What I did at BOYL 2019

So Bring Out Your Lead 2019 has passed in a flash yet again. Several months of preparation and building anticipation, and the weekend has gone by in intoxicating mix of gaming, drinking and meeting friends old and new.

Ash Wastes Racing. I stole this pics from Darrin Stephens. But I ran the game, so there!

The Path to Damnation (Part 7) - Enter the Chaos Champion

The journey of a Champion of chaos is long and convoluted, and that pretty much describes the process I undertook in the creation of my Chaos Renegade and leader of his merry band of Khornate followers.

When I first rolled up the Renegade, his attributes included a bloodletter face and horns, along with a pretty underwhelming sword and bolt pistol combination. My immediate plan was to use on of the lovely Jes Goodwin champions:

The Path to Damnation (Part 6) - Traitor Legionnaires

I'm rapidly closing out my final few models for my chaos warband, and the completion of three traitor legionnaires leaves just my warband champion to go.

I debated whether to use modified Imperial space marines for my legionnaires, but in the end couldn't resist the draw of the Rogue Trader Perry sculpts.

Chaos renegades advance into an Imperial settlement.

The Path to Damnation (Part 5) - More Beastmen

Beastmen Renegades by Tony Ackland (from Slaves to Darkness).

Following my initial trio of beastmen, here are the remaining figures needed to fill my 6-strong squad rolled up for my Chaos Champion's retinue. This time the trio also includes the squad's heavy weapon, giving my warband it's only significant firepower!

The Path to Damnation (Part 4) - Beastmen

With my Adeptus Arbites out of the way, I can now switch attention back to my Rogue Trader chaos warband. If you recall from my first post about this warband, one of the groups of followers I rolled up was 6 beastmen with autoguns.

This was a little problematic as Citadel only ever released three beastmen for 40k, all Imperial.

One (beast trooper Gaxt) is perfect, needing no modification at all. The packmaster doesn't really fit the brief, whilst the close combat beastman seems to be co-opted from Warhammer Fantasy.

The Path to Damnation (Part 3) - Renegade Inquisitor

The path to embracing the dark gods is not the same for all traitors. Those who defend humanity in full knowledge of the power of chaos have the furthest to fall. An Inquisitor may be tempted by the power and riches of the dark gods. Or they may be corrupted into thinking that chaos can be used against chaos. Or they may become so disillusioned and world-weary, that embracing chaos seems the logical conclusion.

The second of my chaos renegade's followers I've chosen to create is my traitor Inquisitor, Drugh. He is a potent fighter in his own right, with an excellent array of wargear.

Inquisitor Dirske finally tracks down the renegade Drugh and his followers.

The Path to Damnation (Part 2) - Ratling Renegades

When I rolled up my chaos renegade warband, I think the unit I was most pleased about was the three ratlings. Not because ratlings are iconic followers of chaos (the reverse is probably true), but because I've always enjoyed modelling and playing with figures of a ratling's stature. I even made a full ratling Inquisitorial retinue after all!

I already had four or five spare ratlings, so it was a case of selecting three to work out how to chaosify them. To my mind, the key change needed was a head swap. The classic Rogue Trader ratlings have beaming round faces - not the sort of look that a trio of corrupted ratlings would sport. In a case of serendipity, I also happened to have a selection of Maxmini's Fallen Legionnaire heads (left over from an aborted Blood Bowl hobgoblin project).

I cut off the original heads, replaced them with the nasty chaotic ones, and sculpted new collars:

The Path to Damnation - Starting a Chaos Renegade Warband

This year as part of the annual Bring Out Your Lead (BOYL) event hosted by Wargames Foundry, myself and a group of friends are going to be playing some Rogue Trader using the Chaos Renegades rules as presented on pages 231-239 of Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness (StD). Note there is a little fettling and fudging to cover available figures and wargear.

The set-up is pretty straightforward. Each participant generates their renegade and four groups of followers. Over the course of a day, we will play multiple games in a campaign type system.

"Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling"

The village had no name, or perhaps it had been forgotten. It lay deep in the chaos wastes and had few visitors bar chaos hordes tramping south, or the occasional Carnival of Nurgle. Each and every villager bore the taint of chaos - the woodsman with axes in place of arms, the porcine butcher, the snake-skinned apothecary. Even the cattle had 6-legs and the sheep had fleshless skulls. Yet village life continued. The young and the strong strode off with bows and their father's swords. Left behind were the old, the lame, the mothers and the children, tending thorned corn, tanning cockatrice leather, building houses from giant bones.

Back at the start of the year, I began the 2016 Legacy Project on the Oldhammer forums. If you're not familiar with the concept, participants make, paint and donate a model to a pre-agreed theme. One of the participants then wins all of the models donated at the end of the project. We agreed that the theme for 2016 would be to create an imaginary classic Citadel range - C49 Chaos Villagers. We're nearing the end of the project, and I decided as organiser, it was high time I painted up my entry - the village piper.

