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

KoW in Finland - building a community

Greetings, KoWsters!

With 2020 behind us and the Third edition tried, tested and found worthy, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a post about my thoughts regarding building a community around a game and also giving a rundown on what the community in Finland is like today.

2015 - a slow start

The way I see it, in 2015 when GeeDubs killed their version of rank-and-flank fantasy, the fantasy wargaming scene in Finland was pretty stale.

Back then in Finland we had a bunch of people playing ETC-hammer, which was, in my view, a version of 8th edition that was patched almost beyond recognition. There was a semi-active tournament scene, with a few tournaments run every year. Then we had a lot of people like me and my friends, who never played new people and mostly kept to ourselves. It was regarded self-evident that there would always be a WHFB by GW and people would always play the game.

Well, come summer of 2015, it turns out that that self-evident fact was not very waterproof. AoS was a joke, and for many of us, it seemed in poor taste, although I hear nowadays it's an okay game if you like 40k. The uproar was deafening, and for the first time ever many people, myself included, looked beyond GW for a game.

Here's actually what I consider to be the biggest single threshold for people playing GW games: they often feel like they're being unfaithful if they take up a game that's non-GW. I felt the same, at first, but soon it started feeling like I had been a part of a weird, weird cult. Miniatures by another manufacturer? Pha! A game that's not titled Warhammer? Peasants! The weird thing, in my view, is that after playing other games for a change, I actually came to realize that WHFB 8th edition had never been a good game, even with ETC fixes. It achieved depth through randomness and complexity, neither of which are dominant in KoW. It had a cool backstory, or had had a cool backstory, but by 2015 that cow had been milked completely dry.

In 2015 we had one tryout KoW-tournament in Finland, with around ten participants. There seemed to be some enthusiasm, but the whole landscape of FB mass battle systems was still blown wide open. No one was sure which game to pick up.

Me and my friends stuck with Kings of War, since it seemed a lot more balanced than WHFB had beem

2016-2017 Participating in everything

I quickly realized that the community I had once taken for granted was anything but, and that behind the seemingly endless flow of tournaments and game days was a handful of people who were working their butts off to make things happen.

The first step I was willing to take was to start attending tournaments. The first few tournaments were only four players, but soon we had a regular six to eight people playing. That's not many, but taking into account that Finland, despite it's area, is only 5 million people, it was a start.

During these two years I spent maybe ten weekends driving to which ever rundown warren of miniature wargaming geeks I could cram myself into for a few hours of gaming. I met a bunch of people and slowly got to know them some, despite being a semi-introverted sluggard when it comes to making new friends.

2018-2019 Pulling my weight

2018 was the year when I really started to put time and effort into making things happen. I organized my first own tournament while still continuing to drive obscene amounts (shut up, Americans, we know you drove longer) in order to participate to tournaments held elsewhere. A weekend here, another there.

Two weeks back I found myself at Ropecon, demoing KoW for an evening and then hosting an event the next day. The tournament at this venue has become the tournament in Finland, despite being only a one day event and the games being of a relatively few points at 1750. Two eventful days full of people coming and going and even getting a surprise game in myself as the backup player!

Round one under way, seven tables means a small tournament, but enough to make it interesting.

After working to build a community for a few years, I notice a thing starting to happen. A new face here, another there. Not everyone comes always, nor does every new face become a regular attendee, but a few do. Slowly but surely we have started to gain some traction, and though it's been a long four years and we're still far from a big game in Finland, I think we're starting to get this thing moving.

The year 2020 didn't happen, as we all know, so nothing to report on that blank space of time.

KoW in Finland - what's going on today?

Previously we've been hosting four to five tournaments per year in different towns and cities in Finland, mainly in Jyväskylä, Turku and in the capital region. Turku hosts a tournament in autumn and late spring, while Jyväskylä usually has a winter tournament, while the capital region is still picking up it's game. The main event has thus far been the Kings of War tournament at Ropecon I mentioned earlier. Tournaments are small, usually 8-12 players, with Ropecon attracting around 14-16 players every year. Small tournaments, but tournaments none the less.

