Anne, Nancy and their Backup Singers

Hi Everyone!

Like many of us I've been making my way through the February doldrums. I lost a bit of steam for a few weeks, which recently included a bad bout of flu and a cold, but I did manage to push along with few more entries and here is one of them.

These gals are a some new recruits to my Sisters of Battle collection.

First up are two heavy weapon Sisters, one armed with a multi-melta and the other with a heavy flamer. These models are from Wargames Exclusive and were an absolute joy to paint. The designer really embraced the gothic aesthetic with their armour, especially with their chimneyed backpacks. These two ladies will be my submission for 'Heresy' as they are the physical embodiment of the Emperor's punishment, created to expunge the heretic in heat and flame (or at least thats whats written on their underwear).

When I first put them side-by-side for my photos it immediately struck me that they look like two epic rockers posing on stage in the midst of a guitar and bass riff, and what better rocker sisters than Anne and Nancy Willson. Maybe I'll go back and put a Heart symbol on their cloaks. :)

The other contingent is a small group of Sisters Repentia with their attendant Mistress of Repentance. The Repentia are older GW models and I love them (made even better as they were gifts from IainW). They are so beautifully sculpted, finger-pokingly crisp and having that wonderful heft of metal.

The Mistress was a bit of a disappointment, and I feel that someone at GW got the short straw in having to sculpt her. I've never been a fan of the quasi-S&M feel of some of the Sister models and this is one typical of that (though the Madonna bullet bustier kind of cracks me up).

Thanks for popping in for a visit!

Curt

'The Scorned' - Sisters Repentia

Sander's location asks us to paint up something red. Being that our local group has been quite keen on the fan-based 40K rules from Grim Dark Future (a breath of fresh air in comparison to GW's core set), I decided to do up a small unit of scarlet clad 'Sisters Repentia' for my slowly expanding Sisters of Battle collection. 

The story behind the Repentia is that they are essentially defrocked Sisters paying their penance by charging virtually naked into enemy lines with HUGE chainsaws. Yep, bonkers, but completely in-line with the 40K universe. 

One does wonder what horrible things they could have possibly done to have been assigned such a dire role? Cowardice? Blasphemy? Maybe they left their hair straighteners on overnight, or got caught borrowing their Sister Superior's special black nail polish? Who knows, but it definitely must have been baaaad. 

I've named my Repentia 'The Scorned' as a nod to the famous quote from Concreve's play The Mourning Bride, 'Hell hath no fury...'

In game-terms, these gals are very susceptible to getting shot to bits, but if they do manage to get into melee they are absolute BEASTS. Their 'Eviscerators' (yes, the name says it all) can really wreck someone's day, even giving serious pause to AFVs and Knights. They are one of those units that your opponent simply can't ignore, having to dedicate some valuable firepower to deal with them before they get too close with their uber hedge trimmers. Great fun. Ultimately I'll need at least another 5 to give the unit some staying power, but these ladies will give me a good start.

These are resin models from Wargames Exclusive. I've become a big fan of their offerings, with a good portion of my collection being made up of their models. Really beautiful castings with bags of character and loads of fine detail. So much so that one feels tempted to dive in and try to pick it all out with the brush. While compelling, I find doing all that extra brushwork often 'muddies' the figure by having too much going on. So I kept it simple and stuck to a fairly constrained colour palette. 

With the figures being resin they are a bit too light to my tastes (I'm still addicted to the heft of metal), so I added a washer to their bases and blended in the surrounding groundwork, with assorted debris and exposed ironwork. (Fun fact: repurposed supports from resin 3D printing make great steel reinforcing bits.) 

Thanks for dropping by!

Curt

Inquisitorial Kill Team - Entry #8 to AHPCX

I thought I'd mix things up a bit for my next trip on Sarah's Balloon by submitting something which is, gasp, not related to 'Mansions of Madness'. 

This time out (up?) we have a 40K Inquisitorial kill team composed of a very self assured inquisitor and her retinue of rock-hard Battle Sisters.

For the past couple of years I've been running a winter 'Dark Heresy' role playing campaign for a few of the guys and, surprisingly enough, Sarah. 

This is Inquisitor Ingrid von Bek of the Ordo Hereticus. She's a badass witch-hunter who will have a prominent role in our upcoming DH campaign. I'll give no more away, but with Sarah's character being an unsanctioned psyker things could get quite interesting. ;)

This model shows her strutting her stuff in a fancy-schmancy suit of power armour, wielding a very rare Inferno Pistol (yes, the name says it all) and sporting really fabulous hair. 

