Those Who Fight Monsters

As a result of The Decision, I now need to start posting about games of 40k Combat Patrol, from the magazine of the same name, that I've been playing with the long-suffering Kieron.

This is almost certainly the awkward crossover point. I've not made notes about what happened or taken photos of sufficient quality, but I've committed to posting about this sort of thing and now it's going to happen. Brace yourself. 

I used the marines against Kieron with the Tyranids for these. 

Scenario 14: Monster Hunt

Following a titanic battle, the only survivors are a Tyranid Prime and a Space Marine Captain. These warriors duel in the centre of the battlefield, fighting past their limits as a second wave of reinforcements rushes into the fray to support them.

As that exciting background text lays out, this scenario had the prime and captain already in contact in the middle of the table, reinforcements for each side in a more usual deployment zone.

We were fighting over objectives, so for all that the deployment was unusual, the game itself was pretty simple. 

Immediately, the two leaders fought each other, and were both killed - we weren't actually 100% sure on who should have counted as charging when this happened, but the result seemed fair enough.

The terminator librarian and Von Ryan's leapers both went for the objective on the objective on my right flank. I didn't actually take pictures of this part but the leapers were eventually brought down by the librarian and some crossfire from the Infernus Marines. 

For their part, the Infernus squad advanced on my left, and were pounced on by two broods of termagants.

Fortunately, that didn't seem to pose them any problems whatsoever, and the marines fought their way through and held the objective with no losses.

Despite being battered by barbgaunts, the librarian likewise suffered no damage, and so held his objective to the end.

This resulted in a strong victory for the marines, and confirmation of my tactical genius.

Onto the next game then...

Scenario 15: Alpha Strike

As yet another strange alien beast is sighted among their foes, the Space Marines prepare to launch an attack to purge the xenos corruption from the planet. But whatever malign intelligence guides the Tyranids seems to have anticipated such a move...

This scenario introduces the Parasite of Mortrex, and to make it seem effective appears to give the Tyranids a bit numerical advantage. This follows a general theme of pretty one-sided games in these scenarios, but clearly that didn't apply to scenario 14, since I won.

Things opened with the marines advancing towards the objectives on the right in a confident fashion.

On the left, the librarian was immediately the target of the psychophage, which scuttled towards him very quickly...

The Von Ryan's leapers pounced on the Infernus marines on the right, and although one leaper went down, the marines didn't last long.

The psychophage closed in on the librarian, and unceremoniously ate him in short order.

The captain now stood alone and faced off against the Von Ryan's leapers.

But with his comrades down, the captain was now surrounded...

And was cut down himself in short order.

So there you go. We won one each, and both times it wasn't particularly close at any point. 

We did also do another very short game, but I'll hold onto that for next time. Exciting stuff, eh?

40k Combat Patrol Delivery 6 - Character Study

I have made A Decision. Specifically, that it's becoming unmanageable to get all of the games played that go along with each of these posts and get the photos from them together and keep track of what actually happened. This has mainly happened because I've fallen behind the pace of deliveries, but I'd like to say in mitigation that the games can be hard to organise, and that they are getting slightly more complex as we go along. 

To deal with this problem, The Decision is that I'll post about painted models related to the deliveries of the magazine, but the games will be separate posts. There'll probably be an awkward crossover while I figure that out, but hopefully this allows me to get things under control, resolve the backlog, and bring harmony to the universe. 

Anyway, this delivery was one of the more interesting ones I think, as it gave me three characters to work on, all of which are nice models in their own right, and it also started a new faction. So let's have a look at those.

First off, probably my favourite model, a space marine Chaplain on a bike.

I had some fun working out colours for this - a couple of layers of logic applied. I wanted to nod to the Genesis chapter colours I'd already established, but those are very bright, and at the same time I also wanted to play into the very dark appearance that seems appropriate for someone going about in black armour with a skull helmet.

