Scenery Project 1 - Fields Of White Gold

   One thing I plan to lean into heavily next year is sorting my scenery collections out. I suspect I won't be playing many games in 2025, so I'd like to get each of them to be as good as I can. The first project I'm going to focus on is my desert scenery as I have a few gaming projects that need that to be up and running.

   I'll be calling Project 1 "Desert Scenery" but that covers a lot of sins, this could be the full on deserts to arid grassland and fields, some of this scenery can work for the Mediterranean as well as Palestine and North Africa, so I want choices of items that I can place on a table to suit the area the game is supposed to be taking place.

   One thing I wanted to add was fields for those areas that aren't just sandy desert and on my list to do last time I made "desert scenery" was cotton fields. I've been trying to work out how to do this for a few years now, but recently I had an idea I wanted to test out.

This is what the internet says fields of cotton in Afghanistan look like, so I had something to work from.

   My test piece of scenery before I try to mass produce them in the new year. Material wise its just a place mat, door mat cut up and some white foliage flock but I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. I didn't want to make multiples of this so I could cover a bit area of table and then decide the idea looked terrible.

   The gap between rows is eyeballed to about right to put 25mm bases flat on the ground with some slight deviations from this. Blocks of infantry can just be sat on top.

All in all, I'm pleased with my test piece, I just need a new source of place mats as I always bought mine from Wilko . . .

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The Duke Of Norfolk Arrives

   I'm all over the place at the moment with my projects* but I had a two and a bit hour drive for work and for some reason my brain decided it wanted to stress over why I hadn't started my War of the Roses Yorkists from a planned purchase in 2020(!). As I normally do for a historical period, I bought enough figures to do about 24-30 points for both sides, with a slight weight towards the army I thought I would end up using more often as I know I have an opponent who would be painting those up.

*as per

   Back in 2022, I ended up stealing some figures from this project to get my Lancastrians up to a slightly bigger than planned points size for a couple of games and while I've not replaced those figures yet, I do have enough in this backlog to get an army on the table, and the more I think about this project the more I want to get a game in in 2025**.

**Hopefully, Wayland Games 2.0 comes online asap

   I've gone back through my notebooks and collection of Freezywater flags for the Towton period of the war and it looks like I didn't have an exact plan on who I was going to painting and had a list of options. I then initally decided to paint the Earl of Essex's livery on my troops, but with it being Green and Black, it is a tad close to my main Lancastrian colours, so I've decided on the Duke of Norfolk with it's plain Red.

   This is my first batch which is a single sprue of troops made up of 8 archers and 4 billmen. There will be a couple more batches of these and then I can start on the various sprues of foot knights. Not looking forward to having to replace my mounted knights but that's a separate issue.

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Sons Of Horus Legion Imperialis

   Having been given the starter box for Legion Imperialis for Christmas (2023) and then having planned to get some test games in as early in the year as I could manage, here I am towards the end of 2024 without having played any games*.

*its been a bit of a year

   I had been planning something Horus Heresy in this scale for ages - I've had a mate print some epic scale marines in the past but could never do something I was happy with. After reading the novels and playing a lot of 30k, the scale of the 32mm game just never felt right. The heresy is about companies of marines, with big support vehicles bashing it out, while the average pick up game of 30k tends to be a Primarch or Preatorian with an elite bodyguard and a squad or two in support, I've seen 3000 point games (about as big as you can do on a 6/4 table) with less than 30 figures a side. LI means you can have 100+ figures a side and still be playing a small game**

**plus multiple titans without needing to re-mortgage

  I've been painting these on and off all year without getting very far, so with Christmas coming up fast, I thought I had better get moving. It turns out they are really hard to photograph, but the green is a touch brighter in real life and matches my 28mm Sons of Horus. I'm compromised on the colour scheme slightly - I am never going to manage a brass trim on the shoulder pads with my eyesight but the big block colours are in place and I think they look about right when viewed from my 3 foot standpoint. 

   I have based to match my Adeptas Titanicus stuff as they will be used in this game as well.

Command base and Terminators

9 bases of Tactical Marines - using a spare command to bulk up

The specialists - Plasma squad, Missile squad and Assault Marines

Contemptor Dreadnoughts

Squadrons of Predators and Sicarans

   What I have painted is just the Space Marine side of the starter box and by all accounts online I need at least double the amount of infantry just to keep stuff on the board in a regular game - although the advice seems to be 3 or 4 times this really. My aim at this point is just to have two matched sides to actually play a game before I start bulking up - far better to have an achievable aim to play than unachievable and never try.

