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All posts for the month June, 2019

Neglected Model Challenge: The Last Chaos Horseman

Posted by Comrade on June 26, 2019
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Earlier this month I was browsing the awesome and inspiring list of blogs in my WordPress reader, as is my wont, when I came across Azazel’s June Community Painting Challenge. The theme was “Neglected Models,” which probably describes half or more of my backlog.

See, I play mostly skirmish-level games, which means I don’t usually need to paint up a full unit of anything. More often I’ll pick and choose figures from various sets to build my warbands. As a result, I’ve got lots of “leftover” miniatures bouncing around in various boxes and crates.

One in particular has been vexing me for nearly a decade: The Last Chaos Horseman. He’s so named because he’s the lone leftover from a set of Chaos Marauder Horsemen that I painted up back in 2010. As near as I can tell, the kit itself dates back to 2002. I’ve always liked these guys, because they’re not the heavily armored hunchbacks that came to define later iterations of the Warhammer Chaos line. They’ve got some character to them, with each figure being a bit unique, suggesting a cadre of individual, elite mounted warriors, rather than a wedge of anonymous armored cavalry.

The first four fellows were a blast to paint, and they’ve been in heavy rotation on the tabletop ever since then, playing the role of chaos marauders, roving brigands, or mounted barbarians in a variety of games as needed. I even developed a bit of backstory for them in this blog post (see “The Cursed Riders of Frostvale”).

The last horseman taunted me, though. For years I moved him from box to box, always vowing to work on him whenever I had a break in my schedule. Along the way I became a father, moved to across the country, built a new game group from scratch, started playing Warhammer 40,000 again, and … you get the idea.

Anyway, reading Azazel’s blog post about his June painting challenge got me inspired to drag out this lone horseman and finish him off.

Now, my painting style has changed (I’d say “matured”) since I painted up the first four guys in this unit. I deliberately tried to recall my earlier techniques in an attempt to make the last horseman fit in with his fellows. This was particularly important for the basing scheme, and I think I achieved a fairly decent approximation of my earlier work. Here’s the whole team.

My only regret is that I didn’t trim off the mold lines on the front section of the plastic horse. Oops! It’s not very visible at “gaming distance” (3 feet away), so we’re all good.

With that, this unit is complete! It only took me a decade. My extremely long term goal is to have a small generic chaos/barbarian warband for use in games like Open Combat and Frostgrave. With this lone horseman completed, I’m one step closer.

Dragon Rampant: Borderlands Burning

Posted by Comrade on June 10, 2019
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The crew got together earlier this month for another game of Dragon Rampant, which has quickly become our go-to game for fast-playing medium-sized fantasy games. The scope of the game is generally a bit bigger than a typical skirmish game, but smaller than Warhammer Fantasy (back when it existed). The flexible nature of Dragon Rampant really accommodates armies of all sizes, as we saw in this game.

This was to be Lawrence’s first game of Dragon Rampant, so we set up a scenario in our Üthdyn campaign setting that followed up on the outcome of a raid on a frontier village in the hinterlands of Glostmurk. The ratmen raiders, emboldened after pillaging the hamlet of Glodd, embarked on an orgy of looting and burning all along the borderlands of Glostmurk.

Desperate to halt their advance and bring the rats to battle in proper fashion, the Wealth of Begovic organized an alliance with a nearby brood of trolls and orcs, promising the savages first dibs on any tasty rat carcasses after the battle. That was good enough for the orcs and trolls, and they hefted their crude weapons and marched to war alongside the Begovic militia.

John was fielding his human warriors as the Begovic house guard, headed up by Lady Almira Begovic herself. His army included several newly painted units, including a somber squad of Oathmark infantry, and a crazed fighter wielding two maces, from RuneWars. It’s been awesome to see his army take shape as we’ve explored Dragon Rampant!

For his first game, Lawrence dropped a truly gorgeous collection of trolls and orcs onto the table. They were drawn from several different factions from Warhammer and/or Age of Sigmar, but they looked superb and totally cohesive on the table together.

Opposite them was an army comprised of basically every painted Skaven figure I owned. Ha! With both John and Lawrence teaming up to field 24 points each, it was up to me to scrape together 48 points of rats to oppose them. If you’ve been following the progress on my all-metal Skaven army, you know that it’s been my goal for a year or so to get a big army-sized pile of rats ready for battle. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for!

