The Hellforged Leviathan Walks!

I've been working on this scary fellow on and off for the past week or so, and I think I'm finally ready to call him done!

Lord Ghôrax Skullborn here is a Hellforged Leviathan built mostly from the Redemptor Dreadnought kit. I think he's possibly a little bigger than a proper Leviathan but when you're calling something a 'Leviathan' being too big shouldn't be a major issue.

Here he is without the Green Stuff and a few of the last few parts. The most significant areas of conversion were the body and the Grav-Bombard. The body is basically made from cut-up parts of the Redemptor's own sarcophagus- the sawn-off cap of an old permanent marker makes the barrel that the head (from the Skulls box) sits in. The Leviathan's larger shoulder blocks were made using the carapace plates from a Warlord (I had these spare since I built mine Loyalist)

The Grav-Bombard was made by removing the barrel from the Redemptor's plasma cannon and adding basically all the wheels from the Cauldron of Blood (I've now bought two of that kit just for bits). After this shot was taken I trialled several possible centre-pieces including the emitter from a Tellyporta Blasta and the end of a Dark Talon's Rift Cannon, but settled on the end of a Leman Russ searchlight. The gribbly teeth were horns cut from Chaos Marine helms.

Over on the other arm, I simply used an assortment of Ork Kan Klaws, as well as the later addition of a Meganobz chainclaw, to make a suitably evil-looking weapon.

Here he is with most of the Green Stuff on. A lot of extra details were added too, including chains mostly taken from the old Marauder Horsemen kit, a couple of Chaos Knight shields, the ends of two Immolator flamers and an icon pole made with a combination of a Bloodletter banner and the old Khorne CSM icon. This slots into a hole in the top of the hull for transport. On the subject, the Redemptor kit has an odd overlarge slot in the bottom of the torso to meet the peg on the legs, which is presumably for posing but means it won't hold together unglued. I filled the slot with Green Stuff, wet the surfaces, and shoved the peg into place in the right pose before removing it, making a much more snug socket so he can come apart for storage.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the Green Stuff work is the various skulls, icons of Khorne, and twisted face-things, including the rather fun Daemon face representing the Hellfire Reactor. These were made by blatant cheating. I have some moulds made up, taken from the AoS Chaos Bastion floor, which allow me to press masses of twisted skulls into Green Stuff. Since the mould is bendy I can do this around curves, but not all the skulls will come out clean, making it ideal for a Chaotic look. (I used waste Green Stuff to add more skulls to the base with the same cast) The little runes of Khorne are similarly made by 'branding' the model with a small icon cut from the CSM Khorne command helm, and the reactor Daemon is cast from the backpack on the same sprue.

Here's another fun little cheat. The World Eaters icon here is just an Ogre belly-plate with a little Earth sculpted into the middle of it.

Meanwhile a look on the other side shows the true ludicrousity of the Grav-Bombard, as well as the little hanging Khorne icons pinched from a Khorgorath after I converted five of them to make them all unique some time ago.

I did a fairly standard paint job after all that. After a black spray undercoat, dry-brushed up with Leadbelcher and Administratum Grey, I had to immediately splodge loads of Blood For The Blood God into the depths of the bombard to coat all the little spoke-things of the six wheels that make up the barrel. I also added some water-effect acrylic gel for bulk. Once that horrible mess had dried, the rest of the process was quite simple. Towards the end, I noted that the eye-sockets were too deep to paint a glow effect in, so after basing them with blue I filled them and the power-plant chimneys with more water effect before painting over the top with thinned-down paints. It doesn't really add any special effect, but does get the colour where it needs to be.

Anyway, think that might be my most detailed WIP post in a long time! Now let's hope he can actually make some 4++ saves and live for more than one turn...

New beginnings..

So, today is an exciting day for me! Not so much for you. Unless of course your day has been very exciting, in which case great!*

Anyway, the point is that I've launched a new website, which will be specifically for the books of the Thelenic Curriculum and my writing in general. I'll add a link to there on the Landing Page, which will gradually become redundant.

