Hive Tyrant Reboot

Work has sucked up a lot of my time lately, and so The Grim Cheapness of the Future has suffered (as has most of my 40K construction in general).  I haven’t given up on the Silver Towers—they will get finished--but I wanted to put up something to keep the dust off the blog.

One thing that’s bugged me a lot in recent Codexes is the lack of support given to older models.  I know, from a business point of view, that Games Workshop wants people to buy all new stuff with every codex release.  Back in the olden times, though, they’d still acknowledge that people might have older models they don’t want to get rid of, and a given Codex would point out it’s still fine to use to use your old Tomb Spiders, Dark Eldar warriors, or whatever happens to be in your army already.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, Tyranids were my first army. I’ve only played them five times in the fourteen or so years I’ve been playing Warhammer 40,000—and that’s using three different codexes.  Most of that’s been recent use in the non-power armor league my friend Marcus has been running.

I’ve got one of the old metal Hive Tyrant models—the one that has a very Aliens feel to it.  I like the new one a lot, but it was tough justifying fifty-odd bucks for a Headquarters unit I essentially already had.  So I dug through my bitz bins and tried to come up with a way to update my old Tyrant a bit for the league.

Also, for the record, most of the monstrous creatures in my Tyranid army are nicknamed after Japanese movie monsters.  My super-expensive Carnifex is Megalon, and my Hive Tyrant is known as Gigan.

I broke the model apart and started going over the individual elements.  The first thing, and one of the biggest, was the legs.  The old Tyrant has small, skinny legs that aren’t much bigger than the ones on a Tyranid Warrior.  He needed to be taller and he needed some bulk.

Taller was easy.  I just glued some plasticard on to the bottom of his feet, then clipped and filed it until it matched his toe-hooves.  This makes the feet look bigger and more solid.  It’s only a hair over 1/16” taller, but on this scale that’s sizeable, and it’s a subtle increase people will register but have trouble picking out.

Then I looked at making the legs a bit bulkier.  Like most Tyranid players, I had tons of large and small armor plates.  I took six of them and filed them down a bit on the inside so they’d overlap well.  Then I put a thread of green stuff over Gigan’s lower legs and put three plates on each one.  I layered them to match the thighs up above, and I think the results were pretty nice.  For the record, I had to do the right leg twice to make the plates look right.

Looking at the new Tyrant, and the excellent picture/ diagram from the last codex, I noticed that the new model has a set of small talons flanking each foot.  They’re like toes or something.  I had a bunch of tiny claws left from the Trygon model Marc and Gillian got me for my birthday last year, so I glued two on each leg (superglue on the ankle, plastic glue on the base).  The ones on the new plastic model go up and forward, but I angled mine back so they added to the sense of a broader foot that covered more area.  For the record, I needed tweezers to get the inside ones in place.

Once I had this (and it was all drying) I looked at the torso.  The big thing for all the monstrous Tyranids these days is the back chimneys/ vents.  Lucky for me, a few years back (in the glory days when GW let you buy individual metal bits from mail order)  I’d bought a few sets of the vents that normally go on the Zoanthrope model.  A little bit of filing, some more green stuff to smooth the edges, and these blended pretty darn well into the back of the old Tyrant.

I also wanted him to look a little more armored in the front.  I ended up doing the same green stuff and plates trick right down the sternum (if that’s the right term for a huge alien dino-insect).  It looks, if I may be so bold, fantastic.

Helpful Hint--If you’ve got one of the old big bugs, I highly recommend playing around with these small armor plates.  The results are amazing and they add a nice amount of life and detail to these older models without being too distracting.  I also ended up doing this same chest-line on a pair of second-generation Carnifexes I’d set up as basic hunter-screamers and it looks great.

Alas, it was about this point that our league began.  I didn’t want to be the guy putting a headless, armless, unpainted model on the board (we’ve all seen it happen), so I rewrote my army list around a Tyranid Prime, which worked better for the endless swarm theme I was doing.  Anyway, Gigan was still sitting on the project board, so I kept working on him when I had a few free moments.  Everything else here took about a month as I got to step away from work now and then.

I put the torso on the legs and used a little roll of green stuff to straighten it out and fill in some gaps.  This also added another few milimeters to Gigan’s height.  As I mentioned before, on this scale every little bit helps.

