Mordheim

Got a little bit done yesterday. It really is quite a draining experience trying to clean plastics without the prospect of painting them any time soon. I think it's all the little shavings of material. Using a file on metals it seems that gravity takes care of the debris, but using a blade on palstic means stopping every few seconds to brush away the detritus. The Knight alone took ages to bring up to spec, I possibly should have left it until last, the Beastman required a fraction of the time.

Anyway, rant over, time to look forward. The job for today will be to clean and build 2 more Bestigor, and a variety of Gor and Ungor (probably 5 Gor and 2-3 Ungor). I also have to buy the 2 GW Beastlords, I already have the Avatars of War version but I really love both that GW sells so I'll definately be painting them at some point. For my Shaman I'll be using a Chaos Sorceror, it has quite a bestial aspect and I think it will fit in nicely. The Knight shown in this post will be my Centigor, at least for a while. I might eventually replace it with an official Centigor model. I'm not sure what I'll use for the Hounds yet.

Hopefully now the Knight is done I'll make some good progress on the foot soldiers today (aiming to get them all done), I'm out playing poker tonight so there will be no prospect of any late-night modelling.

Whatever I get done today, painting starts tomorrow.

The Warp Herd

Ok, it begins. As stated in my intro the plan is to first make a little Mordheim warband, thus forming a basic core for the army. As this small and varied group expands so will the the army core, until eventually I'll have a little WFB army and can make my first sorties into full pitched battle.

I'm not a huge fan of the way that GW has divided up the Hordes of Chaos into 3 distinct armies. It seems to me a clumsy and unneccessary fluff reversal that kind of dilutes the flavour, not to mention not making much sense from a background perspective (aren't Daemons supposed to be hard to summon and maintain? Whole armies of Daemons are a once in a lifetime event, a portent of the Apocalypse? Similarly, mighty Heralds of Chaos on their way to burn and pillage whole cities can no longer venture into the deep woods enroute and coerce/convince a few beastmen to join the fun?). With this in mind I've decided to make my army a traditional mash-up like the Chaos of old, with Daemons, Mortal, and Beasts all invited to the party. Rumour has it that the option to include allies will return in WFB 8th edition, but even if this isn't possible I'll just shoehorn my miniatures into a useable army via the wonderful process of proxy.

So, a couple of weeks ago I ordered two boxes of Chaos Knights (awesome models), a Beastman battalion, and an Avatars of War Beast Lord from Wayland Games (I prefer this retailer when making orders above £25ish due to their large discount on rrp) and the Gods are clearly smiling on this endeavour as the battalion arrived yesterday, just in time for my holiday. That means I have 10 glorious days to get a good start on this project before the tedious realities of everyday life begin to intrude.

I won't bore you with pics of boxes or sprues, I don't see the point. Rather I'll start cleaning up plastic bits and pieces and doing some dry fits. I tend to do this type of thing in between bouts of painting but today I'm going to attempt some sort of clean-up & glue production line, hopefully I can get a fair bit done before the temptation to break out the paints overwhelms me. I'll update with progress pics later today, so until then, au revoir :)

Intro

Hello all, and welcome to my new blog, The Herdstone. This blog will be all about my attempts to build and paint Beasts of Chaos and all manner of other Chaos monstrosities that the old Hordes of Chaos once included. The aim is to eventually have a fully painted Warhammer army, but since this will take a long time I'll be breaking the process down into a few distinct aims, the first of which will be to construct a Beastman warband for the Mordheim skirmish game. I'll then go forth to play a few battles whilst expanding the army in my spare time.

This blog will probably be a little more candid than my other blog, with more WIP photos and random musings. I don't know if it will be any more interesting to read but hopefully it will be more fun to write.

So without further delay, let the journey commence!