The Gut'Reapa' (orcs and gobs army, probably image heavy soon)

[Lorcryst]

That's a bit of bad luck, there are actually three different bodies for the Chaos Trolls ... all three equally ugly, mind, but they do add a bit of variety (I have six of those Trolls, with the weapon and head options you can make a varied unit).

[Urgat]

Ah, darn. Ah well >>

[Urgat]

Here is something different I'm working on:


This is the first prototype of what I'll pompously call my High Grade Cardboard Scenery line (). So, it's just a road, printed on cardboard (13cm wide, so a bit larger than a unit of 25mm bases ranked 5 wide). But it's got three layers! These layers give relief to the usual cardboard stuff. Cardboard buildings, I've got a lot of them. They're cheap, and, when well made, look very good, sometimes better than plastic or resin buildings because they can have so many details, and w/o having to spend hours to paint them. Their only fault is that they're desperatly flat. So what I'm working on now is to make cardboard buildings with some relief.
First is that road set, because one has to start somewhere, because it is simpler to do that a building, and because I have none, and have never found any convincing one anywhere. So this set will include a few different road sections (they tile perfectly, btw), a cross section, a T section, and a couple curves (right and left, you can't just rotate them or it won't tile and it won't look as cool).
Next will be a graveyard, with the yard itself, the (removable) tombs juting out of the ground, with tombstones, a statue in the middle (or wherever one would want to place it), and walls.
Anyway it's a lot of work, even for just that single prototype, it took me hours to make XD (I'm making all that in 3D, in fact, in order to have realistic reflexions, shadows and materials). The final version of that road set will have more stones jutting out or recessing in the ground. I might even add a 4th layer. The soil will also be on the first layer.
So I'm thinking of making some money out of that, actually. I'll see if I can set up some sort of online store, and sell all that as PDF on the cheap (5€ grand max, unless it's some crazy building needing 20 sheets and 100 hours to create, maybe >>). Would you people be interested in such stuff?

[Lorcryst]

I would probably buy that ... I'm also making buildings and scenery out of cardboard (frozen pizza boxes, to be precise), but I'm just cutting, glueing and painting them, nothing as complicated as that bit of road ...

Still, according to my gaming friends, my small house, towers and small fort look great, so I'm quite proud of what I made

[Urgat]

Complicated, heh?



THAT is complicated
Well I wish I could say I'm happy with it, but, unfortunately, I'm not. Oh, it looks cool, no doubt... It also takes over one hour and a bloody sore wrist just to get to the stage pictured above. So yeah, looks neat, but is it really worth the effort? Making one is fine, but making a couple dozen of these? I'm not sure if it's a good idea anymore. They look pretty good in the simple, flat version now, if I may say so, anyway...

[mrtn]

Having to cut out those precis stones, and then having to colour in the edges seems like quite the job. Looks good, though.

[Urgat]

Yeah, it is, though, at least, most stones are actually blocks of stone, you just cut the gaps. Anyway, does anybody see himself doing that for a whole set, or am I just wasting my time doing something so complicated when I could do a simple set with like a dozen different sections? Which one would you prefer? Common people, I need opinions there.

[Lorcryst]

Well, I'm officialy mad (totally bonkers, even), but I would take the time to make those ... provided I had the templates, I'm very very bad at drawing ...

[Urgat]

Well, I mean with those templates I did (it's two sheets per road section btw).

[Urgat]

Hop, last shot of my sneaky gits before painting:

[Urgat]

To get done with this:

So this section will remain a one of a kind prototype.
And this:

is the next try, hopefuly the good one. It's got three much simpler layers. The first one is a white base with the central gutter showing, the second on is the road propper, the third and last one goes above the second one's white areas on the two longer borders, it's the edges (the little squarish stones).
The first layer will also have a couple big dents on each end so road sections join well and don't move off the moment you touch them. Apart from some jigsaw motion for the edges, the cut part is straight lines, very simple. Should take less than a minute to cut it all, mlet's say two minutes to make a section.

[Urgat]

Hop, nothing particularly exciting this time, just two herders I had lying around and finally decided to paint:

[Txan]

Nice, and i see you changed ur pic

[Urgat]

Lol, why the sad face? XD

[Txan]

I dont like da stunties...

[Urgat]

Bah, it's just that I am in a "chaos dwarf" phase, it'll be back to some greenskin soon enough

[Txan]

Good, I do love ur greenies so

[Urgat]

Well, I intended to post a batrep tonight, but the battle was so fast and one-sided it served little purpose, so I'll post a mini bat-rep here instead:

Battlesize: 1020 points (the 20 are so we could take what we wanted, we often do that)

Me:
Big beasts army:
Chaos sorcerer Lvl 2 (no magic item), general of the army (to have a second Ld bubble): death lore spells 3 and 5
Throgg

two units of 5 hounds

3 units of 4 trolls

1 giant troll (giant)

My opponent:

2 exalted champions (no magic items), one is teh general
1 lvl 2 sorcerer with power familier (+1 powerdice), fire lore burning head and conflagration

12 chaos warriors (exalted champ n°1 goes there)

20 or something marauders (exalted general goes there)

5 mounted marauders

2 spawns

3 ogres with great weapons.

He had to deploy first, from my left to my right, he put the spawns, the mounted marauders, the chaos warriors, the ogres, the sorcerer and the marauders.
I put the first hounds, the sorcerer, first unit of trolls, second unit of trolls, Throgg, giant, third unit of trolls and second unit of warhounds.

It basically went like that:

Iget first turn.

on the left flank, the mounted marauders and one of the spawns blocked my hounds and my first unit of trolls (other spawn goes towards the middle). Hounds charged the marauders, marauders fled, spawn charges hounds and makes them flee (destroyed by forest), trolls charge the spawn, get stubborn and ward save 4+, kill spawn on second turn. They then fail their stupidity test and do nothing worthwile after that.
The sorcerer fiascoes on the first turn, loses a wound and ends the phase. He kills two chaos warriors on turn 2 and 2 more on turn 3 with the D6 S4 spell. Never gets a chance to cast the other spell.

In the middle:
trolls and throgg get on the hill in the middle, chaos ogres charge the trolls that went stupid on turn 2, second spawn goes sideway and engage at the same time. Throgg doesn't join the fight. Trolls make the ogres flee (they never rally regardless of general nearby at the end), and spawn is killed in the second round of fight (damn, says my friend who was open to a rear charge on the fleeing ogres, but trolls get stupid later). Mounted marauders rally around there and move towards my right flank, in front of Throgg, thinking themselves safe coz the marauders are nearby and Throgg is alone, and therefore won't dare move forward. Silly horsemen. Throgg uses the one use flame template vomit on them, kills 4, survivor holds (I don't remember what happens to him after that, but he dies at some point. edit: ah yeah, I remember, my trolls who get stupid walk right into him). Ogres keep fleeing, finally run through the chaos warriors, who fail their panic test twice and run.

Right flank: trolls go towards marauders, giant and hounds go around to flank them. Enemy sorcerer casts conflagration every turn, removes a wound on middle unit of trolls, two on right unit of trolls, and two wounds on Throgg. He finally casts burning head on the middle unit of trolls, they get a wound and fail their panic test.
Trolls and giant charge the marauders. Trolls give a few wounds, take none in return. I say that it'd be nice if my giant yelled. He's nice enough and complies, so the marauders and general don't fight, but don't flee either.
Second round of fight, trolls lose one, kill a few marauders in return. I say it'd be nice if my giant decided to jump. My opponent laughs as I roll jump up and down, giant doesn't fall and kills a handful more marauders; now outnumbered, they autobreak, run through the sorcerer who flees off the battlefield with them.
Ogres get off the board too, chaos warriors raly right on the border of the table, but they're all alone on the battlefield. I've lost 5 hounds and a troll or two, so he concedes.

Well, what can I say? I won mostly because my opponent failed most of his panic tests, really (even though we though for about half the battle that exalted champions were Ld9, and despite the reroll). As usual, his ogres were totally useless, and my trolls performed well. Magic was even. We agreed that maybe a giant in such a small battle is a bit too much, though.
Yet we quite enjoyed the battle, a troll army (and fully painted too ) looks really nice, shame my hounds were a mish mash of dark eldar warp hounds, old direwolves and older and oldest (cow and metal) cold ones.

[mrtn]

Congratulations on the win, now get some nice doggies and an army shot.

[Urgat]

Well, I got so many things to work on, I'm afraid chaos hounds are not to be before a long, long time... I've just bought myself a unit of 10 metal chaos dwarfs with blunderbusses... Yet I still have at least 20 savage orcs, 60 night gobs, 10 forest gobs, 18 hobgobs, I don't know how many wolf riders, and older models that were never finished (giants, chimera), to paint.
And yesterday my girldfriend gave me the big boss on gigantic spider for my b-day (gosh, those things go on 50*50mm bases? they're even worse than I thought :/).
And then I'm getting side-tracked by other projects:
my cardboard road set, which should be done soon, for instance, or that (disclaimer: NONE of the buildings in the following picture have been designed by me, I just d/led -when free- or bought them -when not- and built them):

Well, it looks mightily unimpressive on this picture, but it's very large in reality (an ogre can walk on these castle walls). That's half my cardboard buidlings, and I left aside everything that was made in harder material. All that easily covers a good 2/5 of a largish battlefield.
Well anyway, I still got hundreds of points of greenskins to paint, hundreds of points of chaos dwarfs, basically my whole dark elf and ogre armies too...
I wonder if I'll ever see an end to this? And there I was thinking my greenskin army was almost complete, a few months ago...