We are now two-thirds of the way through the first quarter of our Tsaragrad Escalation League. It's time to highlight some of the progress!
The Kor'Shan Tau have continued to assemble on the outskirts of Tsaragrad, while rumblings of the return of The Red Angel of Khorne to the Armageddon Sector have caused warp-spawned entities to materialize in realspace on Volarius.
The combination of ambitious hobby goals and major real-life changes (new job, new car search, new house search) have left me behind the required pace to completely finish my first 1,000 points of Tau by New Year's Eve, but I've made some decent progress nonetheless.
The Enforcer Commander is the least competitive of the three generic Tau commander choices (i.e., Crisis, Coldstar, Enforcer), but its stoic, gunslinging style has always been my favorite from a lore and modeling perspective.
I wanted to distinguish Commander Dawnbringer from other Commander models by making him suitably bulky and imposing. I accomplished this by kitbashing the Games Workshop Commander model with a Broadside battlesuit, which has a considerably broader chest but no jump pack. It was a little tricky to get these torsos to fit together, but I think it turned out alright. The Broadside torso alone looked a little too squat attached to the long battlesuit legs from the Commander kit, so I extended his torso by mounting a Broadside shoulder pad vertically along his sternum. The Fire Caste symbol sitting dead-center on his chest was a nice perk!
The finishing touches for Shas'o Gal'eth's model were a tabard and a back banner scratch-built from plasticard and greenstuff. I've decided to put these samurai-style back banners on the leader of each Kor'Shan unit and on each HQ choice to distinguish them from the rest of the army. I'm really pleased with how Dawnbringer's banner turned out, although it will make him a much taller target for blocking line-of-sight in game! The tabard was more challenging, as I had to sculpt it in situ while hanging freely from his waist. It took five separate sculpting sessions to slowly extend the tabard in multiple layers, but I think the end result was satisfactory (although certainly not perfect).
Just like Big Boss Rikburgis' loyal bodyguard of Nobz, I knew Commander Dawnbringer needed a pair of fearless Crisis wingmen to escort him on daring missions in the streets of Tsaragrad.
These wingmen aren't just any ordinary Kor'Shan XV8 Shas'ui; they are the hand-picked companions of the Shas'o himself. As such, I wanted to clearly distinguish them from other non-Bodyguard XV8 suits. A few aspects I was hoping to emphasize were bulkier/reinforced armor, more defensive stances, unique helmets, and special wing fins that I intend to paint in a different color or perhaps with prominent Sept/unit markings. I decided to build both suits from the Iridium Armor torsos and legs supplied in the standard Crisis Suit kit, and supplemented these base models with two wing fins: a small one made from plasticard and a larger one taken from the Broadside kit. I kitted these guys out with a flamer and shield each, thinking they would be ideal to gain the Enforcer Commander's Objective Secured buff before claiming a contested objective for The Greater Good. Lastly, I modified their legs to make them appear as if they are crouched while descending the stairs next to Commander Dawnbringer. I am optimistic these guys might look pretty cool when painted.
Like I explained in a previous post, one new aspect of my Tau collection is that I want each unit to appear like a mini-diorama when placed together on the tabletop or on a display shelf. Part of this challenge was carefully designing the bases such that they flow between models to give the impression of a continuous, unbroken landscape and provide each unit with their own setting.
I wanted to make sure the leader of the Kor'Shan Fire Caste and his wingmen benefitted from a suitably commanding, powerful stances with solid-yet-detailed bases, so opted to have Dawnbringer descending a set of poured concrete stairs (carved out of chunks of polystyrene) while directing fire towards the enemy. To ensure the bases were cohesive between all of the models in this unit, I grabbed a pen and some paper and whipped up a draft sketch:
After slicing through some polystyrene with a sharp razorblade and adding some textured plasticard sheets to add some interest to the remaining flat surfaces, the bases began to take shape. Below are some work-in-progress photos of the bases at various stages of construction (note that they aren't quite finished yet and still need some scatter/sand):
Crisis Suits are simply iconic; they're one of the main reasons I was drawn to playing Tau, so I anticipate eventually collecting at least two (if not more) units. In general, Tau units are highly homogenous with limited options for distinguishing one unit from another--quite dissimilar from my Orks!--so I hoped to distinguish my multiple Crisis teams through (1) basing and (2) poses.
My first Crisis Team is equipped to be a generalist long-to-mid-range firepower support unit with a mix of Plasma Rifles and Cyclic Ion Blasters. Given this role, I wanted to model them as if they are touching down into a ruined cathedral while scanning for enemy targets to decimate with their potent weaponry.
