Sixth Edition Confirmation and Prices

Confirmed from a local store:

Warhammer 40,000: Rulebook (English) 440pp Hardback Book July 23-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 $74.25
Warhammer 40,000 Munitorum Templates 3 x Templates July 23-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 $19.75
Warhammer 40,000 Munitorum Tape Measure Servo Skull Tape Measure July 23-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 $16.50
Warhammer 40,000: Psychic Powers (English) 32 Cards, Leaflet, Box July 23-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 30-Jun-12 $13.25
Tanglewire TBC July - 7-Jul-12 7-Jul-12 $10.00
Warhammer 40,000 Munitorum Dice 12 Dice, 6 Dice Holders, Tin July 21-Jul-12 28-Jul-12 28-Jul-12 $16.50
Warhammer 40,000 Munitorum Battlefield Objectives 12 Dice, 6 Dice Holders, Tin July 21-Jul-12 28-Jul-12 28-Jul-12 $16.50
Warhammer 40,000 Munitorum Vehicle Markers 12 Dice, 6 Dice Holders, Tin July 21-Jul-12 28-Jul-12 28-Jul-12 $16.50

Painted CMoN Lord on Eagle

This is the last model, and the centerpiece model, to my current Wood Elf army.  Don't worry, I have roughly a billion other Wood Elf and High Elf models to paint for this army, including another Treeman that I'll probably paint fairly soon, but for now this model completes my initial 2500 points. 

I saved this model, which is the Cool Mini or Not Lord on Eagle for those interested, to paint last.  It's an epic model that deserves to be saved for last, as a treat to finish up an army. 

Anyway, the army now marches to war, and I'll have more on that later!

First Eagle Painted

Two models left until I can field my new Wood Elf army.  Very exciting stuff!  The GW Eagles are not very much fun to assemble, but I do like how they look in the end.  This one is painted a bit plainly, but nicely, as I have other plans for my other Eagle and the Eagle that my character will be riding.  I'll have another Eagle up tomorrow!

Project Glade Guard - Complete

Last night, I glued magnets into the bases of the thirty Glade Guard I painted, finishing them up for now.  Long term, I'd like to run string through all their bows, but for now, it's not a priority.  Right now, I'll be working on two Eagles and a character on an Eagle, so that I can run the army at 2,500 points.  Here's a shot of the finished Glade Guard.

I actually painted thirty-one in all, as I had to finish the last of the original twenty.  There's three full command groups in there, so that I can run them in groups of ten with up to full command if I want.  I am particularly pleased with the free hand "Leaf in the Wind" banner.  Wash would be proud. 

Here's a shot of the whole army.

Right now, I have painted:

Fifty Glade Guard
Twenty-four Dryads
One Treeman
One Spellweaver
One Branchwraith
Six Treekin

Two Eagles and a character on an Eagle are incoming!

Project Glade Guard, Part Two

I ended up putting about twelve hours into the twenty Glade Guard yesterday.  While they're not finished, they're certainly a lot further along than they were, and should be done by the end of the week.  I do have to return to work today, so further painting will occur in the evening.  Here's the plan:

This is what the GG currently look like:

The cloaks are not actually attached yet.  Tonight, I will highlight and wash the greens on the cloaks and then make thirty bases.  Tomorrow night, I'll paint the arrows and quivers, and then attach the Glade Guard.  At that point, I'll just need to do the eyeballs. 

So wish me luck, and check twitter for updates!

Project Glade Guard

I've got a whole day off here today, with no real interruptions.  I also have thirty Glade Guard that I've been working on, in various stages of completion.  Ten are done except for their bases, and twenty have their green sections completely finished.  I also have twenty that are completely done. My goal is to finish the lot to an excellent standard with my time today.  It won't be easy, but I think I can just finish it if I work into the evening.  I'll be tweeting up pictures throughout the day through @quietlimit, and will hopefully have a full contingent of fifty finished Glade Guard to show off at the end of the day, being that much closer to a fully painted Wood Elf army of Avelorn.  If nothing else, this will be a great project for the day!

