I know this old GW model is maybe a bit too friendly-looking for a Strange Aeons ghoul but with his converted shovel and backpack full of human legs... well, you know what's on the menu tonight.
Nothing super fancy here, just some layers to get my feet wet for the next round of painting, since I have a desk of primed men and monsters sitting there. I hope to have him finished by Wednesday, we'll see how it goes.
I finished 8 Cthulhu objective markers, mounted on 2" bases. Let's hope the Threshold never sees what happens when they are all assembled and aligned as above...
Same as big daddy there, gave them my bronze treatment and green jewel eyes.
I dug out an old GW foam-molded terrain piece I inherited from my buddy Wil. I'm not doing a whole how-to now but I wanted to share WIP shots. I basically cleaned it, trimmed a bunch of stuff off of it to make room for 2" bases, spray painted it with water-based spray paint and went about making it look best I could with an extensive repaint. More later about that but on with the pics...
The seething cauldron/portal/whatever
A plastic Cthulhu statue I bronzed and added gem eyes to. Honestly, he kinds looks awake right here...
Here's a tester I completed for a Strange Aeons objective counter. I simply used a bag of Mini Mythos that I cleaned up with an Xacto and mounted it on GW 2" bases. I then primed it black. I underpainted it a hard contrast style with some off-white/light grey paint and then some copper paint on top.
After that it got a layer of Verdigris water based stain to tone down the yellow in the copper paint and add some hard lining. To finish it off the paint I added some Model Color Verdigris glaze which I allowed to pool and then rubbed off while wet with my thumb and some flat brushes.
To top it off and make it more mystical-looking I added some 4mm costume jewels for eyes. Seen here are purple/orange/yellow gems. I also got some pale yellow/green ones to add to some others.
I suppose this sounds like a lot of work but all told I probably spent about 20 minutes on him start to finish, not including dry time.
I wanted to do some conversions for the Strange Aeons Night Gaunts, featured in both H.P. Lovecraft's writings and his childhood nightmares, which were probably like this:
I knew I wanted to use Legion of Everblight Harriers since the body type looks like a pretty good match to the illustration in the Strange Aeons rulebook and I already had two Harriers thanks to my buddy Finn at Spindango Fundulation. My buddy JWoolf over at Headwound Minis gave me some GW Bloodletter heads when I decided they'd work best. Together with some snips, greenstuff and some sculpting you get this:
The sell will come with the painting. I haven't decided to either be faithful to the description of a face that is a featureless void or just simply do a monochromatic paint scheme. A featureless void would need some gap filling to mute the facial detail, which I happen to like.
In terms of the game itself, 2 Nightgaunts are 16 points of mayhem and can each Destroy Weapon, which is good in-game. They have Parry and a good enough CC bonus (+2) that starting agents fighting them solo will have to literally be very lucky to survive. They should count themselves lucky if the worst that happens is that they have to re-arm in the re-equip phase. Oddly, buying an agent a Meat Cleaver for 1BP isn't a bad first purchase choice after other skills as the CC bonus matches the Nightgaunt's and cancels out the monster's Parry with its own. If you have that and agents fight together against it the good guys may pull ahead on dice, on average. A bowie knife armed, A3 starting agent would win 1/3 of the time in a straight fight I think these creatures and zombies will be the first gribbly things an agent sees after Cultists so better be ready.
I have 4 Scenes of Horror for Strange Aeons in the works. First
up is a scratch built obelisk/monument/mausoleum/crypt entrance/gateway to
another dimension, what have you. I realized after I got this together it also
sorta looks like an outhouse. I'm with that.
So the layout is evident by the pics. I cut the lid from the
dental floss container and used it as a stoop, which was Crazy Glued. I removed the metal bit that cuts the floss too as you see in the pic above. I glued the Advanced Heroquest arch to the wall,
allowing for how the door swings out and I had to cut some sprue into bricks
for the bottom of the arch. I then spray textured both the stoop and monument
with texture paint to hide cracks and add some interest to the deal.
I also
masked off the Cthulhu statue and texture sprayed the bottom slab of the
stature for a nice unifying look with the rest of the monument. I did two
coats.
I cut the stoop tile to run across the threshold and fit flush with the vertical face of
the floss container, so there was no gap under the door when it was mounted,
then glued that on. I added a tile pad for underneath the monument and glued it
all down together.
Steel wool it
Slice it
Rub it down/ oh no!!!!!
Note that you should scuff and cut the surface of CD’s beforehand to give coatings some traction,
otherwise it could start shedding your glue and paint jobs. Another thing I was surprised to see was that some of the cheap CD's that would be great for Strange Aeons are terrible. The writing sloughed off a few, probably due to cheap label printing. Do yourself a favor and wash them after the scuff and slice, set the aside to dry and see how they look after drying.
Next I trimmed out the base in textured wallpaper. Sometimes
it looks good to mount stuff on top of the wallpaper but I didn’t this time for
two reasons. First, the monument is literally heavy and could probably rip off
the CD since the textured wallpaper is mostly foam and paper so I wanted a bond
right to the plastic CD. Second, the monument looks heavier and more sunken,
therefore more ancient, when the ground seems above the level of the tile. I
cut a few tile out but will paint the underlying area as tile too, to give the
illusion that some tiles are really sunken.
I cut some cardboard as a header for the tile overhang, glued that on and added a molten blob of hotglue to the inside before attaching the roof tile piece, since it needed back filling to grab and secure the tile as the cardboard was too thin and lacked surface area for superglue.
