Yearly Archives: 2009

Skaven & D&D Minis

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Got my eBay orders in today; immediately cracked them open to start fiddling with them.
For starters, I ordered five Rat Swarms from the D&D Minis Unhallowed set.  I have several of the GW Rat Swarms (more than I can field in the current armybook; not sure about the new one), and they’re alright.  But the D&D Minis one looks crazy cool.  So, I snagged a few.  They’ll repaint easily, and if it ever comes to it I can always fall back on the GW ones.  Here’s the one I’ve pulled off its round base and glued onto a 40×40 (next to the GW one).

More significantly, I’ve got the Lifeleech Otyugh I mentioned earlier.  And… I’m not sure.  For some reason, I expected it to be bigger.  I mean, it’s big, but it’s not Large Target, “So big does it go on a 50×50 or a 50×100 base?” big.

Here it is, next to one of the Gutter Runners I’ve take too long to finish painting.

The other thing is, I’m thinking about using it to make another Rat Ogre-mounted Warlord.  I think I could pull the tentacles off (put one in the place of that third leg as a tail), replace the two feet with hands from a Rat Ogre and work in the legs from a Rat ogre.  I’d have to do a bit of sculpting to get a face on the thing, and there’d be a bunch of hair, but I’ve got to do that anyway.

Anyway, now I’m kicking this around.  If that’s where I go, I’m not sure what to use as my Hellpit Abomination.

Warlock Engineer

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I mostly finished this guy earlier in the week, but only put the finishing touches on him yesterday.  I generally like to wait to varnish painted minis before I take pictures of them, but it’s incredibly rainy in the nation’s capital right now, and I find varnishing doesn’t work out quite as well when I spray during the pouring rain.

I actually built him more than six months ago, and just never got around to painting him.  Now that there’s paint on him, I can spot enough things that don’t look quite right that I kinda want to build him again.  (The only thing that would make it tricky would be tracking down the electrical-looking things on his back.)

Anyway, his legs are from a Plague Monk (or a Packmaster; I forget).  The torso is a Space Marine chest, the left arm a Packmaster’s Things-Catcher with the ‘Catcher replaced with the blades from a Warlock Engineer, and the right arm is from the same Warlock Engineer.  The head’s a Clanrat’s.  The lenses of the goggles are the wax stamps from purity seals.  The mess on the back is a barrel from an Ogre Bull with electrical fence bits from MacCragge and some plasticard.  The cable is a pretty crappy greenstuff job.   He’s got a scroll because I’ll always have a Dispel Scroll (or two) on any given Warlock Engineer.

Warlord & Rat Ogre

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Impatient for the Otyugh to arrive in the mail (I mean, I only bought it today), I went ahead and converted up a model that I had an idea for that will probably actually work out pretty well in the new book.

Skaven can now take mounts.  Chieftains and others can ride on litters, on giant rats, and on rat ogres.  I had a chat with Joey on Tuesday about how one would go about modeling that last one; clanrat crotches and rat ogre shoulders don’t mix very well.  To me, the solution was immediate and obvious: a BabyBjörn.

Lots of little things went into this guy.  The weapon is from a Night Runner arm, stuck onto the end of a clanrat spear.  The head and feet are from a Packmaster; I needed feet that would hang down and the head just looks cooler than the clanrat heads.  It’s also a little out of proportion, which just fits in better with the whole baby carrier thing.  The torso and legs are clanrat legs.  Carrier is an Ogre Bull’s punch dagger hollowed out.  The torso and legs on both the rider and ridee are pinned and worked a little bit to get them more upright and not hunched-over.

I have a special shield I’m going to glue on, I think, after everything that’s already there’s had a chance to dry/cure.

Dragon Wars

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I’m thinking a lot about Dragon Wars; a lot because I’m excited about showing off my Dragon, but mostly because I haven’t really played in any tournaments this year: there was the Baltimore Grand Tournament last November and the Fantasy Escalation League tournament in March(?) but that’s it.

