wargaming – Grimmleigh's Lab

40k Ork Army Project: Grimmguttz’ Lads

This project has been a funny one, and an oddly therapeutic one. Accidentally therapeutic. Weirdly therapeutic.

Anyone who has been around this ramble factory for more than a minute knows of my love/hate/adoration/ambivalent relationship with Games Workshop. I freaking love 40k, and have for nearly 40 years.

And I kinda hate what it’s become, and the all consuming capitalist machine GW has become. I’ve been consuming GW media for nearly as long as there has been a GW, and while the games haven’t always been perfect, they were always pretty free spirited and anti-establishment.

Early Warhammer 40,000 was brimming to near overflow with the kind of punk energy that came to life to counter the Thatcher/Reagan political machine, and thumbing through a book or White Dwarf was sometimes akin to putting on a Black Flag album and knowing you weren’t alone in being pissed off at the direction the world was going.

Now, I look at GW and it feels a bit like running into someone I used to know in the old scene, but they’re sporting a suit and clutching scripture while desperately trying to fit in to the corpo world.

ICKY! It feels icky! Modern GW is pretty much everything classic GW was making fun of. Those guys weren’t worried about stock dividends and shareholder satisfaction. They wanted toy soldiers of comically fascist orks, disposable infantry, and uber-men that poked fun at the macho swagger that polluted the entertainment sphere of the time.

So, where does that leave an old-timer like me? I still love that space. I still enjoy the franchise. But it’s a lot like Disney era Star Wars– You’re playing my song, you’re hitting the right beat, but I’ll be damned if you aren’t much more than a pretty good cover band…

This Ork project was one I went in to with pretty open arms and a fairly open mind. I love miniatures, I love painting miniatures. Sometimes, I even enjoy playing the games that are out there that I use to justify loving miniatures. But I’m not a fan of the modern holders of the license, and their interpretation of the rules and I don’t mix well.

But, if I want to play a game with anyone, I pretty much have to have some grasp on 11th edition. So, my solution is to have a Combat Patrol sized force, with an army that hasn’t changed much unit wise since the edition I did like, which was 4th. Again, I know it has problems. But I know how to work around those problems, and it feels like properly cinematic wargaming to me.

Grimmguttz is my Warmaster, and he’s the dessert portion of this painting project. He’s also a little nod to my situation, as I use Grimmleigh* as a pen-name, and my guts tried to kill me. So, Grimmguttz. You’ll see him in a couple of weeks.

Grimmguttz in 11th will be leading a couple of squads of Boyz, a squad of Grots, a Weirdboy, and a buggy. In 11th, I’ll probably put some other goodies like Killa Kans and Dredds, but I’m not in a hurry.

Here’s the first squad of Boyz, lead by Skullpuncha. He’s the farthest up the leadership ladder this squad has with the Deathskulls, so he gets a little blue tattoo action. Everyone else has a little blue worked into their wargear, but they have to earn anything more.

I wanted to lean into a little pirate look for these guys, so there isn’t a unifying color scheme outside of the blue bits here and there. But I did do some stripes on some of the clothes, and plan on doing some other fun marking on boyz that have more clout in the gang.

The rule of thumb I’m trying to go by is that gear bigger than basic shootas should be stolen, so I’ll be stealing lascannons and other goodies from my bits box. I want these guys to look like they’re really only out there fighting because krumpin’ is the best way to get stuff to pinch!

The other rule is that nothing else is getting worked on until this Combat Patrol is done, which is driving me crazy… I like to have a buffet of projects in front of me, but I’m hoping that the desire to paint other stuff will help me buckle down and finish all the Orks I currently have!

The best part of this project, for me, at least, is that these guys translate pretty cleanly into 4th edition 40k. While 11th doesn’t let you do any gear shopping, I can clearly buy extra goodies and gear for my troops in 4th. So, while they don’t have a heavy weapon option for their squad yet, there’s room to buy one later, when Skullpuncha has earned the Teef for it.

