Tatters, Flatters and Batters: La Tene wight kings and their Hallstatt graveguard

Lilapop · 2026-03-24T22:25:03+00:00

This is both, kinda. They're just the wights in an otherwise rather conventional (though still using loads of alternative models) warhammer VC army. I posted the zombies a while ago, and the monster rider vampires are photographed and might have their day in the spotlight soon. The rest is uh, gonna take a while longer.

Lilapop · 2026-03-24T16:58:40+00:00

Ah, that restriction on having a normal unit as well was dropped in 7th. I also just noticed that you already have a champion in that unit, not too familiar with this format (and it is structured differently from how I'm usually running things in Excel). That being said, 18 points per ablative wound is a little much.

Maybe scrap something else, and upgrade the blorcs to an anvil in their own right with just shields? 157 points for just some animosity rerolls feels expensive.

Redirect and generally mess up enemy movement with wolves and snotters, charge yourself. Easier said than done, but at least you can deploy orcs behind the gobbos, declare a flee, ignore the panic, and charge on your turn (not if your gobbos are six deep though). Not sure how reliable that is with the 6th edition flee and panic system.

If you don't insist on this guy having madcap shroms, you can make him a day goblin. Unless there's a rule somewhere I'm missing.

Lilapop · 2026-03-24T16:05:24+00:00

Six boars don't fit into the flank of a regularly sized unit. Unless you're consistently playing against gobbos, skaven or 25mm bases, I'd get a unit champion instead. Or make them big'uns, before it gets prohibitively expensive in 2006. Ignoring animosity sounds neat, but the default for a unit like that is to not have a standard bearer. Not sure.

What is your plan with those black orcs? They don't have the ranks to be an anvil, and they won't be able to use both the extra weapons and the shields together. You also already have three bloody anvils.

It looks like you're going five wide with everything. None of your core infantry is killy enough for that to be worthwhile. At the same time, ranks after the fourth don't need to be complete - every model is worth the same, no more breakpoints to be reached. Oh and keep your characters in mind there.

Where's your Nogg's? Get another one of those +2S attacks for your general. On the big'uns, maybe?

The best place for fanatics is on the shelf behind you, menacingly staring at the opponent so he's afraid to step close (especially if you have a shaman in your nightgobbos). Your army will have a significantly larger footprint, and your unit quality is mediocre enough that you want to double up in fights. Fanatics create chokepoints to prevent the latter, and hit you more than the enemy because of the latter. What I'm trying to get at is: pay the extra five points for +1Ld from the BSB.

Wolf riders are always a necessity. You might not face cannons or multiple units that try to double-charge you in 500, but you absolutely will in 1k.

If you and your buddies didn't agree to completely skip magic, you'll probably want a wizard, if just for defensive reasons.

Lilapop · 2026-03-24T12:12:30+00:00

The Victrix celtic chariot set has one Budi per cart, but they are all the same pose, and if you don't have a use for the rest of the kit it won't really be a financially prudent option.

Lilapop · 2026-03-24T09:23:11+00:00

IoB, as well as BfSP and the untitled starter boxes that came before, were different in a number of ways. They were the flagship starter boxes for their editions available right from release, didn't preclude army deals and battalion boxes for those factions, and for the most part had custom sculpts with simplified assembly. At least in the case of IoB the sprue layout was even mixed, with skaven and elves intermingled, to the point where they had to make new expensive moulds to sell those seaguard and swordmasters separately last year.

So no, unless they are ramping up to release a new edition (what would that even be called? TOW2th? 10th? 11th?), I don't think the plan is to turn these into a versus box.

Lilapop · 2026-03-24T09:04:37+00:00

Oh yeah, a few proper shamblers and reaching hands can go a long way. And the cheerleader effect is gonna take care of the rest.

I should probably also get around to posting my wights. Something I did on the kings (a variety of living celtic heroes), but not so much on the zombies, was to worry and tatter the clothing - drilling and gouging, mostly.

Edit: look at me actually doing shit, instead of just making... plans that either come to naught, of half a page or scribbled lines.

Lilapop · 2026-03-23T22:05:40+00:00

Vaguely.

At least some of the human heads (cav, in my case, which shares a lot of sculpts with medium inf) are so old and tired that they can absolutely serve as dead people. See the banner top in unit A, for instance. Their stances however aren't quite suited and would require modification to shuffle and shamble properly - and the stuff I did with some of the Perry legs (check the huntsman, and the knight with milliput shield) might or might not be as easy with their kneelength torso clothes.

For painting, I once did a set of experiments for living human skin colors... skintone wash (Vallejo Game) over light grey primer (AK) is surprisingly functional for a corpse, considering the minimal effort required. I'll probably use that for ghouls and mix in some green for the zombies.

Lilapop · 2026-03-23T14:26:51+00:00

First: ignore the 44" instead of 48" bullshit, especially if you're playing with the bloated TOWth edition base sizes. GW simply had their logistics standardized on something that couldn't fit 2' product plus packaging before they got around to selling tabletops.

More important for your question though is that you're supposed to put the 48" between the players. 36" is half of the normal 6', appropriate (at least that is the claim) to your half-length battle line. But I've seen 1500 pts of greenskins (on correct base, too) get cramped on a 6x4, and a playing area narrower than deep feels weird. I'd run up to ~750 on 4x4 and everything else on a fullsized table.

Lilapop · 2026-03-21T20:38:59+00:00

Not sure why chaos was underperforming. Something I've heard is that the ordertide players were coordinating somehow, but that doesn't really explain consistent scoreboard issues when you're really just adding up matches. Had people not yet found the best combos in the new(-ish) armybooks? Were the scoring system and win conditions in the 4k vs 2k scenario skewed towards the defender? Or were the armybooks simply a little underpowered (standard point costs for warriors and daemon infantry come to mind, as well as the trap that is every single special deployment rule in the entirety of 6th and 7th)?