Painted Arjac Rockfist

I didn't intend to paint the new Arjac Rockfist model just yet.  I dropped in on the new Games Workshop here in Raleigh on my lunch break at work, and after getting pressured for the forty-third time in two visits to buy some of the new Necrons or start playing Lord of the Rings, I ended up picking up this finecast model instead. 

I would have hated putting this model together in metal, but the finecast went together quickly and simply.  I did manage to slice a piece of his shield out on accident, which you can see from the front, but I wasn't unhappy with how it looked. 

It's a great model, full of detail, and I'm particularly pleased with how the face and the armor highlighting came out.  Comments and criticism are always welcome.

Brawler Bash 2012 Results!

Brawler Bash V, our local Warhammer Fantasy Grand Tournament, finished this weekend with thirty-four participants.  As always, it was an awesome time, with great opponents and a good time had by all.  We had people come in from all over the eastern seaboard.  Not bad for a GT on the same weekend as Adepticon! 

Prizes were given for Bash Grandmaster (Best Overall), Bash Battlemaster (Best General), Bash Crasher (Best Sportsman),  Bash Brush (Best Painted), Player's Choice and Top Club.  The Overall, General, Sportsman and Paint categories also gave out second and third place prizes. 

I ended up taking Best Overall and Best General home, which is my first #1 overall finish in a Grand Tournament.  I've been finishing in the top five with my Beastmen for a couple GT's in a row now, and was thrilled to take the top spot.  I literally couldn't have done it without my amazing club, The Fancy Lads, and we were lucky enough to take home The Top Club award, which I hope will hang in our local store when they move to their new location in September.  Until then, I hope to pass it around for various club members to keep it from week to week. 

 The Grandmaster's Sword for Best Overall

Top Club Prize

Best General

The Mug for Best Overall (Because you can't swing a wooden sword wildly and irresponsibly around the house without a mug of beer to go with it).

Big congratulations to Joel Busta for taking Best Sportsman, Robert Brandon for taking Best Painted, and Dan Pace for taking Player's choice. I'll get the rest of the award winners listed when the results are published, as I probably can't list them all correctly from memory.

In related news, Erik Lindley is retiring from running Brawler Bash due to time commitments, and I'll be taking over running the tournament next year with help from The Fancy Lads.  Brawler Bash is a great tradition for Warhammer Fantasy, and we plan to keep it that way.  We're already planning for and looking forward to Brawler Bash VI in 2013. 

I believe my Beastmen will retire as well, and be shelved for a while.  Best Overall is a good way to go out.  I'll work on finishing up the painting 2500 points of Wood Elves and go with them for a while.  After almost three years of Beastmen, it'll be a very different change of pace.

For those interested in my 3000 point Beastmen list, here's a rough outline:

Beastlord with Crown of Command
Level Three Lore of Death Great Bray Shaman
Level Four Lore of Shadow Great Bray Shaman
Wargor BSB with Beast Banner
Level One Lore of Shadow Bray Shaman
Level One Lore of Beasts Bray Shaman with Shard of the Herdstone
44 Gor in Horde Formation
44 Gor in Regular Formation
10 Gor
22 Ungor
Two Tuskgor Chariots
Two Razorgor
48 Bestigor with Flaming Banner in Horde Formation

The list puts a lot of tough models on the table, and can take a beating in close combat while dishing a lot of nasty attacks out. The general and BSB usually go with the 44 Gor in horde formation, with the Lore of Death Shaman riding with the Bestigor and the Lore of Shadow Shaman switching units depending on my opponent's deployment.  Everything castles around the Ungor bunker and the Herdstone to start the game and then moves forward quickly and aggressively in while the chariots and Razorgor move around the flanks.  I use the ten Gor to ambush the soft parts of my opponent's army if possible.

Anyway, I'll try and get my five battle recaps (with five great opponents) up this week, as well as the full results and award winners when they are published.  See you then!

First Painted Thunderwolf Cavalry with New GW Paints

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I picked up some of the new GW paints this past weekend.  I had a chance to try them out in painting my first Thunderwolf Cavalry model. 

I especially like the yellows and the glazes.  The paints also have an excellent consistency that is nice and thin. 

