From beyond the pale - Revenants, Goreblight and some characters join the fray

 The ruins of the castle, once a sad monument to a failed Order, were now a gaping wound in the fabric of life. A cold wind blew and a hoary everfrost clung to dead branches of the woodlands surrounding the tumbled walls.

Perching on a high fell, the slopes of which were of sheer, dark stone, Coldguard Keep was a fastness of a kingdom long since fallen into ruin. Here they had stood against the frozen wraiths during the Long Winter, their faith a shield against the relentless onslaught of ice and death marching down from the North year after year. The passes guarded by the unyielding edifice of Keep, manned in a ceaseless watch by the Knights of Coldguard and the Guard of the Ford, were the rock upon which the waves of Winter's onslaught broke time and again, ever to assail but never to conquer.

And so it would have been, should their vows have held true.

Here they had stood, and here they had fallen, ultimately brought low by the hardening of their hearts, and the subsequent abandoning of their post. Dearly they paid for their forgetfulness, but dearer still is the price yet to be paid, for on Pannithor death is rarely a sanctuary, and never does it settle the debt of betrayal.

The revenge visited upon the Knighs of the Kings was long in the making, and as it oft goes, also bit the avenged just as deep as those it was taken upon. The Necromancer perished at the height of his spell, but the gates to the Underworld had already been opened. Now the dead streamed forth, eager to avenge both their deaths and their unlife to the living.

The courtyard was teeming with unlife. Runed, grave-worn armor was donned, and ghastly heads were covered with mighty helms, as proudly plumed in death as they were in life. Blades, bitten by the bitter turning of the years, now glow with a deathly hunger. Ragged banners were raised, ghostly horns blared in the mountain air. The Guard of the Kings had risen again.

There is a blast of frigid air and a ghostly laughter rising from some deep place echoes through the roofless halls as the King Arisen gallops forth from the gates. Once a brother to the one who came back first, the Cold King, the one who now returns is a creature washed clean of empathy, honor or indeed any thought save to bring ruin and to bring all living things into the icy embrace of Death. Once a mighty captain, and the co-ruler of a powerful kingdom, the one who returned now bears little resemblance to the noble lord, brought low by the tides of fate.

The inner sanctum of the Keep lays in ruins, its stained glass windows shattered into blood red shards and dry, cold dust swirls in the slow drafts of air that sigh and moan through the corridors. In the centre of it all there is a gateway of massive stone slabs. Once leading down into the crypts of Kings, it now opens to sheer nothingness. Not a darkness, but a desolate deepness gapes under its massive lintel.

From the shapeless opening a shape begins to emerge, while the echoes of the necromancers unholy spell give form to yet another abomination. A faceless creature emerges, clad in bony armor and sinew crafted from the flayed souls of the dead. This creature is not something brought back, but something altogether foreign, a creature native to the sunless lands. Driven by hunger, its very presence seeps the life from all those around it. As it lays a massive, clawed foot onto the stones, an unseen miasma begings to spread and the stones of the ruined castle groan in protest to its presence.

The thing that should not be has come, a Goreblight has emerged, nerver-living, yet ever hungering.

Worst of the Undead are those that are neither forced by others nor bound into any will save their own. The Keep, once the domain of Kings, is now the seat of a deadlier power than any there has held before. A Liche Queen, once a mighty mage-queen, now guides the Dead with an iron will. With a voice devoid of the warmth of life she now commands her legions, and all are subject to her will. A single word from her ethereal lips can freeze a hearty warrior to the bone and a single motion of her hand can call the dead from their graves.

Greetings, fellow KoWsters!

After a longish break from this blog, I decided that it's time to revive it as 2021 is showing some promise when it comes to hobby opportunities. With those opportunities also my hobby mojo is coming back and with that, the graveyard that is my hobby desk is receiving more than sad glanses and forlorn moments of silent reflection. Dust has once again been driven into the small, dark spaces under the paint racks, and water once again sparkles in the cup at the paint station f.

Lately my desk has been filled with Revenants from Mantic and a repurposed Plague first gen mutant and I've also seen an unexpected return by the second Revenant King that I built more than a year ago.

Multibasing my revenants

Mutibasing is one of the coolest things about KoW. it gives me the freedom of expression rarely achieved when basing models on single bases. The small dioramaesque interactions and the ability to create different feels to different units really bring the units to life. Is this unit a ragtag mass of frenzied critters or perhaps a well-ordered, cohesive fighting force? Both can be expressed with ease, along with a multitude of other things.

