The Beatings will continue until Morale improves...

So its been a long time coming, finally the Astral Wolves have a new unit to add to what is a a pretty solid army so far. Before I unveil the first of 5 new models I would like to give you a little back story as to what I had originally planned.

The Astral Wolves was at first intended to be a purely Chaos undivided force, with no special marks of the 4 Chaos gods amongst them... Hell my first idea was to do Black Legion... then I thought why not a sub division of the Black Legion... then I thought why dont i just paint an army of smurfs and cry if someone bags Calgar. At this same time my hobby partner and best friend was starting a Space wolf army and having read the fluff about the wolf of fenris I thought to myself  "Lets stick it to the Space Wolf fan boys who ever they may be!" and thus was born the Astral Wolves, a pirate chapter founded by the red corsairs from the traitors of the Wolf of Fenris. 

Somewhere along this path I decided to represent every dark power in my army... then came the call of Khorne, Oh what a powerful call that was, Suddenly I find myself planning a Khornate army. The whole time however JP kept saying to me "do Nurgle, do plague marines" 

Well just recently I found myself having to put together a 1200 pt list for Arcanacon, and lo the Khornate theme just wasnt working out so well for me.... I needed some extra firepower and some survivable yet cheap troops to field midrange. And so here we find the latest edition to an ever growing force, The first of a unit of 5 plague marines!

The photo does this model no justice, nor does it do the green justice... which for your information is a base coat of Vallejo 'Tail light green' with a heavy dry brush of GW "rotting flesh" and a medium wash of GW Thraka Green over the top!

Like the rest of the army, black, red and gold have been kept as the primary theme, however Green is major feature of all these guys, as red is he major theme of the Khorne Berzerkers and black is the theme for the CSM squad. And now I find myself wanting to return to my original idea, perhaps a unit of 1k sons and the raptors im thinking will be upgraded to pink slannesh fiends! 

In other news "A fair drubbing was handed down" as JP would put it on Friday. PapaJJ said it best when he said my run of bad luck was at an end, Truer words could not have been spoken my friend! Friday saw the Astral Wolves tear through an unprepared Raven Wing of the Uhlfen Templars! They shall not underestimate the power of the Dark Gods again!

Ready for drop pods... and totally not hiding at all but bravely standing behind some stuff!

Gajme 1 saw me tear into them with glee abandon, making impossible dice odds to rip them a new one, Game 2 was a little closer with JP's Rifleman Dread being full of win... seriously! I suggested this setup to him a while ago and now he is running with it, even though im afraid it will make mince out of my rhinos but what the hell, if he can make one snotty uptight pretentious bastards day a living hell with it (and not me you smarmy...) then I will be a happy man!

this was the lay of the board at the start of my turn... no prizes for guessing what the vindicator did... and well...!

Game 3... well I thought JP had a good start and he was just getting the hang of his pod deployment but pure fatigue and apathy took the day to a forfeit victory... no skulls from a forfeit... Khorne was not pleased!

Lukas and the Blood Frenzied (Kharn  and Zerkers) are forced to walk, what you cant see however is a couple of squads of assault marines nearby who got to taste chaos steel!

All of our recent games I might add have been played at the new store in Melbourne "Realm of Legends" and I cant stress enough that if your in melbourne and not playing here either you cant get there or your afraid of meeting people... oh wait we play 40k and paint for fun... allright you can be a little scared but get on down there for game! And if your there on Fridays (maybe sunday this week) then perhaps you can meet ME! oh and JP... Hell I would love the chance to play some of the armys I see on the blogosphere!

And in other news, it would happen that good luck runs in packs, with a fantastic offer from my University to study Engineering: Mechatronics as of next year!  With my upcoming trip to the land of the rising sun less the 2 weeks away I must say im a happy boy indeed!

As always good gaming,

Von Drakin

Defeat!

Last Friday was the next night in the pursuit of a regular gaming night down at realm of legends.  And lets just sat it wasn't the finest hour for the Templar's. 

Having finished the largest part of the build for the 2nd company I took them for a spin, and the results where not as great as I had hoped.  I didnt expect to win, unfamiliar list, unfamiliar codex, new USR's to take into consideration etc, but the 1st game was a drubbing of epic proportions, the 2nd was closer but still hurt allot. There was the beginnings of a third game but i packed it in when a wave of tiredness and frustration took me over. Here are some shots of the 1st game we played.

Again the quality and standard of the terrain was fantastic.

