Dragonrune Ogre Marauders Painted – Adding to the Collection

For some reason I seem to have an affinity for ogres (and giants) in Warhammer. I am not sure why this is mind you as I have not set out to collect a lot of them, it kind of just happened. A few months back I was able to procure these ogres off of eBay for about $20 less than the going price after having my eye on them since around 2001. What are they? Dragonrune Miniatures Ogre Marauders.

Dragonrune Miniatures was in operation from 2001 to 2003 and closed down in 2003 (source). The minis in question were sculpted by Felix Paniagua and obviously look very much in the vein/style of the Warhammer miniatures at the time; his orcs also are very much same style-wise. This makes sense as Felix also worked for Games Workshop.

While Dragonrune went "belly up" they were acquired by Armorcast and you can still get the miniatures.

As you can see I have all seven of the minis from the ogre line. I have mixed feelings about these guys, not the minis mind you. They are packed with details and a proliferation of skulls, heads, chests, pouches etc. In fact in a way they echo the Citadel miniatures of the mid to late 80s which I cut my teeth on as it were (In fact the left hand most ogre has orange and white haircut akin to the ogre on the cover of the 1st Edition Warhammer Fantasy Role-play book). And yes I know the troll slayer on the cover had the orange hair...

Sorry about the digress, I was saying mixed feelings? This was one of those units and/or minis that gave me a lot of grief when painting. What do I mean by that? Glad you asked. By grief I mean they just did not come together in terms of the colors as I expected. The skin tones were better than I expected, but overall as noted the whole experience left me somewhat perplexed. I am not sure about you, but this happens to me every once in a while when painting a unit or miniature. It either is a case where it does not come out quite like I intended or was not as enjoyable to paint.

I did get to work on my black lining technique to give them a more Oldhammer feel and the washes went well. I also gave the weapons a rusty bloodstained look which on the ogre with the orange/white hair and the ogre with the hammer looks good.

Regardless of the outcome I now have yet another unit of ogres for Warhammer and here is what is in my collection at the moment:

• A unit of three ogres for my 6th/7th Edition Chaos Dwarf army.
• A unit of three ogres for my 6th/7th Edition Chaos (Undivided) army.
• A unit of eight ogres for my 3rd Edition Armies which are detailed here.

While all of these guys are assigned to an army and in some cases painted to match the armies or their bases/movement trays they could also be used for Warhammer Fantasy Role-play or for other Warhammer Armies in Warhammer Fantasy Battle proper. In the case of the Dragonrune ones I just finished above they are painted with the more neutral brown scheme I use for mercenary forces in my collection. Another use could very easily be in my ever so slowly evolving Dogs of War army.

In the end, I recommend these guys, they are excellent miniatures with a very good amount of fine detail to them. In fact if you did not know you might be forgiven for assuming they were unreleased GW miniatures.

As a final note I think these are the last ogres I will be procuring for quite some time, although there are still some giant ogres from the Marauder line which I quite like along with some more of the classic lines from Citadel. Perhaps I need to switch to the classic giants! So many choices, limited $, but we will see. Maybe The Citadel Giant, but only 1,000 were produced...

Narrator's Voice: "He would indeed fine a "Citadel Giant" 

Dark Future – The Mad Max Inspired GW Game I Never Got to Play

Let us get this out right away, Dark Future was inspired by the Mad Max movies (Mad Max, Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome).

Note: this is hardly a controversial statement and not one that I ever heard anyone denying mind you, but bears repeating. Back in the day my only interactions regarding Dark Future was seeing the advertisements in Dragon Magazine or the occasional White Dwarf (I did not start reading WD till around #137). And by the time I could somewhat afford it, it was gone from the lineup and forgotten. One thought also before I go further, why is it that GW once again placed their ultra-violent settings for a game in the USA? I think they were trying to tell us something with Dark Future and Blood Bowl...

This game came back to me a few months back when I purchased a copy of Car Wars made by Steve Jackson Games at the local game store. I got the copy for only $20 so not too bad I thought, but reading through it, holy crap is that game complex. Far too rule heavy for my tastes and very math intense. Now I am not averse to crunch heavy games or math heavy, but Car Wars struck me in the same vein as Twilight 2000 in terms of complexity for the vehicle rules. Perhaps a feature of early 90s game design concepts as it relates to cars and the like?