I’m trying to figure out what I should take.  What you can take seems to be pretty lax: Dogs of War, Regiments of Renown and alternate lists seem to be okay.  The only requirement is that you have to take a dragon (with a generic option for those who can’t normally take dragons) and that a Lord has to ride on the dragon.

I’ve never played in a Dragon Wars before, but I understand the scenarios to be nutty, goofy and not what one expects.  Victory is entirely dependent on wounding/killing your opponent’s dragon.

Do I play it safe, and run a list very much like the list I normally run except with the Dragon?  Or do I go all in and put something crazy on the dragon?  For some reason, I’m not altogether interested in sticking a Grey Seer on the Dragon.  The Dragon needs to be stuck in combat, and that’s really not where a Grey Seer wants to be.

Dragon Wars #1
2,000 Points – Skaven

Lords & Heroes
Warlord – General, Dragon, Heavy Armor, Cautious Shield, The Gouger
Warlock Engineer – Accumulator, Condenser, Warp-Blades, Dispel Scroll, Storm Daemon
Warlock Engineer – Accumulator, Condenser, Warp-Blades, Dispel Scroll x2

Core 
Clanrats x24 – Full Command, Ratling Gun
Clanrats x24 – Full Command, Ratling Gun
Slaves x20 – Musician
Slaves x20 – Musician
Night Runners x5 – Throwing Stars
Night Runners x5 – Throwing Stars
Giant Rats x24 – Packmasters x4
Giant Rats x24 – Packmasters x4
Poisoned Wind Globadiers x2
Poisoned Wind Globadiers x2

Special
Gutter Runners x6 – Throwing Stars
Jezzails x5
Jezzails x5

Rare
Warp-Lightning Cannon

This is my “safe” list.  It’s the most like the list I currently run.

In fact, it’s pretty much my regular list, trading my Chieftan BSB with Storm Banner for the Dragon and a few other tweaks to make the numbers add up.  I could easily swap the second Engineer for the BSB (though not with Storm Banner, which I expect won’t be quite as useful, but maybe something like Banner of the Four Black Winds which costs a lot less and could be nearly as annoying with Dragons running around).  I could also swap out The Gouger for Skavenbrew, which could make things more fun: a Frenzied or Hateful (or Frenzied and Hateful) Dragon could be rad.

Dragon Wars #2
2,000 Points – Skaven
Lords & Heroes
Chieftain – General, Great Weapon, Heavy Armor, Cautious Shield
Deathmaster Snikch – Dragon
Core 
Clanrats x24 – Full Command, Ratling Gun
Clanrats x24 – Full Command, Ratling Gun
Slaves x20 – Musician
Slaves x20 – Musician
Night Runners x5 – Throwing Stars
Giant Rats x24 – Packmasters x4
Poisoned Wind Globadiers x2
Poisoned Wind Globadiers x2
Special
Gutter Runners x6 – Throwing Stars
Jezzails x5
Jezzails x5
Rare
Warp-Lightning Cannon
This is my goofy list.  Yes, it’s nearly identical to the list above, but it loses nearly all of the heroes (because Snikch consumes both a Lord and a Hero slot, the Dragon consumes a Hero slot, which makes that one model consume 835 points, a Lord slot and two Hero slots) and a lot of the redundancy I’m used to.  I have to take a Ld 6 hero to be the General (because Snikch is too busy stabbing mofos to lead an army), which rules out an Engineer (and any magic defense at all); I can’t see it being a Plague Priest or a Master Moulder.  I suppose I could take the Priest, buy him the Liber Bubonicus to make him a wizard just so I can take a Dispel Scroll… but that seems wasteful (and would cost 42 points I don’t know where to find).
I normally deploy my army in a pretty symmetrical fashion: the left flank looks a lot like the right flank.  Here, can’t really do that because I’m losing half my Night Runners and Giant Rats.
This is probably a bad build, but I’m tempted to take it because Snikch on a Dragon would be insane.  He’d be next to impossible to shoot at and would be a whirling deathmachine in close combat.  It’s also just a fun idea.
Dragon Wars #3
2,000 Points – Skaven
Lords & Heroes
Throt the Unclean – General
Warlock Engineer – Accumulator, Condenser, Warp-Blades, Dispel Scroll, Storm Daemon
Core 
Clanrats x24 – Full Command, Ratling Gun
Clanrats x23 – Full Command, Ratling Gun
Slaves x20 – Musician
Slaves x20 – Musician
Night Runners x5 – Throwing Stars
Night Runners x5 – Throwing Stars
Giant Rats x24 – Packmasters x4
Giant Rats x24 – Packmasters x4
Poisoned Wind Globadiers x2
Poisoned Wind Globadiers x2

