Another productive day

It's that time of year again, days off, holidays and whatnot. In no time these days fly by and what did you do? We decided to fill at least one of those days with again some scenery building. More Hirst Arts bricks were cast and the table was set for a day enjoying the hobby!

Arjan and Mr. Flibble turned up for this hobby day and we dove in. Lots of creativity was flying around and the concentration and dedication to work was of a high level straigh away!

Lot's of designs were tried and tested before glueing the stuff together. Here a wizards tower is taking shape bfore our eyes. I believe the current status is that it is painted and all ready to go on the battleground. Good stuff!

My own goal was getting the field plates for my arena painted and painting some roads for our city. Buildings we have but some more roads will add to the playability of the scenery.

I also started with building a sort of balcony tower like structure for the arena and built a small shrine. Also started on a long street as well in the days after this one. These are all the works in progress and will see their finished pictures here very soon!

BTB: Living treasure form the Orcs&Goblins point of view

We already played a new scenario: "The writing on the wall" but this warstory was somehow lost in the void by some rogue streaks of Waaaagh! Eventually the orc shaman beamed me his view on the Living treasure battle to be put on the blog. So for all you fellow readers, here it is! Thanks Ludo for coming up with the story!

Potential danger;check. Bad weather; check. Treasure; check. A lot of skull to crush; Ow hell yeah check!
Somehow this evening made perfectly sense to Captain Wortnak. 'Load 'em up boys, we've be going to town. Treasurehunting'. No response. 'Enjoying the bad weather?' Still no response. 'Bashing some sku....' and before Captain Wortnak could finish, his entire Grey Head Clan mob was packed and ready to ride out.
It was already pouring with rain and eyesight was pretty limited. Didn't matter to the grey heads at all. Hell, storms are their favourite weather, makes tornado-attacks (copyright WutWuzDat the Shaman) possible, which meant modifying more skulls in one attack. Arriving at the sceneof the supposed treasure Furrrrr the squig immidiately smelled some dwarfs. He was trained to recognize the stench and somehow make that clear. Hopping like the little furrball it is, Furrrr went straight for some slayers.
'This might not end that well' WutWuzDat said while he and the crew carefully positioned themselves near the hall-entrance of the long abandoned chambers. And for sure, upon impact and sinking it teeth in one of the dwarfs' feet, he met four axes. Not much was left of furrrr at that moment. 'Good thing they breed around here' Captain Wortnak replied.
Then, the hailstorm had set in. All of a sudden huge blocks of ice fell from the skies. WutWuzDat looked up and said 'hey gork, did wez piss you o.....', but never got to finish his sentence. Due to the limmited eyesight, WutWuzDat never saw the giant block of ice coming down on his head and he lost conciousness. Some others orcs and goblins were also hit, but they recovered quite quickly. Moveeee (the squig that held the goblins company was struck by a block of ice, bigger then Moveeee itself. Therefor, this was the end of Moveeee.
By the sound of a goblin hitting the ground, Captain Wortnak turned his head. Those pantsy slayers were trying to sneak attack us from behind! 'Good thing they smell so bad', Captain Wortnak said while he pushed some of his boys to the front. 'There you go, kill them and you might make it into being corporal, wutever that means'. What emerged was a real tiresome battle where the boss and his big 'un companions joined in to meet the massacre.
After the loss of one big 'un and the boys not being able to even see the dwarfs through all the rain, Captain Wortnak decided to call it quits. Enough bashing had been done and this dreaded weather made it no easier spotting the little walking critters of doom. Meanwhile snagging the goblin made reports of beastmen in the area. Another fine reason not to stay with these losses.
Waaaaaagh!

Arena part 2

A quick update on the arena front. One arena half has been built and now it's been painted as well. Details need to be added as some moss and dirt and such, but the basics are done. This part can already be used in a game of Mordheim. Of course for squig hopper racing this arena needs to be built further and details need to be added. Barrels are being painted, maybe add a discarded food cart for selling rats on a stick? Who knows what will be added. For now the second stage of the arena:

BTB: Living Treasure

We're still playing the Border town burning campaign but with some other scenario's then the original rules describe. It is fun to use the BTB surroundings and play all kinds of scenario's in them. This time we've played the living treasure scenario. Some slight alterations to the scenario. We've put in the treasure counters and when a treasure attacks you, there is a chance you encounter The luggage!. We've used the rules for the luggage as described in the blogpost. In our case we've played the scenario multiplayer with 4 warbands, orcs&gobbos, beastmen, possessed and dwarfs.


The following is a first part of the battle report from the dwarf treasurehunters point of view. Other warbands have their stories to tell and if available they will be added just the same!

