Monthly Archives: August 2011

In the Final Stretch!

I’m in the final stretch!

I just slapped some varnish on the rat swarms and the last model that needed rebasing.

This is the same Poisoned Wind Mortar I built back at the end of ’09; it just needed rebasing to tie it in to the rest of the army.

The Rat Swarms weren’t exactly necessary.  They’re there in case the Hellpit dies (likely) and explodes into d3 Rat Swarms (unlikely).  Might as well cover all of my bases, right?

That means all I have left to do is:

  • Paint three banners.
  • Do the display board.

The end, that’s it!  The board I’m going to work on this weekend.  I’m going to procrastinate the banners until next week.

Display Case

You might have heard about Borders closing down and being liquidated.  As it’s where the lovely and tolerant Mrs. Rushputin likes to buy her smut shōjo manga, she’s been cruising through our local store regularly as it goes through its liquidation.  While scanning around to fill gaps in her run of Mixed Vegetables, she noticed that they had begun liquidating furniture and fixtures.

They’ve got a number of very, very large tables that would make excellent gaming tables: if we had a basement, it’s the sort of thing that would definitely go there.

More significantly: they’ve got several glass-fronted display cases.  IIRC, these were where the overpriced CD/DVD collections lived.  Getting a display case for my minis is something that’s been on our to-do list for a long, long time: with as much time and money I’ve invested in my hobby, we’d like to pull its fruits out of plastic drawers in the closet and put them on display.  So, when she noticed these, she gave me a call.

We did some measuring and thinking and, after sleeping on it, headed out to buy one.

We had to do a tiny bit of demo to get it: all four of their cases were fixed to each other: an end piece on one side, another display case on the other, and a strip along the top holding it to the case behind it.  It took all of five minutes to sort that out, though.

It stands 4’8″ tall, 13″ deep and 3′ wide.  It’s pretty big, but not too big.  The shelves are space apart enough that their future contents should be well-lit enough, but it shouldn’t be difficult to install lighting if it becomes necessary.

If you’re in a similar spot, and have been looking for a display case: consider one of these (or, maybe, waiting for the liquidators to get more desperate and then consider one of these).  This one’s in pretty good shape: some of the others are a bit rougher.

Forge World Skaven

I’m really surprised to not see much discussion of the amazing new Forgeworld Skaven kits.

The Exalted Vermin Lord is unbelievable: I’ll probably have this sucker assembled and painted before I get around to doing my classic Vermin Lord.
The rules for the Brood Horror look like a lot of fun, and the model is pretty cool.  Not as cool as the EVL, but still lovely (and heart-warmingly reminiscent of my Hell Pit Abomination).
I’m really excited about both of these models.  Now I just need to wait for the crunch to wrap up before I can order them. :)

Painting Progress – 20110809

Had an extremely productive weekend, which was refreshing after what’s felt like an extended period of being too busy to do anything.
For starters, I managed to knock out the rebasing of all of my Stormvermin.  That’s several more models than I actually need by the end of the month, but it was easy enough to just power through all of them.

Let the record show that I don’t particularly care for rebasing minis. It’s a little too tedious.  Just as well that, at this point, I really only need to rebase a single model (one Poisoned Wind Mortar) before I’m done with all of that.
I also decided to change things up a bit and knock out all of the movement trays.  I did a total of six: two 100mm x 120mm trays (from Litko), two 200mm x 100mm horde trays and two 5 model skirmish trays (from GF9).  They came together pretty quickly.
I also blew through another six Plague Monks.  (Not pictured because we know what they look like and the varnish was drying on them while I took these pictures.)
Finally, a while back I finally got the chance to play Chaos in the Old World (which is seriously a lot of fun), just about the time the Horned Rat expansion came out.  The components were solid, and I found it cheap on the internet, so I ordered a second copy of it (the expansion, not the whole game) to use for my army.  I’ll probably get around to using the clanrat / cultist tokens as wound counters and the rat ogre / lesser daemon tokens as unit filler at some point.  I had a little free time, though, so I ended up throwing this piece of terrain together using the vermin lord / greater daemon token:

It’s just the token, a round wooden chit to give it a base, and some left over Arcane Ruins.  It’ll probably go on the center of my display board, I think.

At this point, I’m getting near the end of prepping my army… that’s good, ’cause I’m getting a little tired of painting rats.  By my count, all that’s left is:
  • 5x Plague Monks
  • 3x Rat Swarms (optional, for popping out of an Abomination)
  • 3x Banners (everything else is painted, I just need to do something with the banner)
  • 1x Mortar Rebasing
  • Display Board
This is, I think, pretty doable.