Grymn and bear it

The moment you've all been waiting for

2010-06-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

I finally got the first tactical squad finished, with squad markings and everything. Then I broke out my phone and attempted to get some decent photos of all my painted Grymn.

I'm NOT putting the photos in this blog, for fear of making this entry absolutely HUGE. I've uploaded all of them to my Flickr account, and you can see the set
by clicking here.

I hope. I'm relying on flickr working.

These aren't my greatest painting by any stretch - but then, I'm deliberately going for a fast, down and dirty painting style to get a project of this size done. Tabletop quality and no more. There are things that could be done better, but I'd drive myself nuts if I tried.

If you look at my OTHER set of photos you'll see what I did with my Warmachine Rhullic (Dwarfs and Ogres) army. Those took a LOT of effort and time, and while they have been heavily complimented I don't have the energy to paint a whole army to that standard again. I'm too used to doing Blood Bowl teams (I own more than a dozen fully painted teams), where you CAN spend that sort of time on the models, because you're only painting twenty or so tops (usually anyway).

When I do my next Grymnproject - Urban strike/riot control team (most of the models for which I've already bought) - I'll be putting in the time and effort, because that will likely only be about ten models.

I haven't quit

2010-06-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

In fact, the first tac squad are nearly done. Just been VERY busy this week, and then I ran out of Devlan Mud (the GW wash that forms the major shortcut in my painting these days).

I've also been making some space on my painting tray by finishing of a couple of other projects in what little hobby time I've had lately - I finished off two Blood Bowl figures I'll be giving away, and finally got around to doing the last touches on my Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team.

With a little luck, I should be able to make tommorrow an orgy of photographs.

A wasted week

2010-06-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to huge amounts of work, exhaustion, parenting and such like I have had no time to make any real progress on my Grymn. This annoys me. I am hugely afraid of losing my motivation.

I did grab time to finish off a couple of other small things that needed doing - a contribution to a Blood Bowl Legacy team (where a bunch of people each doa figure and then one contributor wins the lot), and the Gnolls - but there hasn't been much progress on the Grymn front. Hopefully once Junior is in bed I'll get some work done, but I should get a reasonably early night seeing as I have to work the sunday morning shift for the second week in a row tommorrow.

I have promised myself I'll get the grey on the armour of Tactical squad 1 though. The green is in place already.

I WILL get some decent pictures of the first two squads up as well soon. I promise.

I HAVE...

2010-05-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

...A VERY LARGE PILE OF GRYMN.

My joy is only slightly overshadowed by the fact that there wasonly one Gustav included in the package, not two. Must have made a mistake.

Bah. As if I need encouraging to order stuff from Hasslefree.

I make you shiver with antici.........

2010-05-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

There was a slip waiting for me when I got home.
"You have a packet waiting for you at the post office".
There's only one thing I'm waiting on....and there are lots of small, heavily armed individuals in that packet.
Yay.
Unfortunately my son's nursery had their end of term family picnic this evening, and I have to stick around at home until DHL come with my new passport tommorrow....bah. It'll take a while before I can go get everything and get it all organised.

Question then becomes...what squad do I start with?
Probably best to go with one of the tactical squads.

...pation

Too many idead, too little time

2010-05-23T10:29:00.001-07:00

Sometimes there simply isn't time for toy soldiers. I've been too busy to get any constructive work done on fun stuff.
Today's construction was an Ikea flatpack kid's bed and the resulting complete reorganisation of my 3 year old's room.

I did at least get scout squad 2's bases sanded and inked, and finished a couple of Gnolls for my Norse Blood Bowl team (I needed females as the team is Impact miniatured Valkyries,plus some Hasslefree sideline staff.)

Waiting eagerly for many Grymn. When they show up I'll hopefully be able to get some real progress.

And like the idiot I am...

2010-05-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with list ideas working on the idea that I wasn't to keen on the idea of heavy weapons teams in a rapid response platoon.

So I restructured the army again.

Only a little though. And I won't need extra figures as the ones I have on order (or will have once Sally and I sort out my little SNAFU), beyond a small vehincle from Old Crow.

What I'm doing is adding a couple of heavy Weapons guys to the veteran unit (Two Horgens, one with each of the heavy weapons) and a Skimmer. I'm going to say that the skimmer is part of the payload that the Assault team's aerial transport deploys. Makes some sort of sense, to me at least.

I even started writing a bit of fiction late last night to desrcibe how I see the army going in.

This does all mean I will have excess models, but they'll fit nicely into the next project - that Urban assault team I mentioned. It's all good.

