Stabbin' and such: Triumphant at Last! 2/9/17

[Aegir_Einarsson]

How you rate our helmet relic? I`ve planned to take Marshall on bike with th and ss, riding here and there to give aura where needed . And also did you use some specyfic stratagems?

[Firepower]

It's pretty useful.  I put it on the bike because all my other HQ (Helbrecht and the Champion) can't take relics anyway, and because I wanted my Vindicators to make their shots as often as possible.  9" is a pretty damn wide bubble, and a bike gets it where it needs to be.  Not to mention he's a solid melee unit.  He brought the pain to way more models than he had any right to, and the extra toughness certainly helped.

 

So in short, I think he'll be in a lot of my lists from now forward.

Edited August 5, 2017 by Firepower

[Firepower]

So sitting on my desk next to the Champ for all this time has been big Papa Grim. I never got him to a point where I was satisfied, with a lot of small details unattended and corners cut.

I didn't edge highlight, as with so much color the zenithal airbrush for the black actually looks quite nice as is. A bit washed out in the photos, but whatevs. :P

[Cognative]

Looks great, but reminds me I really need to get Grimaldus and Helbrecht painted. They are really good picks this edition. They were some of the first model I bought (8+ years ago) but I never felt confident enough to paint them, and they just fell to the wayside.

[Firepower]

Yeah, if only I had his Cenos, too.  Bought some crappy generic servitors that could be converted easily enough...but they sound boring.  :P

 

The Ironclads are coming along nicely, at least.

[Aegir_Einarsson]

I like him. Not as much highlited. Quite dark, and matt black gives him grimm nature. Nice! I'm a fun of glowing eyes, so maby this is one thing that I'll add same on plasma:)

 

Good Job:)

[Canadian_F_H]

Yeah, if only I had his Cenos, too. Bought some crappy generic servitors that could be converted easily enough...but they sound boring. :P

 

The Ironclads are coming along nicely, at least.

If they still made them, I'd convert the bretonnian pilgrims. Replace the knight reliquary with a templar. Fitting since it continues the imperial fist tradition of scrimshawing.

[Firepower]

Just finished 1 of the 2 Ironclads that have been on my desk for over a year. I got fluff blurbs to write and all that, but it's late, so here's a quick photo. :)

[Blender]

Looks good! Keep that brush moving! 

[Cognative]

That looks phenomenal. Excellent use of bits. The sarcophagus and braziers fit so well it looks like they were part of the kit!

[Acebaur]

The weathering on the arms is great! Did you just paint brown on it?  The barrels on the hurricane need to be drilled more though and that tabard needs some bling on it ;)

[Firepower]

Thanks much folks.

 

Ace, the arms were airbrushed a gradient from Steel Legion Drab to Vallejo Bonewhite. Sponged on Vallejo USA Olive Drab then Boltgun Metal, and painted 'rust' streaks with Mournfang. Same process for black areas, but with Mithril rather than Boltgun.

 

I think I agree on the barrels. I like the simplicity of the tabard though, cuz it works well with the shield. Plus freehanding on it now that it's attached would be a pain.

 

How's the fire look?

[Metic]

The fire looks good, I might add a bit of black to the very tips. This would be super easy if you just use the airbrush so you don't get this weird black highlight look. Just be careful ;D.

[rye0006]

Looks mighty awesome.

I really like the Sigmarine standard and want to use that for my chapter ancient standard, just need to get hold of one at some point.

[Firepower]

Alright, all done. Fluff tomorrow night. Bed time for now.

More angles of #1:

And number 2:

[Aegir_Einarsson]

very very nice!

[JAG Templar]

The white shoulders are excellent. Nice technique!

[Marshal Reinhard]

How do you do said white?

[Ciler]

If that's white I'm the queen of England.

 

Nah, if memory serves, that may be a bone white of bleach bone (can't remember the name), an old GW paint reference that our esteemed and elderly chaplain is quite fond of.

 

I shall be reporting to the reclusiam at 12:30 for my paddlin'.

[Firepower]

I'm not sure I have the authority to paddle the Queen.

 

The recipe is a few posts up from this.

[Firepower]

Alright, fluff:

 

+The ramparts were empty.  He aimed his bolter over the wall, holding the trigger back and releasing a fury he couldn’t feel in silent, lifeless explosions.  He couldn’t see the enemy.  Nothing waited beyond the bastion to catch his hail of mute shells.  He couldn’t recall what the enemy even looked like.  How long had it been since he stopped trying to?+

 

'This is supposed to be your domain, brother.'  