Special
Gutter Runners x6 – Throwing Stars
Jezzails x6
Jezzails x6
Rare
Warp-Lightning Cannon
This is another approach: still using a goofy character… but one that can actually be a General and uses up several hundred points less.  Throt instead of Snikch, which lets me have an actual General and many more points left over for other units.  Ugh.  But only two characters?

I think I’m probably going to run with that first list, since it gives me three characters.  Dumping three slots into a single model is painful.

Hellpit Abomination

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Quick!  Someone convince me that I shouldn’t try to use a Lifeleech Otyugh as the basis for a Hellpit Abomination conversion!

I picked up a Beast of Nurgle earlier this week, with this intent, but I’ve since decided that it’s probably not going to work out.  (Which is a shame, because I suspect I’m going to have a very, very hard time selling it off to someone else.)  I think I could accomplish the same result, or better, just by sculpting the whole thing from scratch.

EDIT: Too late!  This thing’s going to be badass.

Rushputin vs. Army Builder

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I sat down to work up my Dragon Wars list for later this month.  The only catch: Skaven don’t get a dragon, normally.  Armies that don’t have dragons can (and must) take a generic dragon as a mount for a Lord at 320 points.

At first, I set the roster size to 2,000 points (the size of the tournament) with the plan of just, you know, building to 1,680 (leaving 320 for the dragon).  But that’s inelegant and kinda crappy.

Then, I set the roster size to 1,680.  Well, that screws everything up because there are things you can take at 2,000 points that you can’t at 1,999 or less.  Sure, I can ignore the warnings and errors but if I’m doing that what’s the point of using Army Builder?

Maneaters are 80 points each.  So, I built the list with four Maneaters in it; 80×4 = 320 = 1 Generic Dragon.  Ugh, but that’s sloppy.  I mean, sure, it’s clear that I don’t have any Maneaters in my army and that they’re a placeholder but… sloppy.

So, I tried messing around with the ArmyBuilder files (after backing them up, of course).  The ABCreator is… nearly impenetrable.

Screw it: I’m a smart guy, and I can rock the XML.  So, I opened up the file, poked around, and got it working. Working with the XML directly is, I think, 1,000 times clearer than using the utility (though now that I have a better of idea of what the moving parts are, I think I’ll be more comfortable with ABCreator.

I’d post the markup I inserted, but Blogger seems to be totally against my attempts to display XML in a post. Ugh.  Very annoying.

The point of the story is, editing the XML wasn’t hard at all.  Now that I know how to do it (and now that I think I can probably scoot around in ABCreator with more confidence), a tiny part of me wants to build a Dragon Wars AB file, where each army that didn’t previously have access to a dragon has the Generic Dragon entry for every appropriately sized Lord choice.  That part of me will probably be smothered by the part of me that’s extremely lazy, however.

20091013 Painting WIPs.

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Didn’t have much time for hobby-type stuff last week on account of work getting out of hand.  I was able to make up for it over the weekend, kicking it into gear with those Devastators I’d gotten started on a month and half ago.  (Kromac over there’s been where he is for over a year, now.)

Then, I decided to come to grips with my motivation to paint some Skaven.  I’ve got rat-fever, but I can’t wait for the new Clanrats to drop to get spun up on them again.  Instead, I started slapping paint on some Gutter Runners and then got distracted by the Warlock Engineer I’ve been meaning to paint for a long while.
All of these are WIP, of course.

