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https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/11/15/old-world-new-warhammer/ I don't particularly care myself, I've been playing Kings of War since right before 2nd edition and intend to stick with Mantic, but I find it fascinating that they think people who already scrapped their square bases are willing to return to a system run by the very company that asked them to rebase in the first place.

Finished these finally (yes I know the bases on the back ones aren't done yet) but the painting is done :P Just got something like 2 chariots, a boltthrower, a few lords, a unit of Calvary and I think I can pretty call his army done (at least for now). Really trying to get to more CAV and my Jabberwock this week! So messy pic:

Got a bit of the horde done, I tried for a pattern on one rat, grey and black. I also painted one a kind of tawny colour, which was in honour of my awesomely sweet rat of some 20 years ago, Whiskers. He used to sit on my shoulder and watch me at the computer or whatever I was doing. I really miss that little guy, such a shame rats just don't have the life span of cats :( although I guess that'd make the wild kind a bit more dangerous overall. Anyway! The middle guy here is Whiskers ^^

Not exactly Oldhammer this time, but still a few years old. I picked up this guy in a partially painted state off my mate Matt F, who I haven’t seen in an age now. So anyway, it’s probably taken me 15 years to get around to finishing him off. I’ve certainly been staring at him on my shelves since I moved into this house, and we’re moving up on three years of that now. I’d recently moved him up the queue and been actively wanting/trying to make myself complete him for a couple of months, and this past weekend I finally forced myself to do it. It turns out that this extended timeline very nicely coincided with my playing about with a different technique to my tried and tested method for doing gold/brass to, so maybe it all worked out for the best. Quite a lovely figure, I have to say. Sculpted by Colin Dixon and originally released as the Warhammer Quest Troll Slayer, it was re-released as a companion piece to the mid-1990’s metal slayers that were done by Aly Morrison. While some of those are nice enough models, this one is clearly the best of the entire range, so when it was moved to the WHFB range it was also renamed (or promoted) to Dragon Slayer, as befits such a fine model. I took these photos while the PVA was still wet on the grass tufts, hence the “white blob†look, which has now disappeared. Sorry ’bout that! I considered adding Slayer Tattoos, or Woad Warpaint, but it’s just such a wonderful model as-is that I decided that I prefer to keep him “cleanâ€. I’ve now got plenty more Slayers to paint, after all – many who will come with much more appropriate amounts of skin to add ink to. He’s a bit bright, both with his pants and also his hair. But then, he’s a Warhammer model, so I’m fine with it. The shading on the white stripes on his old-timey Warhammer pants is a bit washed out by the lighting, but at least the blue showed up. He could also look fantastic with a dark, grimy and stained look, but I’ve gone for the bright and clean style here which while far less realistic is just as valid an aesthetic for miniature painting. It’s like Goblin Green-skinned goblins! In gaming terms he’s perfect for a PC or NPC in WFRP and on the tabletop as a Slayer Hero. He’ll find some form of use in KoW eventually, very much as a Dwarven Berserker(slayer) hero. Until then, he can just sit in a display case and pretty the place up. I’ve got some more very old Dwarves painted up here that I’ve completed over the past few years. I’ll have to get them photographed soon and up on display here as well.

Today we have just a few models. All three were painted recently, though the standard was completed last (week!), since I was a little uninspired by the cloaky nature of the sculpt and struggled to find a way to finish it to my satisfaction. In the end I decided that there wasn't a lot I could do without getting unnecessarily ornate with the cloak which is really just supposed to be a darkened rag-cloak and that the head(skull!) and banner itself would serve suitably as the focal points These Skeletons are from at least 1989, and I believe that all three of these were sculpted by Aly Morrison. I've kept to Marouda's overall Undead army colours of Black, Red, old Brass and Steel (and bone!) Shields can be a bit of a challenge, in that I like to keep to smaller ones that don't overpower/hide the rest of the model too much, but want to make them interesting in their own rights. I went with an era-appropriate smaller shield and gave it a half-skullface design, with a bit of an attempted depth painted onto it. The unit they will lead does not yet exist, so rather than hold them back I decided to show them off now. The Standard bearer could potentially end up as one of the ASBs in the bigger undead army, but we'll have to wait and see after the new KoW rules come out in a week or so. Of course, I can always use them in AoS in the meantime.

