Goonhammer Hobby Round-up: October 2021

We’ve survived another Halloween without any of our contributors being gruesomely killed off by a guy in a hockey mask, and so it’s time to look at what they’ve been painting!

PierreTheMime

The spookiest of months is upon us! How has my commitment to getting my Nighthaunt table-ready fared? Well, thanks to a certain development my attention has wavered a bit, but I have managed a decent chunk of my remaining models.

Starting off the month, I took a swing at one of the Nighthaunt’s more interesting characters, Kurdoss Valentian:

 

This was a really fun model to work on, primarily because a lot of my normal ghosts have an intentionally drab and static color palette so adding a nice pop of color for the flag and giving the nigh-King a unique cloth color. I know Nighthaunt models aren’t exactly new to the scene, but it’s still impressive how much material modern kits can hold up with wisps of connecting plastic.

Next up, I cleared my second (and last) Spirit Host kit off my table:

Spirit Hosts are confounding, as they’re simultaneously incredibly busy and difficult while also being very “samey” so it’s not a very interesting hobby experience and one I just had to grit my teeth and get through. They are done, and I will never speak of them again.

Locally, I have a Warhammer 40K RTT coming up and the emergence of the Leviathan hive fleet as a potent force has rekindled my interest in fielding my Tyranid. To that end, I finally put a brush to my Forgeworld Dimachaeron which I’d had sitting around assembled and primed for a while. My initial impression of the model was dislike–it feels unbalanced and a touch out of proportion–but it has definitely grown on me as time went on. It’s still not my favorite, but I’ll happily field it.

 

Next, now in full model-distraction mode, I spotted an errant Deathwing Apothecary in my queue that I decided warranted attention:

Having gotten that out of the way, time for more Chainrasps:

Until I decide I need more, I only have five remaining to make a full two blocks of 20. Are those rookie numbers that I’ll need to bump up? Yeah, probably. But for now I think that’s about as many as I can muster until I get some action games under my spectral belt.

 

SRM

I’ve had a busy month, working on units for not one, not two, but three armies and as many game systems! First up, I finished up the three las-fusil Eliminators I started in September. They’ve gone on to chip away a few wounds in some games at my FLGS, and it was a lot of fun to mix the tacticool camo cloaks and black armor of my Phobois with the big honkin hazard stripe guns and green power cables that would feel at home in 2nd edition.

After a few months of painting power armor (and Cursed City before that) I wanted to cleanse the wet palette and work on a classic model. Fortunately, a Badcast listener sent me an old Aekold Helbrass model from the world-that-was, and I had a blast knocking him out.

While I had a good time working on him, I batch painted him alongside Khagra’s Ravagers. It was a bit of a trip painting models sculpted so far apart together, but they’ll all look right at home with the rest of my Daves to Darkness.

I was fortunate enough to get a review copy of the new Black Templars box for Goonhammer, and wrote a review which is up for your perusal. Spoiler alert: it’s extremely cool!

I also was able to take some leftover Crusader bits and turn 5 of the Indomitus Ass Incestos into Intercessors with assault bolt rifles:

While I’m stupidly batch painting all 10 Crusaders and the Emperor’s Champion at once right now, I did make a point to paint the Marshal first. I painted him to be the Primaris version of my old Marshal, Siegward.

I think he’s been a fun way to not only see how far GW’s sculpting has come since 1998, but how my painting has come along since 2017 when I started this army of black-clad zealous idiots. As for next month, expect those Crusaders to be painted up as well as a bunch more Templars if everything goes according to plan!

Rockfish

I was mostly doing spaceships for the last month or so, but I did get the Kill Rig done! (Expect a HTPE on it soon, I just need to do the writing bit…)

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I painted a big assortment of Dropfleet stuff, they are pretty quick to paint!

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Crab-stuffed Mushrooms

I didn’t have a lot of time for hobby due to an uptick in work, but I did get to paint this lil’ fella:

Corrode

October was a slow one for me, with two weekends given up to attending/running tournaments, and a whole lot of my real job to do. Towards the end of the month I did crunch through a few things, which got me into double figures, but comparing the “backlog of models that need painting” and “models I am getting painted each month” numbers is starting to look worrying. I’m also in the fortunate position of having the army I’m taking to tournaments right now fully-painted, so there’s both a lack of direction and a lack of that incentive to get stuff done on a deadline. So it goes.

Focusing on the positives of what I did paint, I’ve gotten some more work on my Sisters of Battle with 4 Retributors and a Dialogus (which I mixed up with the Dogmata this morning, so no photo). I also filled in a storm bolter for my Dominions by painting an older metal model, which is hilariously squat next to her new plastic sisters.

