Poxwalkers #12 & #14 and Blood Bowl Update

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Ann

My go-to models for Azazel’s Neglected Model Challenges are my hideously neglected* poxwalkers, and this lucky fellow (?) is number fourteen of twenty.

Got to get that cat hair up with a lint roller next time.

Painted him a lot like the others, predictably, though I decided to go easy on the blood/ooze/pus/etc. this time and not turn him into a somewhat juicy mess like his messmate below. Perhaps his cocktail of diseases included a touch of desiccation and a pleasing whitening of the flesh?

I used Pallid Witch Flesh for the white and then some Skull White over that. For the rims of the open sores I used various flesh tones, but finished with the lightest I have (without mixing paints), Kislev Flesh. I used Nurgle’s Rot to give them a little shine. I was originally going to go for, as I said, the dry look, but I decided upon reflection he did need a touch of satin.

Might whiten up that one worm a bit, I don’t know.

I tried an experiment with texture pastes on his air tank, which didn’t work out well at all. I scrapped most of the paste off, though it turns out the stuff can be stubborn so I left a veneer, which I think came out alright. (Thank goodness I didn’t try this experiment with someone, who is more fastidious, like say a Khorne Berserker or anything Slaanesh.)

I ended up, as I so often do, splotching random inks and such on the tank until it seemed advisable to call it a day. Finally, I wanted to give the it a little metallic shine, but I didn’t want to lighten the tank up too much, so I drybrushed on a little Vallejo Gunmetal Grey (70.863) instead of the usual steel colors.

Where’d that piece of hair come from on his horn between pictures? Danged cats!

This mob is characterized by the innovation that all of the zombies with reddish skin are wearing yellow and the green ones are wearing orange.** These two are wearing identical, reversible jumpsuits, as you can see. Even the web gear is reversible.

Recycled Poxbringer Pic: Proudly showing off their yellow mold.

I am looking forward to trying out the new (to me) basing video on my nascent Blood Bowl team. If I like how it turns out, I might do something like it for my desert bases, instead of going the simple route of just slapping some sand on it and calling it a day. For now though, I’m going to continue as I began with my zombies because I want them all to more or less match.

All of my Blood Bowl team are on bases now, so that’s a little progress.

Speaking of Blood Bowl, I did get a little more priming done, but it is back to cold, wet, and humid so that’s on hold for awhile. I did get them all based, and my experiment with priming before affixing the models to bases went well in that I decided I liked affixing then priming better than priming then affixing.***

I also green stuffed a made-between-two-combs-that-my-husband-hopefully-isn’t-using-anymore tentacle to that bloater I was talking about before, where I put the model together out of order and had a horrendous gap I had to do something about. I’ll show him next time, when I post some pictures of my friend, Dave’s, Blood Bowl dwarves he recently painted and was kind enough to let me play against him in a game against his orks. After that hopefully I’ll have a rotter or two to show you.

* “Hideously neglected” might be a bit of an overstatement since the Dark Imperium box came out in June 2017, so I’ve only been working on my Death Guard zombies for less than a year now, which isn’t bad for a squad of twenty by my standards. Frightfully neglected, perhaps?

** In case I’m insane enough to try and paint another mob of these guys in accordance with my original, crazy plan of eventually running a zombie horde once I get back to playing 40K again. “Horde” for the sized games I generally play(ed) would be about 80 to 100 bodies, which would include extras for (hopefully) turning some enemy infantry into more poxwalkers.

*** For one, I didn’t like having to either scrape or tape the bottoms of the feet so I could use cement. I could use super glue, of course, but I sometimes drop my miniatures and with super glue most of the time the miniature (at best) comes off the base or (at worst) explodes into its constituent parts like my friend, Dave’s, poor metal Blood Bowl troll. Still, it is superior in some ways, such as getting those sometimes hard-to-reach nether regions and if you want to spray the base a different color than the miniature.

Work on Nurgle Blood Bowl Team Begins

Posted on February 2, 2019 by Ann

So I bought the Nurgle-themed Blood Bowl team not too long ago and finished putting them together. I started in on the priming, as much as the wet and humid winter weather of Santa Cruz allows.

N is for Nurgle!

The fat guys are called Bloaters. Their thing is being strong and so disgusting that people sometimes hesitate in attacking them, and their mere presence can mess with opponent’s throwing and so on. When I was assembling them, I neglected to read the directions to my peril. Apparently you are supposed to glue one of the arms to a torso piece and then glue the two torso pieces together.

Instead, I glued the torso together and found I couldn’t wedge the arm in. I was able to get the arm cemented in place, with a little surgery, but this left an unsatisfactory gap. So I’m going to have to green stuff some sort of flab/tentacle/whatever to hide the error, which I haven’t done as of typing this.

