The Wizard has moved in

As soon as the first rumours of Skullvane Manse appeared I knew I wanted one.  It’s a fantastic looking item and looked like a great addition to the tabletop.  Ordered mine as soon as it was available on the Games Workshop site.  It arrived a while back and I immediately set about assembling it.  The kit itself is massive, but offers little in the way of customisation out of the box as it is mainly made up of several large pieces that just fit together.  I say fit, but even with lots of glue and hard work the fit is still quite poor and results in a number of large gaps.

After the application of some greenstuff (I need to practice with this stuff as it is currently difficult for me to use) I undercoated it and put it to one side.  My intention was to follow the painting guide in the December ‘11 issue of White Dwarf but the first step suggested spraying it with Charadon Granite.  I’d been contemplating buying an airbrush for a while now but thought this would be a good excuse to buy one and use it.  The choices, however, were vast and being a complete beginner I had no idea what to look out for.  I did some reading up on finally decided on a model that was on ebay.  A few days later I had it in my hands

Good or Bad?  Who knows? I love it though!

It was time to give it a try.  I thinned some Charadon Granite, got the manse out and got down to it.  Wow – wish Ihad bought one sooner – what a great way to quickly paint.  If I’d done this with a brush it would have taken me ages, but in no time I had a thin even coat on the entire model – I’m converted!

Anyhow, with the main basecoat on I could get down to the rest of the paint job.  Didn’t take too long – completed the entire thing over two sessions and I’m happy with the results.  Not as stunning as the version in the marketing materials (pfft! my paint jobs never are!) but looks good.

A worthy lair for any astromancer

Plan to get the airbrush out again this weekend and use it for my Dreadfleet Shadewraith ship.

As you can probably tell, I’ve finally cleaned the camera lens!

Welcome to my abode

Finally got my hands on the Fortified Manor House and have to say I was even more impressed with this kit than I was with the chapel on its own.

Lots of sprue fluff and a whizz to assemble.  I’ve painted everything up now apart from the fences and dry stone walls.

Terrible photograph of it – but I’m really pleased with the paintjob – especially the brickwork effect which I got from a very good blog that detailed a more realistic method of painting them than that detailed in the GW guide.

Next in my sights is the recently announced Skullvane Manse, Lair of the Astromancer – as well as something a bit older, but more on that later.

Mrreegghehllleeebluergh

“Aha”, I hear you cry.  “There was also some Chaos Spawn in that pile!”  And you would be correct.  Assembled one and painted.  Not a lot to say about it really.  The kit has an awesome selection of components so these beasties can be customised in a bazillion different ways – such is the will of the gods of Chaos.

My little darling took on the visage below – and he thinks Papa Nurgle was kind!

I'm watching you!

Down from the frozen North

You may have seen in my last pile of purchases a box of Chaos Marauders.  The plan was to beef up my current small band to a mighty war host – well at least add another few ranks anyway.  Well the latest models have been assembled and are standing in line ready to be painted.

At the same time I also went to the effort of magnetising the movement trays for the whole of my Warriors of Chaos army.

After reading a few tutorials on the ‘net I came to the conclusion there was no right and wrong way to do it.  So I just ordered a load of flexible metal sheets and a bunch of magnets – the really strong rare earth ones (I won’t attempt to spell the name – I’d only fail!).  Really pleased with the results.  In the end I plumped for a ‘hidden’ look – so you can’t see the edges of the movement trays – makes movement measurements much easier to do.

Rats in the house

Bought these on a whim from someone on warseer.com


Both the Frog Gobbo and I had a hankering for a force of Skaven but not sure when I will get time to sort them out.  In the meantime they will no doubt stay in the box biding their time- till the blood god awakes!

How I got here.

Forgive me for the next post which is pretty much a rambling on how I got into Warhammer again after an aborted attempt in my youth.  I'm conscious that at the moment my budding blog has zero readers and though I'm tyring not to chase off any potential subscribers (I wish) I'm also concerned that it doesn't end up like my previous attempts at blogging which were disastrous wastelands of single posts.

Hence I'm trying to seed the blog with many articles that will magically appear over the next few days thanks to the wonderful scheduling abilities of Bloggers engine.  So while this and other posts will seem to miraculously appear over the next few weeks many of them will have been rattled out over the frantic first few days of its creation.  That's enough exposition though - on with the story of how I became Warhammer crazy - again!

Wales, Aug 2008 - a bit wet.

It was August 2008 and we were stuck in deepest Wales with no prospect of the sun ever appearing.  My enduring memory is of grey skies and damp air.  Unable to enjoy the sights without fear of drowning and with two young children in tow (so unable to voluntarily drown in a hostelry) we found ourselves in a toy shop in some god forsaken village in the middle of no-where.  While the kids ran merry and attempted to purchase every piece of tat a young child could gorge their desires on I spied a small corner of the shop festooned with Games Workshop livery.  Thereupon my eyes fell upon 24x12 inches of pure delight!  The Battle for Skull pass box set.  On a mad whim I found myself grasping it and my credit card as I strode towards the till.  

Forgotten.

The sun came out and it never got opened.

It languished gathering dust in a cupboard, unopened and forgotten.  In 2009 we were having a terrible summer and once again the family were all stuck inside while the rain was tipping down - bored senseless.  In a flash of inspiration I remembered the game tucked away in a cupboard and duly went to hunt it out.

Several hours later, having played the tutorials, an epic battle ensued in which the gobbos decimated the stunties and managed to invade their precious mines and rob them of all their shinys!

We were hooked, and we wanted more.  A great debate was entered and each member of the family had to choose an army to side with.  Rustling of the rule book commenced and searching of the website and we finally all decided on our allegiance and picked an army that we could each command to glorious victory on the battlefield.

Wallet survives attack by GW

A trip to the far flung reaches of Sheffield's Meadow Hall and an (S10) assault on the wallet later and we each had a box of figures and a book telling us about the strengths of our chosen forces. Much hilarity when the guy in the shop called my wife’s wood elves 'girly' – she hasn’t been able to live it down since!

So now we are here and the whole family is Warhammer mad - which I'm led to believe is not normal - but then who wants to be normal?  Over the coming posts I'll detail more about my own army, the Warriors of Chaos, and the armies of my wife (the troll) and the kids (the gobbos).

The Warriors of Chaos

I suppose it's only right that I should post up details of my current army (if such a rag tag force can be called that) as a starting point for my shiny new blog.  As is blatently obvious from the title of this post my chosed force is The Warriors of Chaos.  I've always been fascinated by these destructive men from the north so it was a natural choice for me.  Although my other love - skelebobs - had me toying with the idea of the Tomb Kings.

So without further ado, onto the current line up.

Warhammer Fantasy Counters

When I first started reading my Warhammer rulebook I was a little overwhelmed by the number of things I would have to keep track of during the course of a battle.  the obvious solution seemed to be to use some kind of counters placed next to the units in order to recall what rules were in play.  I thought it would be fairly easy to find some online - surely someone else would have done the same and provided a bunch of them to download and print out.  Unfortunately although I managed to find lots of templates for Warhammer 40,000 I couldn’t find anything for fantasy.

Time to roll my sleeves up and work on my own set.

Instructions are included in the download - but it should be fairly obvious how to put them together.  Printing to card is best, but they work just as well to normal paper.  You can either print and fold for double sided markers, or simply cut them out to have double the number of single sided ones.

Download Warhammer Fantasy Counter set.