So lessons.  If you want to feel out  of your depth and up shit creek without a paddle switch from the holy goodness of the mech drug and go full drop pods.  Its like learning to swim.  Two things I didnt do was build my list like I have in the past.

On a tactics post from BOL's a few months back Fritz posted up a matrix system for assesing lists and approaches to list building

here is the link:
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2010/05/40k-army-building-another-option.html


When i got home and was thinking over allot of the new rules and pit falls I experienced I realised I had discounted allot of what I had done to make the space wolves mech list such a solid performer.

So I sat back down and went through each unit and began to assess the effectiveness of each one and needs of the style of play I have started to explore.

Its easy enough to sit in tanks move around and rely on heavy guns to do your long range heavy lifting but when you deliberately remove tanks from your own army you need other options.

Riflemen dreads are a real plus and I will be getting two, should of remembered the rule of 2 in all this got redundancies for certain roles, but basically 4 strength 7 48inch attacks with re-rolls is brilliant especially on a platform that move shoot all the time.

Stern-guard where disappointing but I failed to kit them correctly for the style of play I was after.

The assault squads where lack luster but again I used them wrong and was far to aggressive or far to passive.

Changes on the way.  Terminators,  with no Mech I need an elite unit that will punch through walls and can stand a range of fire. So I'm working on a squad of 5 to begin with, with a view to take them to a squad of ten that I can combat squad off. 

The stern guard I think I'm going to change to Honor Guard. Still use them as a fire base unit but equip them with plasma and bolters. The in built sang priest also helps as I can distribute the other 3 elsewhere. It will also open a force org slot for a Furioso.

These games where 1200 point games, and next week the Space Wolves will come out for one  game as a prep game for Arc. After that Ill continue to work on this little chestnut of a drop pod army.  I have realised though that the theme needs to be more orbital assault rather than pure drop pods as it narrows the field far to much.

Deep striking land raiders might be going to far with that idea, but storm ravens and deep striking terminators is defiantly in. 

Anyway till next time cheers

Thy work be done.

Well its been a while since the Honour guard have had any work done to them, namely the banner bearer who until this date was the only one finished.. *cough*. But not any more, Tonight I would like to introduce you to Mercury!

Lightning effect take...4, First time I have ever tried something like this however :)

 In case your sitting there wondering to your self how on earth I painted the lightning bolt effect I'll spin you a quick rundown.

I used thick bold lines of watered down Vallejo "Dark Blue", building them up toward the center of the line in a randomish patteren. Next I took 1/1 Dark Blue and Vallejo "Andrea Blue" and built up the centre of the lines making sure I kept some of the original Dark Blue showing. Next up was pure Andrea Blue, same theory but making the lines quite thin by now. After that I used 2/1 White and Andrea blue (in whites favour) to trace out very thing lines inside the original, but this time I made sure it was a little "ragged" and even drew little bits arcing off the main line like sparks. After that it was Pure white just at key junctions to brighten up the whole effect.

Easy as pie (once you know how) and I think it gives a great look for only 3 colours. Just remember however not too put down too many original lines or too close, Less is more here and it took me 3 goes, re painting black to get the ratio right.

So the Honour guard now number 2, Vulcun and Mercury. As you might have guessed by now this fellow comes equipped with a power sword! Next up on the hit list is the Blood Champion, Mars.

In completely unrelated news im going to Japan in less than 3 weeks... YAY!! :P

As always gents good gaming!

Frag Cannon take 2

So some immediate feedback showed me that the barrel was too long so I've cut it down  and must say it looks even better.

Need to bling it up with seals and so on but here is Mk2.

Frag Cannon !

So ever since i was sold on the idea of a Dread with a Frag Cannon ive been messing around with a few ideas in my head on how to represent yet another model that GW does not make.

"THAT LIST IS GROWING LONGER YOU BUGGERS!"

Any way I started off with the idea of a barrel gun similar to a shot gun, Harley posited the idea which he is running with of a two barrel gun idea.  Then a few days ago I was dragging my wife through the New Realm of Legends store, (We went out to lunch at a nice cafe after wards I promise) i saw this pedestal base that was made to look like a rotating cylinder of a Revolver.

So then started looking at different types of weapons from machine guns all the way up to Grenade Launchers that all used a a Drum Magazine, the revolver cylinder being the inspiration for this.

Then I found the M32 Grenade Launcher and I was sold.

So set to work creating the parts for a similar weapon for my dread.