Here’s the unit in 4th edition, clocking in at 70 points:

Here’s that same unit for 11th, which is 90 points no matter what I do equipment wise:

Like I said before, I like to shop for my toys. So even though the first unit actually cost the same 90 points as the second one if I buy the kombi-weapon, the fact that I can field 9 basic mooks and a nob for less points and build them up as I like them is a huge win.

Plus, the 40k rules for Killteam mean I can pick bits and pieces from a larger Ork army to make a cool action squad, which is always aces in my book! I’ll show that off as I get closer!

*Grimmleigh is a nod to The Damned song ‘Grimly Fiendish’ from the ’80s, which in itself was a nod to a long running comic strip in the UK… I’m not British, but my name is Leigh and I like that damned song, hahaha!

Workbench

Oops, I Did a Trench Crusade

Really, folks, I tried. It wasn’t for me, I said, fooling no one. It’s too gross, I said, not seeing past the butchered bits on some of the minis. It’s just another game, I said…

Then I looked at who had made Trench Crusade, and it’s literally a who’s who of designers that built my favorite game of all time, yes, the glorious brains that made Mordheim had assembled again, like the Avengers but probably more middle-aged and myopic. I thumbed through the rules, and the mechanics of the game system rolled over my eyes and directly into my brain.

This is the first time in nearly a decade that the rules to a game system have stuck with me just from reading the book. I know there’s some fine-tuning I’ll need to do, but the system is ridiculously simple and elegant at the same time.

I was still safe, though. I’m trying to stay away from resin minis because we just don’t know the long term health risks, and my doctors have encouraged me to just maybe not mess with something potentially toxic. Sadly for my wallet, that all changed when I stopped by my FLGS last week.

Glorious, beautiful, and down right dynamic plastic Trench Crusade figs were sitting there, playing a high-stakes game of chicken with my wallet. My wallet lost. I won.

Everything I love about plastic miniatures is front and center with the troops choices. You can put the weapons and heads you want on the bodies you want. Even the elites and command have a number of options, so you can just make what you want.

And as opposed to the modern GW system of “this is your dude, you get EXACTLY this and can’t change the weapons!”, you can put together pretty much whatever you want within certain limits. The Old World and Necromunda seem to be the only games that let you shop for gear, and that’s one of the reasons why I seem to like those two games… I want to shop, dammit!

This is the first time since Wild West Exodus that I bought some boxes of minis, went home, put them together, and just painted everything in a few days. It was amazing. I had the best time, and now I have 90% of a finished warband.

It’s also the first time ever that I’ve painted the entirety of a plastic range of miniatures, but that’s just because these just launched and there aren’t that many out yet.

Archon Studios did an amazing job with these minis, and the command and elite models are as good as anything I’ve picked up from GW.

My leader, the Hauptman I’ve name Karolina Katzenbach, has a tank-splitter sword and machine gun. She looks like she laughs in the face of danger!

The Feldkaplan (Field Chaplan) has wooden wings and a huge breaker sword, and literal Holy Hand Grenades. The fact that this warband is from New Antioch is not lost on me, either.

Sniper Priests blind themselves and let The Almighty aim their guns for them. They look so freaking cool.

Strosstruppen (shock troopers) come with a variety of weapons, my favorite is the guy with the sword and shield. I painted a praying skeleton with halo on the shield, just for fun.

And the yeoman are just basic cannon fodder, but the unit musician has a glockenspiel, so I imagine he’s got to be the first to die. Just thinking about someone clunking away on one of those while you’re trying to fight makes me laugh a bit…

Overall, great models, great game, and only as gross as you want it to be. And best of all, I’ve actually managed to talk a friend into coming up for air from 40k to check out the game, so I’ll make sure to let you all know how it goes!

Workbench

The Workbench: Finished Models for August 23, 2026

Another week down, and another check in with finished models off of my workbench!

Projects that are ON the bench but not yet finished: Heroclix Kingpin and Sin, 6 Black Templars, 1 Black Templar Land Raider, and some pickup-truck for hillbilly marines or something. Not sure, the Black Templars are for a friend, but they’re cool looking knights in my head! Also, Gladiator from Marvel Crisis Protocol.

This week’s finished models!

