Warhammer 40k: Necron Raiders

I recently bought the the new Indomitus box for 40K and after building all the Necrons in that I had the sudden desire to work on my 2nd Ed Necron Raiders which have been hiding in my pile of shame for let's say quite a while.  I've always loved the look of the original Necron sculpts, really chunky and menacing, I mean look at those faces!

Luckily I snagged all these off of eBay years ago at a really low price and in a decent condition.  All I had to do was give them a bath in Iso to help remove to excessive super glue and then rebuild them.  As I had two Lords I decided to do a simple conversion to add a little variety which has worked out quite well combined with the different paint scheme.

For the paint job I have tried to keep as close to the original paint scheme they had back in the day but with some added pop thanks to the new contrast paints (which work great over metallics) and the Necron neon glow paint.

I kept the basing the same as Amy's Necron army so that they could be used as one whole force if desired and I think it works very well with them, Vallejo's Black Lava texture paint with a green dry brush and the odd crystal or two here and there.

As always I've thoroughly enjoyed working on these old miniatures, so much so that I've starteds to put some paint on my Black Legion now but more on them later...

New Year, New Toys

Well this should have been my first post of the year but that didn't exactly go to plan, best laid and all that.  Anyway, first up we'll look forward to the New Year ahead of us and my resolution; to really get the lead pile (or mountain) down and to aid in this not buy any new games or back any unexpected Kickstarters.  Now I say unexpected Kickstarters because there are a few this year that I (well Amy and myself) will be backing the first of which is running right now, Conan:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/806316071/conan

A great looking board game we've been following for around a year now and much anticipated (being a big fan of Howard's Conan).  Next they'll be the new Deadzone Kickstarter which introduces the Veer-myn to the game as well hopefully funding some more hard plastic kits which will help towards Warpath, which incidentally is the possible third Kickstarter at the end of the year.

Now unfortunately my resolution has already been (or more correctly will be) broken and it's all Alessio Cavatore's fault.  For those of you who don't know his River Horse company will be releasing a Terminator Genisys 28mm minatures skirmish game (distributed by Warlord Games) around June/July of this year to tie in with the new film:

http://www.warlordgames.com/announcement-terminator-genisys-the-miniatures-game/

As Alessio is the chap who brought us the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game I have high hopes for this one (plus terminator miniatures!) and if the game and film do well there could be more games/expansions to follow the potential movie trilogy.

Now it's time to look back a little and see what new toys were bought towards the end of last year and for Christmas.  The major additions were for LOTR/Hobbit, we'd both stayed away from the Hobbit miniatures for the most part but we finally buckled over Christmas and picked up the various miniatures we've been looking at or that fill holes in our collection:

A fancy box full of toys from GW

Now as I'm sure most of you are aware GW brought out one rather large 'miniature' last year, Smaug.  I was torn as to whether I should order one or not, I love how it looks but at that price point and the fact it's resin means I don't think it would see much, if any, table time which would make him an expensive cupboard filler (I don't think I actually have a cupboard he'd fit in though).  So not wanting to be without a Smaug I went on a search for a suitable and more cost effective replacement and I'm happy to report I struck gold:

Not only is Dragonslayer one of my favourite films from my childhood, and so making a great display piece, but this beauty will fill in very nicely for Smaug (but lets not get into the whole Wyvern /Dragon argument) in games of LOTR/Hobbit.

Here are the contents of the box, as you can see she's a big girl and made out of PVC

Here's the Mouth of Sauron on her base to give you a sense of scale

Next up for Lord of the Rings we have some of the miniatures I picked up from our Foundry trip:

I'll be using these as various types of Black Numenoreans; standard warriors with sword and shield; heavily armoured two handers; lighter armoured skirmishers; and heavy cavalry.  These miniatures won't be to everyone's liking but I have really taken a shine to them and think they fit the bill nicely having a slightly nautical air to them, which is inherently Numernorean, and added to that their main iconography is an eye!  Job done as for as I'm concerned.  A little bit of trimming here and there and the same paint scheme I've given my GW Black Numenorean's and I think they'll fit in nicely.

