Saurus Unit Filler WIP & Other Odds and Ends

I like to be frugal, whether I'm shopping for groceries, pet supplies or hobby goodies.  This is why unit fillers in WFB appeals to me.  My two Saurus units presently have 20 models each, but I want to expand the units up to 24.  Inexpensive solution, take the 8 unpainted models I have and turn them into unit fillers.  After sketching out some crude diagrams on post-it notes, I've assembled the first one.

2011 Golden Skulls Painting Challenge

This weekend the L.A. Battle Bunker held a "Hobby-Pocalypse" - a non-stop 33 hour event filled with painting competitions, mega-battles and mini-tournaments.  The festivities included their 2nd annual Gold Skulls Painting Challenge, the store's own version of the Golden Deamon.

Last year my Slann won 1st place for Fantasy Large Model and my Saurus hero won 3rd place for single fantasy figure.  This year I entered my Stegadon in the Vehicle/Monster category.  This year's competition was much tougher.  I took 3rd place after thinking I wouldn't even make the first cut.  Apparently, their was some heated debate about this particular category amongst the staff judging the event!

The staff put on a great event and it was fun to talk shop with all the great miniature painters.  You can check more coverage of the weekend at the store's facebook page.  I managed to get a few clear shots of some of the awesome models:

New Plastic Saurus Hero Picture

I'm usually not in the business of posting about new and upcoming releases (yes, I did it for the Tomb Kings, but that was to prove a point about the direction 8th edition is going) but for the first time in a long time, we're getting a new Lizardmen model:

Courtesy of BoLS

The new plastic characters that we've been seeing over the past few months are very exciting, even if they lack any options.  I like this guy as he fits in with the style of the army without looking like a re-sculpted Temple Guard model.  I've been wanting to paint an albino Lizardmen hero for some time now, so this model will be the perfect opportunity.

According to BoLS, this will be released mid-September for $13.25.

A Quick and Dirty Finecast Review

Prior to our last big game of Warhammer Fantasy, my friend Justin picked up a Citadel Finecast Rock Lobba to add to his goblin army.  He just bought it the night before and he needed to assemble it before we headed down to the Battle Bunker to, um, do battle.  I haven't bought a Finecast model myself so I was interested to check out the assembly process.

Assembly

Night Goblin Theory-Hammer: the Many Layers of the Onion

My best-warhammer-buddy Justin's Night Goblins and my Lizardmen have been seeing a lot of each other on the tabletop.  We've also been discussing ways to make the goblins more effective.  His army is not intended to be a super competitive face smasher, but it still needs to function well.  The army is primarily composed of big blocks of night goblins with fanatics, lead by Skarsnik.  In support he usually brings war-machines, trolls, an Arachnarock Spider or giants.  There are no orcs in the army, only night goblins and supporting monsters.  That's the way he likes it, nothing but sneaky gits that often squabble and occasionally kill each other.

After we exchanged several e-mails about goblin tactics, I came to the conclusion that to win with a night goblin army you have to think like a night goblin - i.e.sneaky bastard!  My theory is that the army needs to operate in layers.  The goblins won't win many straight, stand up fights against another army by going at them head on.  They need to whittle their opponents down so that when it comes to gettin' down to the nitty-gritty (close combat), the enemy is weakened enough to where the gobbos can do some damage.  It was as if orc gods Gork & Mork (or perhaps FAAC and WAAC) had come into alignment!

one year of one inch warriors!

Well loyal readers, my little blog has managed to make it past the one year mark.  I have no super spectacular clip-show style post planned as a celebration, so I'll leave you with a picture of something random I pulled out of the good old storage cabinet in the garage.  Enjoy yourself.

Consumer or Fan - How Does GW See You?

Rough times for Mr. McCourt

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game has passed, the second half of the season is underway and I've had baseball on my mind.  For residents of the greater Los Angeles area, including myself, this season has been full of off-the-field drama up in Dodger-town.  At this point, Dodger owner Frank McCourt is persona non grata to most Blue-Crew faithful.  When he first arrived on the scene in 2004 many viewed him as a carpetbagger from Boston and after the details came out of how he the missus milked the team to fund a lifestyle of excess his reputation sank further.  The Bryan Stow assault has not helped Frank's rep and now the MLB is in the process of wrenching ownership of the team away from him.

