Hobby Update – Beastmen and Wood Elves

Amongst the chaos that is working from home with kids, I’ve managed to squeeze in a bit of painting time (the army book review was mainly a cut and paste so didn’t count as effort 😉).

The first model below was actually completed in July but for some reason I don’t like posting single models completed. Not sure why but I just prefer to put up a few things in a post.

Gorthor the Beastlord

I got this model a while back as part of one of the made to orders that GW were putting out. He is one of the Beastmen army special characters and in the fluff is the greatest Beastlord to have ever lived, with his horde ravaging the Empire almost beyond recovery.

The paint scheme was kept similar to the rest of my beastmen, many shades of brown, with more brown washes and lighter brown drybrushing! Gorhor and his driver (Bagrar)  started with a grey basecoat, drakenhoff (blue) wash) and then a lighter blue drybrush.

How he plays

Gorthor has the standard Beastlord stats (strength, toughness and initiative of 5, 3 wounds and leadership of 9). He has two improved stats, weapon skill (WS) 7 and a whopping 5 attacks. Even his driver has improved stats with WS 4, Str 4, initiative 4 and 2 attacks.

He has 3 unique magic items and 1 unique special rule on top of the standard rules of Primal Fury (ability to potentially re-roll failed hits) and Man-bane (when fighting Empire or Bretonnians you can re-roll failed primal fury tests).

The Special Rule is: Scion of the Dark Gods. At the start of each friendly magic phase, he randomly generates 1 spell from the lore of death. This can be cast as a bound spell at half the cost of the casting value. This is a fun ability that may or may not give you something decent that phase.

His magic items are as follows:

The Impaler: Magic spear that gives him Killing Blow (outright kills non monstrous targets on a wound roll of 6, no matter their wounds and ignores armour saves). Killing blow is never a bad thing and combinng it with his number of attacks and the ability to almost ensure that they all hit, really boosts the change of this getting through.

Skull of Mugrar – this allows you to roll 2D6 for his chariots impact hits, picking the highest dice. Another nice ability to boost the chance of damage you cause on the charge.

Cloak of the Beastlord – This boosts his leadership bubble to 18″. With leadership being so key to beastmen armies, this is again a great ability.

However, like many special characters he comes with some drawbacks. The first is the perennial bane of so many of them, lack of save. He has a 6+ save from being mounted. That’s it. He doesn’t even come equipped with any of the standard equipment available to other lords. Even a shield would be something! That, combined with the fact that he is on a chariot and so can’t even hide in a unit, means that he is just asking to be one shotted by the nearest cannon/stone thrower and at 350 points for the base model, it is a big risk to take in a competitive environment. It’s why he’ll mainly be used as a ‘counts as’ normal tuskgor chariot in my lists, unless i’m playing a more fun narrative game.

Sister of the Thorn and Wildriders reinforcements

The latest batch completed were reinforcements for my sisters of the thorn and wildriders, all built from a single box.

The single sister takes the unit to 6 in total. Ive often run 5 of them with a mounted mage and it’s worked well. The extra body will just help to give them a bit more survivability and shield the mage from incoming fire for longer.

I’ve painted her to as close a proximity to the others as I could. It’s not perfect as my available colour palate for yellows/orange is not very big. The original sisters unit were an eBay purchase, as I really liked the paint job and they were cheaper than buying a new box! It was definitely fun painting a scheme that is so far removed from my normal style.

I also noted, when trying to copy the paint job, that the other sisters I had were kit-bashed using the legs from glade riders and the torso from the sisters, something I’d not noticed before. I quite like that and will take some shots of them at a later date.

The Wildriders were painted as a carbon copy of the other 10 previously painted. Again I literally used crimson wash over the brown to make them more like the red deer that are local to where I grew up.

The additional 4 models now gives the flexibility of fielding 2 units of 7, which is, for me, their optimal number, or a big bus for ‘funzies’.

The wild hunt

I won’t cover how they play in 8th edition as i’ve previously covered this here: hobby-update-the-missing-wildriders