Challenge of Q'ermitt 2013, result = 6th of 12

FYI - Once posted I am going to be updating the date back in time so this fits along better in terms of when the tournament actually happened.  Just a disclaimer in case it ends up being confusing.  This is the NAF forum thread about the tournament - there is a link to the pitch rules somewhere in there.

A quick recap since it was so long ago and I just needed to make sure I posted up something.  A quick pic of each game, I will try to add something funny about each and some notes about my roster, skill upgrades and luck below.

2-1 win vs. Leathan (Wood Elves) on skaven sewer pitch

the sewer water flows in random directions and can carry the ball

1-1 tie vs. Colin (Nurgle) on graveyard pitch

the gravestones were really annoyingly placed in this game

1-0 win vs. Gord (Dark Elves) on boat pitch

fortunately the boat didn't cause as many problems as usual

1-2 loss vs. Joe (Wood Elves) on dwarf pitch

I don't think unpainted teams should be allowed to win tournaments

1-2 loss vs. Dave(Dwarves) on desert pitch

so many knock downs and so little actual damage

1. I had decided since it was league style that putting AG4 on a ghoul might be a bit foolish, since they are the only piece without regen on the team.  I ended up giving it to a wight with dodge as well.  In hindsight this was a mistake - playing a cagey grind game that particular wight wasn't on the end of blocks every turn, and it meant I didn't have him available to blitz with as readily.  Next time I think I would just give AG4 to 2 ghouls.
2. I also chose not to give my mummies any skills, hoping their mighty blow would earn them some CAS and with some fortune (doubles) get block cheaply.  Unfortunately they really didn't hurt anyone even facing several elf teams, but in general my luck was also poor in terms of casualties, I just hardly caused any all tournament - still on the fence about this one.
3. All this allowed me to take the chainsaw secret weapon star player - who combined for a miserably embarrassing amount of stuns/KOs and CAS all weekend (IIRC something like 4) :-(

In the end, I finished pretty well (top half) and only lost to the eventual first and second place winners - so if some of my gambles had paid off a bit better, who knows what could have happened.

Sidenote - it was pretty funny to see Dave (2nd place) also win Most Casualties when Chris E. had brought a dwarf list with the sole intention of winning most casualties - I think he lost by 2 or 3.

collecting a few quick painting points

Back in 2010, I had a rather large dip in painting points that I accumulated.  There was a combination of factors involved - mostly due to playing in practically every blood bowl tournament within Ontario and Quebec that year!  Another thing that shaped my hobby time that year was joining the blog Weekly Minis.  It has pretty much fallen off the rails now - though a few persisted with it beyond 2010.  The goal was to paint a miniature a week and while I really enjoyed the variety it did mean I tended to focus on bits & bobs, or smaller batches that would count for a few weeks.

Dwarf character

Therefore I did end up painting several Warhammer Quest characters.  They were a good challenge to paint in a week and allowed me to use lots of colours that are often neglected.  The part that I left neglected was basing them to match the others and the monsters I had collected.  Yes that's right these figures have sat in a "near complete" state for practically 3 years!!  Since I have done so well with painting this year I just forced myself to grab these and base them to collect some painting points that have been dangling for a long time.

can use as Elf Ranger (Knight) or Lord of Aenarion

The dwarf figure is a special character from WHFB, a bit blingy but I couldn't resist keeping him as the WHQ dwarf due to his amazing dragon cloak.  The above elf figure is an older marauder mini that I removed the shield connector and painted up using lots of white.  I hope to eventually get a more "ranger" looking figure to act as the knight version of the elf ranger.  The below model is a simple wardancer champion that I still had kicking around from a friends venture into fantasy, I really like the combination of two very deep colours - the green and the brown really look fantastic.

Elf Wardancer

I will have another post up for painting points soon as I have completed a zombie figure to send to Axt over at Merry Mayhem News to add to his zombie collection and thank him for the harlequin he painted for me and all his assistance with the dugout for my Insane Goblin Posse blood bowl team.  I have pics I just don't want to share them until he gets to see it first! :)

surprise freebie!

I arrived home yesterday to find an anonymous gift in the mailbox.  I've asked around on facebook & twitter and nobody has copped to being the generous sender.  We have begun sharing the news so sharing this photo with you is an easy way to let everyone know we are expecting our first child late this year - hooray!!

appropriate or not? lol

Someone generously sent us this onesie from the zlurpcast cafepress shop. SWMBO explained it's for around a 6-8 month old so it might be a while but we will definitely share a pic in the future.  If you are the sender please let me know!  Thanks!

