Monday - October 06, 2008

An End to Ghettohammer 40K?

Well, okay, maybe an end isn't necessarily in sight, but it's certainly locatable on the GPS. Let's hope we can get to it sometime in my lifetime. Frankly, I'm a little irritated with myself and all my unfinished projects.

As stated a few posts ago, the remaining unpainted balance of my army is dwindling drastically. My Immortals and Flayed Ones need some finishing touches, and my entire squad of destroyers, sans one of each type, need to be painted. However, once I finish the destroyers, I'll be able to field a more-or-less fully painted army. That goal, in fact, is very well in sight. I'm very pumped at the prospect.

I got my Pariahs converted last night at Arica's. I've decided to clip off their crappy flimsy warscythe blades (that were destined to snap off anyway, because as we all know, pewter is SUPER STRONG *rolls eyes*) and replace them with various other polearm blades from the fantasy setting - two now feature glaives, converted from Chaos Warrior swords, and the rest feature various halberd and beaked axe heads. One, who will be their commander (not that Pariahs have commanders, per se, but I like adding a sense of heraldry, as you know) bears a Japanese-style footman's banner on his back. I apologize for the lack of pictures; I'll try to remedy that soon. With those conversions done, I'll be priming and painting them soon.

I suppose, more than finishing my army as it stands, I'm excited about the prospect of gaming terrain. I found a VERY excellent tutorial on how to assemble a modular table, and I want to make one all my own of either Necron terrain (what I'm affectionately calling my "Shadowmoon Valley" board) or cityfight terrain. I'm inclined, however, to attempt to finish our existing modular city board, but I think it needs some work - in playing on it, we found that we put too much rubble on it, and it makes the board impossible to set models on. I'll most likely end up making it my Shadowmoon Valley terrain. I hope to use some Crackle paint to allow for the cracked landscape with the glowing green showing through. Hopefully, such a paint job will hold up to being a gaming surface. I'm also looking forward to the glowing green river of sludge, that I plan to do with epoxy and everything, as the tutorial instructs. The difficult part looks like it's going to be making the frames for the various pieces... but once that's conquered, they should all fit beautifully end-to-end, and making the terrain is just a formality at that point. Budget - and not skill or inspiration - is the limiter at this point.

And what's a great terrain board without features to put on it? Things are also looking relatively skyward in a terrain-feature department, as my skill and knowledge of how to build reliable and Necron-ish pieces of terrain is growing. I recently finished construction on my ruined stone circle - the Necron obelisk turned out EXACTLY the way I wanted it to. I was worried that the spray paint would get everywhere when I tried to gradate the black out into the stone, but it didn't, and gave me ample room to show the "assimilation" effect I was hoping to portray. This piece will make an excellent terrain feature, and possibly a great objective in games.

I'll really need to see how well the terrain board comes out before I start making sweeping judgement calls on what sort of other terrain or objectives I can make, but it's looking good so far. Once I get my car cleaned out, the SMV board will be highly transportable, also, so I can cart it around with me at will.

I'll keep you up to date on developments as I make stuff. I hope beyond hope that this doesn't turn into another one of those projects that gets shelved indefinitely.