Painted Warhammer Krell, or Wight King with Black Axe

Having picked up the Warhammer Age of Sigmar General's Compendium, I became interested in the Path to Glory campaign rules contained therein. I was hoping to arrange a Path to Glory campaign at some point using my old Vampire Counts models. The new factions are much more limited, and my variety of different Vampire Counts stuff doesn't really make a coherent faction anymore. The closest I had and the simplest to implement was the Deathrattle faction, which contains Skeletons, Grave Guard, and Black Knights, lead by a Wight King. I don't have a painted Wight King, but have several unpainted, so this gave me the inspiration to finally paint one of them up.

I went with my finecast Krell model, who is no longer Krell in the Age of Sigmar, but simply a Wight King with Black Axe (of Krell). It's a really nice model. I tried to imitate the blue glow look of the black axe in the paint job on the Games Workshop website, but couldn't really pull it off. That aside, I think he turned out pretty well for a quick paint job, and hopefully someday he'll get to lead his war band to glory. Have a look below for plenty of pictures.

Playtest of fantasy skirmish rules: Empire vs Undead

I'm continuing to refine my set of simple rules for large skirmish fantasy wargames. I was pretty happy with the combat mechanics after my last playtest, but I made some changes to the morale and unit activation rules. I am also continuing to make small adjustments to unit stats and modifiers. As before, I don't yet have rules for magic, and special rules for things like the undead need to be ironed out. In both previous games the defender won my sample scenario, but it's hard to say if that was due to imbalanced forces or an imbalanced scenario, and it is way too early to start balancing those things. I'm still just just working out mechanics and characteristic values for the units I want to use.

I decided to play the same scenario again with the same units, but swap the forces. So this time, the undead warband would be escorting Princess Wutzernäm though the forest, when the Empire army suddenly ambushes them, trying to steal the princess away from her rightful owner. But the powerful vampire (whose bride she is intended to be) is approaching swiftly with reinforcements, so the Empire force will have to hurry to make off with her.

Second Playtest of fantasy skirmish rules: Empire vs Undead

I'm continuing to work on some simple rules for large skirmish fantasy wargames. After my first playtest game, I made some changes to the combat mechanics and played the same scenario again. As before, I don't yet have rules for magic, and special rules for things like the undead need to be ironed out, but I want to figure out the core mechanics before I get too far into those details. Like last time, the scenario sees part of the defender's army escorting Princess Wutzernäm through some dangerous territory. They are ambushed by a powerful vampire and his undead warband. The vampire wants to kidnap the princess, but time is short because help is on the way, and the undead will have to fight their way through the reinforcements to make off with their captive.

Playtest of fantasy skirmish rules: Empire vs Undead

Lately I've been working on some ideas for fantasy rules, essentially to have something to play using my existing collection of Warhammer miniatures. I've been looking for some existing rules that would work, but nothing I've read so far really fits what I'm looking for. It has to cover a pretty huge range of fantasy creatures, from mindless zombies up to gigantic dragons. I also want something with a 1:1 figure ratio, so each model represents an individual person (or orc, or dragon, or whatever). But I want the rules to be streamlined enough to have a lot of figures on the table, as I have many dozens of skeletons and zombies. Since I was unable to find any existing rules I liked that satisfied these needs, I started thinking about what kind of rules might do the job.

I've now made enough progress and gotten enough written down to try out some playtests of the rules, and this was the first game I played with them. I don't yet have rules for magic, and some special rules for particularly different things like the undead need to be ironed out, but I wanted to try out the core mechanics and see how it played.

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar solo play test Empire vs Vampire Counts continued

I ended up going back to finish up the test game write-up I began in this post. See below for the thrilling conclusion!

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar solo play test Empire vs Vampire Counts

I decided to try out the rules for Age of Sigmar with a quick solo play test using my Empire and Vampire Counts miniatures. The Empire force had one unit of 10 Free Company Militia, one unit of 10 Handgunners, one unit of five Knights with lances, and one Luthor Huss (mounted warrior priest). The Vampire Counts had two units of 10 Skeletons with hand weapons and shields, one unit of 10 Grave Guard with hand weapons and shields, and a Necromancer.

First, some caveats. Obviously playing both sides is not really the same experience as playing against an opponent. Also, I decided not to use any of the "special" terrain rules, and since everything is based consistently I just measured from the bases instead of the models for everything. For simplicity, I didn't use any standards or musicians in my units, and I didn't use any of the Formations. I also needed to decide what to do about the raise spells. I was considering the idea that in order to raise a type of undead, you have to already be using that warscroll in your army, to prevent summoning for example a Zombie Dragon, which would be overpowering in such a small game. In the end, I decided that only models that were part of the army list to begin with, but had been either kept in reserve or removed as casualties, could be summoned.

