Victory Pointless

This was the first army I painted when I first got back into the hobby side of things 3-4 years ago.  I’ve never actually gotten around to playing a game with them and they’re currently sitting in boxes under the stairs, but I recently came across a bunch of photographs I took of them and thought I’d share.

Apologies for the slightly fuzzy photographs – miniature photography is an art unto itself and it’s not one I’ve gotten good at yet. I also apologise if I got any of the unit names wrong – it’s really hard to remember whether a given model is Judicating or Evocating or doing whatever Sequiting is.

Steelheart’s Champions

The first thing I bought when I was dipping my toe back into the hobby after a 20 year absence was the Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire board game, of which this was a part.  As I’m sure Games Workshop intended, this acted as a gateway drug which pulled me back in to a much larger degree, but at the time I had no idea these would be the start of a whole army.

The standard gold scheme is a little much for my taste, so instead I went for silver metallic armour with a little bit of grunge to it, mainly inspired by Dark Souls which I was playing a lot of at the time.  Stormcast are essentially just Dark Souls protagonists anyway – dying over and over again and running the risk of becoming ‘hollow’ each time.

I chose blue as the secondary colour largely because that was the original colour of the plastic and I wanted to keep it as a ‘team colour’.  This then accidentally became the basis of the colour scheme for the whole army.

Stormsire’s Cursebreakers

These are another Underworlds warband, again painted before I decided to do a whole army.  Their colour scheme was chosen to match Steelheart’s gang but I added white as a tertiary colour and made them much cleaner and less grungy.  The idea was that as these are the more wizardly, scholarly stormcast there’s a bit of a class divide between them and the more beat-up frontline guys.  I carried this through into the army when I ended up painting a lot more of these kinds of troops.

This was my first ever attempt at an OSL (Object Source Lighting) effect on Stormsire’s fireball and it was daunting but I enjoyed it so much I now do it everywhere I can.

Sequitors

This is where the army itself really started.  I carried forwards the same basic scheme but again wanted to reflect that these are the footslogging melee troops and went grungy and dirtier again, swapping the pure white for cream and utilising judicious quantities of Agrax Earthshade to make them look a bit muddy.

One problem I faced with trying to get these to match the Underworlds warbands was basing – the push-fit models come with pre-moulded bases, but most of these did not.  I tried to get a reasonably consistent look by sculpting rubble, cobblestones and so on our of milliput with autumnal leaves cut out of folded paper.  On the whole I’m quite pleased with how it came out, but it took a lot of time and effort.

Castigators

I went with all-blue robes on these to set them apart.  Their crossbows are dumb.

Celestar Ballistas.  Ballistae?

I gave the operators a splash of red and bronze instead of gold to set them apart and identify them as part of some kind of engineering corps.  This is two of the same monopose kit so to differentiate them I did a head swap on two of the crew.

Exorcist

I find this model kind of dull, but I’m not sure why.  Maybe because he’s so nonchalant he’s sucking up a wayward spirit but still doesn’t want to look up from his book.  He must be near the end of a really good chapter or something.  Bustin’ does not noticeably make him feel good.

Evocators

These were painted to match the Cursebreakers.  The idea behind the bases is that, if you stand them in the right places, they’re in a circle of little standing stones with the Prime on a raised Dias in the middle.  Possibly a larger squad would be needed to really sell that idea.

Evocators on Celestial Dracolines

Same again, but this time on dragon-cats.  This took ages to paint and has given me a bit of a phobia of ever doing any more cavalry.

Lord Arcanum on Celestial Dracoline

This is the Astrea Solbright model given a head swap and a bit of mild conversion work to make her generic.  Of course I could also have built one out of one of the regular dragon-cat riders as GW intended except I like this model more and if I did that I’d have to throw away two thirds of that box because fixed unit sizes mean you could only take them in multiples of three.  Good job, Games Workshop.

Anyway, I was intending to use her as my general.  Having finished her she didn’t quite seem special enough so I went back and added a sparkly freehand starfield to her cape, which I forgot to photograph.

Liberators

More basic troops.  I only actually painted three of these new and re-used Steelheart’s backing dancers to make 5.

Justicators

Liberators, but with bows.

Knight Arcanum

I wanted to use this model to practice smooth blends, going so far as to actually mix colours like some sort of actual painter or something, but as you can see from the photos it didn’t really work – there’s some noticeable banding on the cape.  One area where I think I have improved a bit is in layering and feathering to smooth out (or at least, break up) transitions like this. There’s a little bit of OSL happening from the glowing rune thingy she’s standing on, but really this should be more pronounced on the metallic armour which would reflect this much more.

