Category: Mordheim

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Recently I set up my Hirst Arts Mordheim table and took some photos, because some of the fine folks at the TCOW gaming club were curious about what I had hidden in the garage. I’ve built this table up over years, from a variety of Hirst Arts molds, balsa wood, and foam board. If you look at older posts in the blog’s Mordheim category you’ll find the details.

To exercise the table, I’ve ordered a copy of Osprey’s Frostgrave from the Book Depository and hopefully it’ll get here before Xmas! I’m also going to invest in a little hobby time to build a handful more walkways, and ladders, and maybe two or three more fence sections to add to the set up. I must also finish the basing and painting on the Hirst Arts ruined Church I largely finished building earlier this year. That would make a great centrepiece for the table as well.

Continuing the theme of “finishing stuff I should have done years ago”, here’s my Mordheim Undead warband finally entirely painted. Rather than using the rather ugly Dracula figure that was part of the original Mordheim Undead metals (and which I seem to have either lost or never owned), I painted up an old Games Workshop Lahmian Fantasy Vampire instead. She’s a nicer figure, although she’s only armed with a dagger and a snake. For Mordheim I’m going to call the snake on her arm a ‘mace’.

To finish off this warband I only needed to paint the Vampire and the two metal Dregs. Once again these figures have been kicking around in my garage since at least 2003. The majority of them were also carefully painted with multiple coats and ink washing too, unlike the Vampire and Dregs who got a base coat, some highlighted flesh and a simple dip in Wattyl stained floor varnish. At tabletop range, it’s hard to tell the difference between those dipped figures and the other ones.

Unfortunately most of my spray on varnish has expired, so these figures are a little more ‘gritty’ feeling than they should be. You can see the shonky varnish in evidence, particularly on the base of that lead Dreg. Compare it to the base of the Zombie to his left and you’ll see the problem. Oh well, I’ve since chucked out all my old varnish and purchased a new batch!

Next on the paint station is a bunch of plastic Cadians. I have two whole troop squads with heavy weapons, plus their command squad and an all metal Cadian HQ section that I’m going to experiment on with Army Painter ‘Desert Yellow’ coloured spray primer.

According to the archives of this blog, I started assembling this Reiklander warband for Mordheim back in July 2003! That’s a little embarrassing really and it makes this warband a year older than my oldest child.

This week I’ve finally finished painting the original warband to a tabletop standard. They were half laboriously hand painted, and half speed painted and dipped. Honestly, once they’re on the table you can’t really tell the difference between those two painting methods either.

Now it’s onto re-assembling my Skaven Mordheim warband and speed painting the lot of them. Alas Games Workshop retired their great multi-part Clanrat sprues in 2009 apparently, and replaced them with rather uninspired single body figures – ugh. Hopefully I have enough pre-2009 Skaven bits to build a decent warband. I’ll also have to pick up an old school metal Rat Ogre from somehwere…

We’ve been playing a little bit of Mordheim recently, one of the better Games Workshop ‘Specialist Games’ that came out decades ago and have since been abandoned by GW. We still play on the 3′ x 4′ Mordheim table I built years ago from Hirst Arts tiles.

This table features a large, central 3′ canal section with a single bridge, which inevitably becomes a choke point. After years of play on the table I’ve decided the canal needs more than a single method of crossing it.

Digging around recently in the garage I uncovered my stash of cast Hirst Arts blocks. I didn’t have enough bridge and arch pieces left to create an entire, intact fieldstone bridge. Fortunately Mordheim is a ruined city and I did have enough remnants left to build two simple free-standing bridge parts. I want them free standing so they can be moved around to cross different parts of the canal. They also extend out far enough that the gap can be bridged with a variety of balsa wood plank sections I also made years ago, or for the more adventurous, the gap could be left empty and the Mordheim ‘heroic leaping’ rules put into play.

I have an Mordheim Orc and Goblin warband that is older than my youngest child (who’s now seven). If you’ve even played Mordheim you know that it’s not uncommon to change weapons between games, as you acquire more loot. To this end I painted all my Orc and Goblin arms separately years ago. The photo shows all my Orc arm options, including a few crudely sculpted wooden clubs. Typically these were blue tacked onto the painted Orc bodies prior to gaming, which worked but was kind of a crappy interim solution.

We haven’t played Mordheim for years, but as I had a bunch of tiny 2mm rare earth magnets kicking around in the garage I decided to try magnetising this Orc warband. Drilling out the shoulders with a pin vice was fairly easy, doing the arms took a little more care but they worked fine. The magnets easily have enough force to hold the limbs on, and can also hold them in any position.

Here’s the Mordheim Orcs with a set of magnetised arms, and the same Orcs with a second set. I should have done this years ago, and if anybody out there is still playing Mordheim grab yourself some rare earth magnets and go for it. I bought the magnets from Aussie Magnets and will probably grab another batch of 100 x 2mm discs as they’re immensely useful for war gaming.

Ah, apparently Aussie Magnets no longer ship to New Zealand. That is unless you want to pay $54 for ‘International Courier’. Instead I guess I’ll be trying out Dangerous Magnets, who are a local crowd.