What does that mean for this site? Almost nothing! I'll still do my usual hobby-based posts on here (look out for a tasty new Khornate Leviathan this weekend) but I'll also still do writing-related stuff on here. Mostly, it just means people going to the www.thetcbooks.co.uk link will now be redirected to the new site rather than here, so won't have to put up with me ranting about the Assault Phase when they're looking for my books. The new site is also much more mobile-friendly, so if you've been meaning to read the short stories but couldn't find them on your phone due to Google Blogs being a bit janky, head on over to the new site.

Going forward I'm even going to be buying some ads! Anyway, if you're curious, head on over and take a look and maybe buy a book or two. Or even review one you've read, if you're a true superhero to authors everywhere.





*Unless it's 'being shot at' or 'being chased by a lunatic with an axe' exciting, in which case I hope you survived.

New Keeper, new paints, and some thoughts.

I finally got my new Keeper of Secrets finished! There are so many gems on this thing that looking on the box you can see where GW's official painter lost the will to live and just did some as metal bumps. I did more than they did, but on the other hand my gems suck.

When the new Keeper came out I was presented with a bit of a problem. Since I already have not one, but two models that I use as Keepers (and which are finally about the right size!) there didn't seem a lot of point making another stock one. On the other hand the variant Keeper, Shalaxi Hellbane, didn't appeal to me visually (though 'it' has nice rules. More on 'it' in a moment.)

The solution, I decided, was to go full-on with magnets, allowing the regular Keeper to have Shalaxi's weapon options. This also allows me to field a Keeper with options like the Ritual Knife and Shimmering Aegis which I don't have on the older models.

More gems than an animated pop-group with an inexplicable movie

The Mammarian Heresy
Now, there was one area in which the new Keeper was, to my eyes, a bit deficient. For reasons known only to them, GW persist in making Slaanesh models with only one breast. Not only that, they've doubled down recently by referring to Keepers and Heralds as 'it', rather than 'she'. I find this a bit irritating, since the other Greater Daemons are all still unambiguously male. Not only that, but only Arnold J. Rimmer is ever going to be pleased with having just one of the things and that's not an example I want my legions of excess following.

As an aside, I entirely take the point that as physical manifestations of warp entities Daemons don't really have a gender at all, but again, all the 'male' daemons apparently do. I personally think that Slaanesh daemons manifest as whatever those watching find most alluring- basically a glamour- so for me that means two dumplings on the plate. I do plan to make some oiled-up Chippendale-style Noise Marines in future, but I'm hoping we'll see a new Emperor's Children book and Noise Marine models soon.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I ended up sculpting in her left (as she would view it) breast, as well as the corset-thing that goes over it. I made it with Green Stuff, and as usual with this sort of project I did it in two stages, the first being the 'structural' stage where I got the basic shape about right, and then, once this had set, the 'detail' stage where I smoothed it out and added the clothing. Trying to do the whole thing in one go tends to lead to pushing the thing out of shape whilst trying to detail it.

Other than that, the only real modelling work that needed doing was adding magnets to the wrists and hands for swapping the weapons, which I did by drilling out a small recess for the magnets and then filling the gaps. As always, there's a thin layer of Green Stuff preventing the magnets making direct contact, which makes the options much easier to remove and lessens the chance of the magnets ripping free. In the end, I left the head and cloak off for painting as well as leaving the Shining Aegis in two parts (hand/ shield) for ease of access.

Someone needs to do one with Daemonette train-bearers

Which cloak to use was a matter of some debate. The cloak for Shalaxi represents 'its' (named character so I've got to) Cloak of Constriction, but I preferred the way the other cloak looked and hung off the wrists. Those hands which are meant to be used with it have a little hole for the cloak but test-fitting showed it didn't cause any serious issues. Likewise the arms are different for Shalaxi but I found the default Keeper arms worked fine and didn't cause a problem with the spear- in fact I prefer it levelled at it is here, rather than point-up as it is on Shalaxi.

Adventures in Contrast
Painting was a bit of an adventure since I waited until the release of the new Contrast paints to do it. The model was undercoated with Wraithbone (the brighter Contrast undercoat) and then painted with Apothecary white for the flesh, Skeleton Horde for the horns, and Volupus Pink, Magos Purple and Shyish Purple for the claws and robes/ clothes. I forgot to get a Black Templar for the black, but a couple of coats of Vallejo Air black did the deed. The metals were painted with conventional metals, over the air black on the claws and weapons, since painting them over Wraithbone really doesn't look good.

