The Doom of Pyr Nekheb - Da Venom Ladz

July 28, 2020

The Doom of Pyr Nekheb - Da Venom Ladz

Sorting out my starting picks for my warband confronted me with some difficult decisions. Right off the bat, I knew that I wanted my warlord to be the Loonboss on Giant Squig. It's a great miniature, part of a really fun imagining of what goblins are like in the Age of Sigmar universe. I also needed to take a Loonboss on foot, however, to buff the block of goblin Stabbas which would form the core of whatever I intended to do; the Loonboss buffs your basic Stabbas to the gills via his Command Ability, a fact which only gets better when paired with the self-buffing Stabbas do as their unit size increases.

There was already a catch, however. The proper thing to do is to give your normal Loonboss the Command Trait Dead Shouty. That lets him use his buffing ability for free once a turn. Peter's salivating at this spell his Lumineth get which makes all his opponent's Command Abilities cost double, and Dead Shouty gets around that. The siren song of the Rule of Cool had my heart overruling my head, though, and I'm sticking with the Loonboss on Giant Squig warlord.

The next big decision was how to arm my initial unit of Stabbas. There's a pretty simple rule for playing Gloomspite Gitz effectively: if your Stabbas are in a unit of 20, take hand weapons, if they're rolling 40+, take spears. My unit doesn't have to stay at 20; I can increase the size to 40 or take a second unit of 20 with my troop addition after my second game.

Ultimately, I went with the hand weapons. I want a varied force (Rule of Cool, heart over head, etc, etc) and, with us keeping things small, I might not get to increasing my unit to 40. I need enough different units to hold objectives and control the board. If I get a second unit, I'll choose spears, but only if I feel confident I can increase them to 40.

With my last choice, I went with an elite (i.e. two of my four choices) unit in the Rockgut Trolls (still not calling them Troggoths, though I'm closer to doing that than Duardin or Orruk). I love the new troll miniatures and I think my paint job turned out okay on them. Plus, they're nasty on the table.

From a lore perspective, nothing is complicated and that's just as it should be. Gibzig Sourshinz, my warlord, was exiled, along with his cousin, Skarnok Cankertongue (the Loonboss). They picked up a cadre of goblins near the surface, lured a few hungry trolls with the promise of food, and the whole warband is now skulking the streets of Pyr Nekheb to find caches of food as a means of gaining clout and power back in the warrens.

Painting and Pictures

When we started this blog, I wrote that I really like yellow armies. That's not changed (you should see my Necromunda Goliath gang, Muscle Beach) and I went with yellow on my Gloomspite Gitz warband. 30 years of black clad goblins is too much, and the yellow really pops with the green skin and purple moon insignia. To boot, I've been working with GW's contrast paints a lot and I really like the Iyanden Yellow color from that line.

The army is pretty straightforward: Iyanden Yellow, followed by a Flash Gitz Yellow drybrush; honestly, the effects of the drybrush are so subtle I'm not really sure it's worth it. The skin is Orc Flesh, followed by a Warboss Green highlight. The rest is pretty standard metals, bone, and wood colors.

The Giant Squig mount Gibzig rides isn't contrast paint but just the progression of GW's normal purple paints. One of the Contrast paints I really dislike is Shyish Purple; it's too dark and highlights aren't picked up. Maybe with enough thinning, but I'm not inclined to do that when their normal purples are so good.