Elsa Bloodstone, Marvel Crisis Protocol

She has super-strength, loves guns, and considers being British a super-power! It’s Elsa Bloodstone, ass-kicking Monster Hunter and all around fun character to paint. This mini has been sitting in my back-log for years now, and the Midnight Sons faction is one I’ll be holding on to for MCP.

Orange is not a color I play with often, and I think I’m going to have to change that!

Carpathian Gunslinger, Dracula’s America

I love the concept of the game, but the rules are just not my thing. Still, great concept. I’ll be using these models for Silver Bayonet instead, which is great. I have had these guys sitting on a shelf for years, so it’s great getting some paint on him. Plus, I’m really enjoying these hand-sculpted casts, there’s something incredibly charming about painting the old-school stuff.

Austrian Paranormal Investigator, Silver Bayonet

Another rescued straggler from the back-log, I seriously love the no-nonsense look of the guy. Like I said a little earlier, there is something really gratifying about painting up something that isn’t 5,000 skulls bolted to a headpiece. This mini is solid pewter, one piece, and cool as hell.

I have some shacks and blasted buildings that would go really well in a Silver Bayonet game, so as soon as I get his unit painted up, I think I’ll be diving straight into this as my first solo game/battle report.

Hawkeye and Enchantress, Marvel Heroclix repaints

You can tell how simple these sculpts are, especially after seeing the Elsa Bloodstone mini above. These presented different challenges, and you can tell the newer Hawkeye mini has a lot more going on with the sculpt. But there is something really unexpectedly amazing going on with the Enchantress mini; she’s a very good early sculpt for Heroclix, and just radiating personality.

The Enchantress mini is proving to me EXACTLY what I was hoping to find when taking on this Heroclix repainting project– these minis are much better than they initially look, and with a little love and a little more work, there’s a world of cool toys that can be had for a very small amount of money.

There is no denying that the Elsa miniature is a better sculpt, and she was an absolute joy to paint for completely different reasons than Enchantress. But I find myself really proud of the Enchantress miniature, she was a challenge, and she rewarded my work and patience.

This was an absolute joy. What an amazing hobby we have!

Workbench

‘Clicking’ Into an Intervention

I have been a collector my entire life. My earliest memories are going from store to store with my mom, looking for Mego action figures to finish out my Star Trek and Super Hero teams. I grew up with a single mom, and even after she married (when I was seven) we still had some pretty lean years, with the early ’80s being particularly brutal.

*Me with Scotty and Uhura at the pool, 1975.*

My parents did their best, though, and somehow I always had a couple of D&D books for holidays, and my dad always made sure I had a few dollars every month to get my comic books. Sure, it was easier with comics only being thirty-five (then fifty-five) cents, but he was only making about four dollars an hour, too. Still, we made do.

That may have led me to compulsive collecting. I’ve never been chill about it; when I had money for Star Wars figures, I had an end goal of collecting a hundred Storm Troopers, because that seemed really freaking cool. When I stumbled into miniatures in the mid-eighties, I wanted everything… which wasn’t too hard to do, since everything was sculpted by hand and cast in lead. So there really wasn’t a warehouse of temptation waiting for me whenever I found a store that stocked minis.

My favorites back then were Ral Partha minis, especially those sculpted by Julie Guthrie. She did some brilliant sculpts, and when the industry shifted to pewter instead of lead, the miniatures were just a little crisper in detail, which made her work pop even more. I learned to paint with those early figs, and had a few dozen monsters and adventurers lined up for my D&D games.

*Classic Julie Guthrie Skellies from Ral Partha, still available for purchase!*

When my local comic shop started carrying Games Workshop stuff, I bough my first box of Space Marines, which was 30 plastic dudes for about ten bucks. I also got a copy of Rogue Trader, and man, was I hooked.

*If you had this, it’s time to book your colonoscopy…*

Here’s the thing about being hooked on 40k in 1989, though; there were probably less than a hundred models at first. Fantasy was the bigger franchise for Games Workshop back then, and they were still making stuff for Dungeons & Dragons. So being hooked wasn’t going to put me in the poor house, and I could afford a fresh blister pack every payday and still keep up with the sporadic releases.

