Adepticon 2018 Doubles Event Display Board

The planning for Adepticon 2018 Horus Heresy event was more than a year in the making for my doubles team partner Paul and I, and we had a great time putting the dream into reality for our Word Bearers & Malinax display board for the event. Having just come off of LVO 2017, and looking for our next project for 2017 / 2018, we landed on Word Bearers armies with House Malinax allies for our next big project. A lot of work went into the planning and execution over the course of the year. The project got underway in March of 2017 and in 2018 we landed in Schaumburg to play in the doubles tournament!

The idea came about after attending Las Vegas Open in 2017. After the Horus Heresy event there, we started thinking about doing a doubles game. Paul suggested we go to Adepticon and do the doubles tournament. I’ve never been to Adepticon, and I was really interested in going. I have gone to LVO 4 times, and while I’ve enjoyed LVO, I was ready to change things up. I also love doubles games, especially with a good friend, so it was a perfect idea. We started dreaming up our plans, and we came up with Word Bearers (its so fun to be the bad guy…) and with a House Malinax allied knight.

At LVO the year before (I think?) the Porphyrion was unveiled, and I fell in love with it instantly. I knew I wanted to get that knight and build and paint it. It was a great opportunity to include it in our vision for the doubles tourney. The idea of a “knight repair station” came up, and eventually, a tainted, corrupted Malinax Knight, with warp-tainted energies fueling it’s Machine Spirit into righteous vengeance in support of the Word Bearers, came into focus. And with that, we started building and painting.

I built up a Word Bearers force and really enjoyed doing that, but for me, the centerpiece of the doubles tournament was the Porphyrion, and I’ll focus on that in this post, as well as the display board.

First step for me was naturally to procure and build the Porphyrion. I got it around May of 2017. One weekend when the wife and kids were travelling, I focused a weekend on building stuff, and got this bad boy built. Its a big knight, and I quite enjoyed the kit. I didn’t get the legs 100% perfectly level, so I need to make a base with him stepping up with his left foot to stay 100% level.

Hobbying while on a hangout!

Putting together the knight was a days’ worth of work, but the real job was to get it “chaos-ed up”. I wanted it to look tainted with Chaos, but not over-the-top-40k-style-full-on-Chaos, if that makes sense. “Heresy era beginning to become corrupted”. So I went to work. I had a very clear vision of what I wanted. Some horns sprouting out of the shoulder pads, and chaos stars sprouting up out of the edging of the armor plate. I used the horns off the Chaos Warshrine model from the Fantasy Battles line. The green stuff is all custom work. I had to do it in batches to let it cure and then add more so I didn’t mess it up with finger prints. I do commission greenstuff work occasionally so I’ve had a fair bit of practice, so this was a fun little test of skill to make it look like a natural part on the armor plate.

Another shot of the right shoulder plate being broken through by corrupted horns of Chaos.

I wanted the armor plate to still look like armor plate (not flesh) but there’s fleshy corruption underneath). The cracking was done with sculpting tools and a lot of patience! The arrows were just green stuff snakes that I flattened out an smoothed into the plate so they looked like they were buckling up from the plate surface.

Another pic.

Then started painting the armor plates. I started them with a base coat of flat black, then painted the base coat with Ushtabi bone. Then washed with Agrax Earthshade. Then brought center of color back up with Ushtabi. Then washed again with Reikland Flesh shade, then quickly “mopped up” the wash from the centers of the plates so that the wash is only in the recesses. Then cleaned up any middle of plates area with Ushtabi again. The buckling corruption on the plates is Leadbelcher, washed twice with Nuln Oil.

Another shot.

A closeup shot of the right plate. The fleshy part was painted with Screamer Pink mixed down with white, then washed carefully with a mix of Bloodletter Red and Carbourg Crimson.

I did the same formula on all the plates. It was a long process but I think it turned out ok. Edges of the armor plates was painted with Leadbelcher and washed with Nuln Oil.

Did the whole armor plate areas the same way.

More work in progress shots of the armor plates. Took several steps of washes and bringing it back up to central Ushtabi color, so it took quite a while (this is all hand brushed – I take the CK studios airbrush class this summer!)

The chassis was simply primed Army Painter Platemail primer and washed twice with Nuln Oil. What a mess it was to wash that huge model, but it turned out great.

More WIP shots of the armor plate painting. Had it all on one cookie tray to keep it all separate from the million other simultaneous hobby projects I had going on.

Mid to late-ish last year last year we started thinking seriously about what the display board was going to look like. I had the chassis build and so we sort of “built the display ideas around it”, based on how big the chassis was. We set it up in our FLGS Heroic Knight Games in Issaquah, WA.

We’re working on the board. The handsome guy is me. The other guy is Paul. 😉

Decisions, decisions…

Measuring stuff out is hard work….

And at some point early in 2018, AFTER LVO (yeesh time is running short!) the Porphyrion is done. Decals and all. I loved the final result. Some pics below.

I magnetized the arms for easier transport and storage. They move a little bit up and down.

At this point I hadn’t glued in the lascannons, but that was easily done later.

Once all our armies were done and the Knight was done, we started on the display board in earnest. Paul put some custom decals on some MDF boards for the floor, and I printed off a cave picture and glued them to 2 sections of MDF board provided by my good friend Richard (he won HH tourney at LVO in 2016 BTW…). We assembed it with L brackets. Put some gothic candle holders with electric tea lights for the braziers, and some Shadowwar Armageddon platforms around the knight. Paul painted up some great Shadowwar terrain next to the Knight to give it a industrial look. Our armies surround a sacrificial Shrine with a sacrificed Ultramarine to give power to the Knight Igneo Morte, filling it with the rage of Chaos.

Some various angles and close-ups follow.

We event got Team t-shirts! 🙂

With important guy names and such on our t-shirts…

We had a ton of fun and played some great games (a future post on this topic! with tons of pics). But we’ll discuss that in a future post. I was blown away that we actually won the Appearance Award (Best Painted / Best Presentation essentially) for our armies and display board. Was hoping we’d make a good showing but honestly a bit blown away that we won! It was great validation and we quite appreciated the kind comments from players and onlookers alike.

Thank you everyone who stopped by and asked us about our display, commented on it, or let us know that they liked it, we really appreciate it. Such a great time at Adepticon, can’t wait to go back next year. Great motivation to make an even more crazy display board next year! We’ll see you there!