Getting ready for Warhammer Day…

A group of us are getting together in Derby this coming weekend to play a large game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle (3rd Edition). This is an event we started last year, and are hoping to continue into the future.

Whilst we are playing 3rd Ed. Warhammer, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are all using Games Workshop models (The Horror!) – it was more the case that those rules enable us to get our toys out on the table.

I used a Goblin Army last year, and whilst it was quite a large in model count, it was not big in points and so I ended up adding two Level 25 Wizards to the army. I wasn’t the only one to do this, and it was generally agreed that magic dominated the game last year (the biggest complaint coming from my opponent, whose poncy elves were on the receiving end of a well-deserved thrashing, with my wizards playing a starring role) so this year Wizards are restricted to Level 15, with only one being available.

This left me with a big points gap to fill. As previously noted, I had painted two units of Trolls for the army, but I wanted to add some more special units in the form of chariots and war machines.

The Bolt Throwers (Spear Chukkas) are from Irongate Studios, and the Stone Throwers are from World War Gaming (purchased from Amazon). The crew of these engines of war are Oathmark Goblin Slaves.

The Goblin Chariots use the chassis of the MDF Celtic Chariots from Warbases, with coffee stirrers added for the crew compartment. The crew are a mix of Goblin Slaves and Goblin Infantry from Oathmark, with some of the arms and weapons from the Goblin Wolf Riders box. The Giant Wolves are from the Oathmark Goblin Wolf Riders box.

It was at this point that I was checking the army list and realised that minimum troops requirements for the army included 20 Orc Boyz and 20 Orc Arrer Boyz, so the last couple of weeks has seen some frantic painting to get these finished – which I managed to do on Monday night this week.

Luckily, I just happened to have a couple of boxes of Oathmark Orc Infantry lying around…

The final touch was adding banners for all my standard bearers. For this, I used the standards from Flags of War. Inexplicably, this range does not include any banners for the wolf riders, so I have to paint these separately to try and match the printed design (which I was trying to avoid as I am rubbish at that sort of thing).

Paint has subsequently been applied to movement trays (I didn’t have time to texture them as I originally intended) so everything is now ready for the weekend – I even have a couple of days spare to remind myself of all the special rules!