Back To Warhammer Quest

What? Who? For those who clicked on the blog title thinking it was about Warhammer Fantasy Battle, well, no, not really. Possibly a little bit anyway. If you're still in the dark, then Warhammer Quest was a rather excellent game that Games Workshop produced around 1993 I think. You take the role of a brave adventurer entering the depths of the Warhammer world is search of riches and fame, where many find a quick and painful death. The game came with five playable characters Barbarian, Elf, Dwarf, Wizard and Trollslayer, and Games Workshop released many more.

So, in case you haven't guessed I have managed to gather up some disaffected youth to play Warhammer Quest with, started last weekend we managed 2.9 quests. The first one was a straight forward dungeon crawl to allow the players to get a feel for the rules, while at the same time refresh my memory. The first quest from the rulebook had the Barbarian single handedly defeat a Minotaur that had slain his father and stolen his enchanted sword (Inigo Montoya style). The second foray was where the party had to stop a Skaven attempt to flood a dwarven underground fortress. Unfortunately due to a cave in and the fact that the Dwarf character had lost his pick meant that the quest came to a short, and ultimately fatal end for Karak Azgal. The third and 90% finished quest was to rescue a wealthy merchants daughter from Skaven, by this time the party was up to 6 (the games monster matrix is designed for 4), so I had to ramp up the lethality of the dungeon, (tee hee). The party reached the objective room which contained gutter runners, giant rats and Throat-Rip-Death-Hell my favourite painted Rat Ogre model. Throat-Rip-Death-Hell was at the end of the room guarding the maiden, so the party eventually slew the gutter runners and rats without too much trouble. Then instead of going for the kill, they faffed around with the intention of shooting poor ole Throat-Rip-Death-Hell instead of duking it out with him. Then the dice gods decided that discretion is not the better part of valour and dumped 9 Chaos Warriors on their asses! After two party members have come to within a whisker of death, three Chaos Warriors are slain and Throat-Rip-Death-Hell is raring to go! That is where Sunday nights session ended and the weekend is where we finish it!

Chaos Warriors ruining the adventurers day.

Birds Eye view

One of the more enduring features of the game was that you could take your character from the dungeon and into a warhammer game. This was all very well if you had an Elf, Dwarf or Human but not much cop if you play with one of the evil armies. Luckily there appears to be plenty of people on the web prepared to create rules for them. Now then, as I've stated before one of my favourite things to do with wargaming is making new rules, so with any more preamble here is my first addition to the bestiary of the WHQ world.

Stonelings

Deep in the cavern systems and dungeons of the warhammer world live snotlings, a kind of simple semi humanoid green skinned thug that is a nuisance if not a menace to the intrepid explorers. Despite their small size snotlings are quite resilient to the dangers below, one such example is stoneling. A stoneling is an immature snotling pup that has unfortunately come into contact with the dung of a Cockatrice, Gorgon or Basilisk. Now normally this is a death sentence but something in the snotlings metabolism allows it to frolick with childish glee in the essentially magical feces, but not without a cost. The creature formally known as a snotling is transformed into a stoneling. Stonelings look for all intents and purposes like grey snotlings but are far more dangerous. The stonelings are much tougher than before and also have strong anti magical powers caused by the metamorphosis. Despite (or perhaps even because) of these changes stonelings are very difficult to hit.

Dung frollicking Stonelings

Wounds: 2 
Attacks: 1
Move: 4 
Gold(each): 50
Weapon Skill: 1 
Armour: 2
Ballistic Skill: - 
Damage: 1D6
Strength: 2
Toughness: 2(4)
Initiative: 1

Enemies Weapon Skill	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
To Hit Foe	4	4	5	6	6	6	6	6	6	6

Special Rules: Ambush, Magic A, Gang Up, Magic Drain 5+, Magic Resistance, Small Target.


Small Target: Because Stonelings are extremely small there is a -2 modifier to hit them with a ballistic weapon and a -1 to hit in hand to hand.

It is a fairly safe assumption that once Stonelings are encountered a creature with the ability to petrify won't be far away. On the other hand the Stonelings may have moved on to dungeons new. It all depends on how sadistic a Gamesmaster you are!

So as with all my other fads, all previous painting schedules are being put on the back burner while I prep lots of unrelated roleplayingy figures to add to my ever growing started-but-not-finished heap.
*sighs*

Bare Breasted Barbarian Buxom Beauties!

 My first blog of the year was all very well intentioned, it was supposed to be about what I planned to do with my vast selection of unpainted models, how I was going to come up with some disgracefully unbeatable army lists, build epic scenery that would put Warhammer World to shame and stuff like that. Then I started looking over my meagre viewing stats and came to the following conclusion, if you put tits (or some derivative name for tits) in your blog title then you get more views. My most viewed post 'Mutated Tits Out For The Lads' is proof. Some of the search words used to find my post were 'mutated tits', 'fat hairy tits' and 'mutant tits'. I'll be honest the sort of person who does put that in their search , probably isn't looking for converted 40K miniatures but rather something altogether less pleasant.
Anyway all this digression leads me away from the real subject of this post, some old School Barbarian Ladies from the 1980's that I painted up a long time ago but still quite like.

