Painted Plague Drones (part 1)

This lot are Plague Drones, which as you probably have guessed from the ‘Plague’ in the name are part of the Nurgle contingent of my Chaos Daemon army for Warhammer 40,000. Like the rest of the Nurgle forces their main draw is being inefficient to kill with almost any weapon in the game, but this unit is slightly unusual in being quite mobile to boot. I’ve had a bit of success throwing them down the other army’s throat as soon as possible to buy a bit of time while the Plaguebearers slog across the board and clog up objectives. One almost downside to the Plague Drones is that they have several wounds. This might not seem like a problem but in an army that gets such a benefit from resilience, it seems like a waste to give the big guns on the other side of the board something to shoot at. Or, to put it another way, I love it when the giant death cannon facing me is forced to ‘waste’ it’s shot by doing nothing more than vapourising a single Plaguebearer (and sometimes not even that considering the invulnerable save and Disgustingly Resilient rule).

I’ve mixed up the two skin colours from the other Nurgle Daemons here, with the mounts in green and the riders in brown. I agonised for a while about how to do the carapace and wings and eventually decided to keep them a bit duller to better contrast with the green of the flies’ bodies. I’m still not completely happy with that look but the rest of them are pretty much right where I was aiming so I’ll consider that a good outcome. Transporting these is proving to be a bit tricky as they’re covered in spiky, sticky-out bits; luckily half the games they’ve played in have been at my house.

Next on the painting table: Swamp Horror.

Painted Nurglings (part 1)

These glorious, cute little piles of goo are Nurglings, part of my ongoing Chaos Daemons project. As befits tiny creatures on a battlefield filled with tanks, superhumans and wizards, Nurglings are quite easy to kill and don’t do much damage. However they are quite cheap, very un-threatening, fairly inefficient to kill and can sit on objectives like champions while the rest of my army goes about the business of fighting.

Despite how amusing I find Nurglings, I decided to keep it as simple as possible when painting them. So it was a simple green wash over white undercoat, then pick out the mankiest bits in pink. I did consider giving a couple of the individual Nurglings a different colour just to liven them up a bit but getting into their backs with the paintbrush looked to be a bit awkward. Overall I’m pleased with how they look considering the effort needed to complete them.

Next on the painting table: Plague Drones

Painted Plaguebearers (part 1)

Here are the first ten Plaguebearers for my Chaos Daemon army. They fulfil my troops choice and appear to be fairly effective so I guess I’ll eventually end up with quite a few of them. In particular, the main benefit that Plaguebearers bring is being really inefficient to kill so I want to maximise that by taking the full-size unit of 30 so that they can maintain the benefit of their -1 to hit ability for as long as possible. When it comes to actually killing stuff, Plaguebearers are not my first choice. But they excel at sitting on objectives and not dying very fast, so usually I punt them onto an objective and / or ram them down the throat of something that specialises in massive single target damage and just let them grind it out over a few turns.

In contrast to the Poxbringer, I wanted this (first, perhaps of several) unit of Plaguebearers to sport green skin. As with the Poxbringer, I did this by applying two layers of Biel-Tan Green wash over a white undercoat. I deliberately kept to a minimal approach for detailing the miniatures since I expect to end up with 30, 60 or even more of these in my army, so most of the smaller spots / boils / etc on their bodies were not specifically picked out. I like the way that the green skin and bone weapons work together.

Next on the painting table: Nurglings.

Painted Poxbringer

This is a Poxbringer, the first miniature in a fledgling Chaos Daemon army for Warhammer 40,000 (and Age of Sigmar, at least in theory). In the time since I last played the game, all the Heralds have been renamed into something more silly and copyright-able; in this case the Poxbringer would previously have been a Herald of Nurgle. It’s a pretty cheap HQ choice and mainly benefits me by increasing the strength of other nearby Nurgle units and occasionally contributing some damage or similar with a psychic power. The few times I’ve been desperate enough to commit the Poxbringer to close combat have gone pretty poorly so I generally aim to keep it behind a big blob of Plaguebearers.

Furycat and I got the itch to play GW games again after a rather long break so we’ve been dipping in with 500 and 1000 point games between combination of my Daemons, his Space Marines and Gary’s Space Wolves. You can read a bit about his initial thoughts here: link. So far 8th edition has been quite entertaining, being fairly smooth on rules interactions and at least tolerably balanced (by GW standards). The missions are the main let down as we’re playing with the scenarios from the main rule book but I understand that there are alternative options available for us to research.