The battlefield represented any of the dozens of pitiful frontier locales that had born the brunt of the Skaven’s menacing attacks on Glostmurk. A flaming hut dominated the battlefield, surrounded by patches of forest in the otherwise trackless wilderness. The three opposing armies drew up their forces, shouted oaths and threats to enemies and allies alike, and then the battle got underway.

In the first couple of turns, both Lawrence and I got well acquainted with Dragon Rampant’s most angst-inducing mechanic — the botched activation roll. If at any time you attempt to issue an order and fail, your turn ends, right there on the spot. It’s an unforgiving mechanic, and it’s also tough to explain to people who are more used to playing Other Fantasy Wargames from a Particularly Large Publisher. In those games, your guys almost always behave as you expect, and you can move all your toys in a given turn. Dragon Rampant doesn’t care — if you fail, your turn is over.

Well, that happened. A few times, actually. Luckily, the hammer seemed to fall on both sides of the battlefield, and we soldiered on.

John had the most success in mobilizing his team, and as a result the Wealth of Begovic advanced mostly in good order toward a timber fence, where his archers took up position, guarded by a solid flank of spearmen.

The ratmen advanced in a much more haphazard fashion, with lots of starts and stops as my dice refused to cooperate. Ultimately I managed to get a decent sized force, consisting of a unit of heavy missiles (assorted rat-guns), a unit of greater warbeasts (rat ogres) and a unit of heavy foot (Stormvermin) to oppose the Begovic House Guard. You can see our maneuvering in the photo below.

Unseen in this photo, I had a unit of Skaven slaves (light foot) racing up the left flank. Light foot moves much faster than most other units in Dragon Rampant, so these guys were able to mobilize and get in position even when the rest of my army was draggin’ their tails.

Here they are in combat with a unit of Begovic spearmen (also light foot, actually). They did OK but I didn’t expect them to hold the entire flank on their own.

While John’s phalanxes closed ranks and prepared to weather the charge from the Rat Ogres, Lawrence’s orcs and trolls smashed into the rodent lines on the other flank. This action was led by his fearsome giant, who strode through the smoke and flame of the burning hut to utterly wreck the poor sad little rats who stood in his way. Check out this photo:

Wow! Truly, this was a beautiful game with breathtaking models and terrain. Only the best for you, dear reader!

Anyway, Lawrence proceeded to trounce me on the right flank of the battlefield. A few factors went into this drubbing. First, I had inadvertently neutered the effectiveness of my Doomwheel by “upgrading” it to add a ranged attack and remove its wild charge special ability. In truth, wild charge was exactly what I needed in this game, because it would have allowed my Doomwheel to attempt a counter-charge when it was charged by that fearsome giant late in the game.

By trading off the wild charge for a cute-but-inadequate ranged combat attack, I had reduced the effectiveness of what should have been a hard-hitting shock unit (the Doomwheel). So it was carved up piecemeal, and I learned a good lesson about list-building.

I had higher expectations for my Plague Monks (bellicose foot, in the parlance of Dragon Rampant). After all, they had the counter-charge ability, as well as beefy combat stats. Alas, they failed their counter-charge roll on the turn when it would have mattered the most, and they were cut down like dogs (rats?) as they fled.

Overall, my rats did not perform well versus Lawrence’s trolls. But maybe that was for the best — after all, what better way to learn about a new game than by giving your opponent a thorough, merciless drubbing?!

I will claim credit for finally bringing down the giant, though, amid a flurry of blows by my elite foot (leader + bodyguard retinue). So there’s that!

At this point, the writing was on the wall for my ratmen. They had mustered for battle but failed to execute their battle plan (in true Skaven fashion). I learned a few things about list-building and the effectiveness of various units in this game.

I addition, I must doff my cap to John’s very careful maneuvering and unit placement as he squared off with his Begovic House Guard. He was able to exploit the wild charge ability on units like my greater warbeasts. I tried to return the favor by goading Lady Almira into charging my Stormvermin (see below) but he was too smart for that. Arrgh! She escaped unscathed, which is an affront that must be rectified in future games.

So this mini-campaign rolls on, with the ratmen slinking away in defeat. It was great to see Lawrence’s army on the table, at long last!

So where will we go from here? I’m painting up some new units for future games, so maybe we’ll try a town raid, with lots of buildings and back alleys to spice things up. I’ve got a big collection of fantasy city terrain that I would dearly like to get onto the table for a big game. Stay tuned for more!

Open Combat: Under the Grey Mountains

Posted by Comrade on June 5, 2019
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Thankar lit a torch and edged closer to the doorway. The cavern entrance was hewn from the rough rock of the mountain face, but the ancient artisans had etched inscrutable runes around the perimeter of the opening. Thankar and his fellow warriors could only guess at the message as they stepped cautiously past the threshold and into the gathering dark. If the words were cautionary, they went unheeded.

The corridor sloped down, the flagstone pavers underfoot soon giving way to irregular pebbles and rocky outcroppings. Within minutes the warriors were enveloped in darkness, their way lit only by guttering torches gripped in steady hands.

Ahead lay their quarry: the vile, chittering Skaven raiders that had absconded with the halfling wizard Argus Nul after the massacre at the Stoic Arms. Thankar and his fellow warriors had tracked the foul ratmen to this underground lair, which offered their best chance at recovering Argus … or what remained of him.

Vincent and I had a chance to grab an empty table at Enfilade last month to play out the second game in our occasional fantasy mini-campaign set the Old World. In the first game, a warband of Skaven raiders swept down from the Grey Mountains to kidnap Argus Nul from his well-defended roost at the Stoic Arms Inn.

For this game, Nul’s gallant cadre tracked the ratmen’s spoor to the trackless caverns beneath the Grey Mountains, where our game begins. We’re using Open Combat, a fast-playing generic skirmish game that is great for games with 5 to 10 figures per side. Vincent brought his Dwarven Forge dungeon terrain to represent the benighted caves, plus some hungry fauna to populate the dank tunnels.

We played at Enfilade, a regional gaming convention hosted annually in Olympia by the Northwest Historical Miniatures Gaming Society. It was a busy day at the convention, and we were lucky to find an empty table on the perimeter of the gaming hall. I’m pleased to report that we had a steady stream of foot traffic coming over to check out our nifty terrain and miniatures, which was nice! It seems there’s always room for a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, even at a historical miniatures convention.

The game began with Vincent’s warband creeping into the dungeon to face my ratmen defenders, which had been deployed throughout the maze-like passageways and chambers. My rats outnumbered his guys, but his figures were more powerful on an individual basis. It would be an interesting game…

The battle was joined in the antechamber, as the elf warrior Carroth True-Shot spotted Vrictus of the Gnarled Root (my Skaven warlock leader) darting amongst the mushrooms. In truth this was a bit of a feint, as I had hoped to lure more of Vincent’s figures into the mushroom forest so I could flank them with fighters hidden in a side tunnel.

Actually, this is exactly what happened … except the combat didn’t go my way, and my flanking maneuver turned into a slaughter.

As the dwarves pushed past the corpses of the slain ratmen, they came into range of Vironq’s Hand-Cranked Doom Machine (my ratling gun). The artillery piece lit up the darkness of the dungeon as it blazed away at the invaders, bleeding them for every step they took deeper into the Skaven lair.

The predatory plants lurking in the dungeon also contributed to the dwarves’ woes, gnashing at them with toothy foliage and barbed tendrils. For the plants, we decided they would attack any figure that came within 3 inches of them. And since Open Combat is a very mobile game, with lots of push-backs and repositioning of figures, this meant that Skaven and hero alike had some uncomfortable encounters with the hungry plants in the dungeon.

Alas, it was too little, too late. Even as the Skaven began to stabilize the situation in the mushroom forest (with Vrictus using his Intimidate psychological attack to great effect against a dwarven champion named Sphen Coldwind), a handful of dwarves had slipped past and were approaching the door to the dungeon jail where Argus Nul was imprisoned. The lone Skaven guard was getting increasingly anxious as the sounds of combat drew nearer to the jail.

Finally, having lost his nerve, the Skaven guard butchered poor Argus through the bars of his cage, then fled into the darkness.

The few remaining ratmen beat a hasty retreat. For their part, the heroes recovered Argus’s spellbook — offering some small measure of victory even as they mourned the loss of the wee little halfling wizard.

Once again Open Combat gave us a great game, with lots of drama and seesaw action moments. Dungeons are exceedingly dangerous environments for Open Combat, because so much of the game involves pushing and bashing your enemies into stuff. When you hit a wall or a piece of terrain or another model, you typically take additional damage. On a wide-open battlefield, that’s dangerous enough — you can imagine how brutal it becomes in a claustrophobic dungeon!

We’ll see where this mini-campaign goes from here. Maybe the next game will be a town assault, where the ratmen are are storming the city gates to plunder the burgermeisters’ holdings? That would be a good excuse to get some of my town buildings on the table, too. Stay tuned!