It's fair to say I had the odd.. issue with the Contrasts. On the flesh, the Apothecary white was great, giving a bluish-grey tint just as I like for my Slaanesh Daemons. On the larger, sweeping areas like the cloaks, though, I ran in to a lot of pooling issues and had some bother finding the right highlights. Nevertheless, the model responded well to my usual Nuln Oil Gloss wash and we got there in the end!

The other worry with Contrast is durability. I think Wraithbone is designed to allow the paints to 'slide off' a bit, to give the effect of making raised areas lighter in colour. However, it seems that makes the paint itself more vulnerable to chipping. I've transported this model once so far and whilst the model itself was chip-free, the Caliban Green around the base came off in a couple of places. I think the oil wash and the highlights have made the paint on the model resilient enough to cope with handling, but since the base edge got neither of those it might need a coat of Stormshield or similar.

New crossover short that absolutely nobody asked for.

Every now and again you have one of those ideas that gets stuck in your brain and won't go away until you do it. This phenomenon is probably responsible for the deep-fried Mars Bar, the Bognor Regis Birdman competition, and many other things that probably shouldn't exist but do.

Into this crowded field of lunatic endeavours comes my latest crossover short story, "The Not-Quite Kidnap of Betty Hardin", which can be found either at that link or in the Crossover Shorts side-panel. In the story, the 13th Doctor meets the legendary Floating Outfit of 1960's Western author J.T. Edson. It's an everyday tale of mistaken identity, bandit kidnappers, and cybernetic killing machines from the far future.

Given that some people (often many of the sort of people who still read J.T.) decry the recent Dr Who canon as overly politically-correct and J.T. himself was as politically-correct as something that most definitely, certainly isn't, this wasn't exactly a match made in heaven but I consider everyone involved to be basically good at heart so I did it anyway. To allay any fears, this is not one of those really annoying revenge-fiction pieces where a writer takes a character they have it in for and does horrible things to them.

To finish with a little warning- while I've done my best to stay as close to J.T's style as possible, not especially hard since he's been an influence on my own to some extent, I should point out to anyone interested in his books that he was very much a man of his time regarding sexual preferences, gender politics and race (though all three topics could be the subject of some interesting discussion in this context.) If you do decide to check them out, You Have Been Warned.

At the very least have a look at that Wikipedia page if you're at all concerned!

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

I don't often do refutations. Most of the time, they're a waste of effort and rapidly devolve into people throwing rocks at each other. But this recent BBC piece on speaking roles in Game of Thrones.. well, you might want to read it for yourself before continuing. One thing you can say for it is that since the BBC isn't ad-supported, it's not click-bait.

Anyway, here's the gist- the piece suggests that there's something wrong (I won't use the 'P-word' because they don't) with the fact that roughly 2/3 of the dialogue in the series is spoken by men. Here's one of the quotes:

"Overall, the actions and words women are participating in are still very attached to gender-related stereotypes".

Now this is a repetition of something I've mentioned before and call Raven's Cry Syndrome. If you're not familiar with what I'm referring to, Raven's Cry was a game that came out a few years ago set in the 17th century that was mostly about pirates. It wasn't very good, but simply pointing this out wasn't enough for certain critics, who instead devoted large chunks of their reviews to complaining that the characters were racist, sexist, and swore a lot. Well guess what kids, pirates were Not Very Nice People, and there's a reason no-one holds up Blackbeard as a paragon of virtue. In effect, Raven's Cry Syndrome is when a period-set piece of fiction or art is criticised simply for accurately reflecting its setting.

MINOR TO MAJOR GAME OF THRONES SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW
Coming back to Game of Thrones, we're looking at a low(ish) fantasy story set in a basically medieval world. Whilst there are plenty of noblewomen, queens and other women in positions of power, as a world where military tactics still revolve mostly around using muscle power to hit people with sharp bits of metal in various shapes, the majority of the military are male. To define our terms here a little, I say low fantasy because whilst GoT has plenty of magic in it, it's usually of the ritual or mystical variety. Even the most powerful magic-users, like Melisandre, can't cast Fireball and obliterate an entire regiment. By contrast, in a high fantasy setting, magical abilities make female military commanders or warriors far more feasible, as seen in my own books, for example. (Come on, had to get that in there). It's hard to tell Magister Thalia Daran to sit quietly on the sidelines when her personal offensive  firepower is up there with the average battle tank.