For my Revenants I wanted to stick to my ruined castle theme, this time crafting the front courtyard of the castle's main hall. Mantic's plastic bases are an excellent material for building bases as polycement makes the structures very sturdy once it dries properly. I used them for the flagstones of the castle stairs, while I clipped and cleaned their sprues for the colums and masonry of the cracked doorway arch. Two Basilean horses donated their heads to make ornaments above the doorway: one still on the wall, the other fallen and cracked, to be almost buried in snow. I carved out the central circular holes to make stained glass windows, using plasticard for the glass panes themselves.

The main problem when making stuff yourself is getting enough detail into the base. With this base I tried to add detail by making cracks and chipped edges to the stonework, while also making sure enough (but not too much, mind you!) is happening on the base. These bases feature ruined walls, crumbled masonry and broken glass and also stone braziers, filled with ghostly flames from which more Revenants are rising. 

I knew I was mainly going for a Horde, so I planned the entire base before getting to work on the models themselves. I use 3mm MDF for the bases as it provides some additional resilience to warping from PVA and other water-based materials. Previously I've used warbases.co.uk, but I probably need to find another provider due to the Charlie Foxtrot known as brexit.

I usually use some pen-and-paper sessions to draw concepts and to map out materials needed, build order and possible problems. This Horde breaks down into three parts; a regiment and two troops. I don't expect to use them a whole lot, but who knows. I wanted to strive to minimize transitions from one separate base to the next when they're put together. That means "themes", or parts of bases need to continue from one to the next, which is problematic when I also decided to go for minimal overhang. Some people like to go for a dynamic feel with the miniatures hanging far over their base, but I find this to be an inconvenience during games as fitting units flush together becomes difficult.

In this base the themes carried over is for one the broken wall of the castle, which runs in a direct line on both the regiment base and the rear troop base. The two troops have a few things that "carry over", a fallen bit of masonry spans both bases and some stained glass, also. Another continuing theme is the stairs, as both the regiment base and the front troop have an identical, short stair. 

The goal is to have a unit that looks tied together without being boring. I also wanted an.. organic? look to the base, meaning I didn't want it look like a flat piece of wood that I glued a miniature ruin on and then threw in some models. Using a piece of MDF and just gluing some random ruins on it usually leaves very little reasonable interaction between the base and the models. 

What I mean by reasonable interaction is simply that models need to look like they're moving through whatever is on the base, and that means the base needs to look like there is some reasonable continuation of whatever is on the base that can be imagined to continue around it. I think you shouldn't glue a horse in full gallop so its hind legs are touching a wall (I mean, how the hell did that horse accelerate to full tilt with one stride?), nor should you just throw a random goblin on the roof of some partially ruined building that's on the base (I mean, sure, goblins are weird, but the single dude haphazardly glued to the roof rarely adds the desired effect). A horse clearing a fence is cool, an ogre crashing through a fence is cool, a dwarf fording a running stream is cool. All these require something else than just having a random ruin on the base.

Now my goal isn't to moan about other people's basing, but more to explain the thought process behind mine. I wanted my Revenants to look like they're marching through the ruined castle and that means the models must be positioned so that a person looking at the base can kind of see the motion even if it isn't there.

Ice and snow

The fun part about basing my Undead is the winter theme. Snow and ice present a challenge as they have a very recognizable look and feel to them, which is difficult to capture at this scale. One problem with creating realistic snow bases is that once there's quite a bit of snow, the snow is everywhere. It's not clumped, it's not here and there. It's everywhere. Every surface that's not vertical will be covered by it, and every nook and cranny will be filled up with it. The magical winter wonderland that's super pretty in early February in Finland looks really really boring when recreated as a base. That's why I decided that I'd rather strive for a look that looks realistic rather than is realistic.

The recipe for my icicles I stole from a long-lost youtube video, and it's simple. Using clear plastic, such as is found on the flyer base stems and sprues, I heat the plastic over a candle until it gets a sheen to it and starts to bend slightly. It's important to be patient, it takes a little while and you shouldn't try to speed the process by getting too close to the flame, otherwise you'll get soot on your icicle.

Once the plastic is malleable, I gently pull the ends away from each other. This creates the icicly narrowing shape. Be careful not to pull the ends too far apart, as this will snap the plastic and the narrow parts will curl before they cool. Once you reach the desired thinness, hold the plastic in place for roughly half a minute, as this will allow the plastic to cool down.

I am yet to manage a totally sharp icicle, but I am also yet to try.

Snow is a little tricky, and I ended up using Army Painters snow flow, glued with oodles of superglue layer upon layer until I achieved the thickness I wanted. What I wrote above about snow forming a uniform cover isn't necessarily true always and everywhere. Cold doesn't yet mean snow, at least not a lot of it, because snow = rain, and there are plenty of cold, dry places where there is snow, yes, but it's not a deep cover. That is a whole lot easier to manage.

