Zone Mortalis Board Painting

Hello,

Long time follows maybe aware that I have been gathering up a Forgeworld Zone Mortalis Board. Well over the last 2ish years I have spent a ridiculous amount of time finally getting it painted!

Thankfully one of friends leant a hand and did an awful lot of work to help me with the base colours! So thank you!!

We started with spray cans! Many spray cans! 2 large Halfords grey primers, 4 cans of Halfords silvers and another 1 and half of a lighter silver.

The grey primer laid down.

Next up a dark silver spray can all over the tiles. 

Then a zenith with the lighter silver on all the walls and vents to give them a nice fade. 

Unbelievable this part only took an afternoon to complete! Let me tell you, I was feeling pretty good about the painting at this point! How wrong can you get!! 

Next we spent a really long time filling in all the floor tiles by hand. Yes we did all 24 tiles by hand at this point. We spent a good long while discussing how to proceed with this and ultimately decided that by hand would be the neatest option and the least likely way to end up requiring touch ups on the silvers. This was so long! Each tile took about an hour to fill the floor. We used about 6-8 pots of GW Zandri Dust. This very nearly tipped me over the edge of quitting painting it all! 

With that done we then had to do the walls! We did this the same way as above. This was at least quicker than the floor but still took a good 30 minutes per tile. 

It was great to get to the end of this part! The end sort of felt in sight, that is until you start listing the bits that need doing! Next I filled in all the 'pipes' on the top of the tiles with Hushnut Copper. Surprising quick this step! 

Next was the messy part. I created a wash (with Drake's recommendation) of Nuln Oil, Agrax earthshade and Lahmian Medium. I brought 4 pots of each and poured them into a small Clip Lock box for ease. I slapped this on all over the tiles! I started with the floors, left them to dry then went back and did the walls. I did it that way to avoid tilting the tiles with the floor or walls washed in the hopes of avoiding the wash drying oddly. 

Then it was onto the airbrushing. I filled each floor and wall part in with Vallejo Bone white. Spraying carefully to avoid the silvers and leaving the zandri dust showing slight around the edges. Again this took at least 30 minutes a tile. I made sure a sprayed the walls from above with the Bone White to create a fading effect. 

Dry brushing was next. I used Runefang steel, I think, to dry brush all of the silver left showing. I was careful to do my best to avoid the now finished floor and walls. After this a used Abaddon black to stipple around all the large and small vents found on the tiles, as well as the cables.  This was to create a sooty wore look around them. 

Then I airbrushed the lights around all the walls. I used a selection of Vallejo reds to do this, Starting close to the light and pulling the airbrush back to create a OSL type look to them. I added in a lighter red on top, mainly just over the light and then added a quick orange as a final highlight on the light itself. 

Lastly I painted the details. The Eagles found on various parts of the walls with the Hashnut again and the small terminals with some greens, whites and reds. 

This is a final tile. 

The whole board set up.

Some closer ups of it set up.

The final thing to do was the doors! I did these in the same way as the walls. Luckily I had just enough paint left in the spray cans! 

I started in September 2017 and had the board done without doors in August 2018. I didn't paint any other models in that time. I added the doors this year in february, which took a couple of days. 

Overall it was a right pain in the arse to paint!! A never ending pit of despair!! Many times I thought about giving up. It really put me off painting and the hobby as a whole for good long while. Having said that, it does look fantastic on a table and it is great to play on! So that has sort of balance the pain back out! 

I will definitely be looking to purchase terrain pre painted from now on! I love painting but I found this a real chore and it lost me my passion for painting. 

I would recommend thinking twice about this if you're going to it. Yes it looks amazing on when done but it is a major commitment and will really suck away a huge portion of your hobby time! I didn't really think about it when I brought it all, as it is so awesome. However knowing what I know now I'm not sure that if I was to do it again if I would.

Then again it looks seriously cool and I'm really pleased with it! I love playing on it!

Has anyone else painted a Zone Mortalis? Did you find it as horrible as me?

Darien

Weekly Progress Report: 21-04-2019

Hi all

Have a look at what we have been up to.

