On the Painting Table: Celestial Dragon

Heh heh.

Well what Nippon army would be complete without an Oriental dragon!? So I went on eBay and bought this handsome chap from Reaper Miniatures.

Well, imagine my surprise when he came in the post and this was how he matched up for size! 

I did have a chuckle but he's actually kind of cute.

Obviously in-game I can't give him the same stats as a full sized conventional dragon but I see him as a fast moving war machine hunter flanking unit. I may even give him access to spells.

I went with a gold dragon look. I always liked gold dragons back when I played Dungeons & Dragons and it suited the special nature of this miniature. I used Dwarf Bronze | Flesh Wash | Dwarf Bronze | Shining Gold | Burnished Gold and Kommando Khaki | Bleached Bone on his belly.

 And here he is with the rest of the army as it stands!I'm getting there!

Pretty soon I'll have a force big enough for a little Skirmish game against Dark Elves and soon after that I'll have a proper army!

Nippon Characters!

After a long break I have finally got back on track with my Nippon army and here are the first two characters!

This first dude is going to be one of my Lord level special characters. He's half human, half Oni and all ass kicking in combat.

(See what I did there?)

The miniature's from Bushido, a welcome Christmas present from my friend Neil. 

I painted him dark red | black ink wash | dark red | lighter red | light red. The metal bits were Tin Bitz | Dwarf Bronze.

This slightly grumpy looking woman is one of two assassin heroes I'm going to have, hiding in a unit, just like a Skaven assassin.

She's a miniature called Kimiko from West Wind and I have to say DOESN'T look as nice as I expected - mainly due to my lacklustre paint job.
 

But she'll do for now. 

 And here's my comp0lete Nippon army as it stands.

You can see that the Samurai are a little smaller than Kimiko but not TOO much.

I'm liking the colour scheme and the start of the imagery I'm going for. When it's done I think it's going to look great!

The Tale of Years - Part Five

For the complete story click HERE

The Dread Seer of Vorshgar


Of Elves and Dwarfs and of the ancient realm of Nippon

Unwilling to watch the Elven prince Bel Shanaar revel in his stolen throne, Malekith and his sister Alatariel set forth by ship to explore the wide world that was left to them in the wake of the daemon horde's defeat, a journey that would take them away from their homeland of Ulthuan for over sixteen hundred years. 

In the Old World, in the long shadows of the World's Edge Mountains, the pair met and forged a bond with the stoic and stunted Dwarfs, a noble race created too by the magic of the Old Ones. Joining with the Dwarfs, Malekith fought bravely against the ravening Orcs and the darker tainted creatures of the forests left behind by the corruptions of the daemons. 

A great hero, Malekith became renowned for his inspiring leadership and brilliant martial prowess. Soon he was appointed ambassador to the High King of the Dwarfs, Snorri Whitebeard, on behalf of Bel Shanaar; not allowing the irony of this station to vex him... outwardly. 

And all the while, his sister, the fair Alatariel, watched and remained quiet, merely learning everything she could about the peoples and creatures that they met. She was a student of every aspect of the world's ecology and anthropology, gathering to herself greater knowledge and perspective perhaps, than any other observer before or since. 

Content with their explorations of the lands of the Dwarfs, Malekith and Alatariel journeyed farther afield, into the lands that would one day be known as Tilea and Estalia, to Araby and then east to the Dark Lands and the Dragon Isles. They crossed the Mountains of Mourn and journeyed south through the eastern swathes of the great continent. They travelled to Nippon, most ancient of human civilisations, a paradise that had remained untouched by the fell fingers of chaos because of the protection of the Three Eyes of Providence.

Malekith remained for years there, sharing the knowledge of the combative arts he had learned from his father. With no natural enemies, the peaceful Nipponese had no use for the ways of battle but they admired the precision and grace of these "martial" arts and gladly absorbed them into their culture in ritualistic form as a means to sharpen the mind and body. 

While Malekith remained in the largest settlement of Utsukushi, Alatariel wandered the islands, guided by a young boy named Takeda Nagatar. She travelled from the tip of the great northern island to the foot of the south, bringing fellowship and happiness with her gifts and kindness. She earned great trust from the simple folk of the Nipponese and was allowed even to look upon the bright light of one of the Eyes of Providence, showing her gratitude with a little smile.

Into the land that would one day be known as Great Cathay went the travellers next, journeying ever northward into the Eastern Steppes. Here the very land was tainted from the touch of Chaos but the pair were undeterred. They went on into the increasingly bitter conditions, determined to witness all this world had to offer them before their time of exploration was done.

And they came finally to the dead and abandoned city of Vorshgar, a terrifying place formed of colossal stone slabs of material seen nowhere else in the world, with steps too tall for elves or man to climb easily and doorways that towered many hundreds of feet tall. The catacombs beneath the city plummeted thousands of feet below the tundra into dismal and unplumbable depths.

In a lower chamber the pair came across a place for the keeping of precious things; a place of great cold and darkness. If the history scrolls tell us anything, they speak of the cursed Circlet of Iron that Malekith found here, a tainted crown that gestated the seed of evil his birthing had brought into existence; that set him finally on the path to damnation and to all the devastating acts that he went on to perpetrate. But no other history but this speaks of the trinket found by his sister in the same cache, an amber pendant that seemed innocuous on first sight.

Alatariel placed the pendant round her neck and fell immediately into death.

Flying to her side, Malekith did everything he could to rouse her, but in vain. Alatariel was fully dead; no longer any part of the world of living things. The elf lord was more deeply aggrieved than he had ever been before. For days he knelt by her corpse, weeping for his lost sibling, but in time, as the Circlet of Iron on his brow worked its terrible magic, he got to his feet and turned his back on her. He knew it was time now for him to begin his journey homeward, to return to the land of his birth and to the origin of his self-imposed exile.

