The Enemy Without

Approximately 42 days ago...

In the damp and dripping ruins of an abandoned comms tower on Tenebrae Quintus, Jaques Bishop impassively listened to a man who was neither there, nor entirely a man.

"Are you quite finished?"

The holo-figure glared but remained silent.

"It is not a matter of betrayal. You were greedy, you delayed, and you were noticed. It is as simple as this."

"We did not delay! The trader argued over payment-"

"Come now, it took you five hours to convince the man the pebbles in his hand were worth more than the figure you planted in his mind? Tsk, tsk. I know you know that I too am gifted as you are - I am aware of everything from the moment you loaded the cryo-stores."

The glowing figure looked murderous and sullen beneath his cowl.

"If the Ordo are aware - and I assure you they are, I still have loyal servants within after all - then Van Saar and the other Istvaanite crones who support him will already be on their way, and our business is already concluded. I told you that this would be the consequence if-"

"You know our resources are vast and powerful, Inquisitor. The work will proceed regardless, the Hive will-"

"No. Your Hive fleet is on the other side of the sector, with a great many space marines in between. But you may do as you please if you think you can survive the attentions of the Ordo."

Bishop flicked the holo-comm off, the cowled figure vanished.

"Goodbye, magus."

High above, entirely unnoticed by the sentry drones and the remote-scanners, something watched in the dark.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Squat Diaspora

Iosef Bryntsen, Explorator 

In what still remains of the Squats in contemporary 40k background they're somewhere in between an edge-of-the-galaxy race maybe something to do with the Tau and a tyranids-ate-them justification to kill the whole concept. Trying to retro-un-retcon them I can see small bands of surviving Squats, fragments of the brotherhoods and guilds - wandering the galaxy in small ships trying to find lost kin, relics and archaeotech of their lost homeworlds, and any weapon they could turn against the Tyranids. In essence, treasure hunters and explorers, and a natural fit for Explorators, Rogue Traders, and the Ordo Xenos.

I managed to pick up a number of lovely, lovely, Squat models a while back for non-insane prices (sadly without arms, but nothing that a few Cadian and scout sprues can't solve) so now I have longish (so many, many projects) term plans to assemble a band of Squats capable of taking on a space hulk themselves (and part of that will be some kind of ancestor vengeance robot as befits a group of angry engineers with less qualms about the heresy of cybernetics) but in the meantime my colour-scheme pilot model found a role as one of the characters for my BSGH setup, a shotgun toting force field hurling loner. More on him later.

Deep Breath

Having just stumbled upon this incredible bit of work, the mental levy finally broke and I decided what I really, really, needed was one more project, so I'm going to finally build that 3D space hulk set every shulker aspires to.

Seriously, how awesome is this?

I had previously held off because I'd never seen the base components to make this work - pure scratch build just takes more time than I have, hirst isn't durable enough (and about as much effort as scratchbuild), plastic sets I've seen look a bit meh, and resin ones just aren't all that 3D (and/or cost one meeleon dollas). Well I know my plasticard skills are good enough that if this Nedius guy can do it, so can I, and he's clearly demonstrated that it can be done incredibly well. I'll steal shamelessly and liberally, but I also have some plans for magnetic couplings for the sections and some LED lighting, and I want to bring some infestation into the fabric of the hulk.

Just to commit myself I ordered up the biotoxin plant already (which I'd dismissed in the past as a horrible silvery blob, so more props to Nedius for the vision). Here goes nothing.

Missionary Man

++ Battlespace Galactihulk, Part 2 ++

One of the more obvious yet challenging parts of the mashup was the player characters. In BSG each player has the role of one of the major players in the series and of course one or more of them is a cylon. The traitor concept maps pretty easily to 40k obviously (too easy really - Chaos? Mutant? Heretic? Necron?) but the idea of one of a unit of space marines betraying his battle-brothers is pretty much anathema to the contemporary galaxy. Betray humanity, oh yes, but one marine isn't going against his chapter any time soon.

So the obvious thing to do was to take a leaf out of a not entirely dissimilar game with a hefty dose of treachery - Inquisitor! So then the problem became identifying ten distinct characters, or really (since I wanted the human players to put their own persona onto their characters) ten character classes, limited obviously by my collection of models.

Brother Ephrys - Missionary

In reverse order then, the last of the ten I settled on was the Ecclesiarchy representative, the missionary. From the fluff, missionaries seemed the most likely to be boarding a Space Hulk or acting within a non-Ecclesiarchy unit. I deeply, deeply love the model from Red Box Games (I think I have a thing for lanterns) but I had to obviously sci-fi it up and 40k it up. Boltgun and an Inquisitorial icon were easy enough but perhaps a little tacked on, so adding some kind of power cable seemed to be a nicely understated way of emphasising the futureness, and yet it's a lantern, so it's got that gothic, broken down kind of future which is what 40k is all about to me. So yeah, I like the model :)

The lantern also opened up the chance to do a bit of OSL which is just the most fun thing to paint for me. I kept to a simple colour scheme of red and blue against a neutral background. The black was highlighted up with hawk turquoise (a technique I learned from somebody or other on BOLS) which lets it maintain a rich blackness without ever looking washed out as it might with pure white highlighting - basically kids, always mix a colour into your greys. The rest of the lighting was simply achieved with varying levels of highlights in appropriate places, and lots and lots of thin washes of red, purple, and black. The only thing I'm unhappy with is the head really, but the model has such a delicate head with very small eyes and a lot of beard obscuring other detail. C'est la vie.

Great fun to paint, and one of my favourite pieces I've done, if I say so myself.

Battlespace Galactihulk

++ Part 1, Resources ++

Space Hulk is awesome. Battlestar Galactica is awesome. Ergo, a mashup of the two would be THE AWESOMEST.

A rather ridiculous project considering approx 6 months work off and on for all of a days entertainment (hopefully more return on the investment in future, but getting a mutually free weekend between five gamers is less than simple sometimes).

Without going into details about the design process, it demanded a lot of custom cards to try and mirror BSGs mechanics. Finding a source which was prepared to do arbitrary designs for volumes of less than a hundred print runs was a bit of a nightmare but a friend eventually pointed me at ArtsCow - 54 custom cards of gameable quality and about 4 weeks shipping figure in somewhere between £6 and £10, offers depending.

Yes I could have done it all with a sharpie and a couple of decks of playing cards, but really, if you're going to do something, don't do it 90%.

Resources posted here.