Ten Elite Infantry for Xenos Rampant

 Please scroll down to see all ten figures;

These figures are, obviously, Games Workshop 40K Space Marines, but I won't be using them for Warhammer 40K.

I bought a box of 10 plastic Space Marines for £10 from someone at the club ages ago, because he didn't want them. My original plan was to paint them up and just sell them on, but I never got around to doing it. 

Once Xenos Rampant came along, it seemed to be a pretty simple thing to paint them up and use them as Elite Infantry for those rules. It also had the other advantage of me not having to spend any extra money on more figures.

I haven't used any 40K Space Marine heraldry on the figures, neither have I painted them up as a particular chapter, although I suppose there is a very slight nod towards the Dark Angels in the basic colour of their armour.

I put them together so that there are five figures with heavy weapons and five more suited to getting close up and personal, if required. That will give me two Elite units for Xenos Rampant.

I'm reasonably happy with how they look and they will do the job perfectly well for XR, with the support of a few units of more standard heavy, light or recon figures.

My next project

I don't often post WIP pictures, but I thought I'd make an exception for this lot, which are all intended to be primarily for Xenos Rampant.

Above I have 30 figures based on Frostgrave plastic  Cultists and Ghost Archipelago plastic crew figures. The crewmen have the same kind of baggy trousers as the cultists and once they have been given suitable headgear they blend in rather well. All of the figures have been equipped with weapons from the various Stargrave plastic sets, plus the occasional Cultist knife, sword or spear. These will work as cult members, pirates, post apocalyptic reavers or ragged mercenaries.

Next, here are 40 figures made up from the Stargrave Troopers and Mercenaries I box sets. I intend these to be Heavy Infantry.

Finally, a mixed bag made up from a mixture of the Mercenaries II and Crew II Stargrave boxes, who will be Light and Recon Infantry (the latter equipped with sniper rifles), five Wargames Atlantic giant spiders with sci fi weaponry and finally 10 Games Workshop plastic Space Marines that I bought from someone at the club ages ago for a tenner and which I intended to paint up and sell, but never got round to it. These will be two units of Elite Infantry. Obviously, I won't be bothering with any Chapter heraldry or other 40K gubbins.

I still have a box of Crew I figures, 15 Crew II figures and 15 Ghost Archipelago figures, plus 12 small spiders and seven giant ones to use. I am sure they'll end up as something useful.

I have to admit that I will leave it a while before I make any more giant spiders. They are pretty tricky and time-consuming to put together and I don't think I'd have done it yet without Guy Bowers' really useful guide on the WSS blog HERE. Having said that, they are worth the effort because they look pretty impressive, even without an undercoat.

Mixing Frostgrave, Ghost Archipelago and Stargrave figures together is really easy and generally everything goes together without any hassle or swearing.

I now have a total of 100 individual figures to get painted over the next couple of months. I am planning to do them in groups of 10 at the most.

Lockdown continues with a few more Ghosts of Gaia

I've got into the habit of overlapping things on the painting table over the last couple of years. It stops me getting bored with painting just one thing, gives me the chance to work on something else while I am waiting for the paint to dry on the first subject and it is useful for finishing off odd blobs of paint on my palette.

Obviously, at the moment I also have a lot of time on my hands, and I am getting lots of figures done which have been hanging around, but also things that I just fancy painting. These are definitely in the latter category. They are six more Ghosts of Gaia from Bad Squiddo. I actually really love these. I liked them when I first saw them, but at the time I didn't need any 28mm science fiction minis. Now, with my S.F. skirmish rules, Reivers Of The Outer Rim in a playable state, they have a purpose, so I am gradually collecting the whole range.

I've photographed them front and back, because there is so much great detail on these figures. The first four are basic fighters with close combat or ranged weapons.

And the final two are equipped with heavy weapons.

While I was painting these, it occurred to me that the Ghosts would make a fantastic Escher gang for the Games Workshop Necromunda skirmish game, although they are certainly better dressed (and with more flesh covered) than the GW originals.