I had leftover arms from my Carnifex, and this let me add some new elements to the old model.  I decided to go with a pair of scything talons and the twin-linked deathspitters.  If anyone’s interested why I can give you my reasoning, but for now just accept that’s how Gigan is armed.  I also added a few of the large armor plates here to make him a look a little heavier (if I decide to go for the armored shell biomorph).

Then came the head.  I had one of those nose-blades leftover from the Carnifex.  A tiny bit of superglue and a hair of green stuff for blending made it look great.  This was probably the most “take your time” part of the whole project because it’s such a thin piece and it needs to sit perfectly.  It’s Gigan’s face, which means a mistake here will be very, very visible and will gnaw at me every time I look at the model.

I attached the head with a line of green stuff that I flattened out to cover the neck.  It gave me a much more solid join than superglue (more contact area), and it also added another fraction of an inch to the height.  For the record, all these fractions have really started to add up at this point.  Gigan’s almost a quarter-inch taller than the original, unmodified model and a bit heftier, too.

I built this on one of the big 60mm bases, so there’s a lot of space to fill up.  If I don’t, his feet are just going to look tiny on this big, open area.  As a final bit of detail, I added a Hive node.   Between the old Battle for Macragge set and a few from the bitz bins, I’ve got a bunch of these. 

I also made a few extra-long tentacles from green stuff to spread across the base.  I just took little balls of green stuff smaller than a Space Marine’s helmet and rolled them between my fingers.  Once I had them, I gave them little curves and twists and let them dry.  I figured out which way they'd sit best and then cut the tips off one end so they'd be flush against the node.  A drop of superglue held each one in place

           

And there you have it.  A revamped Hive Tyrant using the existing model and some leftover bitz.  Definitely cheaper than dropping fifty bucks for a brand new one.

Although the winged version does look reaaaallly cool...

Speaking of which, if you want to see a really cool retrospective on the Hive Tyrant through Warhammer 40K history, go check out the post Marcus just put up over at Atomic Warlords.

Infantryman's Uplifting Primer

Still buried in work.  New novella came out, new book is getting written out, meetings about the Amazon project.  Being a writer is nowhere near as fun as Castle makes it look.  Even if my girlfriend is just as sexy as Stana Katic.

While I’m running behind on actual projects, I thought it might be good to go over a couple basics.  A few notes on how I pick the models I want to build and some hints on how I put things together.

I guess the first thing is to be clear what this blog is about.  I admit, I’ve always leaned more to the hobby-fluff side of the game than the crushing-your-enemies-and-hearing-the-lamentations-of-their-women side of it.  I’m also, I can freely admit, on the less-disposable-income side of it.  Games Workshop and Forge World make some absolutely gorgeous models.  I don’t think there’s many folks here who wouldn’t have trouble spending a thousand dollars a year on Warhammer 40,000 products. 

Pictured Here:  Old One Eye

Which is kind of the problem, because it’s hard to deny this game is getting more and more expensive.  While I love playing it, it’s harder and harder to afford it.  And I really didn’t want to be one of those guys showing up with plastic tanks from an army set or dinosaurs for Tyranids or that sort of thing.

Fortunately, my old career in the film industry equipped me with a lot of skills for making things that look good for less money.  Once I became a full time writer, I tried to find even cheaper ways to build vehicles and utilize a lot of the spare bits we’ve all got kicking around.  And then I discovered the joy that is Paperhammer.

Now, I know there are some folks out there doing really amazing things with Paperhammer templates and plasticard, or custom-molding their own pieces from resin.  Those folks are just fantastic.  They can make a Rhino for ten bucks of plastic rather than a thirty dollar kit, or a Warhound for under a hundred bucks.  I am in awe of them and most of the stuff they do.  But that’s not what I’m doing here.

My goal is to do stuff as cheap as possible.  To work on projects anyone can afford.  I think the most expensive vehicle I’ve built to date has been the Plaguereaper, and most of that expense was the green stuff I used for the Pus Cannon.  I also sometimes do scenery pieces or cheap conversions, too.

