Strange Tyranid Creatures

 Time for some more tyranid weirdness. I bought a copy of Shadow War: Armageddon off ebay this week. It's a skirmish game, in which small teams of orks, Imperial Guard and space marine scouts fight it out in the ruins of the hive-world Armageddon. It was released in 2017, but feels like something from a long way before that. 

While SWA sounds like it should be like Kill Team (actually, SWA sounds like it should be an early 90s rap band), it's actually based on the rules for the original version of Necromunda, slightly streamlined and slimmed down. I really like the idea of a skirmish game involving lots of different species, although in the only game I ever played of SWA, a force of orks was utterly wiped out by harlequins, which suggests some balancing issues.

Anyhow, if you're mental enough, you can take a squad of tyranids! To my surprise, this involves just the big tyranids. I've already got three oldhammer warriors painted up, and the list allows you to take a "gunbeast", which I assume is meant to be a warrior with a heavy weapon. However, I thought this was a nice opportunity to make something more unusual.

I dug out a really old metal model for the game Epic. This was the oddly-named "tyranid dominatrix" (there's a mental image for you), a sort of massive armadillo-type thing with a big gun on its back and a little dude who looks suspiciously like the dead space jockey from Alien (before Ridley Scott ruined it all, but that's a different sad story). It's much more animalistic than the warriors, but then a lot of the Epic tyranid models were wacky to the point of daftness.

Next up, some very little critters. The original tyranid army list was quite interesting: it was published in White Dwarf and allowed you to take all sorts of odd stuff, including genestealer hybrids and several hundred points from any other army (they were mind-controlled, you see). It also allowed you to take swarms of goofy-looking squigs. These were soon replaced by ripper swarms, which feel much less silly and more alien, and the squigs went back to being purely ork-related.

Here are some of the creatures from the squig swarm, which I've probably had lying around for 20 years or so. I don't think they have separate rules. They were such charming models that I thought they deserved separate bases.

This little guy is largely made of legs and teeth. I painted him in an unwholesome flesh colour, rather like the facehugger in Alien, and dotted in his pupils so that he would be looking upward - either at his owner or, more likely, at his next meal.

The next animal looks rather like a cross between an ork and a slug. The very orky face inspired me to paint him green - a bit brighter than I'd usually do ork skin - and the blue hairdo just seemed to contrast nicely. I expect he crawls around, eating whatever unwholesome things he can find, probably leaving a trail of slime.

This little creature is perhaps the most wholesome of the three, but it's a close thing.

First contact!

Warhound Titan and two Lake Town Houses

This week, I had a go at one of my warhound scout titans. The idea of a scout titan is slightly odd: I'm not sure that being half the size of a normal titan counts for much when you are clearly about 50 times bigger than a man. I doubt that you can sneak up on very much. Still, I rather like the old miniature, and it was fun and easy to paint.

Just to show that I've shaded its red bits:

I've always liked the look of the Lake Town Houses from the Lord of the Rings game. They're fairly simple, decent sculpts which fit the rough vaguely-Tudor style that I've been going for with the rest of my buildings. I bought one off Games Workshop, and another from my friend James (thanks James!).

I didn't attempt anything very fancy with them: they were easy to paint and came up looking nice in basic colours. GW have an interesting faded-paint effect on their ones, but I wasn't confident about pulling it off, so opted for unpainted wood.

This one is the luxury variant, complete with gabled window and glass.

This one is a bit less elaborate, but it has its own "outhouse" - ie a dunny.

As I say, nothing very amazing, but they'll fit in nicely with the rest of my terrain and fill up the board quite well.

One Knight and Two Samurai

I've been painting the last of the Epic knights and two more of the Warlord Games samurai heroes. 

The last knight is presumably what became the 40k plastic Imperial Knight kit. I went with similar colours to the others.

And here are all five, pictured as they stride across Abbey Road.

The two samurai guys are a lady with a fan, who I gave a pink robe, and what I thought was a wealthier chap, who is wearing a jacket and carrying two swords. His face was slightly miscast, so I ended up painting a scar down it to "hide" the error in casting. I rather like them both.

Only three more samurai to do now. I'm quite tempted by the Warlord ninjas, who look like a lot of fun (to paint, not to know). 

More Small Titans

I painted two more of the old Epic knight titans. These are lancers, and are just as oddly designed as the others. I like their weirdness.

Again, I went for slight variations on the colour scheme that I used on my titan. They're quite gaudy, but I like that and I think it fits the style of the old models back in 1989 or so.

Here are all the small titans so far, standing in a row.

Little Titans

Somewhat inspired by This Post on Magpie and Old Lead, I dug out some very old Imperial Knight models from epic and gave them a repaint.

They date from around 1990, when Oldhammer was beginning to enter the fabled Red Period. Back then, I would have thought that they looked stupid, and they do look a bit silly, but they've got a certain wacky charm. Looking back through old White Dwarfs, I find the brightness of the epic titans very appealing, with their complicated heraldry and inevitable chequered armour panels. And after all, if you are a thirty-metre robot, camouflage probably doesn't help you very much. You might as well go all-in.

Anyhow, I painted a knight lancer and a paladin. I particularly like the lancer, with its lanky legs and ridiculous WW1 helmet. I painted them in bright colours to match my titan. I've read somewhere that shading up the armour plates gives a feeling of size, so I've tried to do that here.

Here's the titan. I did it a while back, and it needs some more work, but it fits the other titans.

Reaver Titan

One of my earliest memories of wargaming - or rather, of not wargaming - is seeing a picture of some Imperial titans in a games room at school, and then being told to piss off by an older boy called Robert, who had a very square head.

But the memory of the titans stayed with me: huge robots in unfeasibly jolly colour schemes, lumbering across the horizon while tiny space marines tried not to get stepped on far below. Like this:

I never got into Epic, but the release of a new version of Adeptus Titanicus reminded me that I had one of these things lying around. In fact, I had a few old Epic vehicles, and so I decided to give one of my Reaver titans a paint.

I tried not to add anything to the bases that would make the titan look as if it belonged to any particular scale, just in case I decided to use it as a robot in 40k or something like that. I did quite a bit of shading on the armour plates and tried a glowing effect on its top-mounted plasma gun. It was missing the feet, so I cast a couple of new ones using putty.

Because it was a nice day, I took a picture of it outside, standing near some ants taking the war to the tyranids.

It was quite enjoyable to paint, although shading all those flat areas was a little tedious. I might have a go at another epic robot sometime, though. All in all, a success.


So up yours, Robert.

Now get back to work!