Hi-yaaaa, Termie

Shield Wall!

Which is of course how Miss Piggy greets the First Company of any given Space Marine chapter.

This week sees the first of the Crypt Angels in Tactical Dreadnought Armour. There's plenty more of them to come, delivered by hand by Mighty Kas himself only last week.

They're conversions, as always - a mix of Grey Knight bodies with weapons from the Dark Angel Deathwing Knights kit. Massive power weapons and shields are the order of the day, then.

They're nice models, but I don't have much to say about them. Seen one Terminator, seen them all, in general - although I enjoyed painting them, and it's fun to see how much bigger they are than my only remaining Terminators, 80s lead ones.

I Have The Power! Mace.

Standard paintjob for the Chapter - sprayed black, drybrushed with greys, then the red and brass painted in afterwards.

As Kas was here, we did a bit of gaming. Dwarf King's Quest is nearly ready to ship (supposedly), and we were both hankering for some dungeon bashing. So we did a co-op raid on a Bugbear fortress, using Pathfinder rules. The set-up was a time pressure attack, to kill the leader of a goblinoid bandit clan before they could attack a passing refugee caravan.

Using level 6 characters, we randomised the contents of four dungeon levels. I got over-excited, and once we'd picked models I started basing them before we'd even rolled their stats.

Call me Little Red Riding Hood once more, and I'll shank you.

Level one saw us trying to find the secret entrance to the fortress, guarded by lots of rubbish goblins and one super-hard Bugbear Barbarian, who almost wiped us out after we miscalculated his threat rating.

Apparently he was probably the equal of the party all by himself. Oops. 

We didn't manage to kill him, just fled before he wiped us. He did take an arrow to the knee, in the process. Which was nice.

Level two was a sneak through a treasure-laden dungeon, the lair of a massive Black Pudding. We didn't manage much sneaking, it spotted us and we scattered. My Barbarian scattered the wrong way, into the darkness without a lantern, and got eaten in short order.

Sometimes you eat the pudding, sometimes it eats you.

A man down, we stormed through level three - a heavily locked and guarded door. Kas's Summoner gave us all invisibility, and with the aid of that, my Halfling Rogue picked the locks, stabbed the nearest guard in the back, and everyone else ran for the exit before the garrison arrived.

This guy carries his anvil to battle on his back. This is not a good example of practical thinking.

On the final level, we faced the (randomly generated) boss - a two-headed troll. It tore Kas's Dwarven Warpriest in half before we could do much about it, but between the impregnable mage armour of the Summoner and the flanking sneak attacks of my Rogue, we managed to floor the regenerating horror long enough to administer a coup de grace.

Summoner! He killed the boss, so he gets the extra time spent on the paintjob instead of levelling up.

I'm not usually a fan of light sourcing. I reckon it usually only looks good if the model is placed in the right lighting conditions - these photos show that it works, certainly. But that's with the benefit of a bright flash. The rest of the time, he looks a bit too dark and rather weirdly coloured. I'm glad I tried it, though, it's good to know it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

So Fantasy is rather top place, this week - I shall get back into the Marine backlog next, with some vehicles and Tac squaddies.