Vastarian: The Church of the Red Athenæum recap

Vivere est pati.

The Cathedral world of Vastarian is home to a vast assortment of strange splinter cults of the Ecclesiarchy’s Imperial Creed. In addition to its presence on Terra, the Church of the Red Athenæum (which we created for Iron Sleet’s Pilgrym event) also has its own cells on Vastarian and has been trying to expand its influence there. The Church is a radical faction of the Imperial Creed that believes suffering is the highest form of veneration of the God-Emperor. Although we originally created the Church way back in 2016, we started to revisit them in more recent years, creating a host of new models, including a Gunfighter, a heavy weapons specialist, a Halfling, and a new Bibliognost of the Church of the Red Athenæum. All of these models are going to be used in the Vastarian setting, where they will be one of the major factions battling for their spiritual beliefs to dominate the planet. Below is a summary of some of the lore behind the Church of the Red Athenæum, which will continue to get expanded as Vastarian continues to develop!

John Blanche: a new beginning!

The Broken Road - John Blanche, 2016

After an illustrious career defining and shaping the world's of Games Workshop, John Blanche retired last week. It is impossible to overstate how important John was in helping Games Workshop become what it is today. His boundless creativity and vision has touched all aspects of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, epitomizing the dark style that now defines it. For the three of us, his artwork literally brought us into the hobby. A large cardboard standee featuring the central Blood Angel Space Marine from John's cover for the 2nd edition of Warhammer 40,000 beckoned to us from the window of a local hobby shop. This led to us getting a few blister packs (we recently repainted one of the first trio of models we got from that very store) and eventually the 40k boxed game, and the rest was history. His evocative artwork kept us engaged in the hobby since that time, and his Blanchistsu articles in White Dwarf helped inspire us to push ourselves beyond what is featured on the box art and create our own sliver of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. To our continued amazement, this creative journey led us to the Inq28 movement and John Blanche himself, when we participated in Iron Sleet's Pilgrym event in 2016. When starting the hobby, we would have never imagined meeting John, let alone playing Warhammer 40k (or Mordheim!) with him. We feel incredibly blessed to count John as a friend, and want to wish him a wonderful retirement and are excited to see what he does next!

The Church of the Red Athenæum: Aseneth Levedescu, (3rd) Cardinal

And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.

With the blog recently turning 10 years old, it is hard not to reflect back on what we have done in that time. One of our favorite creations is the Church of the Red Athenæum. Designed for Iron Sleet’s Pilgrym event, the Church is a radical splinter of the Imperial Cult that believes suffering is the highest form of veneration of the God-Emperor. In 2021 we began to revisit the Church, creating a host of new models, including a Gunfighter, a heavy weapons specialist, a Halfling, and a new Bibliognost of the Church of the Red Athenæum. In 2023, we hope to continue developing and expanding the Red Church. And while we created a host of different characters from the Church, one of the most iconic is the current Cardinal, Aseneth Levedescu, and her mobile throne. We wanted to celebrate the character and showcase her again on the blog, seven years after her initial creation. To do this, we knew we could take better photos of the model and share the lore we wrote pertaining to her, but we wanted to do something more special. For this purpose, we commissioned the amazingly talented and visionary Nicky Grillet to illustrate and paint Aseneth!

Between the Bolter and Me: 2016, a year in review

2016 comes to a close!

With 2016 coming to a close, Between the Bolter and Me is now four years old! We began the year updating the look of the blog, changing our logo (maintaining the frog theme, however!) and color scheme, trying to reflect a continuing commitment to pushing ourselves forward in the hobby. We also started a podcast, called Dragged into Turbolasers, hoping to use it as an avenue to connect with a wider audience and meet new people in the hobby. Now that 2016 is over and we reflect on it, we are happy to say that we think it was our most productive and enjoyable year yet! Between two major collaborative projects, The Pilgrym and the Curse of the Alabaster, we met so many wonderful people, and spurred ourselves to create what I believe is our best work yet, painting an unprecedented 20 models (a major feat for us!). We even started to create our own background material and try our hands at writing some short stories. But enough of boring prose, join us below to see a picture recap of 2016!

