Reaver and Warhound Titans - Better Late Than Never!

In the course of posting my Titan Defense Company, I realized I'd never gotten around to posting pics of my completed Reaver and Warhound Titans as promised last April. Along with my four Warlord Titans, these comprise the entirety of my Iron Skulls (Legio Metalica) force. I actually finished painting them last summer, but I got distracted by a rather large home redecorating project that followed immediately after...so here they are, better late than never!

These Reavers were picked up along with my plastic Warlords in that initial eBay auction that got me back into this whole Epic jag. I was particularly excited about landing these guys, as I never had any of my own back in the day and they are quite possibly my favorite Titan design, bar none.

They painted up quite nicely; the Legio Metalica color scheme is particularly well-suited to this class of Titan. I slapped a spare purity seal on one of them, and I designed some banners but have yet to go through with the process of painting and mounting them because, frankly, I kind of like how the Reavers are looking without any further adornment. We'll see if I feel like adding them in the future.

And here are the Warhounds, another model of Titan I didn't actually own in my original Epic days.

When I was younger, I didn't particularly care for these guys design-wise, but nowadays I'm finding I like them a lot more. They fit on the same size of base that I'm using to mount my tanks, they're that small!

I'd love to run a Heresy-era list that used all four of these guys as my sole Titan complement against, say, one or two Warlords - it would make for an interesting cat-and-mouse scenario.

And here's the lot:

I'll have to set up a photoshoot soon with the entire Titan Legion on display...

Going Small: Epic 40K Titan Defense Company

[This was my sixth entry for the Fifth Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, reposted here for folks not following that blog.]

As promised in my last post, I'm finally getting a start on my big "small" project.

Back in 2013, I spotted a very nice deal on eBay for a bunch of old Epic-scale Warlord and Reaver Titans. Adeptus Titanicus was my first GW game, and the second minis game I ever bought, so seeing those old sculpts really brought back a flood of nostalgia. I had discovered my own personal version of OldHammer.

A return to Epic scale also meant a return to painting in 6mm, something I haven't done in 20-plus years. I painted up my newly-acquired Titans in the colors of Legio Mortis and Legio Metalica so that they could fight proper Adeptus Titanicus battles, but I wanted to add some infantry as well so that I could field my Titan Legions in games of Epic 40K. Wanting my Titan Legion infantry to look somewhat different than their Imperial Guard brethren, I settled on using proxy miniatures to represent the grunts tasked with keeping the Titans safe from other enemy infantry and tanks, and found some great selections among the "Pax Arcadia" line from Dark Realm Miniatures.

This is the Heavy Weapon Platoon using the "AT Infantry" pack from Dark Sword. Each stand sports a las-cannon and heavy bolter. For color scheme, I went with the classic Imperial uniform of grey fabric and red helmets/body armor.

Here's the Titan Defense Company proper, six five-man squads to a platoon. Dark Sword's "Light Infantry" supplied the requisite figures.

For the Company's leaders, I invoked the Adeptus Mechanicus with the command stands; Dark Sword's "Industrial Infantry" did the trick nicely here with their flowing robes and industrial equipage.

The command HQ stand also comes with its own Rhino for riding in style. I chose a camo scheme suitable for fighting in urban ruins, since that's what my Epic terrain consists of.

Likewise, the basing was kept purposely muted so as to suggest rubble and ruin. I achieved the texture by emptying out a bunch of Earl Grey tea bags, the gluing the grounds to the bases. It's a bit more "in scale" than the basing sand I had on hand.

Speaking of the bases, I went with standard 28mm slottabases rather than the usual wafer-thin bases one typically sees with Epic. The reason I did this was two-fold: first, I like a bit more thickness to my bases when it comes to any scale smaller than 15mm, so that it's easier to pick up without inadvertently grabbing the fragile figures; second, I realized the slottabases were the same thickness as the standard Titan bases. So now everyone's on the same level, as it were, giving an excellent sense of the true scale between the Titans and the swarms of infantry and vehicles.

A selection of infantry and vehicles alongside a Legio Metalica Warlord.

I also threw in a platoon of Leman Russ tanks. These are some of the latter-day metal castings from the line, which came after I stopped playing Epic. I was quite impressed with how each tank is highly individualized with stowage and other customization.

This completes my Titan Defense Company, and therefore my Titan Legion project. However, I'll be back in coming weeks as I begin work on my next Epic endeavor: da Orks!

The grunt's-eye view...

[Epic] Warlords Complete!

Well, complete enough, at least. I posted pics of my Legio Mortis Warlord Titans a while back, but shortly after taking those shots decided I wasn't satisfied with how the banners had turned out. So I went back to the drawing board - literally: I drew up banners on graph paper, both for the Mortis Titans as well as my loyalist faction, Legio Metalica. I drew them oversized so that I could paint them, then scan and reduce. I changed up banner pole configurations, as giving a banner to each Titan made them a bit "samey" and I also added a few extra details, like hanging chains for the Mortis Titans, which seem suitably "bad guy" and totally metal.

