Random Thoughts: bring me those vampires!

Posted by A Person from Porlock at 23:41 Dark Elves, Wargaming
Jan 072012

 

Vampire Counts - Coven Throne (detail)

Not my day today – I twitched my back while playing with the child and now I have a severe head- and backache… but even in this state I spent some happy time looking at all the new releases for the Vampire Counts.

Personally, when it comes down to Undead, I am more fond of dry, dusty skeletons than I am of decaying zombies and vampires… but still I have to admit that some of the kits in this release are just splendid.  Especially the Coven Throne / Mortis Engine and the Black Knights / Hexwraiths show that Games Workshop might be one evil big company… but they surely know how to do miniatures… and, of course, the latter are a triumphant return of the Perry Twins to Warhammer Fantasy Battles after what felt like an eternity of Lord of the Rings miniatures…

Of course not everything is fine with this reboot of the Vampire Counts… the new Vargheists / Crypt Horrors leave me cold, they are ok as miniatures go, but compared to the other kits they are just… average… and I feel sorry quite a number of older pewter miniatures have not been re-released in Finecast. Especially the absence of the old Lahmia Vampires is a sad thing, I had thought about buying those to convert them into Dark Elfin mistresses…

But back to the new releases… I don’ t think I will buy any of those kits for myself  but there are three things I do want: the three plastic vampires that come with the Coven Throne. Not as vampires, of course. For quite some time I have been planning a conversion for a Cauldron of Blood that will use the Cauldron of the original kit and combine it with a chariot (Dark Eldar Raider), drawn by a variety of slaves… those three miniatures – equipped with Dark Eldar heads – would make fine priestesses to attend to the cauldron… so, for my own sake, I hope many people will build the kit as Mortis Engine and sell the rest on eBay…

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To Perry or not to Perry…

Posted by A Person from Porlock at 20:31 Wargaming
Jul 192011

Soon to go into Space? Mahdi Fuzzy Wuzzies

Ah, all those little (and big) decisions of a hobby life… you know I’ve spending a lot of time lately to plan one huge order of miniatures I want to make somewhere in August/September… I am looking forward to it very much, even though it is silly – I have enough miniatures to keep me satisfied for months if not years… but to experience this feeling when you receive one large cardboard box full of shiny new plastics and pewters… it’s one of the moments where I always feel overcome with joy and excitement… and in fact I have saved my meager pocket money for many months now to make it come true and give one huge flash of light into the dimness of my life…

Talking like that, of course it’s always difficult for a hobby butterfly as I am as to which miniatures (and thus games) to choose. There will be a lot of Avatars of War and Anima Tactics in it, probably, but apart from that, everything is still open, with many interesting ideas to choose from…

Quite a number of those ideas center around miniatures from the Perry twins. If you don’t know them (shame on you), those two brothers are among the best miniature designers I know and the main reason (aside from the likes of Jes Goodwin and Aly Morrison) that Games Workshop makes some of the best miniatures for me. They designed some of the classic miniatures for almost every Warhammer and Warhammer 40K army out there and they still are the hearts and souls behind the Empire and Bretonnia miniatures…

They also have their own company doing historical miniatures, including such rarely covered subjects like Ancient Korea or the Karlist Wars. While most of their miniatures are made in pewter, they have also started to do some wonderful plastic sets, each one truly worth its money.

Enter my dreams… you know, as for historical games, I am tending towards collecting ancient (probably roman) miniatures and miniatures from the 30 Year’s War/English Civil Wars, mostly because there are great sets (i.e. kits that I like) for those available from companies like Warlord Games. Thus, per se most of the plastic Perry kits are not interesting to me eo ipso, but I do think they would make great material for conversions in 40 K, mainly for the Imperial Guard (finally Mahdi Guardsmen or Zouave Guardsmen) or for the Neophytes (“Scouts”) of my Space Marines, which should look more chivalric (or much more chivalric) I think…

Wouldn’t that be great? Unfortunately the miniatures of the Perries are “True Scale” (read: almost natural proportions), while Games Workshop does “Heroic Scale” (exaggerated proportions) miniatures (for comparison, look here)… so there is a huge chance that I give money for an experiment that might go awfully wrong… but then, if it does, I guess I could as well just build and paint those wonderful miniatures just for fun…. they would be worth it…

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Keeping track of my projects: Conversions