A thing to keep in mind is that snow is usually soft and must be waded through. That's why it's usually a good idea to make the base, add the models and then add the snow as that allows for a move realistic interaction between the snow and the models. Patience is key, and if you're using snow flock, then multiple thin layers is the way to go.

For the Goreblight I went for a look that the monster is dragging a victim caught in its chains through the snow. which was a bit of a pickle since snow does yield under weight, but doesn't get easily brushed completely off. I went for a compromise with some stone showing under the lady-in-distress, as I think it made the movement more apparent even without me explaining what's going on.

Snow can form uneven piles, but that requires two things: constant cold temperatures that keep the snow from becoming dense, and wind. The constant cold is easy enough to imagine, but that would mean that there should be NO icicles on my base, as icicles start forming when the snow melts in sunshine, but the temperature hangs below freezing. This wouldn't do, so damned be realism! I wanted big, dramatic icicles with banks of snow, so I made big, dramatic icicles with banks of snow.

Next up: a story about hobby related vanity project.

Cheers and thanks for reading!

AoW

The Wyrm-call: Creating an abomination

The ruined castle was quiet.

Gone were the ghostly visions that they had been prepared to expect.

It was quiet, so quiet.

High Paladin Antonin's heavy footfalls echoed in the desolate corridors as they, he and his company of Paladins, made their way through the ruins. The madman had spoken true enough when he raved about the horrors that had been woken, for he could feel his skin crawl with the rippling energies of the place: something dark dwelt here, barely held in check by some balancing force.

Whatever it was, Antonin was determined to be the one to lay it to a final rest.

"High Paladin, this way, the sanctum is here", the familiar voice of his apprentice seemed a hushed thing in the surrounding dark as she beckoned them to follow.

The inner courtyard was as empty as the rest of the castle, with tumbled piles of fallen masonry, sprinked with snow, laying strewn about the paved open space.

And in the middle of the ruins of the mighty castle rose the Sanctum of the Rose, a high domed chapel, whose stained glass windows had withstood both enemy and time alike.

"Let us enter. I have a feeling that whatever waits us inside is the key to this blasphemy."

--

Greetings, fellow Kowsters!

As it happens, the 3rd Edition crept up on me before I managed to build up my Undead to its full extent, and now I'll be revising the list I had planned. Not that I mind, mind you, as all I've seen so far of the Third has seemed very promising indeed.

In order to take a break from painting up the core of the army, I decided to have a go at the Undead Wyrm. It was a pretty interesting task, both exciting as I like the model and a little daunting as I knew I wanted to change the posture of the Wyrm: the original pose looks too static and not tall enough to warrant the Heigh 6 that Third Edition apparently assigned it.

The base was a mix of cork and wood filler. I like to glue the cork pieces from the center and leave the edges without glue so that I can break the even lines between the layers easily. They really stand out if you stack many tiers of cork one on top of the other and it stops looking natural. I glue the cork, let it set and then use pliers to rip small bits off it at the even seams before sealing it with glue. That way I can get a more continuous look to the stone effect.

I wanted to give the snowy ground some wawiness to make it look more like it was wind-swept and deep. I did that with wood filler, using a sculpting tool to shape the mass into mounds. Wood filler tends to form sharp edges and spikes, which don't look snow-like at all, so I got rid of these by rubbing the wood filler, once set, with a wet finger. The water softens the top layer enough for it to lay down into a smooth layer.

I cut through the connection were the tail connected to the chest from two sides with a hobby saw. Resin is nice to work with in that it's pretty soft to cut through and heat bendable. Which was exactly what I did once I had cut the tail loose.

The model soaked in near-boiling water for many minutes as, even at the thinnest parts, the tail is very thick. I didn't achieve a perfect fit with my base and i decided that it's easier to add more cork to fit the Wyrm's position than to reheat the Wyrm itself.

I then glued the Wyrm in place, adding the tail part after fitting the wyrm on the rock. I used greenstuff to hide the cut between the two parts as well as the cut from disconnecting the tail from the chest. I'm definitely not in my comfort zone when I'm working with greenstuff, especially if the work is anything more complex than a simple gap to fill. This time the gap between the two parts was the minor issue that would solve itself along with the more pressing matter of a clearly deformed and thinner part where the tail had been separated rom the chest. Luckily, it turned out okay with one try and the "undead" part of the model gave me some leeway in that it was easy to give the greenstuffing some detail by copying the rent look of the original parts of the model.

--

"High Paladin. Welcome."

