Wargames & Stuff: Fun with 54mm

Sunday, 17 June 2012

Fun with 54mm

Hello again. It has been a while hasn't it? I'm sorry I haven't dropped in more, I certainly intended to keep up posting during my little sojourn with a certain popular UK reality TV show, but somehow it all slipped away from me. It seems that one blog at a time is just about my limit. Nevertheless, it was a useful exercise as it kept me writing to a weekly schedule.

Anyway, although this blog has been inactive, my wargaming hobby stuff has most certainly not been. I still have big things planned of which more information in due course, but in the meantime I thought it was worth posting a catchup of the things I have been up to. And, once again, I have flitted my way to a new project like an old lady distracted by a ball of brightly coloured wool (I assume).

For the last couple of months I have been hard at work on Games Workshop's Inquisitor. For those who do not know, this is Games Workshop's 54mm scale skirmish game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and focused on the shadowy Inquisition, a secretive of organisation of operatives and nutters dedicated to fighting aliens, daemons, witches and just about anyone else they don't like the look off (kind of like the United States armed forces, but more effective).

Inquisitor is one of those games that Games Workshop introduced, promoted like crazy, grew bored of, shoved off into the Fanatic department and then tucked away in a little ghetto within their website and tried to pretend didn't exist when Fanatic was downsized. As a consequence, not all of the models are available anymore and the support for the game is now non-existent. On the plus side, the price of the models has not dramatically increased over the years, models that once cost £12 or £15 in 2002, now cost £18.50 which by Games Workshop standards is hardly an increase at all. And GW haven't bothered to recast them in horrible semi-melty resin stuff with air bubbles and mould lines all over it (also called Finecast, fine in the same sense as Tesco Finest range I suspect).

Inquisitor was one of those games that got away. I had the rules and a few of the models in various states of assembly and painting but hadn't gotten around to much more. But at Salute 2012 I was inspired by this model.

Originally Lady Gregorian sculpted by Steve Buddle and available from Model Display Products. I had to have this model and because of a weird mental tick that requires me to only buy models for theoretical use in games, I turned to Inquisitor where she makes a rather lovely Rogue Trader.

While I was there, I also picked up this model from Magister Militum. He started out as a 28mm scale giant Ape, but with a bit of conversion work became an Inquisitor scale Jokaero (alien apes with a fetish for technology, sort of a cross between Chewbacca and R2D2).

Once I got into it, building Inquisitor warbands turns out to be remarkably addictive. I have two warbands down and am working on a third, with a small band of Chaos Renegades to acts as antagonists planned. It is not unlike building Warbands of Realms of Chaos. Both games favour narrative over competition and are not concerned with rigid fairness or strictly equal forces.

My first Warband - from left to right Cornelius the Jokaero, Rogue Trader Marika Emeraldus, Inquisitor Hans Grummond, Acolyte Serina Barius

Painting in this scale turned out to be easier than expected. It benefits from more subtle highlighting, but the detail has been easier to pick out and I am generally pretty happy with the results so far. Not had a chance for a game yet, I'm trying to get plenty of scenery painted up, but when I do I will post up some results.

Rogue Tech Priest, Martel Cranch

The Rogue Tech Priest Martel Cranch is probably my favourite Inquisitor model. The Servo arm on his back was a big conversion made from parts of an old Ork Mega Gargant from Epic. The model needed a lot of pinning to stay together, in fact the only part of him not pinned in his head.