 

Not once, in all my years of service, had I received such an invitation.  Forgemaster Hynd's voice was the familiar, rasping monotone of surgically replaced vocal chords I'd always known, but with such a thing asked of me, I could easily imagine the distress his augmetic was suppressing.

 

'All the same, Reclusiarch, your presence is required.  There is an abnormality which requires your expertise.'

 

+The battlefield was empty.  He stood atop a mountain of the dead- faceless black and white corpses he could only recognize with detached haziness.  His sword swung and slashed through the nameless, faceless haze he hated for reasons he couldn’t recall.  His arm was gone.  It should’ve hurt. There should have been invigorating agony and the surge of chemical bliss singing through his remaining flesh, but there was nothing but the insidious cold in his bones.   Even as the horde tore pounds of flesh from his body, there was nothing but that wretched freeze sluggishly pulsing its way through his blood.

 

None of it was new.  He roared from the same empty walls and died on the same empty battlefield more times than he could remember.  Every lost detail was simply a sacrifice in the name of sanity.+

 

I saw her before finding my brother among the jungle of rattling consoles, sparking wires and arcane mechanisms well beyond my ken.  She was, even compared to the other Mechanicus cultists I've known, utterly bizarre in her own right.  'Duchess,' she liked to be called, insisting that her official as Magus Zyndrel was perverted by organic tongues.  

 

Far from the wretched stitch work of awkward metal limbs and concealing robes, the Duchess was closer to a maiden of the ballroom than any priest I'd ever witnessed.  The familiar incarnadine of the Martian cult was in abundance, but she eschewed the concealing robes of her kinsman in favor of no small variety in gowns.  Her augmentations were always vainly on display, bare and sleek chrome polished to impeccable luster as a breastplate with the most minimal hint of femininity, elegant arms with nearly invisible segmentation from the elbow down, and a curious, coquettish face of a female in the prime of youth.  No different from her breast, the visage was refined to the slightest of contours, almost featureless but for the single open eye hosting a myriad of minuscule lenses, and a pert pair of smiling lips around the mesh of a small vox caster.  In stark contrast, the faint hint of a faice was crowned in a regal halo, each tip punctuated with small jewels of Martian stone fashioned into a mingling of Templar crosses and symbols of the Cog.

 

'Reclusairch,' she intoned, and admittedly, it was a pleasant sound.  The Duchess spoke not in the grating binary of her peers, but dozens, if not hundreds, of interwoven melodies in clipped syllables, no different from a chorus of small birds.  'Nightingale,' some called her, as if she needed more ludicrous epithets.  As liaison between our Chapter and the Mechanicus forces of the fleet, she'd spent a great deal of time learning exactly which sounds most stimulated to Astartes and human ears.  For the first time since I'd known her, the warbling sound was off key. 

 

+But not the hate.  He clung to the hate with tenacity far beyond desperation.  Existence faded one tiny detail at a time, but that singular pillar of his soul had long been the one and only truth he could not relent.+  

 

'I do not know how this could have happened.  This is...this is blasphemy!'

 

'I'm inclined to agree,' I told her, with anger fast boiling into rage.  Her hand separated into fine, slender utensils beginning at the wrist, waving up and down in small ripples in an unnerving parody of a human drumming their fingers in worry.  As Martian expression goes, I think it was the closest thing to panic she could physically display.

 

The reason was obvious enough.  As my brother explained with much greater resolve, with generous application of the word 'unstable.'

 

'Explain to me how, how in the bottomless wonders of possibility, you could fail the Chapter so fundamentally!'  The Duchess recoiled, my brother simply shook his head.  

 

'We do not know the details.  All we can ascertain is, through some or various malfunctions, he has been randomly passing from induced somnolence and full alertness for an unknown period of time.  Given the degree of trauma present in cognitive monitoring, I would assume it's been happening for at least several centuries.'  

 

The 'he' in question was hardly recognizable as such.  From what was visible, 'he' was a finely wrought coffin of densely reinforced armor, crested with regal wings over the divine symbol of the Crux Terminatus.  The true 'he' was little more than withered, half dead flesh hardly resembling the man it once was, entombed in an icy purgatory and, evidently, driven to madness by criminal neglect.