White Dwarf cars via slotforum

But it was then that I remembered that Car Wars was not the game I was shooting for, it was Dark Future! Ahhh well so off to eBay to see what sets are going for? Yeah... looks like I am going to need to save my gold Guilders for a while, or perhaps go for the "successor game" Gorka Morka? (I will cover that in a future post). In any event this is one of those ones that is on my radar now, but who knows when I will get to it. There is something that keeps drawing me to it and I am not quite sure why, I do not believe it is nostalgia either. I suppose it is possible to "procure" the rules and use Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars to simulate it.

EDIT: in 2021 I was able to score not only Dark Future but the White Line Fever supplement as well. 

Oh and look at that: is not the internet great? There is a wiki for everything, including Dark Future at Route 666, the Dark Future Wiki. As you can see for a game that had a fairly limited shelf life, it did receive a fair amount of support from what I can gather. Games Workshop did have support for expansions for the game such as the PBS4 Battlecars, but like many of the secondary (later they would get called specialist) games Dark Future fell by the wayside to a large degree by the early 1990s. This coincided with the revamp to 4th Edition Warhammer.

I assume if you have read this far you know about Dark Future and probably a lot more than me as I noted, I have never played it. Please lend me your thoughts on the matter after some selected photos that graced White Dwarf from the time frame in question, culled from Pinterest and the Lost and Damned site.

Part VIII - Repainting the 3rd Edition Wood Elf Army, Archers

More Wood Elf Warhammer stuff to share. Over the last few months I have done lots of work on my Dark Elf force along with my Wood Elves I have been chronicling here on the blog. Interestingly I have been working on the Wood Elves in the autumn and the Dark Elves in the echoing their basing choices.

Quick aside: the progress on the Dark Elves can be found here. I will have some new photos up soon of their progress.

As we all know, Wood Elf forces in 3rd Edition Warhammer are heavy with bow armed troops. This also carried over to later editions. In 3rd the compulsory choices are archers of which the minimum to field is 30. Aside from my Skarloc Wood Elf Archers all the bow armed units in the army are the result of the PBS3 -Plastic Warhammer Regiment Boxed Set. I know I have said it before, but while not the best miniatures that GW ever produced they are some of the best value around, even now as everyone and their brother has some spare ones to sell on eBay or trade. Additionally, to me at least these "look like Warhammer to me" in much the same way 3rd Edition Talisman "As I know it"

So with all this here are the units I have completed, not one but two units, 20 strong of Wood Elf archers. As you can see green predominates but I continued with the black and white accenting to tie them into the other units of the army, along with the autumnal basing of red, orange and yellow. This now brings the fire power up to 82; three units with 20 and the Skarloc Archers having 22 in the regimental box set.

The 2nd unit (2nd as in I pictured the first unit here and Skarloc's counts as unit #1 for my army) followed by the 3rd.

To close out, I will also need to get pictures up of my Elven Attack Chariot that I painted up for the Wood Elf force. It came out well and I realized I finished it several months back. I now have a sizable force of Wood Elves repainted and have come a long way when they were simply an Ally force for my mega-battle with Dave and Jeff.

Part II - Creatures of Chaos (Cockatrice, Chimera, Manticore) Painted

EDIT: 7-19-26, Langley Miniatures has shuttered operations.

Link to the Original kickstarter. 

As fall starts giving way to winter you know what that means for my Warhammer and hobby activity: it begins to increase, or at least my blogging about it does. I have a lot of stuff that I have been completing in terms of Warhammer and a lot already photographed. In particular I have been hard at work on the repaint of my Wood Elf army which is now quite respectable in size. But enough of the heads up on where I am at, onto the point of this blog entry: Creatures of Chaos.

