Odroth City Planning Department

Edit: I'm also blown away by he Bell of Lost Souls feature we got this morning for my Traitor Knight!  200 page views to the blog today and 2,500 views to my BoLS forum post!  Thanks guys! Subscribe and comment!

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 The fictitious system our little campaign will take place in has a very beurocratic government, and they finally decided it was time to upgrade the infrastructure of Odroth Prime (one of many planets to be featured)!  The planet itself houses medium-sized orbital defense stations at the polar regions, which are surrounded by vast prometheum refineries and munitions facilities.  Its tactical importance cannot be overstated.

Behold, the mighty Skyshield landing pad, in all its glory!

Big enough to service orbital-to-ground operations!

I enjoy terrain-making, and look forward to pulling out my dusty ruined buildings and giving them new life.  I especially look forward to installing some LED lights in key areas to give the whole scene a little more of a 'lived-in' appearance. 

I'll have a blast taking some atmospheric pictures of our troops with little smoke machines, dramatic lighting, and dynamic poses.  I can't wait to bring this campaign to life!

As usual, comment below any of these posts and let me know what you think, or if you have any ideas you think we'd enjoy!  I also have word from a very reliable source that Kyle will be making his posting debut today (finally!).

Build Day!

Spent a couple of hours today building the rest of my marines.  A nice change from Land Raiders, Heldrakes, Maulerfiends, and Knights.  The build took a while, I also kitbashed every very single one with the Space Wolf kits and bitz I had.  The models are appealingly feral looking, I like it.  Very Khornate.

The totals thus far:

15x CSM squad (2x melta guns)

10x CSM squad (2x plasma guns)

10x Chosen squad (4x plasma pistols)

10x berserker squad (10x lunatics)

8x terminator squad (magnetized Autocannon or Flamer arm)

1x Sorcerer (In a Khorne army? Details later!)

The bulk of my objective-capturing forces.

All told the army is coming along nicely.  I'm thinking I need a rhino for my berserkers.  I'm putting the Chosen into the Land Raider, and deep striking the Terminators.

Trying to keep a battle forged army, so it's not terribly hard to stay in the mindset I've been in for the past 15 years of army building.  Figuring out how to include the Knight is the hardest part, though I guess it'll have to be a "come the apocalypse" imperial ally.  Or I use it as a Lord of Skulls.

The Arrival of Terror

+++++0.150.935.M41+++++

The captain's communication immediately ceased, a monotone static was all that came through the vox-caster.  Worried it was his fault, Private Remis, who was assigned to the device, checked the battery before nervously looking back at the commissar. 

"Don't bother," was the stern reply. Commissar Holdt dismissed the worry with a wave, not caring to break his own gaze out of the chimera's vision port. He didn't need to know the captain was advancing as ordered.  Holdt had been with the company for some time and had come to appreciate the autonomy of their officers.

What the commissar said next, Remis didn't hear, the roar of the chimera's engine drowned out the rest.  The armored command vehicle lurched without warning, beginning a rapid descent down the ridge it was previously resting atop.  The sporadic thud of the mounted heavy bolter firing made the commissar smile, as he continued on deaf ears, "That's why I love this outfit - they have initiative!  Can take an opportunity when one presents itself!"  He saw the other chimeras speeding past his own, which was laden with command and communication arrays.

Private Remis smiled stupidly back at the commissar, unsure just how to react to a smiling commissar.  There was a reason he was a vox operator.  Realizing he still wasn't getting a signal, he adjusted a dial, finally getting a weak reply, hearing voices once more.

Only it wasn't the captain. It was his sergeant, the gruff man that had trained half the company, and he was screaming in absolute terror.

Commissar Holdt's face twisted in horror as he saw why his own chimera had began it's maneuvering.  They were fleeing.  A Knight, with no heraldry he could indentify, had cleaved the captain's command vehicle with a chainaxe that dwarfed even the armored personnel carrier.  He saw what must have been the captain splattered across the interior, and heard the screaming over the vox-caster match perfectly with another distant figure falling from the gaping chasis, still clutching a radio.

Remis frowned as his radio went to static, frantically adjusting knobs.

Standing twenty meters tall, daubed in red and adorned in brass, the behemoth had clearly been one of the few households of Knights to turn to Chaos, sworn now to the service of Urläg Blackfang.  Heavy chains circled its legs, spikes protruded from its armor, and gruesome trophies hung everywhere.  A blazing furnace roared within the belly of the monstrosity, engulfing its surroundings with thick black smoke.  Its pair of piercing yellow eyes turned to fixate on the commissar's own, as if through the vision slit itself.

"Drive!"

+++++ END TRANSMISSION +++++

A Big Build

I did it.  I bought two superheavy kits, and combined them.  That's the kind of thing I could only dream about when I first got into the hobby as a kid.  Now that I have a job, with real life money, it's a little more reasonable to do something like this.  Still put a dent in the wallet!  Will be worth it regardless, and well worth the resale price should I decide it needs to go the route of eBay after some time.

I wanted to make a chaos knight, which could also stand in as a walking Lord of Skulls, and maybe as a scout titan (debatable).  I knew I wanted it to light up like my other vehicles, too!

Used the Imperial Knight and Lord of Skulls model.  Legs from former, torso from latter.  Fairly easy to join the two, little kit bashing with a maulerfiend and land raider accessories for additional spikes and stuff.  LED goodness, too, of course (two flickering orange lights inside chest, with hollowed out vents in the chest to show it off.  And a red light in the belly gun!).  The battery is hidden beneath the tire on the rubble pile, magnetized for easy access.  The button is in a crater on the backside of the cathedral ruin.

