Been a while, hasn’t it?

To cut a long story short: I ragequit Warmachine and Hordes in January of last year like a right little stropper, and a few months later I bumped into Jon Webb (who runs SmogCon) and he said “oh hey, I’m calling in that favour, I need someone to run an IKRPG demo table this year”.

Iron Kingdoms Unleashed was the last big release for the IKRPG, and I had the Skorne Empire book as well (because I’m cheap for the sadistic little nutters), and because it’s a demo table I can’t really get by with cardboard markers and empty bases – models are called for. And if I’m doing something with models, I might as well do something like a proper army, and then a nice chap on Facebook had a Skorne all-in-one army box and Gargantuan he wasn’t using… you can see where this ends up.

So far I’ve played a couple of 25 point games to try and brush the dust off my rules know-how. They’ve been a mixed bag. The first game I won was a top-of-turn-two job, textbook win, not very interesting for anyone; the second was a slightly more protracted version of the same thing where I had to work for it; the game I lost was a total brain-drop where I failed at basic aggression and was rightly punished for my sins. I’m thinking about switching warlocks – Supreme Archdomina Makeda, who came with the all-in-one set, needs to be up front in order to drag her army along, keep them covered on her feat turn, and potentially get stuck in herself, and that might not really be my style. I might either field Tiberion (nice big warbeast with Shield Guard) with her or swap for a more backfield warlock like Lord Arbiter Hexeris who can hold together a more cowardly restrained “send in the chaff and shoot over their heads” approach.

I’ve also scraped together models for another set of IKRPG antagonists (my old mate Lawrence was good enough to donate his Khador army to the cause) and PCs (because I’m clever, they’re all models which will work for either Khador or Skorne), and statted up the PCs. Still need to do the NPCs, draw the maps, and give the scenario a playtest before February. Oh, and it’d help if I painted some stuff. And built the Mammoth.

The last time I painted Skorne, I was going half mad by the end of the battlebox, because I ended up painting every last twist and turn of that trim and filigree on the armour. This time I’ve been sensible and primed them white, then inked over a nice neutral hide-armour sort of colour, to which I’ll be adding spot colours for cloth, skin and weapons. The traditional bright red for cloth, and dark skin ’cause they live in a ruddy desert, and possibly a bone-white on parts of the armour to lighten them up a bit, and they’ll be done.

They’ve not come out entirely as I planned; I wanted them to be lighter, and a bad experience with some unfamiliar gesso primer over which I had to spray another layer has left some of them a bit lumpy, but that’s what happens when you use materials you’ve not tried before. The Liquitex inks work well, although I wonder if I shouldn’t have used the metallic bronze one and gone for a more orthodox Skorne colourscheme. Too late now. Forty days ’til SmogCon and no time to double back. I’ll be in touch.