Battle report: The Fight for Baron Curcass' Castle

The Scenario.

It has been rumoured that Baron Curcass, in his madness, has left his castle, near the river Lynsk, seriously undermanned. The castle is surrounded by a dark, dense forest and peering out from different locations are several warbands, wondering whether they can sneak into the castle for some plunder..





On the eastern edge of the forest emerges Uston'Noth's chaos warband:

Uston'Noth's Tribe. Nurgle Warband: 



Uston'Noth - Level 15 Champion - Mark of Nurgle, Scaly Skin, Moronic


4 Cultists led by Kraak'n - Level 5 Initiate Sorcerer - Mark of Nurgle, Cloud of Flies, Puny
Spells: Stench of Nurgle, Steal Mind, Summon Familiar


4 Chaos Dwarves.

On the western edge of the forest a band of Orcs are led by JugNugg Igg (this warband was created using Erny's generator)

Orc Warband of the Orange Sun:

JugNugg Igg - Level 10 Orc Shaman - leading 2 Orcs (bodyguard)
 Spells: Leg Breaking, Blinding Flash, Fireball, Flight, Windblast, Bewilder Foe

Harnack - Underling Level 5 Orc (The Beserker)
Double Handed Weapon

Heavy D and his Boyz - Orc Champion leading 5 Orcs
 Shields,standard and musician.

5 Orcs of the Scattered Tribe
Light Armour

From the Northern Edge is the notorious Blag and his merry band of Goblins:

Blag - Goblin Level 10 Hero. Light Armour, over-confidence

4 Goblins, including Dot, the archer

Shnaznat - Goblin Level 15 Shaman

Spells: Leg Break, Fireball, Strength of Combat, Animosity, Create Illusionary Hero.

And the remnants of the guards of Baron Curcass' castle:

6 Human Fighters:

And here's the set up at the beginning of the battle:

Turn 1. Sequence: Goblins, Humans, Orcs, Nurgle.

Dot takes a pot shot at a Chaos Dwarf and misses, whilst everyone advances towards the castle gates. The Human defenders, having seen multiple attackers emerge from the woods, begin moving inside for cover and to try and lower the drawbridge.

Kraak'n casts summon familiar and receives a rat full of magical energy.

The summoned rat familiar

Dot taking a pot shot

Turn 2. Sequence: Orcs, Humans, Nurgle, Gobbos.

The Orc archer takes a long shot at the humans who are scurrying for cover, but misses.

The rest of the Orc warband advance towards the gates

JuggNugg Igg casts two fireballs at the humans, but does not wound any of them.

The humans almost get everyone inside the castle, two defenders take up position to raise the drawbridge...

The Goblins, led by Blagg, make quick progress towards the drawbridge, keeping close to the castle walls.

The minions of Nurgle walk into the clearing in front of the castle, ready to split forces in order to try and head off the Orcs and get into the castle. The Dwarves lag behind with their stumpy legs.

Turn 3. Sequence: Gobbos, Humans, Nurgle, Orcs.




Blagg, in a show of courage, silently charges into the back of the last of the humans just before he was able to reach the relative security of the castle. Blagg swings and misses.   !

The human (known as Bill), initially surprised at the sneaky attack, but quickly growing in confidence as he sees the inept swordsmanship of his opponent, lunges hits and wounds the Goblin leader.

Blagg shits himself and legs it away! Bill pursues but fails to kill the little bastard, who keeps running.

The rest of the humans quickly decide to start raising the drawbridge, leaving Bill outside to fend for himself, deciding that his obvious martial prowess will see him through!

The Nurgle Warband approach even closer, except for the Dwarves who can't keep up. Kraak'n casts Steal Mind on the Orc Beserker, rendering him a gibbering fool for 1 turn.

The Orc archer gets lucky with a shot at the Cultists taking one down with an arrow through the throat. First blood!

Turn 4. Sequence: Orcs, Gobbos, Humans, Nurgle.




JuggNugg Igg's Orc bodyguard charge the humans just as the drawbridge is about to raise up. Realising the sprint is longer than they expected, their attacks are weak and miss their mark. The humans, prepared for the attack, hit back and kill one of the Orcs. A stand off ensues.

To help his boyz out, JuggNugg Igg casts Blinding Flash into the combat, meaning neither side can strike anymore blows during the next round of combat - he hopes to enter the fray himself and kill the remaining defenders.

The rest of the Orc boyz prepare for combat with the advancing Nurgle warband.

The Gobbo warband, seeing their leader Blagg, screaming past them, take one look at Bill and decide he's not to be messed with. They leg it after their leader!

