RoC Warband: Squats

Ok, I'm getting to the pointy end with my RoC warband project. In previous posts I covered the Champion, Traitor Marine and lvl 0 Psyker creation process. For my next roll on the retinue table I came up with 7 mutated squats. Read on if you'd like to know more.

Dominant attribute: Manic Fighters
Equipment: Mesh armour, lasguns, bolt pistols
Heavy weapon: Heavy Webber with targeter & suspensor

I chose not to modify these guys at all, deciding to let Khornefication come about purely from the paint job alone.

I'm pretty happy with how this squad turned out. I overpainted a few transfers, which I think makes a big difference to the finished product. Also tried a few different visor techniques. They were a little tricky, not 100% satisfied with them, but I couldn't find a decent tutorial for them so I just had to wing it. I think they look ok.

Never painted squats before either, so that was a first.

Next up will be the lvl 2 Psyker. The last member of the warband. BOYL is not far away too so I better get a move on.

Cheers :)

The handsomest Strontium Dog ever!

Welcome back folks,

Another fun filled session we will be playing at BOYL this year will be a Strontium Dog themed game. We had to create a single character to bring along to do battle with Hitler....coz that's what you do. Now I must admit that I had never read any SD before and when I informed our GM he very kindly sent me a bunch of them to read. When I had gotten through them all (what a great series!) I decided that I would like to find the ugliest mini I could and convert him up.......because that's how I roll.

So, not long after typing "the ugliest mini" into Google I struck upon this chap pictured below. I then posted on FB that I was after him and after copping much flak (fair enough in this case) I managed to procure him in all his ugliness, thanks Eddy. He's an Asgard FM41 Mountain Troll for those of you who want to get one. Why? I don't know, but each to their own I guess.....weirdo!

Shortly after completion the sculptor was taken out back and strangled.

Once I got hold of him there was only one merciful thing for me to do:

So after he had been drowned and stripped of his paint I set to work. I cut off his base, hands and fur skirt (Is that what you call them? I have no idea). This guy went through a few iterations before I was finally happy with the results. The first is pictured below:

I built him a new, futuristic skirt out of wire and putty and gave him a lasgun (modded from an Ork Shoota with a barrel swap and a resistor stuck to the side) and an Ogre gauntlet. I wasn't sold on the skirt or the gauntlet so I cut them off and tried again:

I decided to change his gauntlet out for a couple of tentacles and to give him some pants instead. I also made some fangs for him out of an old IDE cable connector and sculpted the rest of his features out of Procreate. I was fairly pleased with the sculpting I'd done for the most part, except for his boots, which ended up looking more like mocassins :(

I tried to re-sculpt them, but my skills were found wanting. So I amputated his legs just below the knee and gave him some cut down robot legs from Ramshackle Games instead. I think the change improved the proportions and overall look quite a lot. So this is the look that I ended up settling on before paint.

I'm not sure why I went with the orange colour scheme, but it just felt right. Might have something to do with my childhood too? There was a show I used to watch when I was a kid called The Early Bird Show. There was a guy in a monster suit, called Marty the Monster, that was there for comic relief. Here's a pic of him:

He's the one in the dress in case you're wondering.

Anyway, he's done now, ready to dish out some justice to some Nazi scum. All the while being treated like poo by the rest of humanity.

So that's it. Next up will be more of my chaos warband.

Cheers :)

RoC warband: Psyker lvl 0

Hi all,

On my two previous posts I covered the conversions of my champion and traitor squad. Next up on the RoC warband build is my Psyker. I rolled him up as being level 1, which sounds ok, but because he's a worshiper of Khorne he immediately loses his max level. Consequently, he's now probably only good at card tricks.

Name: Clayton
Psyker lvl 0
Personal attribute: Regeneration
Equipment: Mesh armour, flamer, power sword, energy scanner, crack grenades.

Picking the mini to use as the basis for this conversion was a little tricky. I wanted him to look like a has-been, sort of a washed out professional, but not completely useless....still able to convince passers by that he had magic at his finger tips. Sounds pretty vague I know, but it made sense in my head.

