The ETC is a hardcore team event where you bring your filthiest list or you go home. I played it back in 2009 with Team Ireland and this year I was invited to play for Team Wales at relatively short notice as they needed to replace a last-minute cancellation.  I thought I was lucky when the Welsh asked me to use a Warriors of Chaos army as it would mean that I could use an army that I already had rather than paint up a new one in a hurry. Unfortunately, the particular niche that my army was intended to fill in the Welsh lineup required a fairly specific build and I ended up having to paint up almost everything I needed anyhow. The only parts of my existing army that I could use were my Sorceror on a Disc, my Chaos Knights, my marauders and my Chosen (which were pulling duty as halberd armed Chaos Warriors in this list). I had to paint up 50 more Marauders, 11 Chaos Warriors with Halberds and a mounted Chaos Lord of Khorne to bring the army up to spec and this was bolstered with a Hellcannon borrowed from one of the other Welsh team members.

Somehow, and with significant assistance from my wife, that lot got painted up in the three weeks or so that I had before the event and I took off to sunny Montreux. That part of Switzerland is a beautiful place and Montreux itself is particularly stunning.  I was staying at a Youth Hostel just down the lake shore from the event hall and my walk to and from the tournament every day was just incredible. The ETC itself is held over two days with three games on each day. Our first game was against the Greek team who were a good tip for the winners’ podium and so we weren’t expecting to take much away from that. Sure enough we got destroyed – my game vs their Dark Elf player ended 16-4 against after a methodical demolition job. The Hellcannon did well to eat a War Hydra in close combat but that was the only real bright spot for me. Next up we played team Norn Iron and I was feeling good about this as every time I’d played them in previous events, I’d won. Sure enough, I blew through their Dwarf player and scored 15 points for the team. Our final opponents for the day were team Netherlands where I got schooled 20-0 by a Vampire Counts player.

After a hard day of wargaming we headed into the town where we quickly realised that Montreux is not for people like us. Unless you are fabulously wealthy your entertainment options are going to be extremely limited. We sat and had horrendously expensive pizza and then sat on the beach drinking spiced rum until the small hours. The whole weekend was blisteringly hot and, as the town is sheltered by the mountains, there is no wind so the air stays warm even at night.

The next day we were ready for more punishment and we were drawn against Team Belgium to kick off. I played against a Dwarf army that was practically identical to the one I’d murdered on the previous day except this time everything went wrong for me. Another 20-0 shoeing ensued. After the Belgians we were drawn against Hungary where an Empire army proceeded to pull my army apart and then jump on the bits. Some horrendously bad dice sealed the deal and handed 20 gift-wrapped points to my opponent. I don’t like to blame the dice too much in games because generally losing due to dice means that you are leaning on luck rather than good play to win, however this was about as bad as I’ve ever had and I’m not sure that I could have done things differently. My Sorceror failed 7 leadership tests in a row and fled off the table, 8 out of 10 Chaos Knights failed a strength test and were killed by a Dwellers Below, 34 attacks from halberd-wielding Chaos Warriors of Khorne scored 4 hits and no wounds on the Arch Lector, two hits from a mortar killed an entire unit of Marauders in a single turn. Stuff like that. Finally we were drawn against Team Scotland who ended up beating us narrowly and me handily. By this point there was nothing to play for for either team so we all kicked back and had  a relaxed game. I played another Empire army and, once more found that I had no way to protect myself from his magic and warmachines. Still it was a fun game and we’d hit our team goal of not coming last.

In the end we came 24th out of 28 teams and we were thrilled to win the award for most sporting team. We celebrated with more spiced rum on the beach then I bade farewell to Captain Matt and the rest of the lads and headed back to the hostel. I took a lot of pictures over the weekend; pictures of Montreux can be found here while pictures of armies and miniatures from the ETC itself can be found here.

After my adventure in Switzerland I had a couple of weeks before I was off on a real holiday to the US. In that time I managed to finish painting up an HQ choice for my Grey Knight army. The figure is Castellan Crowe but I will generally be using him as a standard Brotherhood Champion and attaching him to a Razorback squad. Following my experiments with the armour of the Grey Knight Terminators, I decided to try a different tack for Crowe. His armour is heavily shaded and highlighted with Charadon Granite and Vallejo Ivory respectively. Rather than leave the silver areas flat and highlight the edges, I chose to accentuate the curves of the armour plates by painting in the sharp reflections and then contrasting these with deep shadows in a non-metallic metal style – although I was using a metallic colour as a base. This was much more successful than the Terminators were although it was time consuming to achieve. Originally his sword was blue but I painted myself into a corner when I was doing the banner and needed a strong colour that would contrast with the blue field of the banner and so I repainted the sword yellow and repeated this for the chained blade on the banner itself. The runes on the blade were done in blue and a weak object source lighting effect was added by means of a blue glaze. The other detailing was done to match the Terminators except the cloak which was painted a pale yellowish brown to complement the sword and had a triple stripe painted on the hem with some freehand lettering added.