The Pilgrym: An Exchange of Hands - the final moments of the Daylight Wall Anomaly

Immediately after finishing the Pilgrym Game,  I knew that I want to write a short story describing the final events of game from the perspective from one of our main characters, Roland Arnesen.  He is one of our more interesting characters. a headless mercenary from the Ordo Machinum, who infiltrated the Church of the Red Athenaeum to help locate the Pilgrym.  What's more, he even has a cyber-owl companion named Bronwen!  Roland and his feathered friend played a small, but important part in the Pilgrym game, and I felt writing about it might help provide some additional context to event, and highlight one of the many plot lines threading through the game.

The story was posted earlier on Iron Sleet, but I wanted to post it here, as well. As an addition, the ever talented Aletheia Atzinger wrote some parts in Bronwen's perspective which have been added! I hope you like it! 

Dragged into Turbolasers Episode 9: The Pilgrym

The Pilgrym group assembles!

Eschewing the normal structure of our podcasts, this entire episode is focussed on recounting the events of the Pilgrym event held in Nottingham.  We describe the scope of the event, both in terms of the storyline, rules used, the people involved, as well as talk about the events leading up to the game, and Warhammer World in general.

The Pilgrym: Told in pictures

Secrets and Lies.

The dust has finally settled from the massive undertaking that was the Pilgrym event.  It is difficult to convey how awesome it all was, from playing the game to meeting all of the talented individuals that took part in it.  My brothers and I took a whole host of pictures during the event, and have endeavored to show a selection of them with descriptive captions to help convey the story of the event, and reveal the fate of the elusive Pilgrym!

The Pilgrym: Rules for the Church of the Red Athenæum

The Hunt begins.

After 7 furious months of work, the Pilgrym game has finally been played and we are back in the United States.  The event was a fantastic success, truly culminating everyone’s hard work and passion.  Over the next few weeks we are going to be creating a few posts detailing the event.  To start things off, we wanted to share the rules that we devised for our warband, the Church of the Red Athenæum.  The game was played using a modified version of the Necromunda ruleset, with a focus on narrative elements rather than strict adherence to any particular book.  For the Church, we wanted to take special effort to convey that most of its members are not fighters; they are civilians that are missing limbs and other body parts, further separating them from any sort of fighting elite.  They are, however, extremely devoted to their cause and due to their lives of suffering, able to withstand a lot of pain.  The only exception to this are the members of their military arm, the Order of the Crimson Hour, which are trained for combat and therefore have firearms, and Roland Arnesen, a sleeper agent of the Ordo Machinum.

The Pilgrym: Roland Arnesen Missionary of Church of the Red Athenaeum

Roland Arnesen and his vox-owl companion Bronwen.

Although I find it difficult to believe, after 6 months of tireless work, our warband for the Pilgrym Project is finished!  The very last model is finally painted, Roland Arnesen, missionary of the Church and sleeper agent of the Ordo Machinum.  He was the first model I built way back in January, and I am thrilled to finally have paint on him!  I hope you like him; he did quite well in the actual event, something we will detail in a future post, so check back soon!

The Pilgrym: Aseneth Levedescu, Cardinal of the Church of the Red Athenæum Finished!

The group is almost ready for Nottingham!

The penultimate model for the Church of the Red Athenæum is now finished!  As the largest model I created for the Church, Cardinal Aseneth Levedescu took considerably longer to paint than the others, but I am happy with the result.  And to go along with the pictures, my brothers and I wrote some background material for her, we hope you enjoy!

The Pilgrym: Kirill Blokhin finished!

The Red Hour is nigh.  The Church assembles.

Today I wanted to share the completed versions of Kirill Blokhin, the Church’s Acirgeon!

The Pilgrym: Vasili Abramovitch, Congregation member of the Church of the Red Athenæum

There will be blood.

In our continuing effort to showcase all of the members of our Pilgrym group, we wanted to show you the finished, painted form of the most obvious mutant that we created, Vasili Abramovitch!

The Pilgrym: Ehret Filipovic, Chief Bibliognost of the Church of the Red Athenæum

The Chief Bibliognost and the Chronicler of the Church of the Red Athenæum

With less than a month before the Pilgrym event, I wanted to start showing some of the final few members of the Church of the Red Athenæum that will be going to Nottingham.  Today, I will focus on the leader of the Church’s Librarian Guild, the organization within the Church that tends to all the scholarly pursuits of the Church and cares for all of its holy relics.  I present to you Ehret Filipovic, Chief Bibliognost.

