Warscroll cards.A few quick tests.

One of the things I love most about INQ28 was the trend away from mass produced plastic game accessories to something more personal.A wooden box, Stone counters,Bone dice... It speaks of an extension of the gaming experience beyond a set of arbitrary rules within the tabletop landscape and towards something more expansive, A form of roleplay and story creation.
For me this tied in with my love of all things arcane, ancient & antique.

Too that end I've been trying out some quick ideas for unit cards for AOS28 to try and get across that same sense of props adding to the game experience. For me it seems that having a beautiful atmospheric set up is a waste if it's going to be undermined by bright laser cut acrylic tokens and badly photocopied character sheets.

I have a nice little wooden card box from an antique shop which i'm planning on using to carry my game accessories and a deck of warscroll cards in something I've wanted to make since AOS launched, and now seems the right time.

I think I'll move away from the "everything is faces" look I've been keeping so far and do something a little more astrological as suites the many realms of AoS.

I'll be making a trip to Cornelissen & sons this week as they have some nice off cuts of hand made rough edged paper for sale in roughly tarot size, So will post up something more final soon, But I thought some might like to see these for now.

Reinhold Heillbrand. Scourge of spirits.

The realm of shadow is not the most ideal place for those who follow Sigmar's light.

 Faith can be misled by foul spirits, prayers become lost and trapped in the all encompassing fog, turning to foul whispers on the chill wind.

Those who come to the shrouded land following the light of the god king must be hard and brutal to survive, their faith must be unbreakable, for nowhere else save the dread realms of chaos will

they be so very isolated from all that is good.

Reinhold Heillbrand is one such traveller. A witch hunter by both trade and choice, Heillbrand is known as the scourge of spirits, For he makes it his lifes work to vanquish those who would invoke the dead and the chaotic to corrupt the rightful lands of the God king.

Heillbrand has come to the realm of shadow fresh from the purging of Excelsis, where the seers and secret merchants talk of ancient mysteries soon to be resolved and long lost truths to be rediscovered deep within the realm of shadow and mist.They speak of rites,both holy and corrupt, and a lost isle among the mist.

They speak of the Mystarikum.

To Heillbrand, they speak of corruption, And he would see these rumours quashed.

He will seek find the Mystarikum first, Before that misguided Stormcast and his peasant rabble, before the servants of the dark gods or the skulking Aelves...

He will find the Mystarikum and ensure it remains hidden.

Reinhold Heillbrand is built from the forge world event only arbite model.I had been after this model for a while and i actually came across it by chance in a trade, with two of his cyber mastiffs. (sadly only the one arbite-a man can dream.)
He say on my desk for a long while as i was unsure what to do with him.I love the figure but i don't really play any game in the 40k universe, and despite painting alot of the miniatures and loving the style, It felt a waste not to game with such a cool and imposing character.
Eventually i decided i needed a witch hunter and after much hand wringing about taking the knife to a figure i will never get a duplicate of, I bit the crossbow bolt and decided to bring him into the world of AOS.

The conversion work is fairly simple since the arbiter already had a bit of a medieval look to him, Just a crossbow to replace his shock maul, a sand timer to replace his walky talky gadget, and the removal of any 40k iconography.
After that i have him a sword from the old empire sprue and decided to paint him with a nice mixture of reds and browns to give him that old school inquisition style. I made sure he wasn't too murky by giving him nice stripped pantaloons (A must when witch hunting.) and painting his sword a nice gem green to add a small dash of colour to him.

I may work back into him and rebase him as he was finished before I started the Mystarikum and as such his base is a little bit too firey.


Game with he might get a warband, or I might have him as a recurring NPC to act as foil to the various heroes and villains trying to claim the secrets of the Mystarikum for themselves.

The dawn knight.

From the questors lodges of the great wildernesses to the very edges of the realm of chaos,
 The warrior now known as the dawn knight has travelled far from his brother warriors for many decades.
He took up the quest upon his first reforging, for in the moment of his
deaths ascendance he saw in his minds eye a darkness, spreading from an unknown place
to shroud all the realms.
For long he travelled from city to city, wild to wild, ruin to ruin, all the time gathering whispers of the many lost and hidden things that threaten the mortal realms.