Alternate Approaches to Scenarios

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Multiple Scenarios

The one really great thing (in my opinion) to come out of War of the Ring is its approach to scenarios.  As with 40K, there’s a little table and you roll for the random scenario for the game.  Where it differs from 40K, though, is that you roll more than one time.  So, you could roll up a game that’s both King of the Hill and Kill Points, for example.  Each scenario comes with a set of victory points, which you total up to see who’s won.

Now, we’ve been muttering about trying to play 40K this way pretty much all year.  The only sticking point is how to make the goals of the different scenarios roughly comparable.  Because, in theory, winning at one when your opponent wins at another should result in a draw.  It’s easy to compare how objectives in Seize Ground and objectives in Capture & Control should work together, but it gets a little tricker with Kill Points in Annihilation.  If we make the assumption that the average 40K army has 12 Kill Points (which seems like a reasonable assumption to me), we can say the following:

  • Seize Ground: Each objective is worth 3 VP.  That gets us an average of 12 VP, with a minimum of  9 VP and a maximum of 15 VP.
  • Capture & Control: Each objective is worth 6 VP.
  • Annihilation: Each Kill Point is worth 1 VP.
When talking about multiple scenarios, though, what happens if you roll Seize Ground and Capture & Control?  Do you get up to seven objectives on the table?  That seems crowded.  So, I imagine that if one rolled both scenarios, that it’d be the two objectives in the deployment zone,  plus d3 additional objectives.  The two deployment objectives could then be either 6 VP apiece, with the additional objectives being 3 VP, or we could combine them so the deployment objectives are 9 VP and the additional ones remain 3.  I don’t know how I feel about that.
Capture, Not Control
Anyone will agree that Capture & Control is really sort of built for the draw.  Most of the games I’ve played end up that way: I hang onto my objective while my opponent hangs onto theirs.  What if your objective doesn’t matter as much as your opponent’s (or at all)?  (I have no doubt in my mind that everyone else on Earth has thought about this already but, hey, I’m on a roll.)  This could go two ways:
  • Only your opponent’s objective matters: If you control your opponent’s objective, and your opponent doesn’t control yours: you win.  If both of you control each others’, or if no one controls their opponent’s objective, it’s a draw.   This feels to me like it would actually produce more draws, however, and possibly reward armies that are more in your face than ones that aren’t.
  • Your opponent’s objective matters more: If we’re working with the multiple scenarios setup above, we can weight the different objectives differently.  (Well, we could weight them even if Capture & Control was the only scenario, but it wouldn’t matter.  It’d be functionally identical to only having your opponent’s objective matter, as above.)

    I imagine this would work out like making your opponent’s objective worth 9 VP and your objective worth 3 VP.  In other words, it would make your objective just like any other objective… but your opponent’s objective as important as almost all of the other objectives on the table.

Hidden Agendas
This popped into my head in response to a goofy tournament format Ben suggested on the IFL forum (which is interesting, but I suspect is fundamentally too subjective to be wholly viable) and is also likely worlds away from being an original idea.
What if you didn’t know what your opponent’s scenario was?  

Battle Report Utility

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Just wanted to take a moment to link to a neat utility that came up on the IFL forum the other week that I used to generate the map in my last post.
You drag and drop shapes that represent terrain and units onto a field.
I have no idea what it’s called, since I don’t speak the German, but here it is: http://www.coolmails.de/MBDespliegueEN.swf.

The “Get Picture” function seems to be busted, but it’s easy enough to take a screencap.  Also, it’s a shame there’s no 40K support.

Ratputin Triumphant

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The game on Saturday happened, as planned.  As cramped as my schedule’s been, lately, I consider that a victory.

Harry ran High Elves, with a list that was something like:
Lords & Heroes
  • Noble – General, Great Eagle, Reaver Bow
  • Noble – BSB, Elven Steed, Battle Banner
  • Mage – Dispel Scroll, Dispel Scroll (Lore of Fire)
  • Mage – Elven Steed, Silver Wand, Starwood Staff (Lore of Death)
Core
  • Archers x10
  • Archers x10
Special
  • Dragon Princes x5 – Full Command
  • Dragon Princes x5 – Full Command
  • Ellyrian Reavers x5 – Full Command
  • Lion Chariot of Chrace
  • Phoenix Guard x12 – Full Command
Rare
  • Great Eagle
  • Repeater Bolt Thrower
  • Repeater Bolt Thrower
I ran the list I discussed here.
It was a full-on battle.  Very, very close with the dice deciding a lot of things.  It was a really good game.

