The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Gamesday Baltimore 2010, Part 2 – The Demons

So this year at the Demons was pretty interesting. The entries were fairly high caliber across the board, if I say so myself. I didn't really have the time or willpower to do much up for them, so I threw my Warphead into the competition with zero expectations, and didn't make the first cut. Hardly surprised, hardly upset!

Anyway, I did take a lot of pictures of a lot of entries, and I'd like to share them all so that those of you who didn't manage to make it can get a general sense of how things went. The Demons were held in a separate room on the third floor of the convention center, where the lighting was better for judging. I went up at around 4:00, so by then the decisions had basically been made. A couple of first cut entries may have been removed from the cases as people went home, but I think for the most part I got a comprehensive look at things.

Let's start with the basic entries first, in all categories. If I'm not mistaken, all of the following set are entries that did not make the first cut in their respective categories. I may not have photographed everyone's entries - I just went for the ones that looked appealing or interesting. Sorry if you got left out!

 

Now, on to the first cuts. Again, I didn't have time to photograph every single entry, because there was a line that I had to mill through to even reach these displays, but I did try and catch the highlights.

 

And, of course, the winners, in a separate display case.

 

Nearby, they also had a couple artist showcases where some very nice models were displayed, but were not part of the competition. Couldn't help but snap a couple photos of those bad boys!

 

That about wraps it up. If any of you spot anything wrong (i.e., I put a basic entry model in with the first cuts, etc) just drop a comment and I'll have it fixed up in no time!

Some day, my lovelies. Some day.

Gamesday Baltimore 2010, Part 1 – The Event

I'm back home, situated, and I've had time to sift through the literal thousands of pictures I took of Gamesday Baltimore 2010. I'm going to try and keep things neat and tidy by dividing the day into two posts - the Event itself, and all that transpired there, and the Golden Demon Competition, in a post to follow. Also, a lot of the images and stuff below were taken while I was participating in things, so if there's an annoying amount of photos of my models in the mix, that'd be why. Sorry!

For now, let's just talk about the event itself!

The Convention Center lobby is a familiar sight after the last time I was here in 2008, though truthfully I was expecting more people since Baltimore is the only Gamesday this year.

It wasn't too long until they felt kind enough to let the rabble in, at which point there was a minor stampede for the Forgeworld line. I didn't get to witness it myself, but I was told one brave soul actually got a running start and slid all the way under the bars that formed the waiting line and up to the counter as people were herded in. I waited a little while, and simply wandered around taking some shots.

Some of the displays were crazy, crazy impressive.

 

There was one really fantastic event that pit the Orks versus the Imperium on an absolutely hilarious scale, with an ungodly-sized Ork titan trying to take down an entire mountain fortress. By the end of the event, the Ork Stompa had been reduced to only a fraction of it's starting size, and there was a whole lot of titan-sized debris on the table. I'm not actually sure who won, but I doubt that even matters.

 

There were some equally nice Open Gaming tables to be found, which I snapped a couple quick photos of later on in the day.

 

There was a whole section of Armies on Display, but by the time I got around to it most of them had been packed up since the competition ended pretty early in the day. Still, the ones that stuck it out got photographed! (And poorly, because of the scratched-to-hell plexiglass everyone had to set up behind)

 

The Forgeworld guys were also out in force, although I didn't see anything new to oggle over in their display cases. Only snapped a couple quick shots because it's all been pretty much covered ad nauseum before. Some display cases of older miniatures and greens, as well.

 

I spent a lot of time this year crowded around the club-run event tables, partaking in what they had to offer. I have to say, I was pretty impressed on the whole.

Rock'um Sock'um Stompas was an obligatory stop for me, where five trundling titans belly bumped and smashed the zog out of one another.

 

I threw my own Stompa down, and was summarily destroyed first on the board. Guess mine's a little too small!

Another fantastic club event involved remote-controlled 40k tank laser tag. Think about that for a minute.

As awesome as it was, I did a poor job of photographing it. Pictures do it little justice, but I did take some video, so when I have time later I'll throw it to the ravenous Youtubes.

There was also a Rock'em Sock'em Dreadnought arena, which I felt summarily obligated to join. There was actually a fairly thorough rules set for the game that gave each walker a couple of damage boxes and a few new abilities. I will say it felt startlingly like Warmachine, actually.

Just like the first event, I was the first one to get wiped out. Oh well!

