Raze and Ruin - Comp Preview Part 2

If you've read the previous entry you will know what this is about. If not, go back and read it! OK, time to take a look at the first four armies and their comp scores. First up, everyone's favourite hairy goats!

Beastmen

As one of the weakest armies in the game, Beastmen need all the help they can get! So, there are very few negatives for them. The only things to be hit are the Shard of the Herdstone (for which the penalty gets bigger the more mages you have), and if you try to spam cheap chaff or Core chariots. As for bonuses, the Ungor Herd needs to change to take into account the Core changes mentioned in the last post, but the others seem fine. I also feel that the Special Characters have been overlooked here, as most of them deserve to be amongst the positives too, with the notable exceptions of Morghur and Slugtongue. With all of this included, we get something that looks like this:

 - Beastmen players may choose to either start at a comp score of +5, or receive an additional 300
points with which to select their armies.

-1 per Shaman or Great Shaman after the first, only if the Shard of the Herd Stone is included
-1 per unit of Ungor Raiders after the 2nd
-1 per unit of Harpies
-1 per Tuskgor Chariot after the first 3

+1 for the first unit of 20+ Ungor Herds
+1 per unit of 5+ Minotaurs
+1 per unit of Centigors
+1 per Giant
+1 per Jabberslythe
+1 per Cygor
+1 per Ghorgon
+1 Khazrak The One Eye
+1 Gorthor The Beastlord
+1 Malagor, The Dark Omen
+1 Taurox, The Brass Bull
+1 Moonclaw, Son of Moorslieb
+1 Ungrol Four-Horn
+1 Ghorros Warhoof


Bretonnia

Ah, my latest flame. :) As I took these guys to Rollcall, I actually think that the comp on them at the moment is pretty much spot on. In terms of negatives, I found the Crown of Command negative harsh in addition to the generic penalty, though I think if it's on a Damsel the extra negative is worth it. Apart from that, I'm not going to change the negatives. However, as with Beastmen I'm going to add in the Special Characters to the bonus pool (though I'm unsure about the Green Knight and feedback on that would be helpful), and I also think that the last one needs an amendment. Whilst +3 is fine if you take nothing but peasants, I feel that a bonus for the old classic Bret RAF army would not be out of the question if no other Knights are taken. With a few alterations to the wording, we get the following:

-1 per Virtue of Heroism
-1 if you have Silver Mirror and Dispel Scroll
-1 if Crown of Command is on a Damsel or Prophetess, in addition to generic comp
-1 per Virtue of the Impetuous Knight
-1 per Trebuchet

+1 per Hippogriff, in addition to generic comp
+1 per Lord/Paladin on foot, +2 if the General is on foot
+1 for the first unit of 30+ Men-at-Arms
+1 for the first unit of Peasant Bowmen
+1 per unit of Mounted Yeomen
+1 per unit of Questing Knights over 5 models
+1 Grail Reliquae
+3 if you only have 1 unit of Knights in the army, reduced to +1 if you also take Pegasus Knights
+1 Louen Leoncouer
+1 The Fey Enchantress
+1 The Green Knight


Chaos Dwarfs

Not a real army. ;-) Unfortunately I don't have the army book for these guys, however I've spoken to someone who knows them and there are a few changes that they have suggested. The first is to put a negative onto each Taur'uk rather than the 2nd, as they are very good. The second is to modify the positives to include all Iron Daemons, as they can be taken out of the game very easily. However, having played against 3 I think I'm going to cap this bonus at +2. A few modifications for generic comp are needed, and with few positive options I'm going to add in a couple of units you don't see very often too we get this:

-2 per K’daai Destroyer
-1 Chalice of Blood and Darkness
-1 per Sorcerer Prophet on Hashut
-1 per Death Shrieker Rocket
-1 per Magma Cannon
-1 per Hellcannon
-1 per Bull Centaur Taur’uk
-1 per war machine after the 4th (note that the Hellcannon counts for this, and this is on top of the
individual scores per war machine)

+1 for the first unit of Hobgoblin infantry of more than 25 models
+1 for the first unit of Chaos Dwarfs armed with Fireglaves
+1 per unit of K’daai Fireborn
+1 per Dreadquake Mortar
+1 per Iron Daemon, up to a max of +2
+1 per Lammasu
+1 per unit of Chaos Dwarf Ironsworn


Daemons of Chaos

These guys are very difficult to comp correctly. A lot of their units are very good, and they can modify their Magic Items for each game. Despite this, they still performed very well at Rollcall so some changes are probably needed. I am unconvinced by the generic penalty on Greater Daemons, as they are a massive liability against certain opponents. However, if this is removed, I'm worried they may be too powerful. I've removed it for now to see how it goes, but it may come back in. Some of the Special Characters also need to be included, as a negative or a positive. I've also removed the number limits for the Core bonus units, as they are now limited by the general Core restriction to bonuses. This is the army I am in need of feedback on the most, so if you have any suggestions please put them in below.