So what the heck does any of this have to do with warhams?  In the aftermath of the annual round of GW price hiking, coupled with subsequent gripping and threats to quit the hobby, I though it would be good time to bring up a topic I've touched on twice before - the idea that wargamers are not so much fans as they are consumers.  You'll see where this analogy is going when we take a look at the other MLB team in the Los Angeles area - my beloved Angels.

FoW Tropic Lightning: Personal Reactions

I was considering writing a post about the upcoming Storm of Magic WFB supplement after pictures from July's White Dwarf have were leaked last week and no one really seems to have given much thought to it.  Instead, I feel more compelled to talk about Battlefront's (somewhat) new Vietnam supplement "Tropic Lightning" - a preview of which you can see at Bell of Lost Souls.  It's not really that new, it came with April's Wargames Illustrated, so BoLS and myself are bit behind the curve here, but moving on...

My father-in-law was drafted during the Vietnam War and was in the Army's 25th Infantry Division, aka the Tropic Lightning.  I've known him for nearly ten years and he rarely speaks about his military service.  Most of the stories he has told about his time in the Army are not about his combat experiences.  Mostly they're about how he learned to fly in Hawaii during his leave time and the bizarre food he ate in Vietnam.  I can only recall one instance of when he talked about actual fighting, which was very brief and conveyed more to me about what it was like to be there than any war film injected with narrative from a member of the Sheen family can.  I know from other family members how much the war affected him for years after he came back.

Salamanders and Stuff

... the kind that spit fire, for Lizardmen, not the green-armored space-dudes.  I had to explain this to several GW staffers when I was trying to find these models.  No, I'm not looking for Forge World Rhino doors, dammit.  Anyways...

These were a fairly straightforward paint job.  The tough part was that there is not much space between the Salamanders' underside and the base, making it difficult to get a brush in there to paint the undercarriage.  I'll base them up later when I paint the Skink handlers.

Painting Plastic Palm Trees

Long time no post, but sometimes life gives you lemons and you waste a bunch time jerking around trying to make lemonade instead of painting silly plastic men and blogging about it.  Anyways, a few weeks back I painted up one of those nifty plastic palm trees I found at a craft store, but I just got around to snapping some pictures.  The whole process was rather simple, since the palm fronds don't come glued to the tree trunk, making the tree easy to disassemble for painting.  So, I took one of the trees apart, primed it black and then dry brushed with the appropriate colors.  The fronds have these little coconuts, which I was thinking about removing, but they look decent when they're giving some color to make them stand out.

Before & After

Great Find at the Local Craft Store - Palm Trees

I was out running errands with the misses this weekend and she needed to stop by the local craft store.  While wandering around I found the display for the California Missions model kits.  When I was growing up, if you went to a public school in California you spent a good chunk of the 4th grade learning about the Spanish missions.  At the end of the year you had to make a model of one of the missions (mine was La Purisima Concepción).  Nowadays, most schools don't make kids build a model as most of the work was, rather obviously, done by parents.  However, a few companies got smart and started making styrofoam model kits of the missions and selling little plastic accessories like farm animals and plants.  One of the things they make are these palm trees:

Tomb Kings Leaked & Gazing into the Future

Pictures of the upcoming Tomb Kings releases have leaked out over the internet like radioactive water from a broken down Japanese nuclear plant (too soon?).  For the best collection of pictures, try this link, which I found through Drinkin' and Modelin'.

Predictably, there’s new Tomb Guard (but no new skeletons).  However, the big news is the new big kits.  I’m seriously impressed with the sphinx kits - although the concept is not too much of a surprise since they were included in Warmaster many years ago. The giant serpent rider kit is, well, it’s interesting, I’ll give it that.  I wonder if the unridden version replaces the Tomb Scorpion.

After seeing the obscenely large Arachnarok Spider and the stomach churning Hell Pit Abomination, I’d been waiting for news of what the Tomb Kings would have in store in terms of big plastic kits.  I think these guys are sign of things to come.  GW has been getting very good at making larger plastic kits and I have the hunch that we’ll be seeing more of them with each new army book.

