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Hobby Blog Number 2
Welcome to Hobby Blog the Second! The blog with the worst photographs on the internet!
40k
My Sisters of Battle have had a bit of development. New models, new paint jobs, new lore. From the deep mad heart of the 40k universe limps an old Oberon-class battleship containing The Order of Our Crippled Mother. In my head canon, the order is serving at the discretion of a Thorian inquisitor. Ready to be deployed to advance their agenda of transferring the Emperor’s soul into a new body.
Arco-flagellants
I see The Order of Our Crippled Mother as a space-bound order of the Sororitas with more limited recruiting options than some of the bigger orders, and they have to be more cautious when risking full members of the sisterhood than larger orders of sisters. Their principle battle strategy, thus, is unleashing waves of Arco-flagellants when engaging with the enemy in space to sweep the decks clear, then sending the sisters in to clean up what remains.
For the most part I planed on using just the flagellant kit. However, I want to field a proper mob of these guys in the middle of the battlefield; something the enemy has to deal with while the sisters can get objectives and deal damage. I used The Unmade kit for my Cult of the the Possessed and had quite a few left over. They are also armed with chains, flails and transplanted weapons so I figured I could bash a few extra flagellants out of them.
The size of the two kits doesn’t totally match up, but flagellants are creatures of melted flesh and metal, muscles swollen with steroids and combat drugs so a bit of disparity and rough green stuff work wasn’t a problem. I think they look quite good. The skull masks read as imperial to me so they weren’t a problem, and The Unmade kit isn’t too heavy on chaos symbols. The only one that really needed removing was the flayed face. I replaced it with green stuff casts of an inquisitional symbol.
When it came to painting, sickly tones and inflamed skin round the augmentations and manacles was the order of the day. The nice thing about painting Grimdark is that you can be a little less precise than you might be otherwise and I can achieve quite good effects with a limited amount of skill. I think having Flagellants is an important part of the list. A gentle reminder that the sisters are not on the side of good.
Sister Teresa, the Ghoul of the Hospitallers
In the lore, the hospitallers are depicted as charitable and merciful, but on board the flagship of the The Order of Our Crippled Mother somebody has to make the Arco-flagellants. I built Teresa out of The Triumph of St. Katherine box. I didn’t like the command models for the sisters, but I love the hooded mysterious figures walking beside the saint’s remains and I plan on bashing a bunch of my character choices from the kit.
Teresa was a simple job, replacing her arms with that of a flagellant as some kind of probing medical device and a bolt pistol from the sisters of battle kit. The backpack was a bit more tricky. It is the original backpack clipped down with the lower part of a cherubim added on to give her more cables and censors (vitally important for the treating of the sick). It was a bit of a rough joint so I hid it with the heart from the Triumph kit. Lastly, the original model has this crown-thing which looks kind of dumb, so I didn’t add it and just filled in the gap with some green stuff.
When it came to basing I found myself with a problem. The original kit has this amazing sculpted base. The characters are walking up and down stairs as they advance and the robes are fitted to the shape of those stairs. Now I could have filed her flat and just left it at that. However, I felt that would rob her of the sense of motion that the originals have and the glorious effect of the robes flowing as the sisters advance.
I made a blue stuff cast of the steps using Milliput, built up the gaps with more Milliput and added a few bits here and there to differentiate it. Finally, painting was a relatively simple scheme with more white than green, stained with copious amounts of blood effect. I often feel that less is more when it comes to blood, but in the case of Teresa, I was willing to make an exception.
Sister Adrienne
She is a pretty straightforward hand-transplant from the Sisters of Battle kit to one of the triumph members, with a shiny new sword and a green stuff strap to hold it in place. She didn’t need a base like Teresa did so just mounted her on one of the metal/green stuff basses I’ve been making every time I have leftover green stuff. It is my first time painting flame and I am pleasantly surprised with it. Also my first try at plasma which I’m less pleased with, but it will do. I’m looking at her while writing this and I see some touch-ups might be needed along with some weathering on her leather components. Also not 100% convinced the pigmenting is as I would like it, but I’m happy enough with it and I can only get better using it, right?