-2 Epidemius
-2 Kairos Fateweaver
-1 Blue Scribes
-1 per unit of Plague Drones
-1 per level 3 or 4 Wizard
-1 if you have 1 Skull Cannon, -4 if you have 2 Skull Cannons. This penalty becomes -1 per Skull
Cannon in an army that consists solely of Daemons of Khorne
-1 per unit of Horrors of Tzeentch after the 2nd
-1 per unit of Beasts of Nurgle after the 1st
-1 per Beasts of Nurgle model after the 5th

+2 if your army consists solely of units/characters of 1 Chaos God (note that this means you may not
have any unmarked units)
+1 if your army does not include any Skull Cannons
+1 per Daemon Prince
+1 per Blood Throne of Khorne
+1 per Burning Chariot
+1 for the first unit of Daemonettes
+1 for the first unit of Bloodletters
+1 per Seeker Chariot of Slaanesh (including Exalted chariots)
+1 per Hellflayer of Slaanesh
+1 Skarbrand
+1 Ku'Gath Plaguefather


So that's the first four armies done and available for comment. I would love to hear what players of these armies think of the changes, and the comp in general. Tomorrow I'll hopefully get to the next 4, and we will then have a good idea about where we are with the comp pack.

See you then!

Raze and Ruin - Comp Preview Part 1

I've had a few aborted attempts to restart this blog over the last couple of months, but just couldn't find a subject to get my teeth into. I may finish and release them anyway at some point, but I've now found a good reason to start blogging again - Raze and Ruin!

My very own tournament has recently been announced for this year - it will be on the 18th and 19th October in Leicester, and full details can be found on the TWF thread here. It will be 2500 points and 5 games, and it will use the excellent Tally Comp system that has been used at Rollcall for the past couple of years. Now I went to Rollcall, and I really enjoy this style of comp, but there are a few things in there that I feel need updating before I use it at my own event. I thought that the best way to get some feedback on these revisions is to put up what I am thinking here over a series of posts and get some feedback from anyone who reads it. This may backfire, but at least it will give me a chance to explain my reasoning for the changes I intend to make, even if no-one is listening!

As I've only got a few days to go before I go away on holiday to the good old U S of A, I thought I'd at least get these initial thoughts up here before I go. I'm going to do the generic comp in this post, as well as the first 4 armies alphabetically later today, and then 4 more armies each day before I have to leave. Then when I get back I will get to look at any feedback from these and get the pack together ready for a final release. I will put a disclaimer here that although I'm happy to get feedback, I'm not going to guarantee that any changes suggested in the feedback will make it into the pack.


Generic Comp

To get us started then, the generic comp scores. If you don't know how Tally Comp works, the idea is that the army lists are essentially uncomped in that you can take whatever units you like. There are no actual restrictions, however some of the more nasty units and items attract a negative score to them and some of the weaker choices get a bonus to encourage their use. These negatives and positives will be 'Tallied' (see what we did there? ;-) ) to get a final Comp Score for your list. This will be added or subtracted from your final Generalship score after all 5 games have been completed - so if you take the nastiest stuff you better win your games!

Here are the Generic Comp points used at the Rollcall event:

Most of these are pretty good, and don't need a lot of altering. There are three changes I do plan to make though, and the first is a Generic bonus for a combat character (not a spellcaster) riding a Monster. I want to encourage people to bring Dragons and the like, as they are brilliant models that don't see the light of day often enough in an uncomped environment as the die quite a lot to cannons. I don't want to extend this to spellcasters, as I feel that some spells are already good enough without them being mounted on something large and impressive! Thus the first draft for this will read:

+1 for a non-spellcaster character mounted on a Monster

The second change I am looking to make is with the negatives associated with big expensive units. In a standard comp pack, units are usually limited to a maximum of 450 points and I don't see why this is penalized in this pack. I think the other parts of the brackets work well though, so the new negatives will look like this:

-1 per unit that costs between 450 and 599 points inclusive
-3 per unit that costs between 600 and 749 points inclusive
-5 per unit that costs 750 points or more

The final thing is to limit one of the problems discovered at Rollcall with bonus units in Core. It was too easy to spam small, low-cost units that scored positive points when they came out of  the Core allowance, leading to some armies being a much higher score than they should be. To counter this, I will be limiting Core units that score bonuses to only score the bonus for the first such unit in the army. This should still let people get positive scores if they wish, but will stop some of the abuse of the system possible without this limit.

