Based On... What?

One of the biggest issues I’ve been dealing with lately is rebasing. The move from Warhammer Fantasy to Age of Sigmar meant all those figures had to be moved over to round bases (although my Empire and Undead armies have decided to stay on their square bases... because sweet Jeebus that’s a lot of figs). In the workd of 40K, we’ve seen Space Marines of all types and flavors move over to these new 32mm bases, finally gaining a sense of the size and mass they’ve always supposedly had.

For most of us, this is a huge project.  I have four major Marine armies—Relictors, Alpha Legion, Thousand Sons, and Death Guard (plus a few others...).  On a rough guess... that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 models that need to end up on larger bases.  And they’re all connected to their current bases in a variety of ways.

Some of you may be in the same boat.  Here's a few options I came up with.  You may have poked at some or all of them...

Well, my first option came to me from WarGamma, a fun after-market site I’ve bought stuff from before.  He’s a sculptor who’s done some wonderful items for “heroic scale” gaming, and he jumped on the rebasing issue less than a month after the introduction of the 32mm base.  Check these out—base expanders.  Just drop your model in, add superglue, and done.  They work out to .70 cents each. 

At first I’d planned to split them between my Relictors and my Alpha Legion, just dropping them on (or under) HQ units, squad leaders, and other key figures.  Then I realized their best use was metal figs on slottabases. Which is only a few Relictors and Alpha Legion guys, but a lot of my Death Guard and Thousand Sons.  And Necrons.  So the priorities shifted a bit there.

As an added bonus, these adaptors make a minifig about a milimeter or two taller.  On a regular base, I think it’d be one even, but the raised area in the middle means slottabases sit a little higher. In these days of size-creep... that’s not a bad thing.

Helpful Hint—These adaptors are great, but they’re ever-so-slightly too high on the edges, even for the slottabase models..  I ended up sanding them down just a bit—maybe a millimeter or two—so they’d be flush with the GW bases.  It took maybe six back-and-forth swipes across

the sandpaper.

Now, rebasing option two’s the classic one. Cut the model off the old base, remount it on the new base.  Straightforward, and only costs you the new bases.  I think you can buy a bag of 32mm bases from GW for about .40 cents per base, but that’s if you buy a hundred of them.  For a ten-pack, they’re .50 each  You might be able to do slightly lower than those prices if you dig around on eBay stores for dealers like Blackdagger or Hobby Titan.

The catch here is that it means wrecking any basing/scenery you might’ve previously added.  Plus... well, I don’t know about you. but the knife’s slipped a few times for me or slid off path and suddenly a marine’s missing part of their heel or toes. It’s a minor thing, but it grates at me.  I did maybe a dozen Relictors like this a few weeks back, carefully cutting off one foot at a time.  Only one lost a bit of his heel.

And this led me to option three.

At one point that past weekend, I got a bit frustrated and just took the clippers to the base of a hapless Alpha Legionnaire and cut off the edges of the base.  I worked from underneath, so the top stayed the same. I filed down what was left and ended up with a figure standing on a flat, decorated disk. And I glued the whole thing to a 32mm base.

End result—all my basing and scenery transferred over.  There’s never any risk to the figure itself, so it’s faster and easier.  Plus, the model ends up being about 2-3 mm taller because the old base and basing transfer over and stack on the new base. I was going at a nice, leisurely pace and rebased about twenty Death Guard marines this way in a little over an hour.

You can even do this with plastic slottabase figs.  I picked out some of my Relictors with missile launchers from the Battle for Macragge/ Black Reach sets.  It takes a little more work to clip the slottabase off, but it works exactly the same.  Clip, file, glue, done.  Faster, safer, a little taller.

And there you go.  Three quick, easy, and relatively cheap way to make your old models new and even a little bigger.

Got to stand up to those Primaris somehow...

Dark Imperium, Week Two

So, spent the weekend putting some of the Dark Imperium models together.  Let’s go over a couple observations and impressions, from the modeling and customizing point of view

First observation... A complaint I had with the DarkVengeance set was that all of the Space Marines were firmly Dark Angels.  All the iconography was sculpted on the models—sometimes quite a bit of it.  It was gorgeous, no question, but it was also a lot of work if you wanted to use them for anything else.  Despite the prominent display of Ultramarines colors and heraldry on the box and promo pics, Dark Imperium avoids that issue, and the Primaris look fantastic without being pinned down to any particular Chapter.  Which is cool, because I plan on using them with my Relictors.

Of course, the flipside to this is that the opposing team is... well, 100% Nurgle.  There’s not a single model here that’s even vaguely something else. Which is great if you have a Death Guard army, or have been wanting one (it is a full army, after all), but otherwise... it’s a bit limiting.

Past that...

Another DV issue was that many of the models (especially the Chaos Chosen) went together in really bizarre ways.  Heads and arms would be a single piece connected by the trim on a shoulderpad.  Legs would be split lengthwise through the kneecap.  It was almost as if GW went out of their way to cut the models in the most bizarre ways possible.