These models are from Early 4th Edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle, when "Goblin Fanatics" got handed over to the Night Goblin faction (revived pretty much from earlier editions of Warhammer, and the early "C" Series models, but mostly forgotten in 3rd). As 4th Edition Models, released in 1992 they're technically not "Oldhammer" by about a year for those who care about strict definitions. (Not me, but hey - I like the history.) Unlike the last batch of goblins from a few days ago, these were all painted in the last few weeks. Four 4th Edition Night Goblin Fanatics Now the more astute amongst you will have noted that there are way too many Fanatics here to be sensible at all. As always, there's a good reason for this. I had a bunch of my own back in the day (which got started but not finished) and my friend Jared had started a Night Goblin/Savage Orc army of his own, though he never got (m)any of the models completed before losing interest and selling them off. I purchased many of the half-and-un-painted models off him, with the intent to repaint them myself one day - and ending up with way too many fanatics for a normal game of WHFB. For the most part, they've sat in a series of figure cases since then. Four More 4th Edition Night Goblin Fanatics. Including a couple repair jobs! Anyway, between Jared's goblins and my own, I ended up with quite a lot of Fanatics, who as I mentioned have done nothing since the mid-1990's besides take up space in a case. Over the years, a couple of them had their fragile chains break, and so got repaired with brass rod. So it's a ball on the end of a metal rod on the end of a chain. That's still unsafe, so it's ok! Hopefully the last four 4th Edition Night Goblin Fanatics I'll ever paint! Since one of my aims this year aside from directed army painting for KoW is to clear off my desk and shelves of half-painted, unfinished and even slightly-started stuff, it wasn't a huge stretch to extend that to the stack of figure cases that have the same in them. I mean, the reason I'm trying to finish the stuff on my desk is to avoid adding to the reams of unfinished stuff in cases, so this just follows the same ethos, albeit, slightly in reverse. These Fanatics all followed the same general scheme shown with the newer plastics that I finished recently (who were cluttering up my desk) - and were also the direct inspiration for me to pull these out and paint them up. I quite like how they turned out in crazy loose formation (though I seem to have a bit of a contrast issue with these latest photos). A horde of dangerously insane goblins swinging their big balls around! Finally and as usual - the "unit shots". Anyone familiar with KoW might be wondering how I intend to use these, as their Goblin army doesn't really have any equivalents to much of the crazy-colourful stuff in the Warhammer list, including Fanatics. My initial thoughts were to use the profiles of Twilight Kin "Blade-Dancers" (Witch Elves) as they've got lots of attacks but are fragile, but the recent Ratkin (Skaven) list also gives the option of "The Blight", which are kinda-sorta Plague Censer Bearers. Dunno for sure yet, but I'll find an appropriate profile for them once the new rules and lists are ironed out and I'm able to start playing again. Until then I'll just push on painting the semi-random crap on my desk and building "units" as I can. Given that the unit is made up of psychotic goblins swinging their balls & chains around like mad Dervishes, I've felt free to face them in various directions rather than all front-on, also with the intent to make the unit look interesting from multiple angles. Now this just leaves me with needing to figure out what to do with those new plastics and the Iron Claw Fanatics that I've painted...