This means that when you get a big battle scene, like the Battle of the Bastards, the defence of Winterfell, etc, you're going to have a lot of blokes in beards standing about discussing tactics. It's just inevitable in such a setting. GoT, of course, makes a point of having characters like Arya and Brienne who break the mould, but they do it in a setting-appropriate way- Arya by gaining mystical powers and utilising stealth and deception, and Brienne by being simply an unusually tall and strong woman. Even so, both run up against patriarchal attitudes, as you'd expect, but they overcome them.

Even allowing for the setting, though, the analysis in the BBC piece is blisteringly unfair. The quote I use as my title has been variously appropriated to Mark Twain, Benjamin Disraeli and others:

"There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics."

The point of this isn't to suggest that all statistics are worthless, but to remind us that you can massage them all sorts of ways to make a point if you'd like. To use the language of Sherlock Holmes, statistics aren't facts, they're data. A fact is data with the context to interpret it. For example, the statistics tell us that the character who has the most lines in GoT is Tyrion. This should hardly be a surprise, given that talking is Tyrion's primary talent (especially TV Tyrion) and he's in more episodes than anyone else. If we look at the chart, we see that in the top four speaking characters we have two men, and two women (and second place looks to be a male-female tie).

Here's where trying to use statistics to analyse fiction falls to bits completely. The two top-scoring women are both, for most of their time in the show, queens or rulers. The thing with being in charge is that often you do more listening than talking. Consider the example of a board meeting- the Chairman is the most important person, but spends most of their time asking their subordinates for reports and getting comments on them. As the saying goes, there's no point having a dog and barking yourself. Possibly the best example of this, though, comes from the very last episode, where the remaining lords of Westeros are appointing a new King. Tyrion does a lot of talking, but it's abundantly clear that as far as those listening are concerned it's Sansa wearing the proverbial trousers. "Shut up, Uncle." may be one of the simplest and most effective burns in GoT to not be delivered by an actual Dragon.

Ultimately, trying to determine who has the most impact or agency in a story based on how much time they spend 'on camera' or how many words they speak is pointless. It's like trying to analyse cooking with economics- cold, hard numbers have nothing to do with the feel of a story. If everyone watching thinks a story has strong, powerful women who take control of their own destiny in it, they are by definition correct. Using statistics to try to argue against that is like watching an unconscious boxer being carried out of the ring on a stretcher and saying that because he landed 100 punches and his opponent only landed three, he actually won. It's not quantity that counts in communication, but quality. To go back to the chart, we see Lord Varys sitting very near the bottom. I defy anyone to claim his was a weak or ineffectual character, he just doesn't make a big noise about his influence. He's called 'Master of Whispers' for a reason.

I'm not sure what the motive of the BBC piece or the research behind it was. I'm all for strong female characters in fiction (I hope my own writing reflects that) but Game of Thrones is completely the wrong target for this sort of piece and nothing hurts a good cause worse than a terribly flawed argument.

The importance of getting it right

Not pictured: Tactics

By now most people who care have probably seen the most recent episode of Game of Thrones (Episode 3 of the final series, for any internet archaeologists out there). Those who have not might want to avoid this little rant for now since there may be the odd minor spoiler in here, though I'll resist any blow-by-blows or casualty lists.

Anyway, those of us who have basically any understanding of tactics were probably more than a little perplexed by the way the big battle in this episode played out from a strategic point of view. There have been quite a few very detailed breakdowns elsewhere by people better qualified than I, but it doesn't take Sun Tzu to spot that the cavalry and artillery in particular were spectacularly mishandled. I've seen a few comments expressed to the effect of this not mattering, or things like 'I must have missed the bit in The Art of War about fighting zombies with dragons', as one particular God of Snark put it. As you might expect, I disagree pretty strongly.

Here's the thing- if your heroes are meant to be everyday men in the street, there's no problem with them doing dumb things on occasion. It always annoys me when critics whine about dialogue in movies or books where people respond to stressful situations by shouting 'F*@k you!' because they say it's 'cliched' or uninspired when the reality is that real people don't always come up with the best and most poetic lines on the spot. But if your heroes are meant to be experienced military commanders (and in the case of GoT, they had enough veteran warriors and strategists to run three campaigns at once) it's important that they at least give some impression of being just that.

In part this is that old classic 'show, don't tell'. You can tell us Sir Hack of Slash is a military genius, or you can show him pulling off a brilliant tactic against impossible odds and make us believe it. Better yet, do both. In the specific case of GoT, it's entirely fair to say that given that their enemy had effectively unlimited numbers and could raise the dead to fight again, no strategy the defenders might have employed would have made much difference, but that isn't really the point. Had we seen the defence well-planned, with a properly obstructed killing-zone, the artillery pounding a hampered advance, archers killing hundreds of the enemy whilst they were held up in the field, etc, it makes the true scale of the threat that much more impressive when they take all of that and just keep coming. As it was, we're left with the impression, false though it may be, that the various heroic sacrifices might have been completely unnecessary.

We see this in a lot of games and movies. One of the Dragon Age expansions, for example, tasks you with defending a castle against Darkspawn, and at one point presents you with the 'choice' of sending troops out to defend farmers in their fields (weakening the castle's defences), or leaving them to die. Of course, anyone who knows the first thing about castles and the feudal system knows that the whole point of the damn things is to bring the food and the peasantry inside at the first sign of trouble, which makes the whole 'choice' feel cheap and the inevitable NPC harangue you have to endure whatever decision you make feel undeserved.

Likewise, in some 40k novels and shorts we see troops fighting using tactics that make no sense whatsoever. Quite some time ago I reviewed the short story 'Mercy' by Danie Ware and whilst I actually quite like that author from what I've seen I stand by my main criticism of it, which is that the tactics employed (and their result) don't make sense. If you write a story where a Guard commander has been reading too much Regimental Standard and orders his men to engage Orks or Genestealers in melee with bayonets rather than 'waste' ammunition on them, that had better not work or all you've done is make the enemy look like a joke. Even if it fails, you've opened the door to the idea that defeat would have been avoided with a competent commander, which is fine if that's what you're going for, but a big problem if he was supposed to be highly-skilled. Losing against impossible odds is fine and can be heroic, but it doesn't look that way if you make the enemy's job easier for them. Death is acceptable, failure is not, to use the old Imperial adage.

Orks! Thousands of 'em!

As a counterpoint, we could think about some of the great desperate defences of history, like Rourke's Drift, The Alamo, the Knights of St John in Malta or Stalingrad in WWII. Whilst adaptations of most of those exist, to varying degrees of success (both on the part of the adaptation, and of the defence) one thing they have in common is that most of the best at least pay lip-service to getting the facts straight where possible. At some, like Stalingrad, both sides made horrendous mistakes at various times and trying to gloss over that seriously distorts the narrative. (As an aside, the directors of GoT could have done a lot worse than watching Zulu for some ideas!) In fantasy, we could look at the defences of Minas Tirith and Helms Deep in LoTR, which to my mind did a far better job of showing a defence that failed (or could have) not because of incompetence or cowardice, but due to the sheer numerical advantage of the enemy.*

So anyway, that's my hot take. Consistency and accuracy matter, not because of the need to ablate torrents of potential nerd-rage** but because if you don't have them, it begins to cheapen your story and weaken any sense of peril or threat, a trap more than one otherwise good author has fallen into.*** Of course, we should be careful not to lay too much of this on the shoulders of GRRM, since his story will presumably work out a little differently.****

Oh, and 'they' were still bad-ass. You know who I mean.






*And in at least one incident, their flat refusal to die when pin-cushioned with arrows. Torch Ork can serve in my Waaagh any time.

**Because as I've said before, once a certain crowd decides they don't like you there's literally nothing you can do to change that...

*** Cough-The Belgariad-Cough. I'm not kidding, I do have a cough.

****If the stubborn bugger survives long enough to finish it.

The Decaying Doctrine

I'll admit that was a sneaky effort to lever the title of a particularly solid Kiuas track in, but it's sort of relevant, as is Kjeldor Thricecurse up there, and not just because he's all Nurgley. The recent reveal of the new Havocs for Chaos and the Warhammer Community tactica piece has got me thinking about something in 40k that gets less discussion than it possibly should- the subject of Decay.