The Pilgrym: Aseneth Levedescu, (3rd) Cardinal of the Church of the Red Athenæum

Aseneth Levedescu, Cardinal of the Church of the Red Athenæum, in all of her somber magesty! 

When first devising the Church of the Red Athenæum, a fanatical splinter of the Imperial Cult fixated on the Emperor’s physical sacrifices, I imagined a hierarchy that was visible based on their self-inflicted wounds. Initiates might only be missing a hand, while the older members of the congregation would have accrued more wounds as a sign of their increased devotion. I envisioned that the head of the Church, the Cardinal, would be so mutilated that they could not even walk, limbs missing, spine severed, riding atop an ambulatory throne. A crude mimic of the Emperor on His Golden Throne. Not sure of how to realize this vision, I set the character aside, and worked on the rest of the Church. With 9 other models built for the Church, I finally set out to build the last model for the immediate future. I present to you: Aseneth Levedescu, Cardinal of the Church of the Red Athenæum (3rd).

The Pilgrym: A few more members of the Church

The Church of the Red Athenæum is almost complete!

With less than two months until the Pilgrym event, I am finally wrapping up the last few models for the Church.  Other than the Cardinal who leads the congregation, these are the last two members that will be a part of the models that go to England.  The first is to represent the librarian/historian for the Church; one who has devoted much of their studies to uncovering the details about the Great Crusade and final days of the Heresy. I decided to base him on one of the other Missionary models Brian Nelson sculpted for the Sister of Battle line years ago. He is already lacking an arm and one of his eyes, so he is right up the Church’s alley.  The model looks right at home with the conversion for Samael too.

The Pilgrym: Kirill Blokhin, Acirgeon of the Church of the Red Athenæum

Rip and tear.

The Pilgrym event is getting closer and closer to a reality, and I have been trying desperately to finish converting the last few members of the Church.  Today, I wanted to share with you one of these models, a character that my brothers and I have been working on for a while, both in concept and model execution.  The entire design process was sparked by rediscovering a classic piece of John Blanche’s art from the Confrontation era.  The central figure in the piece, a sanctioned bounty hunter, always held our imagination, a crazed ganger, reminding me of one of the Droogs from Clockwork Orange.  The creepy frowning mask, the clean tunic and pants, the axe at his belt, the machine pistol in hand, and the noose around his neck, all make for a compelling character.  We set out and create a character in his image, and Kirill Blokhin, the Church’s Acirgeon was born.

The Pilgrym: Bronwen vox-owl

Burn the Witch.

While I am still hard at work creating more members for the Church of the Red Athenæum, I realized that I never posted any finished pictures of Roland's owl companion, Bronwen.  I painted Bronwen to look like a Great Horned Owl due to his pronounced ears/horns.  What do you think?

The Pilgrym: First Congregation Member of the Church of the Red Athenæum

The only cure is dying.

Having painted Samael the Church’s Chronicler, and the first two members of the Order of the Crimson Hour, I decided that it was time to paint one of the regular members of the congregation (which happens to be the only one that I have built thus far).  I wanted the regular members to fit naturally beside the ranking officials and the fighting order of the Church, but I also wanted them to be more subdued and impoverished looking,  with a focus on drab earthy colors.  And so, Matthias Stillman was born.

The Pilgrym: The Order of the Crimson Hour Painted

Blood Simple.

Progress continues steadily with the Church of the Red Athenæum. The two Order of the Crimson Hour battle sisters are now complete. They mark the first time that I painted two models simultaneously in years! And while they took much longer than I was anticipating, I am happy with how they turned out.

The Pilgrym: Congregation Member of the Church of the Red Athenæum

In an hour of Darkness a blind man is the best guide.

In the past few weeks I have been very busy painting many of the models that I have built for the Church of the Red Athenæum.  With all of the painting going on, I have neglected to post any pictures of the first regular congregation member that I built.  I have plans to make a few more, exploring the different holy wounds that Church members inflict upon themselves.