The voice was little more than a whisper, but the bare stone of the chapel walls carried it clearly. Antonin lowered his gaze from the faded murals that covered the walls and focused his attention to the huddled shape near the middle of the chapel. A dark, ragged cloak obscured whatever true shape the creature wore, but the voice was that of an aged man. Antonin stepped forward and slowly strode down, drawing his heavy blade as he descended the broad stairs that ringed the central depression of the derelict sanctum. Quietly, his Guard spread along the walls having trailed their commander into the sanctum, circling the space.

"Thank you, though I do question the sincerity of your welcome."
"Do you? There's no need, for I have, truly, been waiting for you."
"I find that hard to believe."
"Well, not you specifically, perhaps. But one as like you as to make no difference."
"Oh? In that case I surmise that this former servant of yours did no so much escape, as was let loose on purpose, to draw one like me here."
"You do me an undeserved courtesy, High Paladin, for I did not harbor such plans. I am not the evil mastermind that you would make of me."
"Simply an evil commoner, then?"

Rising, the creature cast off the torn cloth that it had huddled under, and the near-dark of the chapel was pushed aside, for the creature's form was wreathed in ghostly fire, pale and pallid green. A shade, a memory of a living man it was, its form held together by the will of the man who should have been dead, but still lingered on, now fully turned to evil. A chill, dry laugh rattled forth from the shade as the two came face to face. The dead are not without mirth, even if theirs always stems from malice. 

"Perhaps not that, either."
"Perhaps."
"So what comes next, High Paladin? Shall you strike me down?"
"Yes, these things usually go that way sooner or later."
"Believe me, High Paladin, I truly wish it would not have to go this way, but I feel that our two creeds are very much inconsolably opposed."
"Creed? Which creed might that be? I know mine, Justice, Faith and Salvation of the Innocent. Yours is more of a mystery, I'm afraid."
"I am of the dead, High Paladin, we who are dead have only one creed. Vengeance."
"Vengeance for what?"
"For oath-breaking, for thievery and for the audacity to still draw breath under the warmth day. Vengeance upon those who are yet to drink from the dried-out chalices of the afterlife, and upon those who would steal our final rest and finally upon all those, who would forsake all bonds of fellowship and cast away their duty. And for what? A few cursed breaths of life more?"
"You despise those who called you back, yet you yourself are a Necromancer, are you not?"
"Yes, I am, and as such I myself will pay, too! One ill turn deserves another, and we who have now risen, albeit through abominable means and into this abhorrent existence shall not rest until all have paid what they are due."


The creature's rasping voice had grown in strength, from ghostly whispers to a thunderous boom that seemed to reverberate from the stone of the chapel itself. Then all grew quiet and a brooding silence settled over the sanctum. 

"I see", Antonin said sharply, "I, for one, have heard enough, but I do agree with you on one account: those who call back the dead shall pay their due, and I shall begin the tally with you!" 

His voice rose to a shout and then the High Paladin struck, the holy symbol upon his chestplate suddenly leaping with divine light. His sword drew a mighty arc through the air and then it struck the shade with a flash of light, followed by a thunderous crack.

As the light faded, the High Paladin saw the shade no more, but the roiling energies of the cursed place still loomed all around them, as a black stormcloud, waiting to be released. Then, a ghostly whisper came, seeming to emanate from the very air of the sanctum and as it spoke, maledictive runes began to glow on the walls. A sickly green un-light that hid more than it revealed.

"I am sorry, Paladins, for you did not deserve this, but for the dead, the means are always justified by the ends, and I need that which I lack but you posses: life.

Only life can pay for death, and what must be borne back from the deeps of death is a heavy burden indeed.

I did not meet you here to fight you, I met you here because I needed your life to pay for the passage of one greater than us all. I would ask you to forgive me, but I hold no such wish and do not wish to lie to you.

Perhaps we shall one day meet in the dry darkness beyond."

The glow of the runes grew as the voice died down.

High Paladin Antonin ran for the doors, shaking them and trying to make them budge, but the accursed runes had seeped across their ancient woodwork and they would not be opened. Antonin's paladins had spread around the hall while the two, the holy man and the shade of evil, had faced each other, now began hacking at the windows and the doors in a frenzy, seeking a way out of the chapel. They didn't scream or beg, they fought to spring themselves from the trap

There was a flash of darkness and a sense of having forgotten something, something more valuable than anything else in the world. The runes glowed. High Paladin Antonin felt himself plunged throught the world and out of it, into a place both under and beyond the confines of Pannithor itself. Then he was gone.

The stones of the chapel shook.

Something had been woken.

Something was coming.