Here we have some Realm of Chaos figures that have recently been released from the Purgatory of a storage case and revived. These were some of the early figures I got. Bloodletters of Khorne from the original Slaves to Darkness volume of Realm of Chaos. Painted back in the day and touched up several times over the years. Pulled out of a storage case a couple of weeks ago to be rebased and lightly touched up again. The middle guy looks a bit odd in the front-on photo, but the Conga-line profile shot helps him to make more sense. These early figures might not have been the greatest of sculpts, but they had a twisted physiology that made them work really well as Daemons. I'm glad that GW has returned to a design close to the original with the recent plastics after their iterations as cosplaying budybuilders and spiky beastmen in the interim. I never had many of the original Bloodletters, and still don't. Getting them up to an even 8 (or 10, or 12) is "on the list" but they're not cheap or easily found on eBay. Back in the day, a Night Horror Demon (I guess he could be a gargoyle, but the trident is telling) got roped into the gang and has been a part of the small unit ever since. I somehow ended up with a broken Bloodletter torso, and so ended up grafting it to a spare pair of Chaos Warrior legs I had lying around after an uninspired Bear Centaur conversion. The arm is off an early Jugger rider. At some point these guys will hit the table again. I'll use Abyssal rules for KoW, though it's doubtful that I'll run a full daemonic army, and instead ally them with "The Herd" (Beastmen) and whatever Non De Plume that Warriors of Chaos end up with. They might be willing to ally with Nurgle, but not with the hated Slannesh or the duplicitous Magicians of Nurgle. I'm sure they'll also end up on a 40k table, after I get some more forces up to scratch and work out which version or combination of the rules my group will play with.

Today's update shows off an "Oldhammer" Warhammer Goblin Unit made up of 2nd-3rd Edition models, almost entirely sculpted by Kev Adams back in the day and based on Rounds and turned into a KoW regiment by virtue of some blu-tac and a movement tray. These figures have been painted over quite a few years, with many painted 5-10+ years ago, a couple last year, and the last stragglers done in the last few weeks as part of my "finish those bloody things" drive. I'll show them off in threes to start with. The command group of the unit (not that these things matter in the new edition of KoW, but I digress). The leader is "Kleaver" from the Goblin Battle Chariots box set with the addition of a Marauder Goblin Shield. The rest of the crew also found their way into this regiment. I think I started painting them to add to the chariots, which I never got painted and slowly faded into the depths of time. I'll have to do something about those sometime soonish. Perhaps they can have some plastic crewmen? The other two are simply command figures from the late 1980's, probably painted sometime in the 1990's. I didn't feel a need for a flag or pennant. Not all standards are giant flags, after all. I gave the musician a Nine Inch Nails back tattoo, since as a gobbo musician he's clearly really into his industrial music. The leader got a red hood to make him really pop, especially given his chainmail coat and plate boots take away a lot of the opportunity to add colour and interest. The next three feature two more from the 80's command figures - the mod-posed figures are a Champion, a Leader and their cohort is a regular goblin from '91. Though I think he looks like the sort to be a unit champion with his cute little glaive. Two of these three also came off the chariot sets mentioned earlier. The centre spear and hammer. Clearly the "red" spear is a close relation to the Hammer, and no doubt that helped me decide to paint the pair of them at the same time. All three of these were originally painted in the 1990's... ...and then the two on the outer were "re-finished" this year. The copper and Bronze scale mail were originally red, and purple. Hideous, you might say? Yes. The shield was originally absent entirely - just a shield boss sticking out of the back of the figure, painted black - so I decided to add a shield. I went for a leering goblin face design. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it falls under "good enough" for me. I could spend time trying to figure out why I'm not satisfied with it, or I could just move on and do a better job on the next freehand shield. So I've chosen the latter. These three are a little more interesting. The first goblin, with the hammer and net is an early slottabase figure, from the C13 Small Goblins range, circa 1885-ish. I haven't managed to find this specific figure in the catalogues, but it looks to be the same style as figures like "Spear Thruster", so possibly/probably sculpted by the Perrys. This one was entirely painted recently, and while I'm not super happy with how his musculature came out, the head is fine, and the mohawk was a fun old-school touch. The other two figures were also painted years ago. The middle figure is one of Bob Olley's Iron Claw Goblins from 1988. It's from the same range that the recent Fanatics I shared came from, and he was probably even purchased in the same blister that they came in. I went for something entirely different on his shield, trimming off the edging and painting it in a kind of pseudo-3D goblin moon-face style. Why is the moon red rather than yellow? Probably so it'd stand out more against the green of the goblin's hide. Dunno. It was an experiment, after all. That's what the more individual metal models did for me back in the day, before mass plastics were the norm. I liked to experiment with a lot more of my models' paint jobs, even if it meant that they lacked a unified unit look. The final figure, another of the late-'80's "champions" also had a shield experiment. The narrative to that figure, if you will - is that he painted his shield himself. I always wondered how brutal creatures like Orcs and Goblins, who had brutal and crude weapons and armour always had such fine, delicate and artistic designs on their shields, banners and gear. I decided to paint this guy's shield as though he'd painted it himself. [see boxout above] Recently. The skull is crude and simple. The blue (and red) paint is messy and spattered everywhere (including on his clothing) and the paint had also pooled at the base of his shield, leading to a mess on the metal where it was leaning on the ground in a pool of paint. Cast yourselves back to your Primary/Elementary School Art Room, and you'll feel the inspiration for this guy. On the backside of these three, both the Iron Claw goblin and the art-school candidate had their clothing repainted. Iron Claw boy lost his garish purple and yellow 1990's tunic and skirt while The Artist's blue scale mail was repainted in a bright copper. Are Heartbreaker miniatures "Oldhammer"? Technically probably not since they were sculpted after Kev Adams left GW's employ, but then again their aesthetic follows the 3rd Edition Warhammer Fantasy look and feel quite closely. This guy is still available today from Ral Partha Europe/RPE as part of their range of Kev Adams Goblins. I should buy some more of them sometime, but at 2 quid a figure by 12 or 24, that comes to £24/48 or a little shy of AU$50-100 for one unit, which is a bit hard for me to justify to myself right now. I just wish they had discounted unit prices for sets of 10 or 20. Basically, they're super-cheap for heroes and unit leaders but it adds up quickly if you want to build whole units. (Though they're probably still cheaper than whatever GW is charging for plastics these days!) Still, this guy is a great figure and for only 2 quid, an easy and easily-justified purchase. And now, The Unit Shot! (Lots more over on the Wordpress)