More pictures of Crowe are on the Grey Knights gallery page.

The first thing I completed was a squad of Terminators. In previous incarnations of the army, Grey Knight Terminators were the mainstay of the force. This isn’t as true as it once was but Terminators as a troops choice is still an appealing prospect. There are a lot of options in the box and the codex lists a bewildering array of builds for each terminator in a squad. I thought about magnetising them but figured that I was probably going to field them as a mostly vanilla squad so I gave them a mixture of free upgrades and left it at that. The arms were painted separately on some of the figures as the two-handed weapons are held in such a way as to make painting the figure difficult when they are attached.

I wanted to try and experiment with different ways to paint Marines and the method I chose for these wasn’t entirely successful in the end. To start with I airbrushed them all Chainmail, then I sprayed in some Charadon Granite/Badab Black into the lowlights. I’m trying to do a similar effect to non-metallic metals but using metallic paint while still keeping the extreme contrasts between highlights and lowlights. Once the lowlights were sprayed into armour joints and the lower facing areas of plate, I started to shade with Mithril Silver and Vallejo Ivory. This part was done with a brush rather than with the airbrush. I hatched Chainmail across the plates to smooth the lowlights a little and then built up the highlights on the upper surfaces before applying a glaze of Enchanted Blue to smooth everything out and to break the harsh silver. Finally I added the extreme highlights in white and ivory.

Next up were the Nemesis Force Weapons and I was pretty excited about being able to do these superfast with the airbrush. “Haha!” I thought, “no tedious blending for me!” I masked half of each side of each blade and went to work then repeated the process on the other half. Unfortunately the tape I used lifted the paint off which meant that I had to do so much tidying up with the brush that I ended up practically painting the entire blades by hand anyway. They started off Mordian Blue and then had Ultramarines Blue painted across the flat of the blades before the shimmer patterns were painted in with Ice Blue and Skull White. This is easier than it looks, it’s just time consuming. Very thin paint and very fine strokes in a diagonal hatching pattern are what you need with a few lines outside the main lighting area to provide some relief.

With the blades done it was time to finish off all the detail. The gold was painted with Tausept Ochre before a thin coat of Vallejo’s Oro Glorioso was applied over the top. Then a wash of Brown Ink defined the details before the individual letters and other details were then picked out with a Mithril Silver/Oro Glorioso mix. The Stormbolter casings and the pauldron shields were painted with Scab Red and this was highlighted with Tallarn Flesh mixed with a little Blazing Orange. Heraldic patterns were painted on in Skull White and Chaos Black. Someone senior at GW – I seem to remember that it was Alan Merritt but I may be mistaken – once explained to me that red, white and black are ‘good fascist colours which is why they are used so much for the Imperium’. Regardless, they provide a very bold scheme to make detail pop so I reserved their use for heraldry.

The bases are resin Ruins bases from Microart Studios. I bought a bunch of them in all the sizes I’d need for a Space Marines army so I have some at 25mm for power-armoured marines, 40mm for Terminators, 60mm for Dreadnaughts and a couple of 120mm oval bases for a Stormraven and a Dreadknight. As the army has a low model count and every figure is elite, I could justify putting everything on a special base. These were painted Charadon Granite and then drybrushed in Graveyard Earth and Codex Grey.

Next up was a Razorback as a way to test vehicle painting with the airbrush. Again, this was sprayed Chainmail and then the Charadon Granite/Badab Black mixture was liberally sprayed into the angles between armour plates. Successive thin coats of Chainmail were then sprayed in blend these lowlights in and I did a few passes with Mithril Silver over the upward facing plates. Then the recesses in the tside armour were masked off and Scab Red was sprayed in there as well as on the cowling for the lascannons. The red was highlighted in the same way as for the Terminators’ Stormbolters and then I wen to work with some freehand. I want the Grey Knight vehicles to look baroque and covered in battle-honours so I painted in a chapter symbol on one door along with some gold scrollwork on the red recesses. The gold was shaded by painting thin lines of black and white around it to make it stand out from the red background and I took the oppportunity to abuse my classical education with some cod Latin on the scroll and the side of the lascannon housing (‘Lux ex Umbra’ means Light From the Shadows). One front glacis was painted with heraldry that will eventually match a Strike Squad Justicar  and the other got a numerical designation in accented gold.

The lenses  in the cupola were painted in much the same way as for the Nemesis Force Weapons, thin hatching patterns of Ice Blue and Skull White over a Mordian/Ultramarine Blue base.  Some final highlighting on the edges with ivory and the tank was done. I didn’t paint the interior on this one but I may well do for future tanks. I have a half completed Stormraven which has got as far as a detailed interior and a basecoat on the outside so far, any Landraiders will also have detailed interiors for sure.

Overall I’m enjoying painting these more than I expected I would, the figures are gorgeous and by stretching myself with the ‘true-metallic metal’ technique I can learn more about painting through these. I haven’t got the technique down properly yet but I have a few more squads to paint and I’ll keep experimenting with each one.

