Shadow Sword: Part II. Magnetizing the Side Armour

Continuing on from the assembling the tracks, I've decided to start magnetizing my Shadowsword. The primary reason for this is to be able to configure my Shadowsword in multiple ways. I don't simply mean the primary weapon though, I also mean the side sponsons. Here, I want to be able to have a choice of selecting where the sponson gets physically located (front, middle or back) or to have extra armour around the sides of the tank.
The picture above is a bit of a progress update, but also to show what I'm doing with the side armour. Pictured here are two of the pieces of side armour magnetized to the side of the tank. A magnet (from k and j magnetics) can be seen in the centre of the left hand armour piece (it sits flush with the level of the armour rather than poking out). The middle armour piece used to have an imperial eagle on it, but I've scrubbed it off somewhat and then covered it over with a Horus eye taken from chaos tank sprues. Underneath, it conceals a rough job on the armour along with a second magnet.
Each of the armour pieces as well as the upper armour bits can be seen in the next picture with their magnets in place. For the larger armour pieces, I simply drilled a hold in the centre of each piece and glued one of the magnets in to the hole so that it sat flush with the front surface. The height of the magnet is approximately the same as that of the armour, so almost no further filing down of the magnet was required. For the upper pieces, I had to drill the depression in the underside a little bit deeper in order to fit the magnet in to a flush depth. The magnet sits comfortably inside this depression. Sponson weaponry are my next job on this tank.

Plaguebearer Musician

As part of my expanding Epidemius lists (and indeed, just lesser daemons in general!) here's a plaguebearer musician.

To be honest, I'm not highly keen on the sculpt of this miniature - the slimey bits just don't look quite right to me. The angles that they make, given the dynamics of the pose, just don't click for me -- especially the bit that connects the knee to the bell. That aside, the rest of the miniature looks good!

The painting of the miniature proceeded with a black undercoat and a green basecoat for the main parts of the flesh. I applied several layers of inking / washing in various tones and mixtures of greens, browns and blacks. Followed by a touch of green highlighting and drybrushing, the flesh was quickly completed.

I used metallic paints on the bells, but dulled them down with brown and black washes to give them an appropriate rusted feeling. I've got some of the slime in a blood colour (pink undercoat and solid red plus brown inking) to give it an unnatural luminous quality.

The plaguebearer's horn was tricky, but I think I pulled off blending the cream colours nearer the tip into more brown colours at the top of his head. Final details included the eye, teeth, nails, tongue, sores and pustules. Overall, I'm happy with this miniature and he'll certainly be included in my lists for reasons detailed here.

Assembled Soul Grinder

After a long wait, my first (and only, to date) soul grinder is now assembled.
However, before I paint him up, I'm intending to do some magnetization work! Basically, I want to be able to transport the soul grinder in relative safety. That means that its going to be unlikely to snap during transit to games (etc). Perhaps the weakest link in the model (or rather, where it may be most likely to snap) is the connection between the lower torso and the spidery (defiler) lower part. I've bought a number of magnets from K and J magnets recently, so I'm intending to place a big one inside the torso and a second at the top of the definer part to ensure that they stay together when they're in play.

I'm also considering a secondary magnetization project with the soul grinder. But I think I should have thought of this much earlier... I'm considering placing magnets inside the tops of the legs (where they insert in to the bulk of the defiler part). The idea is that the soul grinder can stand upright more effectively and hold its pose more strongly than I've go with the current set up -- which is simply the legs slotted in to the holes, unglued. Has anyone else tried this? Is it worthwhile, or is the friction in the holes not much worse than this solution?

Daemon Name Generators

Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness and the Lost and the Damned contain a superb amount of background material for daemons in both warhammer and warhammer 40,000. One aspect of the extensive background is a relatively large table for creating random names for your deamons -- both in English and in the gibberish "daemonic tongue". When published, these tables relied on the user rolling some die to determine the names.

These days, name determination has been very automated by computers! Indeed, there are a lot of name generators online out there if one is struggling to come up with suitable and inventive names for characters and squads. Below are a couple of links to these name generators as a little resource for myself and everyone else out there. There used to be a resource on Games Workshop's site as well (under Hordes of Chaos) but I can no longer locate it.

• Google Search for "daemon name generator".
  
• Fantasy Land
  
• Rum and Monkey
  
• Seventh Sanctum

(Apologies if you read this post years after I post it - the links may decay!)

GenCon Oz

Gen Con Oz is taking place in a little over 24 days from now in Brisbane, Queensland.
Announced on the discussion forums is the tournament for 40k -- based on the old Grand Tournament system. Some interesting snippets that I garnered from reading through the rules:

40 per cent of the tournament result is on battle outcomes
20 per cent on sportsmanship
20 per cent on force composition
20 per cent on painting

There's also a handicap system that's going to be used as well! Sounds like it pays to not go in for an over the top force under those rules.

The missions have also been posted in advance as well. That's fore-planning!

Wow. I'm really tempted by this tournament! It could be a good deal of fun! Mixed Daemons, or Death Guard...?

Weaponizing an Obliterator

Unlike my previous obliterator, this one doesn't have any conversion work applied. However, much like the fiddlesome flamers of Tzeentch that I'm working on, I have struggled with fashioning my obliterator with his requisite weapons. The fit between the nub of the weapons and the holes in the arms of the obliterator are not fantastic. Moreover, they can also be weak if the model gets knocked about a bit too much. So for this obliterator, I have pinned the weapons -- every single one of them(!)
On the left arm (above), I've got a plasma gun (bottom), followed by a random plastic missile that I had in my bits box, flamer and stubber(?). In addition to the pinning, I've applied a little milliput to sculpt over the joins. The tangential arm slot (intended for one of those blades), I've ignored and covered over with more greenstuff to disguise its existence. I wanted this fellow to be pure ranged weapons on his fists!
On the right arm (above), I've borrowed a heavy flamer from some terminators to slot in to the outer tangential slot and heavily greenstuffed over the joins.

The other weapons on this arm consist of an autocannon (obviously no longer applicable in the current rules!), lascannon and a very extended and repositioned melta. I needed to do something with the melta as it stuck out at a really odd angle from the arm without any work on it. Being pedantic, I wanted the obliterator to have his weapons pointing forward -- where he's looking! I therefore pinned it, but left a little of the pin showing to create the extension, and then went over it with greenstuff. I like the result and shall get around to painting him soon I hope.