Wizard House

My local wargames club are always on the lookout for new scenery, but we have a very small number of club members who are willing to build or paint the pieces. Our scenery also tends to take quite a bashing from the club members. So when looking for new terrain recently I was looking for a ready made piece that would be nice and robust.

With this in mind I elected to buy the "wizards House" made by Ziterdes.

The model comes as a single piece, therefore no assembly is required. It is also made of hard foam and so will be very resistant to the level of abuse my club members can hand out. The only things that put me off when buying was the price and the uninspiring paint job that is given to the model.

The Manufacturer have chosen to undercoat (poorly) the model in grey and the roof in a dark red. This takes the eye away from what is a pretty nice model.

After giving it a good undercoat it is a whole different model.

What I love most of all with this model are the great details.
 
The model includes quite a good broom, a great bird box and quite a fun lunch table.

All in all, very strongly recommended.
 

Scenery

I have made scenery from a number of manufacturers.....

28mm scenery:

Scratchbuilt:

Turn marker

Charnel Pits and WIP

Jungle Terrain

Wood bases

Bridge and Castle

Pegasus hobbies:

River

Ruined Towers

The square:
Egyptian/ Tomb kings

Ziterdes:
Wizard House

Time for a few more rats

The thing about a Skaven army is that you can never have too many rats.

With this in mind it is time to add a few more furry criters with pointy sticks.

Nothing too smart or original, but I am keeping with the army colour scheme, so on masse they should look OK.

Is this wysiwyg enough? Engineer with Doomrocket

There is a very simple tactic that can be used with a Skaven Engineer. Look, I will admit it, it makes me feel a little dirty, and no, I am the first to admit it, I learnt about it by reading a forum, not by careful study. However after being mind-razoured more times than I can count, it is time to embrace the cheese..

The play works like this...

Equip a Skaven Warlock Engineer with a doomrocket. It will cost you only 45 points!

Start him within 12" of a Grey Seer.

Turn one, use the skitterleap spell to place the Rocket carrier to the side of the Enemy's line and fire using only 4 dice. The rocket will go 14" almost every time, drops a large template which causes S5 hits. It will pay for itself almost every time and almost never misfires!

The rules ask that my figures are wysiwyg as much as possible and so to counteract the cheese, I thought I would make the figure as obvious as possible.

To achieve this I took a clan rat with spear and added a rocket from the crew of the Empire Helstorm rocket battery. I added a small length of guitar wire as a fuse and fixed a torch from the Empire flagellant set with the end of a paperclip. There you have it, one Engineer with rocket.

I had a slight spot of bother when I tried to mould the plastic of the flame over a naked flame. It all started to melt and turned to mush, but I think I have got away with it on the finished model and it holds it all in place.

The lit rat comes from the IoB warpfire thrower.

The lit fuse was enhanced by two pieces of static grass fixed to the end to represent the light. Bit of a happy accident, but goes OK. Hope you enjoy...

Skaven gutter runners, better when painted

Last time I had started to paint two units of five gutter runners. Since then the paint brush has been put to use and I now hove two units complete with movement trays to show off...

I built the bases so that I could easily move them around on the battlefield. It is simply a piece of plastic card with foam card built up on top then based in the normal way.

As with all of my Skaven these are painted in the Clan Septik, with the colour of the outfits matching the respective rank or status. These are low ranking, so are quite yellowy/brown.

The rest is fairly conventional. Hope you enjoy.

Skaven gutter runners: A start is made

Next on the list of desirable Skaven (if there is such a thing) are a unit or two of Gutter runners.

Who could resist the chance of having a couple of units of vermin complete with slings and poison running around creating mayhem. Well not me for one, the scout rule alone is sufficient reason, just to mess with the thinking of my opponents. These cheeky chaps follow the conventional approach of clanrats with the slings bitz pack. Not difficult and it works very well.

So far I have assembled the boys. You should spot a couple of the actual gutter runner figures in amongst them. looking back I don't think they add anything and I would have been better off with the clanrats entirely ...

I then blasted them with undercoat. I almost always go with black, beacuse I am convinced it goes on better and you cannot tell the difference when you have finished.

I have started the process of painting, by adding on the basic colours. As the remainder of the army, I have elected to have darker rags for the lower order rats, so these boys are going to be pretty shabby...