"Truckloads 'o treasure, truckloads" the drunk farmer was blabbering in the Crooked Tooth tavern. Bjorgir was listening intently to the drunken man's talk. He was gathering quite a crowd in this small border town. Not much happens in these surroundings and a chance of some action or good stories the villagers weren't letting slip away.
The farmer (or so he looked) stumbled in this evening in the tavern, where the dwarf treasurehunters found themselves on a particularly harsh evening. The season was turning to winter and these surroundings were already cold in summer let alone in winter. The story of the drunken man was worth pursuing before the warband travels more down south were the weather is less harsh.
The weather already sent a lot of warbands away and the sturdy dwarfs remained quite long in these surroundings.
The farmer mumbeled something about ...Gorgon's way... "Hmmm," Bjorgir was thinking, "that is something I found on the weird map I found a while ago."
"OK lads, we're heading up north once more" Bjorgir was telling his warband. The beardlings were grumbling under their breath on the harsh conditions already, but followed their leader regardless.

In a corner of the inn a very drunk slayer was quaffing his ale. The 2 slayers already within the warband cought up with him and were getting very drunk themselves. Eventually for a couple of gold coins the other slayer was willing to follow them as well.
With 3 slayers, an engineer, 3 beardlings and a thunderer Bjorgir was prizing himself lucky to have such a warband. They were starting to get some name in these borderlands and gathering some fortune as well.

The warband take up their packs and leave in the cold weather. "Hopefully an easy find, this treasure" the engineer was thinking while they were traveling with the old map to guide them. Eventually after some days travel they found a derilict set of houses and part of some tunnel uncovered. The tunnel was supposed to be named Gordon's way. The dwarfs set to uncouvering the treasure when the weather turned for the worse. Hail was falling from the sky and the hail stones were getting bigger and bigger. The dwarfs gritted their teeth and went on. Upon entering one part of the tunnel they first came upon a shrine or grave for one famous slayer. Loki was well renowned for his deeds and this honorary grave did him justice. The slayers Durri, Grk and Hari were paying tribute to their battle mate. "A good death he found." said Durri. The other (still hung over) slayers mummbeled their respect and were silent for a moment.
2 slayers went outside to inspect their surroundings while the others went in. In running around a part of the hallway all of a sudden they encounter a squig! The hired slayer went directly berserk and split open the squig with one blow of his mighty axe. With squigs around there are gobbo's around and with gobbo's around there was bound to be some orcs as well. Straining their ears nothing was heard by the dwarfs over the hails stones that were falling down, already the size of hens eggs. These stones were doing some serious damage, but not enough to get the dwarfs down.
Under the hail of hail stones some screams were heard nearby of other beings suffering greatly from the onslaught of the weather. According to Grach the engineer it were the possessed that were getting clobbered by the weather.

The two slayers outside all of sudden found themselves faced with a couple of orcs that came running out of the curtain of hail. In no time carnage was happening and the slayers were really hacking into the greenskins. They were no match to big axes the slayers were wielding.

The hail subsided only for a fraction and in no time the hail stones were big as...stones! The dwarfs were getting hit badly. The dwarfs proved to be very sturdy since only 1 beardling fell unconscious when a hail stone the size of an oathstone hit him square on the helmet. The ringing in his ears was to be heard for a while!

To the sounds in the battlefield the orcs were suffering more casualties to the big hail stones and the possessed as well. Some gutteral noises were heard during the monster hail. Apparantly some beastmen were also present and suffering from nature's ice rains.

In the curtain of ice some icy light was to be seen as well when some beastman shaman was using his ice crystal. "How appropriate in these conditions" Grach was thinking squaring his hammer up to run into the room where some misformed bodies were already moving along chests. "The treasure" he thought and with the rest of the warband they went in. A massacre was already going on here between the beastmen and the possessed.

Apparantly the orcs and gobbo's were also taken part, but no livin greenskin was to be seen here. From the sounds of the slayers outside the greenskins were already legging it from the battle field.
In no time the dwarfs were searching the chests for treasure while the possessed and beastmen were fighting each other. This was not long since the beastmen also ran away. After suffering heavy losses from the hail stones the fighting with the possessed proved too much.
All of a sudden the dwarfs were facing some very angry possessed.

Bjorgir and Grach squared up in a doorway fending of the inpoor of possessed in the room. The possessed were pushing hard and the rest of dwarfs took some treasure. The angry mob of possessed proved a bit too much for the already very cold dwarfs. Bjorgir was calling the retreat and the dwarfs ran off (with treasure!).

While traveling to warmer areas Grach and Bjorgir discussed how close they were to the treasure. Living treasure it was told to house, Gorgon's way. They were musing over some pints of ale in a quit border town. In the corner an apparant poor farmer was listening intently...

Hey! Isn't that Loki?

.. or what's his name, the other dead slayer?? :-)

Just added another piece to the 'Dungeon series' that features a 'tomb for yet another dead slayer'. Could not resist to build this one after reading Hans'suggestion. The tomb is in memory for poor Loki who fell at the hand of the Possessed.