Warhammer Fantasy Banshee

I have had this Warhammer banshee model sitting on my painting table for a long time, and I just finally got around to finishing it. I was trying for a ghostly, ethereal look to it, which was hard to achieve. I'm not completely happy with how it turned out, but I'm not sure how to accomplish what I was going for, so it will have to do. Have a look at the pictures below and let me know what you think. If you have any tips on how to paint something to look like a ghost, feel free to share them.

Vampire Counts Army

I got all of my painted Warhammer Vampire Counts miniatures out on the table and took some pictures. Take a look below for the pictures of my entire painted Vampire Counts army, in its current state. The Mantic Games skeletons are some of the most recent things I've painted (before I started working on the Warhammer Quest miniatures), while the Games Workshop skeletons, Vampire, and Wraith are some of the very first things I ever painted, probably close to 15 years ago.

Warhammer Quest Zombies

Here are some pictures of my finished group of six zombies for Warhammer Quest. They are a mix of four very old metal zombies and two of the current (though still very old) plastic zombies, all from Games Workshop. I'm not sure why you only ever face at most six zombies in Warhammer Quest, even though on level one you can face up to twelve skeletons or Orcs or other more challenging enemies. I guess there are a lot of things about the Warhammer Quest monster tables that don't make much sense. In any case, have a look at the pictures below and let me know what you think.

Warhammer Quest Skeletons With Bows

Below are pictures of my finished group of six Skeletons with bows for my Warhammer Quest games. These are some very old Warhammer skeletons that I've had sitting around for a long time. When I started painting them I realized that most of them have arrows stuck into their bases. This would be find if the base was going to look like grass or dirt. Unfortunately, it wasn't going to make much sense to have arrows stuck into the stone floor of a dungeon. So I improvised and adding some little dirt piles where the arrows meet the base. I'm not sure it's all that convincing, but I suppose it's better than nothing.

Warhammer Quest Skeletons With Swords

Behold, six painted Skeletons with swords for use in my Warhammer Quest games. The miniatures are the current Games Workshop plastic skeletons. There's not much else to say about them. Take a look at the pictures below.

Painted Mantic Games Skeleton Warriors

I have finished painting another unit of Mantic Games Skeleton Warriors. I actually bought three boxes of 20 skeletons each, and used them to make two units of 30 each for Warhammer Fantasy. Having just recently played my first game with the new Vampire Counts army book, I'm now thinking that 30 skeletons is not going to be a very effective unit. I was losing 10 to 20 skeletons each combat phase, so a unit of 30 isn't going to last a single turn. I guess I'll have to get more to add to each of my units and try to paint them to match. In any case, below are some pictures of the finished (for now) unit. Click on them to see larger versions.

Painted Wargames Factory Skeleton Warriors

I finished painting up a unit of Wargames Factory skeletons. I gave most of them some old Games Workshop coffin lid shields that I've had sitting around a long time. I also used some left-over weapons from the Mantic skeletons, and bunch of shields from other things. The idea with this unit was to have them look like recently raised skeletons, so they haven't yet been equipped like the rest of the army. So, many of them just grabbed the lid from their own coffin as a shield and picked up whatever weapon they could find. I can use them as extras in a Warhammer game for when I raise more skeletons in any of my other units than I have miniatures for, which is why some have spears and some have swords. Or I can band them all together into a unit of disorganized-looking newly raised skeletons.

Painted Mantic Games Skeleton Warriors

Some pictures of a finished unit of Mantic Games Skeleton Warriors.

Painting Skeleton Warriors

I have a lot of skeleton warriors to paint for my Vampire Counts army, so lately I've been working on coming up with a good method for painting them. Since I have many to do, I need a very quick assembly line method of painting them that will look decent enough from a normal viewing distance during a game. I don't need them all to look perfect when viewed close up, since they will be packed together in units and viewed from a distance. They just need to look good as a unit, and I need to paint a lot of them.

With that in mind, here is the process I have come up with. It is fairly fast, and gets pretty good results. The unit I tested this method out on was a unit of 25 Mantic Games Skeleton Warriors. All the paints I used are from a prior set of Citadel Paints, so the names are not the same in their current paint line. However, there are probably equivalent colors that just have different names now.