RuneBrush

For the first time this year I actually have a whole weekend entirely to myself!  My Mum and Sister are both away from Friday, with my Sister not being back until Sunday evening.  So much time what do I do?  In all seriousness I’ve got a few things that I need to catch up on, but do intend to spend one of the days working on assembling my wolves.

I’m hoping that somebody will go into GW in Swindon on Thursday and pick up the battle force of wolves.  This will mean that I’ve pretty much got all of the troops that I actually want for my army.  I’m tempted to aim to get my skyclaws (5), bloodclaws (15) and scouts (10) assembled up over the weekend.  The scouts require a significant amount of conversion and I aim to fur up at least 3 of the 5 cloaks that the snipers are wearing, so I would think that they’ll not be completely done.  I also treated myself on Sunday to a Runepriest, techmarine with servitors and a Razorback, plus ordered all of the heavy weapons from an online bitz store.  Off the top of my head that means that I should only need one more Razorback and I’ll have all of the models that I need to make my 2000 point army – that makes it sound much easier than the reality.  I want to do a handful of quite major conversions on characters within the army and things like the scouts and Long Fangs warrant more effort than the rest as there are only a few of them and (fluff wise) they’ve been around for quite a long time.  However the whole thing should be pretty straight forward so a target of next year for a complete army is actually possible.

I just chanced across this link to a long list of Norse names, I thought it was pretty cool for any budding Wolf Lords out there.

I happily got home from work yesterday to find a jiffy pad containing a (slightly bent) Space Wolves Codex.  Though £15 is a tad steep for a book, the codex is actually very good.  As with most codices it’s laid out in the familiar format of Background Fluff > Troop Fluff > Coloured Section > Army Selection.  I’ve only flicked through it and so far it seems pretty cool.  They’ve added lots of elements that have in my opinion been missing, such as some of the Rhino varients and Land Raider varients.  Jump pack Blood Claws are now an option which is pretty cool.  One complaint I have is that although there is a great variety of HQ choices, the rest of the army choices seem quite limited, which will mean that most Space Wolf armies are going to look pretty similar in build – especially larger armies.  That said I suppose that the same could be said of many armies.

Another thing that I think is really weird is that they appear to have changed the basic background of Leman Russ.  For those that don’t know, when the Primarchs were scattered amongst the stars, Russ got dropped onto Fenris where he was found by a pack of fenrisian wolves and raised by the she-mother of the pack.  During the time he was growing (Primarchs grew at a rate far in excess of mortals) the pack was attacked by humans who slew the she-mother and another wolf.  Cutting a long story short this same group of humans ended up capturing and ultimately teaching Russ that he was more human than wolf – and naming him Leman of the Russ.  What the new codex implies is that Russ was found by humans and just raised.

The new codex does expand a little on the background of some of the Wolf Lords, with more fluff and background imagry.  There’s actually a banner for Egil Ironwolf’s company   For me it’s fantastic, I’m personally not a big fan of using special characters from codices and would rather just use the generic character’s, so having more background on the other Wolf Lords opens itself up to creating an army founded on a nice bit of background fluff.  This biggest downside to this, is that many of the new plastic’s have Ragnar’s company emblem on them.

All told however I’m quite excited about the prospect of getting a small army put together.  The modelling oportunities are plentyful and being able to mix and match existing space marine boxed sets with the new Space Wolf ones should mean that armies should look varied in style (if not in composition).  However I do need to keep in mind that I want to do something for next years Golden Demon as well

As I’m still in the planning phase with whatever I choose to do for next years Golden Demon, I decided that I’d start to assemble some of the new Space Wolf mini’s I bought at Games Day as it’s my intention to have at least assembled a 1500 point army by the early part of next year.

I’ve finished putting together a Wolf Guard Terminator with Assault Canon.  I will be honest and say that I’m very impressed with the new boxed sets, unlike some other plastics the tidying up is either straight forward or minimal.  The sheer number of weapon variations is also staggering – I think that you have around 3 pairs of weapons for every body so can kit them out in pretty much any variation you fancy.  I think the only slight disappointment is the heads.  Even though there are a dozen on the Wolf Guard sprues and 44 in the Wolf Pack boxed set, you’re actually limited on what is suitable if you want to go for un-helmeted heads and keep some kind of variety without converting any.  Some of the heads are clearly blood claw, some are grey hunter and some would be suitable for any, however a number of the hair styles are truly rediculous.  One has what can only be described as a medieval bob – not exactly feral nor in keeping.  What would have been cool would have been a few bald heads that would have made it really easy to convert (that still had teeth etc).  There is also a distinct lack of beards.  That said, a number of the heads are spot on and a number can be converted pretty simply.  I think that the only other gripe is all of the legs in the Wolf Pack box are standing – none of them are running.

Overall the sprues are fantastic and should add tons of flavour to any Space Wolves army.  Oh and with luck I’ll have a copy of the new codex waiting for me tonight.