Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Plaguebearer conversion with four arms

One of the neat aspects of having plastic plaguebearers (as opposed to the old metal ones) is the greater increased potential for conversions.

This conversion is actually a rather straight forward one, but one that also has a high impact: a 4-armed plaguebearer!


Creating this relies on the shoulder areas of the plaguebearer torso. They are roughly the correct shape to take an extra arm (each of which has a concave area where it would ordinarily attach to a torso at the "correct" location). Given the pustules and boils on the surface of the plaguebearer, it is somewhat necessary to smooth over the largest protrusions that are on the shoulders and (potentially) the lower set of arms.

To finish the conversion, note the positioning of the death head. Gravity is doing its usual trick and pulling it downward. This gives some "real world" credibility to the upper, extra arms and gives a grizzly appearance to this grimdark-appropriate conversion. Finally, the pair of plagueswords provides a threatening visage to this one (appropriate for a Herald even). The positioning of the swords is critical: they need to look like the plaguebearer actually knows what its doing with them, hence why I chose two of them that were at significantly different angles: one ready to slice, the other looking like it might have already done so.  Am looking forward to painting this one!


Saturday, February 15, 2014

Knight Errant and Knight Paladin thoughts

By now the leaked White Dwarf pictures have been going viral around the internet: the new Imperial Knights look to be an amazing model, standing a good shoulder taller than a trygon, with several options. I'm impressed with the model at first sight and the paint jobs that the White Dwarf team appear to have presented.

The Knight Errant is 5 points cheap than the Knight Paladin and features a thermal cannon (one big melta beasties), a D class chainsword and heavy stubber. With AV similar to an Imperial tank and 6 hull points, this guys will be a beast. BUT: he is not completely immune. A good volley from a fire dragon unit for example (which is curiously pictured in the leaks that I'm sure you can find) will readily take out an expensive Lord of War analogue investment it seems.

On the other hand, the Knight Paladin replaces the thermal cannon with a rapid fire battle cannon (2 ordnance large shots at lower S but longer range). On the scale of things, unless Apocalypse is being played, I think the Knight Errant is going to see a lot of use versus the Knight Paladin.

That said, the points price tag is a large dint in any modern army. I can certainly see that it would get good usage in low model armies (I'm looking at you Death Wing, and adepts of Titan!), but could also be cheesed up by drop pod armies. Have this guy at your back line and drop the other half of your army right in the enemies face to prevent some firing.

The most interesting thing for me is the wording of how they can be fielded. It simply says in an allied detachment. Chaos Space Marine armies supported by Dark Mechanicum versions of these beast with a couple of hellturkeys would be most entertaining if permitted.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Battle-scarred power armour experimentation

There are many tabletop game players who utilise pristine painted and un-damaged armour. This is particularly true of space marine players in warhammer 40,000.  But as one gets a little older and wiser, perhaps even more skilled with painting and modelling, the urge to demonstrate weathering on armour as well as battle damage increases.  Many of my Nurgle Death Guard army demonstrates this to greater or lesser extents; as an example, my plague marine tactical squads (squad one; squad two; squad three) show a large number of conversions that accentuate the damage accumulated during battle. Indeed, individual miniatures (particularly the Forge World Death Guard set) demonstrate ways in which to add battle damage to armour quite readily.

Today, I wanted to demonstrate a few simple things that even a starting modeller might like to think about doing to start modelling battle-scarred power armour and encourage them to do a little experimentation of their own.

The easiest thing to do is to drill holes in plastic armour to represent physical damage from bolt gun rounds. In the image below, we can see several holes drilled in a line along both pieces depicted. To add an extra level of detail, I've added radial lines away from the centre of the holes to suggest blast damage that has come out of the hole (i.e. the bolt round exploded near the surface of the armour or slightly deeper and has ripped out chunks of the surrounding ceramite.


The next step to consider is complete hacks of armour to suggest cleaves and strikes with chainswords or power weapons. Have a look at the shoulder pad to the right. There is a large slice taken out of it on the far right hand side. The surrounding area has also been "distressed" to give a feeling of having seen an epic battle worthy of Isstvaan V.

The final bit I've done is to attach wires to the arm on the left hand side. These are (presumably) where the technological pieces would mesh up with the body of the power armour. My intent with this arm is to actually use it for scenery on the base of another miniature -- suggesting a rampaging nature to the other miniature perhaps, or simply detritus from the battlefield in general.  I'd certainly encourage others to start experimenting with these kinds of things: they're modestly straight forward (assuming you have a modelling knife and are old enough to handle one) and can be achieved with a minimum of fuss.