So that's it for the generic comp!  If you have any other suggestions, or responses to what I've written, please leave them below.

For the Lady! Part 1

It's been about 6 weeks since I actually posted anything on here, I've been rather busy!

From a gaming standpoint, I have been fortunate enough to represent Team England at the Warhammer 6 Nations event in Dublin, using my Lizardmen. This was the first time I've travelled abroad to play in a Warhammer event, and I had a great time over the weekend. Due to the nature of the event, I can't really discuss my list or the games for fear of giving something away that the Teams involved would rather I didn't. However, from a personal perspective I ended the weekend with 3 draws, an 9-11 loss and a 7-13 loss. I feel that I did a decent job for the team, but we were unlucky to lose the final round to France and finish third overall.

The 6 Nations put a little bit of stress on my gaming though. I was playing a very particular build of Lizards, and the games were rather tight affairs. I was also playing for England, and whilst a lot of people felt that we were the "B" Team, as a member of the team I felt a great deal of pride in being asked to play for them. All of this meant that I was worried about my gaming - not a position that I wanted to repeat after the event.

I was scanning around for a new army project, and I was partially tempted to try an Elf army of some description. They are very popular on the circuit at the moment, have some great models and I think that the variety of builds could give me what I was missing from the three armies that I use regularly at present. The one downside was a severe lack of funds to buy the models! I then remembered an acquisition I had made some time previously - a Bretonnian army.

For the Lady!

Another Warhammer blogger (with a much larger readership than mine!) has also recently posted an article on army choice - the link is here, I suggest you check it out if you haven't already. I have decided to take a different approach and do a review of the army as a whole. As these are mostly first impressions, a lot of them may be wrong and I invite other Bretonnian players to put me straight! I will start off with a look at the units in Core, Special and Rare, then I shall focus on the Characters, Magic and Items in the book, and finally I shall post a couple of lists I am looking at running in the near future.

Core

Like most things in a Bretonnian army, this section can be boiled down to 2 things: Knights and Peasants. The Knights come in two flavours - the slightly better, slightly more expensive Knights of the Realm and the slightly worse but slightly cheaper Knights Errant. The differences between the two are almost cosmetic. Realm Knights have the advantage of an additional point of Weapon Skill, putting them at the always desirable WS4, and they are Ld8 as standard (though in the age of the BSB this isn't as crucial as t used to be). Knights Errant though, despite having WS3 and a rule which is essentially all the downsides of Frenzy without the extra Attack, are cheaper and still have the wonderful 2+ Save that so frustrates Str3 opponents.

I think both are worth taking for different reasons. Realm Knights are the staple of the army - in fact at least a single unit is mandatory - and small units still pack quite a punch for their cost. Bretonnians are helped out here by a couple of their Special Rules, the first being that all Knight units have a Champion as standard (extra Attacks are always good) and the fickle yet fabulous Blessing of the Lady. If you've not encountered this before, the Bretonnian player can choose to automatically lose the roll to go first to enable all his Knights to have a Ward save. Combined with their armour, and the fact the Ward gets better against higher strength, these Knights are very survivable.

The Peasants, like in reality, are only there to make up the numbers. They are dirt cheap (and generally dirty too) and could only fight their way out of a wet paper bag if someone else was holding it down and encouraging them. Each variety of Peasant in this section has their redeeming features though. For the Archers - the unit you're more likely to see - it's the lovely Longbow they come with. They also have a couple of wonderfully cheap unit upgrades in that they can make their arrows Flaming for only 5 points, and you can have a Skirmishing unit for 1 point per model (taking them up to a massive 7 pts each... ;-) ) Even if you don't choose to Skirmish, you get the Defensive Stakes for free, meaning you're more likely to hang around if something charges you.

The other Peasant unit, the Men at Arms, are more interesting. Very cheap, they boast things a lot of mounted armies lack - Static Combat Res and numbers. A unit of 40 is only about 200 points, and whilst they are individually rubbish, they do have Halbards so can strike at Strength 4. This seems to keep Empire players using infantry, so it can't be all bad! Their real downside is being WS2 and Ld5, but for the role that they are built for (standing in front of something hard for several turns until the Knights come to the rescue) they are very good.