Darien has been building more for his Night Lords project. This week getting 10 Tartaros Terminators built. 

Having had very little hobby time this week, Ikthelion has just about managed to add some recess shading to the turret of his Sicaran.

Hector has mass produced a whole bunch of his marines as he showed yesterday and has made a start on doing his bases for his army

Drake has been working on his Warbringer this week. It is coming along well, but he wishes it was quicker!!

Mass producing marines

Hi everyone,

I've been building all my marine in preparation for a mass priming session. To try to ensure that all marines are built to the same quality, I've implemented my batch building process again like I did with my titans and this lead to me requiring a bigger organiser case.

Each of the sections a little pots in the new box so I was able to separate out the individual parts (or sets of parts and/or sub-assemblies) and be able to work through each set cleaning and otherwise preparing them prior to building - again to make sure the quality was consistemt through out so was able to remove mould lines prior to building in a more organised and quicker fashion.

All in all, this took about 3 evenings to work through which is quick for me as building 4 sets of marines takes an evening per squad for me. I must warn you though, as you may have already guessed, it makes some of it a bit monotomous (cleaning 40 sets of legs in a row does get a bit tiresome) but its worth the effort.

I've built as a result 3 veteran tactical squads who will ride in my rhinos and be all-rounders and a tactical support squad with volkite caveliers for some slightly longer range anti-infantry firepower holding an objective.

Next up, bases!

Until next time,

Hector Cephas

The War for Antemurale - A Narrative Campaign

Hello!

I have been busy at late creating a narrative campaign to run at my local club; The Bastion Gaming Club in Basingstoke. A few of us at the club have been keen 30k gamers for a long time but have not played that many games recently. So as away to encourage us to get models on the table and push army painting on, along with getting others at the club involved, I set out to make a narrative campaign.

I had played a fantastic event in Norwich with the team from 'Conflict Norwich'. I decided this would be a great place to start and got in touch with them, they very kindly sent me a load of the material that they had used for the event. The event ran smoothly and was straight forward to play in. These were the key things I was looking for to keep it simple for our members as quite a few hadn't played 30k before.

First up was setting up a narrative and location for the campaign to take place, so with the help of Drake and Ikthelion we created the Antemurale System.

This awesome piece of work was done by Drake. It lays out the system and the war zones to be found in it. With the system in place, up next was creating some fluff to go with it. So here is the opening paragraphs of the campaign pack;

Confusion now reigned over the galaxy. 

The events at Istvaan III and V had shaken the Imperium to it’s core.The bright future that the armies of the Imperium had been fighting for was now in doubt. Brother had turned on Brother. Legion had turned on legion. Civil War was beginning to consume the galaxy. 

The galaxy was starting to burn.

The days, weeks and months following the tragic betrayal of the Warmaster, were full of confusion. Trust, that once was never doubted, now was. Alliances were being formed and broken across Star Systems and Sectors of space as the various forces declared who they now fought for.

No one remained untouched by treachery.

In the Antemurale system a large selection of forces had mustered in preparation for a campaign of compliance in the wider Lepus Sector. The world of Antemurale Prime had been brought to compliance in a bitter fight that had turned much of the Hive world into a ruin. The peace the planet had only just found was about to shatterer as the civil war arrived in the system with it’s full fury. 

Darkness and betrayal had arrive in Antemurale.

This set the scene. Next I wanted expand on this by giving each of the locations a different feel to the others, so I created a brief backstory them all that explains what value they are to forces on each side of the conflict. Using the war zones laid out in Conquest and those used by the Conflict Norwich team, I gathered up the ones that would best represent the locations in the system. Below is a sample of one of the pages from the finished pack detailing some of the war zones that will be in use.

Lastly was setting out the rules for the campaign. As it is to be run at the club with varying levels of experience I wanted to keep it simple. So it is simply Traitors vs Loyalists and the side that earns the most campaign points will be the ultimate winner. I really liked the scoring system used by Conflict Norwich, so I made use of this system. 

The campaign is intended to be story driven so having several ways to score campaign points is key to help keep the power gaming low. While winning earns a good amount of campaign points, It is entirely possible to lose a game but actually earn your side more points. The picture below is the campaign scoring box from the pack. 

