Evilstu's Fantasy Progress 2020

Spent Thursday pulling out any boxes marked ‘Dwarf’ and totalling up the contents. Turns out I have in my travels collected three of the Dwarf half of the 7th ed starter set. While I’ll get around to painting it all up, a lot of the stuff is not going to be ‘optimal’ from a points perspective. ie, I’m pretty sure I’m never going to need three small groups of miners in a points match. Having said that, I am looking at reworking the siege rules from 6th edition and the miner units would obviously be a nice narrative touch to any sort of siege game.

The handgunners should work nicely and the warriors will probably get rolled up in to a large unit or 2, with any spares acting as ‘rank fillers’ for other units. The little ‘stumpy cannon’ is quite cute, but I might have a go at scratch building or printing something a little more imposing and swapping the crew over. Similarly I might also attempt scratch building/kit bashing an organ gun too. Failing that, there’s always Mantic…

On the GW front I also turned up 5 longbeards and an unopened flame cannon, so some stuff of a bit more interest. Numerous character models from an array of manufacturers too.

So the total count was 228 minis, at which point I lost motivation to do the bases with a textured rolling pin. having had a day to think about it though I am leaning back towards that approach, I’ll just have a look at doing a small list then adding a unit or 2 at a time so that it all stays manageable.

Spent today looking at Beastmen. My original plan had been to do a small force of beastmen for each chaos god and run mixed forces, but that plan stalled after 7th edition when combining mortal daemon and beasts in the one army wasn’t a rulebook/tourney friendly option from memory. I only ever got as far as one unit of Slaanesh beastmen. Additionally, from 7th edition gors and ungors ran in individual herds, rather than mixed ones, so the minis I had weren’t going to be enough to field separate units. The plan I came up with today was to pull everything back into one Beastmen army, paint in a homogenous/neutral colour scheme (except for the Khornegor unit who can keep their red…) and just swap magnetised unit banners if I needed to change the flavour of chaos from vanilla to something else. So that’s where I’m headed. Also means I can do more of a deep wood/forest path base style instead of more snow…

So had stripped the metal bestigors and khornegors I picked up 2nd hand at Cancon, and spent today repairing, re-priming and trying to scrounge together enough older minis to form up complete units. I ended up pulling some old 5th ed Gor blisters and promoting them to Bestigor status. Also opened one of the old beast herd boxes I had and put them together, with the extra sprue contents getting used to convert weapons for the bestigors, of which about 15 appeared to be standard bearers for some reason…. So trimmed down the standard and glued weapons on to make them look more like bills or polearms. The unit looks very ‘rough and ready’ but I guess that’s Ok for a beastmen army. After a few hours of messing about I had 2 blocks of 20 Bestigors with command, a block of 20 Khornegors with command, 2 beast herds both with 12 gors, 8 ungors and command and 5 Centigors.

I got the above primed with the airbrush for the underside (nadir?… Is that a painting thingy yet?…) black coat. Was aiming to get a grey and zenithal white done but it was well over 40 degrees outside and no idea how hot it was in my garage. My airbrush didn’t overheat, but I certainly did, so decided to wait until tomorrow maybe before pushing on.