İzmirCon WHFB Tournament Review

Last weekend İzmirCon took place. As usual, my buddy Mr. Lee made an appearance too, driving all the way from İstanbul. The event I was looking forward to was the Warhammer Fantasy tournament which happened on sunday, where I fielded my Chaos Dwarfs first time.

What was your list, you might ask. Well, it was a little different than the list I prepared during the countdown to IzmirCon. Here is the breakdown:

• Sorcerer-Prophet (General)
     Level 4 Hashut
     Enchanted Shield
  

  

  A shot taken during the second games

     Blood of Hashut
• Infernal Castellan (BSB)
     Shield
     Dragonhelm
• K'daai Destroyer
• 6x K'daai Fireborns
• 5x Bull Centaur Renders
     Additional Hand Weapons
• 25x Infernal Guards
     Standard
     Musician
• 24x Infernal Guards
     Standard
     Musician

Totaling to 2000pts. As you can see, it was a very weak list with only 61 models, mostly because of the limited number of models available at hand. In fact, there were still super glue stains in my hand when I was rolling the first few dice in the tournament.

Anyway, if the first highlight of the tournament for me was to be able to finish my miniatures on time (I had to take the friday off to make it happen btw), the main one was receiving my destroyer. I commissioned that job to Mr. Lee and he made short work of it. If not for his efforts, I would have entered the tourney with my regular dwarfs and most likely win it, heh... Some of you might expect some photos of the monster I guess; but it deserves its own article, so, a little patience...

When I ranked up my army before the games started, people who saw my force were generally full of praises. The lava bases were their favorite, as was the destroyer; but the comments I cared about most was that they look very coherent as an army. This was big for me and I had my doubts about that since I have been gathering miniatures from different manufacturers. I was pleased to hear I'm doing ok on that front.

So, how did I do in the tourney? I came second among 8 players, losing only to the Dark Elves player who won the tournament. I must admit that I was very lucky with my match-ups through the tournament, as in the two games I won, I played against inexperienced players. Hence, I don't think that this result actually represents my skills as a general, the strength of my list or the Legion of Azgorh army list at all. On the other hand, I bagged the sportsmanship award again: Three times in a row now... The most important thing about this was I got this award while placed 2nd in points. As you know, generally it does not happen this way... at all...

Being named as the best sportsman guy allowed me to brag around a little more, right after finished bragging about my new career: A pro-painter. Also, I think I found the name of my army now: Zharr Naggrund Gentlemen! Only fitting in my opinion; but will see if it becomes a thing.

I Bring Fire: More K'daais

Ta-daaa... Yeah, changed the looks of my blog a little. I hope you like it that way. I just thought it was time for a little change so, bear with this theme for some time... please...?

So anyways, back to business, which is the k'daais... I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with me, painting special stuff before even finishing the core infantries of the army; but here they are, three more k'daais.

As you know, even though the k'daais are in the The Legion of Azgorh army list which is presented in Tamurkhan book, there are no models released to represent them as of yet. Hence the chaos dwarf community accepted the challenge and got cracking, either by converting stuff or using alternative models for the task. Being as lazy as... umm... well, nothing comes to my mind to describe the laziness level I have, anyways, so I decided to take the latter route and searched for miniatures from different companies, which could be proxied as k'daais.

First, let me say that it was a very hard and painful task to look for these kind of miniatures. It is not easy to find the correct keywords for such a search. Then, even when you think you found a suitable miniature for your taste, you will notice that it lacks necessary scale information, which is kinda dumb in my opinion. I mean, it is not that hard to put a small ruler next to the model when taking the photos, right? Last, but not the least of your worries will be to see how the miniature looks painted. You can easily find yourself browsing through the galleries of Cool Mini or Not or a similar website for a glimpse of the end product. You've been warned...

OK, I guess I bitched enough. The three k'daai models here are from Reaper Miniatures. This US based company offers a wide variety of metal miniatures, so if you are a metal head like me, make sure to check their website whenever you need anything. The miniatures I bought from them are the Incarnation of Flame and Lesser Earth Elemental from Warlord line and Fire Elemental from Dark Heaven Legends line. As you can tell from my selections, I opted for fire and earth elemental figures to represent the k'daais: Perfect combination of Hashut's flames and the dwarves' affection for the earth and stone.

With these three are done, my k'daai regiment is four strong now and two more are waiting for me at home in blisters. I think six will be enough for my army for quite a while. I also prepared a kind of marker in the process. I intend to use it to remember the "blazing body" rule of the k'daais or an important spell i placed upon the enemy. It looks useful now. I just hope I don't forget them in my games. God, I hate that when that happens.

PS: Ran a search on Google about how to finish "as lazy as..." and here are a couple of alternatives: "as lazy as a preacher on Monday", "as lazy as a dog on a hot day", heh...

New K'daais

Manburner joins in

Scaling, oh and the marker

Incarnation of Flame

Flame Elemental

Lesser Earth Elemental

War Machines Rock!

All wargamer would know that, although painting infantries is fun at the start to try out new color schemes and stuff, it can quickly get boring after you manage to get a sizeable unit ready. Well, that's what's happened here on my side and I went for a change ::drumroll:: A WAR MACHINE!

Big surprise, eh? A dwarf army and a war machine... Well, let me just say that I have more under my sleeve and I'll share them with you soon; but for now, yes, it's a war machine.

This one is from Mantic Games again, the one which they call Katsuchan Rocket Launcher; but I'll be using it as a Deathshrieker Rocket Launcher in my Chaos Dwarf army. First, let me talk about the model a little.

Like all of Mantic's Abyssal Dwarfs line, these miniatures are also hybrid ones. So, you'll be doing conversion work again. The crew miniatures are built using the "normal" dwarf crew miniatures, with adding chaosy headwear to them. Also, there are only two crew miniatures per war machine, so I needed to use one of the infantries from the army box to make it three. But don't worry, apart from the body, there are enough bits to make a third crew miniature.

The war machine itself is a little more different in origin. The chassis is from the Balefire Catapult of Mantic's Undead line, with metal conversion bits again. This time I have no complaints though, since the bits really make the war machine look different than what it was and cool at the same time. Also, the bits fit very well to where they are supposed to go. Decent job Mantic, ::cough:: this time...

The painting stage of the miniatures was very easy. I used the very same color scheme with the rest of my army mostly. I kinda regret that there were wooden parts on the war machine though. I would have preferred to have an all-metal one which would be more fitting for a Chaos Dwarf force; but in the end, meh is all I can say.

When building the base, I wanted to have all the miniatures to be able to sit comfortably on it. Now when I look at it, I think I went extreme there, with the base is about 90mm square, oops... :) Not entirely happy with it and will definitely try and make it smaller when I build the second one.

Just for the sake of completeness, I'd like to make a note that there are also three more infantries finished, to increase the size of the infantries to 24. Decent size to be fielded in small games, so I have no complaints there either.

So, all and all, I have my very first war machine ready to serve Hashut's will. And it rocks, as in rock-it launcher. And yes, I can do word jokes in English too. Or so I think... Anyways, have some photos here: