We continued our Warhammer Quest campaign today with @wobin by defeating the mighty Vargskyr!
It was a very interesting variation on the standard journeys: instead of the hostiles we faced being randomly selected from the encounter deck, we started out with all six corpse rats and all six dire bats, divided into two groups, plus the Vargskyr itself. The Vargskyr didn't start on the battlefield and they represented it striking stealthily from the shadows by making its activation involve rolling the D12 and whichever of the lychgates (the red door things on the edges of the tiles) was on the die, the hero closest to that would just straight up take a damage, no saving throw or anything. To actually get it to come out in order to damage it, you had to get to the "mysterious objects", which are the skeletons and the columns with the raven on top, at which point it'd pop out and absolutely wallop the hero that activated it, then vanish as soon as any damage was done to it, and you'd have to get to the next mysterious object, and so on.
It started out looking VERY rough, almost everyone was at half health quite quickly, but thankfully we were able to rally and once we got through the initial hostiles that started on the battlefield we had some very lucky rolling where the hostiles _didn't_ respawn when it was their turn to activate. After that it was a case of getting enough damage onto the Vargskyr which we were able to do (and once all the mysterious objects were gone it'd remain on the battlefield so we could really wail on it).
So now we're all at Level 2, so there'll be more hostiles to face, and the Vargskyr will actually potentially come back as one of the hostiles drawn from the encounter deck when we play our next regular game! 😬
My Kill Team terrain is DONE! Absolutely fucking stoked at how good it looks, I even painted the screens up to look like, well, screens! Other than the screens, all I did to the rest of it was a drybrush of Ironbreaker plus the rust pigment. I wasn't looking forward to having to individually apply pigment fixer to everything but fortunately using a solid thick coat of matte varnish via the airbrush has done the trick just as well, and with far less effort. The hazard stripes above the doors look so good too, and I made sure I dabbed them with rust pigment so they looked properly worn like the rest of it.
Another game of Warhammer Underworlds, @yayKM took the Gorechosen of Dromm again and after last game I realised that horde warbands really don't work against the Gorechosen so I went for the undead majesty of the vampires of the Crimson Court.
It wasn't looking great for the vampires at the end of Turn 2, but a couple of lucky rolls on my part meant the game ended up with none of my vampires dead, all three of the Gorechosen wiped off the board, and I ended up winning 14-8.
We got this furry little scruffball ten years ago today!
I washed his blankets today, @yayKM made his bed all nice and flat, and he had to completely ball up the blanket and make a headrest instead.
Also after our last game of Kill Team (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2542), I decided I wanted to add a bit of extra pizzazz to my Into The Dark terrain because it looked a bit dull next to my friend's set that he put a fair bit more effort into.
One of the things he did that I particularly liked was adding hazard stripes to all the walls above where the doors are, because it's VERY easy to miss the fact that there's a door there and suddenly your opponent opens one right next to one of your operatives and you're like "...oh, shit." Very happy with my hand-painting efforts for the hazard stripes here, I also did some drybrushing with silver (I had done zero drybrushing at all until this point) and used the MIG brand rust pigment to add some extra grime and wear, and it looks mint. Left is before, right is after.
Now I just have approximately twelve million more pieces of this terrain to do. 😅
After our last game of Kill Team (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2542) I figured I should probably paint up my Plague Marine who has the double plague knives because he's a beast in close combat and against Genestealers my ranged Marines weren't super-useful. I re-primed him using a zenithal highlight and got him fully painted this weekend, and am very happy with how he came out! There's zero drybrushing except on the sand on the base, it's entirely Contrast paints and manual highlighting.
I also realised that I've been painting Plague Marines long enough that I have essentially the three stages of evolution of my painting technique. On the left in the second photo is one of my first Plague Marines from nearly six years ago now, using regular paints which looks fine but takes so long. In the middle is my second batch from eighteen months ago where I was using Contrast paints to greatly speed things up, but still had a plain white undercoat and the highlighting was still done by way of drybrushing. And on the right is this latest guy, with the full zenithal undercoat and manual highlighting!
My eyesight is definitely still very good, but I _do_ need extra magnification when I'm painting eyeballs on my miniatures because they're so damn tiny (the best technique is to paint the whole eyeball black, then put a white dot at the very left and right so you just have the black in the middle looking like the pupil). I've had a magnifying glass on a arm attached to the side of my painting table for a few years and it helps but even with that I've been finding it tricky, it doesn't quite magnify enough without ending up with the end of the paintbrush awkwardly close to the magnifying glass.
A friend has a set of those headset magnifying thingies, so I looked at a bunch and bought a set for myself, from https://visionaidmagnifier.com. It's got a couple of LEDs in it and there was the choice of a USB-rechargeable one or a 3x AAA battery one, so I went with the latter since I'm very unlikely to need any additional lighting given how brightly lit my painting table is. The handiest bit is that it comes with five different magnification strengths and you can easily swap them out, change the angle, and move them closer or further away from your eyes.