Lustria In Flames

A very long time ago, in my younger salad days (1991) I was an aspiring illustrator trying to make a career of scribbling little pictures for books and such, all the while paying bills (barely) with some low-grade retail jobs. Nowadays they’d be called “minimum wage” but back then there was no minimum wage, so they were poverty pay at best. It was a struggle, but…err…I’m getting off topic.

My interest in gaming of all types, and at that time an obsession with Games Workshop’s roleplaying game Warhammer Fantasy collided with this aspiring “career” and I threw some doodles together and sent them off (in a stamped addressed envelope like a cave man) to Carl Sargent, the “head honcho” (as he signed his letters off to me) at Flame Publications. Flame Publications was a subsidiary of Games Workshop Ltd. from 1990 to 1992, that was set up to publish the books for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. They lost the license to Hogshead Publishing.

Anyway, Mr Sargent and the art director Tony Ackland seemed to like my little pictures and we corresponded for a while on commissioning me to produce some work for the up-coming Lustrian Supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. As he said, my art would “constitute roughly 50% of the internal images, maybe 15-20 pieces”.

I remember being jolly excited by the prospect, and eagerly awaited the arrival of the source material they were sending me, along with design and style guidelines (which seemed to boil down to “do that, but with more spikes”).

A few dozen pages of typed text arrived, and I set about my commission with the abandon of a goblin fanatic! But within a few days, I got a phonecall (landline obviously) from Mr Sargent who sounded very gloomy.  Apparently, Games Workshop had pulled the plug on the project, so it was all over.

Ah well, when one door closes, etc.

So he said I could keep the stuff they’d sent as they were hoping to restart the project and would let me know if anything came of it.  Clearly it didn’t and the much-anticipated Lustrian Supplement never made it to print.

For 31 years I’ve had this old manuscript tucked in among my extensive Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay book collection. I understand its quite a rare thing, so I figured that I’d finally get round to digitising these old parchments. 

For those of you interested in the history of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying it may offer some interesting insight into the early stage of development of what could have led to playing games in the steamy jungles of far Lustria.

Enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Addendum.

Its also worth taking a look at the Awesome Lies blog, where I talked about this a while back (thanks Gideon!)

And some exceptional further work recostructing the possible structures of the supplement, had it made it to pring.

Warcry: Ogor Mawtribes

 Warcry: Ogor Mawtribes

Some friends recently tempted me into Games Workshop’s (GW) Warcry skirmish game. Although I’ve yet to have a game, I’ve started putting together a mob or two for it, digging out my backlog of GW miniatures. I have a bunch of ogres and their little goblin fellows (for some reason called gnoblars).

I didn’t do any work-in-progress shots sadly, but here’s the finished crew. One advantage of Warcry is that it has a very low model count, so you only need a few little dudes on the table to play the game. 

In this case I put together three ogres, sorry ogors. Who are implausibly using cannons as firearms! Supporting them are six of the wonderfully characterful gnoblars.

In painting the ogors, I reviewed their backstory. They appear to be fellows who love to eat (pretty much anything they can fit in their mouths). Their society also seems to be pretty brutal so I figured that constant fighting over who gets to the cookpot first would have them covered in bruises. Also, obesity does lead to some unexpected skin lesions so all together I tried to paint them with pretty bruised skin. I used a white undercoat and a mix of contrast paints, thinned acrylics, and various washes and glazes to get the effect I was after. I quite like how they turned out.

The ogors took about 2 hours to build (they needed a lot of greenstuff to fill gaps), and another 2 hours to paint and base.

For the gnoblars I decided on a light green goblin-like skin tone. Again I painted over white with contrast paint, washes and glazes, and all told these took about an hour to paint up. They only took a few minutes to build as they are basically one-piece castings, with just the heads to glue on. Thank you GW! I do so dislike building models.

Overall, I’m pleased with the result. I don’t know how good they are in Warcry, but they’ll look OK winning or losing!

Here are their game stats:

And for my painting challenge/tally, these add 60pts, so I’m now up to 450pts. Not bad.

Oathmark: Chaos Warriors

Oathmark

I recently picked up the Osprey Oathmark rules and I’m keen to give them a go sometime. Oathmark his its own range of miniatures of course and seems to have a “Lord of the Rings/fantasy Dark Age” aesthetic, but I figure my sizable backlog of various fantasy models will do for the game.

At least at this stage I’m focussing on getting these done with an eye to using them for “rank & flank” games of some kind.

I started these a while ago, mostly the undercoat done, but finished them off now (although the bases still need doing). These are Games Workshop figures of course, and my devotion to Papa Nurgle has transferred from my Warhammer 40,000 Death Guard army.

I forgot to take WIP photos, but here’s the final results.

The Chaos Warriors were easy to complete, mostly with rust-style dry-brushing and simple grubby base colours and washes.

These Chaos Marauders were similarly pretty quick and easy to complete. Again, here I used washes over a white undercoat, and simply dry-brushing to achieve the results.

I also have a couple of Chaos Spawn monsters.

With these nearly finished I had a root about in the nether regions of the plastic mountain and found some as yet unused Chaos figures. 

Here I have a few more Nurgle units.

From this box, the Plaguebrearers were based for 40k, but I think I may rebase them on squares for this army.  I still have these fly-monster things to build.

I also have a couple of other Nurgle boxes that will do.

I found these Khorne-aligned units too, so I guess I’ll be breaking out the red and brass paints!

Not sure what this thing is but I think it’s part of the Khorne army. I think it’s a “Daemons of Khorne Skull Cannon”.

It should be fun sorting this out.

From the Oathmark context I'm not sure what army these would be. Human I guess? I'll be making these up with an eye on flexibility of use though, and I may acquire some more figures depending on how things pan out. But I want to paint up all I have first. I know I have some ogres, Bretonnians, various elf factions, and Skaven in boxes somewhere. It'll be useful to get that all done first before deciding what, if anything, I'll do with these figures. 

There are various rule systems that they could be used with; Oathmark, Kings of War, Warband Fantasy, or even the old out of print Warhammer Fantasy rules.

Warband 28mm - Dragon

Among the other projects on the go at the moment, I'm embarking on a couple of 28mm armies for the Warband Fantasy rules.

I have a fair amount of suitable figures in boxes or languishing about in bare plastic, so I figured I should put them to good use.

I've started with a dragon because...well...why not?!

The fine fellow below is actually from an old Games Workshop boardgame called Talisman.  

Found here: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/198633/talisman-third-edition-dragons-tower

He was in pieces in a bits box so I rescued him, glued the broken bits together, slapped on some liquid green stuff to cover the gaps, and finished it off with a bit of paint.

I went for a green colour as it means he'll fit easily with various Warband armies (Dragon Men, Wood Elves, etc.).

The business end of "El Draco".  I toyed with a green tongue but I'm pleased I went with red.

The base isn't done yeat of course, but here he is in profile.  Basing up for Warband means he'll be in a 120mm x 60mm base so i'll dig out some terrain to add to it.  Not sure what yet.

I tried for a sort of leathery look on the wings.  I think they came out OK.

Next will be some old GW Brettonian knights that I've had for years, and I think the first army I'll do is a Dragon Men force.  

I'm planning to do an Undead army to oppose it but nothing's set in stone yet.  It depends what I've got in my stores as I don't want to buy too much for this.

Star Wars Legion was released recently and I'm planning to spend a bit on that, so...

Still, a good start with the dragon I think.