As outlined in my previous entry on the matter, I purchased all three of the Creatures of Chaos from Langley Miniatures by Andrew Taylor. To recap, these are great sculpts and I was happy to support them; they also have a fair amount of other minis I am keeping my eyes on for down the road. The minis are created very much in the vein of the miniatures that Citadel/Games Workshop/Marauder created back in the heyday of 3rd Edition Warhammer.

The minis themselves were a pleasure to paint with very few awkward areas. You know the kind I mean: some minis have areas, usually the undersides that are a pain to try and contort the hand and brush to reach to apply adequate paint coverage.

I decided to mount these minis on 50mm by 50mm bases as that would also allow me a fair amount of space to create some decorative bases in the style of 3rd edition Warhammer. By this I mean the look and feel of the 3rd Edition rule book and White Dwarfs at the time with their crazy painted mushrooms, simulated rushes/weeds and the like.

The only real "issues" I had revolved around the paint job of the cockatrice and the chimera's lion head. In the case of the cockatrice the issue was trying to get the color right so it did not look muddy or like a dark mustard. As with most photos it is kinda hard to see as it shows a shade darker than it actually is. A cockatrice in terms of overall colors is not quite as simple as it seems to begin with. To help with painting guidance, I did look at the Bestiary in the rule book, the 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monstrous Manual and the painted examples from the Langley Miniatures site.

With the chimera, the issue was trying to find the right balance of the lighter colors. In the end rather than go with a tawny color as one might expect from a lion, I went with one that was more cream/ivory in terms of the shade making it more of a "white lion" (no, not the hair band from the 80s). At first it was a bit of a pain and was not coming out well. Part of this is because I undercoat in black rather than white. But in the end, like plenty of minis that I have done in the past that I thought would not turn out well I kept at it. And sure enough I got it to a point where it came together. This happens time and again and the best advice is to press on and keep painting!

In terms of use they have two primary uses for armies in Warhammer. The ones that can make use of these minis in their army list are ones that have, imagine that! Thus they make appearances in my 3rd Edition Dark Elf and Chaos forces as a matter of course.

A few bonus pictures of the project.

For my next post I will be turning back to my Wood Elf host for the first time in quite a while. Right now the army has expanded quite a bit including the fact that I now have over 80 painted Wood Elf Archers. In fact looking at the plans for the army, I have probably only four more units to go: Elven Lords (Cavalry), another Treeman, 3 more Wardancers for the second unit of 10 and a few packs of Animal Handlers aka Beastmasters. For these guys my plan is to use animals from the excellent Wargames Foundry Bears and Big Cats.

As to timing of these purchases? Yet to be determined...

Terrain in Warhammer: The Underappreciated Part of the Hobby

(Grrrrrr.... Once again my love/hate relationship with Blogger continues as this hosting platform ate a large portion of my changes to this post and for whatever reason auto-save did not work....)

As summer turns to early Fall here in North America I take a pause from my intensive construction of my Warhammer Nippon Castle and the start of Castle Von Wittgenstein (as well as numerous Warhammer Fantasy Battle units for various armies). I got to thinking about the overall amount of time that I and I suspect others engage in when it comes to terrain. It is my contention that there probably is not as much compared to actual painting and assembly of miniatures which is to be expected. This in a way is a sad thing because one of the most rewarding areas of the game in my mind and in a way one of the cheapest is terrain. Certainly when one considers the cost of Oldhammer; i.e. that almost any miniatures have to be purchased off of eBay and not so nice prices, terrain is cheap in comparison.

When I say lack of terrain, I am not saying there was none in our games, but rather a decided lack of attention to it to a large degree. By this I mean buildings, forests/woods, rivers etc. were present, but not large scale projects I mentioned above. Even back in the day when 3rd Edition was the current edition of the game, I do not recall creating as much terrain compared to the gold standard of what we saw in White Dwarf. Sure, in my gaming group we had the main board (cut into 12x12 sections for ease of transport), some trees, hedges and fences but not much else. Buildings were taken care of by the Warhammer Townscape book, but none of us attempted to create more elaborate pieces.

As an aside: over time I purchased another Warhammer Townscapes Book years ago and since I inherited our old terrain as a gaming group I reckon I have about 1.5 sets of buildings from the two books. I say 1.5 because despite this I do not have all of the buildings due to various moves and some being destroyed over said time-frame. For those not in the know, Warhammer Townscape was a book of card-stock buildings that one folded and glued.

