Testing... Is this thing still on?

Rumors of my demise have been slightly exaggerated, and I must apologize for my absence over the last month.While it would be easy to offer up a litany of excuses, the main point is I've been remiss in keeping the blog up to date, and it's high time to rectify the situation - While I haven't been posting, I certainly haven't been inactive!

So over the next few days I'll be curating and updating a number of projects (as well as taking a lot of new pics as I'm finding several shots that look good on a phone screen are garbage on an actual monitor. Doh! First off will be one of my most anticipated recent releases, Blackstone Fortress!

Honestly the first 40k box set I've been excited about since Necromunda - Specialist Games, how I adore thee!

Gotta have the group shot first. While I liked the Rogue Trader and entourage that came with Kill Team, THIS is what a proper Rogue Trader group ought to look like with all the strange and esoteric members!

Gotta love stripey pants!

Possibly my favorite model of the bunch, I love the aesthetic and got a chuckle at the name-check nod to Lustram Locarno in the 1st edition Rogue Trader rulebook.

Gotta love a fat priest! Thoroughly enjoyed painting this guy's outrageous rainment.

Burn baby, buuuuuuurrrrrrnnnnn! Dig the model, though it's a bit overpowered in the game itself I'm finding...

"Beep boop. I am a completely normal Imperial Robot and not an abominable intelligence. No sir."

Perhaps the most characterful of the entourage, the ratling twins were a hoot to paint and are quite amusing in-game as well!

If I was only going to paint one Kroot, I basically HAD to paint him up like an archetypal farmyard chicken, right?

The Eldar Ranger was so stealthy it was only at this point that I realized the pic was way out of focus. Derp. Reshoots required!

Quite liked the shades-of-green cameleoline cloak, and took a crack at the Biel-Tan thorny vines thing with marginal success.

Really, really liked the traitor guardsmen, but was really disappointed to find out they didn't do full ten-man squads. Still, great new sculpts full of character!

The second seven got the reversed color schemes on pants and jackets, but it's sort of hard to tell. In game they're sorts of grabbed at random so they all end up hanging together aesthetically at least.

The two rogue psykers are simply exemplary models!

Who doesn't like beastmen? Well, a lot of people apparently but I for one miss having 'em in 40k and was jazzed to see 'em in the set!

The Negavolt Cultists are some very evocative models, and would love to see more of this sort of thing on the Dark Mechanicus side!

The Spindle Drones were a neat new addition to the mix, though it was at this point my cunning plan to trim the slotta bases off the models sort of bit me. Trimming and gluing them down to the new bases was fraught with danger!

Interestingly, the models I'm most proud of are the ones I was least excited about in the whole set. I did some experiments with washes and color modulation on these guys and really dug how they turned out!

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed painting all the models, and the game itself is a blast to play (though does require a bit of a time commitment)! Next up, diving headfirst back into the Heresy with a surprise shift in direction due to some late-breaking news...

No school like the old school - Confrontation Gang Leader (precursor to Necromunda)

The heat wave continues so my hobby output has been pretty minimal this week - On the upside I got a box of joy from Forge World yesterday which included the Horus Heresy Book V, and the Xiphon Interceptor for the Imperial Fists, but as the model is just sitting in a soak tank not a lot of new pictures of progress. So, time to trawl the photo archives and see what I hadn't posted up while my computer was in the shop!

A few months back while spelunking in the Closet of Doom I struck a rich seam of old out of print minis from the late 80's, and I chiseled a few out of the strata as 'palatte cleanser' models to fiddle around with when I needed a breather from the main projects. I'd documented the painting process fairly well, and thought I'd step through the process as an adjunct to the hobby articles from last month.

  

The model for today is from the way out of print "Confrontation" game whose rules were released in While Dwarf and was a precursor to what would eventually become Necromunda. I always thought the model would make a great Rogue Trader, as well. Starting off with faces and skin, as per the 'inside out' method - everything got a basecoat of Leather Brown, then the eyes got a layer of Ghost Grey, and Bronzed Flesh was used to pick out the forehead, cheekbones, nose and lips, leaving the Leather Brown in the recesses for shadowing.

As a bit of a hobby cheat, I do not actually paint irises on models, instead I turn to a trusty Micron pen in 005. So much more control for someone with fists of ham like me!

 

A quick stripe down the center of the whites using the pen followed by the tiniest little dot of Ghost Grey in the middle of the stripe as a reflective dot. A quick touch-up in Bronzed Flesh for any overspill, and then the extreme edges of the nose, cheeks, forehead and knuckles get one further highlight in thinned Bonewhite.

  

The pants got a basecoat of Jade Green, followed by highlights of Foul Green and Scorpion Green, and then a wash of Biel-Tan Green to help blend it together.