The main thing to say about Bretonnian Core units is that you won't often see a Bret army with the minimum points spent in Core. All these choices are good at their job, and with Special and Rare being so specialised (as we will see) they provide an excellent backbone for the army.

It's all about the Pegs!

Special

Whereas the Bretonnian Core choices are all rather good, the same cannot be said about the Special selection. The undoubted stars of this section are the Pegasus Knights. The original Flying Monstrous Cavalry, these guys pack an impressive punch into a very mobile unit. A unit of 3 is surprisingly cheap at 165 points, and for that you get 6 Wounds at Toughness 4 with a 3+ Armour save and the Blessing, along with 4 Attacks from the Knights (with lances) and 6 from the beasts, plus their 3 Stomps. Impressive. The only downside is that you can only have a single unit, unless your General is also mounted on a Pegasus. This is a concept that we will return to!

If these guys are the stars, what makes the rest of the choices so rubbish I hear you cry? Looking at them individually should tell us. Starting with the least poor, we have Mounted Yeomen. Your basic Fast Cavalry unit, able to provide a little bit of shooting and get in the way of anything coming at you too fast. They even come with Spears in case you feel the need to charge something, and are WS3 to boot. So why are they so poor? Mainly because fast moving cavalry is not something a Bretonnian army really needs any more of. Whatever their role in another army would be, the Brets generally will have something that can do it better. Chaffing up a threat? Use a small Realm/Errant unit as they get the Armour and Blessing. Hunting War Machines? The Pegs can get there quicker and can probably do more damage when they do. Harassing flanks? Just use regular bowmen, the range on a longbow negates the need for the movement of the fast cav. By no means a bad unit, just an unnecessary one.

A truly bad unit does exist in this section though, and that is the Grail Reliquae. Apart from being notoriously difficult to spell, the Reliquae again adds very little to the Bretonnian army - however this time being cheap and fast are not amongst its selling points. It's expensive (minimum cost 118 points for a unit of 6 guys plus the filler, and up to 334 for a maximum size of 30) and unweildy thanks to it's strange set of rules. The only real plus side it has is being Stubborn, but with WS2 and Str3 you would probably set them up deep anyway and therefore they'd just be Steadfast instead. I just cannot see any use for this unit, even in a Peasant heavy army. Which is a shame, as the concept is fantastic! Maybe in the new book it will become a decent upgrade a la the Cauldron of Blood, but I won't hold my breath...

The final unit in here are the Questing Knights. Again, as with the Grail Reliquae these are a fantastic concept for a unit. Knights who have lain down their lances to hunt for the Grail, and who have decided the best alternative is a massive Greatsword - this wins cool points straight away. Unfortunately, they also lose the shield associated with the lance, dropping them to a 3+ save in combat. Where they will strike last. I just don't see them working in 8th edition. The only positive I can think of is that they can do some extra damage in the second and subsequent round of combat, but even then they will probably have taken a few casualties and won't be as effective as you would hope. A lot of points for a poor return in my opinion.

The power behind the throne...

Rare

Here is where we see that Brets are an old book - there are only two choices here. But what choices they are! :-)

Firstly, the rightly feared Field Trebuchet. A Str5(10) Stone Thower with 4 Wounds for only 90 points? Yes please I'll take 2! These monsters of an artillery piece can smash apart anything that can really threaten your Knights, and no self respecting Bretonnian general would leave home without a pair of them. They're that good.

The other choice is also really good, but in a less obvious way. Grail Knights are living legends. They always get the Blessing, even if you go first - possibly enabling some sort of strategy to catch your opponent off guard. They have great stats, being WS5 and Str4 with 2 Attacks each means they dish out a lot of damage on the charge. They also can carry a Magic Banner up to 50 points, and can be taken in units of only 3 models. On paper they are fantastic. However, I personally don't rate them. Why, you may ask? Well, they are still only human, and therefore Toughness 3 with 1 wound each. Even with a guaranteed Blessing, they are no harder to take out than any other Bretonnian Knight, and at 38 points a model that starts to hurt fast. Unlike the Questing Knights though, I do see a role for these guys in lists. A smallish unit (5 or 6) can do enough damage to fight on their own without character support, and a large unit as a character bus can do amazing amounts of damage. I think with some practice in order to keep them alive they could make a very effective unit.