Into the dungeons!

After some "Horrors of the Underground" scenario battles and a hilarious Gauntlet slaughterfest I started thinking about building some proper scenery pieces for this type of scenarios.

The pieces should be useful both as 'Dungeon tiles' and as 'normal' Mordheim scenery. That means that the size should be compatible with the Border Town Burning and Dungeon Quest tiles and with our own 'decimal basing' system.

The final inspirational 'straw' which I needed was seeing the beautiful 10mm dungeon made by (fellow EuroGT gamer) Nik Harwood.

So with the help of my former neighbour Gert who provided me with a huge stock of freshly cast tiles (@Gert: THANKS!!! :-)
I started out. So far I made three tiles as shown above. There's a center piece with four entrances and two gangways. One of the gangways has an external staircase, not very useful (or even to be used) in a dungeon setting, but allowing some tactical manoeuvring in Mordheim :-)

The second gangway has a 'wooden' bridge of the type that dungeon masters seem to prefer...

Ideas, tips and suggestions for this or the next set of dungeon pieces are more than welcome! (And also tips on the 'safe storage of scenery pieces' are very welcome :-)

Beware of pickpockets ....

Every now and then I try to convince my gaming group that I actually do something on my warband. Yesterday I was working on some pieces of my ork warband when I stumbled upon an old and lost memory.

About 10 years ago I visited an event called "Spellenspektakel". Back in those days it was no display of commercial stores under one roof, but still an event with lots of small suppliers of miniatures and cardgames. It was then that I purchased a pack of 10 of these small men:

I believe this an old imperial halfling sniper of some sort, but I'm not really sure.

And then, all of a sudden it hit me (no, not the halfling), I could use this as an halfling in mordheim. All it needed was greenstuff and patience. Unfortunately, the gun is not easily converted to a bow or sword, so ordinary halfling's were out of the question. It IS however a nice model to try and GS a crossbow. And since the halfling thief is able to carry a crossbow pistol, I cut of the front half.

The rest of the model is pretty usable for a thief in fantasy, except for that hat and oversized headset. Good thing I was already greenstuffing, so I made the little fellow a cape. This way, he's the ultimate thief, hiding from everyone and "borrowing" stuff from everywhere! He already carries 2 big pockets , so that should work out all fine.

That being said, I took out the GS and started working. This is the result:

I'm pleased with the way the cape worked out. I'm not really happy with the crossbow yet, as it looks more like a big sausage roll horizontally placed on a piece of wood. This does fit the halfling way of doing things, but I might change it.

Anyway, greenstuff rocks!

Pony wagon projects

It's been a while, posting on the blog but it has a reason! I just became a father of the coolest baby boy named Jonas! The painting projects are a bit on low priority the last couple of weeks. This week there was actually some time to paint some stuff!
I was already busy with a pony wagon for my dwarf treasure hunter warband and now finished it.

Yesterday I got a pair of ponywagons as a birthday present from one of our blog contributers Arjan. This got me a good idea on creating a pony wagon train with a pair of ponys. Since my dwarfs will be collecting gold and goodies to amounts they can't carry alone, wagons are in need! I assembled and converted the ponywagons to create the following:

Some conversions were needed. The two ponys need to be next to each other. Easy enough a dummy piece was placed where usually the single pony is.

From above the pony wagon set will look as follows:

The other conversion is the link from the second wagon to the first. The cutaway pieces of plastic frame provided nice pieces of plastic to to fit as a T-piece that will be the couple piece to the first wagon.

new slayer here

A small update on the painting front. I've been mostly busy with digging in the garden the last couple of weeks. I'm also growing a small beard and not that big so I get more and more comments of me becoming closer to dwarfmanship! In so far I'm not digging with a pick axe so I think I'm far from it, but denial is one of the first stages maybe?
Anyway, in the sparse time in between there have been moments I could pick up my paint brush and there was this slayer mini from avatars of war that screamed for being painted.
There is also a great tutorial on bugmans on how to paint a dwarf slayer with this model as an example. I studied the howto and got to work.

A good slayer with agressive looking eyes but he still ahd to maintain a sort of comic look about him what I like in mini's they shouldn/t become to serious in my opinion. I think that is why gobbo's as well as dwarfs appeal to me opposed to the empire or elves.

Aside I'm also working on a good looking thunderer for my dwarf treasurehunter warband. He's getting a leather armour apron garment thingie and coming along nicely:



And you always have to look out for loose laying TNT packages while painting:

Small overview of a part of the painting area with some other works in progress.

