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!