Next up we have the various pieces of scenery/terrain that has been bought or built recently, quite a lot of Deadzone which is now nearly complete (Amy is working on adding the detail and any weathering):

Completed DZ terrain

The pieces still being worked on

Here we have the Rohan village (still a few more pieces to buy for it this year) which has come from 4Ground:

Finally some hills and woods which were picked up at the Mantic Open Day, something we've really needed for some time and are useful for pretty much anything we play, we'll again hopefully be picking up some more this year:

Next we have something that I picked up (or at least began to) in November, the Babylon 5 miniatures game.  I'm a huge fan of Babylon 5 and it's my favourite sci-fi show so I was aware of the game by Moongoose and that it was OOP but after starting to re-watch the show again I started to look into it a bit more and found quite a bit of history with two games proceeding the Moongoose game (B5 Wars and Fleet Action, both from Agents of Gaming) along with an RPG and a trading card game.  Needless to to say after a bit of internet searching these arrived through the post box:

Closely followed by a lovely painted Drakh fleet:

An odd repair is needed and a few chips re-painting but otherwise a great looking fleet straight out of the box

I also have a Shadow Fleet box on it's way to me, again a bargain, but that'll be it for now while I try and finish off painting both Deadzone (you might have noticed the Plague I am working on in the back of a few of the photos) and my Batman Miniature Game crews, namely the Joker's and Penguin's.  The reason for Batman crews getting bumped up the queue is due to the English hardback rulebook going up for pre-order:

Again we're really looking forward to this and the GW 40k scenery we still have along with the Mars Attacks mats will look great for a dilapidated Gotham City block.

Finally for this rather long winded blog post we have a little WIP from Amy who has been working on her Necrons again.  Though we've long given up on the current incarnation of 40k these fellows work very well as Forge Father proxies in Warpath and as cyborgs in various other games:

This is just a small amount of the miniatures she's completed for them but they are the most recently worked on.

I hope you managed to stick with me until the end of this post but with the emphasis being on getting things built and painted hopefully you'll see much more from the both of us through the coming year.

Phil

A journey into the world of 'Oldhammer'

As I mentioned in my last (and first) post I am going to be talking about my journey into the world of 'Oldhammer'.  Now as you may or may not know Oldhammer isn't a specific gaming system or set of miniatures and means something different to different people and to me personally Oldhammer is 40k second edition.

I guess the best place to start this journey is at the start, which is with me at the tender age of 11 or 12 playing Space Crusade round at a friends house.  This slowly progressed to us playing 2nd edition 40k, though I don't remember exactly how new 2nd ed was at the time I remember initially not having any Codices and using Codex army lists for our forces.  Many a Saturday was spent getting a return ticket to Manchester (for 50p!) to spend the day at the GW store in the Arndale centre with its impressive full size Space Marine in the window.
My force of choice was the Chaos Space Marines who's artwork really blew me away at that tender age however the range was rather lacking at the time as the 2nd ed Chaos releases hadn't started but the Rogue Trader Renegades weren't easily picked up (at my local gaming shop anyway).  So my original force consisted of the metal World Eaters, RT World Eater Champ on Juggernaut, RT Chaos Terminators, the newly released plastic World Eaters and then Abbadon upon his release.  It was at this time that my local gaming shop had a painting competition on, simple enough really as you just had to paint up one of the mono-pose Space Marines from the boxed game.  My friends were entering but I decided not to bother as our area had some excellent painters and I told them we didn't have a chance.  Roll on to the day before the competition and we were in the shop just chatting away to the staff and they asked if we were entering the comp, this somehow led to me picking up one of the miniatures and staying up till 11pm (on a school night) painting this miniature up for the day after.  So after school we all headed to the shop and dropped our entries off which were to be judged by a visiting GW staffer (I can't remember for the life of me how it was but I was excited to see them so I can only assume it was a member of the Eavy Metal team or someone of reasonable note, lost to my memory now) but after seeing everyone else's entries I thought we had no chance and wandered off to flick through the Citadel Catalogue of the time (I used to love doing this - I want that one and that one and...) however I then hear my friends shouting my name so I wander back over and low and behold I've come second place.  Slightly bemused the GW staffer explained why he'd liked my entry (creating my own Chapter colours and adding 'banners') and I got to pick my prize however as there wasn't much of a Chaos range at the moment and my prize was to be Rhino sized the GW staffer let me have a Predator so I could convert it to Chaos and that is exactly what I did (based off an image in the newly released Codex Chaos).
Anyway to cut an already long story a little shorter time passed on and I grew out of the hobby for one reason and another and sold of my collection to a budding new hobbiest I knew, though I did keep my competition entry, the prize, Abbadon and a World Eater to centimental value (here would be a great point to break up this wall of text with a picture of these but I forgot to take one so I'll do a small follow up post for these).