Taking this kind of experimentation to an extreme, one of my earlier conversions (see image at bottom) features a Death Guard marine with a backpack that has been extensively decayed away. This is a rather strong conversion, but can still be pulled off with a bit of practise: a nurgling hangs on to the pipework and guzzles down whatever strange fluid is flowing from it, whilst the rest of the back pack lies at its feet -- I very much like this miniature and play it regularly in my Death Guard army to this day. It pulls regular comments from my opponents!

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Magewrath Throne Question

On either side of the Magewrath Throne are two supporters: metallic creatures that somewhat resemble beasts. My question today is what are they? To me they kind of look like Capricorn: the ancient merging of a fish with a goat that has a constellation named after it ... but with wings.  Is that the right interpretation, or am I reading too much in to it and its just a mutant griffin with an odd tail?

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Names for Battlesites, Villages, Cities (Norman / French naming)


In yesterday's post, I explored some (random) names for English (and Anglo-Celtic) locations. The main bit of feedback I received was the need to do this kind of job for other cultures and backgrounds. I completely agree with this. But the main issue is that as I move further away from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds, the less familiar I become with the terminology and the rules.  That said, I'm going to give French and Norman names a go today.

The rules of French are a little different. Not only do nouns possess gender (unlike English), but the ordering of the noun / adjective can in some cases be the reverse of what it is in English (but not always in place names).  This makes creating a random table somewhat harder.  For example, should a place be preceded with "Le" or "La" (the French for "The") can be a tough determination to make. Nontheless, I thought I'd give this a good bash. Moreover, due to the first point, there are common elements in both the first two tables (example: Ville- and -ville; this can be both the start and the end of a name!) - hence one needs to keep an eye on this so as not to generate "Villeville" as a name!

As with the previous post, generate two "elements" from the charts below and run them together. The added caveat is that some characters may need to be subtracted (or added) to make them run together better and sound more authentic.  I've not included prefixes (Le, La), or suffixes (-sur-Mer) here, as my French knowledge is not that extensive, but one could glean several examples by looking at google maps. Here's the charts.


Element One
Element Two
Beuz
ances
Bos
ardy
Breq
bec
Bruque
beuf
Caude
bonne
Compain
boscq
Cor
châtel
Crique
clives
Cros
court
Dau
dalle
Écale
elle
El
eux
Étain
fleur
Har
gard
Hébé
hague
Hau
ham
Mesnil
hurs
Mont
ingy
Neuf
mesnil
Sott
nay
Tocque
ris
Toll
ron
Tonne
tot
Tour
tuit
Veules
val
Vigot
ville
Ville
vy



Here's some example resultant names:

Neufcourt
Sott-mesnil
Vigotfleur
Étainelle
Dauboscq

Suitably Normandy sounding, but perhaps needing some smoothing around the edges and some consonant shifts.


[Postscript: in writing this, I had to figure out how to add accents to text on a Mac for the first time - please don't judge me on that! Those looking to do similar for the first time, check this out: http://french.about.com/od/writing/ss/typeaccents_8.htm ]

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Names for Battlesites, Villages, Cities (English naming)

Regardless of whether you are on campaign for an entire planet, passing through a small village, or having a skirmish in the suburbs of a town: places have names.  Naming the site of your battle, or roleplaying game region gives the narrative strength.

This blog has previously published some latin names for both Death Guard and Thousand Sons, but today, I wanted to tackle a method for generating some English sounding names for villages and towns that might be player in. I might try some planet names at a later date. These names are derived from places that I know, and adapted from the British toponymy wikipedia entry so as to exclude some (but by no means all!) of the more famous possibilities.

There are four elements.  Two main elements that constitute the name (element one and element two) that should be run together. There are then optional prefixes and suffixes that you're welcome to add and append to taste.

Element One
Element Two
Ash
bridge
Balla
bourne
Bell
by
Black
dale
Bright
donn
Broom
field
Burn
firth
Cross
ford
Exe
gate
Finch
haven
Frank
head
Grass
land
Hes
law
Holly
lock
Inch
mere
Ingle
mouth
Ink
pool
Kirk
rigg
Knock
stage
Lang
thwaite
New
tree
Park
toft
Peyn
ton
Pitt
vine
Shin
wall
Thorn
ward
Threl
way
Up
wood
White
worth
Win
wych



Prefixes
Suffixes & Interfixes
Castle
Court
East
Dale
Glen
Desert
Great
Bank
King's
Fields
Little
Green
Lower
Hill
Mount
Park
North
Plains
Queen's 
Way
Royal
-by-the-Sea
Saint
-in-(Generate an additional two elements as above)
South
-on-(Generate an additional two elements as above)
Upper
-under-(Generate an additional two elements as above)
West
-upon-(Generate an additional two elements as above)


Try generating a few and let me know if you like it.  Here's some of mine that I generated:

Ashvine Fields
South Brighttree
Kirkgate
Finchead-under-Peynton
Winlaw

Overall, they are pleasing to my ear and certainly have that British feeling to them.
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