Behold: Jubblies!

'Oh No! My wizardy robes have come undone just as I was about to fireball the shit out of you!'

This is an old Citadel wizard that I have used mainly for roleplaying purposes but made it on to a few battlefields where magical ability took precedent over common decency.

Very pert Executioner type Barbarian and Peek-a-Boo Sally

The next two are nice characterful topless Barbarians, the one on the right is from Citadel, the one on the left is from Black Tree Designs, but when I bought it they were called Icon , I think. The most remarkable thing about this model is she is wearing a mask to pressumably cover up her hideousness but at the same time show off her impossibly pert norks. Women, eh?

Two Buxom Bare Breasted Barbarian Beauties

 Lastly are another two Citadel barbarian girls, the one on the left almost seems transgendered judging by her mannish face whereas the other is considerable  more feminine. I always feel that they are best suited to dungeon crawls as NPC's. The sort of plot devices that have managed to escape from their cells by outwitting the imbecillic guard, stolen his weapons but decided that there simply isn't enough time to put some clothes on.

The cheeky rear view.

I don't really buy half naked female models anymore, which is unfortunate as they are much fitter these days, but I thought I'd like to share these anyway as models like this just don't get the publicity they deserve!

How crap am I?

Well there is a well (?) known figure painting site called Cool Mini Or Not (or CMON to be really cool) where you rate the painting abilities of fellow figure painting nerds. A long time ago I decided it would be a great ego boost for me to put some of my best stuff up on there to make me feel great and let others see how good I am. Unfortunately after clicking through half a dozen pictures of other peoples efforts I came to the conclusion that my stuff was pretty crap!

Five years on from my initial input I have decided to put a few more up on display, partly because I am an eternal optimist but more so because of the 3 main forums I frequent that allow me to put up a gallery, after a combined total of over 30,000 views, no one has rated a single figure.

Undetered I have decided to post like buggery on there to bring up my average rating. The way I will do this -obviously- is by improving my standard of painting, and photography. Well I have 9 pictures up and by adding them all together and dividing them by 9, I get an average rating of 4.95 per figure. This in itself seems an easy task to improve my average. I mean one decent paint job and I should get into an average rating of 6! Well that is my target to achieve a better than shit average rating for all my CMON piccys.

So in an attempt to understand why the people of CMON don't like my painting I will analyse each of my poorly scoring pictures.

Warpfire Thrower team 4.0

First up is my beloved Warpfire Thrower team. The paintjob is (I think) sound, based with static grass and dirt coloured sand. Ok so gloss varnish was used, that was before I learnt that that was soooo unfashionable! The background is equally uninspiring so I have to agree this should have a low score, but 4.0? That's not fair!

Barbarian #1 4.7

Next is one of my Ginger Barbarian. By this time I had discovered the curved-piece-of-paper-that-hides-the-shadows-at-the-back trick. Nice leather loincloth, static grass reasonable, if somewhat bland skin tones. Me likee. Unfortunately most CMONers don't. Score 4.7

Heartbreaker Ratman Warlord 4.7

This one slightly baffles me. When I finished this Ratman Warlord from Heartbreaker (not a heartbreaker of a model, in case you thought it had in fact; broken my heart) I was made up. The unusual colour of armour was acheived by many different ink washes applied one after another a lovely pallid flesh tone and to top it of a border around the picture. Admittedly it was glossy again with that god awful background, but hey! Nobodies perfect. 4.7 for fuck's sake!

Warzone Demon 4.8

Scoring slightly higher was my Warzone demon. Matt finish, minimal shadows and an attempt at a sculpted base. It only got 4.8 so back to the painting table I guess.

Barbarian #2 4.8

I really liked the way this one came out, the figure is from Black Tree Designs and a real pleasure to paint. He has a nice eyebrow ring which isn't quite pictured and a big bloody sword. Still for all his beauty he still only got a 4.8. Sheeesh!

Barbarian #3 5.0

Woop woop! This is the first figure has has a better that shit rating of, wait for it-5.0. It is also the only one that got a comment (nice leopard skin markings). Perhaps the wood on the axe and shield could have been highlighted more, or his nipples darkened to get that extra 0.2 of a score to make it loved, I just don't know.

Barbarian #4 5.1

of all the Black Tree Barbarians this is by far my favourite, he is quite litterally dripping with axes! Big meaty hands and a bald head, who couldn't love him? I suppose giving him pink nail varnish and a bland skin tone helped to lower his score. Sorry old buddy. 5.1.

Imperial Psyker 5.5

My imperial Psyker scored 5.5 with a gloss finish and shit background, but then he did get a frame so it's swings and roundabouts really. Does it matter that it is ever so slightly blurry?  5.5? Really?

Genestealer Hybrid 6.0

My highest scoring model! Also the most recently painted and photographed. A big lumpy base probably helped too! 6.0, yeah baby! Who knows what he would've gotten with a frame? The sky could've been the limit!

I'm not really sure what conclusions to conclude from this rather patchy data, what I probably should do though is to paint a bit better and stop whining about overly critical peers. Frames will defo help though! Best if I don't paint them as Gingers either.