I'm off to the Brawler Bash WFB GT this weekend, and will be there starting this afternoon.  Wish me luck!

Painted Wolf Scout with Meltagun

Last Wolf Scout for a while, I promise.

Even though getting a meltagun onto a scout model meant that some pinning had to be done (it's a metal meltagun), it was well worth it.  Five Wolf Scouts with meltabombs and a meltagun, who can appear, shoot, and assault from an opponent's deployment zone on a 3+?  Yes, please.   They don't cost a whole lot, either, for something that can take out a tank or two very easily. 

I think I did a good job particularly on this guy's face.  The head itself had to be chopped down just to fit, as it's a head built for a Marine torso...but I think it helps to get a little more variety in the scouts.

Fourth Painted Wolf Scout

I only realized after I was halfway through painting this guy that I had used the same head on him that I used on the Wolf Scout Sergeant.  Thank goodness for the magic of painting, and the ability to give him a very different face paint scheme. 

I played what is either my last or next to last game of Warhammer Fantasy before Brawler Bash, and am reasonably pleased with my Beastmen going into the tournament.  I need to do some magnetization and fix some basing this weekend in preparation for the tournament, and I'd like to paint up a couple Thunderwolves as Razorgor.  We'll see how that goes.

Third Painted Wolf Scout

Continuing on with Wolf Scout-palooza, I finished the third Scout last week.   The big improvement over previous work was getting a better snow flock.  Army Painter makes a lot of great products, but their snow is too big and granular, and really sticks out badly on basing.  I suggest either GW or Gale Force 9 snow for basing. 

I'm going to be playing a practice game of Warhammer Fantasy this evening for Brawler Bash, which is up to thirty-one registered people.  I'm looking forward to it!

Wolf Scout Sergeant

So I'm cranking these Wolf Scouts out one at a time this week.  I base coated them this past weekend, but am giving each a couple hours each weekday evening for detail work.  This gent will be the sergeant.  A couple things to note:

I vastly prefer this snow, which is Gale Force Nine's, to Army Painters.  The difference is very noticeable even from a distance, in that Army Painter's snow is made of large grains which stand out from one another.  GF9's snow is made of smaller pieces, which go on more realistically and give the ground here a frosted, light snow look that I wanted. 

I plan on glazing the sword as a power sword, but wanted to try out the new GW glazes, for kicks.  I probably won't get my hands on that new paint for a couple of weeks. 

The eyes are painted and the gun barrel is drilled, as always.  You can't see those details as well due to the angle of the picture. 

New GW Store in Raleigh Has Opening Date Set

Looks like the GW store opening here in Raleigh will have its grand opening on April 14th.  They've got some grand opening events and free stuff, and I may have to make it over there to check things out!

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?aId=18500008a

Space Wolf Scout

Welp, for some reason I cannot get the picture rotated properly, so everyone just put your head on your right shoulder. 

I've had the Wolf Pack sprue for a while, and have always thought it was awesome for the sheer amount of bits it comes with, but what got me going on a little Space Wolf kick was the release (and my winning) of the Thunderwolf Cavalry and Fenrisian Wolves.  I started playing around with the Wolf Pack kit, and ended up putting together five Wolf Scouts.  I used to run a Raven Guard Scout army back in 4th Edition 40K, and really enjoyed it before Scouts were nerfed a bit in 5th Edition. 

Anyway, the basing is dirt, followed by grass and fall leaves, and then some snow.  This base's snow came out a little thicker than I would have liked, but I hope to get it down to a lighter frost look. 

I seem to be distracted by side projects lately, and need to finish up the current Wood Elf project at some point, but I've also got four more of these Scouts, the second half of a Bretonnian knight, and a Ghorgon to finish.  Right now, randomness has the best of me. 

Adding Bow Strings and Arrows to Glade Guard - An Easy Conversion

After putting my Glade Guard together and painting them, one of the things I really didn't like was that there was no string in the bow and no actual arrow.  I mean, this guy here is in the "shooting an arrow" pose, yet he's pulling back on nothing and just holding a bare bow like a jerk.  I decided to correct the problem.