Roll forward many years and I start to remember what a great time I used to have playing 40k so I started looking into the hobby again and end up with a massive Chaos force.  However the dalliance with 40k wasn't to last as it just didn't 'feel' right and the miniatures just didn't quite hit the same spot the old ones did and so the collection was yet again sold on but this time round my eyes were opened to the wider hobby and gaming systems so there was no turning back.  Roll forward some years to 2013 and I stumble upon an announcement of an 'Oldhammer' day at Wargames Foundry and so I became aware of the Oldhammer movement. It would take a further year for me to really dive in (with the announcement of BOYL 2014 - we didn't manage to go but next year is a must - plus the discover of certain blogs like Realm of Chaos 80s and Eldritch Epistles) and after some trading and cracking eBay finds I'm left with a not so small collection of 2nd ed 40k :)

Now is finally the time for some images after giving you eye strain from the wall of text.

First up we have the amassed boxes and Codices.  I grabbed the the game box and Dark Millenium for £10 on eBay, there were no miniatures or the card scenery but everything else plus more (White Dwarf data faxes and cards).

I actually just started of picking these up to read of old times sake however once I started reading I was hooked and the miniatures started to be delivered.  The first force I had to get was my beloved Chaos which you can see most of here:

Being my first army there always hold a special feeling for me and particularly these miniatures.  Then I started to think about picking up some other bits and pieces but for armies that neither myself or my friends had played back in the day so I settled on the Eldar and  Tyranid.

What we have in the brown box is 28 Tyranid warriors and there'a Zoanthrope in that little bag at the bottom.  A strange force I'll grant you but one that was picked up from here and there at a cracking price so no complaints from me.
Next we have the Eldar, now this was a pricey purchase and a risky one.  We all know the issues with seeing 'well painted' on eBay auctions but after good communication with the seller I took the risk and you should have seen the smile on my face when I opened up the package upon delivery.

Fantastic old school paint job on everything with only a few touch ups require due to their age and better still no basing so I could do as I wished with them (I always find basing is a very personal thing with one person masterpiece another persons cluttered mess).
Next up we have one of those impulse purchases that we all make even though we've said that's enough for now, Necrons.  The original Necrons hadn't been released by the time I left the hobby as a lad but on getting back into 40k the first time round they were the army of choice for my wife (an army she is still working on now as they're one of the ranges GW put out now that still look good to our eyes), so while searching eBay for all things retro I came across an auction for a 2nd ed Necron force at a very (very) low price.  Well in for a penny in for a pound and all that so they were quickly making their way to me, this was then followed on with another cracking deal on a Necron force which gives me the following little lot.

As you can see there's no turning back now, just a smaller matter of getting it all painted up though...

One thing I forgot to mention in my first post is that I welcome any comments you have on my posts as well as any constructive criticism you may have when I get round to posting up some painting/modelling progress.

Crucium (otherwise known as Phil)