Random Things

Is it just me, or does anyone else tend to lose all sense of stability as to their time and place when they get sick? And I'm not talking like, "oh, I have allergies, my head is in a cloud blah blah blah" but like legitimate it-hurts-to-move-and-makes-you-dizzy-to-sit-up-and-focus-your-eyes sick. I'm not sure if it's exacerbated my insane hobby-ADHD or clarified how poorly I manage my myriad of distractions.

So, if you can't already tell, I'm taking a bunch of mucinex.

What's first? Ummmmmmm...

Oh, I painted another Ork for my Kill Team!

May I present my team's Leader, Arnold aka "Leg Day":

"Wiff my alllll-see'in eye..."

I couldn't decide what color to make his titan-shoulder guard so I opted for "dirty"

Overall super pleased with how he turned out, and enjoying this format of just sitting down for a night and knocking out a model in one session, letting inspiration carry me where it will for that given model rather than stressing about his adherence to a theme or fitting in with a unit.

Besides, the "powdah" (aka weathering powder, most powerful and sacred of all miniature painting utilities) I'm using on these guys end up bringing the theme right back together, making them all look like the same location is covering them in grime and filth.

Also last week, Artel miniatures posted a preview of some *incredible* orks they have coming out soon, and I will definitely need to add them to my growing forces!

That bottom middle ork jumping off a rock might be my favorite ork sculpt I've ever seen

So what else?

Inspired by talks I've been having with my gaming bro's as of late about playing some Zone Mortalis, I decided it's finally time to get out my corridor terrain sets (acquired through a couple of different kickstarters in the last few years), get the damn things fully assembled and painted, and use them on the table. Expect to see some more updates on these soon.

Advertised as a pretty simple set of "spaceship corridors", I feel like these work for bunker/laboratory settings, too.  I'm trying to give it a grungy, nurgle-y vibe without being too overt. Could work for a multitude of games!

A more complex set, these "Bug Hunt Corridors" were originally done with Space Hulk in mind. I'm trying to go with used/industrial spaceship or factory. I have slightly more of these, including several room modules.

The Bug Hunt Corridors actually already starred in a blog post here way back in 2015 (seriously, what) but I'm updating them now because 1) I never finished them and I want the paint job to look consistent across the whole set and 2) the old paint job looks better in the pictures because of the lighting than in person, where they are really way too dark. I want to throw in a bit of color and life and dirt and grime. Da powdah! (I mean, amirite Rambler?)

And finally, I've been stressing these past few days over what events to participate in during the upcoming NoVa convention this summer. The registration goes live on March 1st, so I need to have my events planned out and be ready to sign up on that date, then use the months between to get my forces ready and practice!

I'm going back and forth pretty hard on some things (looking at you Infinity and your damned 2-day event) and sizing up events I really hadn't considered before (Guild Ball and Necromunda), but our group did settle on one event:

Horus Heresy 30k Zone Mortalis.

Do I know how to play it?  Nope!

Do I have models for it?  Weirdly, yep!

Do I have any of those models assembled or painted?  Of course not!

Ermahgerd?  Ermahgerd.

"I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines." - Claude Shannon

Green is the New Black (Ork Kill Team Part 2)

After managing through a super stressful week at work and illness invading our home, I stole away a few hours over the weekend to finally get some paint on some of these silly Ork bois.

It was upon first sitting down, though, that I realized I hadn't decided how I planned on doing the green skin.

"Maybe like an olive green? Or cartoony and bright!? Or a deep blue-green!?!? Or what about, like red or something weird!?!?!?!?!?!?!?"

I'm not much of a planner, when it comes to painting. As maybe my favorite aspect of the hobby, painting is something I typically lose myself in, and I just go with "whatever feels right" at the time. This means I can almost never repeat a scheme and need to paint whole units at a time, I almost never remember to write anything down, and there are many occasions where I look at painted figures on my shelf and wonder how I achieved a specific technique. It's not very practical, I guess, but it's how I do things. 