--

So there is my Revenant on Great Burrowing Undead Wyrm! I spent quite a bit of time on figuring out how to make it blend in with the rest of my army (who are all bronze armor and the rest is ghostly green) before finally settling on having the Wyrm's purple hide having the color it bore in life and the innards of the beast glowing with an unearthly green. I wanted the beast to look like it possessed a body that had been nigh-impervious to the ravages of time.

The base looked a little bare, being all snow, ice and stone, so as an afterthought I chugged in a banner showing the sigil of the army and a grave of a man-at-arms. I half-buried a shield in snow and replicated the "helmet on rifle stock"-look of modern war graves with a "sword and helm"-configuration.

Next up: Third Edition thoughts and transition from 2nd Edition!

The Growing Dark: expanding my Undead

Greetings, KoWsters!

With 3rd edition fast approaching, my Undead project, which had been on the backburner as work and other "real life stuff" has taken a ton of my time, came back into vogue.

I finally managed to paint up the last of my remaining Revenant Cavalry, bringing me up to two regiments that might be combined into a horde in some future edition that might permit such foolishness.

This project has definitely been the weirdest one of my armies so far, as it is one in which I have scarce played a game as my forces grow ever closer to 2k! I honestly have no idea whether the army I'm building is or will be good now, let alone after Third hits us.

At any rate, the unit which had daunted me for months seemed to paint itself in less than two weeks! Without further ado, I give you the Pale Knights:

Ice, snow and the ruined remains of a more civilized time many years past are the themes for my army's bases, and with this unit I went for a ruined bridgre over a stream. I mounted my undead knights half on the bridge, and half on a ghostly memory of the self-same bridge, summoned from some nightmarish memory long cherished in the dry lands of Death.

I wanted the regiment to look crammed, a surging mass of ghostly knights, packed far tighter than any living riders could be. While I feel like I succeeded relatively well in my goal, I also feel like I created a unit that is almost impossible to photograph in a way that looks something else than a jumbled mess.

I changed the way I paint the armor of my Revenants, replacing the earlier method with a faster one that requires thinner layers and as such dries faster. I rely very much on washes with this army as I went for a theme quick to achieve that looks both uniform and more than meets my "tabletop" standard.

The sigil for my army, the Yr-rune, symbolizes death and ending and on my army it's drawn bright, piercing white on a field of deep, time-worn purple.

The base had two halves, with one half being a half-ruined plank bridge over an icy stream, and the other painted a ghostly green. The ruined half is half covered in snow and besprinkled with icicles, while the ghostly side is far more elaborate, with ghastly braziers hanging suspended mid-air, lit aflame with some malign magic, held in place by heavy chains, while a pale banner flies in an unearthly gale. Everything about the ghostly bridge was intended to be far grander than their living counterparts had ever been.

Yesterday I got a nice little parcel from Mantic that contains what I miss from my 2k, and soon I shall field a grand army of Vengeful Dead!

If I can find an opponent, at any rate.

AoW

Dark Knights: working with water and ice.

It is cold, so cold.

The shaft of your spear feels icy in your hand, even through the padding of your gauntlet. The night air is still and silent, a deathly chill slithers its slow fingers everywhere and a cold mist rises from the stream's slow waters. 

"That's it, lads, form up now! Joston, a few steps right! Make it straight and tight!"

The sergeant's shouts are muffled by the still air and the snow, and the burly man's deep voice sounds small in the pressing dark, devoid of an echo. Dry, cold snow crunches under your boots as you sidestep and take your place in the line, to the back and somewhat to the right from the center. The breath of your comrades smokes in the midnight air and you can feel your toes going numb with the cold, a persistent, dull ache. Lanterns held high cast uneven shadows over the snow, shadows that dance and sway in front of you. The firelight pierces the dark for some thirty paces before racing back, reflected off the smooth bark of the alders at the forest's edge, but making the darkness between the boles even more impenetrable.

From the edge of the shallow stream to the steep bank on the right your line stretches, some fifteen paces, and three men deep. You hear the thudding hooves of your sergeant's horse behind you as he paces back and forth, restless. "Where are they...", you hear him mutter, sword in hand, and then you hear it.

From the darkness of the forest a low keening rises. A lonely horn blowing in the darkness, rising, rising, and then falling. 

The silence afterwards is a tangible thing, an unnatural stillness made worse by the cold seeping into your bones. You feel alone, as though the fur-clad shapes around you were no living comrades, but mere figments of some bygone dream from a life long past, and you feel a growing sense of being trapped. Trapped by the dark and trapped in it, as though the trees around you are but pillars of some endless cavern far beneath the world, and the cold you feel is the chill of Death.