The ruined cathedral idea sounded cool in theory, but it turned out to be the most time-intensive step of the entire wave of Tau units in this quarter. I realized quickly that I would effectively need to scratch-build an entire cathedral terrain piece to apportion the various walls and details across all of the bases while keeping everything looking coherent and uniform. This turned into quite an undertaking... but a fun one! I began by sketching out some templates of three different sections of cathedral wall (wall with windows, open doorway, and arched ceiling):
Based on these templates, I laid out the bases for the Crisis Suits and their attendant drones and mapped out where the various sections of cathedral wall would fall:
With a plan in place, I used the wall section templates to carefully shape the polystyrene and foamboard components necessary to construct the walls. Here are some work-in-progress pics of the wall sub-assembly process:
After building each of the wall sections, I next arranged them onto individual bases and began turning them into ruins by hacking away at my carefully constructed walls with bolt cutters and a hobby knife. It felt Sisyphean to be destroying the walls I had just spent so much time crafting, but thankfully I was able to repurpose some of the ruined chunks as scatter material for the surface of the bases. The bases still need some finishing touches like sand/gravel, but I think they are looking pretty promising so far:
With the bases finished, I was able to start building the Crisis suits themselves. The stock Crisis models themselves are outstanding, but I wanted to impart my own creative spin on them by modeling the unit as if they were moving in unison performing a coordinating landing into the ruined cathedral. I was attracted to the idea of playing with different elevations for the models in the unit, with the models in front being lowest / closest to the ground and models in the back of the unit being higher up. For now, this only meant having the two XV8 Shas'ui suits with at least one foot each on the ground in the front of the unit and the Shas'vre elevated on a flying rod behind them, but if/when I eventually expand this unit to five XV8 suits I will continue to add more models to the back of the unit even higher up in elevation.
The suits aren't quite done yet, but here's how they are looking so far (including a couple detail shots of the Samurai-style back banner on the Shas'vre):
Although Broadsides aren't the CORE-keyworded terrors on the battlefield that they were when the Tau codex initially dropped, they still have decent rules and (more importantly) awesome models.
The standard Broadside kit is quite cool, but I wanted something a bit more unique for my Broadsides. I imagined that, as the Kor'Shan forces are an expeditionary cadre far from their Sept homeworld, each battlesuit pilot would have more autonomy than usual in customizing or retrofitting their battlesuit to best suit their fighting style. In practical terms, I am planning on implementing this idea by having each Broadside's Rail Rifle mounted on a different part of the battlesuit on each model.
Since I only had the points for a single Broadside in my initial 1,000-point list, I opted for a classic 4th Edition Broadside homage by mounting the Rail Rifle on this XV88's right shoulder. With his hands now considerably more empty, I decided to embed his twin Smart Missile System on his right wrist, leaving his left hand free to be holding some ruined terrain (TBD).
I am still working on the bases for this battlesuit and his drones, but here's some work-in-progress snapshots of the XV88 suit himself:
This squad of 10 Fire Warriors and their fearless Cadre Fireblade were the first models I built for the Kor'Shan... only for my phone to erase all of its data in September, causing me to lose all of the early WIP photos of this squad!
I lost all photos of the squad prior to priming, although I featured a finished test model in a previous post. However, I do have one remaining photo of the squad's bases, which are now fully painted. The squad was modeled to appear as if they are camping down in firing positions within a ruined imperial building, while the Fireblade is calling for them to redirect their attention to a new target to their right:
One of the defining aspects of the Kroot in 40k lore is that they are genetically hyper-adaptible: their digestive system absorbs parts of their prey's genetic information, causing them to adapt to their local environment by slowly adopting the morphology of their prey.
I imagined that the Etherals of the Kor'Shan Sept would certainly not have approved of Shas'o Gal'eth bringing Kroot mercenaries aboard the Il'Fannor cruisers of the Kor'Shan expeditions, meaning that Commander Dawnbringer would have been forced to seek out Kroot allies native to Volarius.
If these Kroot were living on Volarius before the Kor'Shan expedition arrived, the obvious next question was: what did they eat?
My answer took some real-world inspiration in the form of mountain goats. Volarius is a mineral-rich mining world covered with large, barren mountain ranges, so I imagined that small goat-like creatures would be well suited to surviving in this climate just as mountain goats are on Earth. This backstory lent itself to two key modeling decisions:
With these ideas in mind, I scoured the internet for suitably scaled goat models for Kroot Hounds. It turns out there are actually quite a few options online, although they are mostly targeted at RPGs like D&D. I bought a few different varieties. A veritable flock of goats!
I don't anticipate modifying these goat models much since they work perfectly as-is. On the other hand, I have begun some fairly involved kitbashing of Kroot and Beastman components for the Kroot Mercenaries. As a test model, I tried using a Kroot head and arms on a Beastman Gor body with Gor horns. It still needs some cleanup and sculpting, but I think the concept has some potential:
Unfortunately, as time has slipped away from me this fall, I've decided to put these Kroot conversions on ice for the remainder of this quarter so I can focus on cleaning up (and ideally painting) my Crisis suits and Fire Warriors... but these Kroot will emerge from the shadows at a later date to help the Kor'Shan spread the Tau'va across Volarius!
My brother came into the first quarter of our Escalation League with the better part of his 1,000 points of Khorne Daemons built and awaiting paint. This meant he was able to jump straight to the exciting stage of getting color onto a bunch of lifeless grey plastic!
He has been experimenting lately with airbrushing as a means of speeding up the often-laborious painting process, and the relatively straightforward color palette of Khorne Daemons seemed like a perfect test case for scaling up some airbrushing.
Here's a gallery of some work-in-progress shots he's sent me over the last two months. I am loving the bright blue weapons as a contrast to the rich red skin! I think these guys are looking great so far, and am excited to see what they all look like once painted up:
