Custom Norse Berzerkers (W.I.P.)

Kill! Maim! Burn! - Khorne Berzerker Time!

On the one hand, I don't like the plastic Berzerkers that come with the Chaos Space Marines starter box. On the other hand, I don't think the look of the Forge World Berzerkers would fit into my army - too khorny and too little norse atmosphere. So, I had a different idea how to do Norse Berzerkers, and here is a picture of my prototype:

My Norse Berzerker prototype

Here are the bits I used building the model:

• Torso, head, arms, weapon and shield: Chaos Marauder Horsemen
• Legs and backpack: Khorne Berzerkers
• Green Stuff to fill the gaps or to cover them with fur

It's not that easy to build as the normal Norse Marines of my army because the Marauder and Marine bits are not made for fitting together. A lot of cutting, sawing and work with green stuff is going to be required if I ever want to field a whole squad of them. Tell me what you think of my berzerkers.

Gaming Day - Review and Gallery

Our Gaming Day on April 14th has been a full success. We expected about 25 people to attend, but our expectations have been surpassed: Over 30 wargamers and board game geeks gathered in Pleiskirchen to play, chat, eat and drink. We even had ourselves a small vending table with lots of Infinity material and other games (I got myself a Blood Bowl Team Manager!). I spent the whole morning playing a great game of Descent and got an introduction game to Infinity in the afternoon. Apart from that, there was a 40k table, a Warhammer Fantasy table, one big and several smaller Flames of War tables, three Infinity tables and some others for aerial and naval combat as well as for historical battles.

My personal conclusions for the Day:

• I can hardly wait for the 2nd edition of Descent to be published, then bought and painted by me.
• I need to play more and worry les about big armies (smaller or simply squad sized games like Infinity or Mortheim somehow suit me better).
• You cannot have such a thing as enough scenery in a game of Infinity.
• Dystopian Wars has got some badass miniatures! (Iron Sky anyone?)
• As has Aeronautica Imperialis - my Eldar Skyhost is heading in my direction via Royal Mail right now. 
• Blood Bowl Team Manager is tons of fun.
• We need to repeat this Gaming Day soon. Maybe even this year.

Here are the impressions of our Gaming Day (more and utterly blurry photos in my Dropbox gallery):

Panorama view of our Gaming Day (via a mediocre panorama app)

Chaos in the Old World: Painted Models

I was planning to do an article about Chaos in the Old World anyway. But since I managed to paint all of the game's models in one whole day, I wanted to show them to you. Since I swapped to white primer, painting really got faster - maybe a solution on my being-a-slow-painter-issue (expect an article about black vs. white primers soon). Without further ado, here are the miniatures:

Bloodthirster, Bloodletters and Khorne Cultists

Great Unclean One, Plagebearers and Nurgle Cultists

Lord of Change, Pink Horrors and Tzeentch Cultists

Keeper of Secrets, Daemonettes and Slaanesh Cultists 

Vermin Lord, Rat Ogres and Clan Rats 

New GW Paints - Colour Range Comparison Chart

What? I have to learn those names - again?

A few weeks ago, my friends and I talked about the new paint range from Games Workshop and came to the conclusion that all of the new names - except for Khorne Red and Nurgling Green - were worse than the old ones. Okay, after the years we might have gotten sentimental about certain paint names (No Chaos Black anymore?!), but none of us understood why GW decided to rename its entire range.

Most of us, especially those who are fed up with GW's recent actions anyway, want to make the switch towards Vallejo paints. Vallejo products are high quality in general, their paints doubly so. One more reason for me to switch are GW's new paint pot lids, which don't stay open at all - a circumstance I find annoying when I just want to drybrush something or paint small details without my wet palette and need to use the paint out of the pot (and no, they don't dry out quick if you don't forget to close them again).

DakkaDakka has a paint colour range comparison chart (Web Version / JPEG Download) for all those who are confused with the new names or even those who want to make the switch to Vallejo paints (a service which GW's own comparison chart doesn't provide).

It's not that I'd throw away all my GW paints and buy hundreds of Vallejo products tomorrow. But I mostly paint with wet palettes, so Vallejo's dropper bottles are more suited to me anyway. GW abandoning Chaos Black, Skull White, Bleached Bone and many other paint names for no particular reason is only making that switch easier for me.

For others, like people who are fairly new to the hobby and painting, the re-organisation of the paint range might even be a good thing. What's your opinion on the new paint range and the name change?

How to paint Skaven - efficiently!

I am back from our Gaming Day (much fun, big success - expect photos soon) and back from my trip to Ingolstadt. On the menu today: Painting Skaven without going nuts.

I've painted quite a number of Skaven and still consider myself sane. You may now ask: How did I do that? The answer lies in spray painting the model with brown instead of black or white and to paint a lot of models at once. Also, you might consider ordering some seasons of your favorite TV show from Amazon (I always recommend The Big Bang Theory) before you start - because it's still not magic and will take a while ;-)

Spray painting your Skaven brown will reduce the paint time dramatically

Alas, I can only provide you with a written guide. But I plan to do a step by step guide in the future (since you can never have enough rats on the table), so you can see how easily this can be done:

1. Build your Skaven
2. Use sand and glue or textured paint, e.g. those from the Vallejo range to cover the base
3. Spray Paint your Skaven with brown paint. I suggest Army Painter's Leather Brown
4. Paint everything on the model with its base colour (e.g. metal parts with Chainmail, cloth with Scab Red, skin with Elf Flesh etc.)
5. Wash the whole model (e.g. skin with Ogryn Flesh wash, red and brown parts and the base with Devlan Mud wash, everything else with Badab Black wash)
6. Let the miniature dry and drybrush every part from the model with a brighter colour than you used in step 4 (e.g. red parts with Blood Red, metal parts with Mithril Silver etc.)
7. Finish the details on each miniature
8. Decorate the base if you want to

The reason this way is great is because brown is a perfect basic colour for almost every other colour, especially for red, skin tones, and brown obviously. So you'll need much fewer layers of paint until the miniature is done. I hope this helps. Do you know other ways to stay sane while painting hundreds of Skaven?

Saturday is Gaming Day

I am really looking forward to the Gaming Day in Pleiskirchen tomorrow. Our Local Gaming Club Die Grüne Horde (The Green Horde) is going to host this event, which isn't going to be any form of tournament. Instead, we want to host a broad selection of games where people can look into those games they don't play themselves and explain those they play to others. Right now, there is going to be Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer Fantasy, Flames of War, Infinity, Aeronautica Imperialis, Descent, Warhammer Invasion, Chaos in the Old World, Dystopian Wars, my friend and his father's custom historical board game and several others I certainly forgot.

Knowing myself, I am going to take a lot of photos which you all get to see next week.


PS: After the event, I'm directly going to Ingolstadt to visit my girlfriends relatives. So, most likely there aren't going to be new articles until Tuesday.

Daemon Prince of Chaos (W.I.P.)

I hope you enjoyed your weekend and found all your Easter eggs!

Today, I want to show you my Daemon Prince of Chaos. I've built this guy about two years ago and didn't paint him much over the time. Maybe that's because the model is definitely going to be the army's centerpiece and I don't want to mess this up. I'm telling you how to build the metal Daemon Prince because I don't like the new plastic version of the model which looks too much like a cartoon figure to me.

My winged Daemon Prince

Here is what you need to build a metal winged Daemon Prince of Chaos, spiced with some hints for building the miniature:

• Metal Daemon Prince of Chaos
• Metal Wings from the Greater Daemon of Tzeentch
• Green Stuff for the hood and to fill the gap between shoulders and wings
• Important: The wings need to be pinned to the Daemon Prince miniature. Without pinning and probably a lot of green stuff, the prince won't be winged for long ;-)

Apart from pinning the wings to the miniature, building a Daemon Prince like this one is pretty straightforward. Still, I can't decide if I'm going to paint him in the colours of my Dire Wolves or in the colours of the Death Guard legion I'm about to start building this year. My Dire Wolves are linked to the Space Wolves chapter, so I'd rather go with the concept of many great leaders, i.e. a lot of mighty Chaos Lords and Sorcerers. With his angelic wings and the moody hood, I find that this Daemon Prince would go well with a Death Guard army. What do you think?

Tutorial: Fiery Daemon Sword

Today, my Soul Grinder is going to be in the centre of attention, or to be exact, its sword. People sometimes ask me how I did the fire effect and it's not that difficult at all.

A sword of fire will draw attention to your model.

So, here is the step by step guide to painting a fiery daemon sword:

1. Paint the burning part of the sword entirely white.
2. Strongly drybrush this part of the sword with a yellow paint, leaving a few white spots visible.
3. Drybrush this part of the sword with an orange paint.
4. Lightly drybrush this part of the sword with a red paint (note: the more steps you take, i.e. the more you blend the colours while going from white to red, the finer the effect will look afterwards) 
5. Now drybrush this part of the sword really lightly with a black paint.
6. Assuming you already painted the metal part of the sword: Strongly drybrush the area between the fire and the metal part of the sword to give it a charred look.

Have fun trying this on your own Soul Grinder or daemonic weapon! But you could just as easily use this method to paint any fire on any other model. Here are two pictures of the complete model which didn't quite fit into my improvised cardboard photo box:

Watch this: Wil Wheaton's "Table Top"

I highly recommend you to watch the first episode of Table Top by Wil Wheaton:

Wil Wheaton and guests, Sean Plott (host of “Day9TV”, a Starcraft II dedicated webcast on how to be a better gamer), Grant Imahara (host of Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters”), and Jenna Busch (geek blogger, writer and host) play Small World!

The show is really entertaining as well as helpful to understand the game mechanics of Small World. I can hardly wait to watch the upcoming episodes.

Children of the Horned Rat

Quuuiiiieeeeeek! Hide your children! The Skaven are invading our lands! Well, okay, miniature Skaven at least. But nonetheless evil and spiky (yes, ouch) little creatures that I learned to love since my friends gave me a box of Clan Rats as a birthday present in 2010. I bought an Island of Blood box not long after this. Today, I'm going to show you the first decent pictures I was able to make of this army. Expect a quick painting tutorial in the near future.

Weapon Teams are the reason I am collecting Skaven. Mischievous rats yielding heavy weaponry with the Warhammer Fantasy equivalent of uranium ammunition? Lovely! But I'm still waiting for Games Workshop or Warhammer Forge to release a proper model for the Ratling Gun (I'm rather unimpressed by the current version).

The Skaven Master Moulder and the Warlock Engineer are nice miniatures. I love to paint warpstone and warpstonish cables - so, yeah, I loved painting those two a lot.

Rat Ogres are great miniatures! I love their look and the possibilities to convert them are endless (trust me, as a chaos player I know what I'm talking about).