The keening rises again, and this time it is carried by a sudden, cold gust that flutters your cloak, stealing what warmth it had kept underneath. The gust grows into a sudden gale and a lantern goes out and the other. In the last, failing light you see the eyes of the man next to you widen in terror, and then you are in the dark. The weight on you grows and grows, a formless terror that draws near from some distant place, the mere unshaped thought of which stifles your breath.

Time becomes a trickle, and as though from a distant overlook you see yourself from afar. You feel the thunder of hooves before you hear it, and then you hear the order shouted and see yourself lower your spear and brace. Slow it seems, this ghostly charge and measureless time passes between a hoof thudding down into icy ground and it rising from the cold snow. Pale streamers on aged lances hang suspended, unseen but illuminated by some ghostly gleaming. 

They come.

--

Greetings!

This time I'll take a look at working on some Revenant Cavalry and working with Vallejo water effects that I tried while working on this unit.

First off, I have to say that water effects on bases are sometimes the coolest things ever, but having worked on one, which wasn't one of the easiest I could think of, I have to say that it takes so much effort to get it half-way right that I'd really recommend that you use them when you know you want them on the base.

I used both Vallejo Water Effects, which you use for making white water and splashing effects, and Still Water, which, unsurprisingly, is used for making pools of still water. Both seem like good products, and I can honestly recommend both products.

The whole process begins with making the base. Multibases offer some of the best opportunities for creating some very impressive water effects, and the Revenant Cavalry are very well suited for this due to their 125mm by 100mm base. There's a lot of room to play around with!

If you use still water, or any self-leveling liquid, you're going to need a depression to fill. I used woodfiller to make the banks on an MDF base (I can strongly recommend warbases.co.uk, they are awesome, at least unless this brexit thing messes that up).

Then I glued some sand on the whole base. As the product I will use will be transparent once dry, I have to make sure the bottom of the stream is textured as well. After a quick spray undercoat, I went for a brown sandy look that I mixed up with some green washes for the bottom of the stream. This was a realization I had when working on it: there is no reason why the algae in the river would be dead and gone even if the base is a snowy winter base, so some green went on the bed. Having no previous experience with water effects, I decided to paint in some depth differences in the base, so that there are clearly lighter and darker areas in the stream.

The thing I didn't take into account was that if I want a two to three millimeter thick coat of water on the stream bed, and the product is a liquid for a better part of a day once poured in, I had chosen very poorly with three-open-sides approach. Granted, it would look good if I could pull it off, but it is no easy task to seal a base watertight from three sides.

As the material would be solid once dry, I painted and glued the horses in place before adding the still water. So this time I couldn't complete the whole base before painting the miniatures, but instead I had to paint the horses first and move on with the base after that. After spending a week painting horses,  I was ready to pour in the goo.

Having no previous experience, I did just as well as you could guess: not well at all. After mopping up a lot of goo from my painting table and spending a few hours scraping it off the underside of the base, I made a really shoddy and barely functioning thingy that kept most of the goo in place while it dried.

The easy way to do it is to make a puddle, so that the whole body of water is on the base and crosses no edges. The next step is having sides open without needing to block corners, as this can be done with relative ease, with either plasticard or other non-porous plastics glued (temporarily) over the gap. The difficulties begin when your water effect goes over the base's edge at a corner. That is very difficult to seal properly, and I'm currently looking for ideas to making that happen in a relatively non-time-consuming manner.

I cut some clear plastic flyer bases into pieces, rounded their corners over a candle flame and glued them onto the water effect with more of the same stuff. That's a neat trick with Still Water; you can glue stuff on the existing layers with more of the goo. A few coats of Still Water more, and this time I mixed in some Water Effects to get some white water on the stream, and voilá, I was ready to move onto the riders.

I assembled the riders before painting, sans shield arms, as those would block too much surface for my taste. While it's mostly true that where the brush can't reach, the eye rarely sees, I still prefer to paint my models entirely. I used a white undercoat because that way I could move straight to washing on the non-metallic parts. I went for the same scheme as with the Revenant King (who can be seen here), as I want to make the Revenants look like ancient ghosts called back into their ancient suits of armor. Armor would be dull brass, while most of the rest would be ghostly green. Some weapon bits, like the shafts of the lances would not be ghostly, but the blades of most weapons would. Shields would be wooden, with worn purple fronts and the yr-rune (which stands for death, or an ending) freehanded onto them. The same shade of purple would be used for helm plumes and streamers on the lances, to give the army some color and a unifying theme.

