intended to match well with the rest of the Harlequins I’ve painted. The crew received the same treatment as the Harlequin Troupe who will ride in it, and the Starweaver itself has ended up looking like a bigger version of the Skyweavers. If I get more Harlequins I’m not sure whether to stick with the same scheme entirely (seems fitting to have an army coherently attired) or mix it up a bit (since these are space-elf dancers who’ve mastered the mysteries of the universe but still choose to walk up to their enemies and shank them personally). Anyway, I had a good time putting these bits together here; the crew were done separately and then glued onto the painted Starweaver right at the end of the process.

Here are a couple of close ups of the crew… or possibly the crew and a random rider who thought it would be fun to hold onto the side of a speeding hovercraft-thing.  I’m pleased to see that the gunner has subscribed to the classic Warhammer 40,00 meme of ‘Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!’.

I’ll get the rest of the band together in the next couple of days for a family photo.

Next on the painting table: Dronbot Remotes.

Painted Earthborn Dire Troll

This an Earthborn Dire Troll, a Heavy Warbeast for my Trollbloods army in Hordes. Earthborns are very nice melee fighters since they’re comparatively cheap, take the Rage animus very well and bring a fairly tasty animus of their own (Not having my Warlock knocked down or pushed around? Yes please!). In addition, they get various improvements to their base statistics if they stand near certain bits of terrain; this should be a game-changing advantage but in practice I either forget about it when I’m moving the Earthborn or I end up getting an irrelevant bonus. Particularly common is getting the increased speed bonus when the Earthborn is already jammed in deep to the other army, though since this normally precedes its untimely demise that is probably not my biggest issue.

Being a bigger kind of Trollbloods I kept to the same basic pattern of blue skin and red hair / rocky things that I think works rather nicely. Dire Trolls are supposed to be more animalistic than the smaller Trollkin, so I decided that a simple brown loincloth was in order since they wouldn’t appreciate finely coloured clothing. As a lover of dynamic sculpts, the Earthborn is probably the finest Warbeast in the whole range since it is actually doing something; almost every other Warbeast is in some variation of the ‘standing still looking cool/angry’ pose. In the lore, Earthborns are supposed to have some limited control over the local environment so I think that the stone on the floor is meant to be created by the presence of the Dire Troll rather than being smashed into pieces by a particularly powerful smite.

Next on the painting table: Harlequin Starweaver.

Painted Bashi Bazouk with Boarding Shotgun

This is a Bashi Bazouk, another member of my slowly-expanding Druze Bayram Security army for Infinity. In the same way that the Peacemaker hails from the PanOceania faction, the Bashi Bazouk is brought in from the Haqqislam army list. Bashi Bazouks are paratroopers and so can appear on other board edges than my deployment zone for a bit of extra confusion. On top of this, they have the Holoecho rule which allows me to place a pair of additional dummy models when he arrives. Like many Infinity rules, I am not yet sure that we’ve actually played this rule correctly, but in essence it gives the real Bashi Bazouk a chance to cause some mayhem while nearby foes split fire between him and the holograms (which are, of course, immediately revealed as fakes as soon as they don’t return fire). This sculpt has a Boarding Shotgun but I’ve generally used the profile with the SMG for the simple reason that it is much, much cheaper.

The sculpt is in a bit of an unduly heroic pose for a sneaky special operations type, and he is also taking advantage of the classic Infinity ‘tactical junk’ to look even cooler.  I have to admit that I can’t imagine many scenarios where I’d prefer to fight using a knife rather than a giant death-cannon, but then again I’m not a futuristic space gangster with wings, so what do I know? I rather enjoyed painting the Bashi Bazouk; I stayed with the same very limited palette that I’ve used for most of the rest of the DBS force and I think it is starting to pay off when they’re together. Once I have all of my current crop painted I plan to take a family shot. My gentle reader(s) can then decide if it’s a nicely coherent force or a mess in green, white and black.

Next on the painting table: Earthborn Dire Troll