Pictured Here:  Chaos Warhound Titan

Most of my Paperhammer projects are at least 90% basic cardstock that I harvest from cereal and frozen pizza boxes, held together with white glue you can buy at the supermarket for less than a buck.  That way everything’s very inexpensive.  It’s also very forgiving if you make a mistake.  One gouge can ruin a sheet of plastic.  If I ruin a sheet of cardstock... well, at the worse I’m waiting until Monday night when the lady and I make pizza and watch Alcatraz.  I also don’t feel bad about wasting cardstock if a template forces me to discard almost half the material because of odd shapes or angles.

On which note... I’m a big fan of simpler templates over more complex ones.  There are some people who do amazing templates.  One guy who consistently blows me away is Eli Patoroch, and if you haven’t seen his work, go check it out.  It’s fantastic.

However, I think as templates get more and more complex, they also require greater and greater skill.  I’ve seen some patterns that require over a dozen cuts and scores for a single detail piece.  While I think many of these make for fantastic models, they’re so overly complex they become very daunting for most people.

I also think there are a lot of times we get templates from people who figured out a CAD model and exploded it into a set of diagrams, but never physically built the darn thing.  There’s a wonderful story about how one of Mozart’s first compositions was technically perfect, but completely impossible to perform.  He’d written something that worked on the page, but it was too inhumanly complex for any musician—let alone an entire orchestra being led by a conductor.  I’ve seen that in a few templates.  They work on paper, but it’s clear their creators hadn’t stopped to consider the sheer number of cuts and folds it would require to actually build the models. 

A simpler template is easier to work with and easier to assemble (also easier to correct, which comes up now and then).  Also, as I hope I’ve shown here once or twice, it’s always possible to take a simple template and build something more detailed out of it.  A template that starts complex is what it is, and it’s harder to compensate or make adjustments as you go along.

(On a slight side note, as of late Patoroch’s started including figure flats in his designs as well.  His tanks come with a few Guardsmen, Chaos Renegades, Inquisitors—whatever’s relevant.  True to form, they’re a little more detailed than just straight flats, but in a much more manageable way.  His “flats” are very nice 3D models with four or five layers each. If you use flats, or have been considering it, you really must check his stuff out.)

I’ve also become a bit wary of partial templates.  The ones that always raise a flag are the ones that have things like “Make this shape x 24.”  It makes me wonder if this designer ever actually built their template, because the moment someone starts printing they’d realize how wasteful it is to make two dozen copies to get a piece the size of a matchbook.  And if they haven’t built it... well...  I’ve found the good templates have everything you need on them, even all the multiples.  At the least, they’ll have all the multiples grouped on the same page.

Finally, I like to build stuff for my armies, but I also just like stuff that looks cool.  I don’t know if I’m ever going to use the Hellblade or my Nurgle Defiler, but I sure like the way they came out.

And that’s what I’m all about here.

Two weeks, tops, I’ll be back on my regular schedule and finish up the Silver Towers.

Excuses and More Shameless Pandering

Well, I wasn’t able to post last week, this barely counts, and next week may be rough, too.

The base of the Silver Towers had a bit of a re-design, so that ate up some time.  I also had to finish up my Tyranids for the no-humans/no-power-armor league my gaming group is doing.  So there’s been foward motion in the project, just no time to write out all the documentation about it.

I also had another book come out.  Last week Permuted Press just released a collection of short stories I wrote called The Junkie Quatrain. It’s four connected/ interwoven/ overlapping short stories set in the same post-apocalyptic world.  I’ve been explaining it to people as 28 Days Later crossed with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. It adds up to a mid-sized novella, so it’s also very cheap.

Also, Amazon Studios is developing a film with the working title of Original Soldiers.  It’s a sci-fi tale about human soldiers leaping into action when America’s droid army is shut down by an opponent.  I’m one of five folks (well, four folks and a writing team) who were hired by Amazon to expand my pitch based off their logline into a full treatment. 

           

So, between that and Ex-Communication, things might slow down a bit in the month of February.  Just letting you all know now.  The good news is, I’ll probably still keep working on things in my down time, so when I get to come back to this on a regular basis I’ll have enough material to go for quite a while.

In the weeks to come—the Silver Towers get finished, Imperial Bunkers, Grotesques and Wracks, a Thunderbolt, Kroot count as everything, a Gargant, and possibly even some Tyranid scenery...

Stick around.  It’ll be worth it.  Honest.