Monday's WIP: Dark elves, Heritage necromancer, Ral Partha rogues

Straight to the piccies:

From L to R: Eastern Front Paladin, 2 Ral Partha Rogues, Citadel Dark Elf, Heritage Necromancer,  Citadel Dark Elf.

Way back when, in the dark mists of late 2012, I won a lot of cold ones with a bunch of these guys and the marauder sorcerers. In trying to work out a way to make them into a unit that made some kind of sense, I decided to just lump them all together. Sure, they looked like sorcerers but they'd be plain old cold one knights. It was a solution, sure, but not a very convincing one. I put them to one side and every now and then drag them out and ponder how to make them work. I hadn't really worked out what rules set I wanted to use and knew that if I wanted to play the latest edition I had to make them WYSIWYG* which for me meant depicting lances and shields on my riders somehow. It was while thinking about those I came across my answer. I would have their lances be covered in scrolls. The reason that they looked like wizards, wasn't because they were, it's because they wished to become wizards. A bunch of bored nobles with burnt out nasal passages (cold ones stink to high heaven) who have discovered something to follow, a cause. The Knights of the Scroll were born.

A citadel dark elf. This is her good side. The other side of her face looks like she has stored acorns in her cheek like a demented chipmunk.

This photo was taken by Jfk187, the awesome storeowner on Ebay who sold me this miniature.

This was the state of the Heritage Necromancer when I bought her. Whoever had it before me had undercoated it and started the process of painting the flesh. The face was bad like 2 year old playing with make-up bad. The lips were a red slash and the eyes were huge black dots. She looked like the Other Mother from Coraline with her shiny button eyes.

And this is where I got her to tonight. With some tidying up of the flesh the black and the red toned right down and reveal a very serene face. Most unlike what you'd expect someone who trucks with the dead to be like. I am finding that I really like the heritage range. Even the barely defined hands add to the character of this miniature.  I base coated the gown with orange and spent a long time layering yellow on top. The effort was worth it. I waver on whether red and yellow are the worst colours out there. They force you to use multiple coats to get the coverage, but I'm finding that the frustration gives way to satisfaction at the depth the added layers give.

A Ral Partha rogue. Another mini that has real problems with definition (the mouth is barely there, the hands are teeny) yet this adds to the overall character.

A different angle on the necromancer. The skull on the staff is goofy. Her face is wonderful.

Footnotes:
*For those who come from other areas of my life and haven't suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous rules-mongering, WYSIWYG is a painful acronym for "what you see is what you get."Simply means that what a miniature looks like is what it is, what a miniature is carrying is what it is actually carrying as far as the rules go. If the goblins on the table carry bows then that is what they are: goblins with bows. I suspect that this became important in competitive/tournament play to lessen confusion. If your opponent doesn't have to keep on asking things like "what did you say they were armed with again?" or have to take back charges because your giants are being represented by a single small goblin then things do runs smoother.

I also suspect that this single 'rule' required people to buy more miniatures as the army composition rules changed.

I'm really talking about Games Workshop and the Warhammer games here. The company has pushed the tournament angle so hard that this appears to be the accepted mode of play. And as time has gone on, rules changes coupled with WYSIWYG have rendered chunks of everyone's collections "illegal" (in heavy, underlined, wanker quotation marks) for tournament play.

And as the product that is being produced has gotten more and more expensive, people are, I am, less and less inclined to keep up with it all. Ranty, rant, rant, rant.