The Dead Also Rises

There have been a few games here and there over the last few months that we'll need to catch up on, but we have a new entrant to the story - The Undead!  It's been a long time since I've played Undead and these are some of the earliest miniatures I ever painted.  A bunch of them were painted by myself and a buddy in a frantic one-night drybrushing and chestnut ink session before I took them up to the old Philadelphia Games Workshop store for a game the next day. 

Anyway, in our continuing sagaNight Goblin Boss Skragg has found himself second-in-command of first Waaagh Gorfang to now Waaagh Grom the Paunch.  But Grom is a little bit hands off, and leaves Skragg to his own devices from time to time.  Always the opportunist, Skragg led his growing tribe of goblins, the Mad Moons, on a raid of a small hamlet outside Leitzburg.   Little did he know that this sleepy hamlet was the domain of a vampire, Count Dimitri Ptyccin.  Dimitri is a minor vampire count in a sparsely populated area leaving him without much dead to bring forth.  Nevertheless, Dmitri mobilized a small skeleton horde to repel the invading greenskins. 

In this game I played WHFB 4th ed rules, and the Warhammer Magic supplement. Night Goblin general was a Big Boss (hero level) and the Undead general was a Vampire Count (hero level).   NG's had a level 2 shaman (Zom the Third). 

Deployment

Turn 1

Skragg sends the pump wagon contraption along with his new squig hoppers off to the right flank around the trees to try and slow down the skeleton horsemen. The two archer units moved up on the left flank, trying to spread out, while the night goblin spear blocks moved up.  Night Goblin Shaman Zom the 3rd attempted to cast a spell but it fizzled out under the gaze of the vampire Dimitri. 

Skragg ordered his doom diver, The Slinga' to hit the unit of horsemen on their left flank.  The crazy diver got very close but hit the ground just short of the musty skeleton horses. 

Meanwhile, the undead horde shambled forth slowly.  Dimitri attempted to cast a spell and raise additional skeletons, but much to his surprise (and Skragg's, for that matter), the Zom the 3rd's dispel spell worked, and his Waaagh magic power was so great that it destroyed Dimitri's knowledge of the spell!

Turn 2

As usual, the Mad Moons couldn't go very long before having some animosity break out.  The lead archer unit. The Death Stiks, decided the "common gobbos" behind them were just too common for their liking and turn around to shoot at them, killing 3 of them.  The Mooners (spearmen next to the archers) got very distracted by this outbreak and decided to stop moving and start yelling at the Death Stiks.    The Slinga' missed the horsemen again, and Zom's spell was easily dispelled. 

Dmitri powered his horde forward, continuing with his plan to have the horsemen hit the goblin line as soon as possible and see if they fearfully run away. 

Turn 3

Zom the Third sucks up all the winds of magic and casts Total Power Waagh! which was so powerful that Count Dimitri takes a wound.  The Death Stiks unleashed fanatic but he doesn't hit anything.  The squig hoppers hopped just short of the horses (I improbably rolled a 7 for each hopper)

Foot of Gork came down, but the heel managed to just knock the skeletons down but not break them apart.

(double ones on the roll to wound!)

The Horsemen on the Undead right flank reformed to go 8 wide, preparing for the fanatic to run through them.  The rest of the Undead army continued its slow, inevitable advance. Flagger's unleash fanatic to stop the chariot.

Turn 4

Mooners fail animosity again. Squig hoppers hopped over the steeds.  Fanatic went wrong direction and hit the archers killing three, while the other fanatic spun towards the vampire.

Pump wagon slammed into steeds, killed 7!

Archer units unload into the steeds, killing 2, but then the doom diver scores a direct hit, killing two more!

Steeds charge the Death Stikkas and somehow they steel their resolve and hold for the charge.  Horsemen win combat, run them over and slam into the common gobbos.

The chariot charges the Flaggers who pass because Skragg is wearing the Crown of Command, but then the Mooners unleash their fanatic, feeding it the mad cap mushrooms that they were saving.  