The Dark Imperium models go together in much more basic standard patterns. Heads and arms are separate on a lot of the models—standard connection points, although it’s worth pointing out that the arms tend to be complete-with-shoulder pad, just in case you had clever ideas.  This means there’s a bunch of easy tweaks to do that can customize the army without resorting to cuts or filing or putty. 

The simplest one is head swaps within the set. Many of these models have separate heads, and they all use the standard neck-ball that Space Marines of all types have used for the past... what, almost twenty years?  I swapped the heads of these two Plague Marines and didn’t have to cut or trim a single thing.  

Also, because of that standard socket, most older head would fit on these models, too (and without too much of a scale problem).  Yeah, it wouldn’t make much sense for a Primaris to wear a Mk 7 helmet, but it’d be simple to work a lot more bare heads into the army to give them a less straight-out-of-the-box look.  I bet some of the Space Wolves unhelmeted heads would look good, too.  Or if the Plague Marines look a little too Nurgley for your particular army, it would be easy enough to swap in some regular Chaos Marine heads to bring them down a notch.

Helpful Hint—I’d perhaps avoid heads with bionic implants for Primaris soldiers.  After all, they’ve been in so few battles at this point, how many of them would have lots of replacement parts...?

The PoxWalkers worried me a little.  There’s ten variants (two of each in the set), and they all have pretty extreme horns. Silly as it may sound, they’re so extreme that it actually makes them all very distinctive.  It felt obvious they were repeating poses/models within the squad (to me, anyway). So I shaved off a few of the horns and spikes. It helped break them up a bit, and it also helped to inch the whole squad a little closer to my existing plague zombies.

Worth noting—I tried to make those cuts as smooth as possible, and I saved all the horns and spikes.  We’ll see how the final rules (and squad sizes) shape up for PoxWalkers when that new codex comes out in the hopefully-near future, and then I might move some of the spikes and some old skeleton horns over onto my zombies so they all look good together.

Also, one last thing to consider. All the Primaris Marines wear Mk X armor.  Every one of them.  Which really means the only difference between the troops, the sergeants, and the lieutenants is the paint jobs.  Want to give all those guys helmets?  Just trade with friends and give that guy a red helmet.  Want to use that unhelmeted Lieutenant as another sergeant?  Done!  Silly as it may sound, the uniformity gives us a bit more space to mix and match

Is there a lot of room for making this model  into that? Well, we may need to see the full Primaris book before knowing that for sure.  But there’s definitely lots of conversion and cutomizing possibilities within this set.

Next time, I may show off a few of them.

Dark Imperium

Well, it’s been about five years since the last Warhammer 40K starter set.  A bunch of us from the Atomic Warlords site sat around this weekend with some rum, the new Dark Imperium set, and a few of the index books. We had many thoughts. Most of them positive.

Marcus was going to talk about the revised game mechanics over at Atomic Warlords. Very short version—they’ve moved 40K a lot toward Age of Sigmar.  Not all that way, but if you’re somebody who really loathes those game mechanics, you’re not going to be happy with the grim dark future...

I wanted to talk about the value, though.  I know a ton of people have already broken it down in different ways. I juat wanted to do a nice, simple "how much does this save us" sort of view...

We’ve got two HQ units (the Primaris Captain and the Lord of Contagion).  Going off the average clamshell prices for single figs, it wouldn’t be outrageous to say these would be $30 to $35 each.  GW’s been getting slightly better about pricing, though, and there’s some online retailers who offer nice discounts, so let’s say they’re only going to cost $25 each-- $50 for the two of them.

There’s two more character figs for the Plague Marines, so there’s another $50.  There are three more Primaris characters, too, but Marcus pointed out it wouldn’t be surprising to see them as some kind of command squad.  Let’s conservatively call them $40 altogether.

There’s also that Foetid Bloat-Drone. It’s dreadnaught sized, so I don’t have trouble believing it could be a $35 or $40 set once we get one with options.  We’ll call it $35.

At this point, we’re already over the box set’s price tag of $160.  We haven’t even added in the three five-man Primaris squads, or the jump troops, or the Plague Marine squad, or that twenty-man PoxWalker squad (probably another $40,easy).  Heck there’s a full-sized, hardcover rulebook, which sells for $60 on its own.

Also, something we realized late Sunday night.  This is a very complete, balanced set.  It’s two actual, viable armies that are pretty fairly matched, not a couple random things that look good individually but don’t really match up (y’know, like a bunch of cultists vs Dark Angels terminators...).

This set is a freakin’ amazing value, even using my very conservative prices.  Half price on everything, if not more.  Split the box with someone, Chaos and Primaris, and get an army for $80.  Heck, let them keep the rulebook, haggle a bit, and get your half for $60 (heck, GW’s giving the basic rules away for free).  That’s maybe a third what you’d pay for either set.  Literally 66% off!

If you don’t have a ton of money to spend (been there, believe me) but really want to get into the game... this might be worth saving up for.

Defiler Weapons

Whoa!  I wanted to get one last post in before the end of the year and realized this is post #150.  Many thanks to the seven of you who bother to keep checking in...

