Teatime Of The Dead: Arise!

So I've been grinding away at the painting, even if I've not blogged about it recently. The end result is that I have, finally, got a small, fully painted, totally legal army! Woo-ho! And here they are:

CHAERG!

Shiny new additions to the force are five of the world's most generic sword-and-broad skellies you will ever see - constructed specifically for ease of painting and back rank filling duties - a Master Necromancer and a rare unit of Cairn Wraiths and Tomb Banshee. Let's ignore the skellies and have a look at the more interesting ones, shall we?

Master Necromancer

Fear my pointy collar!

There's only one colour for necromancers in my book. Black. It's also, handily, nice and easy to paint. This guys is, I will admit, a touch sloppy in the details, but he's fine at arm's length (as Andy Leask pointed out, you don't play with your face right up against the table).

As I mentioned before, my army rules require a wizard as a general. The rules also state that if your general is slain, then all units must pass a leadership test or suffer a number of wounds equal to the difference between their roll and the LD score. A lot of my units have LD of less than 5. May have LD 2. Basically, if your general dies, your army starts to crumble into dust. In an effort to stop this from happening (and also to add points for less work), this model is a "master" necromancer, giving him higher toughness, more wounds and better weapon skill, as well as being a level 3 wizard (4 being the best). He'll also be using units of skellies as meat shields (or perhaps as bone shields, thinking about it) to help his chances of survival, too.

He's also worth a mighty 165 points! Nice.

Cairn Wraiths and Tomb Banshee

Cause terror, unsurprisingly.

Cairn Wraiths and Tomb Banshees can be taken as either characters on their own, or as a rare unit of infantry (not monstrous infantry, it turns out - sorry Andy! - not that this made any difference, but I'm getting ahead of myself). In the rare unit case, the Tomb Banshee is the unit champion and there's a minimum unit size of three. And would you look at that? Two Cairn Wraiths and a Tomb Banshee! Handy.

As well as being easy and satisfying to paint, this is one of the more powerful units available in my army. The unit is ethereal (meaning it can only be harmed by magic - be it magic weapons, magic spells or other ethereal creatures), causes terror (flee!), has decent weapon skill and strength ratings and each wraith has three attacks. The banshee, while only having one melee attack, can make a special shooting attack (even when in close combat or if the unit has marched or charged) resolved by rolling 2d6+2 versus the target's LD, with every point by which the roll beats the LD inflicting a no armour saves allowed wound. (Against low LD troops, such as goblins, you're looking at an average 5 wounds per howl.) The unit is pretty fast too, with a move of 6.

Between them, these lot are worth 175 points (50 each, plus an extra 25 for the banshee).

Plants Vs Zombies

So that's a legal, 700 point army! As I said before, woo-hoo! But an army is no use without a foe, so Andy Leask and I squared off in a training match. (In a remarkable display of army balancing, he was able to field an army of 698 points to my 700 - he could have fielded a lot more mind you - so we were on pretty even terms.) The result was, technically, a draw. However, as Andy had killed my necromancer in the second to last turn, had we played for even a single turn more it's likely my entire army would have been destroyed. As it was, I only hung on for the draw by the skin of my teeth. Lessons to be learned include: my core units are terrible. They are speed bumps at best and need to be approximately double their current size. I see lots of zombie painting in my future. Oh goody. My special and rare units are awesome. Terror and ethereal are a brutal combination of rules, and I didn't even get to use my hexwraiths soul-reapers rule. I need more necromancers. My army will always be vulnerable to the whole "dead general" thing, but the effect can be limited by having back-up wizards. Two basic necromancers, one level 1 and one level 2, cost exactly the same as a master necromancer at level 3. I think I might go down that route next time. Of course, that will require another model...