Margulgh Bladefist's Goffs

[LordArner]

Early this year I and a few of the lads at my LGS decided to take part in the Talavera Open Grand Tournament taking place at the end of October. I planned to take my custom space marine chapter, the Suncrushers, an army based on Rogue Trader space marine designs that I've been working on for a few years and was recently repainting after deciding on a new scheme. Since it's a team tournament, the rules say a single team can't include the same faction multiple times. Being naive, we thought we were in the clear because regular codex space marines and space wolves were different books, thus different factions and other tournaments had ruled it this way. Midway through September we learned that this tournament considered both just space marines, so we had to change. The Space Wolves player in our team only had that army and was almost fully painted, so we decided that I'd pivot to Orks, since I had been buying a few discount sets like Armageddon and the Combat Patrol to start the army in the new year. The only problem was having to start from absolute scratch only a month and a half away from the tournament.

 

The last couple of weeks of September I spent assemblying the entire army. Past experince told me this was a bad idea and that it's better to build a unit, then paint it before assemblying the next, but with the tournament looming around, using a brand new army I had never played and a new edition just released I needed to be able to play a few games and that meant the entire army had to be built. So I got to work. The biggest hurdle was the boyz, as my list runs 40 of them and none of the kits I had bought had the correct number of special weapons or even enough nobz to lead them. After some second hand dealings, some 3d printing and some orky kitbashing, I managed to get everything I needed.

 

 

40 boyz need 4 of each of the 3 special weapons for a total of 12. I managed to grab a few sculpts from the Assault on Black Reach box and that gave me 2 of the big shootas. The other 2 came from the combat patrol sculpts. I was hoping to get some more variation but the way the combat patrol kits are spliced it makes it very difficult without massive amounts of resculpting, which I didn't have time for. Since I built the big shootas, that left me with 2 spare rokkits. Since the arms aren't modular, for the sake of simplicity I chose to glue the rokkit launcha ends to the barrels of some of the combat patrol shoota boyz. I'll be cutting those ammo clips and adding some cables in the future to complete the look. With no more bits left for any more rokkits or any of the burnas, I chose 3d printing.

 

 

The rokkits were simple, as I found very nice models for a bunch of differently sized rokkits and glued them in the same way as before. Again, I'll need to clip the magazine and add cables to complete the look. For the burnas, I didn't have any more shoota boy bodies to convert, so I chose to represent burnas with some hand flamers instead. Since in the rules boyz keep their choppas even while carrying the special weapons, it worked just fine. I also needed 2 extra nobz, because now, just like Imperial Guard infantry squads, when you double the mob size, you get a second unit leader. So to have some sculpt variety, I built one of the combat patrol nobz and used the Black Reach warboss as the second nob (as big as his noggin is, he's now a bit too small to fit as a warboss).

 

 

With everything built I started painting just at the turn of orktober, very fitting. I decided to start with the deff dread. Simply because I really liked the model and because I wanted to practice a few weathering techniques on a large model before tackling huge piles of infantry.

 

 

 

I've always loved the way Forgeworld painted their models in the Imperial Armour books so with this army I wanted to try and replicate all the techniques and effects they used. With the Imperial Armour masterclass books in hand, I tried following them to paint this dread and honestly? I'm really pleased with it. Next, to keep the momentum, I went for the killa kans.

 

 

After that, I took the army for a test game with one of my teammates. I got absolutely demolished but learned a lot. The new ork codex is pretty damn fun.

 

The list still has other 3 kans but as they are still in the mail (I'm also missing 6 meganobz) they'll have to wait. It was time to finally paint some infantry and test the skin and cloth recipes, so I've started painting the gretchin and their runtherds, which I'm using some Black Reach nobz to represent. I want this army to feel like an organic, real horde, so I've gone for three different skin tones applied randomly. Each skin tone made of two colours, one for the base tone and one airbrushed to get different undertones.

 

 

So that's where I'm currently at. I'll be painting these gretchin now, learning what works and what doesn't and apply that knowledge to the next unit. Still a long way to go and a bit less than a month until the tournament but what better time to paint orks, eh? I'll get to the titular Margulgh soon enough...

[BadgersinHills]

Great work! The Forgeworld style really suits these minis. The basing is really nice. Looking forward to seeing more.

[space wolf]

Youve done some good work here! Looking forward to seeing more and good luck...new army+1 month til tourny is tough!