Monday, February 29, 2016

Wrath of Kings: Orsund Cavalier unboxing and assembly impressions

Terror from the Deep!

We are always excited to work with models from miniature companies other than Games Workshop.  It is particularly neat to see what sort of innovations they bring to the hobby.  The market is virtually flooded with new games, so it can be difficult to keep track of everything.  We were excited to see that one of the blogs that we follow, Screwed Up Dice, was beginning an ambitious and collaborative hobby project centered around Cool Mini or Not’s Wrath of Kings.  The project, called A Tale of Wrath, is a spiritual successor to the seminal run of articles in White Dwarf back in 1998, called A Tale of Four Gamers.  This series chronicled four hobbyists’ efforts to start and continue building a new Warhammer Fantasy army over the course of six months, playing games throughout the process, and culminating in a tournament.  Screwed Up Dice is putting a new spin on this idea by changing the game system to Wrath of Kings (a non-GW game), and opening the project up to the entire world, encouraging anyone to signup and start building an army.  Although we realized that we would not have the time to participate in the project properly (the Pilgrym Project is occupying our time almost completely), it was hard not to get caught up in Screwed Up Dice’s enthusiasm, so we decided we should get a few Wrath of Kings models and let everyone know what we think!

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

The Pilgrym: Order of the Crimson Hour

Vivere est Pati.

As we continued to expand the Church of the Red Athenæum, we decided that it should really have its own fighting force.  We decided that we wanted to have this military organization mimic the Sisters of Battle.  After some brainstorming, we devised the Order of the Crimson Hour.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

The Pilgrym: Samael Urkston, Lord of Bones, A Tribute to Wayne England

The Emperor Expects.

The passing of Wayne England earlier this month hit my brothers and I pretty hard, as his art has become synonymous with our ideas of the 41st millennium. This caused us to reflect on his contributions to Warhammer 40,000 and to look back through his seminal 40k art.  Perusing his pieces brought us back to one particular illustration, one that completely encapsulates the grim-dark ethos of Warhammer 40,000.  The illustration that I speak of is of the sneering scribe inking skulls in the 3rd edition 40k rulebook.  The beak-like nose, frazzled hair, and stretched skin combine to create a wonderfully macabre character.  Seeing this artwork again inspired me to create a model for the Church of the Red Athenæum in his likeness. We had been planning to create a Chronicler for the Church, someone who keeps track of the bodily sacrifices and the Church death toll (and might have started to sell body parts on the side).  And what better than modeling our Chronicler after England’s iconic skull inker?  This lead to our creation of the Lord of Bones:

Friday, February 12, 2016

The Pilgrym: Roland Arnesen, headless mercenary

"With their fingers on their triggers, knee-deep in gore."

Over the last few days I have been working on creating my headless mercenary, Roland (who is posing as a missionary for the Church of the Red Athenaeum, but is a agent for Inquisitor Molnar, Ordo Mechanicus). He is still work-in-progress, but I wanted to show some pictures to get everyone’s thoughts and suggestions. Since he is posing as a warrior priest/missionary, we thought that he would be armoured much like Church’s armed force, the Order of the Crimson Hour. Although the Order is modeled after the Adepta Sororitas, they will not have power armor (the Church would not have those kind of resources), but more practical tactical gear.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Kingdom Death: Multi-part kit challenge - Model complete

Born of strife...

As 2015 came to a close, we looked at the multipart Survivor models that came with the Kingdom Death boxed game.  We were not too thrilled with the models, their proportions, the level of detail, and cast quality were just not as good as many of the other single pose Kingdom Death models.  These considerations made us uncertain what we should do with the models; it just did not seem like it was worth our time and effort to try to assemble them.  We ended up deciding to make a single model out of all the sprues and then send the rest off to another hobbyist, with the hope that they will continue to pass the models around to other hobbyists to see what they could create with the parts.  The Muli-part of Death Project was born.  In the last post, we showed you the model that we came up with.  I found some time to start painting the model last month and am pleased to show you the finished model!