Fiends!

So, fucking finally, I actually finished something. Actually, they still want a little more gloss on the water, and maybe some little clumps of static grass, but I took them to a Tournament and got 2nd in Best Painted, so I think I can call them done. Which makes Magore's Fiends my first completed project so far this year, and in time to count for Azazel's June-Unit Challenge, making them also the first hobby challenge I've completed so far this year. Anyhow, on to the shinies!

Magore himself! I played around a bit with using some different inks on the Daemon and Orruk skulls

I also decided to add some freehand, since that's a substantial part of the painting rubric for these events. Not 100% happy with the Mark of Khorne there, but I am very happy with the tiger stripes

Puppy! Riptooth is so great. One of my favourite Fighters in Shadespire, fast and deadly. He looks brighter here than in person, something about the way Blood for the Blood God interacts with the flash, I think.

I use BftBG as the main colour on all my Khorne Daemons, with the idea being that they're outright made of blood and brass. I tried to get the Mark of Khorne branded on his shoulder to look like clotted blood, but had trouble getting it to stand out.

A look at the basing. One more layer of that gloss brown ink will really give the muddy water a nice sheen.

Ghartok Flayskull. I converted him to have a helmet, but it may have been a poor decision, since now I really have trouble telling him apart from Zharkus

And here's Zharkus the Bloodsighted. He and Ghartok are almost, but not quite, identical rules-wise, which doesn't help when trying to keep them sorted out

The whole Warband together. I'm very happy with how these guys came out, even if I do see a bunch of stuff that wants touch up now that I'm looking at the zoomed in pics

Overall, they were pretty fun to paint, especially since I managed to learn from my mistakes with some of the other Warbands, and didn't glue them to their bases until I was more or less done. Made it much easier to get all the detail sculpted on the bases painted up.

They're really fun to play, too, and very effective. The only games I've lost with them were in a mirror match where my Opponent had a better-tuned Objective deck. As well as their hitting power, their Faction-specific Objective cards really help push them up toward the top, with 5 "Score Immediately" cards, almost as many as any two other Factions put together. None of them are particularly hard to accomplish, either, and a couple are almost trivial in a lot of matchups. I plan to do a bit more of a write-up on deck building for them at some point, but wanted to keep this focused on the painting.

Until next time, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

Moon Base Klaisus and Sector Mechanicus

I've been meaning to post this for a bit now. I picked up the Moon Base Klaisus set with a gift certificate my brother gave me for Christmas, and it's pretty groovy, even tho it has some flaws for my specific needs.

Specifically, I don't have a big enough table to support a (roughly*) 4x6 cardboard foldout, and not enough room around my table to allow for actual play if I put a 4x6 chunk of plywood or something on top of it. Here it's folded down to an approximate 4x4 for a 1250 point Game. It looks good from a distance, but if you zoom in, you'll notice that there are four areas, most noticeably the one in the lower left, that don't fit in. That's because the remaining panels that I'm not using had to get folded up on top of the section I did want, which kind of messes with the layout, and keeps it from being flat. I'm trying to decide if I just want to deal like this in hope that I'll eventually have a place big enough for a 4x6, or just cut off the extra panels and make it a dedicated 4x4.

Speaking of the layout, I really like that the street grid is set up at an angle to the sides. It makes for more interesting games when the Terrain is at angles to the Deployment Zones, and it's easier to avoid stuff just getting blown away as the streets provide open fields of fire in the directions that everyone needs to go.

I had thought we were going to have to rule that the Stanchions on the Sector Mechanicus stuff blocked LoS, but it turns out that when it's at odd angles and all mixed together like this, it actually blocks LoS pretty well. My Sector Mechanicus stuff, as you can see, is in a variety of different stages of completion. Most notably, I don't have any of the railings done, so we just played that all the walkways provided cover to anyone standing on them. The walls that came with the Moon Base mix really well with the rest of it, and even line up perfectly with the pipelines. My opponent was amazed that a bunch of it was just clipped together. It was solid enough while his Drukhari were swarming across it that he'd assumed it was all glued.

The one real negative to the set is that you have to be super careful when re-folding it. It's really easy to get a finger inside of the fold, which causes the cardboard to start tearing and delaminating.

Fluff-wise, my idea with this layout was that there had originally been some sort of nondescript installation here. Hab blocks, Admin buildings, stuff like that. Then someone attacked and blew it all up. That's the ruined walls that came with the Moon Base set. Then, quite some time later, the Adeptus Mechanicus found promethium deposits or something like that, and set up a facility to extract and process it. Recently, all contact with that facility was lost, resulting in the Jade Serpents Space Marine Chapter being sent to investigate, and clashing inconclusively with a Drukhari raiding force.

*The dimensions of the board are kind of odd. As near as I can tell, they're based on being folded down into A4-size stacks, minus a bit so you can get a finger in between the boards and the edge of the box and actually pull them out rather than having to dump them out.