I’m splitting the skin tone of the Nurgle units between green and brown; as can clearly be seen the Poxbringer got brown. I’ve been trying a new approach of working mainly with washes for the bulk of the miniature, so in this case I started from a white undercoat and went straight in with two washes of Seraphim Sepia. Everything else is done in the ‘normal’ way; i.e. with paint first. I like the way that the purple guts contrast with the skin, but the bone of the weapon and tree / antler (?) thing sticking out of the Poxbringer’s back is probably a bit too close in tone. I couldn’t think of a clever way to fix that since I want to keep those bony colours consistent even for when I get to the units with green skin and so it needs to be something both slightly naturalistic and contrasting with green. Even with that, I like the result and feel that the Poxbringer will be a good start to my Chaos Daemons. One down, potentially hundreds still to go!

Next on the painting table: Plaguebearers.

Painted Satyxis Blood Witches

These ladies are Satyxis Blood Witches, part of my slowly-expanding Cryx force for Warmachine. In these days of ‘theme for everything’ they fit in the Scourge of the Broken Coast, a theme that is basically limited to Warjacks and things with the Satyxis tag. These particular ones are specialised as ambushers, so I often try to leave them off the board at the start in the hope that the other player will leave a soft solo somewhere they can get to easily. Otherwise they just end up swarming on from the side of the board and gumming things up as best they can. The Blood Witches are mostly useful for taking down other lightly armoured foes, so if I’m facing a really heavy-weight foe then I just have to use them for body blocking. Like all Satyxis, they are lightly armoured but have high defense. As a result they really hate it when someone has an attack that automatically hits, or if anyone can fire template weapons.

I really love the sculpts of the Satyxis range but I find them incredibly fiddly to assemble. The arms are separate on most of them which is manageable with a bit of pinning, but worse, the horns are most separate pieces. Needless to say I just trusted in superglue for the horns. I also think I may have received a minor mispack as I don’t actually have a proper set of horn-pairs – if you look closely a couple of them have mis-matched horns. Painting started off well but I gradually got bogged down in all the belts, straps, necklaces etc and I have to admit that I was quite glad to finally call the unit done.

This one is the unit leader (at least until I get round to dealing with the unit attachment, in which case she’ll be outranked). I had all sorts of plans to make her multi-layered skirt look cool with all it’s trimmings but I decided in the end to leave it simple. From table top distance, of course, the difference is barely perceptible.

I wanted red clothing but also stuck with pink as the spot colour for my Cryx force. Unfortunately I think that it doesn’t really work quite as well as I had hoped.

I spent a while at the start trying to keep skin colour, hair colour and sculpt separate. In particular, I think that I’ve managed to keep those with duplicate sculpts to have different skin tones so they don’t look like twins! To the best extent I could manage, I avoided repeating the same combination of hair colour and skin colour across the unit.

Keen observers will note the battle heels again. Why do sculptors insist on these for female miniatures? The rest of the clothing isn’t too silly, at least taken in the context of the genre

Next on the painting table: Poxbringer.

Painted Jarl Skuld, Devil of the Thornwood

Here is Jarl Skuld, Devil of the Thornwood. He’s a Warlock in my Trollbloods force for Hordes and as such is the lynchpin for the whole army. The main reason I chose Skuld as my first and main Warlock is because he carries a pair of rather long range pistols. Since getting your Warlock killed means a loss in Hordes, being able to contribute without getting stabbed too much in return is quite appealing (not that it helps me too much since I’m still awful at the game). His Feat allows some clouds to be placed in his Control Area, which at least in theory allows me to deliver my forces without having them shot too much on the way in. My favourite part of Skuld’s kit is the Magic Bullet spell, allowing him to gun down support solos and so on when they think that they’re safe.

I very much loved painting the Jarl, as he’s covered in nice bling. I felt that the deep red of the cloak was fitting for a leader of Trolls as it makes him stand out on the battlefield. The only part I was unsure on was the headband. In the end, I did it in white (maybe it’s more like a bandage) as all the other colours I tried ended up blending in too much with the skin or cloak, or were otherwise unsatisfactory.

Next on the painting table: Satyxis Blood Witches.

Painted Seishin

These are a full set of five Seishin for Malifaux. They’re part of the Resurrectionists faction and thematically linked with Kirai Ankoku. I understand that in the brave new world of Malifaux’s third edition that themes are going to be rather important so I guess that they might never see the table now without Kirai. In the past they’ve provided tiny support abilities to friendly models, usually at the cost of Sacrificing the Seishin. Luckily they tend to be summoned incidentally all over the place anyway so their sacrifice was not a big deal.

