Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

Battlescribe Updated

Battlescribe has just been updated to work with allies.  What is Battlescribe?  It's the roster building software that I'm currently using.  I switched over to Battlescribe about a year or so ago because it offered an Android app.  Cool thing about it is that it runs on Apple/Windows/Linux as well as IOS and Android and the price is right -- FREE.   Like most Droid apps, the free version includes ads, the pay version drops the ads.   Also the data and roster files are completely interchangeable across platforms, so I can easily build a roster on my PC then transfer it to my Android tablet for use at my FLGS.  The user community also seems to be pretty good at keeping the data files up to date when new codices drop.

New FAQ's up 9/7/12

GW has posted main rulebook and codex FAQ's.  They can be found here.  I've only looked at IG so far. Further analysis to be burning up the internets to be sure.

What I see for IG largely makes sense:

Grav Chute insertion works anytime a Valk/Vend has moved more than 6", so it works when zooming

Commissars can't cap allies,  while I can see high comedic value...

IG Priests don't affect allies (duh)

Allies don't take orders even if an IC attached to an IG unit.

Rough riders lances explained more clearly

And my favorite:  Leman Russes are HEAVY vehicles.

Venerable Brother Lucas -- Painted.

Now that he's painted, I thought I'd post a few pics of the Grey Knights Ven-Dread that I converted for the Tale of 4(ish) Gamers that was running at my FLGS.  I had a bit of a quandary in painting him; do I stick with the grey scheme that I'd settled on for the vehicles, or do I paint him all shiny silver, like the other Grey Knights?  In the end I opted to paint him like a vehicle while painting the helmet in the sarcophagus silver.

I used a few different washes, Ogryn Flesh, Green and Blue to get a heat stained effect on the barrels of the autocannon.

The Throne of Judgement makes a great chassis for a dreadnaught but it does have a lot of details to paint; A LOT of details.  I'm still not sure that I got all of the purity seals.

Tale of 4(ish) Gamers -- Conclusion

Back in May, I entered into my FLGS's Tale of 4 Gamers contest -- 500 pts per Month up to 2000 pts by the end of Aug.  I haven't done the best job of posting my progress but I did complete the challenge.  In my case I used the occasion to get to some models done that had been hanging around for a long time.  Here's the result:  2000 (or maybe a bit more) points of Grey Knights:

Draigo and Friends, a Librarian, a squad of Termies, a squad of Purifiers in  a Razorback, a Ven Dread, a Storm Raven and a Culexus

Is this a competitive army?  Probably not but it sure is pretty, and it was a lot of fun to finally get on the table.

Oh and the challenge? I won, so I'm now the proud owner of  a special edition red GW Paint station.

Stretched Stormraven Part 2

In Part 1, I covered stretching the Stormraven and lighting.  I left off with figuring out what to do with the batteries.  I decided to mount the batteries on the base for a couple of reasons:  first, I didn't like the idea of having to retrieve the batteries from inside the model in order to change them, second, I didn't like the idea of putting that much additional weight up on top of the flying stand. 

My first thought was to use parts of the crashed Aquila Lander from the old Battle for Macragge starter set; ultimately I couldn't fit the 3 AAA battery pack under any of the bits in a way that would fit on the base.  Looking around, I found a disused Leman Russ hull that had once been a Looted Wagon in my son's Ork army -- perfect.

Here's the boring electrical stuff -- the red LED helps in debugging the connection to the model as it can be a bit finicky.

I opened up most of the bottom of the hull and expanded the turret ring hole slightly to allow the flying stand to fit throught.  The bottom of the clear flying stand ended up getting slimmed down a bit to allow the batteries to fit.  The Russ itself I decided to decorate as a Traitor Guard tank using some Chaos sigils etc

Here's how it looks all painted up

And the Stormraven itself:

And of course the reason for the base, the lights

Grey Knights Venerable Dreadnaught

Some years ago, Dave Taylor built a beautiful Custodes army, one of my favorite models from that army was a Dreadnaught converted from the Throne of Judgement.  I happened to have a Throne of Judgement lying around that I had scavenged parts from, so I decided to use it to build a Grey Knights Venerable Dreadnaught.

 To build the sarcophagus, I obtained  the bit from the plastic ven-dread kit from a bitz seller. I wanted the pieces to look sufficiently grey knight-ish, so I got the helmeted head from the Dread Knight kit.  Lastly, I wanted to build this as a rifle-man dread, after looking around, I settled on using the reaper autocannon from the Defiler kit -- Reaper autocannon on a Grey Knights model?  HERESY!


To de-chaos the reapers, I removed the bayonets and filed off some of the spikes, then I covered up the Demon mouth with a magazine from the IG Heavy Weapons set.

The arms holding the autocannon were built using the hydraulic cylinders from the IG Vehicle accessory sprue, the searchlight from the same source and some plastic tubing cut at an angle.

And a few paint-in-progress shots: