Hordes of the Things for 40K

It's not an original idea, but I've been thinking for a while of creating some Hordes of the Things armies from various accumulated 40K miniatures. A few judicious additions to the heaped-up plastic will need to be made, but I'm hoping to get four largish armies painted up in the next few weeks. The goal is a big game of HotT with some old friends later in the year.

Not quite finished, but getting there ...

The assumed figure scale of HotT is unstated but large. So most of these elements will do their fighting in close combat only; the two orks on a base represent several hundred or more, and the short ranges of 40K weapons mean that most shooting will be factored into the base-to-base clashes. 'Shooter' elements, like the terminator with the assault cannon above, are exceptions.

A great deal of the fun of HotT comes from fitting particular miniatures into the game's 20 element types. The orks will be 'warbands' for the most part, and ordinary space marines will be 'blades'. The big terminator base above will serve as a 'phalanx' using these variant rules. Imperial guard, colonial militias and any other normal human types will be 'hordes'.

Then there are bikes ('riders' or 'knights'?), tanks ('knights' or 'behemoths') and dreadnoughts ('behemoths'). Jetpacked troops can serve as 'flyers' or 'aerial heroes'. And demons of various sorts can be pressed into service as 'dragons' and 'gods' in HotT terms.

There's something pleasing about multi-based miniatures - and these HotT elements will also work well for 'large skirmish' games such as The Men Who Would Be Kings and Rampant. As my 'shooters' are all individually based figures, they'll serve to make up the odd numbers in those games as casualties mount. And it's a lot easier to move six multiple bases than 12 individual miniatures.

Chameleon-men

Our big discovery of the holidays was Daniel Mersey's The Men Who Would Be Kings. It's similar to the same author's Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant games, but it also differs in some interesting ways that go beyond period flavour. The rules are designed for nineteenth-century colonial warfare, but we played them using red-armoured sci-fi orcs as colonialists and pallid fantasy orcs as 'natives'. 

Those games went well enough, and the colonial orcs have since been equipped with a field gun. But I thought we could do with some more interesting tribal types for the high-tech orcs to fight. 

'Tribals' in The Men Who Would Be Kings are typically fielded in units of 16, and a normal force might conceivably have eight such units. So the numbers point to recruitment from the ranks of the owned but unpainted rather than new purchases. Looming largest in those ranks are various reptile and amphibian humanoids. I have quite a lot of the old Citadel Slann - perhaps enough for three or four units - and lots of lizardmen of various sorts.

Among those are these chameleon men, which I bought second hand a couple of years ago. They're from an out-of-production boxed wargame called Carnage, and came with some lizard-mounted cavalry (whose amphibian riders might work as Slann) and some crocodilian swordsmen. I think there are about eight of each infantry type and ten of the cavalry. The Men Who Would Be Kings has an option for playing half-size units ('Skirmish Kings'), so the two sorts of infantry would give me either a combined unit of 16 or two cut-down groups for the abbreviated version. Or they could just mix in with the many heterogenous reptilians I've amassed over the years: reptilian auxiliaries of the amphibious Slann.

I painted the first couple up very quickly last night. They're undercoated in black gesso, painted Vallejo silver-grey all over, then drybrushed white. All the rest is Citadel contrast paint, followed by some black lining and highlights only on the eyes, teeth and horns. If the rest prove as quick, I shoudl have that first unit of tribals done very shortly.

Speed-painted space orks

I'm not normally one for painting orcs green, although I occasionally make exceptions. But when it comes to orks ... well, why not?

These fellows are for Xenos Rampant, Richard Cowen's sci-fi variant of Dan Mersey's Dragon Rampant, which looks a lot of fun. I have a game scheduled with a few old friends in a couple of months, so need an army. That demands some extremely fast painting, so, as outlined a couple of posts ago, I'm using GW's contrast paints over black undercoat drybrushed with grey and white.

It's a very quick and sloppy technique, but I quite like how the miniatures look on the table - a bit dark and more Ian-Miller-ish than the typical "greenskin"- or at least I hope so. 

One of the joys of the Rampant family of games is matching available miniatures to the troop types. So, in the picture above we have the following: recon infantry; light infantry (possibly with the Assault Doctrine and Close Combat Doctrine options); Heavy Infantry; and Berserk Infantry (with Heavy Armour). 

I'll probably add some black and white emblems at some point, but for now the focus is on churning them out. I've got 17 done already (3 recon, 6 light, 6 heavy and 2 berserk), but I want at least 6 recon and a dozen or two of each of the others). Onwards ...

You want it (grim)darker ...

A forthcoming game of Xenos Rampant with some friends has got me scurrying to paint up some more regimented sci-fi troops than my typical rag-tag scum and villains. For these Mantic orcs, I used my new speed-painting method: Citadel contrast paints over black undercoat drybrushed with grey and white.

They're not terribly pretty close up, but they'll make a nice red-armoured horde en masse. And they're very, very quick; if you exclude drying time, I'd say that they take longer to assemble than to paint.

I might add a few details to them here and there once each squad of 12 is finished, but the aim for now is to get a few dozen done to this standard. These two are the first of six; the other four are done barring the bases.

The ratman is a GW plague monk with Skitarii arms and weapon. Six of these will form a unit of 'recon infantry'. I've based them to match my fantasy ratmen, so that they'll blend in with those (I'm going to do some with the same blue-grey hide as this one, so that they can all work together).

Both lots will doubtless end up as encounters in fantasy RPGs and feature in Mutants and Death Ray Guns and the like too.