So, I've decided it's super cool and perfectly fine if all of my orks have variations to their skin tones, rather than being a uniform green across the Kill Team (and eventually 40k force, but more on that later).

Looking through the wonder that is Pinterest, I found basically too many schemes that were cool, so I figured I'd just start trying stuff until I was happy with it.

First, I decided to break out the airbrush to simulate a technique I saw in this wonderful video (though his skills are far superior) where you put on a base green and throw a zenithal highlight using a typical "flesh" color before busting out washes and brushwork. It worked out okay, but ultimately left the orks feeling a bit too pale with the colors I used. Plus I'm going to have to go back and try to really bring out the faces. 

I can't decide if that video just inspires the hell out of me or discourages the shit out of me.

Anyway, after giving everything a wash with some Army Painter Green Tone, I felt like I needed to do some more substantial highlighting.

Josep has had it with Danny's shit!

On the left is an example of a full repaint, using a couple of different greens and some yellow to fully color and shade the grot. It's pretty cartoony and bright, but I like it pretty well. On the right, I only used the Army Painter Green Tone wash and then used some Vallejo Dead Flesh to highlight, and he's a much paler Ork. Liking them both really cemented in my mind that I'm going to just have to have various tones throughout my force in order for me to have a good time with it.

After playing around with greens for a bit, I decided I needed to knock out at least 1-2 of the Kill Team and get them finished. It made sense to finish up Cap'n Sarge first since he's a transplant from my Deadzone force and would only need some touch up and basing work anyway, but it felt like cheating, so I also worked on Beep-Boop.

At first I had his can pretty clean, but if there is a single painting skill that I'm best at, it's making something nice looking become all shitty and grungy and like it's survived some terrible catastrophe. It's my "thang".

"Nooo orkses 'ere... jus' ol' Beep-Boop." 

I decided I wanted for this Kommando to have found some trash and scrap to create his disguise in the field, but when the mission was over, he just never gave it up. He didn't choose the Beep-Boop life... the Beep-Boop life chose him.

So after some GW and Vallejo paint effects (Corrosion and Rust, respectively) and a helping of the-most-underutilized-hobby-material-out-there Vallejo weathering powder, I touched up the edges of the metal again and called him done.

So sneaky. So dirty. 

Next up I'm hoping to power through some more of these orks and finish up the Kill Team, but it's equally likely I'll become distracted and start/continue a different project.

It's been a busy couple of weeks!

Q: Are you still working on those Orks? 

A: Yes, of course! I even managed to finish assembling the team and prime them in order to get them on the table!

First, another Loota Spanner, upgraded to a Rokkit Launcha or however they spell it. This is Scrote, another lovable grot who's earned his way into the big leagues by constructing a custom machine.

And this is the Combat Specialist for the team, named Stryfe. For... reasons. No resemblance to anything. Nope. None at all.

Q: Are you still working on the forest/trees/whatever-the-shitty-title-of-that-blog-post-was?

A: Yes, of course! But, like, not right now. Because it's been extraordinarily cold, which means it's cold in my garage, which is where that work is occurring. So the trees are currently all just bare trunks and twigs waiting for greenery.

Q: Are you working on anything else? You seem like a lazy hobbyist that can't even make a blog post on a regular schedule.

A: Yes, of course! And that's super judgy!

But anyway, one of the other primary projects on my desk is my warband for Frostgrave. I'm creating a warband with a Summoner as my wizard, so I also have to get enough demons ready to summon in alongside my soldiers (and the various NPC monsters I need to get ready). I'm working out a rough backstory for them being high ranking members of a royal court, but of a kingdom where results are more important than what it takes to achieve them, so less popular schools of magic such as Necromancy or Summoning are prioritized for their raw power. I wanted the models to have a "richer" look to them without being charactures of what they represent, so the wizard himself looks older and more worn, while the apprentice still clearly worries about how he dresses, the soldiers will look shiny along with their super-amazing-omg-can't-believe-they-make-these ATTACK PUGS, and then like a dirty apothecary healer and some other meaningless shit because let's get back to the attack pugs!

