The Underhive - Other Companies Edition

    While the last scenery post was about kits I'd bought from Warbases, this one is a bit more of a mixed bag. 

   First up is a structure I built from a sprue of Industrial Gubbinz that I picked up from TT Combat. The sprues of MDF and thick card have been used on pretty much everything I've built, including on the Warbases stuff from last time. I'm not really sure what it is supposed to be, but its useful for building height and putting ramps on.

   Next is a couple of foam made concrete blocks and some ramps. One of the ramps is built from thick card in the same one that the small one of my first bit of Warbases scenery was, while the other two are from War Cradle (Wayland Games other name) and covered in Industrial Gubbinz and corrugated card.

The foam blocks were a test to see how they would look. I wanted some bits that I could just put ramps on without needing big bits of terrain and I'm not too upset by them.

   Lastly are a pair of towers from War Cradle. I bought these as the deadline for the game was coming up fast and I wanted some quick, cheap height to just fill a board while I carried on with the smaller bits around the edges. I was pretty stumped with how to make them look like they were built for a reason, and I don't really think I have succeeded in giving them that look, but they worked well in our game and really dominated the board so they did what I initially bought them for.

   The bigger one of the two, I made a couple of quick changes too. I put the ladders inside as I thought they looked better and it might store a bit more easily, then I cut a square out of the MDF to fit a grate from the Industrial Gubbinz kit. The rest of the gubbinz was added to try and make the structure look used.

   Then the smaller of the two structures (same height but substantially thinner) I went really simple with. I added a barrel on some off cuts and some bits to try and keep the industrial theme, but by this point I was really short of time.

   I've got a few other half built or unbuilt kits left to do, but as the initial game has now past and I'm not sure when I have time to fit another in, I'm happy to leave them for when inspiration next hits and get on with more important projects.

Thanks for reading

The Underhive - Warbases Edition

    In my spare time, one of the things I'm absolutely fascinated by is scenery scratch builders on YouTube, with Eric's Hobby Workshop (https://www.youtube.com/c/EricsHobbyWorkshop/featured) being the one major channel that I can rewatch over and over again. Whilst I'm not brave enough to really scratch build I have dabbled with using MDF kits as scratch aids.

   Last summer before I really had any plans to pick Necromunda up again, I ordered a couple of kits from Warbases as a bit of a test bed for some ideas I had in my head. The first kits I ordered were a pair of Sci-favela Lift Shafts**. Something about the shape really appealed to me and with a little boxing in of the frame at the top, I thought I could make a big difference really quickly.

*And a Lego channel but lets not go there

**Annoyingly at different times and at the point where the local sorting office was overwhelmed and we didn't get any post for two weeks

   Most of the additional bits are made from a thick cardboard recommended by pretty much every Youtuber and I now have a pack that I am working through. While the photo doesn't show it very well, I was really pleased by my little bridge, which I supported with a pipe half because it looked cool and half because it meant it was strong enough not to need a base.

   Next  up was a kit that I have looked at on Warbases so many times but not really known what to do with. The idea of having habs felt right, but I didn't want one or two as I thought it might look odd. Then I had the idea of adding the Sci-Favela Tower to the Twin Shacks set and an idea was born.

   I have based this one but only because I couldn't work out how to make anything strong enough to work without one, but I don't think it distracts. I've added candles in a shrine at the back and broken bottles to make it look lived in. A liberal application of corrugated card hopefully stops it looking too mdf-y.

   The last one for this batch was a Sci-Favela Chemical Tank. This one I really wasn't sure on. I added it to an actual order of bases as it was cheap and it sat unopened for quite some time as I couldn't really get my head around how to make it look like more than a MDF kit with a can stuck in it, but actually once built it looked really good. I don't think it hides the can element as well as the lifts set, so I gave the can a bold colour to make a show of it instead.

   I've added decals and lots of bits to the base to really make it feel like people are using the area. Then tried for a concrete look to break up all the rusty metal I've used elsewhere.

Thanks for reading

Visiting The Underhive

    This is probably a good point to introduce another big project for the start of the year, my first planned gaming session of 2022 was a day of gaming with one of my brothers. When we visited Salute (2021) I managed to talk him into picking up a Necromunda gang - in this case, Cawdor - while I resurrected my Goliaths from an aborted campaign that was started in late 2019.

   Cards on the table, these are by no means my best painted figures ever, for some reason I have a complete mind block when it comes to painting Necromunda gangers, so they have been painted but that's about all I'm willing to call them. The campaign they were bought for was played at Waylands over a series of months in late 2019/early 2020 but was put to a stop when Covid hit. I'd half painted the figures but had gotten no further and while I hate playing with unpainted figures, the scenery was bare mdf and no one else had painted stuff either, so my half painted gangers were a step ahead of the competition. So for this game, I forced myself to finish the gang and while I can't claim it was a labour of love, it was great to see them finished and on the table.

   I plan to do a couple of posts about the scenery I've been building but as I forgot to take a huge amount of photos of the game, I thought I would dump what I did take at the bottom of this post then go back over the scenery at a future date.

Odds and Sods IV - A New Hope

   With more job applications filled out and my man cave returned to it's hobby orientated previous existence complete with DVD playing laptop* and a proper daylight lamp which, all combined, has led to my painting motivation returning. One of the big things I wanted to do with my enforced time off, was to put some time into those 'dead' projects, the ones that when ever I talk to someone about I always say that I don't have the time for but aren't so far down my list that they are likely to just be sold on. These projects included, both, the big stuff - Sharp Practise armies - and the small, less useful, stuff - a storm trooper platoon for 40k.

