Spawn of Halloween

Once again in celebration of Halloween I'm passing the night away painting something scary. Of course few 40k players will find anything at all frightening about a Chaos Spawn. But with rumors now circulating about both Chaos Legions and Chaos Renegades in the works for Sixth Edition, maybe there is cause to hope that Chaos Spawn won't forever be a waste of points. They're a fun unit to paint and very thematic as well, it would be a shame not to make them a viable choice in at least one Chaos book. Is that too much to ask?

Spawn that don't suck, now that's scary. :)

I built this ugly fellow a couple of years ago for the planned revamping of my Chaos Space Marines army. I don't foresee putting much effort into that project until I have a better sense of what the army will be like in the next edition of the game. I'm excited about the early chatter but it still seems too far out to take anything seriously. In the meantime I'm content to wait and only occasionally paint a Chaos Spawn in supplication to the Dark Gods.

May they give us a Codex worthy of them. Ia! Ia!

A heretic can dream, right? Oh well, back to painting... Happy Halloween, everone!

A Rather Different Necron

Despite all the buzz concerning Beasts of War's stash of leaked Necron pictures, a little piece of the puzzle seems to have been missed in the ensuing excitement. So dig this. It would appear there is one more special Necron HQ coming our way to lead the metal-heads in war.

I've got to say that it strikes me as a peculiar choice in design considering the style of the new miniatures due to be released soon, but of course that's just my opinion. Judge for yourself if you think it lives up to the standard we've seen with the leaked Necron photos.

Behold, the secret Necron Lord!!

Bleep Bloop Bleep, I'm a Necron!

Ay ay ay... sorry about that. :) I've had that picture for more than a year and could no longer resist. It's from a training mission I set up for my then 7 year old nephew who had become interested in "Whammer Hammer" as he refers to 40k. After pushing around his five Necrons against my five Chaos Marines for a few turns, the lad decided we needed to spice up the game with a couple of heavy hitters. Fortunately his supply of toy robots and monsters provided exactly what we were looking for, including the heartless mechanical overlord seen in the above photograph.

And yes, I lost that game too! After setting up the terrain on my nephew's Thomas-the-Train table, we placed three objectives evenly distributed along the centerline of our gameboard. I held the middle and right-hand objectives for most of the game until being driven away from the center of the table by a brutal assault on the final turn. Oh the humanity, I lost 2-1!

Hmmm... next time I go up against my nephew, I'll be sure to slow-play him!

My First Time Stripping

I'm having a go at stripping the paint off a batch of miniatures, a hobby first for me. For this I am using Simple Green and the incessant chanting of the Litanies of Purification. By doing so I hope to salvage a combat squad of Space Marine Devastators for my Raptors army, the models having been terribly fuzzed by priming them when it was too humid. This was at the start of the summer when I still lived in Charleston but right before we moved, and thus it seemed an appropriate note on which to depart the city.

I began soaking my minis a couple of days ago but presumably it is still too early to report on any results. I'll likely let them float around in the Simple Green through the upcoming weekend before I try to remove any of the paint. I don't know if this is going to work as the miniatures were really heavily textured by the primer. I admit that at this point I am skeptical but am eager nonetheless to give it a shot.

Swim my pretties, swim!

After dropping in the Space Marines there was still a lot of room for more miniatures that could be added to the chemical bath. I recently came across a small box of minis that hadn't been touched in ages and which also happened to be in need of cleaning, mostly thanks to some very sloppy priming. In this case however the primer has sat on the models for perhaps twenty or so years. I don't have any plans for these other minis but stripping them seemed like a good challenge for the Simple Green, just to see what the stuff can do. So those minis too went into the sauce...

Squats. Why'd it have to be Squats?

Again I am not sure what effect this stuff will have on these minis, but I'm in the mood to experiment. Maybe they will turn out well or maybe they will melt, who knows? It's not like there is much else I am going to do with some silly little Space Dwarfs. I've considered adapting them for use in an Imperial Guard army but that currently doesn't have much appeal for me. It would be kind of fun to chop up some of them to decorate the bases of my Tyranids. That however might be too cruel even for me as it would be like rubbing salt into the wounded collective conscience of Squat-players. Hmm, then again some 'Nid-themed terrain showing Squats bubbling around in the digestion pools would be a hoot. :)

Well I suppose there's no need for me to worry now over the fate of my Squats. For the time being I'll just let them and the marines hang out in the jar on my desk, like some creepy exhibit in a Mütter Museum for OOP 40k. I hope to start working on the Raptors soon assuming this Simple Green trial is a success. I feel inclined to start using Space Marines again in my games so that has motivated me to focus on them for at least a little while.

Happy painting and gaming!