Characters are key to all great stories and each player was asked to bring along a non-unique character to progress through the campaign. Using a variation of the Conquest Campaign system and the one created for the Conflict Norwich event, I laid out a set of progression rules and ways for each character to gain extra abilities and stats. Each character gets one upgrade at the start of the campaign, as well as generating a warlord trait for the whole campaign rather than rolling each game. 

I am also asking the players to record the awesome (and not so awesome!) feats that their character does across the course of the campaign so that I can share them here and on our clubs Facebook page. 

With all this hard work put into the campaign pack we wanted the players to have something special to take home and use during its course so we got the pack printed and bound. 

Game one has now been played, with 10 players on the first day and another 2 coming to join for game 2. As several of those playing hadn't player 30k in a long time or not at all we had a game of doubles to help those who need to know or remember how to play! The points level were small to help with the learning, at 1000 points each. I also didn't make use of the war zone traits yet to keep it simple. The points will increase with each game and I will gradually add in the extra rules as players gain more confidence with the ruleset. 

It was a quiet night for the characters, with their armies causing the bulk of damage, so no cool stories to tell yet. We do have a nice selection of legions playing and they should create some fun match ups!

Once the dust had settled, it was clear it was a bloody fight! The Traitors ended up coming away with the early lead; 20-15. 

Have any of you run or played in a narrative campaign? What was your favourite part or suggestion you could offer? 

Darien

Weekly Progress Report: 14-04-2019

Hi all

Have a look at what we have been up to.

Darien has been continuing work on his Night Lords. He finished assembling 30 Terror Marines. He also built a character to go with the army for use in a narrative campaign at his local gaming club. 

Hector has been busy building terminators this week and will hopefully have more Thousand Sons to show later in the week. He's built a praetor in tartaros terminator armour, a 5 man tartaros terminator squad whose sergeant can be swapped for his standard bearer to form a command squad and his Sekhmet terminators.

Ikthelion has broken out the airbrush this week to get some blue on his Ultramarines Arcus Strike Tank and a converted Praetor model.

I have been playing with my new 3D printer. It is a Anycubic Photon SLA/DLP printer which is remarkably easy to use (post processing is a fair bit less though lol).

 This is after having mixed results with the PLA printer I dabbled with previously.

The lines are fantastically sharp and detailed. I am still learning it's capabilities / limitations though. Hopefully you will see more of it soon :)

Hector Cephas - Thousand Sons Characters

Hiya,

Just thought I would show some of my characters that I've put together while I wait for an opportune moment to get stuff primed and ready to be painted and otherwise a quick update on where I've got to.

As you will have seen in my update from last week, I've made this standard bearer for my tartaros terminator command squad - for those who read my previous list of units for my Thousand Sons, yup, the list has expanded to include some tartaros terminators with scarab occult bits to make them look part of the thousand sons legion without being so heavily ornamented that they may not look like normal terminators as I gave myself the option to field a 5 man terminator squad or a 5 man command squad (aka, I have an alternative sergeant model!). I also made some characters from a box of scarab occult terminators anyway as the sorcerer from that set looked like he'd make a great praetor model as an alternative to the cataphractii one pictured at the top of the post. For those interested in the greenstuff work I am doing on this army, I will be putting up another post in the coming weeks covering this conversion plus other stuff that I am doing too.

Another character model that I've converted is the chaplain model from the Betrayal at Calth set. Quite a simple conversion really - I replaced the plasma pistol with a hand from the Grey Knights strike squad set, the robe bits are from the Scarab Occult set (just snipped them off the sorcerer torso and filed them to fit) and pinned one of the spare swords from the Khenetai Occult upgrade set to the haft of the chaplains power maul to turn it into a heka staff like the one on Ahriman.

I've upgraded my separator box for this project - there just wasn't enough slots for all the bits I need for build all of my marines in batch but this one was a lot more accommodating. I've started the process of building everything, it won't be long at all until it is all built!

Speaking of things that are built - now there are three rhinos and their bigger brother will be coming out to play soon too!

Until next time.

Hector Cephas