You can see more photos of the finished Grey Knights as well as some work in progress shots on this gallery page.

Originally this was part of the 8 armies initiative that I was doing along with some friends from work. The idea was that we would all build up WFB armies together and play against each other as well as enter some of the local tournaments as a group. Progress has been spotty for most of the people involved and, while most people have at least a couple of units painted up each, no-one except me actually has a playable army. I’ve ended up with about 3000 points of Chaos Warriors with a strong Tzeentch theme and visual connection so I’m scoring it as a win. Some of the units have been showcased here already – particularly the Chaos Knights and the Army Standard Bearer but most of the army hasn’t been photographed properly until tonight so here is the rest of it as well as some writeups for the more interesting pieces.

First up is the Chaos Knight Champion. When I painted up the Chaos Knight unit a while ago, I painted each of them individually as I wanted them to stand out. This looked good but it made it hard to determine which of them was the unit champion as they all looked ‘special’. So I decided to convert up a champion figure who would stand out in a unit of individuals. I cut and greenstuffed a Chaos Steed so that it was rearing up, greenstuffed the rider so he was leaning forwards in the saddle and then reversed the grip on his lance so he would be stabbing downwards rather than holding it at parade rest. After that it was time to paint him and I needed the colour scheme to be just as eyecatching as the pose. For this I decided to go back a little to a slightly older version of the Chaos lore and make the champion a corrupted Bretonnian knight who has succumbed to the insidious wiles of Chaos. This reflects the older, more Faustian background rather than the current barbarian-centric version. The idea was that his original armour and barding has fused to him and become his chaos armour and the iconography of Chaos is bleeding through and subsuming the older Bretonnian heraldry. I did a a fairly simple heraldic pattern – per pale azure and argent lozengy gules, in the first two fleur de lys or. This was repeated on the armour plates of the horse barding as well as on the rider himself, his breastplate is in pale to match his arms and his shoulderpads bear the charges, blazons and fields of the appropriate side too.

Next are a brace of Chaos Sorcerors. I have two in the army, both with the Mark of Tzeentch. One is on foot and generally goes in the Warriors unit, the other is on a Disc and hunts alone. The disc-rider is one of the first units I painted for this army but I never got around to photographing him. He’s the limited edition version released to celebrate 10 years of GW Italy and GW Germany and is a really nice figure. I’ve done him with the tentacles fading from purple to pink with a fairly standard blue and yellow scheme for his armour and robes. The Sorceror on foot is likewise in blue and yellow and I’m particularly pleased with the highlighting on the back of his cloak.

10 Marauder Horsemen were another early addition to the army. These were painted fairly fast but came out looking good despite that. I used these guys as test beds for a lot of the techniques I’d use to knock out regular Marauders as quickly as possible later on. I tried not to make them too uniform so the horses are different colours and I’ve used a limited palette on the riders to make them all individual while still keeping them coherent as a unit. They have spears and a full command group which isn’t optimal and they’ve been left on the shelf for the past few games. I’m pessimistic about their effectiveness in 8th edition and they are a low priority for most lists I build these days. I guess they could be decent warmachine hunters but any army with warmachines is likely to have enough missile fire to shred light cavalry with ease. In a similar state of limbo are ten Chaos Warhounds that were added shortly after the horsemen. These are very quick to paint and also don’t seem to have much of a role any more.

The Chaos Knights have already been featured on this blog so I’ll only quickly recap these. I painted them all as individuals to reflect their status as warrior nobles amongst the rest of the army. Each of them has a different theme going on that transfers from the steed to the rider and includes the barding. Generally these ride with the Battle Standard Bearer who has also been featured previously. I run these guys with the Mark of Tzeentch and the Banner of Rage. The Battle Standard usually carries the Blasted Standard and this combination makes the unit pretty terrifying as it is frenzied and has a 4+ ward save vs all missile fire. Because the frenzy applies to the whole unit, it also means the steeds benefit which can be vital when hitting units with a high static combat resolution. Many people seem to have written off heavy cavalry in 8th but these guys are very often the army’s MVPs.

A block of Marauders grew organically over the army’s evolution. Originally there were 15 but as 8th added more benefits for larger blocks of troops they expanded in stages to their current headcount of 30. These have flails and are usually fielded in horde formation. I’ve painted them with a palette of only five or six colours to tie them together and they are definitely fast and dirty as far as quality of finish is concerned. I also have Wulfric the Wanderer and, when playing in a game where special characters are allowed, he joins the Marauders to give them his special deployment rule. In other games he’s either left on the shelf or is fielded as a regular Exalted Champion.

A Warriors of Chaos army of course should have Chaos Warriors in it and mine has 19 in a single unit (the extra spot is usually taken by the Sorceror on foot). As with the Marauders I’ve tried to mix the colours up while sticking to a fairly limited palette. I’ve used four or five different armour colours and three or four different cloak and fur combinations. These were all painted very fast – for some reason every time I played at a tournament I’d discover that my list required more warriors than I actually had ready to go so I’d spend the night before each event speed-painting half a dozen more.

