The Gargoyle

A quiet afternoon in Mordheim and the Slayers were stomping around through some backalley. They were near the plaza with the former church with the big Gargoyle on the roof. Of course more gargoyles can be found in the city of Mordheim, but this one was particular mean looking and grimy as can be. The slayers were not complete though, just a group of 5 dwarfs. The last battle at the great library had some pretty hefty casualties. Two slayers were still recovering from grievous wounds.
The group of five rummaging through the streets contained now only two slayers and 3 dwarf followers. This provides a better chance for the slayer's doom now two slayers are recovering. They were very anxious to encounter some worthy enemies. On the other side of the plaza they suddenly heard some squabling orcs. A nice warm up for the slayers! The glow of some weirdstone shards was casting a green shine on the gloomy plaza.

The slayers stopped to hear what was up nearby and better yet, how much orcs were in the neighbourhoud. When stopping they could hear not only some babbling orcs but also some pirates heading towards the ugly gargole. When they listened very carefully they heard another group approaching with some sloppy and lurching noises. Them filthy undead were approaching as well! Nice, the slayers were in their element. The 3 followers were determined but with 3 foes entering the same area, and only the five of them there...they weren't looking for their doom!
Something was going on with the Gargoyle, that much was clear. All groups were heading that way so it must interesting. The dwarfs ran through the alley towards the plaza. In the open on the far left some orcs were rummaging through some old barrels. On the opposite side of the square the pirates were entering the battlefield and to the right some feint forms of some undead were seen moving behind some windows.

One of the pirates was swinging herself 2 stories up in one tower. What was going on there? The undead seem to be weary of open areas and were cowering and hiding!
With one zombie in the open one of the slayers saw a nice fight and wanted to be there first! Since he was tattooed with a special rune enabling him to close in with his enemy very quick he got to the zombie first! The dwarf went berserk on the zombie and with some decapitated limbs, went down directly. Since a zombie losing limbs was not that uncommon, the zombie was not out yet! The other trollslayer followed behind but was not that quick as his companion.
The 3 remaining dwarfs were taking it slowly and approached the orcs on a safe distance, they might shoot them first to soften them up.
Meanwhile the orcs reached the gargoyle and started bickering in front of the statue, what were they up to?

The pirates were keeping their distance, but the cracking of a whip revealed their presence. Still the slayers could not see the other pirates but there was some small fighting going on behind a building near the plaza.
Out of nowhere some ghouls charge the slayer who is hacking at the zombie. In no time the slayer is surrounded by 4 or 5 enemies. Also the second slayer is getting surrounded by foul undead. But for the slayers it is their pint of beer, screaming their challenges they enter the fight.
The 3 other dwarfs shoot some volleys with their guns into the orcs, filling the plaza with clouds of smoke. Meanwhile the two slayers kill some undead (zombie and ghoul go down).
The orcs seem to have awakened the gargoyle with one of the pieces of weirdstone. Not only that, the lowlife orcs sent the gargoyle towards the 3 shooting dwarfs! This was a bit too much and the hammerer went down instantly. The other 2 dwarfs started resculpting the gargoyle since they have a nack with stone, but the gargoyle keeps it up (it is hard as stone :) ).
The dishounourous orcs now charge the 2 remaining dwarfs who are in combat with the gargoyle. 3 Orcs on one dwarf was a bit too much, expecially after the gargoyle attacks and he went down.
In the background the dwarfs heard a lot of gunfire from the pirates, a lot of running around and it seemed they were heading towards the orcs but still keeping a safe distance.
The slayers were occupied with undead and even more poured from the surrounding buildings. How many could be hiding there! To complete the undead fray a vampire dived from a wall onto the slayers as well. The slayers held and one even managed to get the vampire severlely wounded! 3 ghouls with swords and daggers were attacking the slayers like madmen, but the sturdy dwarf axes seemed to parry each lethal blow! Now it is the Slayers turn to return the blows to the undead and a dreg gets split in two and the vampire goes down as one of the ghouls. This is carnage, the 2 slayers are in their element and wishing the other slayers would never return to this group. More enemies for them, it does not get any better then this!