Bill reforms, feeling incredibly plucky now and heads back to the castle to help his fellow defenders out

Uston'Noth charges into the Orc boyz and the level 15 character chops down 2 orcs with ease.

The Orcs look worried and are pushed back by the ferocity of the attack.

Turn 5. Sequence: Gobbos, Humans, Orcs, Nurgle.




The Gobbos rally, except for Blagg who scurries off into the woods to literally lick his wounds.

Bill charges the JuggNugg Igg, but none of his blows cause any harm. He is soon knocked out by the Orc, never to recover..

JuggNugg Igg moves into the castle where he can see the blinded combatants flailing ineptly at each other.

Harnack charges with a frenzy into the remaining cultists, gnashing his teeth and missing with his attacks. The cultists fluff with their attacks too.

Uston'Noth kills another Orc and easily deflects their attacks at him (it was at this point that I realised that a Level 15 Nurgle Champion was much better than all the other characters...)

Turn 6. Sequence: Orcs, Nurgle, Gobbos, Humans.




JuggNugg Igg charges into the humans, but neither side cause any damage. Harnack the Beserker is more effective, in killing two of the cultists, who feeling overwhelmed, are pushed back. The other Orcs are completely wiped out by the savage attacks of the Champion of Nurgle.

Dot takes another pot shot at the dwarves with his short bow and again misses by a mile. Shaaznat effectively casts leg break on the Nurgle Shaman, who wails in pain and staggers at half speed towards the castle. 

Inside the castle the humans and orcs continue their stalemate with neither side giving or taking an inch.

Turn 7. Sequence: Gobbos, Nurgle, Orcs, Humans

The Gobbos, feeling ridiculously brave (spurred on by their hatred no doubt), charge into the Chaos Dwarves. A few swings later and the Dwarves laugh in their faces. A goblin is nonchanantly put to the sword. Even so, the Goblins want another go...

Shaaznat casts fireball at the Nurgle champion, trying to stop him from entering the castle and actually wounds him!

Uston'Noth, almost oblivious to the fiery wound, charges into the orcs rear (who are already engaged in a battle with the humans) and kills an Orc boy. His sights are on the Orc Shaman next...

The Chaos dwarves take down two goblins with ease but the remaining Goblin, fighting for his life, surprisingly kills a chaotic stunty with a solid thunk to the skull.

Harnack kills the remaining cultist and looks for where else he could charge... he sees the backs of some unsuspecting chaos dwarves...

JuggNugg Igg, aware of the presence of the Nurgle Champion and still fending off desperate blows from the human defenders, decides to cast Flight to the safety of the ramparts!

The human defenders see an opportunity to gain some momentum and charge the repulsive Nurgle champion hoping to repulse the invader from their castle...

Incredibly they win the combat and succeed at pushing their foe back from the interior of the castle!

Turn 8. Sequence: Nurgle, Gobbo, Orc, Human.

Uston'Noth in a fit of fury, kills all but two of the human defenders. They flee leaving the Nurgle Champion to miss all his free hacks.

[Missing photo]. The lone goblin manages to take down another dwarf, before succumbing to a fatal belly wound.




Shaaznat charges the lame Nurgle Sorcerer and spectacularly takes him down with a sharp blow of his stave to the bollocks!

.

JuggNugg Igg, from the ramparts, uses his Magik Teef to cast Raise Undead and raises 8 ghouls who he will command to try and take down the Nurgle champion (seen here killing the fleeing humans with a load of free hacks)

Turn 9. The end game...




Harnack charges the lone Chaos Dwarf and they become locked in combat. For a long time, neither giving in...

Shaaznat, decides he's had enough, not wanting to get involved in the melee in the castle where ghouls are surrounding the Nurgle champion. He wanders off looking to start his own warband, maybe with the cowering Blagg as his minion...

JuggNugg Igg also decides he's had enough, knowing he can no longer influence the battle raging beneath him. He might pop back later to see the outcome..

And how it all ended up. Who knows who controls the castle, the undead or the Nurgle champion? Who won the battle between the beserker and the chaos dwarf? And will the greenskin shamans be able to gather new warbands so as to fight another battle?



A rat chase through some new dungeon tiles

I just had to make a few more dungeon tiles, as I had a fair few ideas ruminating in my mind's eye, derived from other's modeller's work and some I remember from Warhammer Quest and other dungeon explorer maps. And some of my own ideas too. So revisiting my insulation foam process for the tiles and my magnetised, modular wall design, I set off to complete my oeuvre of dungeon tiles. I thought about how best to present them here on this blog and decided to have a little run though of my attempts with an npc and a rat:

A simple corridor with steps leading down into the dungeon. Run from that rat!