Battle Sisters
The meat of the army. I had around 10 figures from Reptilian-Overlords printed. The sculptures are great, but the print quality didn’t come out fantastically, with some details missing and a lot of clean up being needed. I kind of expected that. I happily started bashing them together with my GW sisters kit.
I enjoy the challenge of combining the kits together and solving problems as I go. I also like that there are alternative models out there to make my army unique and if some talented artists make a bit of money from it, power to them! Moreover, the problem with mono-pose is that it really limits what your army can look like and your core squads of sisters or marines can look very similar. That is a problem no matter how great the original sculptures are.
So I hacked them up and put them back together again. The scale was bang on and with only a bit of clipping and cleaning here and there I was able to transplant arms, legs, torsos, weapons and shoulder pads. The arms were the most fiddly to get right as the mono-pose makes them quite hard to switch around, but I got it. There is some mixed success here. Some of the bashes are cleaner, some of them less so, but what is important is that they are mine.
Once painted up, they look much tidier and the irregularities matter less. The dodgy gap-fills don’t pop out. It makes the squad looks cohesive and you can dab rust pigment on to hide the worst of the green stuff.
Mordheim
Not much to report on here. I’ve been working on two Heresy Lab miniatures that are going to be a part of my Hochland bandits. Naturally, a muddy green and brown scheme works for these boys and girls. I used a couple of different pigments to make them look like the filthy rogues that they are. On the table I suspect they will struggle against other bands as they are just human, with rubbish gear, no magic and a small Warband size, but I just like the idea of the band so much.
Building Mordheim
Terrain is just another part of the hobby that I’m getting used to again. I’ve been slowly building up my city, bit by bit. There are so many fantastic tutorials out there that can get you inspired. The trick I’ve found is to think about play space first. How will this impact the game? Will models move in and around it in interesting ways or is it just a dead end?
Working with wood, insulation and plasterboard is easy enough and if you mess up, well, medieval architecture is quite bent to start with even before you drop a comet on it. I feel the buildings are getting there; I’m certainly being more ambitious with my constructions. I need a baseboard, however. That feels like quite a big job so I’m putting it off. For now.
RPGS
Heart
I’ve been running Heart for my gaming group for a while now and the campaign is coming to an end. I have enjoyed the process. It has a looser, more interpretive tone than Call of Cthulhu or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay games that I have run in the past. I like that it kind of gives you license to unleash whatever demented ideas you have that wouldn’t really fit into a more traditional fantasy setting.
When I was writing each episode I spent hours cruising through the art work of Zdzislaw Beksinski, John Blanche and others, looking for the most demented things I could find to fling at my players. It was an interesting creative challenge as the mode of DMing I’m most comfortable with is sandboxes with a plot woven into them. However, the players choosing beats every time had to be reflected in the story and though I had a rough idea of what might happen, I really had no clue that it was going to go the way that it did.
A lot of the concepts that I had for locations and characters ended up not being used, but that’s fine. The cool thing about the creative freedom I had writing the Heart campaign is that I know elements I didn’t use could be included in future campaigns, Spire campaigns or in completely different systems.
I loved the ability to throw creative decisions to the players so that, in the end, the world that the characters were moving through was one that we had built collaboratively. The central focus/chief villain of the campaign in the end came from one of the players and not from myself, which I really enjoyed.
The flip side is that sometimes the campaign lacked focus and elements got introduced to fulfill the beats that turned out to be irrelevant to the overall story.
Heart is a really fun game. The core mechanics are easy enough to play at speed without getting bogged down in combat. However, the rules are just crunchy enough to not be simplistic and to give the players a wide range of abilities that distinguish between the classes. I love the way injury is treated in the game. The stress and fallout mechanics mean that when players take damage it has a narrative impact, not just an arbitrary number that goes up and down.
Heart makes me want to run Spire in the future. However, I’m playing with the idea that once my Heart campaign has been wrapped, I’ll pass the DMing hat to anther player and see what they can build on top of my version of the Heart.