 

The reds and purples were kept pretty dark in hue - As there was a lot of gold detail on those areas I wanted to ensure the details had a dark background to set off against.

 

Laid in all the gold and leather and suddenly the model starts to snap into focus! Overall the model was looking quite dark so the power axe blade and the critter on his shoulder both got a bright blue to (over)compensate.

A few final details, some static grass and the model is ready to go adventuring on the fringes of Imperial space!

Heresy Era World Eaters - Tactical Squad painted, colorado wildfires raging

It's been an interesting week here in Colorado, with sustained triple-digit temperatures and some serious wildfires burning to the north, west and south of us. Over 87,000 acres burned in the High Park fire about twenty minutes north of here (though thankfully that fire is now ~75% contained), and 30,000 residents have been evacuated down in Colorado Springs due to the Waldo Canyon fire. Of more immediate threat is the Flagstaff fire burning on the outskirts of Boulder, quite nearby where I live, and directly threatening a friend's house - he's been on pre-evacuation notice for several days, which has been very stressful. The fires have been fought tooth and nail but were cresting the foothills just a mile outside town overnight:

In the interim, it's been swelteringly hot up in the hobby loft, so it's been a challenge to get much done. I did manage to finish off the ten-man Tactical squad for the World Eaters in time for the weekly challenge being hosted by Dark Future Games however:

On other gaming fronts, we recently finished the Rogue Trader RPG campaign that I've been running, and my friend Dave has offered to run a Dark Heresy campaign for a while, so I also painted up an Anima Tactics model for use as my Sanctioned Psyker. It was a nice change of pace to work on!

At this point I'm struggling to stay motivated on the World Eaters, so I rooted around in the Closet of Doom for some other small project to work on for a bit. Next up on the painting desk is a unit of Iron Hands bikers. I figured painting a mostly-black unit would be a good counterpoint to the mostly-white of the World Eaters!

A 'short' foray into a new technique...

As I've referenced in past posts, I run a twice-monthly Rogue Trader RPG for my local gaming group. We tend to use miniatures fairly frequently, which gives me an opportunity to do a little one-off model or small unit here and there. The upcoming adventure takes the group to Ritammeron, a feudal world that has missed their yearly tithe and the players are supposed to go restore the status quo. One of many things going on down on the planet involves a rogue Squat Engineer who has been hiding out on the planet but recently has begun building technologically advanced weapons for one of the various power blocs. The Adeptus Mechanicus wants him captured, so I figured I should make up a model for him:

I picked up this warmachine fig ages ago for use as a squat in one of my multitudinous half-started projects, but until now it's been sitting primered on the shelf. I wanted to try out some new technique and push my comfort zone a little bit, so I thought I'd take a crack at 'object source lighting' and try to have the glow from the thunder hammer shine onto the model a bit. I read a couple tutorials and got to work - I resolved that for the first try I should try the 'less is more' approach - thinking that if I screwed it up and it looked dumb, it would only look dumb on a smallish part of the model. Heh.

However, for a first try I was pleasantly surprised in how it turned out, and learned a lot about what I should do on the next attempt. I may have been a bit too conservative on the lit areas, but overall I was happy with the final results. I don't know that I'd do this for every model that may have something that could possibly glow, but for the occasional character model I may have to try this technique again in the future!

Galaxy Building...

As I've alluded to in the past, over the last couple months I've been slowing getting my notes and ideas in order for a Rogue Trader campaign. I'd ran a Dark Heresy campaign last year, and while it was entertaining for me (and hopefully for the players), I wasn't super keen on the whole "GM-PC" inquisitor who mandated what the players did and where they went. It smacked a bit too much of obvious railroad-ism, though to be fair it was an easy way to keep the players on task, what with the whole "your other option is to be mind-scrubbed and/or killed" mentality. That being the case I think a Rogue Trader campaign has the potential to offer much more latitude to the players as far as their goals and challenges since the Rogue Trader is controlled by a player with his own motivations, unlike the GM-controlled Inquisitor in the DH system. Of course one of the important parts of any Rogue Trader game is a map of the expanse in which the players will be exploring (warning, stupidly huge picture):

Besides the charts and tables and miniatures and whatnot, I've also been slowly working on an interactive galaxy map of the Koronus Expanse (the locale detailed in the RT rulebook) utilizing the AstroSynthesis toolkit from NBOS. It's not the most user-friendly interface in the world, and there's definitely some things that it doesn't do that I wish it did, but it's the best tool I've been able to find so far. The nice thing about it (other than the full 3d animated, interactive map) is the Gazetteer that it generates based on the sector information - a handy guide for players on one hand, and a separate version that includes all the GMs notes and special info for me. I'm planning on kicking off the game in mid-january, so I still have a month or so to get it all finished up. Once it's done I'll make the sector files available to anyone who may want to make use of it.