Tag: warcry

Painting the Black Talons for Warcry

I’m a big Warcry fan. It scratches that skirmish itch and does not over stay it’s welcome at the table during individual games (looking at you Mordheim and also you Necromunda!). I’ve played a lot of one-offs over the years and in early 2025 I was intro-ing the game with the intent of playing a campaign with a group of semi new players. during this time I decided to get my brother the Blackthorns for his birthday and give them a solid go with painting. This started off well, with two of the miniatures done right around his birthday last March…. then I got the Epic 40K bug and totally shifted gears for a bit there, not getting back to them until DECEMBER of last year. I finally cranked the last one out two weeks ago and it was a journey worth remembering as these are some beasts to paint, and stretched my skill-set to say the least. I am a notoriously slow painter so I feel if I had them done by late Summer, it would have been OK….January 2026? This was not ok.

Stock paint jobs, these guys are mostly painted with gold armor on the box, but I did not want to go that route as it was just TOO FRIGGIN GOLD. Looking at the othher Sigmarines for inspiration, I happened upon an article in White Dwarf issue 502 (a really good issue for paint advice/tips as it goes through their typology of notation going forward for Paint Splatter articles) and in the back it has a beautiful mix of steel and gold armor for Sigmarines. This would be my start. I did a test model of a random sigmarine I had lying around (no idea where it came from) and it turned out super solid. I was quite nervous about messing the Blacktalons up, so this was a critical step.

The Black Talon kit was pretty easy to put together, but I had to decide on helmets or not for all but the elf-lady and I went with no helmets except for Neave who I wanted to look like an emotionless Sigmarine out of the bunch. There isn’t a lot of skin on these guys, so the heads have to look great as they are big focus of the miniatures above all that metal. Rostus and Henrick (the two big dudes) were fairly easy to paint skin- wise, but Rostus is one of TWO bald members of this troop and that’s never easy. Shakana, the crossbow lady, has brown skin and that is the easiest ever to paint and make look good. I’m going to talk about Lorai (the elf) separate.

Metal wise it was Iron hands steel with a wash of nuln oil, hightlighted with ironbreaker, but with a glaze highlight (super thin layer) and when that dries you do a recess wash of drakenhof nightshade and then a final edge highlight of stormhost silver. I did a few scratches in the armor, but since these guys were super badass, I left it mostly alone. The Gold was Retributor Armor with a Reikland fleshshade wash highlighed liberator gold and then a Gore-grunta fur wash, then edged with stormhost silver. I overdid the edging a few times and had to clean it up. Overall both of these recipes worked great for the superheroic models these are, that would never let their armor get dirty.

The rest of the model was just picking out details for the armored guys, but there were two parts to these that I struggled with– the ENTIRE elf lady (Lorai) and the Shakana’s bird. Paint recipe wise I pondered these for way too long (weeks of procrastination) before diving in. The biggest issue with the elf lady is that her skin has to be perfectly smooth AND she has a bald head– no hair at all, totally bald. This along with very delicate armor and weapons and it was no wonder she took the longest by far. Shakana’s bird ended up being super easy, just selecting three different colors of blue and breaking those out into three colors (base layer, highlight, very highlight).

These models have molded bases that have a bunch of stuff on them. I’m not a huge fan of this but it suits these models. Again the base on Lorai was like painting another model though with the tree, mushrooms, water and these weird floating fish things flying around her feet. All of those things needed recipes of highlights, washes and shades and that took awhile. I pondered for several days on what to make the floating fish look like, and how to achieve the shiny water effect on the pond with what browns to use to make it look like muck. I pulled it off but it took way too long navel gazing.

There was one major modelling issue with Neave as she had a horrific gap in her fur cape that had to be filled with greenstuff. Mostly putting these together was a snap (except for Lorai… of course) but it was frustrating to have to fill that large of a gap.

Overall, highly recommended the Black Talons as a kit– these look incredible when painted and I think they redeem the silly looking original Sigmarines. They are absolute terrors on the Warcry table as well.

Warcry Winter Showdown

2025 gaming is off to a great start after Sunday’s Warcry action. I had been planning this even with folks for a few months, trying to get adult’s schedules to align is quite the challenge afterall and Sunday, it happened. We met up over by Old Guard Games (Napoleon’s 2.0) and they had plenty of table space for a couple of Warcry boards. Two of the players had never played before so the first games were teaching games for the most part and I went through the rules quickly before getting stuck into battle. As I’ve played just under 20 times or so, I have the rules down pretty well overall, but there are always a few niggling edge cases to make rulings on in this type of game anyway. I get blamed a lot for overlooking rules when teaching but it’s ALWAYS some sort of edge case, yet I still get yelled at, but I digress.

The first game was the Untamed Beasts (the OG) vs the newish Black Talons mega hunters which felt like the Teen Titans going up against some Viltrumites. We had a “take out each other’s Daggers” mission and while I thought I would get blown to shit, it was a very close match where my Rocktusks took out the Black Talon elf really quick and nearly took out the crossbow gal as well before my dagger was beaten down by Naeve who is a ridiculous powerhouse (and looks like Anissa the Viltrumite as well…). Great game. I was running double Rock Prowler and had a good time with that list.

Untamed Beasts.

uunpainted Neave and the leader of the Untamed Beasts duking it out

Meanwhile the Royal Beastflayers and Rotmire Creed duked it out on a second board. I just got one snap of this one and didn’t get much info except they had some fun and also had nearly the same twist and the same mission as we did.

The third game was a 4 player Tower capture scenario where I busted out my Wildecorps Hunters. Even with 800 points, I was able to field a good force and 4 dogs! This was my first time playing them and strategically I was going to use the dogs to hold down the enemies and then knock the shit out of anyone on the tower with the Arbalester. I had some good rolls there to pop off some enemies but my dogs could not handle the melee meatgrinder near the tower well enough to get the (death grip) grabs. My sweepers that were going to come in and take the tower were wiped out by the boss man of the Royal Beastflayers. In the end, the Beastflayers and the Rotmire Creed decimated each other and the Black Talons tried some of their tricks to teleport to the top of the tower which, despite the fact that Neave Blacktalon was taken out of the game by a TRIPLE 6 ROLL from the Rotmires, one of their meaties climbed to the top of the tower and won them the game. They are really tough to take out and Neave’s move 7 makes them challenging to deal with on missions where the rest get outmaneuvered by chaffffffff.

Painting

I painted pretty furiously in the last week to get my last 6 models done for the Untamed Beasts. This included a few models that I really didn’t need (2 extra plainsrunners) that I had put together to make a silly mostly plainsrunners list at one point. I think the Untamed Beasts have a lot of solid options but my superstars are the Rocktusk prowlers, which I procrastinated a long time to paint as I’m traditionally not good at horses/animals. When I finally did, they turned out great except that when I varnished them they got frosted IN WINTER. I have no idea at first how this happened except that my brush might have been too wet with water to start the process, and when I mixed the batch up of varnish to paint on, the water got trapped in the recesses. Later I realized that I had used Lamia Medium rather than Contrast Medium by mistake, so that frosting was the medium and NOT trapped water. I tried olive oil and gloss coating them again, and neither worked, so I had to reshade various areas and it worked out OK, not perfect, but what is?

All in all, a great day of Warcry, one of GW’s best games and it made the work of putting together and painting all that terrain worth while. Now that I’ve finished my Beasts, it’s time to get back to the terrain painting… ugh.