I Love Specialist Games

In an attempt to keep busy during the surplus of family time that I've had over the past week or so I dug out a bunch of board games we had lying around. I'm not a hardcore boardgamer and only really have the classics - Risk, Monopoly, Clue. But when I was going through our collection I stumbled on a game from a few years ago that I'd never tried before, Milton Bradley's Battle Ball. It was easy to pick up, and while the rules are very poorly written, my family and friends spent a few quality hours playing it.


I was having a particularly enjoyable game with one of my other friends that I play 40k with, who asked if it was anything like Blood Bowl. I admitted that I knew very little of Blood Bowl, but we were having such a good time with the poorly constructed Battle Ball game that it only stood to reason that such a game with a solid set of rules would be even more fun. I spent the next couple of days researching anything I could find on Blood Bowl, which, for someone with an internet connection, is quite a lot! I started with the reference page on Games Workshop and read their competition rulebook which had me interested but didn't seem very accessible for a new player.

On a whim I googled "Blood Bowl Podcast" and found an absolutely fantastic show called "3 Die Block." They have an episode from October of 2009 for beginning Blood Bowl players that details everything about the game in an easy to understand format where one of the hosts assumes the roll of a Blood Bowl novice, and asks questions about the game mechanics that the other host then answers. It was a really great show that made it feel like I was personally being taught how to play by a couple of local veterans.

There are two problems with Blood Bowl, as with any specialist game: old miniatures, and the need for a thriving community. The miniatures problem is easily tackled with all the new GW plastic ranges (I'm planning on converting up a team of Orcs). When it comes to the 2nd problem, I'm in a very lucky position. Evan and I live thirty minutes from the LA Battle Bunker which provides awesome support for the specialist games ranges!

I've taken advantage of this community support by playing Epic 40,000. Epic is such a fantastic game! I'm the type of person who has every episode of Battle Plan recorded on their DVR, and reads memoirs of Guderian, Patton, and Rommel. The application of tactics are what got me into wargaming in the first place, and Epic truly gives the experience of strategically commanding an army.

Epic Troops

Super Heavy Detachment

The Crown Jewel of my Epic IG

Epic Aircraft. I also use these for Forgeworld's Aeronautica Game.

The other thing I like about Specialist Games is the involvement of the community. For both Epic, and Blood Bowl, there are a variety of community collaborated "Living Rulebooks" which keep the 20+ year old games up to date, and it is up to the community to design terrain, convert better looking minis, and generally maintain everything about the game. I feel like these games belong to the community, where the bigger games like 40k and Fantasy belong to GW.

A Piece of Epic Terrain I made from Sacrificing an Ork Great Gargant.

This is why I love the Specialist Games ranges, and why in the new year I want to make them a bigger part of my hobby experience. Along with the Chaos Challenge, my primary hobby focus for the new year will be constructing a Blood Bowl team or two, designing and building a custom Orky pitch, and participating more often in the local Specialist Games community.

What are some of your new years hobby resolutions?

Merry Christmas!

Hey guys, just wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas! Or a happy holidays depending on your religion, I hope you all had a great day and were able to spend time with the family and get some sweet stuff! :D

Sorry for the lack of posts, the holidays have slowed things down a bit . The Chaos challenge is still on, I got a lot of cool minis today, and look forward to posting porgress on my Nurgle army, full of lots of conversions and a fairly cool paintjob :) - sort of unorthodox means of painting the Marines, but it turned out pretty good. I will post pics and the steps in the paintjob within the next day or two.

Time to get drunk with the fam, play some goofy American Idol PS2 game (a game that can only be played drunk) and pass out on the floor :P

Cheers!

Holiday Giveaway Prize

Papa JJ, the winner of our holiday giveaway, requested a drop pod for his Raptors Space Marine Army and here it is! Evan and I picked this up for him today from our FLGS, Brookhurst Hobbies.

We'd like to thank Brookhurst for making this giveaway possible with their 20% discount on all Games Workshop products. Check out their website here.

You can also check out Papa JJ's Raptor's project on his blog dicerolla.

Congratulations Papa JJ, enjoy the drop pod!

Holiday Give Away Winner!

Well the day has come to announce the Holiday Give Away winner, which is Papa JJ! He won a box of troops, details will be posted later as they are in Jake's email and I can't see them to post exactly what was won.

Congrats JJ, and thanks for being a loyal follower!

Cheers

Nurgle!!!

