How Does Your Garden Grow?

Franz walked into the house, throwing hius muddy tunic in to the corner. As Brunhilde watched, he dunked his head in the washbasin and vigorously rubbed the dirt from the days labours from his broad, weatherbeaten face. 

"Sigmar's balls, Hil," he said, sinking into the chair at the rickety table, "I don't understand. Years, years beyond the counting of it, I've fought that rocky, dusty earth out there and managed to scrape enough to eat. But this year..." He turned and looked out of the window; through the thin animal skin that covered the opening, the light was green. "Everything I drop on the ground sprouts. I've never seen like it. Old Grunwald from the other side of the dale is wanting to buy some of our seeds. I simply don't understand." He sighed, then looked at his wife where she laboured over the pot. 

Brunhilde smiled, and went back to stirring the thick, green stew. She knew. The Gardeners were generous. 

Grandfather would provide.

In areas where the Realm of Life bleeds into the other realms, you find oases of verdant growth. But not all life is safe. The Gardeners of Nurgle toil endlessly to tend the fertility of areas where the walls between the realms are thin; as their labours intensify, the plants and animals grow to inordinate, bloated size. The smell of thick, rich loam and mulch hangs heavy in the air and flies crawl across the hot surface of over-ripe fruits. And when the Garden is fertile and strong enough, Grandfather will send one of His Chosen Grandchildren to claim that area for his own, and spread His gifts far and wide.

*********

This is a project somewhat related to my Carnival of Nurgle and is my first purpose built Age of Sigmar Skirmish Warband for the school club.

I'm also going to go so far as to say that these are the paintjobs I'm proudest of all year. So here's some shots of them against a white background to show off the colours.

Each of the characters had fairly substantial conversions to help bring them in line with the concept of the Gradeners of Nurgle. The plague lord lost his axe - although the blade migrated to his back - and gained a hammer from the Necromunda set and a number of branches.

The first rotbringer was built around the chassis of a dryad to help with the arboreal theme; a fair amount of greenstuff allowed the marrying of the two kits.

The second rotbringer, the herald of our merry little band, grew some branches from his back in order to hold the icon of Papa.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Is anyone going to Vap in York in Feb? I might venture down this year.

Based on the presents I got this year, the next few weeks are going to be quite heavily fantasy based. Starting with something with a pleasingly piratty theme...

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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 :)

FORTH EOLINGAS!

A long time ago, The Current Lady West bought me some presents. One set, the Morgul Knights, I built some time ago.

The others waited, until now. In need to cheering up, and also in a slight hobby limbo while waiting for the delivery of Necromunda, I cracked out the Riders of Rohan and knocked them together.

Like all the other Perry Middle Earth plastics, they are easy to assemble and very screen accurate. It's simple to get a decent result out of them and I have to say I'm pretty happy with the result.

And yes. I did string the bows on the archers. Yes. I am aware that I have a problem.

I have, fairly predictably, bought the new Battle Companies rules from GW  (skirmish warming in Middle Earth? How could I resist?). By my current reckoning I have enough to cobble together Rohan, Isengard, Moria and maybe Gondor companies. 

Actually playing games

The school wargames club has taken off rather well. Every night of the week sees the following games in action:

• Pandemic
• Memoir 44
• X Wing 
• Blood Bowl 
• Age of Sigmar Skirmish
• And WFRP on a Tuesday

But by far the most popular is Shadow War Armageddon. For those people unsure about this it's the old Necromunda rulesset repurposed to allow you to field killl teams of almost 40K faction.

Basically anyone can buy one box of figures and they're good to go.

We have a campaign and there's a league match every evening; the kids are scouring ebay for bargains and coming in at lunchtime to spend points to upgrade weapons and work out skill upgrades for their experienced troopers. I've not seen a game take off that well in a long time.

We currently have
3 Space Marine scouts kill teams
1 Ork boyz
1 necron
1 inquisition
1 Imperial Guard - that's me with my Stalkers
1 Tyranids

I also got the Technology bods to make us our own scenery.

I feel quite righteous about this, as it was a history teacher at my school who introduced me to D&D, back in the early 80s. So Mr Bruen, whatever happened to you - this one's for you.

What a lovely day!

 

Like pretty much everyone else, I bought Necromunda on the day of release. I've decided to start with my Goliaths and for inspiration on the palette I've gone back to the original source which is, of course, Mad Max.

I've yet to settle on a Gang Name, so I'm currently using War Boys from Fury Road. I'm leaning towards something to reflect the size of the Goliaths like Doombulls or Bull-e-Boys or somesuch.

In any case, I've completed my first two test pieces.

I've given them names. So here we have Wide Load

And Pig Stikka:

More to come. 

I'm not dead!

Work has been very, very busy and although I've been painting and modelling I haven't had much chance to get anything uploaded here. Will do a big update soon, I promise.