Oliphant!

"Grey as a mouse,
Big as a house,
Nose like a snake,
I make the earth shake,
As I tramp through the grass;
Trees crack as I pass.
With horns in my mouth
I walk in the South,
Flapping big ears.
Beyond count of years
I stump round and round,
Never lie on the ground,
Not even to die.
Oliphaunt am I,
Biggest of all,
Huge, old, and tall.
If ever you'd met me
You wouldn't forget me.
If you never do,
You won't think I'm true;
But old Oliphaunt am I,
And I never lie."

As I mentioned earlier, the boys and I spent the Christmas holidays watching the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings more or less on a loop. The youngest - age 4 - was very taken withe the Mumak. So very taken, in fact that he immediately started asking for one.

It's a fascinating model - for years, one of the biggest that GW made and almost an entire army in its own right. So I didn't mind using my hobby budget to buy one. The sculpt is showing its age - there was quite a lot of filling needed. Once constructed, I broke out the airbrush for the base colours and highlights and followed it up with some drybrushing for texture.

It was a relatively fun little project and led to a happy customer.

Next up, another project for my other son and then - finally! - something for me.

The Church of the Devoured

Since the day you were born, your lives have not been your own. You have been used, and abused, and cast down amongst the filth by those above. You are not a person. You are a cog in the machine. You are production output. You are a target. You are nothing. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your lives. They are as dust. Worse: you are food. Meat to be consumed by the machinery of this Empire of Man.  Our lives are eaten by the factories. Our sons and daughters are eaten by the conscription tithes. Even our dead are fed back to us. 

But it does not have to be that way. You can rise up, on the teeth of angels; rise up, born aloft by the love of the Allfather, the True Emperor, the Devourer of Mankind. The God King who cares for you, who will cherish you and who will empower you. And when there are enough of us, we shall rise from the ashes and dirt and rust and bring hungry vengeance upon those who have despised us. The devoured shall become the devourers! Rise up, my brothers! Rise up, my sisters! Let your old lives end and be born anew into glory!

-Pater Dol, preaching in the Underhive

Several of these you will recognise as the core of my Necromunda gang, built as stock Genestealer Cultists. For Kill Team I added a couple of Space Hulk Genestealers and some more cultists built from the Cawdor gang and cultist bits:

To get the best of the Cawdor kit - which has some great bits in it - you have to be willing to be brutal and start using the saw and knife quite forcefully. 

If I knock together a couple of infiltrators that now means I have two complete Kill Team Rosters. 

Myself and the eldest spent the afternoon building - me some Hobbit Goblins and he a cheap little Revel Star Wars kit I had kicking around for him.

More Medieval Mayhem

As you may remember by two sons - now nearly 6 and 4 - are nuts about knights. The other day th eeldest dragged the box of Fireforge Teutonic Knights out of the drawer and asked me to build him and his brother another. As per usual, I let them choose the colour scheme then I had to figure out at way to make them work. 

The green and beige check on this chap helped me figure out the colour scheme for an upcoming project. Keep an eye out for it. Hint: it's another kind of Knight...

And so here are all of them together.

Again, these Fireforge knights are brilliant kits, full of dynamism and movement. The one charging with the lance has inspired me to dig out that old White Dwarf article with the jousting game and come up with my own version. 

Injuries and a return to Middle Earth

Still not dead! However, a couple of weeks ago in two unrelated incidents on the same day my youngest son broke his thigh and our youngest cat broke his pelvis. As I am sure you can imagine no hobby activity has taken place since between overnight stays in the hospital, vet visits and work.

However, all is not lost: both patients are making good recoveries and both are at home. In hobby terms, my present to myself arrived:

For those of you unaware of Battle Companies, it is a skirmish campaign system for Lord of the Rings, allowing a small company of mooks to improve and grow over a series of battles.

Obviously, it being middle earth related u didn't get a look in for a few days as the Eldest nicked it:

But once I started looking through I realised that the haul of LOTR goodies my wife scored a while ago will allow me to field the following companies:

Isengard (always my favourite)
Mordor
Angmar  (the Witch King is almost as cool as Saruman)
Harad
Gondor

And obviously I have Rohan.

From my point of view this is perfect; a small number of miniatures, all conerted - it fits in with the Inq28 and AOS28 skirmish stuff I've been doing recently and also brings in some Middle Earth. Very excited about this.

So for those people keeping score as we go into 2018 the current projects are:

SWA Imperial Guard
AOS28 Skirmish Nurgle - this has started but got put on hold due to that last fortight , will put up a post when I've got the boss painted but here's a teaser:

Necromunda
Middle Earth Battle Companies1

This seems like enough to keep me ticking over. Of course, Christmas is coming so who knows...

Bits and Pieces and the Next Gen

As I said a while ago, although the blog lay fallow for a few weeks, I was busy.

First, I finished off the Silver Tower set:

And I also started playing Silver Tower with the eldest.

Who, around the time of Halloween asked if I had any skeletons; I raided the bits box and made him these:

He also chose the colour scheme for these, which I have taken to calling the Hounds of Liberace:

Finally, and possibly most importantly; we popped into the local GW to pick up some supplies and the manager gave him a tester miniature to paint, which he duly did: so here is my five year old's first painted and based miniature:

He's asked for some more :)

Random Roundup

This is more a log entry than anything specific. First, loot.

It was my birthday last week and I received the following:

The Bolt Action ww2 starter set - because who doesn't need a new era and project? Also a walking cyberman you can shoot. I have asneaking suspicion my sons picked this more for themselves than me. 

Morgul Knights and Riders of Rohan. This came with a catalogue:

Which rapidly became the Eldest's favourite book. Seriously, he's spent hours looking through it and I have to make up bedtime stories for him from it. 

This led him to want to play more with my miniatures:

And to him building his very first model:

This led to him wanting to watch The Hobbit movies. Unsurprisingly he liked the Orcs. The only thing that scared him was Gollum during the Riddles in the Dark bit, but luckily there is always a cushion for protection....

We also had a game night: 

You can see here how competitive we got when playing City of Horror because everyone took photos of the referecne sheets on their phones and were pouring over them. 

As always, the zombie apocalypse fun of City of Horror led to total carnage and lots of backbiting. 

Next up, back to some painting.