As requested: The list

2010-05-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

Inso asked, and so here it is. My list.

1500 points (40k)

Captain: Artificier armour, Storm Bolter, Relic Blade
Model: Torsten. Quel Surprise. His "Power" armour counts as Artificier armour.
Command Squad: 1 with Melta gun.
Models: Comms chick, Khyli (b), Antar (his "grenade Launcher" is the Melta Gun for the moment. I see GW do actual Melta guns as bitz, so if I ever get a chance I may pick some up.), Spotter, Niehl (converted to have an SMG rather than heavy machine gun...his ammo box will be a med kit to denote the squad apothecary. This idea only just occurred to me, so I'm hoping Sally will be very very kind and add him to my order, that I already messed up...otherwise I order the grenade puller and the Spotter will be the apoth temporarily)
Rhino.

Note on Weaponry : for the purposes of this army, SMGs are Bolters.
Note on armour : Inso asked how I was handling the question of power armour. The answer is I'm sort of side-stepping it. For the most part my "Power armoured" trrops will be wearing helmets. Basic grymn are wearing something that could be approximated to Carapace armour in 40k, but they're Dwarfs and are therefore naturally tough as nails, which means they get a better save.

2 Tactical squads: 10 men each. Flamer, Missile Launcher. Rhino.
the Squads will each have a Stefan and a Gustav as the Special weapons. The troopers will be 2 each of Alun, Dagni and Jinso, plus one of Kadlin. One Saud will be led by Halla (b) and the other by Kjaran (c). Gustav is the only one of those Sans Hat, but I did buy a couple of CC sprues which have helmets on and may be able to get them on his head. Don't know....

2 Scout squads: 8 men each. Shotguns.
Models: Heavy Infantry as seen in the pics below. One each of Inga and Kjaran, two each of Pjotir, Sven and Aylton. Strictly speaking they have bigger guns than their "light infantry" comrades, but that shouldn't be an issue. They're holding a different sort of gun to the others, whch had more armour and more pose variation, hence the decision for Shotguns all round. If we're going "counts as" we may as well go full out.

Sturmguard veterans: 6 man squad. Sergeant has a power weapon. Rhino.
The first Grymn I bought was Krags, because he's my favourite of the range. I wanted him to have his own squad, so restructured my purchases to add Tomlinz, Kurt, Nikolas, Voltan and Khyli. They don't have helmets, but will be singled out probably by having Black shoulder pads rather than the Grey I've gone with as my basic scheme. The Command squad will have White.

Assault Squad: 8 man squad.
the CC troopers with CC helmets and Jump packs. duplicates of Erik, Agnar and Bjarki. Ana will be the Sergeant.

Devastator squad: 2 Heavy Bolters, 2 Lascannon.
2 Horgan, 2 Knut, with the weapons swapped on two of them. They'll be led by Edgar.

I think that's everything.
I'm seriously considering dropping the Devastators as they don't fit with my newly discovered theme as a rapid response force of mechanised infantry (well, semi-mechanised. the scouts go in first, and the Assault squad will be dropped in by off-table air support). I'm considering some skimmers instead. Short range heavy suppport craft launched from an off-table transport.

So...there you go. That's the plan, until someone gives me better ideas and I have to change everything and give HF even MORE money...

I am a sad panda

2010-05-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

I screwed up. For some reason I made a mistake writing down my email address in my last order - the one which should have all the infantry I need for what is now going to be considered my Grymn Rapid response assault force - and so I got neither confirmation or Paypal invoice for the minis.

Hopefully Sally will be able to sort this for me, but waiting is such a PITA...and it's all my fault. Sob.

Maybe I should console myself by going at getting the bases of Scout squad 2 sanded...

Warning: Photo suckage

2010-05-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to get some pictures of progress up...unfortunately all the pictures I took were bloody awful. However, it's late and I want to get scout squad 2 washed this evening...and there's international Ice Hockey on TV, so these will have to do for now.

First squad is all finished, second squad were only primed this morning so I've done pretty well getting the base colours (most of the work) done.

The colour scheme is a really basic military style green and grey combo. I'm still working on ideas for squad markings, but for these initial squads it's just white stripes on the right shoulder.

I'm going really basic with the painting: Privateer P3 series Iosan Green, Bastion Grey, Pig Iron and Midlund flesh as the basic colours (hair: various). All sections except the flesh and hair washed with Granny's Devlan Mud, flesh and Hair get a coat of Gryphonne Sepia. I then took a little Reaper Master Series Violet liner (that I rather randomly got free when I ordered a couple of minis - my current D&D character for one - from them. I like Reaper minis) to bring out facial detail.