I like the gothic details on these figures like the halo and whacky smokestacks on their power packs.

The other four in von Bek's retinue are Sisters of Battle. Two are armed with Storm Bolters, one with a Heavy Bolter and the last one is a young lass with the gift of the gab, a Dialogus, an adept who is particularly persuasive with encouraging allies and haranguing enemies. I see her as Ingrid's herald, press secretary and factotum.

The Dialogus is an an older, now OOP, GW metal (love eBay), but the rest are from Wargames Exclusive, one of my favourite not-40K figure manufacturers. They are tremendously detailed castings with boatloads of character. The only downside (for me) is that they are cast in resin which makes them feel overly fragile, though to their credit they've taken several tumbles without any damage.  Anyway, to give them a little added heft I've based them using metal washers.

I hope to have another group of Sisters ready later this challenge, but we'll see how the next couple of months unfold. I'm in the midst of several big entries (well, big for me) which are absorbing a lot of my hobby time. Fingers crossed that I can get everything I want done.

Next up: 'Docherty's Dock'!

Sisters of Battle for FriendsCon

On top of my 2mm madness, another project I've been working on these past few months has been putting together a Sisters of Battle force for a friends tournament that we just had just a few days ago. Byron hosted six of us loons at his house with a delicious BBQ lunch and supper - a great day out. I'll post a couple shots of the event at the end of this.

Last winter I debuted my first efforts with this project, using models kindly provided by IainW, a long time participant of the Painting Challenge and all around good egg (thanks Iain!). As I mentioned in that post, this is not my first foray into the Sisters of Battle, as many years ago I had collected a sizeable force only to regrettably sell it off. 

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to reconstitute (reconsecrate?) my collection of Adepta Sororitas (nerdspeak for the Sisters) and so have been furiously collecting, building and painting models for the past few months.

I understand that the Sisters will have a new Codex-guidebook-thingy coming out soon, but this force is based off the stopgap rules which were published last December. This is just fine with me as I don't expect myself to be haunting the tournament circuit anytime soon - this collection is largely about enjoying the various models and their attendant fluff, with absolutely no eye to being competitive.

Okay, now how to best describe this lot? Well, let's do it by troop type and see how it goes. 

First up are the 'Big Hats' - the leaders, characters and other HQ elements leading the Sisters.

The Abbess

This lady, the Abbess, is the head honcho, the matriarch of the Order. I call her Madge as she totally looks like a Madge to me. Our Gallic friend Sylvain would best describe her, 'Une Femme Formidable.' 

This figure was a gift from Byron and originated from the Toughest Girls in the Galaxy Kickstarter that was run a few years ago. Thanks Byron!

A wonderful sculpt. I really love the pose, with her brandishing a scroll. 

'These, heretic, are your library fines. Suffer not the Late to Live!'

Saint Celestine

Yes, in the lunacy that is 40K, players have full access to field god-like Primarchs, terrifying Daemon Princes, and for the Sisters of Battle, an undying saint. 

The story behind Saint Celestine is that she was a Battle Sister who, due to her fanatical devotion to the God Emperor of Mankind (GEM), was chosen to be an immortal avatar to her fellow Soritas. In game terms she a bit of a beast, but can be struck down. Not to be deterred, she has a very good chance of immediately coming right back for another bout of zealous mayhem. Yep, kinda bonkers.

GW makes a very nice Celestine model, but I wanted something a little different and found a great rendition of her on Thingiverse designed by the talented 'jimbeanz'. To reflect her heroic stature, I scaled her up slightly so she'd be suitably intimidating on the tabletop. This in turn made her wings quite enormous, so I magnetized them so they can be removed for easy packing and transport.

Celestine is accompanied by what I jokingly call her backup singers. These are a pair of Geminae Superia bodyguards, basically hard-as-nails Sisters sporting zippy jetpacks, powerswords and bolt pistols. Weee! In game terms they essentially act as ablative armour for Celestine, soaking up extra hits for their Main Girl. 

These models are from Wargames Exclusive. I quite like how the jetpacks are modeled with their artificed wings.

Battle Sisters

The main troops are the Battle Sisters themselves. Power armoured ladies, with a wide variety of weapons and fanatical resolve, they form the backbone of the entire force. I painted up about 35 of them, but here is a small sampling along with a few of their leaders. In addition to the venerable metals castings that I got from Iain, I also picked up a bunch of resin versions from Wargames Exclusive.

Arco-Flagellants and Penitent Engine

Okay, these two units are very similar, so I'm lumping them together.  Both are a bit crazed but quite fun to run on the tabletop. 