One off games are happening every now and then, but I think we're not reaching the level of communal activity I'd like to see. That goes to say that people tend to play in their basements rather than at clubs, which is fine unless you want to attract more people. The people playing KoW seem to be from their late twenties to their early fourties, so family life and jobs take a toll on people's ability to get those games going. What surprises me is that it seems that some people in Finland are still looking for the right game to scratch that fantasy itch, even after many years of WHFB-refugeeism.

Currently I think we have around 20 active players, maybe more, and I think there's some genuine interest with quite a few others as well. I'm pretty thrilled at 3rd Edition and the coming tournaments of 2021!

What's required to build a community?

In Finland, I'd say KoW is, right now, a second-rate game. 40k is king with a ton of players, and on the second tier we have a bunch of games from T9A to Warmahordes to AoS to KoW, with many games regularly hosting tournaments. So all in all, the miniature wargaming community in Finland is actually pretty active. My goal has, for the past five years, been to get more people interested in playing Kings of War. Community, e.g. the people playing the game and sharing the passion for their hobby, is at the heart of the hobby, and that means that in order to have a community, you have to get players.

A community is built, I feel, mainly, through relenteless work, a lot of time for the game to gain ground and some shameless advertising.

My tips for getting a community going, although I'm far from being good at this stuff myself:

1. Always attend everything you can

Whether it's a day for one off games in the next town over or a two day tournament, go if you can. Your presence will be noted, and the worst publicity a game can get are events getting cancelled due to lack of attendance. That sends a very discouraging message to anyone that could potentially be interested in the dame.

People want to pick up a game that has players and that's why it's important to help making these events happen.

2. Get in touch with local gaming clubs

Even if they don't actively play Kings of War, or even if they don't show a lot of enthusiasm for it at first, being an active member in the club will draw people's attention and maybe give you a few casual opponents to play against once you get them introduced to the game. People who already play miniature games are, in my opinion, the likeliest people to pick up Kings of War as they know how to start a game.

Interact, mingle, and if you have a friend you usually play, take your games to the local gaming den instead of your basement. That'll give you some visibility.

3. Demo the game

Running demo games is the best way to show the game off.

People are likelier to pick up a game they've tried and found interesting, so I recommend you actively demo the game. Pack two armies with you, small ones preferably, hoist your butt to the local wargaming cave and host a demoing event or a day for one off games. Even if you attract just one Joe Random, who happened by accidentally, remember that the community consists of individual players. Every player counts, especially in the beginning.

4. It takes time

People who are potentially interested in the game need time to get going, and will be more likely to turn from potential players to active ones if you keep the game visible for enough time for them to first feel like they'd not be wasting their time by picking the game up and second for them to have enough time to actually get a force assembled.

5. Ask for help and offer to help

Local wargaming clubs will, most likely, be happy to help you organize stuff and to make things happen so that they could add another game into the bulk of games they as a community represent. If someone is thinking about organizing an event in their area, go a

6. Remember that it's just a hobby

Take time off, let your miniatures sit in the corner and go drink some cold beer or whatever you do when you want to just relax. It's easy to burnout the joy of the hobby if you take it too seriously or don't have enough other stuff to keep you busy, because it can take a long while for the game to gain some players.

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At any rate, I for one can't wait to see CoVid-vaccines rollout and we can get back to the really important stuff, wargaming.

Keep safe and roll lots of sixes,

AoW

Kings of War movement tricks I - "Shadow of the Wyrm"

 Greetings!

I decided to end my blogging hiatus with a somewhat different post, by trying to invade an area that is difficult to write about; tactics.

The difference between tactic and strategy has been oft debated and rarely explained in a satisfactory manner, but in this post I will use tactic to refer to a set of positions, unit movements and measures one uses to achieve a limited goal. While my strategy might be to concentrate my forces and take three out of five counters, tactics are the smaller steps I use to achieve those larger goals.

