White Dwarf Guides for building and painting an Undead Army

Hi All,

As usual I am all over the place and having trouble finding the focus I need to get things done. I think last time I mentioned that I would share some resources I found in White Dwarf that deal specifically with putting together an Undead army. I found those in #'s 142, 211 and 226 (Thanks, Rochie!). So let's tuck in, shall we?

Trying to give you a little more of the cover for reference.

The Official White Dwarf Guide to making a 1000pt Army

Hi All,

With people in full prep mode for OWAC 2 there can be a lot of angst when it comes to making your 1000 point army list. One tactic would be to just give points to what you want to paint and then any amount over the 200 points per month is just not considered.

For the last challenge, I attempted to make a strict, legal 1000 point force. 1016 I think. I ended up adding a lot of stuff right at the end that brought it up to around 1300 and some, War Altar and wizards mostly.

We've all heard that the Armies book, and its minimum troop requirements, were designed for 3000 point armies. It's also been kicking around for quite some time that you could just reduce the troop minimums by 1/3 or 2/3 for a 2000 or 1000 point army. Airbornegrove pointed out to me where you can find this in writing, White Dwarf 144.

It's a pretty good article on a person's thinking for how they're going to start building an army, and I think what the intent of the OWAC really is, rather than being a straight up painting competition.

See, this guy thought so too.

There it is in Black and White. reduce compulsory numbers by 2/3 for a 1000 point force.

But the minimum unit size is still 5 models.

This looks like a pretty playable force.

Anyway, thanks for looking and commenting. Next up we'll be talking about assembling and painting and Undead army.

Realm of Chaos - goodies in White Dwarf

Hi All,

This excellent post by Whiskey Priest got me thinking about a lot of things, so I went ahead and started looking at the White Dwarf issues around WD 107 which he mentions.

After his post on Renegade Orks I had been starting to think about making my own Renegade war band. Off to the tomes (Slaves to Darkness, The Lost an the Damned) to go back over rolling a war band. I was able to complete my book collection (at stupid prices) a few years ago but the bug to actually do stuff with them had never firmly taken hold. I blame my usual gamer ADD.

So, which issues have Relam of Chaos articles in them? Lets see.

The first set of articles I found was in WD104

The introduction of Slaves to Darkness, the color painted figure gallery that was in the book, and an article showing the process of converting Chaos mutations on your figures, complete with stat blocks of the finished example figures.

Then WD106

An exposition of Beastmen. I haven't read it through carefully, but I think it is more or less the same as what is in The Lost and the Damned section of the same name.

WD107

Another article showing the Rewards of Chaos table. Again I haven't checked to see if it differs from what's in the book.

The Chaos Renegades article is different to what made it to press in the book. I refer you to Whiskey Priest's excellent article linked at the top of this post.

WD108

Now this one is interesting. I was chatting with Airbornegrove about a Warhammer Tabletop RPG light idea and he said I should take a look at the "Survival of the Fittest" article. Apparently Orlygg wrote about it quite some time ago here. (Apparently a little over 5 years ago.) He has the full article embedded in his post, but no indication of what issue it is from. It's WD108. This article is essentially the casualty recovery section from The Lost and the Damned, but it is slightly different. What strikes me is it is also similar to the Casualty Recovery from both Mordheim and Necromunda. Not that that is a bad thing, just an observation. I may delve into that in the future.

WD109

Didn't read the article and only checked a few more issues out. Looks like the same section as in LatD.

So there may be more articles before WD104 and after WD109 but I did not find them in my recent searches. Also I have no idea which numbering system is being used here. I have heard that the numbering for US and UK editions are different, all of the ones I'm referencing appear to have been printed in the UK.

Thoughts? I'm pretty sure I'm missing something, like the errata article for StD. I remember now I was also going to do a post about the terrain articles. I will try to get back to that.

In the future I will delve into how I will make my Chaos Renegade war band and that RPG Lite idea I have had.

Thanks for looking and commenting.

The box said "Warhammer + White Dwarf"

Hi All,

A quick one before the lad and I jet off to another track meet. Rochester NY last week, Aurora CO this week. If he places we have one more meet, but it's going to be tough. The competition is super fast and he doesn't usually run his best at elevation. I think the experience of making it to USATF Nationals and Junior Olympic Regionals has been good though.

Anyhow, I finally looked in a box that I had pulled from storage, prospecting for stuff that I believed I had, but hadn't seen in almost two decades.

The Mother Lode! Inside this box I found 123, 124, 130-132, 135-138, 140-144, 146-148, 152, 154, 155, 160, 162-169, 170-172, 174-179, 180-189, 190-199, 200-205, 207-211. Also a ton of Mail Order catalogs, advert inserts, painting guides and lists of retailers.

Also found this, I could never remember the game that Charlie and I played before I delved into Warhammer. I remember one massive battle we had on his living room floor with plastic army men.