Anyway, in these last days of the year,  I thought we could go over the final weapons options for the Defiler.  Yeah, only three years late.  Or a few weeks late, depending on how you look at it.  Either way, not too impressive, I know.

Hey, I’ve been busy...

           

A quick recap.  I built the hull and legs of a Chaos Defiler entirely from cardstock.  The only non-paper part is the ball-and-socket joints, made from some wooden balls I got at my local hobby shop for about two bucks. I designed one to be more of a Nurgle firebase while the other was going to be a Khorne close-combat monster.

First off, I’m not going to be doing the weapons for my Khornate one, despite the current wave of Khorne madness.  Games Workshop changed the options for Defilers since I first worked on this project, and I think it doesn’t work out that great for an all close-combat version.  Power fists and dreadnaught close combat weapons are not the same thing, alas.

           

That’s just one of my many problems with the current Chaos Marine codex, though.  Maybe it’ll all go away someday soon and we’ll finally get one that shows the ruinous powers some love.

But I’m not holding my breath.

           

Anyway...

           

As I mentioned above, I’d always planned on going much more range-oriented on the Death Guard Defiler.  As such, I decided to skip close-combat arms altogether and go with an autocannon/ havoc missile launcher set-up.  Ranged firepower on the move, plus the battle cannon when stationary.

So, here’s what a bit of experience and R&D can teach you. 

The twin autocannons are using the template from Newobmij‘s Imperial Knight—it comes with a heavy stubber, and a few subtle tweaks will let it work as an autocannon.  That template’s available in the STC archive if you want to check that.

Now, I used this template twice for the Knight, and the only issue was that it doesn’t work as well with thicker material.  So I looked around for something a little thinner-than-cereal/pizza box cardstock that would curve well.  It being the holidays, I realized the mailing envelopes I was using to send out books was maybe 30-40% thinner.  Also plentiful and cheap (don’t be greedy—some folks need these envelopes to mail presents and end-of-year business stuff).

That gave me two barrels.  The body’s just a basic 1” square box, 1/2” on the sides.  I sketched it out, added some tabs, and out ti together.  If it was a little loose, no big deal (I'll explain why in a minute).  I glued the barrels on the cleanest side, putting them together and closer to the top. I held it for about three minutes, then added another line of glue where the two barrels touched.  If it was a little messy, well... it's Nurgle.  I stood this on end and let it dry for about fifteen minutes or so before I started handling it. 

While the main body was drying, I made a simple axe-blade by cutting out a chisel shape and then layering smaller chisels on either side of it. If you really wanted to go crazy, you could put more of a curve to this, but just remember it's really important to make the curves on all three pieces line up.  I mounted this on the bottom barrel of the autocannon as the standard chaos underslung blade.

Normally each autocannon would have big ammunition drums or at least dangling belts.  I decided to work around those by putting an armor plate over the whole thing.  It was just a matching 1” square that I extended by 1/2” in the back and 1/4” in the front.  Then I put a top and bottom on it and gave the whole thing 45 degree corners.  That might all sound a little odd, but by doing it this way I’ve got a bit more weight towards the back.  Which is cool, because the Defiler’s “abdomen” is already a little front-heavy with the battle cannon. 

 

I cut some 1/8” strips and added trim along the edges of the armor, and also a few little Chaos “barbs,” or whatever you might like to call them.  The little jags and triangles that show up on most Chaos armor and weaponry.  I used the 1/16" and 1/8" hole punch to create a bit of "corrosion" on one corner of the armor plate.  As a final touch, I used some 1/4" discs to add a Nurgle icon.

I thought about building a traditional, six-barreled missile launcher like the one that comes on the Chaos vehicle sprue.  But then I realized I could do something fun and a little more custom with a seven-barreled missile launcher.  Because all the true believers know how much Papa Nurgle loves his sevens...

 

I started with a 3/4” x 3/4” box and drew an X across it, corner to corner.  Then I used discs from the 1/8” hole punch to mark out five spots—one at the center and the others equidistant out from the center one.  The whole thing looked a lot like a D6 when I was done.

Helpful Hint—When laying this out, remember that you’re not going from the center point—you’re measuring from the edge of the center disc, 1/16” out from the center point. If you don’t take that into account, you D6 face will look a bit squished.

Once I had the five spots, I just mirrored them above and below to give me a 1-2-1-2-1 pattern.  Seven silos.  I added a 45 degree line off each corner and that gave me the front plate of my Nurglesque havoc launcher.  I cut it out, traced it, and now I had a back plate.  Measuring the edges gave me the lengths of all six faces of the sides (which were 3/4” and just a hair over 9/16”).  I’d be more exact about it except the whole body is going to be covered by another armor plate.  I gave it the same trim, jags, and icon as the autocannon.

For the shoulders I traced a 25mm base and cut out 14 circles.  These were stacked and glued until I had two discs that were seven layers thick (there’s those sevens again).  I put clothespins on these so they’d glue flat and let them sit for a bit.