In this post I will explore one tactic for creating opportunity to advance regardless of the threat of faster opponents. Most of us have been at the receiving end of fast units and pinned down with very limited movement options due to the simple fact that the enemy is so much faster. It can often be difficult to find avenues of approach without taking near suicidal risks or the advance getting bogged down to a snail's pace.

Fast units, such as flyers, are often used for just such a purpose: threaten the opponent, force them to either accept unfavourable charges or back down and win the game by pressuring the opponent to yielding more and more ground.

The key to solving the issue lies partially in the fact that flyers, like Dragons, Elohi, and so on are expensive. That means they are often outnumbered and thus are under pressure to achieve local superiority in a fight of their own choosing. Keeping that in mind is important, as it means it's easier to see flyers and other fast striker units for what they are and what they need to achieve. They're not all-powerful super units, but rather very expensive units that need to be able to achieve board control in order to function. If that is denied, they become relatively easy to manage. 

In this blog post I will go through and explain one tactic for wresting initiative from a more mobile force without accepting extremely poor odds.

Note that the examples given aren't neutral points-wise, and should be viewed as illustrations of a concept rather than as a match-up of specific units.

Initial situation: Basilean threat

In this situation the Basilean flyers have moved up to threaten the Wights on the left. They are safely outside the charge ranges of all Undead units and the Elohi are positioned so that the Wights can't escape their field of view, while the Dragon is lined up to threaten all three Undead units.

This puts the Undead in a precarious situation. They can't strike at the Basileans this turn, and moving up against them seems very dangerous; a combined charge from those units is enough to knock out any one of the Undead units with even a modicum of luck. They can't stay as they are, nor can they effectively withdraw.

However, the Undead can adopt a relatively simple tactic to overcome this type of a situation, one that I call "the Shadow of the Wyrm" and it revolves around the very simple mechanic of unit Height. By advancing very aggressively with the Wyrm, which is Speed 7 and height 6, directly towards the Dragon, the Undead can create a "shadow" on the field in which it is safe for the Revenant Cavalry to advance and close the distance between themselves and the Basilean units. Meanwhile the Wights pivot slightly and move up, escaping the Dragon's Line of Sight.

Undead follow-up: Throwing shade

The initial problem with flyers and units that outdistance one's own is simple: you can strike at me, but I can't strike at you. This move doesn't seek to change that in itself, but rather forces the Basileans to either accept very, very risky charges or to reposition themselves, changing the situation to something more like "you can strike at me, but do you really want to?"

The Basilean units are still the ones to get the first blow, but the risks involved make other options seem more inviting.

* There's a slight movement error in the Wights' position, they should be 0.1" to the left in order to escape the Dragon's LoS. The move is possible, so the situation remains unchanged.

The Basileans are far from trapped, but their powerful combined charges have been denied for this turn and the Undead have managed to signicantly advance on the board. Is the game over? Not by a long shot, the Basileans have plenty of options open, but their strongest move has been blocked. Did the Undead conduct a winning move? Maybe, depends on what's going on elsewhere on the board. That's why this is a tactic, not a strategy. 

This move will not, on it's own, win the game. It's one way to scale the obstacle of being threatened by units with superior movement. I find this move particularly good on the flanks where flyers often tend to congregate in order to dislodge their opponent's centre, as when confronted on the flanks, the flyers have far less options for escaping an unfavourable frontal assault.

There are a few key things to look for when trying to set up a LoS shadow on the field:

- You must be able to move up sufficiently close to the unit you want to block, because you want a wide shadow that results from proximity to the enemy

- Make sure you have retaliating units ready to pounce on any frontal charges the flyers may make

- Only advance if it benefits you, don't go forward for no reason!

- Advancing against flyers is dicey, make sure you can deal with them trying to sneak over your lines

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.

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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.