I resolved that by using darker versions of the colours I've already used - replacing yellow with bronze, and moving to Cloudburst Blue for the weapons. 

I used the same colour for the wax seals, so that it wasn't just a sea of black, and followed the codex rules to stick with the standard red for the shoulder with the chapter icon.

Really happy with how this turned out, but so far he's yet to grace the table in 5th edition which is where he'll be killed instantly.

Next, the Tyranids are represented by the/a Parasite of Mortrex. It's "the/a" because in 5th edition, this is a special character, but in the Combat Patrol magazine these are explicitly referred to as "parasites" plural. That certainly makes more sense, and is the justification I'll be using when I field her in 5th edition games.

Nothing much to say on the paint scheme here as it's followed the pattern of the other Tyranids. This one has been on the table in 5th edition, and was of course dead before it was able to act.

Finally, the Eldar (or Aeldari if you absolutely must) get started with a Farseer. I cheated a bit here- I was behind the schedule for deliveries so took the opportunity to try out the colour scheme on some guardians from the next set before I tackled this one. 

For when I need to remember this later and can't, the paints used here were:

White armour bits - Contrast Space Wolves Grey, then drybrushed Vallejo Sky Grey followed by Warpaints Matt White

Green armour bits/weapons - Speed Paint Orc Skin

Red armour bits/weapons - Speed Paint Slaughter Red

White fabric - Contrast Apothecary White over white basecoat

Green fabric - Speed Paint Absolution Green

Gold bits - Speed Paint Aztec Gold, then Nuln Oil

Wraithbone (blade on the spear, rubble on the base) - Contrast Aggaros Dunes, then drybrushed Vallejo Sky Grey followed by Warpaints Matt White

Lenses - Contrast Blood Angels Red

Spirit Stones - Contrast Blood Angels Red, white highlight, then Blood For The Blood God, then repeat the white highlight (little bit fiddly but I like the result!)

Not all of that applies to the guardians (coming later) but it was helpful to use them to nail down the basics.

Now that I'm not posting about the games at the same time, I don't really know how to finish, so for now I'll just sort of trail away to nothing here, as I have now done.

40k Combat Patrol Subscriber Extra - Eee, that's (a) champion

This is a very short post, but hey, it all counts!

In amongst the regular Combat Patrol magazine deliveries that I'm not entirely up to date with, there are also extra "free" gifts for subscribers. Usually these are things like paintbrushes, or a delightful mug, but there was also a model to paint in the form of a Space Marine Company Champion.

Weirdly, this came with no background, rules, or painting guide - just a single page with build instructions.

So, no mission to play, meaning it's paint and post, and I feel like I'm making some more progress!

In game for me, as I'm still mostly playing 5th edition, he's useless until I prepare the rest of a command squad... but he's done, and to be fair is quite a nice model.

So there you are. Onwards and upwards!

40k Combat Patrol Delivery 5 - Eating in the Library

I'm back! Sooner than expected!

Continuing to clear the backlog, here's the 5th delivery from the Combat Patrol magazine.

It's another relatively simple job for painting - another 10 termagants with a ripper swarm base, and the biggest model so far, the Tyranid Psychophage. 

The termagants were such a copy and paste job from the previous set that I'm honestly not sure whether this is a photo of the right models. Always good to have more of those though, they're gratifyingly few points in 5th edition so swarming forwards with them en masse is the way to go. 

I was definitely happy with the earlier decision to use a very simple paint scheme as I went through these.

Tackling the big fella was very slightly more complicated - in the end I did a sort of poor man's slapchop on the smoke stuff emanating from its back, drybrushing up to sky grey and then using Speed Paint Orc Flesh over the top. 

The tentacles are Absolution Green, another Speed Paint colour. I wanted to stick in the theme of the rest of the army but more grey here seemed too much and Orc Flesh again would have been too bright.

It's also my first use of the Citadel Blood For The Blood God technical paint, for the severed marine's arm being dragged along the ground. I can see that being fun when we get to Chaos at some point in the future.

