Another Small Project Selection

Hello!

It's another compilation of recent-ish small projects that haven't appeared on the blog yet! We've got a Dwarf pirate, a bunch of 'Tau' and a hot git!

First up, this guy, one of the infamous Long Drong's Slayer Pirates. This was for a discord speed paint challenge, so he was done in an hour. A classic mini that takes to contrast and the like well - though I did accidentally paint him in jeans! Didn't win the competition but he did get plenty of votes so I'm happy enough with that!

Next up, a bunch of 'Tau' Fire Warriors. A full strike squad of the little blue guys and also a unit of Breachers represented by auxiliary kin, presumably part of a trade deal with the Leagues of Votann. Slightly fiddly conversions for the Breacher weapons, but the result looks decent and with the shoulder pad they fit right in alongside their Tau allies.

Finally for this one, we have the melee monster of the Aeldari, the Avatar of Khaine! As usual, it's fun to paint a big centrepiece model, so this was a pretty good time, using mostly pretty simple techniques and a fairly limited palette. It's a great update of a classic and I think pretty hard to go far wrong with this mini, but that said I'm pretty happy with the result.

Anyway, hopefully you've enjoyed seeing these, thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.

The Vardenghast Swarm - Tyranid Combat Patrol

Hello!

The first batch of the Leviathan box I got on the painting table was this lot, the Vardenghast Swarm, aka the Tyranid Combat Patrol army. 

I usually paint my Nids in fairly big batches so I thought this would be a reasonable ask, though in hindsight it was a bit of a slog doing all this carapace at once! As you can probably see I go for the 'paint lots of little semi random lines' approach to my bug backs, and this lot have got quite a bit more armour plates than most of the previous Nid models. In fact all round the new stuff here represents a slight departure from the smoother Tyranid aesthetic that was laid down with the 3rd edition revamp, and takes a lot of design cues from the older 2nd edition models, in my opinion at least. Personally I'm ok with this, but it does mean there's a lot more sticky-outy bits to paint! 

Anyway, first up, the new Termagants. I'm hopeful that even with the slightly larger bases they will still look decent alongside their many, many older siblings!

The Barbgaunts are the first of the newer breed here, and there's certainly a lot going on here. Being hybrid organisms I debated painting the guns in a different scheme, but in the end opted to keep them on brand, with a bit of a green glow from the symbiotic brains as a spot colour.

Von Ryan's Leapers - a very cool trio of models, but man that is a lot of plates to highlight! You can see here that I incorporated some rubble into my usual swamp bases for this set, a lot of them are standing on tactical ruins!

The boss of this lot, the winged Prime. Another cool kit but another one that's a fair bit more knobbly than his predecessors. Also pretty hard to get a good angle for him to show off wings, skin, carapace, and face!

Finally from this swarm, the Psychophage. This is the model that most drastically departs from previous Tyranid design conventions (bulging abdomen like a spider, reversed back legs, no hooves), but also I think my favourite model in the whole set. Just awfully glibly and horrible looking, a true alien terror. Also had the most fun of this batch painting this one.

And here they are together - sort of fitting into the light box! And I managed to just about paint them all in time for a game!

This was my third game of 10th ed and my first of the new Combat Patrol, against Orks fighting over their town!

It was a lot of fun, both sides having a nice mix of units and the scenario having a nice mix of skill and luck required to win - making for a close game until the end.

Both sides lost their 'chaff' units quickly, with this one Nob being the last 'regular' Boyz that whittled down the Leapers to a single model on one wound.

The bigger units were a tougher nut to crack however as the Warboss and Deff Dread took several attempts to down the Psychophage, losing the Boss in the process.

This mission had disappearing objectives and it came down to holding the remaining No-man's land one to win. Sadly for me the remaining one was in the Ork half of the board so I could only pile a few Termagants onto it against the surviving Deff Dread and two Deffkoptas. A narrow loss for the Tyranids, but a really fun game all the same. It took us about two hours to play, with a lot of rule checking, so I could easily see getting through a game in 90 mins, and playing something like a 5 game event in a day. I certainly enjoyed myself, and I hope you did too! Thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

My Seraphon Update

Hello!

Another Seraphon post, this time with stuff for me! As mentioned before, I managed to grab most of a launch box, so here's what I did with my own new Slann and Raptadons:

Raptadon Chargers - I opted to make both units the melee focused ones, which seem the most powerful individually, as I'm probably not going to be running enough of them to make the synergy between the two types reliable, they are more likely to be running out on their own to charge onto objectives or get in the way of stuff. Still, I'm a big fan of these models and I enjoyed painting them with a more muted but hopefully still striking scheme. They are based on the Snake-kicking Secretarybird, not quite a desert creature for the theme but I think it works well alongside the mostly brown lizards.

And here is my new Slann, sitting on his sandstone throne. I used pretty much all the alternative components to the lava one I built previously, including the cheeky Snakebite symbol at the top! Once again, it's a great kit and I had a good time painting him a bit like the Hypnotoad!

Here he is side-by-side with his predecessor. I didn't quite realise how much bigger this model is! The old frog isn't too far off but his throne is tiny- makes him look very cramped!

Of course the box also came with a new Battle Tome and assorted cards to go with it. Before got round to painting up the models, I had a go with the new rules, playing against Blades of Khorne with a Koatl's Claw Coalesced list. 

The game ended up in a narrow loss, but was pretty close and probably could have gone either way based on a couple of key rolls. The Saurus units felt a lot better than they did previously, with extra wounds, better attacks and better save near objectives made them really tough to shift outside of mortal wounds from charging bloodletters. The army rule changing from +1 to hit to +1 to wound on the charge was a big improvement, allowing it to stack with all out attack for a pretty nasty charge from pretty much anything Saurus. Both the dinosaurs I used, the Carnosaur and Troglodon felt much more impactful as well, with more beneficial buffing rules, extra wounds and more forgiving degradation. Judging by internet reaction it looks like the Starborne are the more powerful option these days, but I'm happy enough with the improvements to continue to play them as the no-nonsense fighting lizards I'm sort-of used to. I'm a little disappointed that the Saurus Knights got left out the book in favour of newer, bigger models, but with the doubling of cost for Warriors I've got plenty to fill the gaps!

Hopefully there will be some more AoS oppertunities coming soon, I would love the get the new units on the table, and play around with more of the new rules. As an aside, all the cards that came with the box are great, and I'm glad 40k has gone to data-cards, they are super useful compared to flipping through a codex or searching on an app! Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.