Anyone with a passing interest in
40K must have cast an envious glance at
Forgeworld's superb
Death Korps of Krieg range and subsequently bought a lottery ticket in hope rather than expectation! I must confess to being in a similar boat but undaunted cast my eyes around for suitable (cheaper) proxies.
First and foremost are
Wargames Factory's plastic
Shock Troops (Sci-Fi Greatcoat troopers). For around £18 (they can be found cheaper) you get 18 multi-part troopers with tons of extras (the box includes 84 heads!). They are nicely done and easy to make up in a variety of poses. A complementary
Support Weapons box is also available. At about £1 a miniature, that compares favourable with
Forgeworld's £3.70 a trooper.
As stated the
Shock Troops box gives you a ton of bits for your spares box and consequently I investigated even cheaper options to convert using these spares. You can't get much cheaper than
Prince August's
Warzone Mutant Chronicles Bag of 80 Plastic Soldiers for just £21.48 (27p a figure). Ok, the contents a bit limited but they are decent enough and by combining heads and other bits and pieces from the
Wargames Factory box you can get very pleasing results (the one below uses the Imperial Trooper body...)
When it came to painting I have kept things to an absolute minimum for these test pieces. I decided against painting WWI German Camo on the helmets or Freikorps skulls. I may do this once I make up and sort out the rest of the models using this to differentiate between regular troopers and elites, but today have stuck to using
Vajello's
830 German Field Grey and
920 German Uniform for the most part.
Overall, whilst they cannot compete with the high quality
Forgeworld releases, these are decent enough proxies and by combing the
Wargames Factory and
Prince August packs they will cost a fraction of the price.
Gromit of the Day:
 |
| Watch Out Gromit! |
Digging out the original Imperial Guard (or Army as they were called at the time) from 1987 the other week, I came across a substantial amount of unpainted white metal so in a fit of enthusiasm decided to paint it up.
I took an early lunch break to finish off these Dark Eldar test pieces that I found sat in the same drawer as the Dick Garrison miniatures. I have a pile of Dark Eldar sat around from when the particular 40K edition came out with them in it and I haven't done anything much with them despite quite liking the plastics (not so much the old metals).
One of my birthday presents was the Dan Abnett penned Ravenor omnibus, three novels about a 40K Inquisitor called Gideon Ravenor. I had read the first a few years back and really liked the detailed insight into the Imperial worlds way behind the front lines. In many ways they are crime stories more than war stories, albeit the bodycount is always quite impressive (!). This trilogy is the second in the Inquisitorial sequence so before commencing it I picked up the first, the Eisenhorn trilogy (which includes the delightful post title as Abnett describes one run down city area!), and have been reading it as I train and plane between Paris, London and Bristol.
Like Ravenor, Eisenhorn is largely detective/police style stories as the lead character and his retinue investigate and hunt down chaos cults in the Imperium. Whilst it does have a good planetary invasion at the end of the first book, but there is enough small scale SWAT type actions to make the wargaming brain cells start plotting. Whilst I have a copy of GW's old Inquisitor game (which inspired the books) I would prefer a small scale fire team unit level game and being a bit of a Judge Dredd fan might have a look at the new Mongoose playtest Judge Dredd game for some Inquisitor or Adeptus Arbites versus criminal gangs/chaos cults games.