Finally! My Forge World Nurgle Daemon Prince and Herald came in the mail today, and after spending an extensive amount of time trying to get everything how I liked it, I finally got everything built. I forgot how tough the Forgeworld stuff is to build sometimes, it seems a lot of it doesn't properly fit together, but the detail makes up for any problems! Now it is just a matter of finding a few good zombie painting tutorials and doing a little research on what I would like the skintone to look like - I will definitely post updates as I go. I have to admit, I am pretty nervous; after spending so much money on the mini, it has to be perfect (and it doesn't help that I am extremely self critical).

Anyways, here are some extremely pixilated pictures I took with my $10 phone.

And of course I accept the Chaos challenge, and will be doing some pretty heavily converted Death Guard stuff. Death guard has always been my thing, and was what I was primarily known for at the local hobby store until I got fed up and overwhelmed and sold everything. Now, I am hoping my second attempt will be even more crazy than the first, with cooler, cleaner conversions as well as a semi competative list.

Here is the rough list so far - it obviously needs tweaking, some play time, and some buffing up, but it will give a basic idea. Going for the Havoc Launcher spam this time around:

HQ: Daemon Prince

Troops: 7 Plague Marines, X2 Meltas, Plague Champion with Power Fist and Bolter

-Rhino, Daemonic Posession, Havoc Launcher

Troops: 7 Plague Marines, X2 Flamers, Plague Champ with Power Fist and Bolter

-Rhino, Daemonic Posession, Havoc Launcher

Then quite possibly a Vindicator..or 3 :)

Cheers!

(The 'Not So Drawing' for the Holiday Giveaway is tomorrow, seeing as no one else entered, it looks like Papa JJ will be the winner! Thanks for being such a loyal follower! However, there is still time for others to enter, don't see why anyone would pass up on free stuff)

Final Week of Holiday Giveaway and I Call Evan out For a Chaos Challenge

Finals are finished and I'm coming into a nice long Warhammer break! We've gone ahead and taken the luxury of neglecting the blog over the past week to make some study time without the guilty feeling that I've been having when I go too long without posting over the past months because there weren't any more followers anyway (except Papa JJ, thanks for being so cool!). Seriously though people, we're offering you free stuff! In an effort to streamline the process I'm removing one of the original steps we had from the contest. Now, all you've got to do is click "follow" on the blog and you're in the running for some free minis.

The break just started but I've already committed myself to a hobby overload. Much, much earlier this year I offered to paint a buddy's Space Wolves army. His collection is probably in excess of 4,000 points. I've dawdled around, painting a single terminator, or a blood claw here and there but now he's laid down the law and slapped a January 14th deadline on at least 1,250 points for the team tournament that we'll be entering. Thus far I've completed a Land Raider Crusader, a handful of blood claws, and that's it.

Minor Victories

While the task seems astronomical, it's by no means insurmountable but there's one major problem holding me back - The Call of Chaos!

Chaos has some kind of hold on me and I know that I've never really strayed from its ruinous powers to explore other facets of the game, but I just can't resist.
As I draw my Khorne CSM army to a close I'm looking for another project, and it's undoubtedly going to be Chaos related.

Evan, having pulled together the final pieces of his Blood Angels, just started converting a new Nurgle CSM themed army. I know the blog has thus far given the impression that Evan and I are real tight, but there's competitiveness between us pushed on by the Chaos Gods themselves. Right here, right now, I'm calling him out for a Chaos Challenge! Who can make the most awesome abomination of an army the 41st millennium has ever seen... between the two of us anyway. But already I feel that I"m somewhat behind. Evan has a clear picture of what he wants to achieve with his Nurgle force, and I haven't even decided on a faction!

On the marine front I'm faced with two distinct choices - Slaanesh, and Tzeentch.

Here's an example of some Noise Marines I painted (for the record though, Evan did these conversion for me, so I might just be awarding him points by using them for the challenge).

I've never done any Tzeentch but I have a lot of ideas for a very mystic looking force that would make use of Dark Angel cloaks, chaos spiky bits, and a whole lotta green stuff. They seem really fun, and pretty under-represented on the table top. I'd love to run around, turning people into Chaos Spawn and letting AP 3 bolter shots fly all over the table.

The other routes would be a huge deviation from my marine-centric hobby experience: a Chaos Daemons force, or a Traitor Guard legion. I love a lot of the daemon models, but I'm seriously worried about my dice rolling abilities, the steep learning curve, and the spattering of daemon hunters across every gaming table in the near future.

I actually own some Daemons

On the other hand I've got serious wood for the Forgeworld traitor guardsmen, but they're so damn expensive! I'm at a loss at this point. I'm continuing to pray to the dark gods for guidance, but eventually I'm going to have to bone up and make a decision. Help me out brothers!

Holiday Giveaway!