I actually converted my figure back in January. He's based on the above piper from the Citadel Militia range, but his pipes are now somewhat more sinister being made from a child's corpse and bones (or a sleeping chaos baby if you prefer). I replaced his head with a squig and the right foot with one from a beastman. The resulting figure looked both sinister and a little bit comedic:

 

Wyrm Emerges

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! -it writhes! -with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

 



- The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allen Poe

 

Equus - Ecclesiarchy Combat Servitor

Combat servitors come in all shapes and sizes. Some are living guns, mounted on tracked mobility units. Some retain their human pysique, but arms are replaced by massive servo-driven grabs and clamps and torsos are plated and riveted with metal.

Other servitors have a more esoteric design; Equus, combat servitor of the Ecclesiarchy, is one of these.

Bro'og the Gorgite - Chaos Minotaur / Alien Mercenary

Back in May Plaiecivile over at the Oldhammer Forums came up with a fun group project to model, paint and create backgrounds for each of the random champions from the Realm of Chaos books.

Ever keen to get involved in fun community projects, I agreed to join in and selected one of the champions of Tzeentch for my model. My particular champion was a minotaur who had received the following gifts/attributes:

• Big ears
• Regeneration
• Uncontrollable flatulance (paralysing)
• Rearranged face
• Temporal instability (voluntary)
• Eyestalks
• Scorpion tail (poisoned)

I decided that I would ignore the non-physical attributes, and focus on modelling a figure with the attributes highlighted in bold above.

At the end of May, I had got to this point - a bit of chopping and parts selection:

 

My Top 10 Minis Of All Time

Last week over at the Oldhammer Facebook group, Juck Vaughan posed this very succinct question:

"What are your top ten pieces of all time?"

The question generated quite a bit of interest, with plenty of suggestions. I myself waded in with a list of 10 miniatures of my personal favourites. Think about the implications of the question though - is it really possible to select just 10 figures? Imagine that you are being forced by your wife/husband, girlfriend/boyfriend, partner or significant other to sell your entire collection of figures. You have been granted a small concession and can keep, trade or buy just 10 figures which are representative of your time in the hobby.

Original Art - Part 4: The Tony Ackland Acquisition

I always like it when big special delivery boxes arrive at my door!

 

But what's inside?

One or two of you might have seen seven pieces of original GW artwork on ebay last week. Not too many of you though, as after nearly a week of being up for sale, only one had a bid. All seven pieces appeared to be by Tony Ackland, as one auction showed Tony's name on the protective cover, and all the others had reference codes e.g. 'TAxxxx'

I was quite keen on picking up one or two of the pieces, and decided to contact the seller to see if he would sell direct (I know, not entirely the most ethical way of ebay buying). Not only was the seller happy to do this, but it turned out he had 23 Tony Ackland originals he also wanted to sell. After a little bit of negotiation, I purchased all 23, and here are the contents of the box:

23 pieces of GW history

Painting the Spawn - Bee Knight Progress

You might guess I'm not the world's fastest painter by the miniscule progress I've made painting the Bee Knight.

Inching along I've managed to nearly finish painting his chaos spawn steed:

Blue, pink and orange - classic Tzeentch colours!

Breaking out the titillating pink - Bee Knight Progress

I finally got round to doing a spot of painting and decided to make a start on the Tzeentch Bee Knight I'm doing as part of the knight group challenge over at the Oldhammer forums.

I wanted to pick a really old school look for this guy, so the colours need to be pretty bright and garish. I decided to start with the Tzeentch steed and went for an approximation of an old blue horror colour scheme; striking blue fading to pink on the extremities.

Pink and blue - a classic Tzeentch colour scheme!

Beekeeping Hats for Beekeeping Knights - Bee Knight Progress

Yet more greenstuff has gone into the Bee Knight, with a smidge more progress. I've now repaired the damage from all the cutting, primarily filling in the gap at the Knight's waist.

I've also created a protective veil to his beekeeping hat that I'm relatively satisfied with. What you now see is the third attempt to make this, the previous two having got me very frustrated and were subsequently discarded.

Mounting the Hive! Bee Knight Progress

I found some time last night to do some more work on my Bee Knight Champion of Tzeentch. The key areas of work were to do some of the infilling from the 'chop' stage of the model (the point where all the components are assembled, but no blending work has been done), and to do some of the structural work and assembly. Here's where I'm at:

Progress to date; pretty pleased with the overall balance and profile

I couldn't resist getting started - Bee Knight Progress

In spite of the pile of other projects sitting on my desk, I tend to get a little distracted by anything new. That selection of components for my Bee Knight was sitting begging to have some attention, and when I found myself with a spare hour this afternoon, I broke out the modelling tools.

The concept for this figure is that he's a Tzeentch Champion, with a tame hive of enchanted bees. There will be some back story to come, but it gives you the general flavour.

The knight will be mounted on a Tzeentch creature of some kind and will be equipped with all sorts of bee paraphenalia. This is where I got to this afternoon:

Tzeentch's Bee Keeper - an Oldhammer Group Project

Over at the BLOOD forums Asslessman proposed a nice group project; the basic premise is to make a Knight with some sort of connection to the creator's background and/or location.

I happen to live in a place called Beeston. Bees appear everywhere:


Beehive on the town hall



Beekeeper statue on the high street