So by Google Maps I’m approximately 1550 miles away from my painting table sat in the back garden of my parents house in Spain. I’ve got another week of holiday left but already my thoughts are turning to what I want to do when I get back home.
First up are my Tomb Kings. At the moment my army consists of 10 Tomb Gaurd, 32 Archers and two Warshinx’s. Not so much an army as a small collection of models. And that what needs to start to change, I need to start forming an army out of this little lot.
But what type of army do I want? What models will I use? How will they be painted? What wIll the theme be?
I started my Skaven because I’d built a Tomb King army out of Mantic models under the old army book and I was getting smashed every time I played. Now this was partly down to the army book, partly down to the build (I had a skeleton heavy army with only 10 archers, the rest were hand weapon shield) and partly (mainly?) down to my inexperience. So I ditched the army (quite literally, I gave it away to a club mate) and brought a load of Skaven cheap of a friend and I started painting.
I came up with a paint scheme as I painted the Skaven and I never gave any thought to army theme. Now I love my Skaven they’re fun to play and I can pretty much smash anyone with them. They are in short utter filth but they’re also just a set of units that work really well together. Don’t get me wrong the paint scheme and basing matches throughout but there’s no thought to why they’re there, there’s no thought. In short there’s no heart to the army.
I want my Tomb Kings to be different. To my mind wargames can be roll playing on a grand scale. Indeed if you read anything by Games Workshop that’s what they see it as with all their talk of you being the general. Now I roll play as well as wargame and I know that to get the most out of a game like Rogue Trader or Warhammer Fantasy Rollplay you need to flesh out the character you play. They need a backstory and ambitions. In short you need to bring them to life. And that what I want to do (if you’ll excuse the pun) with my Tomb Kings. I want to bring them to life and make them feel like a real army on the tabletop.
So how am I going to do this? Well I’m going to start of with the theme of the army. Why the theme first and not say the background of my general? Well I was very fortunate to be offered a Grenadier Undead War Mammoth to buy.
As you can probably guess I’ll be using this as a warsphinx. So there’s my theme. My Tomb King army use the reanimated remains of the war beasts they used in life rather than statues. Now that immediately sets me thinking about how the other constructs in the army will look and offers me a host of conversion ideas.
And it also starts to bring some life into the bones of the army. So I’m off now to research my ancient history and find some ideas to help me flesh out the story of my army. I’ll report back later.
Until then happy hobby time.
The Filth and The Fluff
thefilthandthefluff 