Important Note—in retrospect, these are a little small for Defiler shoulders.  Not horribly so, but just enough that it gnaws at me a bit.  It wasn’t clear until the whole thing was together.  If you wanted to use this same method, I’d use a 40mm for my tracing template.  I still might pull it apart and do new ones before the warm liquid goo phase.

While the shoulders were drying I decided to go back and add some rivets to the whole model.  Looking back, I guess I never got to the rivet stage before.  I know I had the 1/16” hole punch at that point because the corroded effects were done with it. Anyway, I glued a few rivets on at some key points.

I also decided to bulk up the blast plate that sits behind the battle cannon.  The one from the original template is kind of puny.  So I built a larger one and added some more trim and rivets.  It gave the center a bit more heft.

I glued the shoulders onto the central hull. Again, I tried to center them back a bit to help counterbalance the battle cannon.  Once they were dry I added the weapons.  Because all of this is straight connections, I was able to stack the whole thing and use my phone for a bit of weight.

And there’s a range-loaded Defiler, just like that.

(ignoring the three year gap)

Cheap Helbrute Conversion

So, lots of people are already talking about the new Horus Heresy plastics. I might at some point in the future, too.  For the moment, though, I wanted to look back at the last big sci-fi set...

           

(okay, seriously, how do we describe the connection between 30K/Heresy and 40K?  Are they just the #0K games? Imperium-based games?  Grim Future games?)

           

...their last box set from mankind’s grim future, and show something fun and cheap you can do with that.

           

You can still find lots of Dark Vengeance stuff online, most of it at half to 1/5th what you’d pay for them as individual units. A full tactical squad is about twenty bucks.  A lot of HQ characters are just two or three dollars.  And you can usually find the Dark Vengeance Dreadna—sorry, old habits—Helbrute for under ten bucks.

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a reason for this.  Like most of the Dark Vengeance models, the Helbrute’s a block of plastic that takes some serious time and effort if you want to do any major conversions (that said—I’ve seen some great ones).  But it is possible to do some neat looking ones on the cheap without half as much effort.

           

For example...

           

This particular Helbrute is going to be named Occulus Blight, and it’ll be joining my Death Guard.  Before I even started putting him together, I rolled up a little ball of green stuff.  A little bigger than a pea, a little smaller than a marble.  I rolled this back and forth between my fingers until it was as round and smooth as I could get it.  Then I very carefully pushed it into the hood/collar hole where the little face piece would normally go.  I didn’t want the teeth/claws around the hole to gouge the surface of the ball.

Once this was in place, I stretched the putty out on either side to help hold it in place. Again, I had to be careful so I didn’t force it into the teeth/claws on the other side. This was tricky and I had to try twice.  Fortunately, on something this simple, messing up just means pulling the blob out and rolling it smooth again. So don’t panic too much.  It maybe took ten minutes from starting to mix the green stuff to having it in place.  I let it  dry for another fifteen minutes—face up! I didn’t want its own weight to make a flat spot on the ball—and then assembled the Helbrute as normal.

Look at that.  One big eye in the socket.  Much Nurgle.  So pestilent.

 

I did a few quick detail things.  An old scenic rubble piece went on the base.  I snipped off the chains that hang from the power fist and added some “tentacles” made from the horns of a Chaos Marine helmet.  It’s hard to tell, but I also added a big tentacle to his power plant—one of the ones from the old mutation sprue.  It looks really good there, and it’s got me thinking some of those bulkier pieces might work really well on other Chaos dreadna—sorry, did it again—Helbrutes.

I didn’t glue the front plate-armor-hull piece in place because I want to paint the eye without too many extra bits around it. So I’ll prime those seperately and assemble them later.  As one last bit of detail, I added a centered horn to the armor plate.  It’s something I pulled from the bits bins at one point—I think it might be from the Chaos Terminators set.  Central horns are distinctively Nurgle in 40K (and related games).

All in all, maybe an hour to make a distinctive Helbrute.  And about a third of that was just digging up parts and mixing drinks.

(Primed and basic paint pictures coming this weekend)

The Defiler, Pt II

I’m getting buried in work stuff which is delaying the far-more-important work on this project. I’ve decided to break up building the Defilers into a few smaller, somewhat more frequent posts rather than wait until I’ve got the material for a full-sized one... which could take weeks.

Before I did anything else, I sat down and divvied up the components. As I mentioned before, I’m building two Defilers at a time here. The cleanest parts went to the Khorne one. Anything with rough edges or “shaggy” surfaces where the template came off went into the pile for the Death Guard model. If it ends up looking rusty or tweaked... all the better.

Back to building.

The waist piece is a bit thin and flimsy, so I decided to do two things to it. First was a bit of detail. Cut a long strip about 1/8” wide. Now cut that up into 3/8” lengths and glue them around the waist at regular intervals. This gave the visible part a bit of heft, too. Second thing was to build a small box. It’s 3/8” tall by 1/2” square, so it should fit completely inside the ring of the waist.

This is Important -- This little box needs to be flush with the top of the ring. If it’s a bit low, cut out another 1/2” square of card and see if that raises it up enough. Check first, then glue it on top of the box. There’s enough variation in card models that some people may not need it. Don’t worry about looks--this is all going to be hidden inside the waist-- but this needs to be flush to give you solid contact with the torso.