In 5th edition terms the only thing to do with this model is use it as a proxy, but it's the same size and basically the same shape as a Tervigon, so that's the obvious thing to do with it. 

But first, it got an outing in 10th!

Again, not a huge amount to report from these games other than the Psychophage is, clearly as intended, an absolute monster when facing an enemy psyker - devouring the Librarian and the terminators he was leading in pretty short order.

But if the librarian stayed out of it, the terminators were able, eventually, to punch the big bug to death.

Capturing objectives in time is still an issue for the marines though - possibly more due to the limits of the simple scenarios in the magazine than anything else.

That's all for now but painting, and hopefully gaming, continues! I'm still behind, but the gap between me and the remorseless march of time is closing a little.

40k Combat Patrol Delivery 4 - Terminator(s) Genesis

I am, I promise, catching up.

This mad project of keeping pace with the 40k Combat Patrol Magazine deliveries, painting everything and playing the games before the next delivery arrived, was always ambitious. Stopping it to paint a bunch of other stuff before Christmas didn't help, and neither did accepting every other thing that Hachette have offered me. 

I'm now both late, and broke.

Anyway. This delivery, from... some time ago, was actually a relatively simple one - the only models were a Space Marine Terminators squad, but there were some extra paints and brushes which is always nice.

This photo taken much earlier than the others

I'm pretty pleased with these! I stuck with the 2nd edition style of having these be brighter than modern astartes seem to be, and swapped to using Army Painter Highlord Blue for the weapons which comes out brighter than Citadel Ultramarines Blue.

Of course, you can't have "2nd edition" terminators without hazard stripes on the power fists, so I had a go at that too.

Having painted the models, I once again tracked down Kieron and went through the games in the magazines, and once again completely forgot what happened in them. But I did take some photos, so those are here now.

I will say that all of this is now starting to function as a complete game, and more rules are being explained allowing us to experience even more wild swings of balance based on which models are available with each issue of the magazine. 

Ok, that's the end, and I've made basically no reference to the relevant film, so I'll put this here.

Perfect.

Scout Movements

I'm continuing my current interest in 40k, and continuing to insist that 5th edition is the main one that counts.

A standard mission in 5th edition requires at least two Troops choices, which the space marines I've been collecting through the Combat Patrol magazine don't form a legal force by themselves. 

Bastards.

To correct this clear error, I needed a simple Troops choice. Enter the scouts!

These were an eBay find at about a tenner, which for some reason included one model that was magnetised at the waist. They're older models and much smaller than the primaris models that form the rest of the army, but I'm fine with this - background wise, the scouts are newly-created marines so I'm happy with them not having fully bulked out yet.

Since they have sniper rifles and camo cloaks, having these guys in bright red armour with bright blue weapons didn't seem quite right, so I went for more muted colours based on the army scheme (having looked through the Insignium Astartes to check that this was allowed, because non-sanctioned colours on my toy soldiers would be unforgivable). 

So I matched up in a way that made sense to me:

Red = Brown (Speed Paint Hardened Leather)

Blue = Grey (Speed Paint Runic Grey)

Yellow = Beige (Contrast Skeleton Horde)

Metal = Dark Grey (Constrast Basilicanum Grey)

I used Speed Paint Sand Golem for the camo cloaks and non-armoured bits of uniform, drybrushed with Vallejo US Field Drab to match the bases.

I also wanted to try a low-contrast version of the chapter icons and squad markings - reasoning that a flash of white on each shoulder would probably somewhat undermine the other camo efforts.

I went for Vallejo German Grey and Vallejo Iraqui Sand to replace the black and white parts respectively. I also finally went for the freehand version of the chapter icon that I had in mind when I picked Genesis in the first place.

So there we go, I now have a legal, if unbalanced, space marine force. I look forward to having it completely wiped off the table at some point soon.