Actually, when GW re-released Necromunda a year or so ago, I thought about buying an Escher gang for old times' sake but I didn't like the new minis that they put out. The originals were much more to my liking, and the Ghosts of Gaia have, to my eyes at least, the same vibe.

Painting roundup - finally finished all the current Sci Fi stuff

People may remember that I bought a box of GW Blackstone Fortress figures a while ago. I had most of them painted before the end of 2019, but there were a few left over.

Anyway, these are now done, because I buckled down and got on with them.

The first one is this chap, a Chaos Space Marine. He's obviously going to be a NPC in my home-brewed rules. I'm not bothered whether his colours match any of the GW Mythos Chaos Marine legions, but I reckon that he looks OK.

Next are these two odd-looking creations. They are supposed to be Negavolt Cultists, whatever they are, but I am going to use them as Cyborg NPCs.

Finally, here is a guy who simply can't keep his feet on the ground. He is labelled a Rogue Psyker, which seems OK, as he will fill that role as another NPC in my rules.

Well, they are done now. Hopefully, I will get my rules out again soon and get some sci fi skirmish action going. 

Painting - a few odds 'n' ends

The weather has been particularly horrible this week, so I have been painting a few figures, basically clearing space for getting some Napoleonic Portuguese infantry started.

Anyway, I've finished off four more figures from that GW Blackstone Fortress box set I mentioned previously.

According to the blurb on the box, the two blue guys are "Ur Ghuls" and the robot thingies are "Spindle Drones". According to me, the blue guys are Mutants and the robot thingies are potentially Sensor Droids, or maybe some other sort of droid, depending on the kind of game I am playing. Lazily, I have stuck pretty much to the box art regarding their painting schemes, because I rather like how they look. I am thinking that the blue guys will also make suitable Null Men figures for Frostgrave.

I've also been painting Monks. Surely, we all need a few monks? I am thinking that monks could crop up in all manner of games in many periods, right?

Specifically, I bought these because of a conversation I had at the club about taking part of the Magic rules from Sword and Spear Fantasy, specifically how magic can be used to boost the fighting ability of units and also to rally hits off of units. Our reasoning was that these aspects of Magic could be seen as being akin to religious figures boosting the fervour or morale of the troops, something that was a common feature of mediaeval warfare, as well as in earlier and later periods. Holy Men even have a role in Sharp Practice. As I have both FIW French and Napoleonic Anglo-Portuguese forces for SP in 28mm, a monk or two might come in handy.

Of course, monks can also feature in other settings, too. Saga immediately springs to mind, as well as Dux Britanniarum. Monks in a fantasy setting might also be possible. Who knows?

These four are rather nice figures, Foundry, I think, and I wasn't too concerned about which particular Order they might belong to,  so I painted three up as fairly generic monks. The fourth one I wanted to make a bit more colourful, as I am planning to add him to my Late Roman army, so I felt that a bit of an "imperial" habit might be appropriate.

Finally, I painted this chap;

He's a bit wizardy-looking and a bit like a Ranger for LOTR, but also a bit hermit-like. I really like him, and I can easily see him as a Christian Hermit supporting my Late Romans too.

More Sci Fi figures

Yeah, I know I said I was finished with 28mm sci fi figures for a while, but I saw something to make me change my mind. Anyway, that was back in September. 

The thing that made me change my mind was me thinking that I needed some non-player characters and general purpose bad guys. Well, a box set from Games Workshop, a company that I haven't considered buying anything from for about 20 years, popped up on a post on Facebook and I had one of those "light bulb over the head moments".

The box in question is for something called Blackstone Fortress, apparently a new GW game. The thing that I liked though was that it offered up a range of figures that might usefully supply me with a few NPCs for my sci fi skirmish rules.

The figures themselves are plastic ones and claim to be snap together with no glue required. Well, they do snap together, but being a cautious type, I decided to use glue as well, just in case.