Arco-Flagellants are essentially criminals who have been swept up by the Mechanicum, lobotomised with a dull spoon, brutally augmented with cybernetic power flails and then festooned with auto-injectors containing toxic mixtures of combat drugs and pain inhibitors. Think pro rugby for the 40th millennium.

They're led by a priest, providing them a little moral guidance to help chivy them along. 

Penitent Engines are similar to Arco-Flagellants, but the poor loon (looness?) is 'installed' half naked in an open cockpit power-suit, armed with paired flame throwers and huge circular saws. Yep, totally plausible.

Unlike the 'misunderstood' Flagellants, the Penitent Engines are piloted by REAL jackholes. You know the type: evil crime lords, small-fingered, porcine heads of state with no moral compass, and the absolute worst, those guys who wear their ball caps backwards and drive those annoyingly huge Dodge trucks with sport exhausts (okay, these examples may be somewhat coloured by personal bias, but you get the gist).

The idea behind both the Arco-Flagellants and the Penitent Engines is that they're promised absolution only if they get rendered down to bloody viscera on the battlefield. 

Yes, all this helps to underscore that, while the Imperium of Mankind may not be an especially forgiving place, it is a big supporter of karmic hubris. As I've said before, one can only imagine that recidivism is probably non-existent in the Empire. 

Vehicles

Last up for the force are the vehicles. These lumps are all variants based off the tried and trusted Rhino chassis. 

The Repressor is sort of a crowd control vehicle, if 'control' means either shooting, immolating or squishing your offending crowd. It features multiple firing ports to shoot from, a handy-dandy flame thrower, a pair of stormbolter turrets and an anti-personnel dozer blade.  Very noice.

Forge World (or as I call it, 'Gouge World') used to have a Repressor model, but it has long disappeared from their catalogue. Undeterred, I found a great 3D kit on, yes, you guessed it, Thingiverse, designed by StFishbulber. The various bits took a bit of cutting, filing, and repositioning, but the final product is fairly convincing I think.

The Immolator. With its extra crispy flamey goodness, the Immolator is a perennial favourite of Sisters of Battle collectors.  For something a little different, I used a third party turret from Wargames Exclusive as I quite the raw, aggressive silhouette it gives.

The last vehicle I'll cover is the Exorcist. This silly thing is basically a combination of a Kayatusha rocket launcher and basilica pipe organ. Makes perfect sense. I love the baroque design, especially the Sister gunner at her 'keyboard' and the servitor drone loading the rockets into the pipe organ. Again, it's completely nuts, but in a fun way. 

So there you have it, the basis of my Sisters of Battle force. For those who are curious they didn't actually do too bad in our FriendsCon with two wins and one loss (a miracle in of itself as I had no idea what I was doing most of the time). 

Noah sending in his Eldar against my Girls with Byron and Ray on another table in the background.

Greg moving up his Tau against Ray's Deathwing (aptly titled as they were soon to be rendered down to smoking boots only a few minutes after this photo). Poor Ray, such a good sport.

My plan is to add a few more units over the coming months, but I feel the pull to try something else - maybe some WWII stuff for my Italian Campaign, we'll see where the brushes take me.

Thanks for visiting - I hope you all have a great week!

40K Penitent Engine

Hi Folks!

Just a small past to end the work week. This time out we have a Penitent Engine from the 40K universe.

Taking a dip into the GrimDark, penitent engines are mechanical constructs piloted by super-bad sinners serving penance for some particularly heinous crime (team-killing on Xbox Live, refusing to signal when changing lanes, not picking up after their dogs, nasty things like that). Upon sentencing they are basically grafted into what equates to a dreadnought chassis and then injected with all manner of psychotropic drugs and pain inhibitors. After a quick buff and a shine they are then pointed at the enemy and released. Weee!! Death and destruction ensues. Actually, death in combat is the only way getting out of this gig, but thankfully that usually comes along pretty quickly.  As you can imagine recidivism is markedly low in the Dark Imperium of Mankind....

This model is not an official Penitent Engine (Gasp! I know, a heresy in of itself.), but rather a nicely crafted proxy from the talented folks over at Wargames Exclusive. It's an all resin kit which went together like a breeze. It came with the option of a heavy stubber for the upper pintle weapon, but that seemed a little out of character especially when you can have a huge honkin' flamethrower instead. No contest there.

This should provide some cathartic stompy-burny fun until it's blown into self-righteous scrap. 

Thanks for dropping in and have a great weekend everyone!

Curt