The fun part about all this is speculating what else may be coming down the pipe.  There are units out there that could easily be retooled into a bigger plastic kit: war hydras, ogres mounted on rhinox, treemen, dragon ogres, hell cannons.  Who knows what else GW might pull from the fluff and surprise us with.  I have my fingers crossed for a Coatl for my Lizardmen - check the background section of the army book, there's a picture of one!

Stegadon Finished

New Goblins and Hipster Toad Tries a New Magic Lore

Today's post is a 2-for-1 special.  I recently got a game in with my lizards against my regular opponent and his night goblin army, using their new army book for the first time.  I've played several games against goblins recently so I'll share my thoughts on how they perform under their new book  versus the old.  I've also made a few promises online that I'd break form from the rather predictable choice of running my Slann with Lore of Life and try what is generally considered their second best magical option, Light.

First, because it's most relevant, I'll talk about the new Gobbos.  I didn't get the chance to really read through the new book, so the following is more a series of educated observations rather than serious analysis.  The army I faced consisted primarily of night goblins units, all packing fanatics, with a supporting cast of trolls, two giants and bolt throwers.  If you're going field night goblins, all or nothing seems to be the way to go.  With only one or two night goblin units on the table, drawing out the fanatics is not as daunting as when your opponent's whole line is chalked full of them.  I hate those damn fanatics.  Skarsnik was leading the goblins, which also seems to be the way to go with a goblin army.  His ability to delay opposing units forced a Saurus blocks, Salamanders and a unit of Skinks into reserve.  The goblin magic was good, but not particularly overpowering - when Curse of the Bad Moon landed on one of my Saurus blocks, they had to roll toughness tests and not initiative, which saved their scaly asses.  My opponent gave some of their new magic items a try as well.  The Skull Wand didn't manage to kill a single model and the Bad Moon Banner didn't do anything since through a series of bad animosity rolls and the close deployment for the Blood & Glory scenario, the unit with the BSB ended up charging early in the game.  Had the BSB not done so, the banner would have been much more effective.  Like many others have said, unless use you run an all goblin army you're not likely to see this item on the board - I fight goblins all the time so I'll have to get used to it.

The Chapel of St. Nigel - Making Terrain on the Cheap

I'd been thinking about Dethtron's Gaming on a Budget series over at the House of Paincakes and I realized that I had a piece of terrain, circa 2005, sitting in the old storage cabinet that I could share with you to illustrate some of the principles that Dethtron has been writing about, hopefully motivating you to join the ranks of the home made terrain enthusiast - wow, I feel like Alton Brown.  Anyways, click on the links sprinkled throughout this post to read the related HoP article.

If you've played Warhammer long enough there are certain items that you've probably accumulated over the years, like the red plastic rulers that come in the boxed sets* and piles of tiny white dice.  If you had the 3rd edition 40k boxed set, or maybe even one of the original battle-forces, then you probably have some of the old plastic gothic ruins lying around.  Sadly, I never had any of those ruins, but I did amass a small collection of Lord of the Rings ruins from my days as a GW red shirt (we got a free box-game ever time one of the movies came out).  Alas, they are not nearly as cool the 40k ruins, but sometimes one must make do with the contents of one's proverbially terrain making pantry.  Here's what I did to spruce some of these ruins to turn a bland, ho-hum piece of terrain into something better, the Chapel of St. Nigel!

Old Stuff Day!

Today is Old Stuff Day!  Proposed by Warhammer 39,999, today is the day when bloggers across the interwebs are highlighting some of their posts from the past, whether they be a best-of, a nugget of greatness lost in the blog rolls or something that a new reader may have missed.  Thus I present to you, loyal One Inch Warriors readers, a few morsels of pure awesome from the 30 posts that I've managed to crank out in the short life of this blog:

Halloween WIP Part 2 and a Note on Painting Flames - This post is everything I originally wanted the blog to be, painting models and sharing the techniques that I used to do so.  This also made From the Warp's Tuesday Top Ten, which blew my mind.

a word in your ear or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog - This post is what I did not expect this blog to be. I started writing it the day before House of Paincakes launched, without any knowing the launch was coming, rather most serendipitously.  They liked it so much at HOP that it made the first Weekly Top X.

And now something from another blog: Creatures, Weirdos, Freaks and Minions from Bringer of Victory.  If you missed this post go read it now.  But maybe go to the bathroom first because it's so funny I almost pissed myself laughing.  I plug this blog all the time because it's the best around for Warhammer Fantasy knowledge and the writing is high quality.