Finally I have my block of Chosen. These are somewhere between the Knights and the Warriors in theme. I’ve made them all different but not to the same extent as the Knights, rather there are repeated colours in the unit but they are in general more individual than the warriors as befits their status. The champion has stone coloured armour, the rest are a mix of dark blue, pale blue, red and purple with one in particoloured blue and red armour.

You can find more images including some work in progress shots on this gallery page.

I was competing in the WFB event with my (mostly complete) Warriors of Chaos. Armies are small at 1500 points and the event features some strict composition rules that prohibit most of the nastier elements. No more than two total magic levels are allowed for example along with a blanket ban on named characters and restrictions on flyers and large targets. My army at its core is largely unchanged from previous events. The rundown is as follows:

Sorceror of Tzeentch; Ironcurse Icon, Spell Familiar (General)

Exalted Champion of Tzeentch; Chaos Steed, Blasted Standard (Army Standard Bearer)

5x Knights of Tzeentch; Full command, Banner of Rage

19x Warriors of Tzeentch; Full command, shields, War Banner

10x Chosen of Tzeentch; Full command, halberds, Lichebone Pennant, Favour of the Gods

30x Marauders; Full command, flails

The tactics are fairly straightforwards with this force, the Sorceror goes in the Warriors unit for some protection and to bolster the line with his close ranged magic, any of the infantry units acts as an anvil while the Knights are a hammer.  The Knights are a very strong unit even at higher points values and I expected them to be devastating in a game of this size.

First up was a Dwarf army. Mostly it was based around large combat blocks led by a king borne on a shield and bodyguarded by Hammerers. Two smallish Quarreller units, a couple of bolt-throwers and a Grudge Thrower were his only shooting units. He moved forwards, I moved forwards and managed to avoid his big block of hammerers for long enough to smash through his lines. By the time he’d brought the Dwarf King and his bodyguard around to bear, I’d demolished all of his support and was able to charge him from all sides with everything in my army at once. Not even Stubborn, elite Dwarves led by their king can handle that kind of punishment and the game was a massacre. I’d lost my Battle Standard Bearer to a challenge but my army was otherwise fully intact.

Next in line was a tide of Chaos Daemons. This featured a horde sized unit of Bloodletters, supported by Flamers, a Herald of Tzeentch on a disc, a single Bloodcrusher and all led by a Daemon Prince. he set up with these last two holding a flank by themselves while the Bloodletters held the centre and everything else skipped forwards to take targets of opportunity. I wasn’t sure how to take the two big guys on, especially after they demolished my Marauder block but then they carried on through into the Chaos Warriors and were summarily dispatched on the first round of combat much to my relief. Meanwhile my Sorceror had almost single handedly destroyed the Flamers with repeated applications of his Flickering Fire of Tzeentch spell and theChaos Knights had charged down the Herald of Tzeentch who’d been caught out in the open. This didn’t go exactly as planned due to my Exalted Champion’s sudden inability to roll dice but after a coupel of rounds the inevitable occurred and the Daemon was sent howling back to the Warp. All this time I had been (pleasantly) surprised by my opponent’s reluctance to commit his Bloodletter block. He’d danced around some difficult terrain in the centre of the board and was perfectly content to let me come to him. On my last turn I’d destroyed everything else in his army and was in position for a combined charge but decided that I’d already won and that charging in would only give him the opportunity to score some late victory points while it would be impossible for me to improve my situation. Thus I ended my turn as soon as it started and took a convincing win.

Finally I played against a very nice High Elf army. The lady who it belonged to ended up taking home the best painted army prize after a judging call between her army and mine. Her force consisted of a noble on a Griffon, a large block of Swordmasters, a block of White lions, two units of archers and a repeater bolt-thrower. I wasn’t really sure how to deal with the Swordmasters and, frustratingly, I hadn’t rolled any useful spells for dealing with them. I love to cast Treason of Tzeentch on great-weapon wielding Elves but I didn’t have anything that was likely to help me in this game. Luckily for me, she hadn’t rolled any good spells for her mage either so things evened out for me. The odds got better when she wiped out her own unit of Swordmasters in a calamitous series of miscasts over three turns. The first one wiped out half the unit and they panicked only to rally right on the table edge, The next turn saw another miscast and the mage took a wound and then finally a third miscast on turn three killed the mage and triggered another panicked flight, this time off the table. Having neutralised her own most dangerous unit for me, she had precious little with which to stand against the heavily armoured horde crashing down upon her and a resounding victory resulted from the mopping up operation.

By the time the victory points for all three games had been tallied I’d managed to pull out a clear lead and won the Best General award which handily will be most of the price of the Codex: Grey Knights that I have on order.

An entirely rewarding day out with good opponents and fun games, see the full gallery of pictures from the event on this page.

