LotR: The Shadow Lord -- A Possible Lesser Daemon Miniature

I entered this miniature in a local painting contest. He did well, but not enough to claim the prize!

The miniature is one of the newer LotR ring-wraiths: The Shadow Lord. Although it wouldn't be allowed in tournament play, I thought that the ring-wraiths would make absolutely splendid generic lesser daemons for a chaos space marine army that has no overall allegiance to the major chaos powers.

The painting was fairly straight forward: following a base coat of regal blue, the miniature was washed heavily (darker toward the lower portions of the cape) and highlighted subtly to lighter tones of blue higher up. A few parts of the cape are picked out in space wolf grey. The silver metallic parts are painted in boltgun metal, washed in black and highlighted in a very thin white line. The bronze colour metals were base coated in shining gold, inked with chestnut and highlighted in bleached bone. The more leather areas were done in bleached bone and washed darker using sepia. Finally, the sword followed a wet blend technique that I first piloted on a bloodletter who was wielding a frost brand.

The base (made from the citadel basing materials box) was painted in a desert colour scheme which does much to complement the colder feeling that the wraith exudes. Overall, I'm very fond of this miniature and pleased with the way he came out.

Battle Summary: Death Guard vs. Death Guard! (767 points)

This was a fun, yet peculiar game that I wanted to share with you. Basically, I loaned out some of my miniatures to an opponent who didn't have too many points worth of marines. We ended up deciding that my opponent would call all of his marines = death guard, so there were plenty of "count as" marines on his side of this table.

Both of the army lists were identical:

HQ = Daemon Prince with Wings, Mark of Nurgle, and doom bolt (160 pts)

Troops 1 = Plague champion with power fist along with 6 other plague marines (1 melta gun, 1 flamer) in a rhino with a havoc launcher (266 pts)

Troops 2 = Plague champion with power fist along with 6 other plague marines (1 melta gun, 1 flamer) in a rhino with a havoc launcher (266 pts)

Heavy Support = 1 Obliterator (75 pts)

The game board was only 4 ft x 4 ft as the points value was rather low. The scenery was a desert world, with a few ruins scattered around the place (4+ cover save).

The mission was annihilation. That's six killpoints each side.

Early Turns.
The set up is by table quarters, and we both set up with one troops squad in cover of some ruins and the other rhino hiding behind it (my opponent is emulating my set-up almost perfectly). The HQs start behind cover, with no line of sight and the obliterators are reserved.

The early turns feature a number of volleys from the havoc launchers which ultimately cause a wound each on each daemon prince. The rhinos in the cover continue to sit there whilst the other rhinos charge toward each other ... and the lurking daemon princes.

Middle Turns.
My daemon prince tears down his rhino. His obliterator comes in to play and destroys my rhino in exchange. Both plague marine squads get out and rapid fire one another. In the subsequent turn, they engage in melee. His daemon prince proves to be the difference and finishes my squad off. Meanwhile, my daemon prince slays the obliterator.

My obliterator comes in to play and destroys his daemon prince, whilst his surviving plague marine squad rapid fires my daemon prince back to the warp. A few choice plasma shots from my obliterator finishes his surviving squad.

Late Turns.
The havoc launcher from my opponent's rhino that is still in cover finishes off my otherwise pesky obliterator. At this stage, there are only two rhinos (plus their squads) left in the game.

We make a "gentleman's agreement" at this stage -- there will be no more shooting (too many of Nurgle's good guys have already perished and Nurgle wants survivors). Therefore, the game will come down to the two rhinos attempting to ram each other.

Despite some neat moves on turns 5 and 6, turn 7 sees my opponent execute a perfect ram maneuver to seal the victory by 1 kill point ... my rhino is smoking between his rhino and a hard place!

It was a fun conclusion to what was a brilliant game!

Noise Marine Assembley

As well as a number of other concurrent projects, I'm also building up a small number (six!) of noise marines. This one is the first that I've assembled.

The major issue I've found with assembling these guys are the sonic weaponry. Simply put, they don't fit snugly enough to the chaos space marine's abdomen. On this miniature, I've had to file away the belt buckle to near-oblivion. Even with that done, there are some micro-issues with the pose. The miniatures right arm (on the left hand side of the picture!) doesn't connect smoothly with the torso -- it is at an angle to the torso despite my efforts to file away the belt buckle and everything else that might be pushing it away from the body and causing this. Secondly, although the opposite arm sits flush with the torso, it is located a bit further back than I would have expected for a standard noise marine.

As a result, I'm going to be doing a little bit of green stuff work around the shoulders of this noise marine to correct for the sonic blaster not fitting more flush with the body. I'm going to try to choose front torso's a bit more carefully now that I know the problems with assembling noise marines!

Can Noise Marines Hurt in Vacuo?

Go with me here ...

Noise marine weaponry fires, well, noisy shots that literally tear apart their targets by vibration.

Noise requires a medium to travel through.

Therefore, if one is fighting in power armour in hard vacuum, can Noise Marines actually do any ranged damage? :-)

Or do their weaponry have a psychic component to them as well that would still deal damage in vacuo?