Next Chaos Marauder....Tre Manor's Helvaskt

This is another of Tre Manor's Red Box Games Miniatures.  And its quickly become another favorite of mine.  I think it has a rather cool pose, I can see the awesome downward swing of that cleever like sword.

I'm continuing my paint scheme throughout everything, so the panels on the shield just had to be that glowing like blue.

The musculature of the back practically paints itself.  There it is again giving me that Bart Sears comic book art feeling.  Bart recently did two issues of Conan, absolutely stunning artwork in those books.

Decided the backs of these shields need a fake painted wood grain.

So another of the barbarians in my growing collection of Tre Manor miniatures.

The Blade Itself.....

Just finished up Joe Abercrombie's book The Blade Itself ater getting delayed and setting it down for a bit.  So no this is not about a miniature.  I set it down not because I found it boring, but because I got busy doing other things and finally found some time to actually for a little bit.  I normally read lots of books, but lately my time just has been short.  I have been looking for something to fill that awful void left between Bernard Cornwall's Saxon stories and George RR Martin's Ice and Fire.  And I think I have found that author.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book from Logen Ninefingers to Glokta to the Dogman and the crew that he travels with.  Very fun and very well done for his first major novel in print.

Redmanphill over at Subject to Stupidity, linked here on my blog,  did a much better review than I could do on this book, I recommend you give that a look if you are looking for a good novel to read... http://subjecttostupidity.blogspot.com/2011/03/blade-itself.html

For me I plan to pick up George RR Martin's Dance With Dragons next...I've been waiting a long time for that.

WAB Tournament Results - La Crosse's River City Hobbies

With a relatively short amount of preparation and notification to people interested, we managed to pull off a tournament in Warhammer Ancients Battles with help from our local Fantasy Guru who is well experienced with doing Warhammer styled tournaments on the Fantasy side of things.

We managed to generate a good amount of interest, having at one point 16 individuals signed up to participate in the event in the worst time of the year for a tournament being summer, which is good considering that the Warhammer Fantasy tournaments sometimes struggles to fill 28 spots for a much more popular game.  We did not want to collect entry fees and such and have to go about doing refunds to people on such short notice, so we just allowed verbal commitments, which allowed for people to back out at anytime.   In the end we had 10 people show up.  With the short notice and poor timing of the event we considered this to be a success, as we anticipated having 10-12 players. 

The tournament was a 3 round event, using victory points to convert to battle points.  Round 1 was Take and Hold the center, Round 2 was a Flanking attack, and Round 3 a pitched battle.

As you can see we had some good talent show up.  Bennett and Mike Butcher are very well known for being extremely good converters, army builders and painters.  Kevin and the Matts play a considerable amount and are very good tabletop generals.  In the end, Bennett won the overall, Kevin was as usual the most jovial, Mike Butcher took home the top spot in Paint since Bennett was the Overall winner.

Name	Army	Battle	Sports	Paint	Total
Bennett Blalock-Doane	Early Imperial Romans	10	11	16	37
Kevin Bruins	Carthage 2nd Punic War Italy	10	15	12	37
Matt Herrbold	Crusaders 1.5	9	11	14	34
Mike Butcher	Saxons	6	12	15	32
Shawn welte	Imp. Romans	3	13	15	31
Jerrod Horstman	Shieldwall Normans	4	12	13	29
Mike Bates	SW Flanders	7	10	11	28
Rich Nelson	El Cid - African Invaders	2	12	10	24
Matt Jayjack	Vikings	7	11	5	23
Abe Warpinski	Ancient Greeks	2	13	5	20

And as you can see with my 3 in Battle points my Romans definitely struggled, I drew Kevin in the first round and played to a draw, Viking Matt in the second round and minor loss, and Flanders Mike in the Third round to a crushing defeat. 

A special thanks to everyone that was interested and attended.  We plan to do this again.

Edit:  Its been brought to my attention by our Tournament Organizer that there are possibly a few errors in the paint scoring, due to a glitch in Xcel sorting.  The winners do have correct scores, battle and sports are correct, Bennett's score is correct, and my Romans did tie with Mike Butcher, but the others may be off.  We apologize for the errors.

More Marauding....the Horde grows with more painted minis

This model was a really old conversion sitting in my box, dates back to my beastmen army in '03.  Finally decided to paint it.

Even though its essentially a gor it'll work for my mutant marauders.

Pluse I kind of like the action of the pose.

The one below will be part of my great weapons marauder unit, another somewhat odd mutant.

And this pair.  Again a converted Gor from 2003 that I never used, so I popped off the head and fixed him up.  I have also used a few flagellants in the previous group of marauders so this will just be another addition.  The weapon head is actually from skaven left over bits.

 What's chaos without some grisly trophy?

Conradt the Crazed...the newest Marauder

There are some miniatures that are aptly named, and "the Crazed" is very fitting for this Red Box Games, Tre Manor miniature.  Just look at that face.

This along with the previous two are perhaps my favorites of Tre's sculpts.  You cannot help but have an evil smile on your face while painting this miniatures melon.

Like the rest of the Helsvakt line and some of his Reaper sculpts, I really love this armor and its what I would envision Chaos Marauders wearing to battle, spiky and gladiatorial like.

 The basing is typical of my Chaos Warriors army.  HO Scale RR ballast, the rocks are fake, and just broken pieces of cured Apoxie Sculp.  The base painting is five different dry brushed/stippled colors. 

A fall like burned out static grass from Woodland Scenics and a likewise burned out arid Grass tufts from Joefix.