So you should have the waist on the chassis at this point, with the box inside the waist. I’d hold off attaching the torso yet. It’ll be a lot easier to work with if it stays separate for now.

Before you start to assemble the legs, it’ll help to figure out what kind of pose you want your Defiler to end up in. I’ve got two, but they’re going to be a bit different. The Khorne one will be a super-dreadnaught geared up to charge into close combat and lay waste to everything it can. The Death Guard one is essentially going to be a firebase, something that just hunkers down and starts shooting big guns. As such, I want to pose their legs to reflect these roles on the battlefield. The two front legs of the Khorne Defiler (or middle legs, depending on your point of view) are going to be higher so it ends up in a more aggressive, rearing-up pose. The Death Guard one will be squatting, all equal, all low.

So, as you begin to assemble these legs, remember those all-important tabs from the A section? This is where they pay off. Slide the D section into A. If you’ve done this right, the curved end of D should butt up against that tab. This means you can glue the legs in two different directions (along the plane of the joint and the plane of the tab) so this piece will be rock solid once it dries.

I assembled four legs for each Defiler. Once they were glued I covered them with wax paper, and set a mid-sized book on them to hold the joints flat. I left these to dry for about half an hour and went on to other things.

A bit of honesty as we move on to the next step. Remember before when I said all the time-intensive stuff was done? I lied.

The Defiler’s front claws are tough. I tried cutting them out with tabs on them and it just became a mess of 1/16” cuts in thirty different directions. I’m actually tempted to say don’t do them the way I did, even though they did turn out very nice and solid in the end. You could possibly save a lot of time and headaches just cutting the claws out of the template as-is and adding scraps of card as tabs where you need them. It might be a bit less structural, but I’m not even sure of that. I tried it on the “thumb” claws and it seemed to work, but they are a much simpler shape. I may experiment with this and get back to you.

While the claws dried I went back to work on the legs. As it says on the template, you’ll need to buy some wooden beads for the ball-and-socket joint on the legs. I went to my local craft/ hobby store and picked up two bags of 5/8” (15.9mm) wooden beads for $1.19 each (that’s $1.19 per bag, not per bead). The suggestion is for 1/2” beads, but in my opinion that makes the joint harder to assemble because of how deep into the leg the beads sink. Go a tiny bit bigger and make life easier on yourself.

Put a few drops of glue in the end of each leg and then push the bead into place. You’ll need to hold it for a few minutes, and it’s best to turn it around a few times so the glue hits as many points as possible. Watch out for leaks around the corners.

That’s all for now. I’ll try to get another quick update posted this weekend.

The Plague Tower, Pt. 3

To conclude the very drawn-out construction on the Plague Tower...

So, when I left off I’d just glued the tower to the chassis and finished up the pus cannon. At this point, a few issues presented themselves.

I couldn’t hope but notice a certain wobbliness to the tower. I wasn’t worried about it falling apart but it had a definite wibbly-wobbly quality to it. And not the good kind of wibbly-wobbly. So I went into the lower section and put two diagonal struts. I straightened the tower, held it in place with a few books, and cut the struts to the spaces. Clamping these was a bit of work. I ended up just holding the deep one for about twenty minutes or so. Once they were dry, the tower was notably improved, stability-wise.

The other thing was that the front of the tower just looked... flat. I balanced it on the axles to get an idea how it was going to look and it felt clunky. After coming close to ripping the axles apart, I realized the problem was as simple as it sounded. It just looked flat. It needed something like a grill or a cowcatcher to sell the idea of it being a dynamic thing and not just a static object.

I toyed with the idea of using two of the spike-rams from the Chaos vehicle sprue, but they didn’t seem quite right for some reason (I also only had one spare one). Then I hit on the idea of using the obelisk-shaped tombstones from the Warhammer Fantasy zombie sprue. Alas, I’d already used most of them to make a graveyard and only had three left--barely enough for one side. I even peeked at Battlewagon Bitz on the WarStore, but no luck. Neil doesn’t stock zombie, skeleton, or demon parts, curse his black heart.

(I jest. I love the WarStore.)

Anyway, I realized I’d have to build this thing from scratch. I cut a series of six triangles, 3/4” at the base, 1 1/4” tall, but left a 1/2” or so tab past the base. Then I cut three more with no tab and cut them in half lengthwise. The tabs glued on to the base of the tower along the front edge, three on each side. Once they were in place, I set the half-triangles down the center lines of the full triangles, bases against the edge of the chassis-platform. This gave extra support (gluing in two different directions) and also created a visual “broadhead” effect, style-wise, for the cowcatcher. This looks like something that would shred through trees, soldiers, small buildings, or anything else that got in its way. In retrospect, I should’ve jammed a few random body parts into the corners. It’s still not too late, I suppose...

At this point I just had to attach the wheel-axles. I shuffled the wheels around to make sure each axle was in the best spot because they’re all slightly different (the downside to doing so much of this off the cuff). Just a sixteenth of an inch here or there, but it was enough that in the wrong order one set of wheels could get left floating above the ground. The tower itself weighed enough by now that I could just glue them, set it on top, and let it dry.