Running around the corridor's corner, the rat gets a little closer.

Into a more sandy corridor, with mining track. The rat is slightly distracted by a small hole in the wall. 

Our hero creates some distance between himself and the furry one as he runs through a hot, lava room. How did he get in?

The  lighting changes, must be something to do with the summoning star in the middle of the room.

He had to run in and run out of this room, running up to the bars and back again, the rat in hot pursuit, He still admired the different coloured tiles and simple patterns. 

The light floods in and washes out the subtleties of the blue coloured tiles. I bet those patterns took a long time to do, thinks our gallant npc as he runs through what appears to be a newly made archway.

Hmm, I think I've seen this archway before, he ponders before he screams like a girl and runs away with his hands in the air. There's a raaaat in the kitchen.

Across a rickety bridge spanning some slimy sewage. The rat contemplates jumping in...

Interesting. Am I in a swamp or a dungeon room. It almost looks like it used to be a forest.... The rat looks knackered and falls back. A quick swim in a sceptic pool sees him a bit invigorated.

A skiddy marble floor sees our hero slip and slide as the rat regains momentum.

And up some stairs. Yikes, they're broken, jump over the rat and back down...

Shit after all that, a dead end!

Some pretty shitty photos of my new dungeon tiles, but it was a bit of fun having them chase through all the new sections and walls. Here's the new lot in one shot, I think you can see the painting and detail much clearer in this photo:

I need to do some proper nice photoshoots of my stuff, decent lighting, adding details and narratives etc. Well it just so happens that I've finished school and when the kids and wife are out, that's exactly what I'll do. Just need to finish painting up some of this dungeon scenery I've got stashed away...

Retinue Table: Dragon Ogre (Shaggoth)

Although this is a relatively modern sculpt from GW, it is one that I've always admired and one that I've longed to paint. I captured this from Ebay a few years ago, painted terribly and in a pretty bad state. So after a good clean up I decided to get to work on it and 3rd Edition Nurglify him a bit. The iconic Dragon Ogre by Ivan Bartleet (see later in the post) with eagle perched on his forearm, has always been an inspirational piece, so I used that to influence my own take. Using an Undead Carrion bird as his pet, giving him a plaguebearer's cyclops eye, hernia issues, with Nurgling playing with intestines and arming him with a a rusty flail; this is what I came up with:.

I've kept the palette decidedly pastelly, to provide some contrast with the dark open wound and tried to create a kind of scabby appearance to the scales on his back by using a range of yellow and orange glazes. As you can imagine it was a bit of a pain to paint, because it's such a hefty model and also because I'm pretty inexperienced of working on such a scale. There are quite a lot of large surface areas of skin, so to add some interest I included some blue veins (which are a bit washed out on the photos).

You can see the blue veins a bit more clearly in this photo.

So this fella was sold as a Dragon Oggre Shaggoth and when I delved into my Lost and Damned tome I noticed that a Level 25 Dragon Ogre was indeed called a Shaggoth. It's 3rd Edition stats come in impressively as:

M WS BS S T W I A Ld Int Cl Wp PV

6 7 4 6 6 7 5 6 10+3 6+2 9+3 9+3 335

And here's a bit of background from p.154:

"When forks of lightning sunder the night sky and the roar of thunder sends children running to their parents in terror, the people of Kislev say that the Dragon Ogres are fighting each other on the peaks of the World's Edge Mountains. A traveller, a mule skinner or miner huddled in a cave to shelter from mountain storms might see the battling Shaggoths and Sharunocks, as the oldest Dragon Ogres are called, silhouetted against the night sky by lightning-flashes. When the lightning falls in the night, as the tales proclaim, the Dragon Ogres are wakened from their death-like slumbers. As they stir they bellow with the thunder rolls and emerge to fight each other for the chance to become a Champion of Chaos."

Imagine having one of these brutes in your Chaos Warband retinue, well that's exactly what I hope will happen when I roll my next warband - it would happen on a roll of a 76 or 77 and then a 1 in 10 chance of him being a level 25 Shaggoth... I'll take some shots with him in an "unrolled" warband soon...

Here are the WIp photos so you can see the conversion work, which was pretty straightforward really:

And the inspiration behind the piece; on the one hand the work of Ivan Bartleet's Dragon Ogre champion from an 80's White Dwarf:

And Adrian Smith's Dragon Ogre Champion illustration from the Lost and the Damned: