"Terrain," a Plan, and morning progress

Raw materials.

Since my FLGS doesn't do terrain, you have to port it in with you when you go there to game.  While I have a fairly nice setup for Uncharted Seas, a blue base isn't going to work for Warmahordes and the islands are comically undersized for 28mm.  I have plenty of foam and hardboard left over from those islands, but making up new hills and things will take a bit of time.  Since I want to have "terrain" for Thursday I needed a quicker route.  Carrying a minis case and bag of books, dice, etc. as I am, I'm not too keen on adding another box on top of it for terrain, so space saving factored into my plans.  The answer was quick and easy: felt "terrain".  The idea is simple and one you're all no doubt familiar with, cutting out felt shapes to stand in as hills and forests.  There's no 3d element of course, but since Warmahordes runs on standardized shapes and volumes determined by base size it will work well enough.  It's also a quick, cheap, and easy solution that I can roll up and stuff into a bag.  While I intend to get on some real terrain, this will be a good place holder.  As a slight change from the Uncharted Seas setup, I put weights in the bottom cloth to try and hold it in place on the table.  Because fabric comes short of 48" on the bolt, and because the tables at the FLGS are wider than 48", the cloth won't quite be  4' x 4'.  This isn't an entirely bad thing though as there should (hopefully) be less shifting of the cloth due to foot traffic and overhang.  We'll see how it turns out.



After many iterations, I think I'm closing in on a tournament build.  The main ideas are pIrusk, Black Ivan, Greylords, and Winter Guard.  With Superiority and a Ternion cloud, Ivan is DEF 17 against shooting, plus any missed shots will trigger Dodge and let him move around (though not Bulldoze).  I don't need to say much more about the WGI Deathstar, but I will anyway: the Ternion cloud bumps them to DEF 20 against shooting.  This still doesn't help with their big weakness (templates), but it's still nice to have.  The Greylords also have a magic spray for Incorporeal and other things that need magic attacks.  The rest is still up for debate, but currently has the Great Bears, eEiryss, Widowmakers, and probably some other stuff.  With some things decided, I'm using this list as the list I paint towards.  The good news is I have all the pieces primed and ready for painting.  The bad news is only the Winter Guard are actually painted, and then it's just the unit with no UA or WAs.  It's a bit of a hill to climb, but settling on which particular hill will help me direct my steps towards a particular goal and (eventually) reach it.  I'm trying to tell myself that if I can get it painted before the Warstore's Black Friday sale gets going then I'll fill out the pButcher theme list (and maybe some Kayazys) with that sale, but that's very optimistic.  Once I get things firmed up more then perhaps I'll break it down into more manageable goals.

A new dynamic duo.

For now I'm all but certain I'll be running pIrusk and Black Ivan, either together or separately.  I've mused a bit about painting Ivan previously, and over the weekend I remembered the pot of Tamiya Smoke EV gave me way back when and decided to give it a try.  I got bases down for all the metals on Ivan, then slopped around a thick coat of Smoke.  Turns out it smells a lot like cough syrup.  It seemed to take a while to dry, and I'm not sure it was completely dry when I went back to Ivan despite letting it sit for an hour or more.  The results looked pretty good, very similar to a thorough washing.  When I get back to him I'll take a second look to determine whether I can leave it as is or need to highlight a bit, but hopefully I can call the metals done.  I'm going with the studio scheme for Ivan with a few small tweaks, mostly the green shoulders to tie him in to the rest of the army.  The plan is to freehand a 5th Border Legion logo on the upper shell, but we'll see how that turns out.  The black should go pretty quick, just some sparse edge highlighting, leaving just the red and maybe a bit on the green.  It's possible I'll get him finished in the next session, though more likely it'll be two more sittings before he's done.  Not a bad turnaround for a jack though, especially with my slow painting speed.  While doing the green and red on Ivan I roughed those colors in on Irusk as well.  He has a ton of little fiddly details which will be great fun to do.  Hopefully I'll figure out how to highlight this green right by the time I get to that point, which will be after the flesh and maybe the metals as well.  Irusk will take much longer than Ivan but doesn't look to be horrible.  Of course the real hurdle will be the remaining WGI bits and Kovnik Joe, but one hurdle at a time.