Monthly Archives: April 2010

Display Board WIP

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I’m just about ready to slap some paint down on the display board I’ve built for my Khornate Chaos Daemons.  Not a bad idea to snap a few pics before then.

The board is 3/4′ MDF, cut to be ~17″ x ~26″.  I needed a 15″ x 24″ board, but wanted room for the border (which I knew I needed to help keep things from falling off).  The raised parts are pink insulation foam.

All of the flat surfaces are covered in the same textured plasticard I used to make my bases.

The dais in the center is textured plasticard, plus some extra plasticard cut into an octagon and a Khorne symbol.  Nothing fancy there, I suppose, but I put a lot of work into cutting it out, so I’m proud of it.

I’ve had an Arcane Ruins set since GW released them that I’ve done nothing with… I got a lot of use out of it on this.  The skulls and faces on the edges of the raised platforms are from it, as is the obelisk in the back center.  I’ve tarted up the obelisk with some ForgeWorld etched brass Khorne symbols.

I originally tried gluing the skulls and faces on with E-6000 for some ridiculous reason.  That was a mistake: the glue ate through the foam like a hippo through marbles.  I ended up filling in the holes and gluing on the faces with wood glue.

The board rests on a breakfast tray.  This idea is blatantly stolen from Matt Hoell, who uses one as his display board.  I needed more room than the tray’s surface offers, however: hence the MDF.  I need to affix the board to the tray, though: I want to lift the board off the table, but I don’t want to make it that much easier to be knocked over.

So, there’s a bolt that goes through the board and through the tray.  There’s only one, because I wanted it to be removable, and there’s really only one spot I can hide a bolt: under the obelisk.  I’ll lift and carry the board by the tray, not the by the board.

Because it’s removable, 1) I’ll be able to reuse the tray with other display boards and 2) be able to store the whole mess more easily.

Also, the bolt is metal, which allowed me to glue a magnet to the inside of the obelisk.  That’ll keep it in place… but be easily removed and stored.  (I might even turn it into a fifth objective marker.)

EDIT: I’ve finished this!  You can find some pictures of the finished product here.

1 Year Old!

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I just realized that, yesterday, this blog turned one year old!

Although Warpstone Pile is a far, far cry from Bell of Lost Souls, I’m both surprised and pleased with how successful it’s been.

Some stats:

  • 127 posts (not counting this one)
  • ~2,700 pageviews in the past month, 993 Unique Visitors
  • 32 Followers, 39 Google Reader subscribers (plus my friends who get spammed with this thing via Google Buzz)

My most active pages are, easily, the ones about my Hellpit Abomination conversion.  Second to that are my other Skaven conversions.  This only makes sense, when you consider that my conversion is the third result when you Google “Hellpit Abomination,” just after Warseer and DakkaDakka.  (Under Google Image Search, it’s the third result there, too, and is 9 of the first 36 results.)  I’ve seen better conversions for it, mind you, but that’s pretty neat!

This thing’s also horned out my other online outlets: I don’t post to LiveJournal (where I keep up with my friends) nearly as much.  The Twitter Feed I set up for the blog (WarpstonePile) has seen more posts in the month or so since I’ve created it than my personal one ever has.

Anyway, thank you for reading this thing!  (The blog, not the post.)

Got My Game On

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I managed to get in several games this week!

Battle Missions

Tuesday, I met up with Jeff to throw down some Battle Missions.  (My first time actually using the book.)

He was running his very cool Gue’vesa IG army: everything’s converted up to be Tau-ish, from his Valkyrie converted from Devilfish, Piranha and Valk parts to his robotic Sisters of Battle built from Necron and Tau bits.  Both games were at 2,000.

I was running the same 2,000 point Khornate Daemon list I ran at Battle for the Cure.

Warp Rift

We decided to kick things off with a Chaos Daemon mission: I rolled for it and got Warp Rift.  (12″ around “rift” in the center of the board.  Defender deploys anywhere 12″ away from the rift.  Daemons can Deep Strike as normal, or can “walk on” the table from the rift.)

I lost, by kind of a lot.  I had trouble getting past the leafblower: something would get to one of his squads, obliterate it and then get blown away by the squad behind the freshly deadified squad.  Still, it was a neat mission, and was a fun game.  I’ll definitely have to build a Warp Rift terrain piece to use for this in the future.

War of Attrition

We had time for another game before closing and we’d decided that it was only fair to play an IG mission.  Two of the missions looked… bad for us due to the nature of my army.  We weren’t going to get a good game out of Bloodletters slogging a quarter of the way across the board before being blasted away by lasguns, so we settled on War of Attrition: deployment zones that put us near each other and the ability to recycle Troops choices.

I fiddled with my list a bit, as I don’t consider my 2K list to be very good: split up the 16 ‘Letter squad into 2×8 ‘Letter squads and swapped out two Daemon Princes for two Soul Grinders.

Suprisingly, this game felt closer, though I still got my teeth kicked in.  It ultimately boiled down to one side of the board seeing us trade a Bloodletter squad for two infantry squads each turn (because the Bloodletters would come on close enough to assault that turn and the Guardsmen would come on close enough to rapid fire them into nothingness; rinse and repeat) and big nasty things trashing tanks and being blown away on the other side.

Again, also a lot of fun.

Conclusion

I’m definitely sold on Battle Missions.  They’re fun, thematic and don’t require custom army lists.

One thing that I noticed is how differently they played from the core missions despite the changes being relatively subtle.   There’s a lesson here: a light touch.  There’s an inclination in scenario writing to throw a lot of different things in, and I think this does a great job of showing how just a few small changes makes for a significantly different game.

I expect that my default 40K setting for the next several months (at least) will be, “Let’s try some Battle Missions.”

Malifaux

The next day, I met Thalaric at Game Parlor to have him walk me though how to play Malifaux.  I don’t really process or understand rules until I see them in action and, frankly, Malifaux system is so different there’s no way I could have grokked them without having someone sit down with me and answer a question every 30 seconds.

I was running the Witch Hunters crew I picked up at Madicon, Chris started out running the Cult of December.

The first game probably doesn’t even qualify as a game.  More a matter of going through the motions.  “There’s no reason to cast Flaming Bullets on Samael, but I’m going to do it because I need to understand how it works.”  That sort of thing.

Second game was a bit more of the same, but it progressed much more smoothly.  Also, it became clear that Sonia Criid vs. Rasputina is not a good matchup, as the former is really pretty much designed to kick the latter in the face, hard.

Third game was more of an actual game.  Chris switched over to his Viktorias crew.  The game was surprisingly close… a very close win for me.

The game was interesting enough for me to decide to buy a few more minis for it, though my opinion of the game remains… complex.  I’d like to get in a few more games before I write up a full post about the game.