The fellows over at Paul's Basement League set up a fun little board where Independent Characters could deathmatch eachother for the amusement of Khorne, and I felt compelled to throw my Big Boss into the mix. I couldn't use the special rules that were set up for him, but I just ran him as a fully loaded-out Ork Warboss and he did just fine for himself - he actually broke the dominating Dark Eldar Archon's win streak in the first round, which had apparently been going for quite some time. He went up against (and lost to!) Commissar Yarrick quite a lot, though - that pesky 'umie just doesn't stay down!

 

Bolter and Chainsword also represented with quite a nice collection of goodies.

 

Later on, my buddy Chris and I got our game on with a quick 1,500 of Daemonhunters versus Orks, where we played eachother to a virtual stalemate. The tables we were using weren't anything too fancy, but they were open and available thanks to the fact that the 500 point tournament had progressed to the point where there weren't many competitors left.

 

Afterwards, I resumed my wandering and took another handful of miscellaneous pictures of the goings-on.

 

All in all, it was quite a day. I was a little surprised at how empty it got after around 3 o'clock - it seemed like a lot of people started leaving early after they'd had a look around and bought the things they wanted. I had to duck out a little early myself because we had to get back to New Jersey, so I didn't get to hear them make the grand announcement about where they're planning on holding Gamesday 2011. According to the rumbles of the internet, it's slated for Chicago, though, and the internet never lies.

There once was a man named Glen Burnie…

Hey folks. Long time no update. I've been quite busy these past few weeks, but not with wargaming stuff! (Sorry!) My fiance and I have been driving all around the country on a massive road trip, which we have documented - in a way - on another site I maintain on the side dedicated to our travel companion slash hand puppet that we take photos of. Don't ask, there's not much more to it than that.

Anyway, Games Day Baltimore 2010 is tomorrow, and we've spent most of the day driving. I'll be all over that event with my camera, and I'll hopefully have some excellent photos for all of you in the coming days. We happened to pass by the mythical Glen Burnie Battle Bunker today, and I talked Kim into letting me pull over, hop out, and take some photos!

Without further ado, the Bunker:

 

It was pretty interesting, and as I understand it a lot of the stuff in the Bunker's going to be at Gamesday tomorrow. Speaking of which, there looks to be a lot of exciting club-related events that I hope to participate in, including one which apparently involves remote-controlled 40k tank laser tag. I can't think of any way that can't be awesome.

I didn't have a lot of time to put things together for the Golden Demons thanks to this colossal road trip, so I'm probably just going to throw my Weirdboy into the mix with precisely zero expectations - even I know it's not painted well enough to win anything.

A month for the Motherland

Hello folks!

My lack of recent updates has been due in large part to my law school final exams pulling up on me at high speed, but now that I'm all done with those it's time to get back into wargaming.

For whatever reasons, I've been losing interest in 40k a little bit recently. Perhaps I'm just growing tired of the way Games Workshop does things. Other than the new ork walkers, I haven't bought anything from them in ages, and I don't really plan on doing so.

Instead, I've been finding myself fascinated by Warmachine. I've been playing a lot of Warmachine over VASSAL in the past few days to get a handle on the rules and how the game operates, and I think I've reached a point where I am comfortable with it now.

I've dropped a fair bit of money on a nice collection of Khador models - all new in blister. I am currently looking at:

• The Butcher of Khardov
• Karchev the Terrible
• Kommander Orsus Zoktavir
• Supreme Kommandant Irusk
• The Old Witch and Scrapjack
• A War Dog
• Ogrun Bokur
• Beast-09
• A Kodiak Heavy Warjack
• A Spriggan Heavy Warjack
• A Beserker Heavy Warjack
• A Juggernaut Heavy Warjack
• One of the new plastic Khador warjacks that can be made into 4 different kinds
• A full unit of Kayazy Assassins with Underboss
• A full unit of Iron Fang Pikemen with Kapitan and Standard Bearer
• A unit of Widowmakers
• A unit of Battle Mechaniks
• A unit of Doom Reavers
• The Great Bears of Gallowswood
• Man-O-War Drakhun
• Man-O-War Kovnik
• A Koldun Lord
• Kovnik Grigorovich
• 2 Manhunters
• Yuri the Axe
• Fenris

All told, it's a sizable amount of stuff. Now, with that said, I'm laying out a couple goals.

