Let Battle be Joined

That's right boys and girls.. its finally here....

The Battle For Salvation Registration is finally upon us, and I am proud to announce the Lancashire Wargaming will have a presence at this GT. A small contingent is being sent to White Plains to bring the pain of the Amish Countryside to those city and suburban dwellers! Now all I have to do is convince Moros that he should consider painting one of his armies on this days, convince Ross that IG aren't allergic to tanks, and convince Todd that just because GKs can do it, doesn't mean it should be done.. me.. I just need to find some way that an old codex can be competitive :/. still up in arms whether or not to bring my new ravenwing list or the standard. more to come in the upcoming months regarding our progress..

there is a special team tournament on Friday and man.. I have just been itching to go back with Moros and mine 'khorne angels' like with all khorne deamons and deathwing termies which did pretty well at the dream wizards tourney sponsored by Beltway Gamers. We were on table 2 in the final round but ended up playing daemon green and his colonial GT winning SM allied with some nice IG gunz. wasn't pretty, and i've been itching ever since to get some vengeance.

so get ready White Plains, Lancaster County Pennsylvania is bringing the pain in October!

When do conversions go too far?

image courtesy of The Kingworks Creative Blog

As many of you have seen, the BOLS video battle report this week showed a battle between the Orks and Dark Eldar. (See link here in case you live in a cave) The Ork army featured custom built battle wagons which were absolutely gorgeous. The problem however is that these models were so different than their official GW counterpart that many people have complained about this conversion.
I have some thoughts on this conversion (proxy). At our club we allow all sorts of proxies and stand-ins for models so that people can play.

However, we try to encourage our guys to use models, cut outs, proxies, that are similar in size, shape, and scale of the GW original. This is not because we are GW fan boys and don’t want to encourage our guys’ creativity. In fact, quite the opposite, we really want our guys to convert models. Hopefully we can show some of Little Zach’s (LZ) custom ork conversions, they are gorgeous and they stick within the parameters of the original models.

So.. what’s the deal with the gigantic battlewagons being a problem? Milking the system. (sidenote – this is not saying the person in this discussion intentionally is breaking the rules here) battle wagons, as designed in the 40k universe are supposed to have short armor 14 fronts with LONG smaller armor sides. There is a reason this model has been built like this, the rules are written to use this model. The game has been balanced (well in theory) to use the model with the small armor 14 area and a larger small armor area. The model was supposed to be vulnerable on the sides. Makes sense.

Now, by his custom conversions, he has eliminated this very vulnerable area of his models and his army in general. He had a HUGE area in the front that is now armor 14. In order to get side shots on these beasts one would have to travel halfway around the map instead of simply changing position slightly. This is where we start to see why a tournament or opponent would not allow this model to be used. It massages the model’s size in order to create a tactical advantage for one player. If you are in a tournament, and you see someone with a model such as this, and you think it will provide an advantage to your opponent that he would not normally have, please tell a Tournament Organize and hash it out. Don’t be scared to lose your sportsmanship score.


Having said that, don’t be a dick. Seriously. If the guy has a cool conversion, he is honest about it, and explains to you why he did the conversion the way he did. (fluffy or just looking cool or whatever). Your opponent should explain to you what the conversion is, and ask your permission to use said conversion in the match. ‘Hey guys, I just converted these awesome battle wagons as large tanks because I am roleplaying an ork army that had raided Mars and took a bunch of the heavy armor there, do you mind if I use these models in our match?’ (*presents models*) you say, hey no problem man, thanks for asking. I don’t mind at all. Boom, there you go, no need for messy arguments. If you agree to it, there shouldn’t be a problem at all. More importantly, if you lose, you can’t blame it on the model conversions. You agreed to it, so you are stuck with the results.

Most people won’t have a problem with this, but yes, you will see those people who will try to lame the rules by the way they construct their models. But have a talk with your opponent first regarding them. Maybe he even has an extra model in case you don’t agree on the conversion that can be swapped out. Just be aware of these things before you start your match, once it is started, its too late. Starting a match is basically agreeing to what your opponent is running. Have fun with this guys, and lets get out of the video battle report what we should, inspiration for modeling, converting, painting, and playing.

Until next time,

Brother C.

Plastic Model Stripping

As a continuation from my brief tutorial on stripping metal models, comes… stripping plastic models. Now, I hope you didn’t throw away that undiluted batch of simple green from the first one. If you did, or you weren’t stripping anything previously, here is what you want to do.. er… this is what I did.. you can make your choices on your own.

Take about 70% simple green and 30% water (I just used tap) and mix that up a bit. Next you want to add your models. Try to make sure the parts you want stripped are submerged in the simple green mixture. (note – one could make all kinds of apparatuses to suspend only the parts of the models they wanted stripped in the mixture – ross is famous for having his land raider nose dive ) I didn’t care too much about the bottoms of these bikes so I made sure all the top parts were submerged.

I waited about 4 hours before stripping, which I feel was enough time to start to break up the paint. Unlike the metal models, these are a bit tougher to strip. They require more elbow grease, and if you weren’t the original owner, who knows what you might find under those layers. The diluted simple green doesn’t seem to dissolve the super glue as well as the undiluted, so you need to be careful not to break pieces off or scrub too hard and bend the ones you don’t want bent. I ended up breaking off a few handle bars before I decided to be a bit more careful.



The trick for me was to get a nice lather going. Since only manly men play 40k, you all will obviously appreciate the similarities of using a loofa in the shower with some herbal essences shower gel. It comes out in a lotion medium, but you need to work the loofa in order to get the cleansing suds you need for your dirty body. Right! The NO gay porn guarantee… so as I was saying the lather is the key here. The paint just seemed to come off easier once that simple green was worked around a bit. I kept having to go back into the container to fill my brush to get more suds. But in the end, the more suds I had on the model, the cleaner it came out.



Rinse thoroughly, and blot dry with a paper towel. (sorry for bad image) As you can see here in the pictures, the previous owner has some kind of black primer on these that just did not want to come off. The job isn’t perfect, but once I reprime them, you’ll never know they have been reworked.

As an end note.. don’t forget to clean up the sink before your wife gets home from work!

-Brother C