While I was at it I did a test base of trees just to fill a board quickly. While the trees are probably out of scale - possibly better suited to a 15mm figure size - I don't hate the idea and I will mass produce a few more bases of these as well as really start the buildings.

This stuff does not photograph well. . .

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Big Gunned, Chaos Chicken

   While we aren't doing much in the way of gaming I wanted to try and make sure the combat patrols for the Chaos 40k campaign were ready to go at a moment's notice. Then I could start working on the stuff for bigger games knowing I had a bit more time to do them.

   The Sentinel walker was the last model I needed for my Traitor Guard, so I had to get it moving. It's been built, sprayed and washed, sitting on my painting desk for a couple of months while I tried to decide how to tackle it. In the end, I just put a picture of one on the screen and went in with my gun metal paint for the joints as this broke the big stretch of desert yellow up allowing me to get past my mind block.

   I then added loads of red decals from the Chaos Knight sheet to look like hand painted glyphs, again to break up the single colour. I did this at a much earlier stage than I normally would, again, as I just needed to not have a model in a single block of colour.

Now its been leaked that the new Guard combat patrol is completely different . . .

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31st Hervictus Artillery

   Like my Traitor Imperial Guard combat patrol, my Hervictus guard also needed the requisite artillery pieces, but I found these harder to do, which is why they were put off for so long. My traitors could just have converted crew that came with the guns, they don't have a real uniform anyway, so a slight variation on the gun crew was no big deal. My Hervictus guard use Steel Legion bodies, which just didn't come close to the supplied crew.

   I had a couple of plans of either using regular Steel Legion figures posed around the guns to represent a crew maybe grabbing their small arms but I wasn't convinced when I tested it on the kit I bought for my traitors. My second plan was just to assume there wasn't a Hervictus artillery regiment, so the guns would be supplied by somewhere else*, but I thought it would just look odd on my main Imperial Guard army.

*which is something I plan to do with the other regiments I have in my head

   Then I found someone in Poland selling 3d prints of Steel Legion gun crew, designed for this kit and I was sold. Until I saw the postage costs and I put it off until I just couldn't think of a better plan.

   The markings on the front of the guns show the regimental badge, the regiment number and the platoon colour and gun position, so both the guns are from different platoon**, but hold the same position in their platoon (e.g.yellow might be platoon 1, with white showing gun 1 in that platoon).

**allowing me to expand in the future and have batteries for bigger games

I really fancy another 4 of these now. Oh and a command squad for these?

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The Dark Angels

   My second ever army for 40k was a fallen Dark Angel army using Chaos Space Marines (they were also all dedicated to Slaanesh but that's a different story). I keep starting a fallen Angel squad for my current Chaos Marines but mostly I can't decide what I'm trying to achieve with them - are they a Slaaneshi squad, or a regular marine squad, should they have Noise Marine guns?

   Then I had a thought - why not do a separate Fallen Angel Combat Patrol? Using the Chaos Marine rules (as they will be fighting on the Chaos side anyway) all I needed was a 10 man tactical squad, a Master of Possession, 5 Possessed and 10 Cultists.

   My head canon for this army is that they are Dark Angels from Luther's side on Caliban swept into the void when the planet fell. The Chaplain is a 30k Chaplain, so not the religious nut jobs of 40k but moral leaders whose job is the mental health of marines - if a marine is faltering its their job to fix them. So, 15 lost marines are looking to their Chaplain to explain why their father attacked them and where they now are - except he doesn't have an answer to hand. Then at some point a voice starts giving him answers and leading them to supplies, which is seen as some sort of miracle, however, little does he know but he's being set up by a daemon. As the corruption spreads his men are blind to it, even when the voice explains there is something he can do that would make his men even stronger.

The Chaplain/Master of Possession 

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A Red Sun Rises?

   Painting time has been nearly non-existent over the past couple of weeks but a unit that missed this blog are 10 Khorne Bloodletters that I bought from a second hand model shop in Norfolk to bulk up my Khorne Daemon numbers.

   It was only after I had sprayed them (as I bought them built) that I noticed I had 3 horn blowers, but as I went without any upgrades on the other 3 units I have, this shouldn't be an issue*. Otherwise, they were painted to match the rest of my Khorne Daemons and have been mixed into the box with the rest since this photo.

*although barely any of the rest of this army has made it onto the blog for some reason?

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