It Came From the Stars... A Slann's Tale (Part 1)

"Lord Soquala-Astrain left Lustria in his great temple ship enraged. He, and his Slann breatherin, the greatest of the Old One's creations had failed to peotect this young world from the vile eye of Chaos.

Soquala refused all contact, remaining within his ship's command chamber focusing his entire will upon travelling deep into space. He was determind to find the Old Ones, his burning rage had cooled down to a cold fury. He would find the Old Ones and demand of them an answer as to why the Great Olan failed.

For weeks, years and eventually generations none of Soquala's Skink aides saw him. Eventually they all passed away, and almost passed entirely from memory Soquala was so focused on his quest for an answer. No other Slann traveled out in to the depths so far."

From the First Orbit of the Lord Solar, Poldrakens Heart​

This is the start, and currently the extent of the fluff I've dreamt up for my emerging Seraphon force. I imagine them, as the Battletome describes, as a force of celestial power, imagined into being by the Slann that leads them and fading away outside of battle. But I think he summons the same Seraphon to being each time, and through his experiencing their actions in one campaign they come back different each time, slowly developing a greater capability and understanding. Somewhat like Pokemon and their Pokeballs.

To capture some of this on the table I'm going with a starfield pattern on the skin of the Seraphon, which will hopefully show them to be 'made of the stuff of the stars' and give a nice uniform look to the army amongst the different colour of their scales. I also see the star pattern showing how Lord Soquala lost touch with almost the entire physical world on his journey and coming to battle now his mental constructs are not as solid or bound in tradition as many other Slann's are.

Obviously I have a way to go on the background for my army, I want to next write up some details about how Lord Soquala found his way to the Mortal Realms and what now motivates him to fight. For the time being I intend to leave very vague what he may have met out in the far reaches of space.

I hope you enjoyed this little look, please let me know what you think and any ideas on where I could take the theme.

Busy Few Weeks With Dinosaurs

Hey, a couple of weeks missed and I apologise for that. I've been pretty busy in the evenings so the spare time I have had has gone towards painting not writing. Tim also promises a new game write up soon. :) I have got in a couple of good sessions whilst I've been an author-absent.

I've built up a bunch of Seraphon now, beyond the Ripperdactyls I begun with I've made enough models to equal the new Starter Set (Old Blood on a Carnosaur, eight Saurus Knights and 12 Saurus Warriors) I alos got a chance to get out to the garage and undercoat a bunch of models. So here comes a photodump of what I've got done since last we met. Enjoy and please comment.

First off I finished building Sol-Qlor on Starror

The 9v battery is in the giant base, it was quite the challenge getting the wire

and LED through the whole figure

Here are the Seraphon so far, Skink Priest was kitbashed

After a few goes I found a nice way to do an easy Lava Base
Tutorial coming!!

They then went into mass production

I've started putting basecoats down to test the colour scheme, please so far

Did I say 8th Company before, I meant 9th. Devastator Command

Age of Sigmar - The Poldraken Rex Constellation

Because I find myself with so much free time on my hands (not at all true), and most of my other projects are wrapping up now (also, surprise surprise, not at all true) I've decided it's time to pull out and dust off some WHFB boxes and turn my Lizardman sprues into a Seraphon army. I know most of the reviews of the new Battletome have been less than stella, but I find the new space faring reptiles of the imagination quite appealing. Mostly, as before, because of the great big dinosaurs, but also the freedom the Slann now have from the Old Ones plans make them a less predictable and more exciting force.

I've spent a few days now thinking about colour schemes and modeling posibilities, reading through all four pages of rules for Age of Sigmar, looking up more rules, such as the Clash Comp., HeelanHAGG and the Norwegian Masters comp to help me structure my army and considering a story and style to my 'Constellation'. One of the great, yet insignificant aspects of the Seraphon (don't Google that at work btw) is the army structure is based upon a comstellation model, each with a Slann at their centre.  With this fact in mind, I went to work. I found an image of a starscape and drew a dragon on top, this was a much better result than my attempt at drawing a dragon myself. 

The Poldraken Constellation

The mighty Poldraken Rex Constellation has plenty of stars, and a good few of them are nice and large to represent all of the big dinosaurs I want to field, now on their beautiful round bases. The initial list I'm going to work on is the models you now find in the Starter set, a Carnosaur, 12 Saurus Warriors and eight Saurus Cavalry. This should give me an opportunity to see if I like the game, army and paint scheme enough to continue. Then, as an example based upon the local NM comp I'd be looking to build something along the lines of the following: 

Plenty of big monsters and some tough space lizards running between the legs, great fun. So as I plan to start work on these next week, if I don't have the sense to push further in one of the earlier projects, I'll be posting some updates here soon.