Grabbing the plasma cannon gun and cutting it down I then with the aide of several styrene tubes and plastic from the evergreen range of plastics built a drum magazine for the Frag Shells to be loaded into.

Filling in the holes with the round nubby bits from sprue and using styrene Truss from "plastruct" I built my gun as you can see from below.

The key things from this build is getting the legngth of the seven barrels right so they all match up.  I compensated for this by using the "evergreen" strips to bind the barrels and then used .05mm plastic sheet on one side to close out the magazine on the mount facing side.

The other key part was to pack out the Plasma Cannon Barrel and start to make it look less like an energy coil.  This I achieved by again plastic strips that are just layered over it.

TBH as a scratch build I really happy with the outcome. It could be more accurate in build and I may do it again to improve the weapon but then again I may not Cheers

JP

Excitement! Adventure! Thrills! oh and rolling some dice...

So I have been awefully remiss again of late, leaving you the fine reader with nothing anew to read. Let me just say that in my defence not only has it been a busy time of year (which I think we all know too well) but I have in all honesty been incredibly lazy, thats right you read it here first! I have been slacking off!

As some of you may know and the rest of you will soon know I am a full time uni student who works part time. Painting and blogging were great procrastination tools for skipping study, but alas like a train wreck the school year has come to a close, work has not ramped up and I found myself procrastinating from the hobby.

However I have found my groove once again and have started to paint/model and play once again with a furious fervour. So I have found myself workign on projects that have sat still for far too long. Oh by the way, Papa JJ your Astral Wolf is constructed, and base coated ready for stage 2. I have decided to give you a model that perhaps you can take to those Kill Team games with a proud smile and say "I was given this by an Australian" or at the very least not openly crying while saying "I had this thrust upon me by... *sniff* an Australian"... wait what? Never mind.

So as you can see The Honour Guard are starting to take shape, the dread is at least assembled for the most part, the Land speeder finally has a crew and the depths of my madness have not slipped too far...yet.

In other news I would like to say that the Laws of Probability are a harsh mistress. For the last few weeks I have had a curse upon my brow, a curse of the shitty dice rolls. Hell you want to see a lot of 1's rolled on the table? come and watch me throw 2+ saves sometime! In all seriousness the dice rolls were actually skewed to the negative of about 3 to 4 standard deviations of the Bell model curve. Lets just say I actually have a greater chance of winning the lottery 2 times in a row with the exact same numbers picked than repeating the last four weeks of dice rolling.

So if you read the Arctic Templars blog and noticed some Astral Wolves lurking in the photos, be rest assured that they were mine, and suffer they did greatly at my hand. To cite example, in one game to the loss of nearly a whole 2000pt army I had managed to kill 1 drop pod and 3 long fangs. Que sera, sera.

But fret not avid readers for the universe is going to end, eventually. Everything will balance out and we will suffer the heat death (where the entire universe has the same tempreture and density everywhere allowing for no chemical exchanges and thus no transfer of energy) and in the same way that the universe will balance out so does luck. Just recently I tried to enter a premier event known as Arcanacon, which in Melbourne is one of the single best weekend tournaments about (or so I have been told). This event has been running for a very long time and was my first eye opener back in the dark and forgotton time forever known as the Happy pants incident or to some the 90's. Well to cut a long story short, event unfolded where it was looking like I wasnt going to get in again except for a new device the organisers but insitu to fair the playing field for the reserves some 80 to 100 places away from getting in. A ballot of 10 registered playing spots was held and 10 names drawn at random from a barrel. Wouldnt you know it but I got drawn, the equivalant of rolling 11+ on 2D6. or passing a leadership test at LD3!

P.s JRV your offer sounds very interesting! drop me a line at bobgill13@hotmail.com and we can chat!

So anyway I have the next 4 days off, so im going to go make a big jug of Margarita's and sleep in the sun :P

Until next time,
Good Gaming!

Games night at the new Realm of Legends Store

Well Today's update is a a few Shots of  some games we played at the New Realm of Legends Store out in Croydon.  It has to be the 1st truly well thought out Local Friendly Game store in Victoria. 

the Guys out there have made a really great start to the new store the terrain is really great with what seems to be more on the way.  You can get all the great product lines for conversion work from Maxmini to Scibor Minatures as well as MicroArt Studios. 

The Idea of a One stop shop for gamers Is really evident and so far represent a great success, I cant recommend it more and though its about 30 minutes from home I'm defiantly going to make the effort most Fridays to go down and have a game.

Anyway till next time cheers JP