Now, without further ado, the crappy pictures:

The tension mounts...

2010-05-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of painting the second scout squad. Hopefully I'll keep myself motivated long enough to get them finished today (at least the actual figures. Not the bases. That's a three day job with glue drying and so on.)

Pictures - assuming I can take some decent ones - later. They'll be here by the weekend latest. I hope...

While you wait, a question:
I had an evening shift at work yesterday. very quiet actual wor wise, so I had plenty of time to waste online.

I'm pretty much settled on these as the army's basic APCs

and while I was looking around Old Crow's site saw...
these
Potential Grymn Speeeders armed with Thermal Lances (I'll leave you to translate that into Grannyspeak yourself). Wht do you think? Ideally I'd switch out that dome at the front for the top half of a Grymn as the pilot...but I have no idea how their models go together.

I also liked these
but they don't strike me as Battlefield models per se. Too aeronautical.

In other news, quite ridiculously, a Grymn project to follow the one that I've barely even started (and indeed don't have all the models for yet) came to mind today. Small Urban-themed strike team for skirmish game use (like the one that Granny used to make maybe, or this "Faction Wars" I've seen mentioned that might just be cheap enough for me to splash out on the rulebook for). Seem to remember someone had done something similar already. Haven't looked yet though.

Edit: had some daft formatting issues. Sorry.

so...

2010-05-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

That's me 70-odd quid lighter, and once the order works through the rest of my Infantry (24 more models) bought.

Happy happy joy joy

2010-05-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

My latest order arrived.
I have many Grymn
Must have more.

First to sort these into their units, tomorrow the next order.

Bah.

2010-05-10T05:22:00.001-07:00

So I failed to get the first pictures up. I'm still working on getting used to my new toy.

Still waiting on my next batch of Grymn (Sally at Hasslefree tells me they're on their way.) That will let me do my second scout unit, but the rest will be part units. Going to order the rest of what I need to stop myself going mad.

I'm also thinking about walker possibilites.

Sorry there's a distinct lack of visible progress. I'm desperate to get on with this...

Playing with a new toy

2010-05-06T01:57:00.000-07:00

I've got a new phone because my old Sony (actually not very old at all...but a complete piece of shit...NEVER BUY A SONY TELEPHONE. Had horrible reliability problems with it, and both the ones it replaced...) finally pissed me off for the last time. I now have a shiny new Samsung thing with Android, and I'm experimenting with the camera, using the first squad of grymn as targets. Will try and get the pictures up on here this evening.

Planning the army. Again.

2010-05-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

Soooooo...as I said, I rewrote the army list.
The number of Grymn I will be putting on the table as part of a 1500 point army? 61 (plus some transports, which I will probably buy from Old Crow. They appear to almost be standard among those who collect Grymn.

The Squads I've chosen are a Command squad, a squad of veterans, two tactical squads, two scout squads, an Assault squad and a Devastator squad. Not actually knowing the current rules I have no idea if that's good or not. I am led to believe that the Tactical and Scout squads are useful for actually winning the game these days, because only basic choices can claim objectives.

The bulk of the army - The tactical squads and Veterans - will be the Grymn Light Infantry models, with SMGs doing a "Counts as" for Bolters. The basic troopers will for the most part be helmeted, while I'll be using some of the Helmetless troopers, led by Krags (easily my favourite individual Grymn) as the Vets.

The command squad will include the Spotter (who'll be serving as the army's medic, seeing as one is apparently now compulsory), the Comms model and of course Torsten as my leader.

The Scouts will - just to be contrary - be the "Heavy" infantry. The models seem more lightly armoured (I've got the ones without Environment suits) and the "heavy" part only refers to their guns - which will "Count as" Shotguns. Again, I have no idea if this is good or not, but it differentiates them from their SMG armed brethren.

The rest should be easily guessd - CC troops with Jump packs, and two each of the two big guns, accompanied by Sergeant Edgar. I read on the Forum of Doom that the Guns carried by Horgan and Knut are interchangable, so I'll do that if that proves true.

As far as painting goes I'm usually a stickler for detail, but with these I'm going to be going for quick and easy. Base coats, a fairly heavy wash and then some ligt detail work. With over 60 models to do that seems like the best way to get this project done. I can go back and lavish more attention on them at a later date if need be...but let's be honest - I'll more likely be adding more bits and bobs to the army! (Vanguard? Heavy armour? the ever-elusive Grav bikes? Tanks?)