Now, keeping up with just about ANY miniature line is going to put you in an interesting financial predicament. If you want to collect an army for 40k or Age of Sigmar, you could easily spend a thousand dollars, and that’s just for funsies. I know tournament players who spend even more, as they try and chase the meta and stay on top of the most competitive releases.

And that’s not even getting into the fire-hose of releases GW puts out every week. Luckily, I’m not a huge GW guy (even though they’ve still managed to get some money out of me in the last few months).

Marvel Crisis Protocol was another beast altogether, though. These are super dynamic miniatures, and they’re big, beautiful, and fun to paint. The release schedule isn’t as robust by any means, and if you were only interested in one team or faction, you could get the ten minis you needed to play the game for anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dollars. That’s downright cheap in the miniature wargaming hobby!

But, if you’re a collection minded sap like me, MCP is dangerous. I love that world. I grew up in that world. I built my adolescent moral compass reading comic books, so I’m not going to be so good at resisting the temptation when new kits come out each month.

I gotta catch them all, dammit!

I’m trying not to be that guy anymore. As I mentioned earlier this year, I’m finding more and more examples of how rampant collecting can be devastating for families when that collector dies. I’m also trying to have an office that doesn’t look like a pinata stuffed with war dollies exploded in it.

The new Nimrod box almost got me. Actually, it did get me. I bought it, after selling off almost my entire collection of MCP minis. And once I had that, I had that monkey on my back again, and I was making plans on how to aquire that old collection again. After all, it was only $65 for that Nimrod box, how bad could it be if I spent a year or two getting the old minis back? I still haven’t completely talked myself out of it.

*Luckily, they’ll be easy to return if I choose to go that route…*

What a junkie I am. Luckily, I managed to have an emergency intervention with myself before it got out of control… yet.

I realize that it would be silly to deny myself the fun of collecting and painting super hero minis. There really isn’t anything wrong if I wanted to go whole-hog into MCP again, either. At the end of the day I wouldn’t be endangering anything other than my discretionary income. So I’m going to allow myself to collect supers. I’m just trying to pull back on MCP.

They are big, for one, and take up a lot of space.

Second, they’re expensive. Not in the “get a squad and you’re set” kind of way, but definitely if you want to collect the entire range, or at least get all the characters you like… which in my case, is most of them.

At an average of $15 per figure, the minis would get really cost prohibitive, really quickly. And stay that way, too, since Atomic Mass Games tends to release at least two boxes (at $65 each) every month. That math tells me my discretionary budget would be just a Marvel Crisis Protocol budget.

Luckily, I already had a solution to this issue. And it’s a fun one, because I’m stubborn and really enjoy ridiculous challenges. And it’s a solution that is about 1/15 the cost!

Yeah, I’m talking Heroclix. And yeah, I know they look like ass for the most part. But, with a little work, you can make them look like a pretty acceptable kind of ass, which is where all the fun comes in!

(And honestly, they only look like ass compared to modern mass market sculpts. Compared to a lot of the indy studios, or the stuff I grew up with, they look great.)

Plus, they take up about a third of the space of the Marvel Crisis Protocol figures. Here’s a couple that I already had painted up!

I placed an order for some used Clix, which came in at about a buck a figure. I got some heroes, a couple of standard goons, and a few of my favorite goofball villains from the silver age comics that I love. This is what came in that box when it arrived yesterday:

That’s 29 miniatures, which came delivered to my house for a total of $35 when shipping was added in. That’s about half of the price of a box of three MCP models. I totally get that I am intentionally getting a far inferior sculpt, and that there’s some work that will need to be done to get them looking good.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of work that goes in to making any miniature look good. The MCP figs need to be assembled, mold lines need to be cleaned, and the mini needs to be primed. The Clix? Well, they’re assembled. Sometimes poorly, but assembled. The mold lines need to be cleaned up, but for all intents they only need to be primed if you want to prime them. The factory basic paint they come in is primer enough.

This will be a fun project! And even better, there are tons of costume variations for the characters that have been made over the last 26 years of production. For folks like me who are really tired of the Jim Lee X-Men costumes, this is welcome news!