I wasn't completely sure as to what extent I want my Undead to be mindless automatons or would I actually prefer them to have some level of sentience. For a story-driven player like me, the backstories of my armies matter a lot, because that determines the look I go for when positioning the models. So would my Revenants have an inhuman accuracy and a contemporarity to their movement or perhaps a game-of-thronesian wighty ferocity? I eventually decided against both, and decided to go for feel of long-dead knights reliving some faded memory of a charge. There's some unity and a sense of an ordered unit, like there would be with living knights charging, but I wanted to keep from adding too much individuality to the Revenants: they are dead, after all, and serve under some dark will other than their own.

--

The snow is cold against your cheek.

You know this, but cannot feel it, not anymore. Around you dark lumps under a thin veil of powdery snow mark the places where your brothers-in-arms gave their lives, felled by an enemy whose deadlines their resolve could not match.

You know there is a place for you to go, a deep place, a place somewhere else than here. There is a gate, and you should go thither, now that you have bled enough to still your heart.

Yet you cannot depart your now-cold flesh.

Something sets its will against you and bars your way. It tells you to rise, and you must obey. There is no choice, as there was in life, but there is a consciousness, a you, and there is pain.

It is so cold, and there is no way out.

--

Scratch-building miniatures - The Engines of Death

Greetings, fellow KoWsters!

In this post I will go through the basics of scratch-building miniatures for war gaming and go through a step-by-step guide of how I built two Bale-fire Catapults for the Undead army I am currently working on.

Scratch-building is a nice way of adding a bit of uniqueness to an army and of, dare I say it, cutting costs if those are an issue. However, as is the case with every non-standard unit choice in Kings of War, Rule of Cool should be adhered to. You really want the unit to fit in with the rest of the army, and thus you should make sure you only scratch-build things that won't look out of place or unintentionally comical next to the manufacturer-made models in your army.

That means that there are certain armies that are easy to scratch-build units for and others that require a lot of skill and patience (and some that I really would not even attempt. I think the armies fall into categories something along these lines:

Easy:

Greenskins
Undead

Medium:

Human armies
Demons & otherworldly creatures

Difficult:

Elves
Dwarves

Easy armies are those that naturally have a worn, rough-shod look to them. Goblin war engines are easy enough to craft and Orcish chariots are also relatively easy. Nothing looks out of place and asymmetries are a naturally occurring phenomenon. Chariots can look ramshackle, and catapults can have strange contraptions for producing the energy for propelling their shots.

Medium armies require a more refined look to the models that you create, and should be approached with more planning and forethought, as lack of eye-catching detail is often a dead giveaway with scratch-built models, as is softness in detail on greenstuffed parts. That's why demons and other unnatural creatures are sometimes a bit tricky to craft, even though they don't have easily recognizable gear such as boots or belts that might be tricky to craft in a manner that looks convincing.

Bottom line is, scratch-building is a method of substituting money with time. Sometimes you might save some time due to delivery times, but usually you'll be spending oodles of time on a unit, instead of spending oodles of money on it. Sometimes you end up getting the best of both worlds, and spend both oodles of money and oodles of time on it.

Creating my own Balefire Catapults

My project grew out of desperation: the model's available for Balefire Catapults were not up to my standards in epicness or scale. The GeeDubs version from their TK army is long out of production, not to mention how costly it would be, and the Mantic one is... slightly small. I want my engines to be menacing machines of destruction and so I decided to build some myself.

I spent a few hours doodling and gathering ideas of what might work and what I might be able to pull off, and before long I had a working concept. I decided to build the typical throwing arm-and-twined-roped-for-torsion version of a catapult, as I felt that a counterweight using trebuchety thing would look too heavy for what the Balefire Catapult does.

Scavenging was quickly done, as all I needed was some matchstick wood for craft projects, some 1mm thread, plasticard, greenstuff, cork for the base, glue, and time. Lots of time.

I started by gluing the sticks together into clumps of four in order to get sturdier beams for the machines. At this point one shouldn't be too concerned with anything else than making the pieces lined up properly, which is mainly achieved by making sure your cuts are even and straight. That means I had to wait until the PVA was properly set and the pieces could withstand the hobby saw without breaking apart.

I started constructing the bases at the same time to make sure my machines fit the base properly. Sometimes, as was the case with these machines, one can build the unit directly onto the base, which makes assembly easier and also makes the unit look more natural on the base. this is very difficult with units like chariots that tend to have a lot of area that needs to be done under them on the base.

I managed to put the base structure of my machines together relative fast, in just a few hours, as I had a good idea of what I was doing from thorough planning. Planning stages saves one the trouble of going back to make more beams or cutting and crafting more of the basic parts needed for moving on with the construction.