Summary

So, to sum up this first stop in the tour of Bretonnia, the army has some pretty solid choices in the book. If you want to be overly critical you can say that they just boil down to Knights and Peasants, but I think that even within that simple distinction there is enough flavour and variety to make any sort of list work.

Next time (hopefully not as long a break as the last one!) I will take a look at the rest of the book - the Characters and Magic Items.

If you have any comments or ideas to share, please feel free to leave a comment here or get in touch on Twitter. I'm always keen to hear feedback!

Until next time!

Painting for the love of Painting

I've been a little slack in updating this blog recently. I've still got my notes from the Bjorn Supremacy Teams event from the beginning of March sitting around somewhere, and I had all the good intentions in the world of writing them up in the week following the event. Nearly a month later, and nothing has happened. I'm not even going into that event here, as I may yet pull something together regarding that. However, I haven't been sitting here twiddling my thumbs. I've been painting.

All hail the FPP!

If you follow the Warhammer Fantasy community on Twitter, you'll probably be aware of the vast range of opinions on painting that exist. Some feel that it is something that has to be done only when absolutely necessary, and feel that requiring anything more than a basic paint job to attend a tournament is sacrilege. Then there are those that have huge amounts of painting skill, that can produce something amazing everyday before breakfast and that see even the stringiest painting points as a right rather than a privilege!

I'm somewhere in the middle. There are times when the only way you will get me to pick up a brush is to have a tournament the next day that requires a minimum painting requirement. At other times, I really enjoy it and try to make every model as good as I can, spending ages doing it too. I've just gone through a period where the latter has been the case, and it all started with a Dragon.

Zombie Dragon

You have to love a Mother and her Dragon

I eventually finished the Dragon I wanted to take to Battlefield Birmingham in February, and I really enjoyed painting it. It was, and still is, the biggest model I have ever painted, and despite my reservations at the start of the project I really enjoyed the challenge. The first step of this was to put the model together, and this in itself was a massive undertaking. The model is shown in one of my first posts regarding the Battlefield Birmingham event, and looks very impressive even with no paint on. I decided to leave the wings off whilst I painted the model, helping me reach the whole model but meaning that attaching them wouldn't be as strong as if I had done them first. Still, I thought the ease in painting would make up for this.

I wanted the model to bring back recollections of Drogon from the Game of Thrones TV show, so the image above was my starting point. A black undercoat and several coats of very dark red saw the model reach the point shown in the photo below.

(Quick note on photography - most of these photos were taken with my phone camera for Twitter, and I've never been too good at photographing miniatures. That being said, they should give an idea of what I've been doing!)
 

Raaargh!

I was pretty happy with the basecoat, despite how long it took. I was planning on coating it in Dip, to tie it in to the rest of my Vampire army and to help darken it further. But only after I finish all the details, so a long way to go before that stage!

The wings were supposed to look a lot lighter than the rest of the model, as they were supposed to be thin and light. I know they aren't sculpted like that, but I wanted them to look right rather than painting them as they are sculpted. Here is a wing with the red stage finished, pre-dip.

 My wife doesn't understand the anatomy of this wing. I just think it looks awesome!

I then stopped taking photos during the prep stage, so I only have ones now it's finished. There were a hell of a lot of details than needed doing once the basic skin tone and scales were done, including bone for the teeth, horns and claws, and the eyes and mouth too. These little details took quite some time, but after they were done I applied the Dip. This was the biggest point where it could go wrong, and I was worried as I started to brush on the dip. I needn't have worried though, as it all turned out ok in the end, as you can see in the below pictures.

I have to say that I'm very happy with how it turned out! The stone you can see in the last photo lifts out, leaving room for the Vampire Lord to stand on the base. I felt that this was the best way to incorporate the rider into the model, as I didn't fancy ruining such a nice figure by trying to attach a rider to it's back.


After this model was finished, I looked around my painting desk for another project. My eyes fell on my half finished Ogre Maneaters. I had started to put together a unit of 6 with 2 pistols each, and then left them as I wasn't sure my skills were up to the task. With confidence brimming after finishing the dragon above, I decided I would have a go.

Ogre Maneaters

The idea that I had for this unit was to make them look like Wild West gunslingers. Back when I first started to build these figures, I had tried to sculpt stetson hats for them to wear and this was hard. I found it so tricky, that I put the unit on the side and gave up on the idea of putting coats or cloaks on them. This was where they were when I came back to them. I haven't really tried to use green stuff in this way before, so I scoured the internet for some ideas on how to do what I wanted to. My first attempt is shown below:

I was actually rather pleased with this! It may be rough and crude, but it was my first go and it looked ok. I tried to get it to look like he's shrugging it off his shoulders a bit, and I used the end of a paintbrush to try and get a curl to it.