After last weekend, the latest unit of my old-school Ogres finally got finished, with the completion of "Bounty Hunter", who like so many other models I've been completing recently was started 10+ years ago. Without too much chatter, here they are: As I said, this guy had been part-painted and in a minis case for some amount of time probably approaching 20 years - sometime around when the others were started and the initial ones were painted, in any case. I've kept as much of the original paint I started with him and worked on the rest. Still, I had one hell of a mental block to overcome in order to finish him. Gutlagg here was basically finished years ago. I may have even shown him off before, but now his unit is finished, and he's been promoted to the unit leader. So hey! This guy has a name, but he's usually just referred to as "Ogre Thug". There are two versions of this guy with just a small variation between them. This one has a small pouch attached to his chest, while the other has a small armoured disc. Since I somehow ended up with three of this guy, including both variants, I ended up converting two of them. One can be seen here, with the original mace head replaced by a hammer head and the spike on his helmet removed. The guy showcased on this page was originally painted in an embarrassingly garish scheme. (Yes, how he appears here is heavily toned down). His weapon mod was also embarrassingly bad. So bad in fact that I don't think I took any photos of him at all before reworking him. His mace head had been replaced with an Advanced HeroQuest (Or Dark World? Something like that, anyway) Ogre's Big ugly tree-club with a spike added to it. It looked awful. I ended up adding a Mantic Ogre's 2-hander blade to it, and it looks roughly a million times better now. Here's the final, completed unit of these Ogres. I'm getting down to the last few of these old models now to paint and finish, which is both heartening and also a little sad.