I had a look through my mini cabinet and found a poorly painted old Blacksmith. He looked the part, big apron (could pass for mesh armour), old man who's been around (was a psyker along time ago) and strong (regeneration)....win!

The name? Well, being an Australian, the choice was a fairly obvious one really.

After I stripped him I cut the lantern & hammer from his hands and carved his period trapping away. Then it was just a simple case of adding his new equipment and puttying him up a bit to finish him off. A fairly straight forward conversion and I'm pretty happy with how he turned out.

So all that was left to do was slap some paint on him.

So for this guy I decided to give him some gnarly skin. I like how it turned out. I also gave him a World Eaters tattoo on his shoulder, which was a little tricky to do. The lightning sword was another story all together. I tried about four or five different ways, looked at a few tutorials, but in the end it end up looking a bit meh. I've scratched it up as a learning experience that I'll hopefully get better at in the future.

Overall I'm really happy with this guy. The conversions and the skin colour turned this languishing mini into something I'm happy to put on the table.

Next up will be the chaos squat contingent.

Cheers :)

RoC warband: World Eater Traitor Legionnaires

Hello and let's start,

On my previous post you saw the champion that I created. Next on the list are the 6 World Eater Traitor Legionnaires, Assault squad that I rolled up.

Sergeant profile:
Personal attribute: Spits Acid BS S3 attack
Equipment: Power armour, Chainsword, 2 x Bolt pistol, crack & frag grenades, Bio scanner

Grunt profile:
Dominant attribute: Fangs +1A H2H
Basic equipment: Power armour, Chainsword, Crack & Frag grenades, Bolt pistol.
Standard equipment: 2 with extra Bolt pistol, 1 with Hand flamer, 1 with Plasma pistol, 1 with Autocannon.

All suffer/benefit from Frenzy when enemy within 12".


I wanted these guys to look as ragtag as possible. My reasoning being that Chaos Marines would not have access to new gear, they'd have to salvage what they could from their victims and make do with what they had. To that end I raided my bits box and created them from many different sources.  I could list all the parts I used to make them, but I won't because I can't be arsed.

One thing I wanted to try to do to a few of them was to make their armour look like the old Chaos Renegades armour used to. You know, with the recessed ribs and piping like in the pic below:

To this end, with my rudimentary sculpting skills, I thought I'd try and cheat a little. So I bought a length of Ultra ATA IDE ribbon cable, cut it into small sections and stuck these to the legs.

Then I tried sculpting over the top of it. You can see the results of my toil below:

My skills are pretty ordinary when it comes to sculpting and this was much more than I had ever attempted in the past. There's plenty of gaps, poorly blended areas and mismatched proportions. In my estimation they look great viewed at arms length on the tabletop. Any closer and you'll say "oh!" when you see all the flaws. Saying that though, I did have a lot of fun making them.

Fats forward a month or so and I came to my senses, they looked terrible. Well, two of them did anyway. So I cut them off and had a rummage around and found two likely candidates.

The offending legs.

Space Crusade CSM's.

I cut one standard mini and the sergeant in half and transplanted their legs onto the now legless subjects.

Now the next issue was paint. How was I going to make them look like a coherent unit with all of their varied appearances? I just decided to cross my fingers and hope that the Khorne colour trifecta would tie them all together. Here's hoping.

So that's how they ended up. What do you think?

Next post will be the lvl 0 Psyker

RoC on fellas!

Jes Goodwin MK1 Terminators

A long time ago, 1988 to be exact, GW released a single version of this Terminator sculpt. Which was quickly followed up by two more iterations the following year. I much preferred the first one though, wishing that they'd made more with some variation with the pose. But, they never did, it was just a prototype.

Fast forward 31 years (eek, I'm really bloody old!) and coming to the realisation that GW, and by extension Jes Goodwin, were never going to do that especially for me I decided to give it a crack myself. Here's what I came up with:

I was spurred on to make these and get them ready by Nico. He's going to be brining his awesome custom SH table to BOYL this year. This was the perfect opportunity to get a squad ready for the game, and I thought why not a unique squad while I'm at it?

Anyway, I better get a move on with the rest of the minis I'll be needing for the event.

Cheers :)