Weirder Sh*t (Or "I'd have gotten away with it too if...")

 

This weekend just gone was the annual Warlords of Albion Halloween game- Night of the Living Lead. This would be the last one at Foundry before they (potentially anyway) move location so I thought I ought to go up having not been to any of the others. These games always have a good ol' satirical focus and this year was no exception. The village of Sunlit Uplands was having a by-election since all their previous leaders have proven to be vampires. The aim of the game was to get as many votes as possible for your own particular politician... by whatever means! However, I decided to go in a completely different direction and make a warband of pesky kids who, being too young to vote, are ignoring the adults and doing their own thing. I did have a politician, but Bellamy Corvid (despite having a solid band of downtrodden yokels behind him) was 'prevented' from getting anywhere near the polling station to register his votes.

I decided a good Halloween theme would be 'Kids on Bikes'- ET, Goonies and Stranger Things as direct influence. These would be running around trying to do their own objectives and get under the feet of the 'grown up' activities. The first trio is the original, Lliot, his brother Mikel and the strange little creature Y.T. who they are trying to get back to a particular location so his space ship can come collect him... Rather than bikes (which aren't very medieval) I decided they should have hobby horses.

Y.T., being a creature not of this planet, is best left alone. Unfortunately some voters decided to walk into his tone circle whilst he was waiting for his ride and Y.T. was revealed as the Ymgaarl Thing! A genestealer of course... He savaged one of the voters but opted to plant a 'seed' instead of tearing their face off as per the Rogue Trader rules. There was only one turn of the game left, but it was long enough for the voter's controller to roll a 6 and spawn the demi-Ymgaarl. Well, extra arms come in handy whilst voting, right? 

The second bunch of kids are the Loonies, on the hunt for the hidden treasure of One-Eyed John Thomas, nastiest of the pirates. They went equipped with rotten eggs (torinoko grenades) and Errata's spring-loaded boxing glove (short range pistol), but ended up needing none of them. They talked their way into the dwarf bar which had the tunnel running below it and emerged with very little drama on the cliffs overlooking the town. 

Burner, Tef and Endie, the more grown-up of the bunch. They were tempted to get in on the voting action but got largely ignored.

Here's the Wierder Sh*t crew. The dwraf Nog had equipped them with Heinz bean tin communicators so they could ride around on their hobby horses and Mad's skateboard trying to find the chaos rift for Elf to close. Elf (German for eleven and definitely fitting the misisng role in their little DnD party) being a level 5 elf wizard. She managed to get two of her three spells off, shielding the gang from arrows and causing a bunch of bugbears blocking their path to fight amongst each other whilst they snuck through. Unfortunately the minotaur that then raged into her whilst chasing fleeing cultists was too tough to suffer from her leg breaking ability and took her head off whilst Tayr stood looking on. A fitting end to one of the most irritating child stars of the current age... Mad managed to escape and skate away, taking the blows on her pads, only to be met by a bear in the woods and devoured.

Weirder Sh*t (Or "I'd have gotten away with it too if...")

Cult of the Leering Lune month 3

Another big unit of spiky stick boys has joined the ranks of the Night Gobbos! It's been tight going this month as there have been lots of other things (nuisances, troubles and celebrations) going on. Nevertheless I actually managed to have a clear weekend to finish them off. The plan is to get the big units out of the way before the nights draw right in so that my limited hours of light for painting in the winter can be spent on smaller amounts of figures. These I have primed ready to go because who knows when there will be another dry day...

This is another 'monopose' spears unit made up of a cheeky spear chappie. I'm not sure there were any unlisted variants of this one? I haven't found any on my collecting journey.

I swapped the banner and gong around as both these guys are duplicates of models already in the army. I also lengthened the banner. I'm not sure why the night goblin standard bearers all have such short poles... perhaps to cram more into a mould? The champion is also a duplicate so I gave him to Kev Adams at BOYL in the hope he'd put a new head on. He did not disappoint! 

My front rank goblins got a bit of extra attention on their hoods just to spice up the look of the unit a bit from the front.

The rest are quite plain. They do have yellow moons and flares on their hoods but they're not easy to see against the cream. I probably should have outlined them in black.

The essential fanatics for this unit share the yellow hoods of the command squad to associate them with their point of origin.

Another shaman has crept into the month's output, this time with his familiar. Again sharing the yellow hood motif. This guy is a Heartbreaker Dark Goblin from Ral Partha Europe. A number of the Heartbreaker figures have been coopted into my night goblins for variety, including the two on my first machinery of destruction...

The wolf chariot. The chariot itself is Harlequin/Black Tree, which I purchased with no crew or wolves from a chap at Colours last year. The replacement wolves are also Ral Partha Europe. Since the two goblins in the crew are quite a bit larger than the rest of the night gobbos I decided putting them in the chariot would disguise this.

I have tried to give the chariot a bit of the look of the classic Kev Adams machineries with some putty plants and rocks on the base. Not as many as on Kev's (it has still got to fit in with the rest of the army and I didn't have an entire day to sculpt little features for the base) but I may add to it at some point in the future.

Let's do the points/gold coins/costings thing then. From month three of the challenge you only get 25 'gold coins' to spend each month and the army has to remain 4th edition 'legal'. Fortunately I still had 34.6 gold coins banked from the last two months (goblins be cheap y'all) so no danger of running out of funds just yet. By my calculations this is 36.45 gold coins (fanatics are 1.15 each if you're wondering where the odd decimals are coming from). It takes the army total up to 1157.5pts with 511 pts of characters, 560.5pts of mobs and 86pts of war machines, so totally fine on the legalities front too.

 

Cult of the Leering Lune month 3