The first two figures in this update are a pair of the first batch of Squig Hoppers released by GW for 4th Edition WHFB, back in 1991-1992. WHFB3 (the "Oldhammer" edition) didn't feature Squigs in any form, and goblins were really just goblins. When WHFB4 came around with it's 40k-codex style army books, Goblins gained several subtypes in a properly-supported form, such as Night and Forest. I seem to recall mentions of Night Goblins predating 4th edition, so there's that. Night Goblins have kind of become the de facto subtype in more recent years as opposed to the more generic ones from WFFB3. Anyway, I really quite liked these models, and so I collected quite a few of them. One of these two was painted quite awhile ago (5 years? 10? Who knows!) while the other was started right afterwards and only finished last year. It was shown last year in near-complete WIP form at one point, but I never showed off the completed model. As I've stated elsewhere - sure these Kev Adams sculpts look cartoony, disproportionate, and not especially realistic. But they do have real character. I'm well aware how often "character" is used as a kind of code/excuse for poor sculpting of older models, but here I really do mean it as a positive. These models might be a year or two out from "Oldhammer", but being from the Kev Adams run of goblinoids, they're Oldhammer and Old-school enough for me. More importantly, they're great models in their own right that still stand up well today. The second pair I'm sharing today were both painted a long, long time ago. Back when I used to actively play WHFB, in fact! These are Bob Olley sculpts - Goblin Fanatics from his Iron Claw range circa 1998. Since they're painted in the colour scheme of Night Goblins, they'd have been painted during the early days of 4th Edition. As regular readers will know, I'm not an especially big fan of many of Bob's sculpts, and these are no exception. Still, back in the day you pretty much only had what was available - and this was it. No eBay, no internet shopping and mail order to GW from Australia was a rare and exciting occurrence. Especially for a teenager or young adult. You can see that the flame motif used on my more recent Night Goblin Fanatics goes way back, though. Because I am nothing if not imaginative and experimental. With these models being real outliers of the "weird and random" part of the WHFB Orc and Goblin list, they don't really fit in to a KoW Goblin Army as the list stands right now. Hopefully with the "officially unofficial not-GW army lists" that are supposed to come out later on in the year, these guys will find a home on the tabletop again in 2015.

As part of my continuing push to clear off my painting desk via actually finishing off models, I gathered together these three Goblin Fanatics a couple of weekends ago. I got them either from eBay, or WAU, or something like that at least a couple of years ago. I can't even remember, to tell the truth. It was certainly before we bought this house and moved in. They had been assembled, sprayed black, had their bases painted goblin green, and parts of their skin had also been painted goblin green. Unless that last part was me. Anyway, they'd just kind of floated around since I got here, and had been separated, and one of them had suffered a fall from the shelf due to Leonard the Cat going "fishing" from the top of the bookshelf - snapping the chain, which was hanging by a thin thread of plastic. My "Assistant", Leonard the Cat. "Helping". So anyway. I saw a couple of them taking up space and decided to finish them as a quick weekend project. The plan was to get them entirely done in the one weekend. It ended up taking two, but close enough. Glued the chain back together and off I went. It took a bit to decide what to do with their clothing. I feel that while Night Goblins can be dark as you like, it's nice to make their "special" models pop in some way. I also hate checked patterns on goblinoids, so I went with flames. Initially using an off-white, I decided they'd look better with a bit more colour, so I went with the brighter flames. Yes, I know that the base of the flames "should be" yellow as it's the hottest part, and the red at the edges. These flames, of course, are made of paint representing a pattern on cloth rather than actual flames, so I'm fine with the red being adjacent to the green of their faces, and the yellow against the black of their hoods. It's all about contrast and "pop" here, but without over highlighting black cloth or green skin up to white, which always bothers me a little. I also experimented a little with the balls and chains. I wanted them to look like worn and rusted metal. While they took a little longer than I'd planned, I'm quite happy with the final outcome. Now, on to the next models.