Posted by A Person from Porlock at 19:23 Wargaming
Apr 132011

Sir, too many projects, Sir! CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGE!It’s a terrible time to be alive just now, so there is little hope for me that I will have much time for my hobbies at the moment… too much work, too many duties… some things can’t be helped, I guess…so instead of whining, I do what I sometimes like to do: get down to reality and find out just how many projects I am just running…

You know (I mean it: you really know it when you read this blog occasionally) that I am always doing too many projects at the same time considering how much time I actually have at my leisure. I do this without thinking – a bad brush-stroke or just a shining new kit, a brilliant new idea and I am gone, leaving my current project catching some dust somewhere in my room. Stupid? It surely is… but on the other hand I am almost proud that I still have some fantasy left inside me after all these years working night & day…

Anyway, I will start with my favourite projects: conversion work. Mind you almost all of my projects could fall into that category, as I love it to add bitz to almost all my miniatures. And even if I do pewter miniatures, I at least take care to add something to the bases, even if it’s just a skull or something…

So I will narrow my definition to: projects where I form miniatures out of several kits to create something really new (at least really new to me).

What am I just working on or at least heavily planning?

  1. The Commission: There can be only one.
  2. Neophytes (Space Marines): as my Space Marine chapter is based on the Black Templars, I file Neophytes (or Novices, as I like to call them) instead of the usual Scouts. While there was the old Games Workshop webpage, they had an article online where they showed some cool Neophyte miniatures made of Scout weaponry combines with Bretonnian and Empire parts. It’s that I want to recreate.
  3. Cavalry (Space Marines): another old project of mine, often stopping for weeks or months. As I define my order (and the Black Templars they are based on ruleswise) as to be quite antiquitated, quite chaotic and quite crazy, I want to replace at least one unit of bikes by a full cavalry of Space Marines riding fierce horses to battle. I originally tried that using Empire horses, but this looked quite bad… then I got some ideas from various similar projects all over the web. At the moment, I am trying out to use Chaos Knight horses and legs combined with Blood Angels Death Company upper parts and some other bitz. And, yes, I am only doing this because I need an excuse to work with those two kits…
  4. Inquisition Weapon Servitors (Inquisition): my newest project in this list, I only got the idea when I bought those old pewter henchmen some weeks ago. As I strongly dislike the old weapon servitors like this one I am now keen in doing my own – using weaponry of the Imperial Guard and a crew of fanatics.
  5. Venerable Kasrkin (Imperial Guard): I really don’t like the current Kasrkin (elite warriors) models (like these) – they are metal, they have too few special details that keep them apart from the rest… keeping the Swiss Guards in the back of my  mind, I am experimenting in creating my own Kasrkin guardsmen using Imperial Guard weaponry combines with models from the Empire line of miniatures.
  6. Skaven Steam Tank (Skaven): actually this one will be (almost) straightforward, combining the plastic Steam Tank with metal parts from the old Doomwheel (not the plastic one, its wheels are too big). I am still unsure, though, how to create the appropriate crew…
  7. Plastic Witch Elves (Dark Elves): the Dark Elves are my oldest army and they are in dire need of a restart. As part of it, I intend to recreate all those far-too-many metal units with handmade plastic ones. I especially abhor the metal witch elves of the product line. There was little I could do there so far, but the new Dark Eldar miniatures is providing me with many intriguing possibilities. Taking kits from there (especially the Wyches) and combining the bitz with traditional fantasy weaponry (especially from the Corsairs kit) I intend to make my own witch elves.
  8. Plastic Black Guard, Executioners, Shades, Assassins, Dark Riders, Harpies and Lords (Dark Elves): I am too tired to list my ideas for each of these units, so let it be said that my plans include plastic kits from the Dark Elves, High Elves, Wood Elves, Dark Eldar, Tyranids and Warriors of Chaos product lines. It will be interesting to see how many of those projects I will actually start before Games Workshop finally releases some original plastic kits for these units – but I don’t think that would stop me…

I think these are all the conversion projects that are worth being mentioned. Of the armies I collect (or intend to collect) in Warhammer or Warhammer 40K, the Space Orks are fairly absent, as are the Lizardmen, but this is only because I am not really running with the orcs yet and the Lizardmen can’t really use bitz from other product lines… you can give an elf a human hand, but you can’t do this with our scaly reptile friends…

Of course I should have mentioned my BloodBowl projects, but to me, they are no real conversion projects – though I am trying to turn armed miniatures into unarmed ones (if you might call an iron fist being unarmed…). So about them some other time…

Next: Running armies – part one

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