Some notes:

  • The battlefield was different than what I’m used to seeing.  This was great.  I’d just been complaining with some other folks on RPG.net about how WHFB battlefields always look pretty much exactly the same: Forests to the right and left, halfway between deployment zones with one to two hills along the back edge of each deployment zone (for bolt throwers, etc).  Harry started dropping hills in the middle of the board for fear of the Warp-Lightning Cannon.  I put forests in each deployment zone, hoping I could scout my Gutter Runners.

  • He lost his mages immediately.  On his first turn, his scroll caddy miscast with double 1’s (kill the Mage).  The other Mage died on my second turn: he’d been in a unit of Dragon Princes… which had lost a member to Storm Daemon, allowing the Warp-Lightning Cannon to snipe him.  To say that this helped is to wildly understate.
  • The Throwing Stars on my Night Runners didn’t really do much for me, though it did have a strong psychological impact on my opponent.  He seemed unreasonably concerned that he was going to get shot to pieces; I’m not sure why.  Yes, most of my army had shooting, but so much of it was at a negligible range… and it’s not like it was two blocks of archers and two bolt throwers.
  • I did like the larger unit of Night Runners, though.  They were more effective at screening, and tied things up pretty well.  Shame they’ll be losing Skirmish in a few months.
  • The Gutter Runners did quite nicely.  They locked down two flanks effectively and, on springing into combat, did me proud.  They were unable to help with warmachines, though.  I probably should try a Tunneling Team, after all.
  • I still like the Warlord with the Cautious Shield and the +5 Ward Save.  He’s not a death machine, but he helps keep the unit around very effectively, and is about as hard to kill as I can manage.
  • The Assassin wasn’t able to do much of anything, but that’s because Harry moved his general halfway across the table.  A flying general is handy to have.  I’d probably be better off with two Warlock Engineers, though, if only to provide Dispel Dice and Scrolls.
  • Ratling Guns didn’t get to shoot once.  I don’t expect them to, any more.  They’re another target, though, and are a threat that must be dealt with, which protects my other units.
  • Likewise, the Giant.  He didn’t get the chance to do anything except eat two rounds of shooting… which is pretty much what I thought he’d do.  At 200 points, I probably should have higher expectations, I think.  Maybe next time, I’ll try Ironguts or something.
  • The Jezzails kicked ass.  They deployed behind the hills, in the back corner, which meant they were safe from enemy fire (so the only thing that would chase them off the table would be misfires).  They still had a clear line of sight to the middle of the field and, if anything crossed over the hill (which happened several times), they were able to unload on it at short range.
  • The Warp-Lightning Cannon did quite well; threatening the heck out of most of his units.  It paid for itself in frying the Mage.  At one point, it shot down the flank of the unit of Dragon Princes that contained the BSB.  At S10.  I rolled a 1 to wound the BSB, but incinerated the rest of the unit.  That was pretty close, there.
  • The MVPs for the game, I think, were the Globadiers.  Small enough that he didn’t want to waste anything on them, those two 20 point units were able to kill hundreds of points of Dragon Princes, as well as opening the door to put down to enemy characters.  They were fantastic.

At the end of the game, he had:

  • General (fleeing)
  • BSB
  • One full unit of Archers
  • 2 Bolt Throwers

I had:

  • Nearly full block of Clanrats (with General)
  • Nearly full block of Slaves
  • Nearly full heap of Jezzails
  • Warp-Lightning Cannon
  • Half a unit of Gutter Runners
  • 1 Globadier

One quarter was contested, one empty, two mine.  I’d captured a banner, as well.  Ultimately, I won by over 800 points, but it could have very easily been a defeat had his Mages not been fried.