My ultimate goal is to have all of this built, based, and painted. Initially, I figured I might be able to pull it off in a month's time, but I think that's unrealistic considering my previous track record... particularly considering how slowly I work.

With that said, I'm dedicating the next month of my work to nothing but Khador, and I'll see how far that gets me. I would like to reach a goal of 35 points of  Khador done within this timeframe... I was considering doing a 'build everything first, then paint everything' approach, but some models, like the Iron Fang Pikemen, can't be built completely prior to painting; their shields interfere with painting, which means I have to do those separately and then attach them. Given how disorganized I am, leaving parts unattached and loose like that is a terrible idea for me. So, I'm going to go unit-by-unit, I think.

To cut down on the administrative end of the web site during this time, so I spend more time working on the Khador and less time tinkering with the site, I'm not going to be subcategorizing this work - for now. I'm going to try and post regular updates (at least daily) with the fruit of that day's labors. This will all be lumped into the Khador category for the time being. After I'm done working on the Khador stuff, in a couple weeks time, I will go back and sort the posts into proper subcategories.

So, off we go! Hopefully, those of you that play 40k and visit the site because of it will give Warmachine a look. I'm really much more impressed with that game than I am with 40k, because the gameplay is a lot deeper. 40k is checkers; Warmachine is chess.

Page Navigation Fixed

I just got a couple e-mails letting me know that the page navigation for the site wasn't working. It should be fixed now - sorry for any inconvenience, and thanks for letting me know!

Blood Angel Rules?

Okay, hear me out on this for a second, I want to get an idea of what you guys think.

I do not actually have the Blood Angels Codex, so everything I know about it is bits and pieces that I have inherited from various internet fora. But, I was thinking... wouldn't the Blood Angels rules be a pretty good fit for my Legion of the Damned army?

Let me make the case.

• Fluff-wise, both the Legion and the Blood Angels suffer from a disease. The Legion's is apparently warp-based, whereas the Angels suffer from a geneseed defect, but both produce a roughly equivalent result: consuming rage. I can see equivalencies between the Legion's contagion causing squads of the Damned to behave much like a Death Company.
• Sanguinary Priests make everything within a radius get Feel No Pain... and Legionnaires seem to slough off what would look like fatal blows. You could make a character like Sergeant Centurius and his Animus Malorum (a Fire Hawks Librarian's skull that steals the souls of the enemy and reinvigorates nearby Legionnaires) into a very, very easy Sanguinary Priest, and the effect would still be perfectly true to the Legion's fluff.
• Blood Angels can deep strike a Land Raider. Now, arguably, this is a really dumb rule and also probably very limited in effectiveness, since you can't always find a ton of room on the battlefield to just plunk a Land Raider down in even if you don't scatter. But. The idea is there - a Land Raider can appear from an unexpected quarter, as though from nowhere, bringing it's cargo of Legionnaires and heavy guns to bear. It's perfectly in tune with the Legion's 'appear-hit-vanish' style.
• Blood Angels appear to be a relatively elite army. This means you won't see as many of them on the board as a normal Space Marine army, because they trade numbers for abilities. By extension, since there aren't a ton of Legionnaires (they're the remnants of a chapter, after all), there shouldn't be many of them knocking around the board, either. It would seem Blood Angel's ability to deploy slightly lesser numbers fit the Legion's general fluff.
• Blood Angels get some of the coolest dreadnoughts. I love dreadnoughts. In fluff reasons, I've been telling myself that the Legion might have a number of dreadnoughts just because their relatively advanced and integrated life support systems might help slow or stem the contagion that afflicts them; they're a means of prolonging the Legionnaires so that they can deliver the Emperor's wrath.
• I don't know anything about the characters in the BA codex other than the fact that they cost a truckload and are awesome to compensate.

Now, problems with the idea include...

• Blood Angels seem to use a ton of jump packs. I don't know how to model jump packs on Legionnaires and not have it look ridiculous. You could conceivably play off the BA's angelic look and give them skeletal wings or something, or regular jump packs, I just think on the whole they'd end up looking a little silly.
• I've made an Ironclad dread for the army already. I don't know if BA can even take an Ironclad dread.
• I don't know if the 'counts-as Vulkan' model I have (Thanasius) actually fits anything in the Blood Angels HQ options.

On the whole, though, I think it's pretty viable. What do you guys think?