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt7 (last)

The final post!  A week of necromunda terrain photos has come to an end.  I'm sure you'll be seeing more of these once we get some games started back up again.  So the final step after the weathering powders was a very light to light spray of black paint to give a soot effect.  I held the can pretty far from the pieces so it wouldn't just paint all over everything but give a nice dotted effect.  Between the weathering powder and this spray, it really helped to pull all the disparate parts of these terrain pieces together.

front

back

I also gave the undersides a much heavier spray.  Yes you mostly can't see the bottoms of steps and such, but in necromunda you are often leaning over to get a model's eye view and I couldn't put up with the thought that the bottoms of the steps would look perfectly clean.  This was a quick way to resolve that and it added a bit of extra depth to the soot being sprayed from a couple angles.  Then all it needed was sealing, and a quick touch up of water effects over the blood and they were done.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt6

Close to the light at the end of the tunnel now.  The pieces were painted & washed, suitably cluttered and had some rubble & blood effects.  The second last step (I'm not counting sealing, that was going to be required anyways for terrain this nice!) involved applying some weathering powders to give some rust effects.  I ended up cheaping out a bit on this step as apparently it's better practice to use a few different shades of the powders to really get the best effect, but I only started reading about using them after picking up a single pot and I was impatient so one colour would have to be enough.  Here's the final large walkway piece.

left side

right side

back

Applying the weathering powders was fun and easy.  I highly recommend using some rubbing alcohol as your "binding" agent (binding in quotes as you could still brush it off, but it held it well enough that it didn't all spray away under a coat of varnish) - I tried a few different methods I found online and determined that combining two of them really did well for me.  In future I will test with using one colour per method to see which works best.  Method one is apply some powder dry and then use the end of a brush (not the brush end) to drop some rubbing alcohol above the powder and let it run down.  Method two is once you have that wet streak - get some powder and kinda flick it off your brush onto the wet part.  Always do this over some paper so you can kinda save the powder.  You won't save it all and I just threw it into a "shit mix" of flock that I throw any kind of random flock bits into.  I suspect it will work best with a darker colour using method one and a lighter colour for method two but I could be wrong.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt5

Now these pieces were starting to come together.  All the junk piles and miscellaneous crap made them look busier and would also really influence the amount of cover provided from various angles.  I used various types of flock and foliage in certain places (tried to keep the foliage to a minimum) which was especially helpful in hiding the pennies used to weigh down the pieces.  This had the added benefit of avoiding the "clean" look.  Even though there was a bunch of junk around, if there wasn't any dirt or rubble it might still seem a bit too put together.  Here's another one of the small "gangways" which have steps that will allow gangers to get up the walkways from the ground floor.

right side

left side

I also decided to put a bit of blood splatter on each piece, some places it was obvious (like on this one, the serrated edge of that giant gear doesn't look very nice!) and on others I used it where the piece was starting to look a little plain.  Basically painted some red down and gave it some washes with red and brown inks, and then used some water effects to give it a glistening effect.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt4

After getting these all assembled, sprayed metallic and washed with inks - they still looked really clean and not very "underhive". So I decided I needed to add some junk to give them character. Here's one of the smaller what I call "gangways" - not sure why I've given it that name but just to differentiate from the walkways (still not digging the "catwalk" term)

left side

right side

What I did was take a bunch of various bits I had collected for making terrain and while I was spraying the trophies for the Canadian Open this year - I left them in a box behind what I was spraying.  So all the bits got some spray from gold, silver, bronze, and red.  Then I gave them a quick spritz with some grey and necrotic flesh.  Some got some green wash and some got some blue wash.  I mixed up these bits and glued them on, along with some bits of cloth and bits of bamboo sticks.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt3

I used one of the shorter set of structure bits to make a long and low walkway for this piece.  Once I had all the pieces assembled, my next step was to spray them all with the army painter metallic paint.  After that I used a mixture of the soft tone and strong tone inks - also from army painter to wash over all the pieces.  Some pieces got just soft tone, some got just strong and some got a mix.

left side

right side

This was the piece where I tried using a cut up longer railing and I ended up having to rip it off and use one of the actual laser cut smaller railings because it would have interfered with the connectors.  The balance of this piece also (along with the last piece) convinced me I needed some sort of weight along the bottom to make sure any heavy models wouldn't tip it over, so there are some pennies glued in inconspicuous areas.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt2

Here is another piece of the necromunda walkway scenery I have been working on this year.  I bought a couple sets of Micro Art Studio "catwalk set" made of laser cut HDF - funny name - makes me think of this.  I think it may have been more flexible if I left all the stairs separate and space to attach them, but at the same time it would also make setup take a lot longer and there would be the possibility of damage occurring while putting the table together.  So for the most part I assembled each piece with one set of stairs attached.

right side

left side

back left

Assembly was pretty quick and easy.  White glue was all that was really required.  You do need to be a bit careful, as I did break one piece just from pressing down too hard on it to try and pop it into place, but overall they went together really well.  The one thing I will mention about assembling them is I tried cutting up the long railings to use as short railings that would look a bit different, but you need to pay attention to where you will be connecting them.  They came with special connectors as well which are handy to string a bunch together temporarily.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt1

I'm going to take some advice and split up these posts to stretch this accomplishment out.  Late last year we began talking about playing some more necromunda again this year.  The one thing I definitely was missing from my scenery collection is enough walkways to easily connect all the rest of my necromunda terrain and provide alternate routes for juves and gangers to traverse the gaming area.  More walkways will also help to fill a full 8'x4' table so 2 games can go on at once!

Here is the first piece.  As I go through the posts I will explain how I got them to this point.

right side

left side

back

These took significantly more work than I had anticipated to really give them some character.  I am really happy with the final outcome though and it is a very large project complete which is always positive.