Emboldened by this modest success, I moved on to the next one:

Again, not too bad! The unfortunate line across the bottom was from a fold in the green stuff, but it should be covered once it is painted. I tried a slightly different look for this, putting the fold in the other side. I wanted to ensure that they were all different, and this should give me a way to do this.

2 down, 4 to go. I had posted these first two on Twitter, and the suggestion was to try and make the folds more obvious. I attempted this on the next one:

With this one I thought I had got the hang of it. I was really happy with this one. The extra definition in the fold made a difference, and I put more effort into the folds for the last 3.

Here's number 4 - though my ham-fistedness is starting to show...

Number 5 turned out rather similarly too. However, once I got to the final one I ran into difficulties. As I used the arm from the Thundertusk that had the vulture on, part of the cloak was already on the model, and when I tried to get it to match it looked a little odd...

I really wasn't happy with this, a needed bump back down to Earth for my sculpting ability! I ripped it off and had another go, and the second time I got something that looked pretty good. Blending the green stuff onto the shoulder was still tricky, but I think that I managed to get it to a passable state.

Here are the completed maneaters, complete with hats and cloaks:

I have also managed to put some paint on these now, so there are a few photos below of the finished unit:

For my first real attempt at sculpting, I'm rather pleased with how the unit looks! My favourite is definitely the one with the long rifle, but whether this is to do with his cloak, his hat or his gun I'm not too sure.




Ogre Firebelly

I've wanted to add a second Firebelly to my Ogre army for a while. They are very useful models, and whilst I really like the stock figure, I didn't want two of them in my army. Having searched Google for some ideas for an alternate Firebelly model, I ran across the below on the Ogre Stronghold:

Here is the link, to ensure credit is given where it is due! I decided to shamelessly steal this idea. It's a fantastic concept, and given my new found enthusiasm for sculpting, this would provide a nice challenge! I started with the base model. Unfortunately the sword in the above picture is from the Lord of the Rings Balrog, and I just couldn't find anywhere selling it on its own (and I certainly wasn't buying the whole kit for the sword! The lack of a bits service from GW sometimes still annoys me...). I decided to use a different weapon and try to sculpt the fire onto it. Here's the bare plastic:

First up, I needed to learn how to sculpt fire. Fortunately there is an excellent tutorial on the Tale of 4 Geeks website. I tried this out on the weapon first, and here are the first results:

I also put a cloak on him (naturally! ) and had to resculpt the thumb on his left hand. I'd done this sort of green stuff work before though, so I was more interested in how the fire came out. Once these two bits of fire had dried, I added a third on the tip of the weapon and tried to link the base of the three fireballs. Here is how it turned out:

Dodgy photo I know. But as I've said, photography isn't my strongest point...

Despite the photo, the weapon actually looks pretty good. I also added a final fireball to his left hand. I let it all dry and then moved on to the other parts of the model. I wanted to add some extra bits to his clothing, and then I had to do his hair. Here is the next photo:

You get a better view of the work so far here. The hair isn't finished, but the rest is just about there. The final part was to wait until it had dried a little, then add the lines to the hair to make it look like it is actually hair!

Here is the final figure before paint is applied:

I decided not to add the 'cage' around the back of his neck, I thought that the cloak I added would give enough detail to his back. The rest is very similar to the original picture, and I give full credit to the original sculptor for all the assistance his pictures gave me.

I then moved on to painting him. The skin was rather straight-forward, as it was the same as all my other ogre models. Then for the red on the rest of him, I drew on my experience from painting Blood Angels many moons ago. The hardest bit was painting the fire to look realistic, and again I have to credit the Tale of 4 Geeks site for another really useful tutorial in painting fire. I've taken some more pictures of the final result, and here they are:

I keep saying it, but I'm really pleased with how this model came together. I think he might be my favourite Ogre I've painted so far!

Bragg the Gutsman

As a finale to this particular post, I thought I'd post up some pictures of the other Ogre I've been working on. No Green Stuff on this, just the standard model from GW. Unfortunately the rules for this particular special character are so dire that I doubt I will ever field him as the character he is supposed to be. However, he will see table time either as a regular Maneater, or as a second Tyrant.

I hope you have enjoyed this look through my recent painting exploits, and as ever if you have please feel free to comment below or get in touch on Twitter.

Thanks for reading, see you soon!