The dwarfs with the gargoyle are faring worse. The gargoyle is too quick and critically hits one dwarf. The other dwarf meets the orc boss and does not survive.
The pirates are running on the walkways. After their shooting, the orcs now take up their slings and have a go at the pirates but miss everything. Is it the orcs aim, or the pirate swiftness? One of the pirates does a diving charge into the orcs but misses completely. A big thudding noise can be heard behind a wall. A few seconds later the pirate emerges apparently unscathed and dusting himself, trying to look cool (still swaying slightly).
The orcs try to advance over the plaza but get horribly shot at before they reach the slayers. One of the orcs gets knocked down by one of the whip-carrying girl pirates.
The slayer-undead fight gets up close and personal and the vampire wakes up just in time and takes out one of the slayers. With so much foes for the one slayer that is left, it is finally too much. Still it takes a couple of dregs to let the last slayer meet his doom.
The undead are now heavily bruised and the orcs easily kill the vampire (after the slayers did all the work).

Eventually the undead route and leave the table. The only ones left are the orcs and pirates. The pirates get some casualties but are ice cold and keep their ground for some time. After some more fighting the pirates decide it is too much for them and leave on their own account.
The lowly orcs have their victory and the other warbands have heavy casualties. For the slayers it was carnage, but it is what they were looking for. The slayer warband gets only more battlehardened and have even more lust for seeking their doom in Mordheim. The slayers will be ready for the next fight!

The inside of the Towers

Due to a lot of circumstances work on the two towers has not progressed that much further. However, since I got a request at Tom's Boring Mordheim forum to show the inside work, I will certainly do so ;-)
The first two pictures show the 'tower with the stairs'. This one has a (custom made, since I accidentally used the parts elsewhere) stairs that leads to the entrance. The first floor is therefor not located at ground level. I'm still not sure whether to seal off the space underneath this floor or to make some sort of dungeon or cellar underneath.

The second tower is featured on the other two pictures. This tower has the first floor on ground level, which means that even a large creature like an Ogre can enter this level. Although it wouldn't be able to use the Heroquest door ;-)

The second floor was allocated a little lower than the one in the other tower, in both cases 'normal' sized miniatures are able to stand inside the tower on the second floor(s).
The floors were made out of balsa wood, the inside walls got some 'plastering' to hide the sterile clean plastic original (lack of) plaster. The outsides of the buildings are out of the box very nicely decorated.
One of the towers was battlemented (if that's the correct word), the other got the little 'observatorium' at the roof. Both are in desperate need for a paint job (If I only had time), but have been used in Mordheim battles already. They make very useful (and nice) scenery.

Mordheim Slayer warband painting (1)

The Dwarf Slayer warband is being painted! The Mordheim scenery is taking up a lot of time, fun though, but the dwarfs don't get painted in this way! The first part I started with is the dwarf skin. It has to look muscular so it will take some layers of paint to get a the muscle toning just right. The first layer was bronzed flesh after I applied flesh wash. The next is again a layer of bronzed flesh where you leave the very heavy shaded areas as they are.
Taking pictures from the dwarfs is quit difficult with a digital SLR camera and flash. The following picture you can see the shade of the lens after the flash in the picture. Still a good picture though (handy tip anyway when making macro pictures in the evening: don't use your flash so close!)

This week friday a new batlle is on the program and with the gold my slayers aquired last battle, I hired a new dwarf clansman with a brace of pistols. This results in the following great miniature:

Also worth mentioning is my new desktop LED lamp I now use for painting. It is great! The best light every, it does not turn hot has hallogen does and it only uses 4Watts of energie! How cool is that!

Modular Mordheim Buildings

Quick overview in the Mordheim Building department. We're building like dwarfs overhere! With the first hirst arts molds I got a lot of 'simple' building blocks. This builds some nice and clean buildings but nothing fancy so far (al though this already looks good in my opinion). I defined some basic bases for building ruined buildings, streets and large items. This results in the following measurements of bases for our modular Mordheim building blocks:

regular building: 100 x 215 mm
street: 100 x 300 mm
large base: 300 x 300 mm

In the following picture you can find the buildings I made until now. Also the new large city centre is visible. With the fountain water has to be added and it is finished as well.