It was one such whisper that brought him to the realm of shadow, to the great marsh, and to a town of rotten wood built upon the broken bones of a sunken city of white stone and green metal.
It was here that he slew a foul beast that had been plaguing the villagers for many moons,
And it was here that he fell in battle to it's vicious bite.

But he did not die.Instead he awoke within the flooded ruins of the great cathedral at the centre of the ancient city.Around him the townsfolk had gathered, and in their hands they bore his armour, polished to a deep black and painted with the sigil of the coming dawn, A light come to burn away the darkness.
The townsfolk believed him an angel, a hero of the old stories as was painted into the ancient cathedral roof centuries before, come to bring light and peace back to the great marsh.
Now they follow him, and he has taken them all as squire, For he feels that within this shrouded realm, the secrets that he seeks and the gathering dark will be found.

For the dawn knight I wanted a real oldschool feel.I wanted some good old fashioned heraldry as would suite a travelling warrior, and a really characterful face.
The great thing about the stormcast models is the lovely flat areas that really suite freehand design work, And I'm pretty happy with the shield design i chose.Partly it was inspired by the old orc shields, and party it was a homage to John Blanches stormcast sketches which features his trademark "All the faces all the time" design style.
While i felt like the armour itself was a little plane and i could have done more with weathering, I'm happy enough with my Bryan Blessed lookalike and he will be a fine leader of his band of trusty pilgrims!
One small note on the model that i would give to someone building one would be to get rid of the chainmail and the scroll.To me they don't do anything to strengthen the silhouette of the figure and there's no real way to paint them that matches a dirtier freehand style.




(MORE FACES!)

Therin ,Pilgrim of the blind saint.

There are many secrets that draw the lost and desperate to the realm of shadow.

Some come to hide, others to search for lost treasures in the sunken libraries and mist filled ruins of the great marshes.

A few however, Come for the shadow itself.

The wizard going by the name of Therin is one such traveller.

It is whispered that he seeks the lost secrets of the Mystarikum, for it holds the first temple to the blind saint, who in the age of chaos weaved mists around the hidden lands and deceived even the gods themselves to keep the people of the shrouded realm safe.

Others claim he is a spy of Sigmar Sent to follow rumours and stories of a dark and terrible force gathering in the darkness, Or to find the fey Aelves and reveal what they are hiding beyond the eyes of curious gods.None truly know what great and forgotten secrets Therin seeks, All they know is that he has decided that the quest of the dawn knight coincides with his own, For now....

Therin is built from the Forge world Hector Rex astropath model.He came with a rather sanzzy, If a little impractical helmet.I was in two minds about whether he should keep it and remain a blind wizard, But decided i wanted him to have visible eyes. His entire face has been re-sculpted and his staff head changed, plus all 40k gadgets and gizmos removed and puttied over.

I decided to keep the purity seals since they are anarchronistic as it is in 40k and seem pretty standard fair for a holy(?) man wandering through the darkness

.

Welcome!

For a thousand years the realm of shadow fell into the grip of chaos.Where once the sacred dark was pure and it's mists lay like oceans between the mountains peaks, It was turned to a place of echoed screams, foul whispers and sickening miasma.

Yet within this haunted land there remained a sanctuary, a place where the holy shadows dwelt in wait for their return to rule.This hidden land, veiled to all but those that knew to seek it, Was the Mystarikum. When finally the rule of chaos was broken by the light of Sigmar, the old darkness spilled forth from it's long lost hiding place, the last denizens of the Mystarikum returning to their ancient homelands far across the realm.

But all was not as it had been.

The shadows had grown vengeful, the creatures of the shrouded realm had learned to hate all trespassers, and secrets, born and gathered over tne many centuries, lay within the Mystarikum itself...Lost within the unknowable isle until such time as it is found again.

Now there is talk among the new settlers and old natives of a new land, far off past the great marshes and the broken coast, through waves and fog.The Mystarikum had revealed itself, and it's secrets will soon be known.

The Mystarikum is my own personal take on the dark age of Sigmar, Where those who wish too can follow my conversions, games and story snippets. 

I look forward to posting more soon and hope you enjoy the things to come!