 

+Then the pain came, and it was all he had left.  A sudden jolt of genuine sensation, sharp and ruthless enough to shatter the walls under his feet and banish the fog of formless death shredding apart his body.  He roared into the cold and dark, impossibly furious and yearningly grateful at the intrusion.

 

When his eyes opened, they weren’t his eyes.  His vision was a grainy haze, infiltrated by lines, numbers, words that meant less than nothing in his panicked rage.  One of the dead men was standing low in front of him, clad in that preciously familiar black and white. Another stood beside him, a crimson man turned to a bulked, chitinous insect by too many arms and abundantly reinforced armor.+  

 

“Kill!  Kill them all!  Kill and burn and crush and purge!  Kill th-“ the words scrawled out along a flowing strip of papyrus, substituting for the Dreadnought's vox system after the roars of our forsaken brother had deafened half of the priests attending his awakening hours before.

 

'Fix.  It.  Now.'  My hand was already reaching for my weapon, with every intent of turning the Duchess into a smear of oil and false blood across the chamber.  To her credit, she didn't so much as hint at retreating.  She knew my mind, and I believe she was ready to accept punishment.

 

'The Machine spirit is coherent.  The error, such as it was, is terminated,' my brother said, intervening in word, but not coming to the Duchess' aid beyond that. 'The current anomaly lies within our brother, Reclusiarch.  That is the reason I summoned you.'

 

I did not cease in drawing my weapon.  It came free from the loop at my waist with a slow hiss of iron stroking leather, and sparked into life with a press of my thumb to the stud in its hilt.  The Duchess lifted her crested head high, staring up at me with her one open eye, silently intent on making amends for her egregious error.  I ignored her, if only barely, walking around her and to the hanging sarcophagus.  I climbed the suspended rigging, bringing my death mask level with the boxy occular slit of its visor.  I roared into the interred knight's face when a cracked my weapon into the side of his coffin. 

 

'-ill them all!'  the vox boomed in reply.  I hadn't expected that, but then the hammer blow was more directed at getting his attention than avoiding whatever mechanical devices were silencing him.

 

+“Control yourself, brother!” the one in black urged through a mask fashioned as a flayed human face with a timbre more used to the taste of authority than sympathy.

 

“Peace,” the one in red pleaded.  “We will.”  

 

His attention drifted a moment, stunned from the delirious wrath, and drawn to something familiar.  A cross blinkered in and out of fuzzy existence, sharp and bold in the corner of his false sight.  Words came unbidden from a mouth he didn’t feel, calcifying the hate that sustained him into a singular, pure meaning.+

 

'For the Emperor.'

 

'Welcome back,' I replied, grimacing still at the disgraceful event behind my helm, before dismounting to the floor and turning to my brother and the visibly ashamed Magus.

 

'Resume your duties.  We have a Crusade to attend.'  I left the chamber without another word.