He left Alatariel to the ice.

But the beautiful elf was not dead; merely slumbering in the dark places of the mind; and when sixty four days had passed her eyes snapped open. They were no longer Elven eyes however. Now, they glowed darkly, almost black, with no whites visible Now they gazed upon vistas no mortal creature had ever known.

The she-elf smiled for she could see all now. She could see almost to the very end of things and she knew what she had to do; what her dark purpose was at last.

She could see all of future history stretching away before her and a billion turning points that might take it in any one of a myriad directions. She could see all possible futures and she could see the one she wanted with all her heart; the one she realised now she had the power to bring about.

In her mind's eye she could picture a broad valley with black mountains to the north and the World's Edge mountains to the east; with a black gulf of sea reaching in from the west. She could see badlands to the south and a time when a great Empire that was yet to exist would think itself safe to the north.

She could see a seemingly unstoppable force arising from a southern land of the dead that for now harboured only life and the war that might occur there, in this valley; in this devil's pathway - a last chance war - to prevent all of civilisation from falling into ruin.

Alatariel gazed long into the dark paths of the future and saw how it all would end and she let herself smile long and broadly.

This was only one of a billion possible futures whose events were perilously unlikely to occur. Left to its own flow, the future would never pass through that valley; these events would never occur. Left to its own flow, the world might truly become a paradise.

Alatariel climbed back to the snow swept surface and started walking away from the great abandoned city with stark purpose.

That was something she would have to ensure never happened. 

This Last Chance War would occur if she had to redirect the mighty flow of history herself. 

Her destiny was set.

On the Painting Table: Warhammer Samurai!!!

It's wargasm time!

I don't know about you but I like them.

These are Wargames Factory Samurai miniatures that I'm going to be using in my new Warhammer Nippon army.

Scale-wise they're a little small (though GW models tend to be a bit over-chunky) but still usable and there is a general difference in stature from people from the east and west anyway.

I've gone for a dark red | black ink | dark red | lighter red armour plating with khaki | cream on the cloth.

I wasn't sure about it at first but am now pretty happy.

I'm not great at faces I have to say but for mass infantry in a wargame they will certainly do.

I didn't feel my painting was up to my usual standards but these are only the first five of a much larger force.

It's a major bummer that the sprue connects to the swords and is thus really hard to file clean without damaging them or leaving a little nob.

I've decided to have a little Dark Elf / Nippon Mordheim campaign so we should be seeing lots more of these guys in the near future. My wife is eager to get playing.. which is real nice.

The Tale of Years - Part 2

The Raising of Nippon

Over eight thousand years before the present time, the Old Ones came to the world from the dark gulfs between the stars.

No one knows their purpose, save perhaps the Slann, but it was they who seared the brand of sentient life onto the plains and valleys and in the mountains. Using magic undreamt of they created the Elves and the Dwarfs, the Lizardmen and the Ogres.

And the Orcs… The Orcs they brought with them as tiny spores, blowing where the wind would take them to fester and grow in the damp shadowy places of the world.

Tales are told elsewhere of these times and of the gift of magic that the Old Ones passed on first to the Slann Mage Priests, and then to the graceful Elves; but here we concern ourselves with tales never spoken of before; facts concealed from previous chronicles. For there is an action that was taken by the Old Ones then that is little known in the Old World and all but forgotten elsewhere; something that occurred scant years before the Great Cataclysm that ended the Old One’s plans for the world for all time.

Far from the land that would one day be called the Empire; far from Ulthuan where the young Elven race looked up at the moon in wonderment; far even from Araby and the Southlands; beyond the great continent of the Old World; lay a dark stretch of turbulent ocean.

Coming down from the empty skies at dawn, the Old Ones reached out with their power – a technology that none save them could understand – and as they gestured, the waters split. A chain of beautiful islands rose into the sunlight for the first time spanning hundreds and hundreds of miles.

Here, in the land the Old Ones named Nippon, the oldest of human civilizations was brought into being.

The Old Ones blessed these first humans with great strength and with wisdom; they whispered to them the secrets of the winds of magic; and they gifted to this people a handful of wondrous jewels.

These brilliant stones contained the most powerful enchantments and were known as the Eyes of Providence. It was said that as long as they remained in Nippon, then the land would forever be protected from harm.

The Nippon people flourished under the benevolent guidance of the Old Ones and the power of the Eyes; each jewel hidden away; each one separated and cosseted so that none could steal them. They became a proud and intuitive people, living in harmony under the cherry blossom and the watchful gaze of their masters.

But then the Great Cataclysm came, and the Old Ones vanished from sight as the very poles of the world were torn asunder, becoming gaping maws into the Realm of Chaos. If they were slain or exiled, no one knows but they were gone and never more did they return.

Their kindness was torn away from the Nipponese people as it was torn from the rest of the world, and this nascent culture; this civilization with so much potential to change the world; was left very suddenly alone.

To the far north, the wastes became a maelstrom of chaos energy, an eternal source for evil and corruption, and to the south… oh so near to the lovely beaches of Nippon, the wastes became the harbor of Daemons – billions upon billions of gibbering squawking monsters whose only desire was to extinguish the living.

But the Eyes of Providence still remained in Nippon and for now, their brilliance provided a bower of safety for this ancient civilization. The daemons could not cross the water and make landing as long as they remained.

The Old Ones may have gone forever, but their enchantment and protection continued...