Painting Shadespire Bloodreavers

I've written up a step-by-step guide to how I painted the Bloodreavers in the Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire core set. These were the first Bloodreavers I've painted, and the first Khorne models of any kind really. I took pictures along the way, though they didn't turn out great. Hopefully you get the idea. Unless specified, all of the paints are out of production Citadel/Games Workshop paints from their previous (and now replaced) range.

The method I came up with ends up being pretty fast, and I think it would be good for painting up a bunch of models in large batches. There are a lot of steps, but most of them are easy and don't require careful painting, so they go quickly. The washes at the end really help obscure any mistakes. As you can see from the pictures, I don't worry too much as I go along about making mistakes or getting good coverage, especially on the early steps, because it will get fixed later. Each picture is the result of the several steps listed above. Have a look at my process below and let me know what you think of the results.

Age of Sigmar battle report: Deathrattle vs Stormcast Eternals

I finally managed to get in a game of Age of Sigmar at the local gaming store. We played to 1250 points. I used mostly Deathrattle, though officially it was Grand Alliance Death, since I took a wraith, which can't be taken as allies to Deathrattle. I faced off against Stormcast Eternals, which obviously I know nothing about.The battleplan was Duality of Death from the General's Compendium 2017. There were two objectives on the table between the two armies. Only a leader could capture an objective by moving within 3" of it. As long as that leader stayed within 3", they would hold the objective, and at the end of their turns get a number of victory points equal to the number of turns they had held the objective for (and also heal that number of wounds).

My army was two units of 40 Skeletons each, one unit of 20 Grave Guard, a Necromancer, a Wraith, and a Wight King as my general. I also had a summoning pool of 80 points intended for use summoning a Banshee. The Necromancer and one unit of Skeletons would try to prevent the enemy from holding the objective on my right, while the rest of my army tried to capture and hold the objective on my left.

Warhammer Quest Skaven Stormvermin

It has been a while since I've made any progress on the Warhammer Quest monsters, but I've finally completed a group of 12 Skaven Stormvermin. The paint job was pretty straightforward and similar to my previous Warhammer Quest Skaven, but for some reason it took a long time to get these finished. I suppose because I had other projects being worked on at the same time that I had more motivation to make progress on.

With these completed, I'm now very close to having the entire level 1 monster table painted, which you'd think would motivate me to work faster to reach that milestone. However, looking over the level 2 monster list and seeing how huge an undertaking that will be is somewhat discouraging. But I suppose I've just got to keep plugging away at it. Getting all the monsters painted for Warhammer Quest was always going to be a huge undertaking. Certainly a marathon, not a sprint, so I'll have to accept that there will be periods of relative inactivity. In any case, have a look at the Stormvermin below and let me know what you think.

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.

Warhammer Quest Beastmen

I've completed another entry on the level 1 monster table in Wahammer Quest. This time it was 8 Beastmen with spears. The models are extremely old single-piece plastics. They also have halberds instead of spears, but close enough for my use. The painting was pretty simple. I gave them each a different color of cloth to give some variety. I also gave some of them brown leather and the rest black, and some white metal emblems and the rest yellow metal. Hopefully this helps them look a little less homogeneous even though they are all the same model. I didn't vary the skin or fur colors at all. I'm sure that would have helped, but I didn't want to spend a the extra time on it. I had some trouble getting the hooves to look convincing at first, but I'm pretty happy with how they turned out in the end.

Warhammer Quest Goblin Netters and Clubbers

This checks off another entry on the Warhammer Quest level 1 monster table. I painted up 3 netters and 3 clubbers to represent the entry for 6 goblin netters. Well, one of the clubbers was actually painted by a friend of mine a long time ago. They are mostly black cloth and green skin, and were pretty quick to paint with my normal basic techniques. Nothing too fancy, but I'm now one step closer to completing the level 1 monster table.

Warhammer Quest Goblin Shaman and Wild Cave Squigs

Here are some wild cave squigs and a night goblin shaman I've painted up or Warhammer Quest. These are on the level one monster table. I don't have much else to say about them, really. If you're interested in seeing the pictures, have a look below.

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 Quest Lair of the Orc Lord miniatures

After many years, I've finally painted the miniatures from the Warhammer Quest Lair of the Orc Lord expansion. Half of them (the three Big'Uns and the snotling) were painted years ago when I was first playing Warhammer Quest. I did some touch ups on them, and added shield decals, but didn't bother to repaint them. The orc lord, shaman, squig hound, and goblin jester I painted recently. Hopefully I've improved a bit over the years. Have a look below and let me know what you think.

Warhammer Quest Savage Orcs

I finished up another group of level 1 monsters for Warhammer Quest. Or mostly finished. I will eventually need 12 savage orcs with bows, but the plastic Savage Orcs box only comes with 10. I painted up the 10 I have, but I will eventually need to find a way to get 2 more of them from somewhere.

The box set of plastic savage orcs has the option of arming them with bows, sort of. It comes with 10 hands holding bows, and some hands holding arrows and some quivers, but this seems like an afterthought. They clearly aren't intended to be made into bowmen. Due to the poses of the models, they don't look like they intend to do anything with their bows other than hit someone over the head with them. And they look like they'd much rather stab someone with their arrows than actually fire them. In addition, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to attach the included quivers that looks like it makes any sense.

However, the savage orcs you encounter in Warhammer Quest have bows, so I gave these guys bows. It took some work just to get a couple of them to look like they might be considering actually firing their bows, and to attach the quivers where they hopefully don't look too out of place or tacked on.

Mantic Ghouls for Warhammer Quest

I finished painting 12 of the Mantic ghouls for use in Warhammer Quest. There isn't a ton of variety with the Mantic ghouls, with only two different upper bodies, two different lower bodies, and three different heads, plus a few weapon options (knife, cleaver, and some weird claw glove). I tried to get as much variety as I could with what options there were so they didn't look like a bunch of identically posed clones. See below for the results.

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 Quest Dark Elf Black Guard

I am still slowly making progress on painting all the miniatures for the level 1 monster table in Warhammer Quest. It has taken me a long time to get these 12 Dark Elf Black Guard finished, but they are finally done. The paint job is very similar to my Dark Elves with crossbows, just with black cloth instead of purple. You can see the results in the pictures below.

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.