The game was a lot of fun to work on and answering the questions brought back some great memories. I strongly believe that, while 2nd Ed 40k had a lot of flaws, Gorkamorka was the most fun and the most fluid version of those rules. Also being a skirmish game it avoided many of the systemic pitfalls that caused problems in WH40k. I always felt that 2nd Ed WH40K had too much focus on individual models and that strong characters were the main elements of an army rather than units of guys. In Gorkamorka, the much smaller scale works well with that dynamic.

I’d still like to see a more detailed skirmish system using the later 40k framework though. Maybe I’ll write one myself.

Firstly I started by figuring out how I was going to tackle it. The Doomwheel is a very complex kit which is practically impossible to paint once assembled. I don’t particularly like painting parts separately though so I tried to work out what the smallest number of lumps I could make it into was to simplify the painting process. It turned out that this number was twelve. The central frame was the largest piece with the driver installed, and the rest were mostly single components or very small assemblies. Everything was then undercoated white and I got stuck in!

Firstly I painted all the metal parts with Chainmail, all the wood with Scorched Brown and the outside frame was painted Mechrite Red for now. I then painted Dwarf Bronze over some of the parts that I wanted to be bronze or copper. Golds and bronzes don’t cover well so I find that it’s best to paint a basecoat of silver on first then to paint the bronze or gold colour on top of that. I put some base colours onto the driver and the crewman to see what worked and settled on a fairly plain red, grey and green scheme for them both apart from the driver’s leather armour which was painted with Graveyard Earth.

My view of the Skaven is that they aren’t particularly concerned with keeping their stuff in pristine condition, nor so they worry too much about tetanus so the next step was to dirty up the metal. First I washed it all with Devlan Mud mixed with a little Badab Black to patinate it and give it an overall grimy look before highlighting it up again. Next I applied layered glazes of Snot Green and Gryphonne Sepia to all the bronze  areas, in total I applied four of these glazes alternating between the two colours to get a nice deep colour. Finally I highlighted with a touch of Shining Gold mixed with Chainmail. The silver metal was given a single glaze of Snot Green and then two coats of Ogryn Flesh before being rehighlighted with Chainmail. Finally I attacked it with Blazing Orange to create rust spots. For this step I simply dabbed it on erratically with the point of a brush to create randomly shaped blobs along the centre of the metal areas. This was then shaded where necessary with Devlan Mud painted into corners and crevices. Blazing Orange looks far too bright on the palette but it is pretty much the exact shade that actual rust goes when applied to dark metal.

Next up I decided to tackle the various bits of Warpstone and for this I figured I’d try my hand at some object source lighting effects. Essentially this is where you paint on the reflected light from a point source to provide the illusion that it is actually emitting light. Firstly I painted the Warpstone chunks themselves, these were straightforward Goblin Green with Sunburst Yellow and Skull White highlights along the vertices. Then I got to work on the reflected light. Shining a coloured light onto something changes the colour of that thing to a combination of the two colours (the colour of the light and the colour of the object that it’s shining upon). This works exactly like mixing paints – which is handy for figure painters! There are curved bars around the four smaller pieces of Warpstone, two on the front and one on each side bar. The inside surface of each of these was overbrushed with Goblin Green and then highlighted up to pure Sunburst Yellow. I also used the lighter shades of these highlights to highlight up the inside of the central framework where the big chunk in front of the driver would reflect onto and around the open slats in the boiler thing that the driver is connected to. This makes it look as though there is greenish light seeping from whatever hellish machinery lives inside there. If I’d been clever, I’d have foreseen that I would be doing this and would have extended the effect to the inside surfaces of the wheels as well but I’d already stuck the wheels on by this time and it was too difficult to get a brush in there reliably thanks to all the spikes. Never mind.

The wood was washed with Devlan Mud and Gryphonne Sepia before being drybrushed with Graveyard Earth and Codex Grey. In the photos it comes out a little pinkish but in reality it’s a much darker and grubbier brown. The red metal was also dirtied up with layered glazes and washes before having bits of Chainmail applied to it to represent peeling and chipped paint. I tried to imagine where Skaven crewmen might have worn down the paint and gave those areas an extra highlight of Mithril Silver to represent the shininess of constant use. The rest of the exposed metal was carefully glazed with a Badab Black/Gryphonne Sepia mix.

Finally I assembled the rest of the pieces, painted and flocked the base and presented it to its new owner – who was very pleased with it. I am also happy with the way it turned out although I am kicking myself for not being able to finish the object source lighting properly.  It’s a fine tabletop piece and I’m sure that Jan-Eric will get a lot of use from it.

You can see all of the pictures associated with this project on this gallery page.

I took the Chaos Warriors that have been slowly taking shape over the summer and Mario took his new Tomb Kings. Originally the plan was that he’d come over to my place yesterday and we’d have a few tutorial games to get him up to speed with the rules as he’d never played WFB before, what actually happened was that he had to do some work-stuff at very short notice so he sat at my table working on his spreadsheet while we discussed the more theoretical side of the game and I bashed out a few speed painted Chaos Warriors to bring my list up to size. This meant that the games at the tournament today were his first ever. “Don’t be a wuss” I said over his concerns that he might not be ready, “You’ll figure it out, it’s not rocket surgery.”

