Leviathan Carapace

The carapace for the Leviathan Crusader was finished a few weeks ago to easily allow access to the battery and switch inside the torso.

With a few pins and a bit of glue, the two shoulder pads have been fitted to the central carapace.

A couple of magnets have also been added inside the carapace so some extra weapon options can be included.

The eye lights look good and I reckon they were worth the extra effort.

Leviathan Crusader Problem

Even though I built this bad boy a few years ago, I have only recently painted it. I also thought it would be a good idea to add a couple of LED eye lights, you know, just for fun…

And the lights work well. I even attached a light switch to the back of the torso to make switching them on and off nice and easy.

But, and it is a big but, after I have painted all of the armour and added the lights inside the torso, I then found that the top armour section needs to be fitted BEFORE the two shoulder pauldrons are glued on. This means I can’t remove the top section to switch the lights on and off. Damn…

Finally…

After many years, the Leviathan Crusader is nearly finished.

This is yet another model that has been sitting in the garage waiting to be undercoated for far too long. Once I actually got going, it did not take too long, and I really needed to take advantage of the half decent weather.

As this was always intended as a large mech for my Grey Knights, it ended up with a very simple colour scheme. I have even worked out a model profile for it, based on the weapons it is carrying and various Forge World weapon profiles.

I need to find a few Grey Knights icons to add to the armour, which I think are up in the Loft Full Of Lead somewhere…unless I used them all up on something else.

40K Game

It seems like ages since I rolled any dice in anger, but in reality it has only been a couple of weeks. And it will be a while longer as the world battles this very real crisis.

One would think that staying at home would mean plenty of time to paint figures and get ready for the return of some sort of normality, but I am really busy actually working…

A while back I posted a bunch of pictures of a large battle between a combined Blood Angels and Grey Knights Task Force versus a Death Guard host.

Before the lockdown, Mr Steinberg and I had another large game, this time a Grey Knights force lead by Inquisitor Coteaz and a small retinue going up against the Old Foe, The Death Guard.

I set up my industrial terrain again, but this time with more open space and less towers.

I used the Coteaz and Retinue profiles from White Dwarf, but they really were not very good. Although it is fun to add a varied unit of soldiers, they are not very well trained or armoured for an Inquisitors Retinue and they were little more than a speed bump.


Mr Steinberg’s Death Guard are a spectacular army across the table, all nauseating green and putrid pustules.

We had agreed what vehicles we would be taking before the game to make sure it would be as balanced as possible.

…so there was a Land Raider on each side.

I was overly impressed with Inquisitor Coteaz’s Psychic abilities, they did not benefit the Grey Knights or the soon to be deceased Retinue. They may work better with an allied Imperial Guard army.


A Grey Knights Purgation unit with Psycannons and a Mortis Class Dreadnought with four Autocannon’s should be able to hold the flank, right?

There were objectives to hold and these randomly changed each turn to make it more interesting, this was a scenario from a White Dwarf a while back.



The Blight Drones with their speed, flamer attacks and probes can make a mess of most things, including a Land Raider.



If you shoot something enough, it will go down, the massed firepower of the Purgation squad and the Mortis Dreadnought eventually killed the tentacled Death Guard Dread.



The Mortis Dreadnought went down and the Purgation fell back to some cover to make their last stand…

The Grey Knights were falling too fast and not taking enough of the Death Guard down, it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

A really good game again, I just need a a little more firepower, maybe the Leviathan Knight will help next time.

40K Battle

On the rare occaision we get a weekend game organised, it is great to have the time to set up a complex table of terrain, get loads on toy soldiers on the table, eat pizza, roll buckets of dice and have a thoroughly enjoyable day.

It does take me ages to actually get the pictures online, this battle was played some time ago, my Grey Knights and Blood Angels against a massive horde of Death Guard.

So I am not going to make any comments, just leave this big list of picture here…

Very Big Gun

Here we have the H.E.L. Cannon for the Leviathan Crusader, a very big gun indeed that is about the height of an Imperial Knight.

I am working on some homebrew 40K rules for the Crusader, to run it as an Imperial Knight variant, based on a Forge World profile. This weapon will likely be a Volcano Cannon, hopefully enough to deal with a Chaos Knight.

Leviathan Crusader Torso

There is not much to the body of the Leviathan Crusader, apart from the spine and a box for the arms and head to attach, that is about it.

I did have some new help during the build, the main problem was keeping anything that could hurt the little chap out of paws reach.

The finished torso looks like it was a Games Workshop design for the Grey Knights.

Just because I could, I have made up an LED circuit to provide lighting inside the helmet. It took longer to make the mounting for the on/off switch.

I am still a bit worried about undercoating the whole thing…

Leviathan Crusader Weapon

The is indeed a very big gun, but not the biggest that a Leviathan Crusader can carry.
The next weapon build will be the H.E.L. Cannon. That looks like it will be the height of an Imperial Knight.

Leviathan Crusader Started

This is a very big box of bits, the Dreamforge Leviathan Crusader.

I bought this model years ago as I thought it would go with my Grey Knights really well, the helmet design is a perfect match for later generation Grey Knight Terminators.

It is quite a complicated kit and it got put on a shelf to collect dust for a while. And I do mean a while.

I also had no idea how to go about painting it. As it is a fully articulated model, I thought I should paint each component before building, something that would take some time to do. This is another reason it has sat around for ages.

But now that I am playing 40K again and models the size of Imperial Knights actually have decent rules and I have an airbrush, I am building the damn thing.

So starting with the feet, I am working my way up the model. By the time I got to the top of the leg, I realised this will be considerably taller than an Imperial Knight. I think I will need a homebrew 40K profile for this model, something that is in between a Knight and a Titan.

Kill Team Grey Knights vs Scouts

So many games of Kill Team over the last few weeks, trying out new forces and working through the scenarios.

Mr Steinberg wanted to try out a predominantly Scout force with a couple a single Primaris Marines.

My Grey Knights had to advance across the combat zone into the waiting Scout snipers and various Scout weapons fire.

The objectives were scattered on differents levels, so forces had to be divided leaving lone models vulnerable.

Sometimes you just have to rely on the excellent armour of Space Marines and just take the hits, after all, reaching the objectives is what wins the game.

With the Scouts having taken up a defensive position, the Grey Knights moved and once within 12″ the Rapid Fire of their Storm Bolters proved very effective.

The Psychic phase is great for the Grey Knights, almost a free Mortal Wound dished out every turn. It did not take long before a few of the Scouts were out of action.

With only five models, any losses on the Grey Knight side hurts a lot, so once they were close enough, it was important to get close to the objectives and try to benefit from some obscuring terrain.