A Tale Of Old Gamers - Darren Burrows EterniOrc
Project Eterniorc
As a wargamer my approach to gaming has very much been shaped by my first Army - 4th Ed WFB Orcs and Goblins. There's something about fielding a force that can utterly ruin your day as a player, even when playing the game of your life that makes you somewhat relaxed about the idea of competition and pushes you very much towards just being there for the fun and chaos of it all.
So when Adam posted about maybe doing an old farts WFB series, I was all over this like a shot. Sadly joining high school saw me go hard for 40K, which resulted in me swapping my Orc and Goblin army for some Space Marines a friend had spare to throw into my then fledgling Dark Angels army, no big deal but by god am I missing some of the old sculpts now.
Particularly having seen eBay prices for things like the Rock lobber of the era or the old Grom the Paunch mini.
Since games workshop also “End Timesed” The Old World and replaced it with AoS, it also limits my options to either what little GW sell for Gloomspite Gitz, and Orruks and thenworking out how to proxy them, scouring eBay, or 3D printing to build the army. Since I’m not as familiar with AoS as I am 40K, this initially filled me with some concern, since I suspected I’d be having to proxy a lot to make the modern range work.
As things stand, I’ve seemingly fallen somewhere in the middle. Sadly this does mean a mishmash of minis and styles. But I can work with that. One of the particular standouts, was finding a designer (Monstrous Encounters) that is enamoured with the older 90s era style of mini, with a lot of their work covering replicas the of the old hero quest minis, the old style Adeptus Arbites, WFB Style undead and more importantly for me, a few units of Orcs and night goblins, along with a few ball and chain fanatics. It was shortly after browsing this person's Patreon that inspiration struck. I always struggle with themes, colour schemes and ideas for concepts for armies - so finding something to give me a solid core is always a good thing, so with the discovery of He-Orc on the Monstrous Encounters Patreon, Project EterniOrc was borne! While this doesn’t really drive how I build the army, it at least gives me a basing scheme - which is now aiming for very Castle Greyskull like grey green hues on rock - perfect for night goblins.
While googling early on to try to find era appropriate STLs, or third party source of minis, I also found a couple of interesting ideas I’ll be trying to replicate. Firstly, mixing the odd purely scenic base into larger units, just to break them up and make them more visually interesting. So I’ll be looking to throw in the odd base of purely stalagmites or mushroom formations to give a unit a bit more visual diversity. I’m also tempted to see what happens when I mix up base sizes a little in some units, using a rank of 25mm bases, followed by ranks of 20mm or alternating between 20 and 25mm for gobbo units, again having been inspired by something I saw online while looking for decent proxies.
So far I’m mostly just printing whatever minis take my fancy from my growing library of greenskin STLs, as well as grabbing the odd GW box here and there, quickly building an unhealthy backlog of unpainted minis to add to my already terrifying pile of grey. Though I do want to include more official GW minis, since as much as I may love 3D printing and what itcan bring to the hobby. I’ve long been against the idea of using it in place of actually supporting the company behind it all. Sadly I did let my printer run away with me a little early on, as I start to develop things further I’ll be changing that and just falling back to printing where I can’t find a suitable proxy mini, a style of mini that fits what I’m aiming for more in terms of theme or where eBay prices are frankly exorbitant for things I can’t buy directly - which sadly most of them are.
So far in terms of prints I have the following waiting to be painted or with some form of paint on them.
40 night goblins with spears
40 night goblins with bows
20 Orc Arrer boys
20 Orc boys
10 goblin giant rat riders
10 or so ball and chain fanatics
A bolt thrower
A goblin rat chariot
A night goblin shaman being carried by a helpful gobbo
And the man of the hour, He-Orc himself.
It being my birthday this month, my ever lovely and eternally patient wife surprised me with the gobbapalooza box and a pair of night goblin shamans, giving me a LOT of options for cheap magic users. Adding to this I also have the Warhammer+ Bazdrogg Nekk Choppa model and the Store anniversary Gutrippa Boss, as well as the premium Orruk box from the Mortal Realms magazine, which IIRC is basically the start collecting Orruks box. Where GW minis are concerned, I think I can get away with 1:1 matches for most, if not all of the goblin minis. Though several options are sadly missing from the current line up. The Orcs however are more of an issue - for official minis, I have no easy 1:1 proxy for standard boyz, with my only real option being Ardboyz, though these are too heavily armoured for standard orc boyz to my eye, so could work better as either bigunz, or black orcs. The Savage Orruks however are a perfect savage orc proxy, since most of the sculpts date back to WFB. For black orcs I’m thinking the Orruk Brutez could work, being big, chunky models. That just leaves the Kruleboyz - a range which sadly doesn’t easily fit into 4th ed WFB - I say sadly because I love the Blanch/Miller callbacks in their design. I could use them as a form of Savage Orc Bigun, since while no such unit exists in the game, it’s not hard to imagine that there would be Bigunz in the many savage orc tribes in the old world.
Ignoring the characters for a moment or any of the GW minis that I’d need to dig out, I’m already at the 1200 point mark, without factoring specific armaments or unit additions such as musicians, banner bearers or leaders. Not bad going for a few days of printing.
As for painting, I’ve mostly been noodling around, printing masses and masses of minis, painting a few of them to get a feel for quick colour schemes - with a more recent focus on those that are more likely to be damaged due to delicate parts, such as the printed chariot.
Behind this I’ve been throwing myself into playing lots of Total War: Warhammer III’s grand campaign to try to cement ideas for a core concept beyond “da green horde” which often feels like the default for green skin armies. Right now I’m leaning more towards night/forest goblins and savage orcs, eschewing the other types of greenskin, though on paper this does kind of eliminate certain unit options, these could either be worked around or proxied with some thought if needed, such as using giant spiders in place of chariots.