Warhammer Magic Items - why less items in the army books might be good thing

So Bell of Lost Souls posted a review of the mere 8 magic items to found in the new Orc & Goblin army book, and much griping ensued.  Why just 8 expensive items?  Its quite obvious if you look back at 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy.  Back then magic and magic items were a separate supplement from the main game. Army books did not contain any spells or items, unless they were attached to a special character.  The magic supplement had tons of magic item that each came printed on their own nifty card.  The majority of the items could be used by any army, but there where some that restricted to a single army. Some armies did not even have their own items for certain categories.

Just as percentages for army selection has made a comeback, this appears to be the direction that GW is taking magic items for 8th edition.  The main rule book is full of items that can be used by any army and the Orc & Goblin book has just a few items unique to them.  Not much of a shock, it's just like 5th edition. The only question that remains to be answered is what will become of pseudo-magic items - dwarf runes, Chaos gifts, Brettonia vows and the like.

That unknown aside, I actually see a benefit here.  With GW's decision to print the new army books in full color hard back and jump the price up to $37.50 a book*, the centralized source of magic items in the BRB means that the frugal and crafty Warhammer player need only take mental note of the items from the new army books most likely to pop up on the battlefield, instead having to amass a stack of books in order to sift through the pages of items that have appeared in the 6th & 7th edition army books (most of those items being useless anyways).  I'm fine with the new structure of magic items in 8th Edition, as Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing.


*I'll do the math for you: $37.50 a book multiplied by 14 armies equals $525.00 - ouch.

The Knights of Bal Timorea Winner!

Santa Cruz Warhammer announced the winner of the drawing for their Knights of Bal Timorea - yours truly!  I can assure all the participants and those who followed the project that they will go to good use.  The Brettonians were my first WFB army and have always held a special place in my heart.  I honestly intend to get some games in with this guys, so expect to see them fighting against the forces of evil across the battlefields of Southern California in the near future!  I feel really lucky to get to keep all these great looking models.  Here's all the knights together:

I would also encourage you go check out all the participant's blogs and continue to support everyone's efforts to contribute to our online hobby community: Mik's Minis, DiceRolla, My Dice Hate Me, Painting Sanctuary and From the Warp.

Battle Toads: Strange Advice about Slann Mage Priests

I don't write much on tactics, a WFB strategy savant I am not.  Go see Bringer of Victory for that department.  However, a recent BOLS article about Lord choices made me face palm.  The article was suggesting some "interesting" Lord level character combos.  One suggestion was running two Slann.  One would have Lore of Life with Focus of Mystery (giving him loremaster).  The other is packing Lore of Death with Focus of Mystery and Focused Rumination (+1 power die per casting roll).  As a Lizardmen player, I'm all for all-glory-to-the-hypno-toad, but this suggestion really stuck in my craw.

15mm Warriors - Scaling Back to Paint Flames of War Miniatures

Recently Flames of War has pried my interest away from my Lizardmen army after I picked up some Operation Market Garden intelligence briefings - my favorite WWII battle.  Before I jumped into my next FoW endeavor I'll share with you my experience during my first go around with 15mm mini's.  In 2008 I was given a British Para company for FoW. They don't see much action, much similar to the real 1st Airborne Division, aka the Stillborn Division (that's not a sick joke - read A Bridge Too Far).  Prior to getting my hands on the paras I had never painted anything besides 20-30mm figures.   Despite the rather straightforward painting guide in the D-1 book* and the solid advice of Art of War Vol. 1, painting 60+ of the buggers looked daunting. Particularly, I was concerned how difficult it would be to get effective shading and highlighting at this scale.

I painted these one platoon at time, ending up with 3 platoons, extra PIAT teams, company HQ, snipers and a blister pack's worth of machine gunners. With each platoon I modified my technique slightly, until I did the final platoon and though "dammit, why didn't I do this the whole time." Here's how I developed my  technique as I moved through the company.  Note that I used Vallejo paints for the entire company, with the exception of the bases.  If you haven't tried Vallejo, I'd highly recommend them particularly if you're setting out to paint WWII mini's as the colors are close to being 100% historically accurate.  The little eye dropper bottle are fun too.  Sorry for the poor quality pictures, they where taken before I built a light box.