So far, I have made and painted two Chaos Beastmen and seven Traitor Guardsmen. 

Now, in the past I used to play a fair bit of 40K and I had an Imperial guard army, so these were an obvious place to start. However, these traitor guardsmen are festooned with spiky bits and blades sticking out all over the place, which I think look pretty silly. After all, you could have someone's eye out with an injudiciously-placed spiky bit, so I cut off the most obviously stupid ones.

As for the models themselves, I rather like them. The poses are quite dynamic and the figures appear to be based on the Cadians I used to own. Because they are the chaps who have gone bad, they look a bit ragged and that suits me fine. After all, these are going to be deserters, outcasts, scavengers and hired muscle. I wasn't too keen on a couple of them wearing furry cloaks, but I knew what to do about that.

I wanted these guys to look like a group of guns for hire, deserters from some local system war, but still military-looking. I gave them a combat-hardened look, with the tattered remains of camo ponchos on some figures and, using the unwanted furry cloaks, the remains of some leafy green camo garments on the other two. All of them have camo trousers and helmets. I wanted their body armour to look battered, so overbrushed some bare metal on the paintwork. I quite like their improvised look, which is helped by the curtains of chainmail a couple are wearing.

The two Beastmen are also deserter types. They are far more ragged, with battered armour and torn cut-down trousers, but that also looks good, I think.

Some vintage Games Workshop figures

A long time ago, I used to play Warhammer and 40K, plus a bit of Necromunda from time to time. However, I sold off my armies ages back and never really gave much thought to playing any GW games again.

Anyway, back in 2015, when I was looking for something else, I found a  undercoated or part-painted GW figures in a box of odds and ends that I'd just stuck up in the loft when we moved house in 2013. I decided to paint them up for practice, and also so I could submit them to the TooFatLardies painting challenge.

I've still got them, but previously never posted anything about them on my blog, so I thought that I'd remedy that now.

First, there is a Chaos Space Marine standard bearer and a Savage Orc Shaman. Both of these were part-painted, just having basic colours blocked in and therefore needed a fair bit of work to bring them up to scratch.

This figure was originally a Necromunda Redemptionist gang leader (I think) but I remember buying him to be used as an Imperial Inquisitor for a Inquisition force that I never got round to completing. He was just undercoated in black, so painting him up was a fairly straightforward job. I think that he might come in useful if I ever get around to putting my Sci-Fi skirmish rules notes into some kind of order and collecting a few models to play with.

This last one is a bit of a mystery really, because I never had any Space Orks. I think I bought the mini in a sale in the old GW shop in Bristol that was pulled down when Broadmead was redeveloped and they built Cabot's Circus.

He is a Bad Moon Space Ork Big Boss. I remember the figure from AARs in White Dwarf back in the early 1990s. He is from the old ranges that Games Workshop replaced with larger and more brutal-looking Orks. Personally, I liked a lot of these older figures a lot. They had a quirky charm, although the older Space Marines left a bit to be desired, in my opinion.

So, now I've remedied an omission and put these few remaining figures on the blog. I'd be interested to see what people think of them.

Some plastic Mordheim figures

I bought a sprue of plastic Games Workshop Mordheim figures earlier this year at the club's Tabletop Sale. My original idea was to use them as warband members for Frostgrave, but in the end I didn't think that they suited the theme of my warband, so I put them aside to decide what to do with them. 

Anyway, a while ago I made them up, adding a shield to one of the figures, and undercoated them, and looked at them for a few weeks until I decided that I'd paint them up and try and sell them on at the next Tabletop Sale or on the Bring-and-Buy table at our annual Reveille II show, which is on 26th November.

I am reasonably happy with the way they have turned out, I've tried to make them look a bit shabby and functional rather than "parade ground", with some chipped paintwork on the edges of the shield and hopefully they will find a home, otherwise they'll end up on Ebay and, failing a sale by that route, they'll get stuck in a drawer and forgotten.