The Plague infection spreads...

I've been playing a few games of Deadzone recently at the club against Andy. And I decided it was time to finally get some of the Plague models I've not touched since the first Kickstarter painted.

I also recently received the Warpath and Firefight rules from the Kick starter for that. I didn't get any of the models just the rules. Now I have them I have plans to make a Plague army for the Firefight. These are very similar to the Warpath rules but don't require as many models. Effectively they are the next step up from Deadzone. As such I don't actually need to get that many more Plague models.

But first I need to get what I've already got painted. In this case, mortar team, grenade launcher, teraton and swarm.

Big Dæmon, Little Dæmon...

... or as Father Ted might say. "This Dæmon is small. That Dæmon is far away."

It's odd how it's turned out this way, but the last bit for my Abyssal army for now are the smallest dæmons and largest dæmon in the army.

Imps and Archfied of the Abyss. Though I might have to use him as The Lord of Lies. I'm really torn between the two. Neither is the obvious choice, both subtly different and both the same points (when they both have wings).

Anyway, these will be last Abyssals for the time being... onto other things for a while. There's still plenty of Abyssals to add in later!

Frostgrave - Epic City and Dungeon Game

We usually only get to play Frostgrave on club nights, where we have just 3 hours to play. The other time we play at shows and there we're really wanting to get members of the public to get some play in rather than ourselves. Neither allows us to play a really big game. So when Tim at Mountain Gremlin Games offered space in his shop for a day it seemed the perfect chance to get a big game of Frostgrave under our belts.

The Walenton Manor scenario in Arcane Locations had piqued my interest as it used a dual table set up. Two floors of a manor with moving staircases. Well I wasn't about to make the terrain for a manor, but I could see that a similar scenario would work with my city and dungeon. Initially I had planned to make staircases and trapdoors as suggested in the original scenario, but I could see those taking up too much space in the dungeon so decided instead to make a set of Portal Stones out of some spare castings I had in my Hirst Arts bits boxes. These I made into pairs with coloured runes engraved in them.

We used the same rules for placing and moving the portals as in the Manor, but allowed them to be placed on levels above the ground on the city board. We decided it would take an action for a model touching a portal to move to the other paired portal. The action would count as a move and so it would be possible to teleport and the cast a spell. We also decided that the dungeon really needed to have the Minotaur in it at the start and gave an additional 50xp to the player that killed it.

There were four of us playing and we used our usual warbands, there's quite a bit of disparity in power in our group with 30 levels between some of the warbands so we teamed up with weakest and strongest versus the middle two. My Ekementalist and Andy's Summonder versus Steve's Witch and Jeff's Thaumaturge.

Things started well and it wasn't long before we had models in the dungeon trying to get their hands on treasure. The mobile nature of the portals made for lots of tactical movement and Steve and Jeff soon found themselves without ways to get out of the dungeon. However myself and Andy found ourselves outnumbered and started losing members of our warband fairly rapidly.

Treasures would be extracted from the dungeon by one player, only to have another kill the model carrying it and then sneak it off the table. At one point my captain had a sneaky little imp carrying one and would have been able to catch him until a portal appeared between him and his goal and about 4 of Steve's Skaven burst out in front of him. The best he could do was to run away.

Towards the end of the game all me and Andy had left was our Wizards whilst Steve and Jeff had the large majority of their warbands. We stood at the top of the tower and tried to elemental bolt the enemy below as they ran off with the treasure, but it wasn't to be as Steve and Jeff's wizards and apprentices blasted us with Strike Dead and Push. In the end we only got three treasures off the table to Steve and Jeff's ten.

We all had had a blast. This was by far the best and most epic game of Frostgrave we've ever had. 6 hours of play time in total. Brilliant, we will have to do something similar again, but what can we follow that with!

Gargoyles

Continuing with the Abyssal army, next up is two troops of Gargoyles.

These models from Mantic are normally balanced precariously on little pillars, which looks okay, if a little silly. I wanted to see what I could do to improve that.

Since I have been semi-embracing multi-basing with this army I thought since Gargoyles are a Gothic architecture thing perhaps I should have them flying over a Gothic ruin built from blocks from my Gothic Hirst Arts moulds.

I painted them on their little pillars in the same basic scheme used on all my above-ground Hirst Arts terrain and then cut them off the pillars before gluing them in place flying over the ruins of a church wall.

Although I normally dislike buildings and other large structures on movement trays, I think this works rather well.

Abyssal Champion, Efreet and Tortured Souls

The Abyssal Army grows again.

I've just completed the Abyssal Champion from Dungeon Saga and the metal Efreet from the Kings of War Abyssal Army.

The Tortured Souls that Mantic produce don't to me match the description in the rulebook. For some reason they are only the same height of a man and are throwing firebolts. In the rules they are large infantry with fly and can't do any ranged attacks.

I came up with an alternative solution. I had a pack of three Basilean Elohi which I bought some time ago. They're large infantry with wings and I think with the mods I've done fit the fluff quite well. With the addition of some chains, a head swap with some zombies and some damage to their armour I think they work quite well as fallen heroes or fallen angels.

The Forces of the Abyss grow

A few weeks ago I posted photos of the first unit of my Forces of the Abyss army for Kings of War.

Over Christmas and the new year I've been busy mostly working on items for my re-enacting hobby, a Boer War uniform and restoring a vintage bicycle. However I have found a bit of time inbetween all that to paint up 3 more units for the Abyssals.

The first unit was a regiment of Flame Bearers. These are based off the same sprue that the Lower Abyssals I painted last time and I've again put them on a base lit with flickering LEDs, see the video at the end of the post.

The second, which I actually painted at the same time is a Harbinger of the Abyss. I saw these as being the Abyssal army's equivalent to an Army Standard Bearer so I have built it up just as that. I decided to use some more flickering LEDs to make some rather precariously balanced fires at the top of the standard. I initially used conductive paint to get the electricity up the banner pole, but this proved to be very troublesome and in the end I used normal wire wound up around the pole. The pole itself being the return path.

Finally I just completed a troop of Hellhounds. I had three of these from the Dungeon Saga kickstarter and managed to obtain 2 more from elsewhere. I decided not to multibase these as I may need them for Dungeon Saga in the future however Dungeon Saga has a smaller base size from Kings of War for these models and so I based them up for Dungeon Saga and put some fillers in.

They're all the same model, but being relatively randomly placed I don't think that's a problem. If I ever get some of the Kings of War metal versions to supplement these I will be able to mix them together,

Lion Rampant 3 way game

Sunday afternoon meant a game against my friend Ed. We'd had a Lion Rampant game planned for some time and I'd built up new models for my Wars of the Roses army and the medieval wagons I posted earlier so we could play the convoy mission.

However Ed brought his son, Henry, along as well and so a slight change of plan was needed. After a quick google I found that others had had some success with three player Lion Rampant. The modification needed was to sort out the turn sequence. It seemed popular to use playing cards to designate each player's turn. One for each player drawn randomly to designate the turn order then reshuffled and repeated.

The scenario would require a little more work as I still wanted to use the wagons. In the end each wagon was assigned to a player and the players had to get as many wagons as they could off the opposing side of the table from their starting position.

I also decided to put quite a few more buildings in than I normally see in a game of Lion Rampant. I have quite a collection now since I've been building up my Frostgrave city board and I fancied seeing how the game worked through more built-up terrain. We ruled that no models could go inside buildings.

Ed used his own force of Fireforge medievals whereas myself and Henry used my Perry Wars of the Roses. I picked Lord Fauconberg's retinue and that left Henry with Edward IV. I just had enough models to do 24 points of each, though Henry had no fast moving troops.

It looked like Ed would have the easiest job as he had the shortest route since he started on one of the long edges. But it was not to be. He found himself sandwiched between mine and Henry's troops and all but wiped out before I found a way around the back of Henry's forces. Unfortunately for Henry his slow army and having to move through the town meant he didn't get very far.

Eventually Henry's forces were wiped out and I captured his wagon. We ran out of time and had to rule that myself and Ed would have got the wagons we held off the table without further combat. This meant I had 4 glory from those and Ed had 2. In the end after boasts were taken into account that left myself on positive points, Ed on zero and Henry unfortunately on negative points.

We all agreed that the game had been great fun with some especially tense moments as troops fought amongst the town.