LOOK AT HOW FIERCE THESE GOOD BOYS ARE! So strong. So, so strong. Reaper Minis is the fucking best in the business (but also like 20 other companies I can name which are also wonderful but seriously guys if you want his kind of spotlight make some badass attack pugs and we'll see what happens)

Front row, left to right: the Summoner himself himself (Gamezone Miniatures), his Apprentice (Reaper Miniatures), the Apothecary (Alkemy Miniatures), three Imps (Wyrd Miniatures), and four soldiers (Rackham Confrontation).

Back row, left to right: two "crossbowmen" (Rackham Confrontation) and a zombie hiding behind the apprentice (Zombicide Black Plague), a Lesser Demon (CoolMiniOrNot's Wrath of Kings), a Lesser Demon (CoolMiniOrNot's Massive Darkness), and a Greater Demon (CoolMiniOrNot's Massive Darkness).

I've also just joined into the amazing Wargamer Ramblings's's's's D&D5e campaign, playing a character named Hankleford Glitterthumb, a gnome warlock folk hero. The miniature I found is pretty spot on except for being a halfling, so when it arrives I'll just need to replace his feet. Friggin' EXCITED.

My friends can call me Hank! (miniature from Alternative Armies)

Q: O-kay... well, lemme stop you right there, because you clearly have more to go you sick addicted monster you, so I'll just ask the next question. Do you ever actually do anything with these minis, like, you know, play games?

A: Yes, of course! I actually played games more than once this past week!

First, I played a game of Star Wars Legion against my good buddy Andy. I currently have a very tenuous grasp on the rules for the game and its mechanics, so while my typical inability to roll dice successfully is more to blame, I'm taking this defeat squarely on my current inability to know what the hell is going on while playing this game. My Rebels got murdered. It was ugly. And beautiful.

Luke leading around 700 points of Rebels to their horrible, horrible deaths. If you look closely under the landing pad, you can just barely make out Wedge Antilles flying his airspeeder like a reckless idiot, clearly on his cell phone (and probably getting yelled at by his wife for leaving his dirty socks in the floor when hampers exist for a reason dammit), just before getting shot down by a stormtrooper with a rocket launcher and Vader throwing his fucking lightsaber.

"This is our shitty backwater shantytown! We don't need no stinkin' Empire here!"

"Defend the trash, boys! This here is our trash!"

"Don'tchu let them get near this engine I've left layin' out in the middle of the road! I'm gonna fix it up one day! And I'll tell yo- ...oh shit, is that...?" *lightsaber noises and screams*

So yeah. SW Legion continues to be a super fun game that I'm consistently too lazy to sit down and read through the rulebook for. Which Andy is super happy about, I'm sure.

Speaking of reading rulebooks, I did actually spend some time reading through the Kill Team rules for the game this past Saturday (well kind of, my buddy Dingar came over and we worked through the rules and read most of them, so that counts).

You can see a slew of pictures over on Da Masta Cheef's blog of our battle between his ancient and awesome Tyranids and my Orks, named the Crushbone Commandos. We played a simple "kill all the things" mission since it was my first game of it ever and his first time fielding Nids, and shockingly I won the game? I'm not sure what happened either. The Orks were a ton of fun to play with, though, and my opponent was super fun as always, which is all I really want out of this hobby.

I still think those little Nids look like weird, angry alien cats.

So many little ankle-biters!

The Orks holding their own as each KT continues to hit eachother without ever dealing any damn damage.

Stryfe, Combat Specialist, trying to be awesome and kill the enemy Leader but ultimately failing. Like an Ork do, yo!

Q: And that's it? Or do you have something else?

A: Yes, of course!

Long story short, my oldest is turning the big 1-0 (that's 10, in case you're on the strugglebus) in a few short weeks, and he's recently taken a big interest in painting miniatures and wanting to play. So, of course, I'm thrilled.

