The last few weeks I've been pretty focused on getting my Warmachine army started. Normally, I'm one to go with the blue colored good guys in any game I play, but for once, the knight in shining armor wears red. Khador has a lot of themes I generally like. They're heavily armored with heavy melee damage and ice based elemental powers. One thing that greatly interested me was that Khador doesn't make any of the game's smaller robots. Every Warjack they make is as big and heavy as they come.
The first thing I picked up was Vlad, the armored knight styled warcaster to serve as my primary avatar in the game. Along with Vlad, I picked up two of Khador's Heavy Jack Kits to build myself my first machines of war. One really cool thing about the plastic jack kits is that they come with a single chassis, but give you all the parts you need to make four different Warjacks. In theory, you could buy one for every figure you wish to build, but luckily I found a great tutorial online that showed me how to magnetize the different arms and weapons to allow you to easily swap your kit into any figure in the set.
This take's a fair amount of work, but the results are well worth it. You'll need a small Dremel tool and a set of 1/8" rare earth magnets. With the Dremel tool, you'll want to drill a small hole in any joint you wish to magnetize and then insert a magnet into the hole with a dab of super glue. The magnets take some practice to get used to. They're quite strong and on more then one occasion I dropped one only to have it yank its brethren from some of my completed pieces. Keeping a good distance between your finished bits is rather important. The other thing to keep in mind is that you need to be very careful to watch your polarities. You don't want to put a magnet in backwards and find your arm repels itself from the socket. I did well for the most part, but unfortunately, the shoulders are reversed on the two figures. Not a major problem, but it means each figure has a set of arms that only works on that figure, rather than arms that can be used interchangeably.
The results of this are really quite exciting. It's sort of like building your own toy. Arms can be adjusted and posed all sorts of ways, letting you tweak your figure however you like. It's a great way to start off in the game, as you'll get a good variety of big figures to try out. I'll also mention, the two Warjacks in the Khador starter set use the same parts as the heavy kit. While you don't get all of the parts for each figure available in the heavy kit, if magnetized, you can buy another heavy kit and have three chassis to swap around.
From there, it's back to my last article to paint up the figures. I didn't actually use the wood stain on this one. Seeing as they're a little nicer figures than I normally use, I decided to try a wash. A wash is pretty easy to use and acts much like the stain. It's very watery (and generally should be watered down further). The nice thing is that you can brush it over the figure and it will run in and darken the crevices, while still being easy to tone down by drying your brush and using it to absorb. I probably went a little overboard on the wash here, but I'm happy with it. Certainly not something I'd do for cheaper board game figures, but for these really detailed guys, it works really well.
In addition, these were the first figures I every made custom bases for. This was pretty simple for the most part. I started by painting the bottom of the base white. For the jacks, I glued a tiny rock to break things up since it was such a large base. Then, I simply poured some good old white Elmer's glue down and used an old brush to spread it around. With snow, it seems to work best if you get a pretty thick layer of glue to start with. From there I got a little tub of snow flock and just poured it over top. After waiting a bit to let it dry, I shook off the extra and that was it.
Anyway, enough rambling. This is really supposed to be a gallery post, so lets dive into the pictures. Enjoy!
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