Mordheim Slayer warband basing

A quick note on my bases for my new Mordheim warband: the slayers. I took some of the tiles from my hirst arts molds and painted them separately. Made some slots in them so my slayers will fit in nicely. I was a bit worried about damage to the tiles when playing because they are made from simple plaster. The paint will prevent some but I added some mat varnish and I think it looks good as bases for my Slayer warband.
Can you spot the bases that don't have varnish on them? :)

And this is how the dwarfs will look like on the bases. This is (of course) not a slayer but one of my dwarf henchmen:

modelling day results

Our modelling session from a week ago was productive as you might have seen. Since then the scenery has been painted and is now ready. More new buildings added for our city of Mordheim! The first one here is the housing Ludo was making. Some nice wooden accents around the house and a very playable piece I might say.

The second building for showing you is the second warehouse I was making. It is number 2 of a set of three. As said in can be used alone or in conjuction with the other warehouses as a block of buildings.

The building Hans is working on (his church like structure) is already painted, but I'm without pics here so that one will show in some of the next posts. For now I will leave you with a small overview of the present Mordheim Scenery. This will look good on the batllefield when we are going to play on friday the 13th.

Last in a quick snapshot of the 3rd warehouse I'm making. The first floor is done and glued together. Now for the second layer and then slap some paint on and the set of 3 is complete!

Modelling day

Autumn is making the days grow shorter, colder and wetter outside. This means we have to entertain ourselves inside with a day of modelling. I've been casting me new Hirst arts moulds to create a big pile of building blocks after the inn project. With this in place Hans and Ludo had time to come over for a day of building buildings. They wanted to get a go at these new building blocks and when it results in more buildings for our Mordheim games, that is a good thing!

I set up the table with all bulding blocks sorted in small boxes, put out the glue, paint, sawed some MDF bases and we were good to go. We started before noon playing around with all the blocks before glueing them into a building

Hans started maybe 3 concept buildings and destroyed them all before really deciding on building a church like ruined building. Ludo was very creative with a mosaic flooring and a nice wooden lid outside that could be an entrance to a basement of some sort.

Myself I started a project for 3 storage houses that can be put next to each other as a block of houses but also apart be separate buildings. The idea is that the centre building has 3 walls and that the left and right wall act as a wall for the other storage houses if put together. The left and right storeage house will have then only 2 major walls and act as real ruins once put by themselves on the battlefield. The 3 buildings will have a small pavement at the front and very small allyway like road at the back. Today it was the centre building I'd be working on.

I made some sketches first so building is easier. Building out of the blue is somewhat difficult because you have to build the entire concept or idea without glue first to check if it will work. And building 'dry' is very unstable :) and will get you started anew some times :).
We were using a goblin shaman as a test miniature to check the buildings sizes, windows position, etc. He will be posing in some of the pictures in this post (a real celebrity you might say :) ).

Hans decided on building a church like structure with some open walls for good playability.

No wooden flooring was needed here, but some wooden benches for this curch were made with the latches from one of the moulds. Ludo also used this concept for putting up some benches against the wall in his building. Cool concept looking good in both buildings I'd say.

My building was coming together nicely and with 3 stories high not a small building. Here you can see the concept with twoo wooden floors and both Hans and Ludo concentrated at work.

Ludo decided it would be a good idea to have nails in the flooring and started hammering away on his paint mixing tile.

The sounds were like he was hitting through the tile but nothing broke and the result is a very nice looking building here.

Some details on the curch benches here. Simple concept but coming together nicely in the church building. Keep in mind when creating these kind of small features for your building not to glue them in place before painting.

It will look like the following picature when finished but you can see here that painting this when everyting is glued together will be a nightmare if not impossible.

We did not get to painting yet after a day playing around with the plaster building blocks but the final result looks good! The concept of modular buildings that fit together (base size wise) is proving to work as you can see in this final picture. This will conclude this post of the modelling day that was relaxing, fun, productive, creative and something we will definitely repeat.
Of course the finished products will be shown here on your Mordheim building scenery blog! :)