He's had some Space Marines that he painted last year (just 10 or so) in a scheme of his own devising, but this past weekend decided he wanted to change them all to Crimson Fists after reading about them in the January White Dwarf and hanging the poster from it on his wall.

Trying not to let my enthusiasm show too much, I gladly agreed that we could go to HobbyTown and get him the couple of paints he needed to follow the painting guide in the WD. While we were there, they had those neat little single-sprue, random marines, and of course I got him one (yes I should have made him wait until his birthday but I don't care). He scored the super cool looking sergeant model, and immediately got to painting his guys when we got home.

Since he's just starting out, the mountain of knowledge and experience looming in front of him is quite daunting. He wasn't struggling with the tutorial, but he was clearly becoming frustrated with it. So, I decided having a real-life example of a Crimson Fist he could look at while trying to follow the tutorial would be helpful, and after he went to bed I hunched over the kitchen table way past my own bed time to get that sergeant finished up.

Behold, Brother Sergeant Alec:

*chainblade noises*

And because I'm sappy, I put a little note on the bottom. If the years have passed and you've somehow stumbled onto this collection of words I've placed here, son, I love you very much. You're the friggin' coolest, man.

Q: Alright, for real, we done yet?

A: Yes, of course!

A Return to Orks (Ork Kill Team Part 1)

As another part of my previously-mentioned (see: Blog Post - "I mean, what's a couple of years when you're playing the long game?") desire to get in a happier place with my hobby, I'm also trying to focus on projects that are a joy for me to work on rather than feeling like I'm constantly slogging through something that feels more like a job. A sort of organized way of following my muse rather than a disciplined "must paint whole army now fun be damned" approach; which, of course, is also an approach that will require more stringent discipline in other places (aka quit buying frigging armies all at once and creating huge backlogs that ultimately feel like work and cause me to lose the passion necessary to complete the project).

40k has never been the game at the center of my hobby universe. I've read quite a few novels for its fiction, have collected several of the rulebooks over the years, etc., etc., but it's never been my "thang" when it comes to rolling dice. Honestly I'm not sure I've played more than 5 games of it ever. It's a large commitment in a battle where I've already committed to quite a few other theaters (seriously, I have a problem) and I've just never taken the time to make it happen.

BUT! 

Kill Team, as a small skirmish version, is something I can totally commit to. It encourages fun, unique hobbying opportunities for your miniatures because there are so few of them, and the nature of the game allows each miniature to become more narratively-fulfilled while playing, which is super important to me. I'm a "cinematic moments" kind of player rather than a "strategy and winning" player, in a way that I'd rather create a ridiculous and memorable moment in a game than always just play to win.

So, after some consideration and some urging from friends I haven't see in far too long (namely Da Masta Cheef) I decided I would work on an Ork Kill Team. Building Orks has long been my favorite thing to do within the realms of GW's universes, and this seemed like the perfect excuse to finally getting around to working with the cool stuff I started with GorkaMorka a few years ago.

I sat down this past Friday night, intending fully to spend a solid 15 minutes cleaning up my desk and arranging some pieces in preparation of getting started. What felt like a short time later, as I looked dazedly down at my hilariously messy workspace filled by a Dakkajet and five completed Orks, I thought to myself, "Damn it's probably been a couple of hours by now, I need to get up for a minute." As I stood up, I nearly toppled over, my legs totally asleep. I'd been sitting at my table, in a silent little "office" (that's basically a glorified closet) for nearly 5 hours!

But hey, progress is progress. Let's check this shit out.

So first of all, the Dakkajet. Now you might be saying to yourself, "But WaaarghPug, you moron, there are no flyers in Kill Team!" and frankly, you'd be correct. I bought a Dakkajet years ago simply out of love for the kit, and have had it on my shelf ever since. (This is the original Dakkajet, mind you, that could only be the fighter plane or the bomber). However, in starting this endeavor, I wanted to make a vehicle because dammit it's, like, my favorite thing. Plus I needed to know what bits I could rob from the sprue for my KT!