First, I drilled a small hole in the "pulling" hand, which is bare plastic with no detail on top anyway.  I got some thread from the sewing section at a local store, and ran it through the hole.  I figured out roughly where the string would meet the bow on the top and bottom, and ran those sections of the thread, one at a time, through some superglue.  Then I wrapped the string around the top part, and once it had set repeated the process on the bottom, cutting the thread each time with scissors. 

I got some small needles for the arrow, and clipped them down to the proper size.  They're glued at the hand, so that it looks like the feathered part of the arrow is under his hand, and glued again to the bow.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Painted Treeman

Getting the Treeman done finishes up the "Wood" part of my Avelorn army for now.  What I have left to do on the Wood Elf side consists of Glade Guard and Eagles for now, and then I hope to either work on the High Elf side of Avelorn, or another army altogether for awhile.

I got this model in trade for painting an Arachnorok a while back, and made some small modifications.  I removed one of the legs in order to give the Treeman more of a "striding forward" look, and added in some of the Treekin parts to give him more short, aggressive limbs.  In painting the model, I continued to try and add as much color as possible, and pushed color on the base as well, even adding in some flowers.

The army as a whole is really starting to come together, with only a few models left to do.  In other news, this picture was taken with the IPhone 4S camera, which I mentioned yesterday.  I'm pretty amazed at how well it turned out. 

New Army Case / Display Board

I'm constantly looking for a way to easily and safely move my models around, and I'm constantly disappointed.  Foam is great for smaller armies, but it's tough with larger fantasy armies both in terms of setup time and the sheer amount of foam you need.  I have a nice wooden case, which holds a decent amount, but it weighs alot and is very large, so it only gets broken out for grand tournaments and the like. 

I think my latest attempt at creating a case might be the best so far.  I took a storage bin and lid, flipped the lid upside down, and glued some sheet steel to the underside of the lid.  The steel is painted, so that the lid can now be used as a display board, and my magnetized models now sit on the steel.  When I want to travel with the army or store it neatly, I can place the bottom section (the container) on top. 

The one downside is that I can't find a larger lid for even a huge storage bin, and will have to do some more looking around for that.  Right now, I can fit my 2500 points of Wood Elves on the bin I have, but I"ll need something larger for Beastmen or future projects that are not so compact.

Treekin Painted, and Hopefully Not Too Horrible!

I was pretty worried when I started my Avelorn army about painting the Treekin models.  I've only seen them a couple times where they looked good, such as Bobby's Wood Elf army.  The models themselves are...not great, but I've never seen an acceptable substitute unless one changes the entire theme of the army.

One of the things that changed my opinion of the models somewhat was the fact that I got them in finecast.  Call the material whatever names you like, but I once again got flawless models.  The benefits of having finecast was that I could easily change out the parts that I used for each Treekin.  My front rank, rather than having multiple unwieldy tree limbs all over the place, now have more "human"-like limb structures, which I think makes them more dynamic and easily recognizable as moving monsters, rather than weird, mutated trees. 

The second thing to do was to make sure that there was plenty of color on the models so that they weren't dull.  I picked out all the faeries in light purple, and did the eyes in the light blue from the regular elf models.  Then I made sure all of the vines and leaves were bright green, and even gave some treekin green hair and beards as the model allowed.  Basing was kept dense and colorful as well.

I hope you enjoy the models, and comments and criticisms are welcome. 

Oh Jabberslythe, Where Art Thou?

He's a painted Jabberslythe, and he's been out on the town.  The trick was to get the reddish orange hair in, and the leathery purple wings, so as to match him to the rest of my Beastmen. 

On the battlefield, he's done his Jabbery best.  I played him in a tournament a couple weeks ago, and he took out a group of Empire Light mages in game one, and then killed a High Elf Level Four in the second game.  He's not super tough, but his mobility is very nice in getting around the board and into areas your opponent doesn't want. 

Still, I'm not sure he does much that couldn't be done by a Razorgor at one fifth of the cost, so you'll probably see him in my army, but as a nice Gor unit filler like in the picture above.