4 years of 40k painting in review, Part 5

Welcome to part 5, because no one expects the Inquisition. The last part of my Standish Standoff 2011 army consisted of Castelle Crowe an Inquisitor and his henchfolk. Nothing like a few crazy guys with swords and shields in a sci-if setting to really crank things along. Now as of when this list existed Crowe was pretty much a tax and army liability, see free kill point. He allowed my core unit to become a troop and thus I could take more than 3 and better yet the could score. On his own he was rather a let down. A character on foot with only 2 wounds but he couldn't join a unit not be joined. Furthermore my opponent got bonuses for charging him. Oh and no power weapon? Yay what a dream HQ. So as a tax he is what he is. Getting him to do anything worthwhile in games was always a treat and I would just assume he would die, as he usually would.

The real leader for my force then took the form of a generic inquisitor. Tricked him out with psychic powers and power armor. No psych-broke grenades for him. Just in as a nice utility piece, also his friends are pretty good to. More importantly he could buff his henchmen allowing them to get +1 strength allowing them to better wound marines, and provide his unit stubborn leadership of 10. The rest of the army was fearless so making sure these guys staid stuck in was the trick.

I opted to go for a more greytine armor on him to match up with the crusaders. Keep the inquisition all forces all of a similar paint scheme. I liked this model as being metal it had the actual equipment I wanted on him, force sword and bolt pistol. The book version is also pretty slick. Nothing to special with the crusaders although I did do some freehand work on the tabard to draw in a sword. Something to this day I'm still no good at. Likely to be my next step in growing my painting skills.

Accompanying him are a cluster of death cult assassins. Wait you say, I've seen those models before on this blog? Yes you have. I repurposed some confrontation models. The griffin executioners are excellent assassin models. The masks help them look more the part to me than the bondage girls of the GW model. Also the GW model was perpetually sold out and about 5 times the cost. Easy win for me to take these instead. Little customization to add in axes along with the sword and they are good to go. The strong artistic similarity between the Confrontation Griffin faction and Grey Knights is what put me on them to begin with.

So here we have the army to head to the big event. I did very well for the day. I took 6th overall, and won Best General that year. Considering my last two, and first two, monthly tournaments ended with me being visually trounced for three games straight, coming out on top game wise was a huge step up for me. I got some lucky draws for match ups. Facing orcs in my last two games. I'd never played them before and had little concept how effective my list would perform against them. I took one other thing away from that event though. I got to see some of the most amazing models I had yet to see in person. I thought what I had done was pretty top notch and slick. Oh how wrong I was. Yes I climbed the peak after a long 7 months only to discover I had only made it to the base camp. Yay more climbing to go!