Episode 6 Return of the Fly Guy

In my spare time, when I'm not doing the things that I really enjoy doing, I mold young minds. No, I don't use clay. I'm talking actual minds. As crazy as it seems, I am a teacher and one of the stories that my students read is a series about a fly name Fly Guy. 

All the ladies love me

4 Corners of 30k - Week 10

Week 10 - Balance

What is the biggest complaint that you hear about most tabletop games?

You hear the words: "OP", "broken", "unbalanced" and more.

Games Workshop is one of the biggest culprits of being unbalanced; mainly do to it's release schedule for army updates.

I dare say that the Horus Heresy line offers something big to Warhammer 40k fans: balance.

Episode 5 The Paintbrush Strikes Back

A long time ago, in an LGS far, far away a gamer was rolling dice and moving tiny metal elves around a table. It was a joyous time. The the dark forces that been changed the rules for the elves and the gamer some eff this crap, put the models in their foam, and placed them on a shelf in the basement. As tragic and rage filled as this ending was, it proved to be the beginning of something else. Later, as I walked around the store wondering what to do I saw . . .

Sick 'em boys

4 Corners of 30k - Week 9

Week 9 - Melting Point

Well, there has been a lot of building and priming going on at the Swonkob Bo stronghold but waiting for product from the UK; is like watching paint dry. For an impatient buyer like myself, it makes getting things from Forge World a lackluster experience. Three and a half weeks of waiting and the Royal Mail finally showed up at my house. Ok, it was lackluster for 3.5 weeks but I was pretty excited when I saw the box in the driveway!

Initial thought when I saw the box: "AWESOME!"

Second thought: "CRAP!"

Are those my models?

You see, it broke 100 degrees on my car's thermometer that day; all I could imagine was the box in the middle of the oven of asphalt and a puddle of resin at the bottom of the box!

After a DEEP breath, I examined the contents of the box and, not only was everything below the melting point, it was all accounted for!

After looking over each item; the "wow" moment for me was the shear size of the Cerberus Tank Destroyer bag! It is HUGE!

Here it is next to an Ironclad box!

The instructions were elaborate and covered the ins and outs of the 35+ pieces of resin. I'm looking forward to putting it all together! But I promised myself that I won't build it until my painting table is clean; so clean it will be!

After drooling over the Cerberus Tank Destroyer, my attention quickly jumped to the Alpha Legion dread body. Oh yeah!

This is how it looked when I opened the box (less the arms):

I proceeded to remove the chaos iconography with a razor....well, except for those amazing hydras on the chest!

Within an hour of its arrival from the land of tea and crumpets, the dread looked like this:

It'll be easier to see once there's paint but the points on the edging came off clean and the chaos arrows are all gone!

Next week: Recon Marines and....wait for it...my Praetor!

Time to clean house!

Swonkob Bo - OUT!

[Images acquired from http://warhammer40k.wikia.com and http://forgeworld.com; images were used for reference purpose only, not for monetary gain]

Episode 4 A New Hopelessness

Who wants to come here for vacation?

I thought I was living in New England, but it feels more like North Carolina. Seriously, this morning was 72 degrees F at 7am with a dew point at 70 degrees. I felt like I was back in Jacksonville, NC. It's been like this for days and it doesn't look like it's going to let up. I used the weather as a lame excuse for not painting last week and I'm going to use it again this week. However, I have set up a makeshift spraying box in my kitchen. I am going to prime the succubus it there, but with the humidity being what it is I'm not going to open any windows. I don't want to fumigate my house or get my daughter high with the fumes. I will have her primed today and maybe get some paint on her tonight when my daughter goes to sleep. 

So to fill the gap I'll walk you through my Nephilim Protector conversion. This one was much easier to do the the Soldier.

4 Corners of 30k - Week 8

Week 8 - WIP Up A Conversion or Two!

This week we'll be focusing in on some conversion work! I wish I had the conversion skills of our DuskTillDawn compadre, Darth Murphy but I'll have to make do! We'll cover the final inventory update (that's right, i said FINAL!) and you'll, also, see my first attempt at the pre-heresy color scheme!

The main conversion work is around the Alpha Legion iconography, as seen here:
 

Episode 3 Revenge of the Nyss

New England . . . if you don't know is a collection of states in the northeast corner of the United States. If you don't know there are six of them. It is cold in the winter, warm in the spring and fall, and can be downright disgusting in the summer. Currently we are in what we consider a heatwave. The temperature has been 85+ for more than a week, which wouldn't be all that bad if the humidity didn't make the air feel like a wet sponge. These are not ideal conditions for spray priming or seal models. So painting has had to take a backseat to other endeavors. 

What does all this mean for today's episode? We get to take a look at the Nephilim that I have been converting. 

Bo Knows: Converting for Horus Heresy

How to convert for Horus Heresy

This is an impromptu post on converting 40k models into pre-heresy armies. I cover some of this in my weekly blog called 4 Corners of 30k but Lycane suggested that I do a 1 stop shop all about making a pre-heresy army from stuff you can get at your favorite local game store!

So there are 2 reasons that you would build this army: 1. Because pre-heresy stuff looks REALLY cool or 2. Because you want to play the rules from the Forge World Horus Heresy rulebook along with answer number 1!

Either answer works and even if you aren't playing the Horus Heresy rules, it's an incredible reference guide.

Let's get started, shall we....

Let's take a look at some Forge World stuff and compare it to stock GW stuff.

Here is a Forge World MKIV Space Marine in Maximus armor:

Here is a Forge World MKV Space Marine in Heresy era armor:

And here are some items found on a standard tactical Space Marine sprue from Games Workshop that you can pick up locally:

Now you'll notice the chests are virtually the same. The MKIV plain shoulder pads are the same as the contemporary pads and the MKV studded shoulder pad is the same as the studded contemporary. The suit pictured above is a full MKVI Corvus pattern suit. The "beakie" helmet is a key factor to that pattern of armor.