SNOOZE

I built a stone henge a while ago as an area terrain piece.  I was never happy with it.  It didn’t look interesting.  It’s low hills meant that model teetered when placed in it, and the stones never made it feel like it should give any kind of significant cover.  It was pasty, cracked, boring, and I hated to field it.  Most of all, it wasn’t cool.

So, I set about making it interesting.  My first thought was that a nice, pastoral scene might give it some more visual interest.  Green rolling hills with a little static grass might be nice, right?

WRONG.  We’re in the grimdark future where things are always grim and dark.  I busted out my kids (NOW MINE) tempra paints, based everything in black, and started drybrushing up from there.  I had intended to go up from black to a mid brown and add some greens from there, but after getting some sand on there, and moving up from black, it just wasn’t working.  There was no warmth to it.  It just looked charred.  And it still looked cracked, and that’s when inspiration hit.  It would have to be lava.

So, I poked around a bit and found a couple short articles on painting lava, and took a stab at it.  I figured I’d make the whole piece seem like some daemonic shrine thing, with fire and lava inside of everything, trying to get out.  All the stones would have fire in their cores and all the cracks would become lava fissures.

I started with a dark red, moving to lighter red, then blazing orange, and finally a yellow.  I think, overall I was a little heavy handed with the yellow.  I could have fixing that situation by grabbing a finer brush, but that didn’t happen.  Is it was, I had heavily damaged my large(ish) drybrush from painting over real rocks and sand.  I’ll have to replace that.  I liked that brush, too.  =(

In the center of the piece was a smooth, round stone that was different than the more jagged stones that surrounded it.  Stones all gathered from my back yard, I might note.  So, I decided that it should be some magical blue flaming thing, to contrast with the orange and yellows in the surrounding parts.  I went one with a dark navy blue (Imperial Blue?) and up to a very light baby blue.  It turned out well.  I wanted a more ‘charged with electricity’ look that I didn’t quite accomplish, but it’s good enough.

Overall I’m now very happy with the piece.  It’s grim, and dark, and most of all cool.  I think it’ll get used heavily from here on out.  Dangerous terrain tests, here I come!

Because he had an odd number of players, I sat out the first round and did what I could to help Mike and Jon beat each other up in an Annihilation game, and John and Brent with their cap and control.

But, for the second round I matched up with Jonathan for an Ork vs Ork slugfest.  We rolled cap and control with four control points.  We both fielded very different deployments.  I was fielding a pretty typical Kan Wall, with a couple extras:

• Warboss with PK, BP, and cybork
• Big Mek with KFF and cybork
• 5 Kommandos, 2 burnas, Snikrot with Warboss attached
• 2x 5 Lootas
• 2x 29 boys, Nob, BP, PK
• 10 boys
• 2x Deffkopta, TL Rokkit, Buzzsaw
• 2x 3 Killa Kan with Grotzookas
• 2 Killa Kan with Grotzookas

Jonathan had something like:

• Mek w/ SAG
• 14 grots w/ Runtherd (playing ring around the Big Mek)
• 12 ‘ard boyz w/ Shootas, 1 big shoota, Trukk w/ big shoota
• 20 boy squad, nob, pk
• 20 Storm Boyz, with Zag
• 12 Warbikes
• 3 Killa Kans w/ Rokkits
• 3 Killa Kans w/ Grotzookas

I went first.  I wanted to push my Deffkoptas forward, but there were no good targets.  All Jon left on the board were his SAG Mek (w/ grots) and a boyz squad.  No good targets.  So, I sent one after the Mek with Grots, and got him killed off, easily.  That’s about all that happened turn one.

Turn 2 I got all my reserves.  Which meant that my Snikrot crew got to come in with no good targets.  I ended up going after the SAG.  Popped in right behind them, killed the grots off with the burnas, and then the mek went down in assault.  I also attacked hit 20 boyz squad with grotzookas and some other stuff.  They ended up under 10 boyz, but I could quite get them to break.  If I would have, I would have won in round two.  But, it was not to be…

Jon’s turn started badly with his full squad of Storm Boyz scattering onto my lootas, and then getting lost in the warp.  But got better when, he got his Warbikes and Kans in.  He dropped them right next to my Warboss/Kommandos/Snikrot, and lit them up with rokkits and Grotzookas, killing everything but the Warboss, but laying two wounds on him.  It hurt.

He also pushed forward his Warbikes, and they shot and laid 19 wounds on one of my boyz squads.  And the I rolled boxcars on my leadership roll, so they ran off the board.  That’s a LOT of shootie!  TL Assault 3 is scary.  I guess they’re worth their 25pts each!