I did a test model and it looked good so I went ahead and did the first scout unit the same way, and I'm at least satisfied with the result. I'll try and post these first pictures tommorrow.

For now though, my own little Grymn wants his bedtime story...

Somebody stop me...

2010-05-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

Oh Gawd...I just had an idea to restructure the army a little...again.
This will mean buying yet more models.
That said, it will also result in a - to me at least - more pleasingly uniform appearance to my squads. I think.

This may well require a couple of small conversions...one of which means doing some sculpting...which I've not done before...not well anyway...oh dear...

More later, when I'm not at work coming up with stupid ideas to while away the last minutes before knocking off time. If I'm a very lucky boy then my most recent Hasslefree order will have arrived....

Edit:
Some shuffling around of points...and I've added an extra squad to the army list at the cost of a few whistles and bells. It boils down to the fact that I wanted my favourite Grymn model (Krags) to have his own squad rather than being part of the command gorup (where his place will probably be taken by the guy pulling the grenade pin).

So here's the plan...

2010-05-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

I started buying the Grymn figures I wanted before I had any sort of cohesive idea what the army was even going to be....in fact, even before I decided that I'd use 40k as the basic system.

(Note on 40k: Let's face it, for all the bile I'll probably throw at Granny in this blog, 40k is still the most widely played pure Sci-fi skirmish style game around. There area fair few players around here, and so if I ever get the urge to drag myself to a game table rather than just enjoying this project for the joy of building an army then I'll easily find folk to beat me soundly.)

There are several ways of using the Grymn in 40k. The most popular are apparently Guard, Marines and the Inquisition.
Inquisition immediately appealed...because I love the Eisenhorn books (though I thought the third one was much weaker than the first two). Unfortunately, a glance at Granny's website put me off the idea. Too tricky to build that sort of army with what Kev White - the man behind Hasslefree (as if you're reading this and didn't know that) - has produced....so I went out and bought the Marine codex.

Now, when I first started playing Granny's games all those years ago I bought her magazine and it was chock full of these cool warrior monks in armour. That has ALWAYS seemed cool to me, and the first miniatures I ever bought were that wonderful set of 30 plastic beakies, and a metal attack bike. I painted them matt black. They looked AWFUL. I later collected a HUGE army of Metal marines, before Granny did her first major Goal post shift, made half of my stuff obsolete and killed my interest in further playing of her games for a while. However, the love of the regimented, uniform, proper military look has apparently stayed with me, because when I started playing Warmachine my first army was a Khadoran force that focussed on the heavily armoured models. That sort of theme gets me. Disciplined ranks fighting together.

A friend (the one collecting Eldar actually) has the Guard codex. I looked at it and dismissed it as not something I wanted to play or collect.

So, it was locked in on marines. I visited http://www.hasslefreeminiatures.co.uk and ordered the miniatures I needed for the bulk of the army I sketched out. Then I completely changed the army. So I have some figures already, more on their way, and a nice list of what I want to buy...that should make mr White and his family happy.

And so it begins

2010-05-04T12:27:00.000-07:00

I have of late decided to kill two birds with one stone.

I love the background of Warhammer 40,000. I've read a fair few of the books released by the Black Library (FWIW, I heartily recommend pretty much anything written by Dan Abnett - especially teh Gaunt's Ghosts series and the Eisenhorn trilogy...which is conveinently available in one volume. "Brotherhood of the Snake" is also a good read.), and the grim Gothic/regressive high tech future thing really appeals to me.

Or maybe it's just nostalgia based on the fact that I've been following this stuff off and on for nearly twenty years now.

Unfortunately, I have - for a variety of reasons - developed a healthy loathing for the collection of muppets collectively known as Games Workshop...a company that truly has fallen from what it once was, thanks to shifting from focussing on making games to making money from impressionable teenagers. Games Workshop will Henceforth only be referred to here as "Granny". There are explanations why lurking on the net if you choose to look for them.

So...I want to build an army to play the game in their world...but not support them (this is not least inspired by a friend who has started collecting Eldar).

Here's that other Bird.

The nice folks at Hasslefree miniatures make a very good line of models called Grymn. Space Dwarfs. Granny used to make Space Dwarfs too, but dumped them into the maw of the Tyranids. I'm a bit of a fan of the short fellas with beards, playing them often in both Blood Bowl and Warmachine. I'd wanted to get some because they're cool. Putting my two desires together has put me on the road to collecting an army of Grymn for use in - Primarily - 40k.

This blog is intended to show my progress as I get them ready for battle. I hope you'll enjoy following my progress.