For me the lack of terrain is odd when you consider the totality of the hobby. Even though I saw some of the excellent buildings created by Dave Andrews in various White Dwarf articles, it was not until after the heyday of 3rd that I really started constructing my own buildings. But a funny thing happened when I did start creating them, I did so in a style very akin to 3rd Edition. This is probably not as "funny" when I think about it, for example (Willmark's Homemade Warhammer terrain).

Now, I posted these years ago on Chaos Dwarfs Online and are a selection of some of my terrain and the style is distinctive, at the same time familiar. But even with these I still was not doing anything too new, as a lot of the pieces were right from White Dwarf (not that it is a bad thing).

I guess when you put it all together, terrain is one of the most under represented parts of the hobby (to a degree) but one of the most universally praised? Or put another way, gamers love terrain, but usually the last thing created. This in and of itself is surprising for another reason when one considers terrain is actually one of the cheaper areas of the hobby.

Nippon Samurai Unit Complete – 25 Ashigaru/Ronin for Warhammer

Once again I've been working on again/off again Nippon mercenary force. I have got a lot of stuff on the bench right now but as we are in the waning month of summer here in North America my thoughts turn back to painting. So with that I finally finished up a unit for the Warband of Nippon: a unit of 25 samurai.

As with all of the units of this army I am making them flexible enough to be used in varying editions of Warhammer via the 2nd Edition Ravening Hordes to using the 6th Edition Dogs of War rules for later versions/

• When used in 2nd Edition they will be fielded as ashigaru with hand weapons.
• In 3rd Edition they fall under Empire as a "Count As" force. From that list they use the stat line for Eratzsoldier with light armor and hand weapons.
• For a true 5th/6th Edition Dogs of War force? Well they do not really fit at all unless I used them as Norse Marauders but the base sizes do not really work. With that said I do not really think I can use them as is in any form really as the Core choices for Dogs of War are pikemen and crossbowmen. The only thing that comes close for the 20mm bases in the Special Choices are dwarfs. Not really helpful there GW.

So without further delay here are the ashigaru/ronin/lower class samurai as promised. They are not the best unit I have ever painted but considering the stop start nature of them at least they are complete. I tried to keep the colors somewhat muted for most of the warriors as some later units will really stand out. These guys I wanted less flash but still painted a few brighter colors.

Anyone else with a Dogs of War or Nippon army force? I know of this very cool army here. 

3rd Edition Warhammer Armies- Old Worlder Ally or Old Worlder Mercenaries?

As the title notes... but not really much of conundrum. The reality is these guys I just finished up could be used for one of three things in 3rd Edition Warhammer Armies.

• Part of a small force of Bretonnians; unlikely as they are by far my least favorite army?
• Or as a Old Worlder Mercenary unit?
• Or as a Old Worlder Ally unit?

As I outlined here these minis are from my very first army, Bretonnians... which lasted all of one battle before converting them to Empire. (see I disliked them even back then!) Through the years they saw a few different configurations, even buying 5th edition Bretonnian warhorses and repainting them. Fortunately for me I did save the horses they came with and had a vague idea of making them into a terrain piece: horses around a paddock. But as in my previous post I noted I wanted to bring them back to 3rd Edition. They were mostly in good shape but a fair number of the horse tails were missing so green-stuff to the rescue.

Regardless of how they are used there is still a further plan with them. I still have 10 more horses that I will expand to another unit. Once I have the riders for them I will split out the Templar painted knights for their own unit... Dues Vult! (Note- nothing more implied by that other then the Templars themselves.) These are left overs from my Imperial Knights who were re-based on armored horses and fit perfectly.

Like the rest of the mercenary forces I've used brown bases for them and added a few half-buried shields and mushrooms to give them that 3rd edition look and feel.

Anyways, here is the finished unit. Of special note is the Templar in the front row on the right of the standard bearer. He represents the first Warhammer minis that I ever painted. I've since repainted him a number of times and hopefully this is the last.