Closing in on the final part of assembly, I trimmed an open
zombie hand and glued that to the door, so that once painted and assembled, it
will look like something is emerging from inside. I intend on painting glowing
eyes inside the door. I had haughty ideas of lighting this nerd up but I have
finals the next two weeks so nerts to that.
I spray primed the whole project black so if I can just get
some paint time I can finish it up. More pics when it is done.
This was my wish list for next Edition, prior to my seeing the “Leaked” 6th
Edition ruleset on Scribd: I sorta see advance deploy, deep striking and the like becoming
more strategic and less tactical, more like how it works in Apocalypse, when
staring at it from the current core rule set. I think what I have been discussing
with my buds, our wish list of changes, would be for 40K to have more “free” usable
items to really create plays. As it is, there are so many things that 40K
offers for games that are too damn risky because the detriments usually crush
what little benefit pays out if there is success. When I say risk I mean what
seems unfair risk. It is a usability issue disguised as a balance problem. Case
in point, Deep Strike. It's almost a joke. So many races are offered it and so
few can use it in characterful ways. If a race can't realistically use it
without wearing space marine armor or riding a spore into the ground then keep
it out of my differences for my points totals and give me something I can use
outside of buying yet another model that gives me the board effect I want in
Deep Strike, etc.
Then today my boy John sends me the “Leaked” 6th Edition ruleset on Scribd. I’m sure many of you have seen it already and have
decided if it is real, has merit, etc. I ate my sandwich and started reading
that vehicle damage table since, you know, that's practically part of my IG
codex.
Then I read the rest of it.
Here are some observations from a pedestrian player to his immediate friends
at all levels who play, not the homeless tourney hookers. I’m only interested in
changes that may bring faster, more conclusive and less slogging play, which
better translates to a good story, so I like the following that I see in this leaked, possibly-real document:
1.Evasion and Patch Up are interesting. More later but I want to say that first.
2.Airborne, page 47. That is basically jump troops
that never have to land and take terrain tests but still benefit from terrain.
Finally in the spirit of some models and fluff, dare I say intuitive representation?
3.Movement, assault and shooting is the turn order
now. This I liked when I heard it before but consensus was it seemed to
indicate a fan-produced fraud. Still, this seems solid design. Not sure about
authenticity either way but I think it has merit when stacked with Evasion,
revised Deep Strike, Reserves. More below.
4.Flyers have rules now as do Agile for large
creatures and Eldar Titans. Funny to see them cited in a main rulebook, pg 54
of this leaked thing. Yup, Titans, Flyers and Superheavies are all in this set
of main rules, so they are now peeled from Apocalypse and exist in the core
rules. This seems right, now that I think of it, since GW just went wild
releasing plastic flyers now and superheavy kits over the past year.
5.Wow, reserves are drastically changed, to the
tune of resource management: You have a pool of dice for all units in reserve.
You can allocate up to 3 dice to each unit and use those dice for making
reserve rolls, in effect choosing who gets better odds of showing up. Pg 137.
6.Deep Strike has changed. You can deep strike
units outside of 18" of an enemy and they just stick the landing? Win. If you
try within 18" you do the scatter roll bit. Deep striking units that
successfully land 12" away from a unit or close can trigger a Defensive
Fire action from that threatened unit. Sweet.
7.Strategems and fortifications are in this too,
which originated from City Fight and Apocalypse.
8.Weathered Bastion pg 147 sounds exactly like the bastion I built years ago but never finished. Now we have stats for it and it's
official, assuming this is all legit. Open top, troop capacity, gun ports, points cost, blah, blah, blah. At last, some fluff on the table outside a Space Marine with new style cape. And I didn't need VDR to have it.
9.To my Nid player bro John: If Evasion is
true, your Nids just became a level of faster we've both been complaining
about. Add in how Deep Strike and Reserves works with all the assorted features
and I think your army got a HUGE boost. Think
about it this way. According to these rules, you have better say in what
happens with reserves. Now, putting things in reserve may not be a last resort
but instead a strong first tactical choice… a universal one. Deep strike is way
more accurate which is great for flanking your units via Spore or whatever, you
can drop stuff right along board edges now with no fear of scattering off the
edge... that's more real estate for you to use in a game. But Evasion may help
you the most since that is army-wide and free. If it affords you even a bit
more protection, it's really good. I do believe Evasion is real, since they put
shooting before assaults now. There needs to be another layer to the
shooting/hitting dynamic just because of that alone. But with the shift in
order of assaults then shooting really may not change my IG army much, it changes Nids
a lot more; I see this simple swap of order as just making things more
decisive/conclusive: I'll get more shots off in general and that may cack units
more solidly but then and you'll close faster and kill quicker. But if all of
that is true, it favors your army most, since I still have to shoot the
same-sized army, which is now faster, where I am not as much more shooty in the
same way... over what I'm betting is a shorter amount of time.
10.Gotta tell you though, if these are the rules
for Flyers then Santa got my letter. I have waited 15 years for these rules, at
least between Forge World rules and house rules. The Vulture,
Valkyrie/Vendettas will be super fun to use, acting like strafing aircraft and
skimmers, evac'ing and acting like they are CAP's, as they should behave. It would be interesting if winged Hive Tyrants, Lords of Change and the like could act as flyers or
something.
So, the question stands, until the rulebook comes out. Will next edition be Hug Wolves and smelling people being hugged? Or will it be cat language butchery and insane Kenny Loggins five hole fatalities? I want the latter.
