Categories
Warhammer

SpoooOOOooky!

Went with a new approach to the Ethereal vibe with my Cairn Wraith. Pretty jazzed with the finished product. What do y’all think?

Cairn Wraith

Categories
Warhammer

Why I hate nerds…

I hate them.  I really do.  This latest GW release is a perfect example of what is wrong with the internet warhammer community.

Friday 1:16 pm: Horrible Demon models!!! Games Workshop is in decline, these models are horrible, I am going to drive my car off of a bridge on my way home (to my mom’s house) from my job at the movie theater.

Friday 10:05 pm: I guess the new 360 degree views of the models make them look better

Friday 11:37 pm: Look at this list of models that I just bought.  I dropped $450.00 on these awesome new Demon kits

And so it goes.  But, after basking in the florescent, acne-fueled glow of the nerd forums this week, I have started thinking about GW models that actually were terrible.  You know the style: bad concept, poor execution, maybe some horrible casting in clunky metal.  Let’s remind ourselves of some truly bad GW sculpts.  I challenge each of you to throw up a pic (or link to a pic) of the worst workshop model that you have ever seen, preferably one from the 90s.  Mine is DOOM Rider!!!!:

Uckkkk

Categories
Warhammer

Green Stuff!

For some reason unknown to me, I’ve been avoiding use green stuff for the last 10 years. I’ve had “grey stuff”, which is a similar type of 2 part sculpting epoxy and have used that for any gap filling.  I’ve never really been happy with it.  It’s always been very difficult to work with.  I upgraded recently to some nice silicon clay shapers for sculpting and I was still having difficulty with the grey stuff just being unworkable.  I thought to myself “professional sculptors use this stuff, I must be doing something wrong”.  Well I was.  I wasn’t using green stuff.  I had an unopened tube in the drawer for ever, and I decided to break it open and give it a shot.  I think it was the cheat skate in me that made me want to use up the grey stuff before I opened up the green stuff.

Wow.  What a difference.  The green stuff is sooooo much easier to work with!  In my second task with it I’m rebuilding parts of these terminator arms that I cut up to do weapon swaps on.  Making the shapes, getting it to blend smoothly into the parts around it, all just so much easier now.  It’s actually got me excited to try some more conversion stuff now that the sculpting part is so much less intimidating.  Wish I had known this years ago…..

Categories
Warhammer

Change of pace

I just need a change of pace from painting High Elves.  Getting slightly burned out on trying to paint every model to high quality.  I’m going to spend the next few months just making some units base coated, table top acceptable quality.  That includes a Dark Angels army.  This week I did two tactical squads.  There are some comparisons in the pics against the first tactical squad I did, just so you can get a sense of the relative quality level I’m going for here.

It’s really refreshing to finish 2 entire units in just 3 nights worth of painting.  It was a tough pill to swallow to just base coat them though.  I kept finding myself wanting to add more details.  🙂

 

Categories
Warhammer

Change the Unplugged GT scoring

This week I’ve updated the scoring criteria for the GT (found here).  I’m writing this post to explain a bit why we’ve made the changes.

First off let me begin by saying that the decision to make these changes was not treated lightly.  Although it’s well before the event we have already sold tickets to about half of the seats available.  I believe that it’s important to be up front with tournament information so that players know what they are getting into when they buy a ticket to an event.  Although I wasn’t very concerned with getting the scenario information out until later on in the process I wanted the overall score breakdown to be clear.  That said – something needed to change.

It takes a lot of effort to plan a GT and part of that planning is making up all the rules that will be in effect.  Unfortunately, sometimes when you make up rules they don’t actually turn out to be that good.  It was through much discussion and testing we came to realize something had to give.  First off, the paint scoring was WAY too harsh.  To compound with that the soft scores were worth a lot in the overall breakdown.  Couple that with battle points that were intentionally more difficult to score and you ended up with a huge mess of players sitting in the middle of the field during the later half of the tournament rounds among other issues.  Some tournaments might not mind that, but it isn’t what we were going for.  We believe the new system is a better approach and solves these problems.