*badass jet plane sound effects*

Yes, the wings ARE on backwards, you astute reader you! Back at Da Shop, da boyz thought it "looked kooler dis way" so they added jets to the middle and end of each wing! Suck it, physics!

First up for the Kill Team members, we've got my Kommando Boss, designated with the codename "Leg Day":

One of my only photos mid-build.

"Get wif it, boyz!" he screams in a fierce whisper.

You're damn right that's a Knight Titan's face as a shoulder guard.

Next up, we've got the as-yet-unnamed Burna Boy, rocking the monowheel:

This dude definitely loves his job. What a smile!

Good side shot of the wheel.

Power system for the wheel.  I like to imagine it having those big dumb blue batteries that go in Power Wheels riding toys for children, lol.

Third, there is the Demolitions specialist Kommando, Harambe:

I wanted a bomb squad suit kind of look, and this chopped up armor from an AT-43 miniature worked perfectly! 

I'm trying my best to make sure each team member has WYSIWYG equipment for their roles, but I feel like this guy would just bludgeon fools with his stikkbombs rather than use a choppa.

Odds are this dude blows himself up immediately.

Fourth, we have the Ork Loota named "Deddshott" wielding this friggin huge deffgun like it's nothing more than a slugga:

Deddshott was maybe the most challenging of the bunch, needing some extensive surgery to remove enough plastic for the gun to fit in his grip.

The goal was to have him holding the gun up close to his body and appear to be lining up his shot, his forward foot braced on the rocks.

Moar sights is moar betta!

And last, but certainly not least (although, well, kinda least), is Scrappy, my stand-in for a Loota Spanner.

Scrappy is a small lad, but with big dreams.

Using an old Ork motorcycle, some plane parts, an old metal banner from the GorkaMorka kits, and a gun from some spess mahreen robutt, he has constructed a device that puts him on the field with da big boyz.

My headcanon is that it sounds like a very loud RC car.

The Kill Team so far:

Back left is a regular Kommando, using a model from Scibor, and bottom right is a re-based Kommando I made for Mantic's Deadzone game. 

Part 2 should see the completion of the team, and hopefully I'll even start painting them!

Gorkamorka!!!

Da Swedish Chef!

For some reason, every time I say or think the word "gorkamorka", the Swedish Chef voice is in my head saying "GORK DE MORK A".

Yeah, I know.

Okay, let's try this again.

Datz betta

Right now at the local game club, we're in the final stages of playing toss away Gorkamorka games to get a good handle on the rules before starting an actual campaign.  So that means, of course, that everything is in a "work-in-progress" state at the moment.

There always needs to be a centerpiece, so allow me to introduce you to Cassandra:

Junk armor plating and ram?  Check.

Stylish interior with Ork driver?  Check.

Dem rokkit boostas!?  Check and check.

Dem passengers?  Yeah sure okay, check.

Now clearly she's a WIP, but she's just a Revell Snap-Tite 1:35 scale fire engine, some bits, some plasticard, and a bit of spray paint all-told.  I've not decided yet if I'm going to try to keep it red, or if I'll go with a completely different theme.  Being the crazy person I am, I've already got plans for 3 different groups to play with... Haha!

Now obviously the campaign won't start out with me having this many models, but this is all that I've gotten so far in general (minus a few grotz that didn't make it into the picture):

And the last piece I'll show off today is the WIP gunner chair for the trukk.  I've taken a seating bit I had from a different game, put an Ork on it, and have rigged it up with a magnet to fit on the top of the trukk.  My intention is to work up a mount on the front of it where I can change out weapons to equip the trukk differently, which is why the Ork doesn't actually have a weapon attached yet.

I'll be sure to post up more pics as I get them painted, so that's all for today!  Now to the spray primer, and then the brushes!