As promised, here are the details for our Holiday Giveaway! In order to enter, you must either be an existing follower, or become one. After becoming a follower, send an email to either angeluscensura@yahoo.com or daemonetteboobs@gmail.com letting us know what project or army you are currently working on.

Each email should contain "New Entry - [your name as a follower]" as the subject, and your project in the body.

The raffle will be held on December 15th by random drawing from a hat, and the winner will receive a troops box unique to that individual's current army project, just in time for the holidays! We will announce the winner on the 16th of December, as well as send email notification. If all goes well, we plan on doing similiar contest and giving out free stuff more often, hopefully getting bigger and better prizes as the blog progresses.

The only rules: Entry must be 40k, and only one entry per person

Good luck, and happy holidays!

Cheers!

Blog News!

UPDATE:

Real life has taken over! Our blog posts have been somewhat limited over the past few weeks, but with the college semesters coming to a close, here is what we will have for you, starting Dec. 6th.

Monday - Painting/Modeling article on a Commander Dante conversion as well as a Blood Angels overview

Wednesday - General Tactics

Friday - Battle Report from the previous nights 40k game

Also keep an eye out for a Christmas raffle we will be hosting, details will be posted Dec. 1st, the prize will be unique to your 40k projects!

Cheers!

Tanks for the Blood God!

Good afternoon everyone. Last month I showed off a preview of one of my khornate dreadnoughts and today I have some pics of the rest of the Vehicles and monstrous creatures.
My berzerkers ride in style with their World Eaters rhinos:
I wanted my World Eaters to look very grungy and battle worn, so I adopted a simple, yet highly effective color scheme for all of the vehicles. I began with Army Painter's "Dragon Red" spray primer. After seeing the dark effect Jawaballs was able to get from it with his new Blood Angels I had to get my hands on some. Dragon Red is a very deep color, but didn't seem dark or brooding enough for an evil chaos vehicle, so after highlighting the edges with blood red, I used the Citadel Tank Brush to apply a liberal amount of Badab Black wash over the entire vehicle, allowing it to pool in recessed areas and making sure to press pretty hard in order to separate the bristles and get a very streaky effect.


I knew that I wanted my vehicles to stand out and the best way to accomplish that would be freehand icons. This was my first attempt, and in all honesty, I'm not that wild about it. I used a freehand technique that I picked up on the From the Warp blog. This worked phenomenally well, however I ran into problems when I tried to apply the transfer to the uneven surface of the rhino's hatch, and it ended up being fairly uneven. It's not that bad overall though, and I get lots of positive comments at the local gaming store.
This one was much more of a true freehand, and though it's still slightly uneven, it is definitely my favorite rhino.
My favorite pieces of my chaos collection are my defilers. the idea behind them is that the daemon's wrath has grown so powerful that the machine is no longer capable of holding it at bay.
Rhinos are great but when it comes to Khorne Berzerkers, there is really no better way to deliver a brutal assault than a Land Raider. I think that the freehand on the side of the Raider turned out much better than on the Rhino, I'm planning to add one more of these to my final Tournament list for a proper Berzerker Raider rush.


The new Daemon Prince is my favorite model to be released in recent memory. I used the same formula on my vehicles for his armor and wings, while for the skin I employed a 40/60 mix of Codex Grey and Dwarf Flesh, painted right over the Dragon Red spray.


I'll close out today's post with some pics of my objective markers. I've found that adding some themed objective markers to my armies is a nice touch that makes games much more interesting to look at and fun to play for both myself, and my opponents - they're always after me lucky charms!

Games Day 2011

Good morning everyone. 2011 will mark ten years in the 40k hobby for Evan and I, and to forever codify such a monumental occasion, we've decided to take pilgrimage to the Mecca of our hobby: Games Day. We've been planning this trip for a few months now and yesterday I received an email with information about ticket sales for Games day 2011 (which are available Black Friday in case you haven't heard) and I can actually taste the excitement, even if it still feels like it's a million years from now. We live in California, and I've attended a couple Games Days in the past when there were three a year in the United States, but this one should prove to be extra special as we're really planning to make a journey of the whole thing. I hope to see you there. If everything goes according to plan, Evan and I should be easy to spot...

Commander Dante

I hate to make posts of what I will be doing without having any pictures to show for it, however, I just felt like throwing it out there if anyone else is interested. Next week, I will start on a conversion of Commander Dante for my Blood Angels army, as well as post my army list along with some tactics I use (emphasis on some tactics). The conversion will be fairly simple, but I will go through the painting techniques step by step, in hopes that it will inspire others to do more conversion work. I have never gone with the "herd" so to speak, in that I am not a fan of the "cookie cutter" molds and strict by the book ways of doing things (Geez, lets think of some more goofy metaphors I can shove into a single sentence...). I have always been a fan of doing things differently and standing out. This can turn into a problem at times, as I take on projects much too big and become extremely overwhelmed (*cough* Nurgle Project *cough*). Anyways - the point to my rambling: I enjoy converting in anyway big or small, and admire those who go out on a limb to make their minis look different from everyone else's. This Dante conversion, as I said, will be simple yet effective in creating something different from the norm.

