From the towering mountains of the East…

…comes a new Ogre Tyrant, feeling hungry.

I’ve been really enjoying Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but I have a bad case of wargamer attention deficit disorder.  However cool something is, there is always a feeling of something else at least as cool out there.  When we all first embarked upon out Warhammer Fantasy journey, the first choice is invariably to select an army.  I chose Beastmen and they have not disappointed me, being both entertaining to play and satisfying to convert and paint.  But when I chose them I looked at other armies too, to decide if, perhaps, they were the ones for me.  One army that was definitely in the running was Ogre Kingdoms.  I like the miniatures and I like the fluff.  Now that I’ve been playing Beastmen for a while, they also strike me as a very different sort of army to play – instead of a tide of bleating goatmen, there would be a small number of fat hungry guys, always outnumbered and always looking for their next meal.

So a little while ago, Furycat had more or less the same ideas, except that he was tempted by the Tomb Kings (full disclosure: I think they have some pretty nice looking miniatures too), and when we spoke about this, it started my gamer ADD churning.  We more or less decided to each start playing a new army at the same time: he with Tomb Kings and me with Ogre Kingdoms.

For some reason, that wasn’t quite enough for me.  I was browsing through the web a while ago, and stumbled upon a thing of beauty which totally inspired me.  Someone had converted some of their Ogres to be females, and it’s all documented in DonTheDime’s Gnoblog.  Now, as with all works of genius, there is more in that blog than I’m ever going to be able to work on. But one aspect – Ogresses – is enough to set my own wheels of creativity going. Follow me down the rabbit hole, and let’s see where this leads.

Paint your miniatures!

This post is more like a status update for my benefit, or perhaps a to-do list might be a more accurate description.  After buying and assembling a bunch of Ungors, Gors, Minotaurs and even a Bray Shaman, one might reasonably ask why I haven’t actually painted any of them yet.  Well, the answer is that I am part way through doing a great many of them.  However, not even one is photograph-ready yet.

I have painted all 8 of the Ungors I made, but since I left the shields off for ease of painting, I have the slight problem that the shields are currently in a box somewhere, as I am in the throes of moving house.  So all they need is to have their shields painted and stuck on (an easy task, one would hope), and then basing to finish them off.  Once I find the box with the sprues in then it ought to take no time at all.

The Gors are still very much a work in progress.  I’ve painted 8, and there are another 8 on the painting table right now.  I think I’ll go for 24 dudes to complete this unit, so another 8 will see me there.  There are a couple of pieces (notably the banner and a couple of shields) hiding in a box somewhere, but I paint so slowly that I will probably have them handy again before the unit is done.  Although I could have based the 8 finished Gors, I prefer to wait and do a full unit since it’s easier to be consistent.

The Bray Shaman will probably be done after the Gor unit is finished (i.e. some time around 2023 at my current rate), but I still need to decide on colours.  I’m definitely going to paint the severed head he’s holding with a completely different skin colour so it looks like he’s killed a Gor from a different tribe (and for contrast) but I am uncertain on his own skin.  I think it would be good to do him in a slightly different colour from the Gors so he stands out as being marked by his heathen Gods, but which way to go?  The Gors are all dark grey skin and black fur, so my current options are to paint him much lighter, heading toward white skin, or to go much darker and have him mostly black and very deep grey.  I guess white (or at least light grey) skin would probably make him stand out more.

My Minotaurs have had exactly no work whatever done on them.  The weather outside is too cold and wet to be good for spray undercoating, and since I’ve got so many other miniatures to paint, there is no need to rush into them.

What does the future hold?  Well, thanks to the miracles of eBay I am now the owner of not one but two Beastmen Battalions, and an Orc and Goblin chariot.  So my running total for the army is:

72 Gors
28 Ungors
20 Bestigors
3 Minotaurs
1 Chariot

Of course, one of the Gors has already been ‘promoted’ to a Bray Shaman, and that fate will probably befall another (with a Bestigor Head or something) to become a Great Bray Shaman.  A third will crew the Chariot, which will need a Bestigor to ride on the back and continually roll 1s to wound (and I intend to get some of the new Boar Boyz to provide Tuskgors since they actually look like they are wild and ferocious instead of waiting to become bacon).  Another Bestigor will have to be promoted to a Battle Standard Bearer; I’ll probably get him a Chaos Warrior cloak and use the Minotaur banner so he looks the part.  And, finally, perhaps yet another Bestigor will be converted into a Beastlord if I can make him look impressive enough…

From the dark forests of the Old World…

…stumbles a brand new Beastlord, looking confused.

Hello world!

This is going to be a blog about my trials and tribulations using Beastmen in Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

So, why Warhammer Fantasy Battle?  Well, the group of gamers I play with decided en masse to give this game a go since there is a new (8th) edition out.  Many of us had played earlier editions, but even the most recent had stopped more than 10 years ago (and it was more than that for me).  We all play Warhammer 40K together, so we just picked an army each, and jumped in.  I picked Beastmen.

Why Beastmen?  They just look cool.  Plus, I like the idea of a bunch of bipedal goats rampaging around the villages of the Old World, trying to eat or despoil anything that they can get to stay still long enough.

Why a blog?  Some time ago, I was inspired by my friends’ blogs, – justinmatters’s and furycat’s, and I thought I might have a go, but I never did.  Yesterday, I stumbled across this blog (of a complete stranger) and it was pretty much what I’d been thinking of for a blog, combined with something to write about (i.e.  a new army in a new game system).

So, lets say ‘cheers’ to another blog destined not to be updated very often, and eventually forgotten.