Horsemen kill all the pump wagon crew.

Turn 5

Undead: Horsemen win combat, run down the common gobbos off the board. the Mooners roll a 3 and pass panic check no problem but fail animosity.  Flaggers fail animosity as well but charge the chariot defeat in combat. 

Doom diver scores direct hit on skeleton warriors, but only kill one and cause wound on the wight champ.   Zom again gets Total Power, casting Waaagh! again and wounding Count Dimitri - he was one left, but has stored the "Escape" magic card just in case...

On the Undead turn, Dimitri and his unit charge the Flaggers who pass their fear check and they issue double challenges.

Night Goblin champ and the wight duel but fail to cause wounds.  In true Herohammer form, it comes down to the final combat between the generals - Dimitri vs Skragg.  The Vampire Count Dimitri goes first, causes 3 wounds, and defeats Skragg.  

The Night Goblin Flaggers fail the break check automatically, flee and the skeletons run them down causing and the Mooners fail their panic check.  The game is over.  Count Dimitri's skeleton horde has fended off the night goblin attack on his sleepy hamlet, and Skragg needs to sulk back to Grom's leadership hut and hope he doesn't notice...

Warmaster

UPDATE: the fellas over at the very cool gaming site TheMiniaturesPage.com pointed out a slight bit of confusion in this post concerning the "scale" of Warmaster. I referred to Warmaster as "epic-scale Warhammer". This is in terms of the type of large-scale formation/battalion warfare that Epic 40K rules depict, not the exact same scale of miniature size as epic 40K (although i did point this out in the 2nd paragraph of the original post, expecting a potential misunderstanding). But hey, i'll blame that on GW since none of their figs are actually the size of the scale they're supposed to be!
:endUpdate

These are two armies from the release of the Warmaster game, back around 2000. Warmaster was epic-scale Warhammer using the basic rules of Epic 40K. High Elves and Undead were the armies that came with the boxed set.

After my not-so-satisfying speed-painting of the Space Marine and Ork armies that came with the Epic 40K boxed set, I was determined to do a better job with Warmaster. These figs were not quite 6mm; they're probably closer to 10mm (which is typically the case with GW figs: just a little bigger than the scale they're supposed to be).



This meant there was a higher-level of detail and I needed to come up with a better method to paint two entire armies in under 3 weeks, but with enough detail to do the model some justice.

I undercoated everything with black spray paint and for the High Elves, I let that do most of the work. I picked out the major details with color, being careful to leave black as a trim-line. This was much easier with the Warmaster figs than with Epic40K figs (although I got much better at it with practice, and when I returned to Epic figs was able to use the technique successfully).



The Warmaster demo release was much more time compressed than Epic 40K (and that was no picnic). I really only had time for one level of detail, which was why I tried the black trim-line approach. Paint the main colors, pick out the small details, move onto the next stand. There wasn't enough time to apply any further shading for the Elves. But looking back at the figs, and the pics, it really wasn't necessary. Looking at small-scale figs bunched very close together on stands allllll the way down on a gaming table, the black/major-color technique works just fine. And it's definitely "good enough to play".



As usual, The Undead were another matter altogether. Skeletons are the easiest figures to paint. Period. And for Warmaster scale, easy is the name of the game. Again, I spray painted the fig with a black undercoat. Then I rapidly dry-brushed some sort of bone-color right over the entire fig.



After the first dry-brush, I repeated it again with white, trying to focus on the edges of the model. I don't even remember the specific colors used on the bones for these figs, I just remember cranking 'em out in about 2 days.



I picked out the other details when the bones were finished. The Warmaster armies were also the first figs that I employed the sandy-dirt color and green flock basing technique. I was very pleased with how it turned out.



Below is a zoom in on the skeleton archers.



After I took these pictures I found the two "leader" models for the High Elves and Undead in the back of my miniature display case. I was never really happy with how they turned out, so I'll spare The Internets from their bandwidth.