The plan:

I plan on using a Sanguinary Guard model as the base, equipped with an Infernus Pistol and the one handed axe that comes with the box set:

I had originally bought an Asteroth model when I started the army, but I don't like how he plays or looks, so I am going to use his wings with the scrolls as Dante's jump pack. I also plan on modeling a skull with the top cut off, filled with blood, and putting that in the hand that holds the Infernus Pistol. Since I can use an arm with an Infernus pistol attatched at the wrist, his hand will be free to do so. Fulff wise, I think the skull can be used as a relic, which will translate the Death Mask special rule. I just don't think the mask itself is frightening enough, as it is modeled from the face of Sanguinious. The skull will be a better fit. After reading Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol", I've become entrigued with Freemason rituals, one of them being the act of drinking wine, which symbolises blood, out of a skull. In the meantime, email me some of your guys' conversions, along with some notes as to how you did them. By next friday, I will pick a few of my favorites (unless, of course, I don't receive many emails) and I will post them up on here.

Cheers

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Commander_Dante

Have Feedback?

Finally got my laptop fixed - have lots of stuff planned for this blog.

If any of you have had a chance to look over our Terrors of the Warp rules, follower or not, send us an email and let us know what you think! We would love to get some feedback, positive or negative. Suggestions on how we can tweak it to make it better, battle reports, some issues you've run into or stuff you really enjoyed - let us know!

angeluscensura@yahoo.com
daemonetteboobs@gmail.com

Within the next few weeks, I should be getting the Daemon Prince of Nurgle and Herald as a birthday present. Jake, my girlfriend, our friend Alex and I will be heading to Chicago for Gamesday this next year if everything goes right, and I am hoping to enter the Daemon Prince into the Golden Dameon. Not sure what will happen, my painting skills are above average but not by too much. - Anyways, I plan to document its progress on here, along with some other cool stuff we have planned.


Hope to hear from you guys - Cheers




Just visiting? Become a follower!

Deathwatch Kill Team Project

I've been taking a lot of inspiration from video games lately when it comes to my hobbying. I guess you could say that I play a lot more video games than I should, and with all the awesome shooters being released right now who could blame me? Alright, I'm not even that cool... I have logged a considerable amount of hours on Sims 3 this month as well. But I spent a few days at the end of October playing through the Halo: Reach campaign; which is where I began to develop the concept for my Deathwatch Killteam for games of Killzone. The characters in Reach aren't particularly fleshed out or well-rounded, but they are bad ass, best of the best soldiers for their particular roles, which was something that I really wanted to capture with my Deathwatch Kill team.

Wanting to make my killteam more 40k-centric, I started with an apothecary. This was the only model that I had in mind prior to playing Halo: Reach, and is the only one that I've finished as the project stands right now.
My favorite character in Reach was Jun, the sniper. I knew that I wanted a character within my killteam that was exactly like Jun, and after some leg repositioning, and minor green stuff work I ended up with this:

That's not a ghost, it's a WIP shot of my Deathwatch marine, but this blurry, pixelated piece of shit picture is the best I can muster at this point sans lightbox and awesome professional camera that are both at Evan's house. I'll make sure to get a decent shot of him once he's painted, but at this point I wanted to show a comparison between the mini and a shot of the character from Reach.
Because the killteam is so small I didn't want a bunch of static marines standing around in their usual battle stance. Instead, I wanted them to be in life-like poses that captured the characterization of the particular model and their role in the unit. For the marksman I payed close attention to this picture, using the kneeling legs from the Space Marine command squad, and having him rest his trigger arm on his right knee. I also however, wanted diversity throughout the squad and as the apothecary was already kneeling to aid his fallen comrade, I used the straight leg, also from the command sprue, so that he would be standing.

I've found Video Games and movies to be an awesome source of inspiration for modeling throughout my 40k career. Earlier tonight I finished the Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign and have been kicking myself for selling my Imperial Guard codex on Ebay earlier this year. It's stuff like this:

That makes me want to run out and buy all the goofy Catachan models that look more like this.

Crashed Laptop...