BTB: The lost caravans

The late evening sun shines red on the few buildings in fore town of the borderland city Mohawa. The occasional grunt and murmur sound was heard from one of the buildings. Inside a group of dwarves known as the Alequaffers was tending their wounds.
Bjorgir was discussing with Grach that it was for the best that Grach would go to the mountains to report the latest findings and doings of the warband. Not speaking of the fact it would better to get better from the horrible wound he just suffered.
Meanwhile Durri and Loki were the no happy dwarves and quaffing some stale ale. They survived a battle where they faced enormous odds. Loki even got stuck in battle with 6 beastmen before he went down. He dealt some terrible carnage and was becoming a massive dwarf all together.
“It is a terrible loss” Grom muttered. “The beardlings go for fame and adventure, not for cold nights, little food and death.” One of the beardlings wasn’t with them anymore. That last fight was too much for him. One of the Ogre villains thumped him quite badly and the beastmen trampling over him afterwards were too much.

What happened with the warband today? In this small fore town, on the middle of the road they found a wagon being trashed by ogres. 5 Ogres in total were bashing into 5 guards the Merchant had hired.

The Merchant’s wagon was already smashed to bits, the horses run away and the crew was barely standing. In the middle of this fight the dwarfs saw a fellow merchant in trouble and dashed towards the fighting spree to help. At the same time at the other end of the road a massive group of beastmen saw the riches of the Merchant’s caravan and was not planning to leave that to the ogres.


Dwarves and Beastmen charged the Ogres who proved to be very sturdy indeed. Loki and Durri were hacking and slashing into one Ogre while one the 3 beardlings were watching from a distance. They were too afraid to come even near the battle.
From a distance Grach and two thunderers were shooting away with their handguns. Clouds of smoke were billowing everywhere with every volley they shot. Grach being the expert he made a big difference in how fast he could reload and shoot. “Keep practicing lads” he shouted with a mad grin as he shot another round of lead towards the ogres.

The clouds of smoke probably obscured their vision somewhat, because after rounds of lead no ogre suffered any wounds from the handgunners! Their aim was a bit off this fight.

Eventually the beastmen managed to get 3 ogres down and the slayers also hacked one to the ground. The remaining guards took care of the last ogre and now the dwarfs were standing opposing the beastmen. With some hesitation the beastmen charged the dwarfs. Now the real fighting was commencing. First rounds the dwarfs took heavy casualties.

When Durri went down, Loki was infuriated and started chomping away. He felled 4 beastmen himself. The beardlings were going down very fast and now the thunderers were being attacked. They were no match in hand to hand fighting. Grach was swinging his hammer for all he was worth but it was to no avail. All dwarfs went down in this massacre.


Hours after the battle Bjorgir was gathering his warband, he feared the worst. “How many would have survived the onslaught?” he thought. His head still ringing from the blows he received, the noble found out there quite some survivors. Actually he brightened up seeing his entire warband there…no wait…one of the beardlings was not present. This still was a dark day for the Alequaffers. Some new grudges would be written down and remembered the next fights they entered.

Dwarf Treasurehunters WIP

My Dwarven warband is already up and running in our Border Town Burning campaign. It is always nice though to have some backup mini's for new recruits, change of gear and the like. Besides I love painting, therefore new dwarfs are in progress. This is a small update of the projects going on now.
First up is a dwarf ironbreaker. I managed to get a good deal on an old box of ironbreakers. Ideal material for my Mordheim dwarf warband in my opinion. This is the one that is now under the brush. The metal was easy of course (and there is a lot of it). But this sturdy fellow is riveted all around and I came up with the great idea of making all the details bronze. Took me a while to paint all these rivets and details altogether. The finsished pics will show this in more detail. For now this is its status:

Click to enlarge of course!


Next up is the noble, there was of course a noble leading my warband, BUT... not a real goodlooking noble-y fellow representing this. This dwarf leader is the ideal mini for leading my warband here. Lot of gold thread to paint but it is getting there.


A new thunderer in progress. i only managed to paint the leather armour he is wearing though. Awesome model though. Again a good deal on an old box of thunderers and this one with the dragon barrel is really shaping up to take part in our Mordheim battles. I also want to start with a small conversion of one of the thunderers to put a big sight on one of the guns with an enlarged eye painted on. Ideas enough, now find some time to execute.

A beardling is also being painted (only undercoat and first layer of skin). Almost not worth mentioning, but since I was posting on what projects are going on her he is:

New slayer in town. no this is not a BA Baracus Slayer personification: it is a first layered skin dwarf slayer. Took a while to pin this fellow together and greenstuff all the gaps, but he will be cool and mean looking.


A Marker or signpost is a small side project to the mini's. No big buildings this time but small details to upgrade the existing buildings we have. Also an orb, some books and chests have been painted (no pics though).

Finally, I made a statue for our scenery. For comparison my noble is standing beside it. The statue is made with air curing clay (not my favorite stuff to work with, but still reasonably result). It will be incorporated in a small marker or building/ruins/rubble or some other.