I threw on a few last details, too. This thing is so big that there’s a lot of blank space on it. I used some more tidbits from the zombie sprue to put a hanging corpse and a few severed heads along the battlements. A little excess white glue made it look like the corpse was leaking down the side of the tower.

The tower is considered open-topped for purposes of embarking and disembarking. I decided to put a few hatches on the sides to symbolize this. They’re just simple shapes with Nurgle icons made from 1/4” hole punch disks. After a lot of thought, I decided to close up the bottom section in the rear, too. It would cut my usable space in half, but it also would hide the diagonal struts, the base of the pus cannon, and other things I’d prefer not to be seen. So I made a panel to cover the back bottom half using some scrap card, building it right to the opening. I put a wider hatch on that, and glued the whole thing in place. It’s worth noting this made the tower rock-solid, as much again as the diagonal struts had.

I also took one last marble of green stuff and added little threads of it all over the model. I did some quick work with the sculpting tool to make it look like rot, corrosion, or whatever other damp, soggy substance you can think of on a Nurgle vehicle. This also helped make a few joins a bit more solid.

This thing’s about 90% cardstock, so I still went for the “liquid goo” phase with the acrylic paint. The paint seals the edges of the cardboard so moisture can’t get in to make the paper swell and deform--it’s more-or-less the same principle as painting foam with Chaos Black before you prime it with spraypaint. I layered the acrylic paint on especially thick on the tower. Doesn’t hurt to be safe, and if it shows through... so what? It’s Nurgle.

Priming this beast took some time. It’s about three times larger than a Land Raider, and I was doing light coats so the cardstock stayed as dry as possible. On the plus side, since I was going at a slow pace, by the time I’d done the fourth side the first was just about ready for the next coat. I gave it two good coats, one coat across the bottom, and then dusted a few trouble spots.

As I’ve mentioned before, painting isn’t my strong point, so I’ll just do a quick overview. All the metal got Tin Bitz as a base. The pus cannon, the Nurglings, and anything else kind of rotted got based with Dark Angels Green.

The metal got drybrushed with brass with gold even lighter over that. Then I put rust patches all over that, which is just a bit of Blazing Orange dabbed on with a really crappy old brush, and a light dust of Tin Bitz on top of that. The icky bits got drybrushed with Snot Green, washed with green ink, and then drybrushed with Camo Green. I did a super-light drybrush of Scorpion Green around the mouth of the pus cannon just to emphasize the muzzle.

For the main body, I used a variation off the color scheme for my Death Guard. They’re all based with Dark Flesh, then drybrushed with a few different colors to build up small patches of white (I go off the idea it’s their original armor--pristine white and gold--that’s gotten filthy over the millennia). I simplified this a bit for the Plague Tower, but it still ties nicely to their paint scheme.

So, not counting the six frozen pizza boxes that gave their lives for this project (really, their days were numbered once LOST went into the final episodes) total cost for some tubing, half a pack of green stuff, a new bottle of white glue, and a blister of Nurglings... about $22 and maybe twelve hours altogether.

Not a bad price for 700 points of Chaos/ Apocalypse fun.

The Plague Tower, Pt. 2

So, with the bulk of the tower done, it was time for details. I’m going to list all these out in order, but the truth is I often jumped from on element to another as different sections and details were drying. So if the pictures look a bit further on at places, don’t worry too much about it.

First thing I did was take a quarter and trace three circles. This gave me a card Nurgle icon that stood about as tall as a Terminator. It’s eye-catching and leaves no doubt how this war machine is aligned.

Next I took my 1/8” hole punch (grab yours there on the right) and made a hundred or so little disks. Once I had a good pile, I used the white glue one drop at a time and covered the two long corner-strips with rivets. I also ran rivets across the tank-straps, which would help sell them as metal, too. Also, if you look close, every here and there is a cluster of three rivets forming another tiny Nurgle icon.

I also cut an interior level and a top platform. Because I’d made the whole thing with simple measurements, it wasn’t hard. Just like on my diagram, the top is 5” x 5” and the interior one is 5” x 6 1/2”. I think the inside one needed a tiny bit of shaving to make it fit, and I glued each of those in with a few long tabs. These’d be holding up metal Death Guard figures so I didn’t want them tearing loose.

The rivets gave me another quick inspiration. I knew I wanted to put lug nuts or some sort of detail on the wheels. So I used the 1/4” hole punch to make some larger disks and made a Nurgle icon on each wheel. It’s hard to tell in this photo but I also stacked a 1/8” inch disk on top of each one, too, for more depth. If there was excess glue, I spread it out to form the “arrows” that go between the three circles of the icon.

At the top of the tower is the plague mortar. Played with this for a bit. First I thought of doing three smaller tubes in a Nuglesque cluster, but having three barrels seemed a bit misleading. I decided on just one big mouth up there, and used another bit of piping from the store (about $.50). The guide rails/ wheels on the side are two quarter-traced discs again, plus one that’s about 1/4” larger. The two quarters (so to speak) got glued together and centered. Once it was dry I marked off 45 degree marks and made a straight cut across the bottom.