Not these guys

The Havocs are a particularly interesting example of this mechanic, which boils down to models and units getting weaker as they take damage. In the game, it happens to basically any unit with more than one model in it, or which is a single model with 10 or more Wounds, but it's quite a bit more complicated than that. The new Havocs, with their Toughness of 5 and ability to fire on the move, have got quite a few people excited about power-creep and auto-take units. Whilst I don't really see why the Havocs are T5 (unless they're supposed to be wearing a Chaos Armour version of Gravis Armour*) I think people are missing a more important change in the grand scheme of things.

Havocs, as modelled in that image from the Community article, are capped at five models strong. On top of that, their default equipment is either a Heavy Bolter or Lascannon. Taken together, this means that the very most Wounds a unit of Havocs can take before its firepower begins to be reduced is one, and that assumes you're prepared to remove the Champion first. As an aside, being the Champion of a Havoc squad seems to be one of the worst jobs in a CSM army now. You don't add anything to the squad unless it gets very close (unlike, say, a Devastator Sergeant with his Signum) and you're almost certain to either spend the game doing nothing, or get killed. Compared to the old version of Havocs, who could have up to five bolter-armed chaff models added to the squad, the firepower of the new ones is very fragile.

Now of course, adding those bolter marines costs points, points which you could now spend on something else, like, say, more Havocs. But those guys don't simply add survivability to the unit, they can actively discourage an enemy from shooting at it at all. I recently saw a game in which an Iron Warriors force with two units of ten Havocs (Slaanesh of course) sat them in ruins blazing away at an oncoming Khorne force, and lost barely any of them for the entire game. The reason was that the Khorne army's firepower was limited, and whilst it could have killed a few Havocs each turn it couldn't remove enough in one round of shooting to reach the big guns, which were the only things doing anything. You will often see this in other units, too- players will ask how close a model is to the next stage of its decaying profile, and then try to damage it enough to reduce its effectiveness.

I know they're the wrong scale, but hey

Decay is even more complicated than that, though, because different models decay in different ways. The general rule-of-thumb is that a model starts to lose some level of effectiveness once it's lost half of its Wounds, but this only holds true up to a point. A Stompa, for example, starts to decay having lost only 10 Wounds of its 40 (25%) whereas a Warlord Titan similarly takes 10 Wounds to reach its first break-point but has 70 of them (~14%). An Imperial Knight, on the other hand, has the more common three levels to its profile, meaning that in the case of a Castellan it has to take 14 Wounds before it begins to suffer. Just as 8 Wounds is the 'sweet spot' for a Character where they can't be targeted but are reasonably tough (9 would be even better but is rare), for Vehicles it seems to fall somewhere near 30, meaning the Castellan is in a good place and the Stompa takes it in the shorts.** This also leads to the odd situation with light vehicles where a Dreadnought or Buggy with 8 Wounds 'feels' more durable than one with 10, since the 10-wound versions start to decay very fast- 5 Wounds will weaken a Contemptor but have no effect on a basic Dread.

But wait, there's more! Even when a model or unit does decay, the significance of that decay varies massively. A Morkanaut, for example, loses Movement, WS and Attacks as it's damaged, but if it's being used as an anchor for a Freeboota gun-line doesn't much care, since its (bad) BS remains unchanged. The same effects are far more pronounced on the more assault-minded Gorkanaut. Infantry squads of course lose models to Wounds, which reduces their overall effectiveness, but a Combat Squad camping an objective with a Lascannon marine can be reduced to a single model and still play a significant part in the proceedings.

Overall then, decay is something every player needs to be thinking about, both from the point of view of their own forces and that of the enemy. It makes certain abilities and Stratagems that inflict or repair relatively small amounts of damage potential game-winners when used to cross a break-point in one direction or the other, and can make some units less of a bargain or game-breaker than they might appear. It's also a mechanic, like much else in 40k, with some serious oddities that could possibly use a tweak.





* Or to SELL MOAR MODELS!!1

**No change there, then