There was a Warmachines event happening simultaneously with the WFB tournament in the same hall so there were only ten players which is about half as many as usually show up. Mario met his first opponent, a Bretonnian player while I was matched with an Empire opponent. My general was a level 2 sorceror on a disk who didn’t manage to do much of anything during the game due to having only one useful spell (Gateway) which was always shut down by the pile of dispel dice that my opponent was able to muster. As soon as he died I realised I’d bought him a Spell Familiar so he should have had a bit more utility. I also realised about this time that I had paid for a Chaos Spawn but I’d forgotten to pack one in my case so I was down a bunch of points. These things collectively displeased me. Despite my forgetfulness and the loss of my general to a wildly optimistic round of shooting from some Pistoliers I easily won the game mostly thanks to the Chaos Knights and their superhuman ability to kill things. Wandering across to check on Mario, I was heartened to find that he’d won his game too so Team Acony was off to a great start.

Next up for me was a High Elf army and Mario faced off against a Skaven horde. This one started badly for me and went downhill fast. My Chaos Knights smashed into a mid-sized unit of White Lions and got butchered due to some terrible dice rolling for armour saves. Only the army standard bearer survived and I just managed to keep him alive long enough to finish off the last survivor from a unit of Dragon Princes who had previously been on the wrong end of an Infernal Gateway. My hero popped the last Prince then fled and died. Without my Knights, I was very much on the back foot but the Warriors managed to pull things back a little. It wasn’t enough though and the game ended with a convincing Elven victory. Across the hall, Mario had been tabled in short order but had learned from the experience.

For the final game, I drew a Skaven list (a different opponent to the one who’d demolished Mario) and Mario was matched up with a Dwarf army. My game was very back and forth with many points that could have swung a decisive victory for either side. Highlights for me were Gatewaying the Plague Furnace off the table in my first turn and having my Marauder Cavalry survive the battle after actually managing to kill things. Low points were having a Skaven unit break my Marauders and clip the General as they pursued, the next turn the Marauders rallied, the general lost combat but didn’t die and the pursuing rats hit the Marauders again who they broke again and pursued into the general who was already fleeing and thus had to flee again – right off the table. Sigh.

In the end though I’d killed almost everything on the Skaven side and had managed to preserve most of my expensive units (characters aside) so pulled out a win. Mario hadn’t been so fortunate however, he’d found out the hard way that the only army that can beat Skeletons in a long-drawn out meatgrinder are Dwarfs and at the end of his game there were still a large number of stunties standing up while none of the Khemrian forces remained on the table.

Out of the ten players who took part, I came third and Mario placed eighth. Both of us tied for most sporting player and I won the best painted army (by dint of being the only player at the event with a fully painted force no doubt). A good time was had and those of the group who didn’t take part still turned up to watch and cheer Mario and I on so even though they didn’t play, they still got a little stoked for action over the winter.

The Seetroll event was a doubles tournament with each player bringing along a 1500 point army built under a zero comp system. Originally my plan had been to go along with Mario and his Tomb Kings but he was unable to go at the last minute so I roped in New Guy Ryan as my doubles partner, thrust my daemon army into his hands and ran a couple of test games the day before the event to shake down the new rules. Ryan had played 40k previously some time ago but had never played WFB, for my part I’d never played 8th edition before so this was a pretty steep learning curve for both of us. I wrote both of the army lists based largely on what I had painted rather than on any optimal list-building considerations, despite this however the two forces worked well together. We had:

Daemons:

• Herald of Tzeentch (General with Daemonic Robes)
• Herald of Slaanesh (BSB, Level 1 wizard with Siren Song and Soporific Musk)
• 23 Horrors with full command
• 27 Daemonettes with full command and Siren Standard
• 5 Flesh Hounds plus Karanak
• 6 Flamers

The Chaos Mortals fetaured:

• Sorceror Lord of Tzeentch (level 3 with a Disc, Golden Eye of Tzeentch and Infernal Puppet)
• Exalted Hero (BSB, on a chaos steed with the Blasted Standard)
• 5 Chaos Knights of Tzeentch with full command and Banner of Rage
• 15 Chaos Warriors f Tzeentch with full command (hand weapons and shields)
• 15 Chaos Marauders with full command (flails and light armour)
• 10 Marauder Cavalry with full command (spears and shields)
• 10 Chaos Warhounds

I’d finished the Chaos BSB the week previously and had started work on the Warriors, only 7 were painted by the night before the event but a late night speed-painting session got the remaining 8 done in time for us to field two fully painted armies. When we got to the event we found that named characters weren’t allowed so Karanak got swapped out for two ordinary Flesh Hounds which were kindly lent to us by one of the judges.