Mystery solved on the finger/horn thingies.

The above player is called a Pestigor. Their thing is they move a bit faster than the rest of the team and have horns, which it can use when to blitzes/charges an opponent. Hence the name, I’m guessing. A pestiferous monstrosity that gores people.

I did read the directions on this guy and it never showed the two finger piece in the directions, which I super glued on after I primed it. I looked at it on the sprue, clipped it off and thought maybe it was some weird extra that I could randomly glue on to something as nobby growths or whatever. But then again it had a number (#34) so maybe it had to go with something. After fiddling around for awhile I saw that it fit onto the pestigor’s hand like a glove, so to speak, and the mystery was solved. Fortunate too, because I almost tried gluing one onto my aforementioned bloater’s embarrassing armpit gap.

Be nice if they supplied the correct bases. 🙂

Finally, the box came with a pack of 32mm slotted bases. I could have filled in the slots with green stuff, but this was too much work so I dug out some regular bases that I have and decided to use those.

I was thinking too of doing something a little different than my glue-some-sand-onto-the-base-paint-the-ring-desert-tan-and-call-it-a-day technique and use Duncan’s Blood Bowl basing for these guys. It has the virtue of being pretty simple-looking and as I said, different than what I’ve been doing.

Also, I’m going to work on getting at least one miniature done for Azazel’s Neglected Model Challenge for February 2019. Hope everyone has a good February.

Ancient Blood Bowl Glories Return

Posted on January 9, 2019 by Ann

The last time I played Blood Bowl was in the late 1980’s during my college years. A friend’s boyfriend owned the game (it had cardboard guys instead of miniatures) and he wanted to start a league so we played. It was fun but summer came and everyone spiraled off onto other paths and I never saw any of them again. Not unusual for college with life organized into semesters and staying in touch with social media not being what it is today.

Fast forward to now, and a friend wanted to start a league. Sound familiar? I said yes and we had our first game at his dining room table. There were three games going on at once, ardent spirits flowed freely, and it felt a bit like gaming at a convention in that you had to yell to talk to your opponent. It was great fun.

I thought the cheerleader and dwarf referee were a nice touch.

I wish I had thought to take some pictures, but I didn’t. Fortunately though, I did get in another game a couple of days later with the same opponent, who had two painted teams, and was kind enough to invite me to his house. My hosts also kindly shared their lovely meal of chicken and asparagus too, which I greatly enjoyed. He played the Orks and I played the Humans.

I had one special character, the big guy in front to the left with no helmet. He was slow but extremely strong and good at hitting people. Not a bad guy to have in a scrum as it turned out. The other special character, the guy with the winged helmet standing next to my Big Bruiser Guy, is included in the photo but I didn’t have him on my team. I’ll probably try him the next time we play.

As it turned out that was the Stupidest Troll Ever!

It was a good thing that trolls can regenerate because our blue friend fell into a bunch of pieces, the victim no doubt of one hundred year old super glue bonds. Fortunately we got him put back together in time for kick off. Unfortunately he turned out to be the Stupidest Troll Ever, which is saying something considering that you have to roll a 4+ on a D6 each turn to get your troll to do anything other than just stand there.

Apparently if you have some of your own guys standing next to your troll, you can get a positive modifier on the Hopefully He Won’t Just Stand There and Do Nothing roll, which can be helpful. For our game we didn’t realize this. I think he might have done something in one or two of the eight turns we played. We’ll remember our error next time for sure. Also, I am told that you can hire trolls on your team that aren’t paralyzingly stupid, but where is the fun in that?

The Ork/Goblin/Troll Team.

My take away with playing mostly the basic game so far with only a few of the special rules is that it is fun enough that I want to paint a team or two. I decided upon the Nurgle team and bought the team box. I based my decision completely on the fact that I like painting Nurgle, though now that I’ve delved a bit more into the game I think I’d enjoy a team with more of a passing game. Still, it’ll be fun modeling the guys and I like that one only needs a handful of models for a complete team versus building an army in larger games.

For next time I hope to have another poxwalker done. I haven’t been playing much 40K for awhile now, but I do want to get the unit finished. I think they’d be fine in Blood Bowl if you overlook the fact that most of them are packing knives, broken rifles, wrenches with spikes tied to them, and the like. I’m not too worried about it considering that goblins can bring chainsaws, giant spiked ball-and-chain weapons, and throw bombs at the opposition, and the less said about the Forge World drunken dwarf on a zamboni-looking thing the better!

Flesh Nurgling 100 pixels wide no background