Converted Blackstone Fortress Adventurers

I've cracked it.  Three posts and all of them on the same topic.  Which is now finished.  And allows me to play the game with all painted miniatures.  It's a good job I'm sitting down as I type this as the last time I achieved anything like this was the previous Warhammer Quest game GW did, "The Silver Tower"!  So I now present the Adventurers from the Blackstone Fortress game.

First up, the Rogue Trader (middle) himself and two of his buddies

Rogue Traders go waaaaaaaay back in WH40k.  The first game was named for them after all.  They're essentially captains of lone ships or flotillas of ships and their remit is to explore the galaxy, investigating things and generally getting rather rich in the process.  Bit like Christopher Columbus in space.  They can have crews of specialists, Imperial Guards regiments and even space marine assigned to them to help them do whatever needs to doing spread the word of the Emperor, find new planets, contact new races and either steal their stuff, or kill them and then steal their stuff.

My Rogue Trader mixes kits from Warhammer Fantasy Battle and the 40k world and I'm rather pleased with his arrogant manner and gesture.  The adventurers in Blackstone Fortress represent the Rogue Trader Janus Drake and the motley crew that he's surrounded himself with.  The other two are a Kroot mercenary, now working with him (not much converting needed here, just a selection of stuff added and a pelt) and the Navigator.  Navigators are the mutant psychics able to pilot ships through "Warp Space" using their third eye which grows in their forehead.  I chose a helmet with something that could be a third eye and I rather like the staff which is also from a mix of kits.

Next up are the Mechanicum related adventurers.  The two little chaps are Ratlings (Halflings in space) and one is a sniper with the other having a tracker and other assorted gubbins instead.  They started life as goblin bodies and with a few choice Imperial guard and skitarii parts they become ratlings.  The heads come from an old bretonnian sprue as  they really looked the part for me.

The last chap is the large robot explorer.  The one in the boxed set steps outside the usual Grimdark aesthetic and GW explain that he is a relic of a bygone age.  I like my future properly Grim and Dark though, so I converted him to be  a mighty servitor (cyborg) with an unfeasibly large gun and pinchy power claw....

The last three are the religious pairing of a lunatic who likes to burn heretics and then chop them up with the chainsword that he's welded to the underside of his flamer (don't try this at home kids!) and a preacher who likes to read Harry Potter whilst slaying the unbelievers.  The third one is an Eldar and he's based on a fantastic Dark Elf assassin model who has been 40k-ified with the addition of a shuriken catapult and stuff on his belt.

Lots of different parts in all of these and a real blast to build.  And we've even started playing!  Here are some of the adventurers in action.

It's a great little system and we absolutely smashed it.  However, it's a legacy game and so you draw a card to see what gets added to the game after each expedition...... and after the first expedition we drew the mighty Chaos Lord so we may see him sooner than we'd like - yikes!

More converted Blackstone Fortress Adversaries

In a fit of good sense and concentration rarely witnessed anywhere near my painting table, I managed to keep on going with the Blackstone Fortress figures and have now completed all of the adversaries.  I figured I'd get these done first and then treat myself to the Adventurers.

They're all converted/re-purposed and the first lot are the Traitor Guardsmen.  These are converted from the plastic chaos cultists set of figures.  A fair few head swaps and arm/weapon swaps with plastic Cadian guardsmen to make them more traitor guardsmen than generic cultists and lots of Imperial guard kit (radio pack, canteens, etc) help them along, as does the standard "army" green and brown paint scheme.

I've always rather liked beastmen, so I was pleased when I saw GW were including them in the Black Fortress game.  When I started 40k, back in the "Rogue Trader" first edition days, the Beastmen were part of the Imperial Guard.  They operated in abhuman packs and served in order to pay penance to the Emperor for having been born mutants!  I decided to bring this idea back and so my beastmen conversions are built using plenty of Imperial Guard kit, including a couple of breastplates.

The awesome flagellants kit helped too, with  bell, weapons and arms

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Next up are the big baddies - Chaos Space Marines!  These are smashed together from all sorts of chaos space marine and space marine kits and leftovers from other conversions.  I've always found the Black Legion a little boring (as well as not really wanting to paint black armour.....) so I went for my favourite traitor marine chapter instead - Word Bearers.

The Wordbearers are the real baddies of the 40k world, having been the ones who started the Horus Heresy in the 30k setting by making pacts with daemons and dragging other discontented legions in with them.  I'm particularly pleased with the Chaos Lord as he uses a cloak I really like.  For his helm I found the largest and most OTT helmet I could (not too hard in GW kits!) to help him stand out and hopefully catch his horns on the ceiling of the fortress, allowiing us adventureres time to escape.....  The other two are deliberately kept quite standard to help the lord stand out even more.

One of the fun things about converting is how ideas come to you whilst converting, like the idea of making my beastmen part of abhuman imperial guard squad.  The idea for the Rogue Psykers came when I decided to do Wordbearers as my chaos space marines.  It occurred to me that instead of doing psykers like the ones in the box, I'd instead make them the leaders of the Guardsmen, who have been given to the Wordbearers to make into daemonhosts.  It's this that gives them their horrifying psychic powers......

Some masked heads, a bell and an unholy tome with stocks completed the look and the gold breastplate marks one out as the captain.

Blackstone Fortress converted adversaries

Now, I've always been a bit of a Games Workshop fanboy - Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy Battle were what brought me into this hobby.  It's no great secret that GW diverged somewhat from what made them so successful during a lot of the 2000's....... but they've recently rediscovered a lot of what made them such a big draw in the 80's & early 90's - actually giving the customers what they want instead of telling customers what they should want and utterly ignoring them.  Mind blowing stuff, for sure.....

One of the things they've rediscovered is that wargamers rather like full games in boxes with great figures and so they've recently been churning boxed games out as often as they can.  A couple of years ago I bought the reinvented Warhammer Quest game (basically a dungeon crawl where you're all on the same side against AI controlled enemies) and our gaming group really enjoyed it, so when GW announced the next Warhammer Quest game would be in the 40k universe, I was absolutely in!

I decided to do something a little different though and despite the lovely figures GW were including in the game, I decided that this was a great opportunity for me to instead convert all the required figures from miniatures and parts that I already owned.  This would give me something unique, save a bit of cash and scratch the converting itch I always have.  Oh, and attempt to ever so slightly rebalance the wargamers scales, which are always heavily weighted towards buying shiny things instead of painting them.  So, I picked up all the game parts you needed to play for a song from eBay and got converting..... and I now present the first completed figures.

These first chaps are my take on the "Negavolt cultists" - lunatics who seem to have taken to electrocuting anyone who strays into their territory.  As you do.  I had some bodies from the old empire flagellants and having found some oversized power arms, they reminded me of fiddler crabs so I went with one massive arm and almost nothing on the other side.

Weird electro machinery on the back finished the look.

These next ones are my version of spindle drones.  The "proper" ones are a little metallic and clean for my taste, so I added some 40k weirdness with odd little robed individuals.  Are they robots, cyborgs or something else entirely?  We may never know....

Now, having said I was going to convert ALL of the figures, I now must admit to not converting these next four.  At all.  In any way, shape or form.  I stuck to that resolution about as well the one I periodically make to stop buying figures until I've painted a load of what I already...... I just really liked the figures and so caved in and bought myself some.

Anyway, these unsavoury fellows are Ur-Ghuls - ghoulish monsters who seem to use warp space to stalk their prey.  Or something.  Anyway, I suspect I wouldn't like to meet them down a dark alley, but they were delightfully easy to paint and hence why they leapt to the head of the painting queue.

And here they are, all together in the class photo.