Sorry for the lack of posts on my part, my laptop recently crashed (or something along those lines, can't get to my desktop) so I have to figure out how I'm going to pay to get that fixed. Until then my posts will be fairly limited - however, I will still be working with Jake to get more stuff out on here.

As for the new scenario - I hope everyone enjoys it as much as we do. Feel free to send either of us emails with proposed changes or any problems you run into that need clarifying. It started out as a pretty sloppy, half-assed idea that I came up with at 4 or 5 in the morning when I couldn't sleep. Then with lots of help from Jake, it turned into a pretty well rounded and fun to play game. Hopefully we can continue to put out scenarios along with the progress of our other projects, seems like I never sleep, so I end up jotting down a lot of ideas. Its just a matter of time to get that idea to a fully functioning game that runs smoothly and fits with different fluff.

Cheers!

They're Here: Terrors of the Warp Killzone Scenario Release

Angelus as a zombie

Hello everyone. As promised I have the Terrors of the Warp Killzone scenario for you tonight. I apologize for not getting this up over the weekend but I found myself consumed by the zombie marathon on AMC leading up to the awesome premiere of The Walking Dead. In that undead spirit I give you Terrors of the Warp. We've had a great time putting this together and I hope everyone has as much fun playing it as we have. Enjoy!

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Good afternoon everyone. Last week these awesome zombies from Mantic Games showed up in my mailbox and I've spent the last couple of days getting these painted up for something very special that Angelus and I have been working on for Halloween.

As promised in one of what turned out to be our many introductory posts, this will be our first home made scenario for your games of 40k: Terrors of the Warp. ToW will pit your kill team against the countless gibbering hordes of tortured souls of the undead that wander the warp in search of warm flesh, and daemons that seek hosts to satisfy their seething bloodlust.

This ain't your daddy's zombie kill!


We're not the first to come up with the idea of marines vs. zombies in the 41st millenium, but we wanted to make this a fast, fun scenario that is as awesome as it is playable, so we looked to the new Killzone rules that have been created and released by BigJim on his blog, Galaxy in Flames.

With these fantastic kill team rules we set out to create a scenario that felt like a one off arcade experience, drawing inspiration from games like Call of Duty WaW's Nazi Zombies, and the Infection scenarios on Halo.

Tonight we plan to be finishing up with playtesting and putting the final touches onto the game. Check back this weekend for a release of the rules and a battle report.

-Daemonetteboobs

The Rest..

Here are those pics that I couldn't post yesterday:

Cheers

My Turn

Hey guys, Angelus and I have been hard at work getting some pictures ready for the blog, you've already seen some of the fruits of our (well, Angelus') labors in his posts profiling his new Angels Sanguine army and I received an email last night with the edited pictures of mine.I'll start off with some work in progress shots of my current project, Chaos Space Wolves. This idea really came into fruition while I was working on painting up a Space Wolves army for a friend, reading through his codex, and getting beaten on by his puppies on a regular basis. My first army was Space Wolves, so I also relished the nostalgia of putting some wolves together, but with all the dogs out there right now I wanted to do something with a bit of a twist, which is where my love of the ruinous powers and some inspiration from Black Matt's awesome Black Legion Blog came in. The list I'm working from is a modified version of the 11th Company 40k podcast footslogging space wolves list.


Nothing fancy here, just a basic kit bashing of the space wolves and chaos terminator sprues. The pieces fit together quite nicely though, and I feel like you can't even tell that they aren't part of the same set.
This is one of my cyclone missile launchers that I converted from the chaos rhino havoc launcher and some small chain that I picked up at Michael's craft store.

And finally, here's a group shot of what I've done thus far.


I hope you enjoy these! Angelus also sent me some pictures of my Khorne themed chaos army that I plan to do a profile on in the near future. Here's a little teaser.


Thanks for reading guys. We've got a lot more material coming!

More pics to come...

There were a few more pictures I had inteded to upload, and I know that Daemonetteboobs wanted to upload his Khorne and WIP Chaos Wolves, but we will have to hold off until tomorrow due to site maintenance.

Cheers

WIP Angels Sanguine

So here are some of the pics from my Angels Sanguine army, which is still a work in progress. I got so used to painting Nurgle for 3 years (dry brushing, some streaking, some rough highlights, more dry brushing, a wash or two, and BAM! done) - so painting reds and highlighting blacks is taking some getting used. So far I think they look pretty good though, definitely tabletop worthy.

I used Sanguinary Guard models as my Sergeants and Sanguinary Priests. Only have one Priest painted so far though, and it still needs to be based. As for the Assault Marines - just a kit bash of SM Assault Marines and Death Company. Found it cheaper to buy 2 of each box rather than 4 Death Co boxes.

Cheers