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I also added to my Custodes with a Contemptor-Achillus Dreadnought, and briefly dipped back into Fallout with an Enclave Officer. Proving once again that concentration is a filthy word which has no place in my life, I finished out with the new Emperor’s Champion (coming to HTPE: Black Templars whenever my co-authors finish painting theirs) and also some unpictured Ork terrain from the Octarius box.

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That’s it for October – in November I’m aiming to pile through more Sisters and Custodes, but having said that I’ll likely get distracted by something else entirely.

Primaris Kevin

I was lucky enough to join not one, but two Necromunda campaigns featuring our own Lost Zone campaign rules, and it was the perfect inspiration to get a gang painted. I have a Van Saar gang called the Murder Hornets and painting these guys is a lot of fun.

First up we have a pair of Neoteks, the Van Saar Prospect who inexplicably are equipped with some of the most advanced anti-grav technology in the Imperium. While GW seems to love putting pistols on these guys, I find that the relatively low BS and high mobility makes them better suited for lasguns. Rather than use the inexcusably terrible curved flight stands I found some old straight pegs and drilled a hole into the underside of the hoverboard.

Next up my gang needed a proper champion, so I put together an Augmek featuring a plasma gun and a energy shield mounted to the model by a magnet. While most of the models are glued together rather permanently, I like the flexibility of magnetizing the energy shield so that I can easily add it during the campaign.

Then we have an Archeotek, and to be blunt I don’t understand what Games Workshop was thinking when they put this unit together. It also seems intentionally built to rely on the trading post to be effective, as the starting weapons are primarily pistols and a hilariously overcosted rad beamer. I also found that the model itself is ugly, with odd protuberances and an unnecessarily phallic dangly bit. Fortunately a bit of green stuff and the judicious use of cutters seemed to fix that. I gave him an energy shield even though they can never have one (again… why?), but the core feature is a magnet positioned so that I can add a heavy weapon. I had some fun making a true multi-melta as my first build.

During the course of my campaign with The Beltway Gamers my guy happened to find a heavy bolter, so naturally I had to add one.

This week’s match was against my good friend Michael who I had first met at the GHO Narrative, and a core part of the mission is a robot who you have to program to head towards a vault and crack it open. I had some fun rooting through my bits box to put together a suitable amalgamation. I’m particularly proud of the drill bit; it’s a screw for hanging things off of drywall.

I’m really happy with my progress this month, so I’m going to finish with a group shot of the Murder Hornets. Next month I plan on painting another two gangers for the other campaign, and possibly play around with making terrain.

Charlie B

The last time I appeared in one of these roundups was August, and from then until now my gaming area (also our living/dining room) has been a building site. To assuage the torn umbilical cord of regular games, my good friends Tom and Andy invited me over to their place to take on 2,500 points of Necrons. This gave me a few short weeks to expand my marines enough to make fighting weight.

Bulking out another Intercessor squad up to the full 10 helped to en-heft my battle pile. I made a couple of specialists: a designated combat squad leader with a skull on his helmet and pauldron, and a sniper with marksman’s honours. No in-game effect, just for flavour.

When I started painting this army I was spending about 8 hours on each marine. Having to get these guys painted faster than usual forced me to find new efficiencies in my painting steps, getting them down to about 4ish hours per dude. I wrote about said lessons here.

I also did my first unit of Bladeguard. These lads are much more knightly than the rest of my army’s vibe, so I had a good long think about why a unit of space knights were hanging out with my space Romans… and wrote a bunch of lore. Said lore was then echoed by my heraldry choices (like the ghostly dragons on their tilt plates).

Finally, as I was planning to rock a giant, slow-ass battle pile in this clash, I decided I wouldn’t have much use for my Impulsor so dialled up Xzibit and asked him to drop a chonkier butt on my floating pickup truck. The gladiator hull sits quite securely on the back of the Impulsor chassis, so this tank can now function as either.

Smug about getting all this ready in time for the game, I slung them in the car, drove down to London, and lost the game in turn 2.

I mean, I lost on objectives, but I wasn’t tabled. Not at that point, anyway. We played Grand Assault, in which the defender can’t retake objectives once they’ve fallen, and this combined rather poorly with a Necron army that could move 6” before the game starts, then claim 4/8 objectives in the first turn as they swept over no man’s land. Accepting that I couldn’t possibly prevent them taking one more objective for the rest of the game, I accepted my defeat and resolved to punish them as best I could. The battle pile gave them a tough nut to crack, and if the scenario hadn’t enabled the Necrons to recycle dead units, they would’ve looked pretty thin on the ground by the time my marines threw in the towel.

Finally, this weekend we played one of our occasional sessions of Deathwatch roleplay, for which I needed to paint up a marine for myself and another for a friend who doesn’t paint:

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I had fun experimenting with different methods of painting with these two lads; since they’re one-offs they don’t have to fit into a wider army. It’s easy to get stuck into a routine with painting, so little palette cleansers like this are a fun opportunity to try something new, screw it up, then figure out how to fix it.