There your are Conradt the Crazed!

A pair of New Chaos Marauders Painted...Tre Manor miniatures

Since I've decided to expand my Warriors of Chaos army with lots of new and different models and away slightly from just Games Workshop models, I have had absolutely no regrets.  I rarely...let me repeat that...I RARELY just paint models out of the package that that I have not converted in some shape or form.   The models below are two that I have not done any converting too, and I absolute love the looks and the detail to them.

This model is one of Tre Manor's Red Box Games, Helsvakt, miniatures and it is absolutely stunning in detail and a blast to paint.  There is so much detail on it.  The skulls on the cape in the back is really cool looking.  I'm really loving all of the stuff Tre is doing for his own company and for Reaper Miniatures.

The shield below had a bunch of scars in the surface sculpted into it.  So, I thought I would accentuate that in my color scheme and make the shield sort of glow a little.

The musculature is awesome, I'm a huge Bart Sears fan and his drawing style and this sort of reminds me of this style but in 3 dimensions.

Next up is another of Tre Manor's sculpts, this time from Reaper Miniatures.  This model is huge.  The Helsvakt is about 25 mm, this model is probably around 32 mm.  Which is fine by me, humans are not all the same size, and I'm already mixing GW Gors, Ungors, both new and old with both new and old GW Marauders.

I believe the name of this miniature is Kord the Destroyer.  The face detail just screams at me, I love it.  The model itself is very reminiscent of his Helsvakt models. 

I'll be using both of these models on the extreme flanks of the units.  I'm very much looking forward to assembling the units in whole.

The Blue and Burnt Orange paint schemes are getting carried all the way through the army.

Both of these models are really going to influence me in my conversion and sculpting work in the future.  Tre's technique for doing fur is definitely making me rethink how I have been doing it. The detail is top notch in my book.  I'm putting final touches on a whole slew more of the marauders, so much more to follow on my Warriors of Chaos.

Khorne Chaos Space Marine Conversion...Chicago GD News & Go-Kart Racing Report

Another Khornate Space Marine conversion.  I do like this look.  One of things I did on this model was to not use the cone head or have a tongue sticking out.  I'm not a big fan of the tongues anyway.

The possessed legs dow mix well with other bits and the arms are cool also.  Added a tattered tabard to the model also.

 

You can tell I'm beginning to run out of chaos bits in my bitz box, as I dipped into the loyalist box.

A very straight forward conversion.  As is the Slaanesh one below.  Which basically just got a tabard of leftover greenstuff.

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Friday Racing Report.

Not much to report on the Go-Karting front.  I managed to get to the track, made a bunch of adjustments to the kart, got it down to a pound over minimum weight.  They split us into two groups.  Went out in the first heat with 4 of the fastest karts in the class.  Started second to last and finished last, my set lasted good for about 2 laps, after that I was so loose that I thought I was going to hit the wall and porta-pot outside the fence every lap.  The flagstand could see my side panel number for most of the laps as I tried to save it and still run as fast as possible.  Terrible heat.

Heat 2, major adjustments in air pressure and moved in the left rear tire about a half inch.  They inverted the field, I and another clone engine were on the front row.  It's disgusting how much more torque the Animal 206 and Flathead Briggs makes, as they were lined up behind the clone on the pole and pushed him past me before we got to the green flag.  So a restart this time the clone on the pole did not even get on the gas and they still pushed him past me to the point that the kart in third was equal with me at the green flag.  They threw the green anyways, ridiculous.  I drove it super deep into turn 1 and 2 and came out side by side with the polesitter.  Ran this way for a couple laps, got around him after pinching down in the corner to scrub his momentum.  Ran in first for a couple of laps, one of the faster flatheads caught me, ran side by side with him for 4 laps.  Lost the lead and then lost another spot with a lap to go as I was getting super loose again.  Better but not good.  Made more adjustmenst in tire pressure, and went up a gear to see if I could get more straightaway speed.  Wouldn't matter as the screw job was on and they called me for a 3-wide penalty that was B.S. in the corner and sent me to back about 6 laps in, the B.S. part about it was I was not the person that made it three wide and was under someone else, the guy that made it three wide stuck his nose under me and hit me in the left rear in the corner.  They also sent my old man to the back a couple laps before me.  Complained about the call after the race, and the track official I can tell does like me for whatever reason.  And I did it nicely, basically asking for the reason, all he did was yell at me, so I got pissed and pushed him for an explanation and kept pushing for one until he just walked away shaking with anger.  It was actually kind of funny, because I never even raised my voice, and I never got an explanation, other than it was a judgement call.  Maybe its because the guy that hit me sponsered an event for them a few weeks ago. Doesn't matter, now I know the politics.  lol.

My sister jumped in my dad's kart for the pit crew race, had 12 karts on the track.  She took second in that after leading every lap except for the last one. Really good job for her first time out on the track, beating all of the guys.  Take that guys, most of you got beat by a 38 year old girl.

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Chicago Gamesday Golden Demon News

• I was unable to attend, recieved some emails from a couple of guys through our Yahoo group, but its cryptic in nature, I'm thinking something along the lines of the return of Vincent Hudon to competition, not sure though.
• I don't have anything to report, other than Gamesday-U.S. will be in Chicago again next year as they had to sign a multi-year deal with the convention center to get a better rate from the Chicago Mob.  Yay mob!, maybe I'll actually be able to attend next year because of this.  Its within driving distance, must clear my calender.

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Next up.....Pictures of some freshly painted Chaos Warrior marauders.......hopefully.