Finally found my hard copy of Warhammer Armies. I knew I had one, just could never remember where it was. Inside were copies of army lists I had made for Bretonnians and some other lists I made for my friends I was trying to rope into the hobby.

I don't remember this poster at all.

I also found this one. So I'll have to get frames for them and hang them up in my Garage game room. When I get that set up.

Also inside were letters from my friend Charlie detailing his moves for our Mighty Empires campaign, more color xeroxes of my had colored map, and a bunch of notes on another "continent" I made using the Mighty Empires tiles.

It also shows how faulty my memory is. I seem to have been still getting White Dwarfs as late as 1996 and ordered stuff in 1995 for sure. Funny, I thought I had completely given up by 1993 at the latest.

Anyhow, I received some stuff to make a painting tray from Game Craft Miniatures. I'll let you know about it in a future post.

Thanks for looking.

Terrain Tuesday 7 - I know it's Wednesday

Hi All,

I took the pictures yesterday, but then forgot to actually write the post. Terrain fell to the back burner as I frantically tried to finish the Bretonnians. Since coming back from Kublacon and vacation I have only managed to shave some mold lines and sprue connection points of the Newcromunda bulkheads.

Here's some photos.

Somehow my wife hasn't given me an ultimatum to get this thing out of the family room. There is still a lot of work left to be done.

Scraped bulkheads down to the left. Bulkheads and barricades left to go on top.

Lastly, for Father's Day, I bought myself a bag of tree armatures. 21 trees is not enough.

So there you have it. As usual I am very scattered and not putting in time like I should. I need to do what I tell my children to do. A little work every day is better than a ton of work at infrequent intervals. But my parenting style is to hold myself up as an example of how one shouldn't do things.

Happy hobbying.

Terrain Tuesday 6 - One Tile at a Time

Hi All,

The terrain builds have ground to a very slow pace as I'm trying to finish up the Old World Army Challenge. You should check it out if you haven't already. There is lots of great stuff and the participants will be posting up their finished army shots in the coming month.

But I did manage to tile the Stable Barn.

I still need to stucco the sides, finish the forge and forge roof. I thought I had some DAS, but I found some Fimo for doing the chimneys. Maybe I have DAS somewhere.

Seeing Blue finish up some trees got me thinking about my sad little forest. I'll try to bang these out as well. For the army I just have to scratch build a wagon and paint the final three camp followers. I would love to paint up a War Altar, but I can't seem to find the Monk figures I know I have somewhere.

The teachers strike here has added a lot of uncertainty and anxiety into the mix for me, so we'll see what happens.

I'd also like to welcome Paul to the blog. Let me know if you have a blog, it's not in your profile.

Thanks for looking and commenting.

Terrain Tuesday 5 - Coaching Inn, again

Hi All,

Not super productive lately, but I have done a little more work on the inn and stables. Mostly in the evenings while we watch tv.

So I finished the roof and added leading to the windows of the inn. Yo can see I added a chimney too, I just need to clad it in DAS and sculpt the stone work.

This is the stuff I'm using for the window leading. I thought I was being original, but I think they painted a lattice in the windows in the original. A good option if you didn't buy this stuff already.

I started tiling the stable roof. You may have noticed a few issues with the roof cap on the inn. The double wide tiles didn't seem to look right, so I ended up trimming a few of them down. For capping the walls the double is definitely too big, so I'm going to score a single width to make a peaked tile for it. Still obviously need to texture all the walls. The forge roof seems to be too large as well. I think I'm going to cut the overhangs flush with the cutouts. I'm not sure what went wrong there, but I cut everything out 20 years ago so I'm not sure what's up.

Thanks for looking.

Terrain Tuesday 3 - Coaching Inn and Stables

Hi All,

This last week I've been working on the Coaching Inn and Stables from White Dwarf 143. Since I still can't seem to locate my physical White Dwarf magazines I was able to find the terrain articles and a repository of a magazines in pdf form out in the wilds of the internet. Let your conscience be your guide.

I had built the majority of this model back around the same time as the Barn and gotten slightly farther in that I had managed to glue the base roof pieces on top. As you can see my angles don't quite line up.

After doing the tall roof section I realized that it, and the Barn roof, have an issue with the first course of tiles. So I've decided to cut a thin, 1 - 2 mm strip, to put along the bottom edge to get the tiles to look right. The other challenge with this roof is the valleys. I looked at some pictures of actual flat tiled roofs and I think I understand how to do it.

I want to say that in the past I used Super Sculpy to make the rock for the chimneys on the Cottages. The article says to use DAS and I actually have some, so I will be giving that a whirl. One thing I may try is making a tealight forge. I saw an example in one of Tony Harwood's guides. "Models for Wargamers: Dampfpanzerwagon Guide No. 3" A link to Tony's blog here.