Lord Castellan

This guy is the most Dark Souls of the lot, and I dig it. Plus he has a bird-dog. I’ve just noticed his primary hat-spike is a bit bent. Arse.

Birbs 

These are black mainly because my D&D character at the time had a black parrot familiar and I thought they could pull double-duty to represent that.  Scale-wise, they’re too big by a factor of about 20, but hey ho.

Conclusions, Range Review & AoS v 40k

On the whole, these look better than I remember. This is highly irritating as it means I haven’t really improved all that much over the last three years. Still, there are a few things I would do differently now. Some bits of the models look quite flat (especially the gold) – nowadays I’d push the contrast a bit higher in those areas. These models are also quite ‘traditional box art’ in their look – nothing wrong with that but I think my style has moved on a little bit.

The Stormcast range is interesting as a relatively ‘new’ army in the context of Games Workshop’s broader model range.  Firstly, they were obviously an attempt at porting Space Marines from 40k into a fantasy setting – they’re big beefy supersoldiers in armour with massive pauldrons created from mortals who have been deemed worthy via an excrutiating process by a god-like father figure.  What’s interesting is in the ways they deviated from that base model, presumably in order to ‘fix’ things they saw as issues with Marines.

Primarily, the models are more diverse both in terms of armour patterns and also gender.  Both of these sit well with me – all else aside it makes them slightly more interesting to paint than endless identikit supersoldiers who only really differ in weapon loadout.  This only goes so far, however – I still got bored in the end of painting yet another squad of platemail beefcakes, it just took a bit longer.

Lore-wise there also seems to be a bit more scope for individual Stormcast to have actual personalities, whereas Space Marines are generally rationed to a maximum of one per chapter.  Stormcast are also, so far as I can tell, The Good Guys in a fairly uncomplicated way which Marines are definitely not.

Now personally I quite like Space Marines (as a fictional construct) being brainwashed fascist stormtroopers upholding ‘the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable’.  But, things do get a bit awkward when GWs marketing get involved and present them as Space Marine Heroes who are Brave and Heroic and Super Cool and Heroic and (fascist) and Heroic!  So I understand the drive to make Stormcast more easily marketable in a way that doesn’t require any small print about not really being an endorsement of Neo-Nazis.

That said, I do think the more simplistic narrative makes the setting overall a bit less interesting to me.  It’s not a dealbreaker by itself, but I’ve found it difficult to really get into Age of Sigmar’s fiction for other reasons as well.  They’ve gone for a very light-touch, top-down approach to worldbuilding and I get why – they want to leave blank space for people to create their own storìes within this world – but there’s a resultant lack of texture which doesn’t really do it for me.  Unlike 40k and the old Warhammer Fantasy I don’t have a clear picture of what it’s really like to live in any of the Mortal Realms and that makes it difficult to understand the stakes of the conflict.  I’ve tried reading three Age of Sigmar novels so far and bounced off of all of them, I think largely for this reason; for the fantastical to be impactful it has to be juxtaposed with the mundane.  40k understands this, it tells us what it is ‘To be a man in such times…’ right there in its intro text.  AoS seems to lack this grounding (or at least, I’ve yet to read anything that gives me a good feel for it).

Anyway.  That may be why, despite having this army more-or-less ready to go, I ultimately gravitated back to playing 40k instead of AoS.  The other big turn-off, which cropped up while painting this army, is fixed unit sizes.  Sometimes I want to paint a big load of all the same thing, sometimes I might only feel like painting one or two or three at a time and then move onto something else.  I like to chop things up and sometimes ‘waste’ a member of a unit for conversions or to try out a different colour scheme.  With fixed unit sizes I don’t really have that freedom – I ‘have’ to paint the whole box if I ever want them to be a valid unit on the tabletop.  It’s a subtle thing, but it has a disproportionate impact on my enjoyment of the painting process and makes it all feel much more of a chore than if I had just a bit more wiggle room to follow my whims.

Of course, since then 40k has *also* adopted fixed unit sizes in 10th edition, so I suppose this point is now, unfortunately, moot.  This hasn’t *yet* shifted the scales back in AoS’s favour, but who knows – perhaps if I get sufficiently fed up with 40k or somehow magically acquire more spare time this army might see a battlefield after all.