I'm quite happy with how everything turned out. The full parade is on display below. The back banners came out a little washed-out due to the way the light was hitting them, but you get the idea. . .

As I said at the top, there are still a few small details here and there that I may come back to, like extra symbols on the leg plates and possibly punching up the basing a bit (although I'm mostly going to be gaming on urban rubble boards, so there's not a whole lot extra I could do - maybe add a bit of a ruined building or a rusted-out hulk of some sort?). But this is close enough for rock and/or roll, and I'm moving on to the next phase in my Epic 40K project, which is...well, more Titans! Two Reavers and four Warhounds, all Legio Metalica.

[Epic] Traitor Titans of the Legio Mortis

I actually completed these guys a few weeks ago, but only just got around to taking photos of them.

These are the first of the Warlord Titans I picked up through eBay earlier this year. I've painted them up for use with Adeptus Titanicus as members of the traitor titan legion of Legio Mortis. In due time, these will become Chaos Titans of Nurgle, but in the AT continuity they are still more or less closer to their human roots. Nevertheless, I loaded these guys up with as many chaos-like weapons as I could lay my hands on.

My goal in painting these was to give them as much detail and care as I wished I could have when I painted my first Warlords as a young lad. Back then I wanted very much to do a full complement of banners, flags, and pennants, as well as scale-appropriate paint jobs, and I'm quite pleased with how I was able to realize those goals. I found a fun way of making sturdy banners by using plastic from blister packs and a bit of heat from a candle flame to shape the plastic into billowing forms. I used jewelry chain to hang the banners, as suggested in the AT rulebook - it looks great, although it's a bit flimsy and I anticipate much breakage and repair in future games. Ah well. The disruption pattern (modeled on World War I German designs) sported by the Legio Mortis, as nice as it turned out, nearly proved my undoing.

My next project in my Epic collection will be to paint up four more Warlords from the loyalist Legio Metalica. Fortunately, those guys don't sport disruption patterns on their carapace, so things should go a bit faster.

Here they come...

I'll have to come up with names for each Titan, I think.

The disruptive camo pattern: Never. Again.

The groups' Praetorian. He's set up for long-range bombardment and support.

Tentacular action!

A vague fly-head suggests this Titan's future as a servant of Nurgle.

This guy might be my favorite. Chainsaws, chainsaws, chainsaws!

Current Projects Update

Here's the most recent shot of my work area. Two of my current projects are easily discernible; the third might be a bit harder to pick out, still being largely in bags, but it is, ironically, my current obsession.

• The Normandy project is moving along nicely. Shortly after posting those pictures of painted Highlanders, I decided that consistency of scale was more important to me than I had realized and I resolved to limit myself to a single manufacturer as much as possible. I plumped for Artizan, and all the figures have since arrived, been based, and primered. (And as a change of pace, I'm taking the advice of several other bloggers and doing the base texture before I paint the figures. Should be interesting to see how that pans out.)
  
  As an old fan of Necromunda and Mordheim, I couldn't be more pleased that the figures currently occupying space on my table constitute the entirety of what I need to play Operation Squad. Of course I plan on expanding by adding other squads and eventually moving into the game's vehicular supplement (see the primered Panther over on the left?) as well as playing larger, platoon-scale games of NUTS! once my collection gets big enough, but I'm loving the small scale that the basic OS game offers. Next up: ordering a few buildings from Paper Terrain, finishing up a couple other terrain-related odds and ends, and then playing some games! Hoping to realize the latter goal by the end of summer at the latest.
• Up on top of the plastic drawers sits another skirmish-level project, my 28mm samurai. I'm looking forward to Osprey's Ronin rules, but if those aren't quite what I'm looking for, I've always got Taiko. In fact, I'm planning on basing my samurai with magnets so that I can mount them in scenic movement trays in the style of Impetus to do larger-scale Taiko battles even if I end up using Ronin for my skirmish games. I plan on working on these guys slowly but surely, mostly as a colorful relief from the earth tones of my Normandy project.
• Lastly, there's the surprise project: my return to Epic-scale 40K. I posted back when I made an impulse purchase of a heap of classic Titans on the subject of my abiding love for Epic gaming and the many good times that Space Marine provided. Well, my old adversary Alex and I have been furiously exchanging emails, planning out our return to the fold. Amazingly, I just last week landed a complete boxed set of Adeptus Titanicus (styrene buildings and all!) for less than half of what I paid for it 20 years ago. And I've been slowly acquiring other pieces for my quickly-expanding collection, all the while trawling NetEPIC and ginning up armies. The plan in place right now is to build a Titan Legion/Space Marine army and paint up a few traitor titans as well - I've already picked out legions and paint schemes and can't wait to get started on that. The long-term goal is to build up an Ork army with my three old Gargant models as centerpieces. Alex is putting together a Knight-based Adeptus Mechanicus army with his long-term goal being the fielding of an Eldar army similar to the one he had in days of yore.
  