*This is how I imagine the upper class live

   As I am sure I will mention in a future post, I was in Edinburgh for a weekend recently and one of the things we did while there was go into the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards museum ** and what a museum it turned out to be. So with two units of Highland Scots on their way from Front Rank Miniatures, it was high time I got some more infantry from the South Essex out of the way.
   I decided to paint just a single unit at a time, but upon realising that if I painted at least one more sgt I reckoned I would have enough troops to try a small test game of the rules, I instead added both the none private ranked models to the painting queue and got on with it. While most of my readership was out enjoying Salute, I was painting Napoleonic infantry, normally one of the things I hate doing, yet this time I found myself strangely enjoying the process and I genuinely don't know why.
   With 3 units of British infantry, a rifle unit and a multitude of higher ranks I reckon I have enough Brits painted to at least try the rules out, which is what I plan to do in the coming weeks, along with painting more troops.

**Which has a French eagle on display

 

   Next up, I step away from strictly useful painted models into pure fancy and because I wanted to territory. After going to Warhammer World for the first time in a good few years in 2016, I left with a strange sense that I had been too harsh to Fantasy Warhammer's replacement, Age of Sigmar, so in 2017 when I decided I wanted to spend the year trying as many rulesets as I could, to figure out what systems I actually liked playing the most, rather than just playing what I had always just played, it became obvious that a demo of AOS had to be in order and it turned out to be a brilliant ruleset. While getting an opponent wouldn't be hard - living walking distance from a GW store and driving distance from Wayland Games - it was also clear that to play the game regularly I would need to drop something else, so it went on the back burner as a 'play another day' project, however, this didn't mean it was 'dead', I still wanted to be in a position where when I decided to start playing I could pick up my army and just go. So, with a small list written I started buying models (generally second hand from eBay) and trying to get the list together.
   The Gryph Hounds aren't the last bits to paint but they were the ones I wasn't sure how I wanted to paint. I knew I wanted to match their colours to the army's infantry but it couldn't be a direct match as these are supposed to be natural***, living creatures, so the body is a much toned down blue, the feathers are a lighter blue than the Stormcast colours, while the ornamentation matches their armoured counterparts exactly.

***Natural magical

   Another model that has been on my desk for a long, long time is the Techpriest/Magos Dominus for either 40k or 30k. It started out as a bog standard 40k techpriest, it underwent minor conversion just to make it look different to the one I already had painted up, then after it was primed and waiting for my inspiration to get painted, I had a better plan.
   In the end the figure has had; his two handed axe reduced to a one handed weapon, been given a walking stick (the flesh is weak), upgraded his single servo arm to be a pair on his back and one on his arm and been given a rotating cannon on his shoulder.

Green Hivers

   Before I went to University I was exclusively GW when it came to table top gaming, I tried all of their games, bar Inquisitor, at some point or another (although, I do own the rulebook and have figures for it stashed away somewhere), but the games that really took hold and I found myself playing more than any others were 40k, Necromunda and LotR. When I left to go to uni, my gaming group also disbanded with my normal three moving to Wales, Spain and Nottingham between them, which is what lead to my years of minimal gaming while I found a new group to play with.
   Since then, every couple of months or so, I stumble upon my two Necromunda gangs, which leads me to having a nostalgic reminisce where I decide that one of my gangs will get bumped ahead in my painting queue before something else distracts me again and the figures are left in my case for next time. But we have now had the news that Necromunda is the next specialist game getting released and this has put a deadline on getting my gangs fighting fit so I can try the new rules on release.

    While I strip the old paint off my gangs and work out what colours to paint them in, I figured that getting some work done on some other Necromunda related models would keep the bug going, so out of one of my cases came the Ratskin Scout and out of my lead pile came a giant scorpion.
   The Ratskin scout was a must hire for the first 2-3 games in the current* rules and as the colour scheme was obvious** he jumped the queue.

* Replace with old if reading

this later than September 2017.

** Brown, brown, a little bit skin 

tone and a touch more brown.

When we used to play the game, we used to mix up scenarios quite a lot, either adding a raid on an arbite head quarters to get a lot of cool gear really quickly or monsters attacking us when someone's gang was getting too strong too quickly. We always used to use whatever big based model we had to hand to represent the monster as our funds never went far enough to finding anything better, and it was something that I wanted to change but didn't know where to look, when I saw Heresy Miniature's giant scorpion model I knew I had my answer.

Thanks for reading

Ash Waste Vehicles

       So here I am, a complete post-apocalypse, Mad Max rip-off, sell out, but I'm really enjoying the models. . . 

      These are from Ramshackle Games, and although they look a lot like they are kits, and the website will sell you them as such, don't let all that fool you! What I love about this range is it is basically just a catalogue of vehicle bits, with a category that is just packs of parts, that with a bit of work, that look good together. Having said all that negative sounding stuff, I have to say I absolutely loved the whole process, there is a lot of filing and green stuff to part parts actually stay together and fill voids, but when the point of these vehicles is that they are bolted together from scavenged parts I really don't care. 

      The only parts of the models that aren't included in the packs are the guns, which are spare plastic GW ones that otherwise live in my bits box forever.

        As I always try to build something with an eventual use in mind, these were built to play an old GW expansion to the Necromunda rules, Ash Wastes. I suppose it was basically what the old Gorka Morka players got when they kept asking for a use for their old Vehicles. So these rules allow you to mount your gang on bikes, cars and bigger transports, put guns on them and see what happens.

Thanks for reading