There were two games for the event both using the Meeting Engagement scenario from the book. Our first was a mirror match versus a Marauder heavy Warriors of Chaos army and a Daemon army based on a huge block of Plaguebearers. We lost this game despite some sterling work from the Chaos Knights. We’d actually run out of time before the game ended and there were still two turns left to play when we finished, this was something of a bonus to us though because things were starting to get really ugly and, if we’d played the last turns then the result would have been worse for us I think.

The second game was against the rather unlikely combination of Lizardmen and Orcs. This one went much better for us, we were able to control the battle much more and this brought us a conclusive victory – the Orcs had been largely wiped out along with most of the Lizardmen with the exception of the large block of Saurus warriors that we’d successfully avoided engaging all match.

We were expecting a mid-table finish on the balance of our win/loss record and were hugely surprised when our names were called to receive the third prize. First doubles tournament for either of us, first 8th ed event for me and the third and fourth games of WFB ever for Ryan meant that this was quite the result for us. On the train home Ryan was eagerly planning out a Daemons of Khorne list to pit against the rest of us.

The Warhammer Fanatics’ event was a very different affair, minimal comp (only some specific army restrictions and clarifications) and a 2250 points limit. It was also much better subscribed than the Seetroll event. My army (which to my shame wasn’t fully painted) was as follows:

• Sorceror Lord of Tzeentch (General, level 4, Disc, Golden Eye of Tzeentch, Ogre Blade, Spell Familiar)
• Exalted Hero of Tzeentch (BSB, Blasted Standard, Chaos Steed)
• Wulfrik the Wanderer
• Chaos Sorceror (Infernal Puppet)
• 5 Chaos Knights of Tzeentch with full command and Banner of Rage
• 17 Chaos Warriors of Tzeentch with full command and Razor Standard (hand weapons and shields)
• 10 Chosen of Tzeentch with full command, Lichebone Pennant and Book of Secrets (Halberds)
• 10 Marauder Cavalry with full command (shields and spears)
• 10 Chaos Warhounds
• 24 Marauders with full command (light armour and flails)

The events of the previous weekend had demonstrated that small blocks of weak troops are now a waste of time. Go big or go home. I wasn’t ready to put down a block of forty Marauders in Horde formation as our first opponent did last week (in fact he had two such units!) but I certainly needed to beef up the marauders. I inflated their numbers to 23 and put Wulfrik in the front rank to add some punch and give them his surprise deployment rule. The Warriors also saw a marginal increase in size although they didn’t really need it. They were bodyguarding the level 1 sorceror in this list and proved to be a very valuable unit. Before playing many games of 8th I’d been wavering over the role of the Chaos Knights. I wasn’t convinced that five of them plus the BSB were going to be a viable force. The test run at the Seetroll event demonstrated very clearly that these were still a ridiculously powerful unit even at the minimum size and that I needn’t worry too much about filling out their number.

There were three games over the course of the event and my first was against a Dwarf player with a fairly standard melee-focussed army. He had an Anvil, a large block of Longbeards, a large block of Warriors, two Gyrocoptors, a cannon and a Grudgrethrower. A Dwarf Queen carried to battle on her shield and a couple of Runesmiths rounded out the force. He played very conservatively indeed and didn’t use the anvil to push forwards as he really should have done, as a result he handed me complete control over the battle and I was able to demolish each of his units on my terms. At the end of the battle he had no surviving Dwarfs at all and I hadn’t given up a single victory point. Only some really incredible flee rolls coupled with some terrible pursuit results kept him in the game past turn four.

After this mauling I was firmly in first place and so my second opponent was the Dark Elf army in second position. This battle used the Dawn Assault scenario which mixed things up a bit and led to some interesting developments in setting up. The Dark Elves featured a huge unit of Spearmen in horde formation, a respectably sized unit of Executioners, a Hydra, two units of Harpies, a unit of Dark Riders, a Sorceress on a Dark Pegasus, two repeating bolt throwers, a small unit of Crossbowmen and a minimum sized unit of Cold One Knights led by the Highborn. By turn two I was convinced that I had lost, my Knights had crashed into his Spearmen and been filleted thanks to the Cauldron giving them the Killing Blow ability, the Cold One Knights were tearing chunks out of my support units and Wulfrik was nowhere to be seen. I’d managed to get most of the Executioners to murder themselves with the Treason of Tzeentch spell but I couldn’t see how I was going to score many victory points from this army. Luckily it seems that Chaos Warriors are the new Daemons for 8th edition, even a complete numpty can just keep pushing them forwards and expect not to lose too heavily. So, despite my army getting smacked repeatedly in the face for the first half of the battle, it absorbed the abuse the Dark Elves were piling on it and came back out fighting.  Wulfrik turned up on turn 5 and helped the surviving couple of Knights to finish off the Spearmen, The Executioners were wiped out by the Warriors and the Marauder Cavalry and the Chosen had finished off most of the Dark Elf support units. All that was left by the end were half of the Cold One Knights, the Hydra (which had failed to engage anything in the entire battle) and the Sorceress. My Lord was dead but the Warriors were still intact. The last turn had the Warriors facing down the Cold One Knights and the Hydra, I moved them backwards to make the charge less reliable and my opponent decided not to risk it. I was pretty sure I’d lost but was optimistic that I’d done enough damage to score some points. As it turned out I’d lost by 155 points which resulted in a draw.