Back in my teens, I used to finance many of my Warhammer purchases by commission painting for other people. I got to paint some cool stuff, and bought a hell of a lot of Space Marines (most of which are still unpainted to this day(!) One of the kits I painted for other people was the stuff from the MD8 Skeleton War Machines box set, which was the eighth in the Machineries of Destruction range. As with my old Dwarves, I only ever had a couple dozen of the old Undead models, and sold off most of them back in the day, excepting a few (exactly as with the Dwarves). Since Marouda's "building" an Undead Army for KoW (as fast as I can paint it for her) and I've been following Subedai's blog for a couple of years, I've gotten inspiration for various bits and pieces. Recently, he showed off his Plague Cart, which triggered something in my pea brain and sent me to eBay looking for some of the cool old Undead kits I painted back in the day. While I haven't been completely successful so far, I've managed to get a few pieces at least. Here's the first of them: The Skull Chucker (also alternately known as the Screaming Skull Catapult before that new TK kit took the name). Yep, there are some "mistakes" and missing bits there. First and most obviously, the crew are "wrong", and it's missing the Skull Ammo Pile. It was sold on eBay with two loaders and a spotter, but not the bonehead who fires the catapult. Still, the price was ok, and shipping from the UK was decent rather than exploitative (both real concerns when you're here in Australia) so I figured "good enough" and got it anyway. There was a ton of old superglue encrusted on the launcher arm and frame, and the arm was glued slightly up at an odd angle. Also a fair bit of old, old flash and extruded bits of lead to clean up. No big deal though. I used a bit of greenstuff to get a good bond when reassembling, and then noticed that both braced were missing from the kit. D'oh! Now luckily I'd just bought some undead Tomb Kings stuff off a guy locally, and I'd literally just received the bag of bits that he'd "forgotten" (cough) to send out with the other stuff a week earlier. I thought it would be worth checking through to see if there was something appropriate in it that I could use to fix up the Skull Chucker. Now the bits bag was actually filled with cool bits (it was a big reason why I bought his stuff). and it included several of these ...banner poles(?) After cutting them down, they turned out to be a great fit, and the socket cutouts with little embossed skulls on the joins worked perfectly as replacement pieces. I should make up a replacement Skull Ammo Pile. It was one of the first things I thought of, but I completely forgot about it until now. Shouldn't be too difficult, at least. They look like they're supposed to be there, so as fas as I'm concerned, Job's a Good'un. For the paint, I stuck to Marouda's chosen Undead palette. Bone/Black/Brass/Iron with deep Red and some Aqua (verdigris) as the spot colours. My style of painting bone might be a bit bright to be properly realistic but it pops nicely on the table. The crew provided me with some stuff to work on at work last week. I'll have to prepare some new models to work on for this week's lunch breaks now. It's like an extra deadline each weekend. Eurgh. Undead Stone Skull Thrower and Orc Bolt Thrower. Back together for the first time in a long time. It's nice to put the recently-completed war machines side-by side for a shot. Back in 3rd Edition WHFB, I used to regularly summon Skeletons as allies for my Orc and Goblin army. They often just stood in lines breaking up the line of sight between my Orc units so they wouldn't kick the crap out of each other via failed animosity rolls. Now that's something I don't miss in KoW!

Something from 1988, this Bolt Thrower sat around part painted for more than a decade. Recently I noticed it on the paint desk and decided to get rid of it - doing so in my current fashion by finishing the bloody thing. The crew had already been painted several years ago, so it was really a no-brainer that somehow took me years to figure out. What does that say about me, then? Ahem. So anyway, I finally got it done. Semi-interesting fact: The same bolt thrower was also packaged with Dwarf Crew for a time as a Dwarf Bolt Thrower - sometime after they discontinued the cool-looking (and much more Dwarfy) Imperial Dwarf Bolt Thrower. The thing about this Bolt Thrower is that uncrewed, it's generic enough to be used with pretty much any army at all. My plan for the time being is to use it (and the Goblin Stone Thrower I also fixed up recently) with the LotR Moria Goblins for the time being, as my 3rd Edition Orc and Goblin army is probably quite awhile away from becoming a force that can hit the tabletop. It's far from an "exciting" paintjob, I'll admit. But then it's a simple thing made from metal and wood and wheels and spikes. Very utilitarian, and so I decided to reflect that with a very simple and straightforward paint job. I might string the bow one day down the line. But not today. Here's the Bolt Thrower alongside that Stone Thrower I also recently repainted. Hm. I thought I posted that here as well. Perhaps I should put it up.

I think I have not ever done a WiP thread (on this board), or if I have I don't remember it. This batch of figures are what got worked on for the February Leg of the Resolutionary Paint Challenge but didn't get finished -or- they were just hanging around partly painted of the painting desk. In short: candidates to finish for March. The little witch with the green hands is part of a four piece pack. She is missing the top of her staff (maybe it went in the cauldron). Juliette is not really 3547, she is really the bones version, but there is no 77xxx number for her that I can find. The human archers started off primed white then two of them got an experimental blue mixed from one of the dark blues and Sky Blue. I also experimented with my new yellow paints on two of them, More about the Sky Blue next post.