When I originally bought these, I had all sort of ideas for cool painting of these as various dragons and so on. Eventually they got put away in the case and forgotten about, and anyway as probably the cheapest models in the game they’re easy to justify overlooking. In the end I got a hankering to put some colour on the Seishin simply to clear them from my backlog and realised that, since they’re supposed to be some kind of ghosts, I could just paint them accordingly. Hence, they got the simplest of paint schemes: white, then a green wash, then more white over the top. Simples.

I dedicate this post to Azazel‘s Gender-Ambiguous Model Painting Challenge for March. These are clearly not specifically male or female so I consider them a perfect fit.

Since the miniatures themselves are not super-interesting (and anyway are all the same colour) I thought I’d share pictures of them on various different coloured backgrounds that came with my lightbox. I still prefer the white background though.

Next on the painting table: Jarl Skuld, Devil of the Thornwood.

Painted Runebearer

This is a (or possibly ‘the’) Runebearer, a caster attachment for my Hordes Trollbloods army. He is entirely about supporting your Warlock of choice and seems to bring something of value to all of them. The Runebearer increases the size of the Warlock’s Control Area which is pretty useful all the time, and can cast one of their spells for them. In terms of abilities, that is about it but I think that I’ve never really regretted taking him into a game with me. The Runebearer is also a solo which means that he can score flags and I’m generally quite happy to keep him back there out of harm’s way.

The Runebearer suffers rather from having a somewhat boring sculpt, but I suppose since he’s meant to be Moses this is to be expected. I went for a somewhat drab clothing colour as befits the Runebearer’s status as a support model, and I think it works pretty well for him. Once again I started off trying to do a glowing effect on the runes on the tablets but I was not happy with the results so I went over them as grey stone.

Next on the painting table: Seishin

Druze Bayram Security family photo

I finally finished painting all my (current batch of) miniatures for my Druze Bayram Security army in Infinity. Interest in the game has waned again among my group of friends so I don’t currently have any plans to get more. Of course, games go up and down in our desire to play them so Infinity is just one strong advocate away from returning to being a regular on the gaming table. In the meantime I enjoyed the process of painting this lot; they’re a rather different sculpting style than most of the miniatures I own.  In particular, I really like the way they look like a coherent force with their matching colours.

I don’t think that they add up to a very sensible army for gaming purposes, but in case anyone is interested, this is what they would be fielded as (with a minimum of messing with profiles).

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GROUP 1

BASHI BAZOUK Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 15)
VALERYA GROMOZ Hacker (Hacking Device UPGRADE: Expel) Combi Rifle + Pitcher / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 21)
DRUZE HMG, Chain-colt / Viral Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 29)
DRUZE (Fireteam: Haris, X Visor) Combi Rifle, Chain-colt, D.E.P. / Viral Pistol, CCW. (1 | 25)
DRUZE (Fireteam: Haris, X Visor) Combi Rifle, Chain-colt, D.E.P. / Viral Pistol, CCW. (1 | 25)
DRUZE (X Visor) Combi Rifle + Light Grenade Launcher (E/M and Nimbus) / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 27)
DRUZE (X Visor) Shock Marksman Rifle, Chain-colt / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 27)
DRUZE Hacker (Killer Hacking Device) Combi Rifle + Pitcher, D-Charges / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 25)
DRUZE Hacker (Assault Hacking Device) Combi Rifle + Pitcher, D-Charges / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 28)
DRUZE Lieutenant (X Visor) Combi Rifle, Chain-colt / Viral Pistol, Knife. (0 | 23)

GROUP 2
CLIPPER DRONBOT Missile Launcher / Electric Pulse. (1.5 | 17)
FUGAZI DRONBOT Flash Pulse, Sniffer / Electric Pulse. (0 | 8)
PEACEMAKER Heavy Shotgun + AUXBOT_3 / Electric Pulse. (0 | 21)
AUXBOT_3 Heavy Flamethrower / Electric Pulse. (- | 4)
HUNZAKUT (Forward Observer, Deployable Repeater) Rifle + Light Shotgun, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 18)

6.5 SWC | 309 Points

Open in Infinity Army

Painted Druze Shock Team with Chain Colt

So here, finally, is the last of my current batch of miniatures for my Druze Bayram Security force in Infinity. This is yet another Druze Shock Team and is toting a Chain Colt. In game terms, all Druze Shock Team profiles carry this as a side arm so I suppose that the idea is that this miniature can represent any equipment load-out.

I very much like the no-nonsense posing of this particular Druze Shock Team. Infinity has a lot of miniatures with rather outlandish poses and while I do certainly enjoy a dynamic miniature it is quite nice to have a rather more solid looking option on the table. The paint scheme, of course, is the same as the rest of this force.

Being the last Infinity miniature in the queue, I plan to take a family photo in the next few days and share the whole team at once.

Next on the painting table: Runebearer.