I’m not saying I won’t buy more MCP. If I do, I plan on just sticking to mutants or characters I really like, and using the Clix project to tame the wild collector in me. My wife is already laughing at my really convincing resolve with this idea.

I’ll keep you updated on this silly new project… oh, and another thing! The Clix are 28/30mm scale, so they’ll fit with my existing minis and terrain. I even have some ideas on how to work powers into my game engine!

More soon… I’ve gone on long enough!

Workbench

Coming Down with a Bad Case of The Old World

There I was, minding my own business at my FLGS. I had stopped in to pick up some of the new (to me) utra-metallic metallics from Vallejo (which are freaking amazing) and then everything went fuzzy.

When I came to, I was sitting at my hobby desk, with a freshly assembled unit of Chaos Marauders from Warhammer: The Old World in front of me. Holy hell, I did a nice job putting them together, too!

This is obviously what happened, since the reality of just seeing these amazing minis in the shop, shrieking like a schoolgirl at a BTS show and deliriously buying these beauties in a state of delirium doesn’t sound as cool. I’m a super manly man, mind you. I don’t swoon at just any war-dolly.

Just most of them. Here’s the first finished minis, looking damned fine and ready to kick some teeth in:

The unit leader is called Karga, she’s from a Warhammer Underworlds warband, but she looks cool with this group, so she’s the leader. The mini might even be a dude, who cares. She’s Karga. The Ruinous Powers care not for the gender binary.

She’s backed up by Hjork, who is wielding a banner of the Carrion Crow. The Carrion Crow is definitely not Nurgle, or any kind of Chaos God. Just a freaky cool crow who brings disease and laughs at mortals whilst they sleep.

The other three dudes don’t have names yet. Karga cares not for names until these milk drinkers earn them. Then Karga might stop calling them Meat.

The long term on this project is going to be a full-on Chaos warhost, supplemented by some Nurgle duders from Age of Sigmar because those sculpts are sweet as hell. I also have a bunch of stuff from Darkwater that’s going to fit in really, really well.

And for once, there’s no time limit on these guys. I’m just going to have fun and paint. Fun is good.

As for The Old World? It’s a good time! As I was thumbing through the rules I was really happy to see how much they had streamlined the old ruleset, which was pretty bloated and cumbersome. It’s still a little bloated, mind you, and you could bludgeon a small contingent of halflings with the FAQ alone, but it feels a bit like home.

skirmish games, Workbench

Warcrow Orc Revenant

New year, new game!

I have always been a fan of Corvus Belli‘s Infinity miniatures, and have probably painted more Infinity figs than any other game. Mostly, that is because I worked in a game store that sold a ton of Infinity, and I was often contracted to paint armies for folks. I loved it. Loved the minis, loved the lore, but the game? Damn. I’m just not that kind of masochist. It’s crunchy, tricky to play, and I often found myself knowing I had lost in the first turn. Still, those minis are sublime!

We had been hearing about Corvus Belli developing a fantasy game for years, and most of us just assumed they would be putting out a fantasy re-skin of Infinity. Flash forward a few years, my store is gone, my game group is fractured, but dammit, CB just put out some lore for Warcrow, their new fantasy game. And… wow. It’s not an Infinity clone. It’s a good, solid game with very little crunch, and some amazingly well done minis. The lore is pretty spiffy, too!

My first fig for Warcrow is an Orc Revenant. The Orcs of Warcrow expect to die gloriously in battle, but they also continue growing throughout their lives. Once they reach their 30’s, they are pretty damned big, and salty as hell about not being dead yet.

These salty lads and ladies become Revenants, and set out into battle to meet the best end possible. The figure makes me happy, and I had a really good time painting him!

Assembly, on the other hand, wasn’t so great. The model is made from Siocast, which is a pretty environmentally friendly type of thermoplastic. I approve of that. The mold lines? Not so much. I also snapped the blade that goes on Punchie’s Stump, since it appears that Siocast is pretty fragile. I was going to complain a bit, but having put together more recent Warcrow minis, I’m happy to say that CB has worked out the kinks in the molding process and Siocast is working out pretty well for them!