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.

A Litany of Excuses

In my last post, I owned up to being behind with my efforts to paint all the models in the Combat Patrols magazine series as they arrive. Now, I'll belatedly make the case for my own defence.

Essentially, it's that I was painting other 40k stuff, in order to use it playing 5th Edition 40k Apocalypse, as we'd planned for our big Christmas game (which, it turned out, was festively delayed due to snow). 

So, to save some amount of face, here are some pictures of those things. It occurs to me that many of them have been sat around in pile of shame for close to two decades, so finally painting some of them is cause for celebration, even as it distracted me from painting new stuff. So that's something.

Inquisitor and retinue! Painting these was entirely critical, as it allowed me to include a land raider as a transport, and I definitely wanted that to happen.

Servitors! I think these are probably the oldest sculpts I've painted for a very long time - I'm reasonably sure they appear in the 2nd edition books somewhere, although I can't be bothered to check. In any case, they are still very nice models, and sit there shaming me for not having painted a tech priest to go with them. In the Apocalypse game they filled out the crew for an artillery platform.

A Valkyrie! When these first came out, I knew immediately had to have one, I think they're great models. I even went so far as to wire it up to have LEDs on the wings, but then, unaccountably, never finished painting it. 

Even more unaccountably, when I came back to it I decided I wanted to go for a dark "special forces helicopter" scheme rather than the light grey "fighter jet" version I'd previously started. I also ripped out the wiring and LEDs as on second look the wires were far, far too obvious. I suspect it won't be my last ever go with lighting though, because I'm a glutton for punishment.

Having used this in two games now, I can say that the model is much more imposing than its stats in the game would suggest, so there's a definite psychological advantage to having it too. 

Speaking of which...

Assassins! 

Since Apocalypse allows you to ignore army selection restrictions, you can also ignore the "0-1 Assassins" rule, and therefore field them from all four temples. 

Maths fans will have spotted only three in the photo, which is because I also had an Eversor Assassin painted, so he isn't new and doesn't qualify for a picture here. Also, he doesn't look great, so he might get a repaint at some point.

I've run out of things to say about these, but there was another photo, hence this sentence. 

Grenade launcher Arbitrator fella! This guy actually didn't make it into the Apocalypse game, but I painted him, so here you are.

And yet, here's something that did make it in. Apocalypse practically requires super-heavy tanks, so here's mine, the technically super-heavy Malcador!

Mostly, what this did was trundle about slowly and miss things, but it's a satisfying chunk of tank to plonk on the table, so that's nice.

In my head this is associated with my Praetorians. Does that matter? No. But I've told you anyway. Main paint colour for this was Vallejo Green Brown, a piece of information that I'll find useful should I add another at any point.

It's a big boy. Have a look at it next to some Leman Russ tanks for scale:

In fact, have a look at the Leman Russes on their own!

I'm not sure I'd say these are technically "done" but they're "done for now" so that'll do. They were both painted very poorly in the distant past, so I stripped them and gave them a very quick paint job. It doesn't match the Malcador because I want these to be associated with my Cadians... which also desperately need repainting but that hasn't happened yet.

But here's something that did happen! The Apocalypse game itself. I didn't take enough photos to talk through the game itself, but there were lots of models on the table, which is nice.

Statistically, if you're reading this,
you're probably in this photo.

And finally! To go with the Genesis marines I've been painting from the Combat Patrol magazines, I've painted a few more intercessors to edge them towards having enough troops choices to be legal in 5th edition. Not there yet, but it's getting closer...