The Daemon's Claw

I have been building some jungle terrain. These could be used for a wide variety of games including 40K and Ghost Archipelago. I also have a couple of skirmish Africa games, Congo and Death in the Dark Continent that these will also be useful for. This will give me a variety of bright coloured foliage to spice up the jungle. I have some of the GW palm trees to add to the mix and provide some bulk. I have also been assembling my Frostgrave crew models. This gives me 20 plastic pirates armed with a variety of non gunpowder weapons. I have also been reading some Conan stories. This is great for the kinds of warband adventuring that you get in Ghost Archipelago. I can mix these with my African tribal models and some of the Lucid Eye Amazons. What could possibly happen to this brave bunch of grey plastic swabbies wandering down a jungle path? This gives me a great range of models which can make a number of different factions and have some random encounters or scenari...

I am planning a game for Call to Arms later in 2019. This weekend I am looking to test the concept. I am using Ash Barkers Last Days rules in a scifi setting. The original concept and several mechanism are drawn from the old Ares Magazine game Wreck of the Pandora that I played about 40 years ago. The background to the game is that the Biological Survey Ship Pandora relayed a distress signal but now is not responding to communications. Several parties have sent teams to investigate. These could be commercial salvage crews, bands of corporate enforcers, regular military units. The objective of the rescuers is in no particular order, recover the ship, save the crew, recover any biological specimens, recover navigation and planetary analysis data. Rescue teams may cooperate or compete. This initial game will test the concept and see if it works. It is easy to think that the ideas are good but in practice they might not work. I made the outline of the ship out of my Death Ray ...

After painting my Imperial Guard Kill team, I got inspired to make some other models for that army. over the weekend I made a Valkyrie assault transport and now I have been making some Ogre assault infantry to go in them. You can get 4 Orgyns into a Valkyrie. Hagen kindly gave me some spare custodes shields so now my Ogres have some nice looking assault shields, these could either be the Slab shields or Brute shields. I need to have a second type of shield so I can field units with a mix of high armour and invulnerable save models. These will then be supported by the IG infantry and Storm Troopers. I drew inspiration for this army from the 2000AD Rogue Trooper stories, this force is the Norts a totalitarian regime rather like the Imperium in the 40K universe. Anything is acceptable in achieving final victory. I find it rather useful to have other sorts of material for inspiration. Whether it is the GW books or youtube channels or a great art book, its all important to have ple...

After the game against the Scouts the Death Guard fought the Death Watch, for who was the most "Deathy". We played a narrative mission with the Death Guard trying to destroy the objective markers, probably vaccines or other research into disease and infection vectors.  The Death Guard chose take forward positions and then rush their two Fighters, down the right flank to be behind the containers. They win Initiative and continue their rush around the corner into the marine on the flank of the Death Watch position. An idea occurred to me after the game, The Death Watch could have used the decisive move to move the veteran away from the Death Guard The Death Watch Leader and gunner in their position, the Death Guard Plasma gunner is sneaking round the dome to get a shot. The Death Guard flow forwards into the objectives in their half of the table. The Death Watch Black Shield counter charges into the plague flail fighter. The Death Watch leader blazes away with hi...

Several of us got together at the Warlords for some games of kill team. We got some more people into the group. I played two games against the defenders of the Imperium. The lackeys of the Corpse Emperor were no match for the Sons of Moration. In encounter I was up against Kent's scout force. These were just the models he had in his case to support his bike marines. I can't remember the name of his chapter, Hawks something I think. It didn't matter his goose was cooked. The scouts were mostly wearing camo cloaks which combined with long range and concealment meant the Death Guard were often hitting on 5s or 6s. This mission was about recovering intelligence so I didn't need to kill the scouts only keep them off the objectives long enough to recover the data. Each objective is worth one with the central worth 3 points scored at the end of each turn.  The Death Guard chose to take forward positions and the scouts chose to booby trap the pile of crates they were us...