Helpful Hint - As I mentioned before, remember that the card is triple-thick on these. If you force it and try to cut through the whole thing at once you’ll wreck your blade. Same goes with foamcore and even plastic. Be patient, go over your cuts two or thee times, and just work your way down. You’ll get a cleaner cut and your blades will last longer.

Once I had that I added more detail with the 1/4” and 1/8” hole punches. I also traced a piece of card for the base of the mortar and added some Nuglesque detail to that as well. I mounted the whole thing on the top of the tower with a blob of green stuff that I molded just enough to give a rough shape to. I didn’t want anything too elaborate.

In retrospect, I would’ve used a slightly smaller piece of tubing. Of course, it does use the 7” blast marker, so it’s not like the barrel’s ridiculously oversized...

Next up, the double demolisher cannons. I toyed with the idea of having them side by side but decided they’d go better with the putty work I was planning like this monstrosity. The demolishers are doubled-up plastic tubing, just like I did with the Malcador a while back. They’re a touch longer to help them stand out against the broad front of the tower. I set the whole thing on its back and superglued both cannons in place.

While the cannons were drying I mixed up a blob of green stuff about half the size of a golf ball. I ran three lines of putty out around the large icon on the front to complete the Nurgle icon. Each of these lines got poked and shaped with my little sculpting tool until they had a very messy, organic feel to them. The bottom, vertical one ran down to the highest demolisher cannon and then continued between the two cannons. Eventually it would go all the way down to the pus cannon, but I wanted to wait until the chassis section was attached to the tower.

I came back to this a bit later, after the superglue had dried, and built up more putty around each cannon. The idea here was for the texture to look (hopefully) a bit like decaying muscle tissue. This made the cannons more stable and solid on the tower, it made them look a bit larger, and it also gave the tower a good visual line. The eye flows easily up and down the tower, hitting all the details.

The top of the tower needed railings-- battlements, if you like. They would give it a clean top, add some more detail, and also keep figures on the platform from plunging almost a foot to the tabletop whenever the tower moved. First I put a 1” piece of card on the inside edge (you can see two of them in the shot with the plague mortar). Then I ran two thinner pieces along the top edge of the tower. These were cut to be flush on the top with that 1” piece. Now I ran a 1” piece on the outside edge to make this are flush with the “metal bands” that ran along the two front edges of the tower. Last but not least, I ran another 1” piece on top of that which ran “around” the tower and clamped the whole thing with a forest of clothespins. So in the end I have a wall around the plague mortar that’s five layers thick.

I topped the little wall off with spikes made from the old plastic Rhino’s cowcatcher. Also added another wave of 1/8” disks as rivets. This project is what really got me thinking about buying the 1/16” hole punch, although I still think the larger ones were the right way to go for this. I think on this scale smaller rivets might vanish, especially with the broad open areas. At this point, I also stuck a Nurgling by the cannon--the Plague Tower is supposed to be infested with them after all.

In the Apocalypse book I loved how the Plaguereaper had body parts floating in its pus tanks. I decided to go a step further and used some old Warhammer Fantasy zombie parts to show whole helpless victims being rendered down into... well, pus. All it took was snipping the parts, filing them flat, and supergluing them in place. I have another idea for these tanks but it’s going to have to wait until the very end of the project...

I also used this time to fill in a few gaps around the tanks. Little scraps of card with a few disks on them look like metal plates riveted in place. Voila. No more gaps.

It was time to fasten the chassis to the tower. I measured off the tower’s exact footprint on the platform, glued it, and actually piled some books in the bottom of the tower. Fortunately, as I mentioned, the platform was built to hold weight. While this was drying I also added a few more Nurglings around the base. You can never have too many.

Once it was dry, I used tinfoil to bulk up the pus cannon against the tower. Then another largish marble of greenstuff covered that and gave the weapon an imposing mass. I tried to keep up the muscley look here, and I also connected it up to the line of “rot” that was centered on the front of the tower.

Next up, more assembly, a few final details, and painting.

The Plague Tower

Sorry for the long absence. Stupid real world job getting in the way of my toy soldiers...

Since I got into this whole scratchbuilding thing, Apocalypse games have held a special thrill. Scratchbuilds are almost required so it mean I finally had a chance to catch up with some of my friends who can field half a chapter’s worth of Dark Angels or an entire Eldar craftworld. Being who I am, my thoughts for the big stuff tend to run towards Chaos.

The Plague Tower of Nurgle is just great. It’s got a solid amount of history behind it, both fluffwise and in the game itself. You may have seen some pictures of the old Epic model with the goblin-esque faces on the front, or maybe the new one in Apocalypse Reloaded which looks a bit more like a siege-tower. Plus, it would give some big-game punch to my Death Guard army because it has a very solid statline and two demolisher cannons. Two! And those are its small weapons. Could you ask for more fun?