A little skintone

So I've been tinkering with the Sneekboss a little bit, and I have managed to take some hilariously unflattering pictures of my work so far. I've only really been doing the skin, so keep that in mind.

 

My highlights are, as usual, pretty heavy handed, but I don't know how to do much better. I'll try smoothing it out a bit more with some Thraka green, but it looks acceptable from a tabletop standard, and I don't want to lose my mind over it.

After I get the skin settled, I'm going to work on adding a red warpaint camo pattern overtop, which will hopefully make him look less silly.

GW Conversion Contest

Since I'll be heading to Gamesday Baltimore this year, I took a peek at the contest categories this morning. Aside from the usual Golden Demon competitions, it looks like GW is hosting a slew of other ones this year... and this one caught my eye.

40K Vehicle Conversion Competition
- Single vehicle no taller than 18"
- 40K vehicles only (no Forge World models allowed)
- Unpainted models recommended to clearly see conversion work
- Must be composed of at least 60% Games Workshop product
- Register by 12pm
- Judging finished by 3pm, pickup at 4pm
- Awards for Crowd Favorite, Studio Favorite, and Best Overall

From Games Workshop's site.

Is this the contest I've been dreaming of? Did GW finally make something for the converters? They want me to submit unpainted stuff? Freedom at last!

Of course, the only problem with that is the fact that most of the stuff I'd like to submit doesn't satisfy their "at least 60% Games Workshop product" rule.

So, dear readers, I'm turning to you on this one. Do you have any great ideas? My current best concept involves a looted Valkyrie, but I'm totally open to suggestions on this one. Making something like a Mega Dread would be great fun, but I don't see a way I could really do that with 60% GW bits...

Do you want to live forever?

So last time I was at Gamesday Baltimore, I was surprised at the number of people in costume. Being the sort of person who enjoys attention, I've been mulling the thought of what I could realistically pull off for a costume for the next GW event I go to.

I've settled on trying to emulate a Death Korps of Krieg Commissar, since I already had a gas mask on-hand. I've tracked down a cheap peaked cap on eBay, and though it's a little small for my gigantic head, I'm working on trying to stretch the thing out so I can reliably wear it over a mask. I also had the incredible fortune of finding one of these Swiss Military Greatcoats at my local Salvation Army for the grand sum of $5.I'm going to work on modding the Nerf Recon I have into a bolt pistol prop, since their shapes are sort've similar already.

As I stand now:

Things I need to find...

A left-handed ice hockey glove - preferably as big as I can possibly get, to use as the basis for a Power Fist prop. I'm checking eBay and Craigslist, but I haven't found anything yet. I obviously don't want to spend a ton on a new, proper pair of gloves that I'm just going to be building things on anyway.

A 'frogged' military vest - similar to these. I think this is going to end up being the hardest piece of the costume to actually find or make, since I can't sew very well and those 'hussar'-esque coatees are very expensive. I'm trying to find out if anyone I know has, maybe, a marching band vest that would work instead that I could pilfer, but I find that just as unlikely, really.

Cheap gold-fringe epaulets - like this. These seem to be expensive, too, but I figure out of all of the things I could try making, this one'd be easiest.

My old Imperial Guard Uplifting Primer - I had one, but I'll be damned if I know where it went.

If any of you guys have any ideas as to where to obtain any of this stuff, I'd be interested in hearing it!

Dear TheWarstore.com,

We have to talk.

I don't think your bitz service and I can be together anymore. More and more, I feel like you only think of me as a wallet and a pair of credit cards. I'm a human being, damn you, with feelings!

Hey! My eyes are up here!

It's time to put it all out in the open - I've been doing commerce behind your back, with other bitz services. Oh yeah, you better believe it. I've even done it on eBay, with dozens of sellers.

Don't act surprised. You had to have seen this coming. A single grotzooka bit for $14? More than a third of the cost of the box it comes from? What about an $17 Razorback Upgrade sprue, when the difference in price between a Rhino and Razorback is only $5 MSRP? Two and a half dollars for a single iron gob? Really? Have you no shame?

I understand that  you have needs. I've tried using Paypal to spice up our transaction life, but you always want more. You're driving me away, into the arms of another bitz service. A bitz service that genuinely wants to know how my day was, and knows how to gently and lovingly assign prices.

All in all, I have no regrets - the good times were sweet, but you seem to have lost that lovin' feeling... and I just can't bring myself to stay.

We'll always have that order I placed during the 2009 ork first wave releases...