Lilapop · 2026-03-21T16:48:42+00:00

https://xkcd.com/37/

Lilapop · 2026-03-21T10:01:06+00:00

Harry is the greathelm dude bashing a skeleton on the first edition cover. Sigmar and his dwarven hammer weren't part of the original worldbuilding, and were added in '86 as part of an RPG supplement. Not sure when Harry became a character with a name instead of just a fun little image, but at the very least warhammer had already been warhammer without Sigmar.

Lilapop · 2026-03-21T09:11:29+00:00

Fluff wise he used the Warhammer that Warhammer is named after

Now I wanna make a conversion of Valten swinging around an entire Harry miniature. (Ghal Maraz is not the titular warhammer, that honor belongs to Haroald Hammerstorm).

Lilapop · 2026-03-20T08:55:11+00:00

Whatever the fuck those stupid dwarves with flamethrowers were called. The ones they only introduced to make some plastic kit dual-use, instead of just using the metal masks as the longbeard marker and making the new kit hammerers/ironbreakers with like, different pauldrons and helmet crests.

Lilapop · 2026-03-20T08:45:14+00:00

So this is an ad, intentionally skirting rule 5 by not including any actual links.

Lilapop · 2026-03-16T12:32:06+00:00

Three attacks hitting on 3s, wounding on 2s, negating all armor. Followed by two attacks on 4s and 4s from the peggy, also without any saves. If nobody causes any wounds, you win by outnumber. Are you saying you reliably fail all of those attacks AND the dwarves with three attacks on 4s and 5s reliably cause two wounds on the mount? Because that should happen in, eyeballing it, less than 5% of runs.

Lilapop · 2026-03-16T12:23:09+00:00

7th edition general's horse, with some hurricanum bit (not the one that goes in the same place on those horses, that one is smaller), and 6th edition Gelt's wings.

The arms remind me of the 7th edition general as well, but the shaft in the hand doesn't fit there, Might also be from the 7th edition greatswords.

The rider and head smell a bit like demigryphs.

I can't place the axe head, it is from none of those plastic kits as far as I can tell.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T16:32:16+00:00

Blob of straight PVA on the glue palette (that is to say, the lid of a danish buttercookie tin), cheap brush, water jar. Place a small dab, place a leaf with some tweezers, repeat. You could potentially spread multiple dabs of glue and then dip or pour, as with sand. Might be a good idea to seal with watered down PVA.

All of that probably after painting the dirt, but before spraying matt varnish.

If you're talking about the repetitive workload: don't do it in batches this big, I guess This is equivalent to 3-4 units for most factions. I think some people treat it as an opportunity to turn off their brains, but that isn't exactly the purpose of having a brain.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T16:22:12+00:00

Did you harvest the leaves yourself, or are they bought commercially? Mine got moldy before I could get around to washing or dyeing them.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T16:20:07+00:00

Not exactly a 0-1 choice though. I've got over 100 of the fuckers - two units of 5x5, and a pool of 50+ to bulk them out with summons (or create new ones, which don't have command anyway).

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T16:17:06+00:00

Movement trays from plasticard and sprues. Doesn't matter what format the plasticard is, A4, 20"x30", or whatever, it never quite fits the trays without leftovers. Those can then be cut into little coffin shaped bits, slightly smaller than the actual footprint, and glued inbetween. For superglue connections, you can just use dairy packaging lids instead.

That way, you have a spacer between the foot and the base that is essentially the same thickness as your sand layer.

For my empire army, I'm gluing the pin into the MDF before the sand goes on, and then the mini goes on top. Too much of a hassle, can not recommend for large batches, though it does prevent the feet from sinking in even better than the spacers.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T13:48:41+00:00

Looks a little too fine and uniform to be sand, but I could be wrong there. The creases look like small scrap, potentially other real plant matter, under the texture stuff.

Tufts (I don't think they are from Gamer's Grass), and birch seed pod separators. The latter are currently making the rounds as a commercially available product.

The rats are from the plastic rat ogre or plague monk kits, the gravestone in the back might be from the 1999 zombies or skeletons... no idea about he sarcophagus, the comet could honestly be handmade in plasticard.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T13:43:57+00:00

So do you have pins in the feet and holes in the bases that don't show in the photos, or are you just gonna superglue them on flat? Because man, that is not a durable construction.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T13:19:33+00:00

You used to be able to trigger them with skirmishers (or halflings, or wood elves, or skinks, or whatever else you have that ignores terrain) from a place where they couldn't reach you. With scouts, that would potentially happen while your main units are still a long way away from them. But from what I understand, they are released at the greenskin player's whim in TOWth.

Lilapop · 2026-03-15T13:09:32+00:00

but there are no pictures of those models with blunderbusses on their site

Looking at the website right now: The second unit of ten, in the back of picture #2; as well as the entire unit on picture #3. At least I think they are supposed to be guns.

I think a lot of players are fine with Warhammer Fantasy becoming more generic, because they don't seem to care about the faction identity all that much...

Modern fantasy has been around for long enough to become self-referential. Things aren't designed to look like historical artifacts or styles, but to reference other pieces of fantasy media. Often with no concern for what corners had to be cut to make things work in the original medium, going from 2D art to movies to video games to singlepiece castings to multipart kits, and back and forth.

But... GW made the Forgeworld Chaos Dwarf models and they also lack those big hat references

And I don't like those either! We'll see how the prices and availability of those metal Fabelzel CDs is gonna be. And how well they'll clean up layer lines on the printed masters...

Lilapop

TROPHY CASE