My Catapults would be relatively sturdy and unlike the rest of my Undead force, they would be real, physical objects in stead of being ghosts or memories of ancient weapons. I broke the cork apart some and angled it in order to get a little more dynamic look for the base, as putting everything in right angles will look boring and a little bit off once it's done.

When working with matchsticks, a trick you can use is to first place the pieces together with PVA and then drop some super glue on them (I use the Army Painter glue) to get the pieces to hold a little faster so you can get stuff constructed quicker. I'd advice against using just super glue for gluing matchsticks as the wood is relatively porous and the liquid glue tends to get sucked into the wood, leaving very little glue between the parts and making the connections brittle.

For the engines "machiney" parts I decided to use the 1mm twine that I glued over some round sprue bits to create a winch for arming the Catapults. Twine is a little tricky to work with, but it can be used to create some very realistic looking ropes which is handy because, in my view, greenstuffed ropes tend to be way out of proportion and very difficult to work with to create the kind of contraptions that I want.

Twine reacts well to super glue and the easiest way to work with is to glue one end to wherever you want it to be first, then getting the twine into its intended position and then run some super glue all over the twine to harden it. It will retain some flexibility so it won't be brittle, but be careful with bending it, as it won't be really elastic like plastics so you can break it and fixing that is a bitch.

Then I added the throwing arms to my Catapults, and for the "baskets" I used thin strips of plasticard that I glued into a grate and then I glued sharpened pieces of plasticard upwards to create a mixture between a huge brazier some kind of a brazen claw. I wanted the machine look practical but also evil, intended not only to do it's job in battering down castle walls, but also to sow fear and despair as it did so.

I first used a thin metal pin as an axle to pin down the throwing arm (I use metal sticks with one looped end that are intended for crafting jewels). Then I threaded a lot of twine back and forth over the throwing arm and the axle to create a twisting look, like the twined ropes used in real ballistas and catapults and once again used super glue to make the twine set.

I didn't want two identical machines so I made one that was just being armed and the other so that it had just been fired, with its throwing arm in the middle of its motion. At this point I also inspected  the machines and my plans for how I intended to finish each machine in order to avoid making mistakes or overlooking something that would make the project a lot more difficult later on.

At this point I also asked for some outside feedback from my better half, as getting another person's opinion is really valuable in getting things right. When I have a project I really like, I tend to overlook its shortcomings in terms of how it is actually turning out and getting that negative feedback is really important for successful scratch building.

An important point here is the willingness to listen to feedback: if you are not prepared to hear that your idea sucks and then having the reasons why spelled out to you, you probably will end up crafting some silly looking stuff. Of course, there are people who always see the negative in everything, but for the most part, people point out misgivings for a reason. Accept and analyse what feedback you get, and improve the end result.

Then it was time for greenstuff and some more twine. I used twine for ropes securing the machines to the stakes driven into the ground and for the rope connecting the throwing arm to the arming machinery. I used quite a bit of greenstuff in the baskets, along with some skulls, in order to make a flaming mass of skulls. I also added a few shields to the tops of the engines so that I could later paint the army heraldry on them, to tie them into the host.

The two materials that require time, and thus planning the construction stages are PVA and greenstuff. They take roughly a day to harden enough to withstand further construction and one should plan stages so that one can do most of the greenstuff work in a single go. That way the time-consuming wait for the materials to settle wont become a repetitive thing that further delays the already lenghty process of scratch-building something.

Painting the machines was relatively easy, as they are mostly just wood, twine and relatively few details. That's a double edged blade, however, as even though the machines were quicker to paint, I had to make sure there was enough going on on the bases to make the units looks finished. Luckily, the snowy winter bases of my Undead helped a long way, as adding snow drifts and icicles added some nice detail quick and easy.

At first I ran into the problem that I couldn't quite get the machine to look natural on the base. It sat there nice enough, and everything seemed to be in order, but somehow it just looked off. It took me a while to realize that the problem was that the machines needed to look weathered, like they'd been out there in the cold for some time. If you leave stuff out in subzero temperatures, it will accumulate a thin layer of frost on every surface that hasn't been touched in a while, so I went for an overall, intentionally uneven white drybrush. That way I could make the machine look like it had those tiny ice crystals that make everything look silvery grey in the cold on it.

Overall I ended up being pretty satisfied with my Balefires. They have a unique look to them that still doesn't mean people won't know what they are supposed to be. I'm also relatively happy with the level of detail I managed to put on the machines without making them either too cluttered or leaving them too bare.

Cheers for reading and, as always, feel free to comment!

AoW

Next up: Revenant Cavalry and my experience using Vallejo water products.