The Codewraith

I am in the signals. I am the hiss of static from an untuned radio. I am the flicker of snow on your screen. I am the blocky glitch in the video, the hitch in the music. I am the frequency on the edge of hearing, the colour you can't quite see, the ghost in the machine. 

And I am here for you. 

This was a simple little noodling about with a ghost. It wasn't started with any sort of a plan, just one of those nice evenings sat in front of the bits box and seeing where the muse takes you. In this case, it led me here. I took the opportunity to play with my new greenstuff cable maker which allows me to produce something a little more flexible than guitar strings.

Overall very happy with the final outcome and it's given me a couple more ideas to so with some ghosty chaps.

The Piper at the Gates of Down

They say that he comes out in the dead of night shift. When the forges are only just ticking over, when the Hive hums with the quiet lives of the darktimers, when the lights are low to conserve power. Then he can be heard, metal boots on metal floors. His sightless head swinging side to side, seeing without eyes. And if that blank face catches you, they say, his pipe will rise and a skirl of noise will reach out and wrap itself around you and they say you will follow him to the Gates that lead down, down below even the underhive and there.... there ehy do not say what will happen to you. But you will not come back. So they say. 

I've been waiting for inspiration to strike with the Delaque kit. The Dune Navigator is an obvious choice, but there seemed to be other possibilities in this rather Cliver Barker-esque style.

And so we have this guy.

A relatively simple conversion - a generstealer head fastened in the wrong way round and an arm from the escher kit for a slightyl spindly, out of proportion look and we were away.

The final result is pleasingly creepy, I think.

Undercover Nurglings

Klaxons blared. 

"Sector Five containment down--"

"Security breach in Third Quadrant--"

"Core cogitator shutting down, someone's rewired the--"

"Explosions in barracks Alpha--"

Magos Trismegistus span around, breath rasping from his augmentic lungs. +++How is this possible?+++ he demanded. The officers and skitarii around his looked panicked. +++This is supposed to be a secure installation!+++

The Magos span back to try and get a handle on the constant flow of catastrophic data from all areas. For a moment he paused - one of the skitarii had been shaking. Was it... laughing? He shook his head and tried to focus on the hellscape his life had suddenly become. 

This is one of those idle thoughts prompted by having some leftover bits. What would happen if....? In this case, what would happen if some nurglings found a way to pilot a skitarii round like a suit? The answer: something magical.

From a construction point of view, the coat had to be split open and be widened. I did this with plastic putty. I then had to trim off some the bits of the nurglings to make sure they fit - and end of a horn here, a pointy elbow there. Then a pole for them to operate the gun and we were all set.

I painted them the same as my existing Skitarii to allow for maximum infiltration fun. I imagine I can play these as a poxwalker in a nurgle kill team or as a skitarii in an admech kill team just for fun.

Realms of Battle

As I mentioned earlier, my wife noticed how much I was enjoying painting scenery and so treated me to a couple of the Realms of Battle tiles which were made available for armies on parade.

First, the Age of Sigmar one. I painted this with the same tones as the necropolis scenery I did for the Caliburn Fall setting. I now have a lovely little set up for AOS games.

Second, one of the sector imperialis ones, which I painted up to match the Kill Team scenery. This involved a lot of weathing powders!

I really enjoyed these and certainly wouldn't be averse to picking up a couple more next year.

Stalkers

"I don't need numbers to throw into the meatgrinder. I need a precision blow, a... a stilleto. You understand?"

"Yes, Lord General."

"The issue is that we can't outflank through the wastes outside the main Hive. Nothing can survive out there and no troops can operate in a landscape that has been so twisted by chenicals, atomics and the warp-furies of the arch-enemy. So... dammit. I will not launch another full-frontal attack."

"Lord General." The rasping breath of the respirator - a respirator, here? Though the Lord General for a moment - accompanied by the coarse scrape of a cammo cloak against armour announced that the figure from the back of the briefing had stepped forward. "I think, perhaps, we can help."



Tarkov was once an Agriworld, bounteous and fertile. But the 13th Black Crusade turned it into a chemical wasteland of drifting ash, slagheaps of ruined warmachines and fields of bone and metal. The Imperial Tacticians assumed the world would be lost and drew their plans accordingly.

Astonishingly, Tarkov held out. Their PDF and Guard regiments were decimated. The 1st Tarkov Foot were wiped out in the Fall of Hive Volga; the 2nd Tarkov died gasping in the Plague Rain of the Zhukov River Valley. But the 3rd Tarkov Foot adapted to the new conditions. Working in small detachments, wrapped in ABC Protective gear, they melted into the acid rains and appeared from the wastes to carry out devastating precision strikes. After the Relief of Tarkov in 499.M41 the 3rd Tarkov Foot - now better known as the Stalkers - became the force of choice for any theatre which required small kill teams, stealthy insertion or guerrilla disruption.

These are designed for the SW:A campaign at work. I love the idea of the Death Korps but I'm not paying forge world prices so I wondered if I could play around with the aesthetic. Feeding into this was Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, an SF masterpiece from the old USSR. taking the palette from that film and a Soviet-inflected colour scheme as opposed to Prussian have them enough of a different feel to the DKoK .

All of them were converted; they had head swaps using some resin pieces from Kromlech and then cloaks made of greenstuff. Leftover bits of the cloak were used for bandages and wrapping on the guns.

The most substantial conversion was the kneeling sniper who used the lower torso and legs from a Warlord British Line Infantry to get the kneeling position.

Overall I'm really happy with the ragged, Rogue Trooper-esque feel to these guys. Now just to see how they play...