 

~~~~~~~~~

 

Hours later, the Strategium was subjected to thunder.  Ponderous, menacing and towering in lethal glory, the second of our venerable fallen arrived to attend the final planning of the Crusade.  Smoke rose from two sconces on his shoulders, mingling with belched smog from the exhausts further back, occluding the chained reliquary of his shell's previous inhabitant standing high as a haloed banner.

 

'High Marshal,' he boomed, coming to a halt and filling the room with grinding, metallic cacophony simply by turning on his axis to scan his audience.  'High Marshal.  You've grown, little Ludoldus.  High Marshal...'

 

My liege smiled.  I did not.  My lord deserved respect, even if the hulk of lethal intent was his former master.  The machine continued to turn, pausing to dwell on each new face, the grand sons and grand daughters of mortal officers he'd known in life.  When he turned to me, I was already scowling.

 

'And you too, eh?  I heard you struck Grevald.  Hardly sporting, beating a man when he's half dead and half insane.  But you always did have a temper, little W-'

 

'Reclusiarch.' I corrected preemptively.  'If you're quite done, Marshal Endruus, a thousand heresies unfold on the world below while you dwell on jocularity.'

 

The boxy killing machine made a noise that resembled two anvils colliding inside a drum.  A laugh, no doubt.  Endruus was always insufferably well humored.  A far more pleasant noise was the familiar sound of bolters locking ammunition into their chambers, the heavy cannon latched beneath the wrist of a hammer that could punch through a Land Raider, and a chorus from the six guns serving as his other arm.

 

'Well then, you'd best shut your yammering and get me to the fight, Reclusiarch.'

Edited August 11, 2017 by Firepower

[Firepower]

Got in a game today.  That makes two in one decade.  Weird.

 

Fought a Guard army largely composed of tanks.  Way more fun than the previous game.  The brand new Ironclads easily earned their points back.  They deployed from Pods, 1 made the charge.  My opponent had two transports full of Ogryns as a wall between me and his parking lot full of Russes and other nonsense, all bundled up in a single corner of the table.  So, smashy Dread number one dutifully smashed one of them open.  

 

The real fun happened in the middle of the table.  He had a hellhound and whatever the 2+ poison-spitting hellhound-ish monstrosity is.  "Those have to die," says I.  "We agree," reply my Vindicator and LRC.  "Would you like us to land a 5 wound cannon shot and a 6 wound Multi Melta shot?  There are also 50 squillion bullets I can shoot," added the LRC.  

 

"Why yes, that would be splendid."

 

Fun fact, rolling boxes full of promethium explode.  Like, really, really explode.  Killing the hellhound basically turned the center of the table into a smouldering crater, taking out a big chunk of the Crusader Squad I had nearby, and my fancy-hat Castellan.  But both the Hound and the poison spitter died before they could do any real harm (aside from the whole explody bit, but so worth it).

 

The rest of the game basically unfolded in that back corner.   He was quite confident the Ogryns would smash the Ironclad to bits when they got out of their smashed tank.  With no frame of reference in experience, I wasn't sure if he was right.  He wasn't, by a wide margin.

 

So began a back and forth between the Ironclads, Helbrecht, the remaining Castellan, and much to my opponent's dismay, the Crusader Squad that had gone nearly forgotten safe and cozy inside the wonderfully resilient (seriously, so many saves) LRC for several turns. 

 

Second fun fact, if you don't remember that your warlord gives everyone in 6" +1 Strength, don't count on your opponent to know that either.  I could've bulldozed through the Ogryn screen at least a game-turn faster if I hadn't forgotten that bit.  

 

In the end he basically won by attrition.  After finally killing Helbrecht with a shmuck Vindicare, then the LRC- which I rammed into a tank once it got below 4 wounds- the Vindis were the only real tank killers I had left, and they apparently blew their loads knocking out those evil death nozzles at the beginning of the game.  Towards the end it was a matter of 'I'm going to charge with this 1 wound vehicle and hope you make it explode' strategy.  

 

The one final laugh came from my remaining Castellan.  He moved to the objective in my opponent's backfield and charged his obnoxious little tech priest.  Both survive combat, the Tech Priest backs off in the following turn, and my daring Castellan is left staring down the barrels of a Hydra, a heavy flamer, three Russ Heavy Bolters and two Guard squads with Heavy Bolters.  He survived the whole ordeal, only dying when the guard squad charged to strip him of his final wound.

 

A great game, all around.  Very much like the old days of 'My job is to get into melee as fast as possible, while your job is to use a jillion tank shots to stop that from happening.'  My LRC got to be the beast it was born to be, shrugging off punishing salvos and tearing armor to shreds with withering salvos of fire, rather than spending the whole game backing out of melee.  And dear God, the explosions.  So many explosions.

Edited August 12, 2017 by Firepower

[Brother Talarian]

Nicey done my man. Glad you had fun. Hopefully your zealous marines will kill the renegade guardsmen next time.

[Firepower]

I'm still just giggling about the nigh invulnerable Castellan.  Imagine the visual of a Hydra shooting a billion rockets at a single man, filling the area with explosions, and when the dust clears, he's standing their with slightly scuffed armor...which is sparking wildly as it rebuffs a horde of flashlights and heavy dakka from understandably shocked Guardsmen and their tanks.

 

The real heroes are the Guardsmen who decided they'd best charge the guy after seeing that unfold

 

I also forgot that on top of all that, he also survived a shot from that damned Vindicare, when my opponent rolled a 1 to wound, immediately used a command point, and rolled another 1. 

 

I wonder how best to reward the plucky model.

Edited August 12, 2017 by Firepower

[Ciler]

Some sort of seal, or if you feel so inclined a lot of chipping on his armour ?