I need to have a think about how I'm going to do it. I want to do things a little differently than as shown. Probably stupid. I t wouldn't be the first time.

I'm also intending to deviate from the original build article and use some of this active mesh to simulate window leading.

Lastly, since I am focused on my Bretonnians at the moment, I thought I would give the Inn a French name. I scoured the internet for fantasy Inn names and came up with a short list. The one that seemed the most fun, without having to cringe if ladies or small children were present, was The Clumsy Troubadour. So Le Troubadour Maladroit it is.

On a final note. I finally reopened my Mighty Fortress. I'll be working on that semi simultaneously. I've been having trouble finding info on how it was done in the past, I did find a few interesting articles on what people did a few years ago with some old sets. I'll share that in a future post.

Thanks for looking.

Terrain Tuesday 2 - Finished Barn and build log

Hi All,

Well in the first installment I showed you some river sections and the Wargames Terrain book. I then promptly finished building this barn from a White Dwarf article.

I had started building this back sometime around 1990 and had carried it around with me between 4 states and several house/ apartment moves. I'm not sure where my White Dwarf issues are but I found a copy of the Barn article here. According to DJK's Fantasy World, the barn was in Issue 140. He also lists other projects, but seems to be missing the cottage and Inn and stables issues.

Anyway on to the build.

So here we go. A project started in the early 90's. Why I stopped here and never finished it I can't really be certain.

Printed copy of the original article. I wanted to refresh my memory on the construction of the roof and see what colors were used to paint it. On thing that became immediately obvious was that the print out of the template was smaller than my actual building. I vaguely remember something about enlarging the templates from the Cottage article, but I could find no evidence for that in this article.

So I measured the actual model and brought out my era bag of scrap terrain materials. In addition to carting around the models, I had also carted around a garbage bag filled with foam core, construction paper, mat board and balsa wood.

I briefly equivocated about making the interior playable, but decided this building had been left unbuilt for too long and had not been put together for interior play.

Again from memory I seemed to recall using wood glue to put it together. This was a more recent purchase. The set time was not fast enough and I couldn't figure out a way to weigh down the roof bits so they would stick correctly.

Hot glue gun to the rescue. It was a little tricky, and I did eventually have to carve out some overage with an exacto knife.

I found, before I glued it down, that my lean to roof was a tad too large. So I excised 5mm.

Roof substructure on!

My cellphone decided not to rotate this picture, but I cut out a chunk of card and made 1cm wide lines on it. I then cut the strips with a snap blade box cutter and left a couple of 2cm wide strips for the roof crown. The article gives different widths. I forget what they are, but I didn't like them.

I then started hand cutting shingles with said box cutter. You can use the strips with notches cut in them to represent tiles or you can cut individual tiles. They did the latter in the article and I had done it previously on the cottage.

I quickly used up my first batch of tiles. By the way, gluing them on is a great project for sitting and watching tv with the family. You know, so they don't think you're trying to avoid them.

We're not going to run out of tiles this time.

Breaking out the paper cutter for full production mode. My cuts aren't quite as accurate, but it goes way faster.

Et viola! Remember to leave a couple of double wide strips. I got over zealous and only left myself one.

I also tried my tin snips to cut the individual tiles. Works a treat. Much faster and I didn't have any problem with tearing like I did on occasion with the box cutter.

Always remember the old adage, "measure twice, cut once." My barn door was a hair too small.

Roof on, door still too small.

My collection of aged balsa. I save everything.

Fixed Barn door with planks etched in and cross planks. I just used a sculpting tool I had handy to gouge some lines in the balsa sheet. I should also add that I used Aileen's Tacky glue to put the doors on. It lives up to it's name and just sticks things in place better from the get go. I did have to use a toothpick to clean up some overage though.

The lean to door. I should have used card or thinner balsa for the cross bracing. Oh well. You can also see the ground work I added. On to paint.

Black base coat. I brushed it on and had some trouble working the paint into all the nooks and crannies.

Paints used for the body of the barn. The original article said to dry brush with Bestial Brown, Elf Grey, and Skull White. I don't think I have any of those colors left so I had to improvise. I used Nutmeg for Bestial Brown, Rain Grey for Elf Grey (which was later changed to Codex Grey? I couldn't seem to find an example on the internet.) And Drizzle Grey for Skull White. I tend to use a very light grey in place of white.

For the roof you were supposed to do a dry brush of Moody Blue followed by an Enchanted Blue highlight. I did successive dry brushes of Midnight, Navy Blue and Blue Heaven

For the ground work my normal Earth Brown, Territorial Beige, Desert Sand combo.

I then added flock and static grass after varnishing the whole thing. Done.

I hope this inspires you to pull out an old abandoned project or maybe try your hand at one of these classic designs.

Happy building and painting!