After that bloodbath, I had dropped to second place so my last game was against the new tournament leader with his Goblin army. This battle was the Meeting Engagement scenario with the added twist that each player could kill one enemy character before the battle (and score full victory points for it). Rather unsurprisingly my opponent chose to remove my Sorceror Lord from the battle and I deprived him of Skarsnik in return. His army was almost entirely Goblins with only a single Orc present (a level 4 Shaman), it featured a horde sized block of Squigs, two hordes of Spear Goblins, a couple of small units of archers, a Doom Diver, a rock lobber a unit of Trolls and two minimum sized units of Wolfriders. Various Goblin Shamans, a BSB and a goblin Warboss were scattered around the list to fill it out. Again, this battle was one that went very badly for me to begin with and ended up turning around due to the incredible resilience of Chaos Warriors. Wulfrik turned up on turn 1 and destroyed the Rock Lobber before getting wiped out by the Squig herd, the Chaos Knights took on the Trolls, routed them and carried on through to the archers but couldn’t catch the fleeing monsters and also triggered every fanatic in the army in the process. Despite this a couple of Knights survived and slaughtered the archers. My level one wizard sent a Purple Sun of Xereus towards the Goblin line but fluffed it and it went across the Chosen instead. Luckily they all survived but it demonstrated how neutered my magic was without the Sorceror lord. By comparison the Orc magic was devastating, the various direct damage spells did very little thanks to the high toughness and thick armour of the Chaos army but the Waaagh! spell was used in almost every turn to staggering effect. Goblins that can get in surprise charges that always strike first and can reroll misses are not to be underestimated and this was the downfall of Wulfrik’s Marauders, the Chaos Knights and the Marauder Cavalry. Even the Warriors, who had easily been the most reliable unit in the army prior to this match ended up failing break tests and running away from the cackling Greenskin tide. At the end of the game I’d caught up a little but I had still clearly lost. In the end there was a 560 VP difference which translated to a 12-8 loss.

I’d scored 38 tournament points in my games which put me in 6th place on battle results, I dropped some points on the soft scores due to the unpainted models in my army and so my final placing was 7th. I wasn’t particularly unhappy with that despite the fact that I’d dropped so many points in my second and third games. the opposition was very tough and the games were hard fought.

This figure and twelve Chaos Warriors are the only parts of my list that weren’t already painted. I’m confident that I can crank out a dozen warriors in a week so it was a relief to finally declare this guy done and move on. It often happens to me (and I’m sure every other painter in the world) that I’ll start working on a figure and it just won’t come together. The figure will then get sidelined while I work on other things and sit partially done on my painting table for ever – let me tell you about my Dwarf Rangers that probably need less than two hours work to finish off but have sat in a case for four years. This figure was one of those that I couldn’t get on with at first. It started off as simply the normal metal Chaos Lord on Daemonic Steed figure with no modifications. I liked the figure but had no clue how to paint it – especially after I finished the rainbow-hued Chaos Knights regiment that you can see in this update.  Somewhere along the line I decided that I needed a mounted battle standard bearer and this figure seemed an obvious place to start from. The conversion is very simple; the hammer was cut off right above the hand and was replaced with a spear from the Marauder Horsemen sprue. The banner itself and the banner top also came from the Marauder Horsemen and I swapped the head for one from the Chaos Mutation sprue.  I also decided that I didn’t want the steed to be a Daemonic Mount but instead to be a ‘normal’ Chaos Steed so it got rebased onto a regular cavalry base.

When it came to painting this figure I really had no idea how it was going to end up. In the end I pretty much just threw paint at it until I could see something worthwhile emerging then tidied that up. Originally the armour and barding were to be a pale rosy lavender so I started with a bright pinky-blue basecoat and glazed it with Hawk Turquoise. That didn’t work so well and I ended up repainting it in a greyish purple which ended up getting highlighted and declared good enough. The horse was going to be black with flamey accents but that didn’t look so good with all the detailing on it so it ended up a chestnut colour instead with reddish hair. Finally the banner. I painted it blue then yellow, highlighted that right up and then sketched in the freehand design in the centre using Black Ink. Once I’d got something I was happy with I blocked it in and highlighted the pattern. At this point I realised that somehow I’d finished it. This was a nice surprise so I built up a taller base from smaller square bases and greenstuff to help him rank up properly (he overhangs the sides of a base even more than the plastic Knights do) and slapped some varnish on him before I could talk myself into doing more. He’s a little fussy and there are some messy areas but from 3 feet away he looks fine.

The full Warriors of Chaos Gallery is available here.