  This way we can play both the original Adeptus Titanicus rules with a handful of titans per side or have nice big bashes with NetEPIC armies. We only manage to get together about once a year at best (living 1,000 miles apart tends to put a crimp in social plans), but we're already planning to bring our tiny little armies along for whenever it is we see each other.

Oh, and I've also got plans for a third Armies of Arcana project, but that's projected to be a ways down the road and will warrant a post of its own, coming up shortly.

An Epic Acquisition

Adeptus Titanicus was the second miniatures game I ever bought, and in many ways it's responsible for my miniatures wargaming hobby.

The game came out in 1988 and was (I believe) Games Workshop's first "epic" (i.e. 6mm) scale game. Set in their Warhammer 40,000 continuity, but thousands of years earlier during the Horus Heresy, it was a game of giant robot combat, which naturally appealed to my young adolescent sensibilities when I saw it sitting on the game store shelf. I still remember walking out of the store with the box tucked under my arm.

When I got home, the game contained within did not fail to disappoint. It came with four expanded polystyrene buildings and six plastic Warlord Titans. The rulebook dripped with good old-fashioned grim-n-gritty gothic-punk flavo(u)r and was my introduction to the joys of the 'Eavy Metal painting team and rulebooks with full-color photos. (Fantasy Warriors, my first miniatures game, didn't go much farther than pixelated line art for its rulebook.)

At any rate, I never played much of Adeptus Titanicus, but I enjoyed painting up the titans, and the photos in the rulebook caught the eye of my friend Alex, who was to become my first gaming buddy thanks to the conversation the rulebook sparked. A scheduled game turned instead into a broader interest in tabletop RPG gaming, and we didn't actually play a miniatures game until a couple months later (and Fantasy Warriors, at that!). But it certainly fired our imaginations, and it's no coincidence that a few months later we each asked for and received a Games Workshop game for Christmas (he: Warhammer 4th edition; me: Space Marine 2nd edition). We played a lot of both games over the coming years, but we both agree that our fondest memories from those years were courtesy of Space Marine and the truly "Epic" games we played. Over time, all those excess Titans (and the styrene buildings) from the AT box were lost to the sands of time, although I hung on to my metal Ork gargants (one Great and two Slashas) and still have them today, even though the gargants have for years served mostly as symbols of good times long past.

I was giving some thought to those memories a couple weeks ago, specifically in regards to the "Oldhammer"movement. As much as I admire the vintage Citadel sculpts of the 80s, my heart and soul lies with the epic-scale minis of the early 90s. So I went to eBay to see what was on offer...

Imagine my surprise when I found a lot of fourteen vintage Titans (including three metal Reavers and a Warlord still on the sprue) for a seriously reasonable price. I put the auction on watch on followed it as it got closer to the finish line. By the final day, the price was still not terribly exorbitant  so I started bidding - and I won. In the end, I paid about $8.25 per Titan, a very reasonable price considering that one often sees single titan figures being offered for upwards of $25.00.

What's more, the lot came with a bunch of "extras," stuff I was only dimly aware of back in the day - custom heads, new weapons, and various other add-ons and ephemera. Clearly this lot belonged to a devoted Adeptus Titanicus gamer.

One of the things I love about picking up stuff like this on eBay is how you sometimes get these fun little personal touches in the lot. For example:

Considering this was probably painted in the early 90s, that reference isn't perhaps as dated as it may first seem. Nice to know The Hammer is still enjoying some level of popularity in the 41st millennium.

By far the weirdest feature of the auction was this Reaver Titan, which has some sort of home-wired attempt at creating a light-up system for tracking void shields. (Normally you just use a spinning disc set in the base):

What you can only barely see in the picture is the massive watch battery case required to power the lights and switch, nor can you see the rather sophisticated wiring under the base. It was a noble effort, but I think I'll stick with the spinning discs.

I emailed Alex about my purchase and he immediately wrote back, enthusiastically offering to take some Titans off my hands. How could I refuse? We don't live in the same city anymore, but we do manage the occasional visit, and when we do hook up, we'll be sure to bring our minis along and finally have that game of Adeptus Titanicus.

In the meantime, these guys have a date with a Dettol bath. (Yes, even "It's Hammer Time" - hey, it's preserved in picture form, at least.) I'm quite excited about doing these Titans up properly, with lots of banners and heraldry. Pics will, in due course, follow. I'm also now cagily monitoring eBay, looking for more deals on vintage Epic figures. I'd like to re-acquire a nice collection of infantry and vehicles to go with my Titans, and my Gargants will need some Ork Boyz to swarm around their feet. I'm also thinking of giving Future War Commander a look by way of rules for any game that isn't purely titan vs. titan, in which case I'll use the original Adeptus Titanicus rules.

Quite unexpectedly, it looks like I've found my niche in the Oldhammer movement. Go figure.