So, now the board was much more balanced.  Over the course of the rest of the game, Jon managed to take out one of my kans, and shoot my small 10 boy mob off of the objective.  Jon’s trukk came in and executed my Warboss.  Trukk then parked on the objective and got blown up.  I contested with a turbo boosted Deffkopta, but went on to a subsequent turn.  They killed off the deffkopta, but I managed to break the squad.  They ran, and then regrouped back onto the objective.  One more round of grotzooking got them off of the table for good, I took the victory with one point controlled to his none.

Some things we learned:

• Ork warbikes are VERY shootie.  They’re a bit pricey, but probably well worth fielding.  Landing 24 S5 wounds in a shooting phase will ruin just about anyone’s day.
• Kommandos with Burnas are pretty good.  It was pretty awesome to be able to choose the table ledge, too.  The squad just came in too early to be truly effective.
• Deff Koptas first turn assault was cool, but I didn’t have any good targets.  VS SM’s or CSMs it would have been much, much more useful.  So, in future lists I might just take one, instead of two.
• Killa Kans with Grotzookas are awesome.  As always.  Those things /always/ pay for themselves.
• Deff Koptas are good at turboing in at the last minute to contest an objective while holding a 3+ cover save.
• Lootas work very well in groups of five.  A one roll for shooting sucks, but a 5-6 makes for a real decent volley of S7 wounds.

So, we learned a lot about our units, and had a great time doing it.  Next play date is on the 11th!  I can’t wait.

Decorative Sea Glass in it's native state.

I later bought a bag of my own, with the intention of making some kind of giant crystal growth area cover things.  The bag cost less that $3, and is plenty for maybe 8-10 of this pieces that I made.  While I was at Michael’s, I found some 4″ thin wooden disks that I’m using as the bases for this terrain.  Larger might have been better, but I think they turned out fine.  Here’s the finished product:

I think they turned out pretty nicely.  I still need to hit them with dullcoat, and prolly ‘ard coat a couple of areas to bring out the crystalness of the crystal, but I think they’ll look good on the game board.

I learned a couple things while working on this project.  Firstly, I know that I couldn’t glue the glass to the wooden base directly, as it was smooth wood.  I’d need some substrate to prop it up, so I mixed some off my basing sand with white glue, and smeared that onto the bases, in order to coat them, and plant the glass into.  This didn’t work out so well.  The sand wasn’t deep enough to properly seat the glass, and the smeared on sand lost the natural look that you get when you sprinkle it onto the glue.  Next time I do something like this, instead of the mix and smear approach, I’ll get some air dry clay (that I’ve used successfully in the past) and use that to first set the stones, and create any kind of terrain contours, and then use the standard white glue + coat in sand approach to apply the texture.

This was my first attempt at any kind of object sourced lighting.  It’s really a very basic usage, but I think it really makes the piece look cool.  After the initial glue+sand+glass dried, I washed it heavily with a mixture of black tempra paint, white glue and water to make a thick wash.  I was careful to only get a little on the glass itself.  After that dried over night, I first drybrushed the sand sections with Reaper Muddy brown. then Vallejo Yellowish Rust, and finally a bit of Reaper Worn Olive in a few areas.

Next I moved on to the areas closest to the glass itself.  First I heavily drybrushed Reaper Deep Amethyst, then a 50/50 mix of that and Reaper True Blue, then a tiny bit of plain True Blue.  Finally, I got a bit of an off white, and roughly hit the edges of the glass, and added a very slight amount to the bases themselves.

I’m happy with the overall effect, and thing I’ll be very happy to have these pieces on the field.

I’ve pumping out a lot of 40K work lately, and some of it I’m kinda proud of, and based on a suggestion from my buddy Warmfuzzy, I thought it was about time I had a venue onto which to accumulate my work.

So, this is the place.

Expect WIP pics, and game musings.  Info on how to make some of the things I work on.  Maybe some battle reports, or general mini hobby info.  Maybe thoughts on rules, or army lists, or even random complaint/compliments/reviews on video games that I’m currently into.  We’ll see how this thing goes.

Check out the Mathhammer, and Gravity Machine links on the top for some programs I’ve written.  Anything that I make that may be of interest to other people, I’ll through on the Resources page.  Starting out, I’ll have the Vehicle Status Tokens that I made recently.

I hope you enjoy what I have to share, and I’m always happy to hear from anyone who cares to comment (for better, or worse) on what I’ve done.  ttfn!