I decided I wanted to go for the siege tower look. I also really liked the creepy, organic look to the pus cannon on the Plaguereaper model, so I wanted to make mine more like that. One of the things I love about Nurgle stuff is it’s very easy to mix in those organic elements. I sketched out a few simple plans, because at its core the Plague Tower is a really easy model. It’s just a tall block, really, which means it almost calls to be made out of frozen pizza boxes.

I should note that I decided to leave the back open so I could place models inside and keep track of what’s where. It’s not on this side view diagram, but I also cut a small opening into the front. That’s for the pus cannon, so I can run whatever forms its core along the chassis for this thing and give it some stability.

Helpful Hint - There’s not too many exact measurements in here once I get going because I did a lot of it by eye. As I mentioned, this is a simple model. Plus, if something’s a bit off or mangled somewhere... it’s Nurgle. After Orks, this is the best army for irregular, imperfect models. And if something’s really bad, you can just put a lot of goop over it and it looks perfect again.

I cut out both sides and the front twice. They’re so big you can just use a pair of good scissors if you don’t rush. Each of these double layers got glued together slowly so I could make sure nothing was going to slip and mess up an edge. Once they were together, I folded them into a piece of wax paper and stacked a few hardcover books onto them. After about an hour under the books each side was very flat and rigid.

The wheels are just the lids off old vitamin jars. If you look it’s amazing how many of them have the same standardized lid. I’d noticed it a while back and just started saving them because I figured all those identical circles would be good for something. Between myself and my girlfriend, eight double-thick wheels took about six months to save up. I superglued them together, then used greenstuff putty to make them solid and also add some messy-looking detail.

I played around with how to do axles for a while, then settled on the simplest solution. Just make square tubes that fit inside the vitamin lids. Now it’s just high school geometry. I know the lids are 3.5cm in diameter, or 1.75 radius (I always go metric for the super-precise stuff). Two radii are the two sides of a triangle, which means the third side is 2.475 cm (rounded up).

Then I made a very simple platform, as detailed on my extensive plans. Think of it as the chassis between the wheels and the main hull (the tower itself). To help make the platform solid, I cut a few long strips of cardboard 1/2” wide. I folded these four or five times to make a bunch of zigzags and consummate V’s and placed them inside the platform (a system first devised with the Mk. I Land Raider). This gave the platform load-bearing inner walls and made it a lot stronger. It held up Under the Dome with no problem.

So, by this point, the sides were pretty dry. I decided I wanted to install the pus tanks now, when I could still lay each side more or less flat to dry. To keep it asymmetrical, there were going to be one large one with two smaller ones on the opposite side. I used two vitamin jars and an old superglue bottle. The heavy pipes coming out of the bottom are little tube elbows I grabbed at my local hardware store (total cost, about $2 for all three). I glued these in place, then did more green stuff to make them solid and add to the look of goop and corrosion. I cut slots into the sides that the tanks could settle in, then lined up the pipes and cut holes for them.

Helpful Hint - Remember, the card is double-thick on all these sides. If you force it and try to cut through the whole thing at once you’ll wreck your blade. Same goes with foamcore and even plastic. Be patient, go over your cuts two or thee times, and just work your way down. You’ll get a cleaner cut and your blades will last longer.

Once these were in place I cut a 1” strip of card. This would be the metal bands holding the tanks in place. A little bending, a hard crease on either side, and I had a snug-fitting band. I used clothespins and a few big clamps to hold that in place while it dried. On the port side, I set a heavy pair of scissors between the two tanks while it dried to give it a bend.

I let the two sides with the tanks dry overnight. In the meantime, I took the first pass at the pus cannon. For the core, I just took a 6” square of card and rolled it up nice and tight into a cylinder. I used some duct tape to hold it shut like that. The front piece with the notch let me get it lined up so it was centered with about 2 1/2” reaching out past the front edge. Then I fastened it to the chassis-platform with some glue and two “straps” across the far end (which would end up inside the tower). That got clamped to dry.

While it was drying I bulked out the card cylinder with some aluminum foil. It’s cheap and easy to shape. This helped me build the basic shape of the pus cannon’s muzzle without using a bunch of expensive green stuff. Once I had the shape, though, I did use about an inch of green stuff on it to make sure it kept the shape. I gave this some basic texture just by dragging my sculpting tool along it.

Now it was time to assemble the tower proper. I cut two long strips of card 2” wide and gave them each a light score right down the middle. I glued one edge of each to the front and clothespinned it at top and bottom. Once that was solid, I also trimmed the top and bottom of the 2” strips to line up (another eyeball measurement). I glued the sides to the front along the same strips. It did overlap the tank-straps, but as I mentioned earlier... It’s Nurgle.

So, here’s where it is so far. Nothing’s glued together yet, mind you. I just balanced the platform with the cannon on a couple of the wheels (square axles won’t roll) and stood the tower on top of that. In the foreground for scale is my girlfriend’s warboss, Bah Bossa, from the Black Reach set. She insisted that I point out he’s still a work in progress as well and his paintjob is incomplete.

That’s the big bulk of it done. Next for a bunch of detail work.