I pilfered some jewelers chain from Hobby Lobby for a lot of my Chaos stuff.  Perfect size.  I wrapped one of the greaves, and have several trailing behind the monstrosity as if it had broken free form its shackles inside the warship.

Without further ado, here are the pictures. 

What hundreds of dollars of plastic looks like.

LED battery hidden in the rubble.  Green belly LED will be swapped for red.

Making formerly Imperial models chaos-themed is more fun than actually building the model.

A bulk of the Lord of Skulls components.  The rest will be an Imperial Knight.

Pleased with the dragging chains and debris.  I figure the warships chain these monstrosities up in some deep hold when not in use.

Red spray paint is my friend.

The finished piece.  Chest flickering LEDs aren't noticable in the picture, but look great in person.  Might add impaled marines or guardsmen as trophies?

Rith'gor the Ascended

I finally got to painting my daemon prince!  He'll serve as either a HQ for a daemon detachment (if I want allies), as an HQ if I decide I don't want a sorcerer (in a Khorne army? More on that later!), or as a stand-in should my champions roll well (or poorly?) on the Chaos Boon table to ascend to daemonhood.

Nothing fancy with this one, standard build and paint job, no crazy conversions.  I did intentionally keep the pose of him identical to Urläg, however.

Don't forget the sunscreen, boys and girls!

Gimme five!

A Daemon-Prince is good company in my EVE-Online adventures

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Skulls for the Skull Throne!

Been cranking away at the Land Raider.  My idea to have a freehand wolf on it was replaced with a huge symbol of Khorne on the top, and piles of skills on the sides.  I like bold, simple designs when I can manage them, a freehand wolf seemed too much a departure from the stoic norse wolf-men that I'm building.  A giant rune of Khorne is the way to go!  Also, the Heldrake can identify it as a friend and not think it's a rolling buffet line.

Blocking in the designs with micron pens and undercoat. It’s okay to be sloppy at this point.

Top design is finished (isn’t it?). Wondering what to do with the sides. Still a little sloppy, will clean it up soon.

I hammered out a few rough designs on the Land Raider today, and hope to get it finished by next week.  Still debating what to do on the sides – maybe a thick black stripe where the symbol meets the edge, and “bleed” it down into skull designs in the negative space?  Decisions, decisions!  If you have ideas, let me know, please.  I’m trying to get at least a playable force built and painted by May.  Slacked off in February, time to step my game up!
Added some skulls on the sides, not sure if I’m 100% pleased with them yet.  Feel like it needs something, Urlag’s name in a banner? Who knows!

(Edit: I've painted over the spikes / flagpoles as they distract from the theme.)

In progress.

Lighting effects and functional doors.  Still has detail work to get done.

 

In progress shot of the skull designs on the bottom of the vehicle.  The effect when viewed at a normal distance is pretty spectacular, look just the way I expected!

Terror From the Skies (and Beneath the Skies, Too)!

So I started building my Heldrake.  I decided that a standard great dragon/wyrm appearance would fit my theme nicely, and converting some great raven-bird thing would be too difficult given my time constraints and I had absolutely no idea how to accomplish the look aside from using huge feathered wings (which wouldn’t look very daemonic to me).

I was able to kitbash the remains of my Maulerfiend kit into the Heldrake to add some larger hind legs, doing away with the ‘hel-chicken’ trope you see on the internet so often.  I’ll also use the (previously unused) lasher tendrils from the Maulerfiend to add more wires and umbilical cables to the rear of the best.  I decided on just one, to make more of a whiplike tail, rather than using all six of the lasher tendrils.

With the Imperial components from my Space Wolf kits (which are used to wolfify my marines) I built a dead loyalist marine.  I attached a zombie corpse head where the helmeted noggin should go, and made his arms and legs look suitably limp.  I then crammed his lifeless form into the talons of the beast.  I’m pleased with the result.  I knew from the start that I wanted to emulate the official art of the Heldrake pictured below:

The initial idea was to do a ripped-open Valkyrie cockpit in the claws of the beast, with it breathing down the canopy - not very practical.

The reality of the pictured concept would have been a challenge without endless cutting and repositioning of the existing neck piece (it arches upward, not downward).  I could have flipped it, which I tried, but it looked a bit funny and the armor plates visually weighted down the figure making it look like it was falling, not flying.  I had to find some other way to show the Heldrake in the act of some vicious brutality toward Imperial scum.  Thus, the scorched marine was born (died?):

The model itself looks good to me, a limp marine with dented and melted armor, the zombie’s lifeless expression, and trailing legs. The paint job to make him look suitably bloodied will make it or break it.

The Maulerfiend legs attached at the socket where the smaller standard legs should be. You just need to clip the talons from the ‘hinge’ portion of the original legs, and attach them to the Maulerfiend kit.

A side view of the (now primed) Heldrake, showing off those bulked up legs. Makes it feel more like a monster that can shred you with either set of talons.

After a couple of slow hours building the Heldrake and movie-watching I decided to move on and crank out the rest of the Maulerfiend.  Not much conversion went into this one, if any.  I’m open to suggestion, but the model itself is suitably barbaric and Khornate.  Maybe I can greenstuff some daemonic faces leering out of the armor? Dunno. I’ll have to think on it before he gets the spray-treatment.

A boring, plain Maulerfiend. He needs a hug.

I may pull Urlag out tonight and do another couple of painting layers.  I really need to be in the mood to paint, and I think I feel an itch coming on.

++UPDATE++

I painted Urlag – a little bit, anyway.  I’m liking how the skin is coming out.  Always a work in progress.  The Forge World books and photographs inspired me a lot, as they use a very muted, washed out palette.  I'll probably repaint the leather straps beneath the shoulders to add a BIT more color.  Need to think on it.

Work in progress of the mighty warlord Urlag.