Mark: 40k Daemons by Starky

Last night a couple of us assembled at Starky's for our weekly paint night, where I was able to grab a happy snap of his 2nd place winning Kill Team from the weekend along with a couple of the other Daemons he has been working on.

The Kill Team

Daemon Prince

Daemonetts

Screamers

I'm looking forward to the blue skinned terrors from across the table once he has the army finished.

Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: Kill Team Run and Done

On Sunday I ran a Kill Team Tournament for the local gaming club, everyone involved seemed to having a lot fun. With only 6 competitors we were able to keep things very casual and all of the games were played in high spirits. There were 5 games played using scenarios borrowed from the WarmaHordes Steamroller package, so it looked like each of the players was going to get a game against each of the others. But it seams that it's possible to mess the pairings of the first couple of games up and require a couple of people to have rematches, I'm sincerely thankful that we had such a understanding group of players and I apologize again to those players that were effected.

We rounded out the day with James Williams taking top spot with Tyranids, or the Doom of Malan'tai and Friends, second place was taken by Daniel Stark (Starky) with an exquisitely painted Khorne Daemons and, Anthony Illett rounded out the placings using my AOBR Terminators. Congratulations guys.

I only wish I remembered to take some photos through the day, all I have to show you is a picture of the swag I donated as prizes. I'll be catching up with Starky through the week and I'm going to try and get hold of some photo's of his daemons.

The SWAG

The next event I'll be running will be our annual Tricksters Blade Warhammer Fantasy Tournament, the date should be finalized after we finalize the club incorporation.

Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: Terrain-tastic

With the local Kill Team tournament coming up next weekend and the club moving ever closer to officialdom, I've decided to add a build of terrain and add a little variety to the club's terrain collection. I had set out to add a couple of pieces to the Jungle terrain set and repair the stuff I made for the Lustria campaign we played back in '05, but because of a little miscalculation on my part the lake I was making came out bright green instead of the dirty green I was after, so it became part of an arid alien landscape.

While the lake started out as an accident I do like the way it came out in the end. The only issue I'm having with it is the GW water effect I have been using, it's taking an incredibly long lime to dry. It's been 7 days since I applied the last layer and it's still no where near completely dry, I have been told by others that have used it in the past that they have had the same issue. The bottle was purchased back in late '05 or early '06 shortly after GW released the product so I don't know if the age may have something to do with it.

The alien flora is made from some plastic plants for a fish tank sprayed purple and attached to a balsa disk covered in textured paint. You wouldn't believe the looks I got from the girl behind the counter at the local $2 shop when I went in and asked for the purple spray paint.

The bases are made from 1/2" blue foam that I beat the stuffing out of with a hammer to achieve a cracked surface similar to sun baked mud, attached to 3mm MDF.

There isn't much to say about the "brick" hill, it's made by gluing down a stack of polystyrene rectangles painted with textured paint then dry brushed bleached bone.

I wanted something to represent the hand of man on the table, so in came Pringle Industrial. These were really simple to make, they're just pringles tubes glued upside down (washed out first) glued onto 3mm MDF bases, then sprayed with a couple of different  aerosol sprays. All told I think it took less than 15 minutes to build and paint them ready for basing. The pool of liquid in the base of the busted tower is two part epoxy resin that I poured down the side of the tower and let pool and the gaping hole on the other is a right angled PVC pipe joiner that I had lying around.

I made the fountain for the city fight table I'm working on as well, and painted it to match the other scatter terrain I made for the club tournament in January this year. It was made by cutting a couple of circles out of foam core that I then topped with 1.5mm balsa. The statue is an old metal GK Terminator (oddly I have more of them spare than plastic terminators). The liquid pool on the Pringle Industrial piece was left over from the "water" in the pond. I'm going to have to get hold of some more resin for any other water features I make in the future, It is a lot better to work with than the GW water effect and is almost completely solid after 24 hours.

I made this fountain for our Mordheim campaign at the club and while I'm happy with the way it came out, I'm frustrated by the fact that the water effect still isn't 100% dry after almost 4 weeks. There is a big gouge in an area hidden by the statue where the knight's shield broke off and fell into the pool.






Until next time .......

Mark

Mark: Arrrrr......

Picture from Paizo

 I've picked up and started running the first part of the Skull and Shackles Adventure Path (AP) the Wormwood Mutiny for Pathfinder RPG by Paizo, so there hasn't been a whole lot of painting being done of late. The AP has a great premise with the characters waking up, stripped of their gear, and press ganged into service on a pirate ship under a brutal captain, but after running the first session it became apparent that the first section of the AP, while well balanced and makes sure the spotlight is shared amongst all of the player characters,  it is very monotonous and quickly becomes rather boring. I've re hashed a couple of things and I'm going to allow players to take 10 on most tasks which should speed things up and reduce the likelihood of  them being whipped by the first mate for not completing their allotted tasks something that can very quickly kill a character.

I don't want to give any spoilers of what's to come for my players but Richard Pett has lived up to his reputation of a man who writes brutal modules, and I can see a lot of places where a party wipe will be all too easy if I'm not careful in how I run things, it does have a cool story though.

I was planning on assembling/converting all of the NPC's and creatures but after realizing that there were just shy of 100 of them I decided to go with the paper mini's from Paizo. They don't have the same feel as a metal or plastic mini, but they are a lot cheaper and, the artwork is far and away better than I have seen on their paper mini's in the past. I did however manage to one Pirate done before I went with the Paper versions.

The Paper Cut Pirates ( yeah they're that mean)

As far as gaming on the table top goes I've had a couple games of Mordheim, where nothing really exciting happened until the last game where we played Ambush from the '02 annual, there were 6 players, Having the highest warband rating I deployed in the center of the table and the objective was for the other 5 players to steal the wyrdstone my hero's were carrying. At the end of the game I had 2 miniatures left on the table, a crossbowman that was a couple of levels up and therefor difficult to get to and my Warlock that I had hidden out of the way so he didn't get singled out, apparently people aren't fans of fireballs and flaming swords, I really don't know what the problem is. I was lucky and only lost 1 miniature in the post game working out of injuries. It was a champion so it does sting a little but I have enough cash to replace him. I also had a game of Fantasy against Travis last week, I really need to find a way around the Super Slann with the lore of life, T7 Saurus and, Regenerating Temple Guard really are hard to dent.

Until next time .......
Mark