The main change is that the competition (what the tournament is primarily) will be split into two competitions.  The tournament side, fondly known as “Overall” for now, is what one would expect from a normal tournament.  The other part is an army appearance competition.  We will be recognizing top scores in every category, check out the Scoring and Awards page for the breakdown.  As far as prize support goes, in addition to trophies we’ll be awarding winners from Overall and Appearance equally.  The Unplugged Gamers have always been a hobby club at heart, and we want to make sure that we emphasize that element.  An appearance competition side by side with a tournament should let everyone know, we’re in it for the looks!

Please don’t take this to mean that we are watering down the tournament side of things.  On the contrary, the tournament will be more focused on generalship than anything else.  We are in the Northeast, the land of ETC players, with home to many of the nations finest generals.  Because we’ve removed the detailed army appearance judging from the tournament side we will be using a simple tiered system to include in the tournament Overall scores.  This is mostly to promote people to paint their armies to nice standards.  It’s a courtesy to your opponents to have a reasonably painted army, and we’d like to recognize that by awarding 10 out of the 15 available points to any army that went a reasonable amount above the bare minimum.  We really expect most armies to score at least a 10.

We have also moved the battle point scoring to a different scale.  Each score tier will be 150 victory points.  This was purely a numbers game.  We ran simulations and this provides a better player distribution across the field.

I won’t go into exhaustive detail about the Army Appearance competition.  We’ll be giving out awards for the top spots.  The exact criteria for scores may change as we now have to re-examine the breakdown in the light that it isn’t contributing towards Overall anymore. Do keep in mind that this is now a full on competition.  There will be no pity points.  We expect scores to occupy the full spectrum of the scoring range, just like battle points would.  Of course we have 3 dedicated and experienced paint judges, and they will all be providing comments and feedback to every player.

At the end of the event, two score lists will be published – Overall and Army Appearance.

In closing I just want to touch on our final award.  We’re calling this one “The Complete Hobbyist”.  This isn’t the “grand winner” of the event per se, it’s just the person who excelled the most in ALL areas.  We’ll be taking an equally weighted average of players rankings across Overall, Appearance and Favorite Opponent.  The player with the best average across the 3 will be our “Complete Hobbyist”.  It’s a throw back to the Unplugged Gamers hobby roots.

Questions and comments can be directed at the comment section here or the forums.

Can’t wait to see everyone at the event.
Cheers,
Jon & The Unplugged Gamers

Categories
Warhammer

Waystones completed

I had completed these waystones for Templecon and unfortunately never got around to taking pictures of them.  Initially I had intended to use them on the display board but realized that they would make pretty good unit fillers.  Since I was short on archers it was the perfect opportunity!

I like that they are generic so I can float them around into whatever infantry unit needs a few extra bodies.

Categories
Warhammer

Madgub Shroomluva…

…is the wildest Night Goblin in the Old World. He is the self-proclaimed prophet of the Elder Gub. He has a penchant for shrooms and an obsessive fear of lightning. He can be seen here casting a spell to scare off an omen beetle. Gotta protect them shrooms, ya gub it?

Madgub Shroomluva - 1 Madgub Shroomluva - 2 Madgub Shroomluva - 3

 

Categories
Warhammer

You Shall Not Cast!

(By you, he means enemy wizards, not himself…)

Check out this Grey Wizard that I converted it this evening.  Parts of this model were taken from the wizard, state troop, flagellant, and hurrrrrrrricanum kits.  It took a lot of crafty planning and fiddling to get the arm positions right or, as most paint judges will say: “just a kit bash, huh?”  Because we all know that players who use green stuff (sometimes poorly) deserve more conversion credit than those you shave plastic with their hobby knives and select unique bit combinations…

This model accurately represents its kit: Lvl 4, Shadow (hence the grey wizard beard), fencer’s blades, and white cloak of Ulric.  You better believe this bro will be painted with a white cloak and grey robes.

IMG_0085 IMG_0086