Not a whole lot to say right now, I am buried under a big pile of loot from Lock & Load 2013 that our buddy Boots brought back from Seattle for me.  Aside from the June release of the Stormblade Captain for my beloved Cygnar, I have a huge heaping helping of new models from the Convergence of Cyriss with which to entertain myself.

 

So after clearing it with my wife, I was allowed a reasonable budget for new things from L&L, and with Mr. Boots being so generous and willing to ninja shop for me, I spoke to him about what I was thinking of getting, and he went out and procured for me between rounds of judging, gaming and being amazing.  Below are some photos of what he brought back for me, and then we’ll talk about what I am working on right out of the gate…

 

Mr Boots had been so kind as to box everything up for me and keep it closed as we sat in a Tim Horton’s in Welland Saturday morning, each of us playing a game of waiting with the other as we drank coffee, talked about Lock & Load, Life, work, etc.  This box sat between us, full of potential and joy, but remained closed until we had danced the social tango of two friends meeting, ostensibly for coffee.

My gears grinding away, the cogs slipping into place in my mind and the timing precise, I paid the man and quickly grabbed the box off the table and ran screaming from the Welland Coffee shop.  No one could stop me now, I was mad with power and flush with the excitement of new models…. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

 

Once home and pleasantries to my wife and daughter were over with, I was allowed to dive into my new box of models and pull everything out, taking stock of all that I had to assemble and play with after waiting patiently for the delivery.  The breakdown of my goodies is as follows:

• Convergence Battle Box
• Forces of Warmachine: Convergence of Cyriss Book
• Prime Axiom Convergence Colossal
• Warcaster Aurora, Numen of Aerogenesis
• Warcaster Axis, The Harmonic Enforcer
• two units of Clockwork Angels
• a Heavy Vector Kit
• Galvanizer Light Vector kit
• Mitigator Light Vector kit
• Diffuser Light Vector kit
• Attunement Servitor blister
• Accretion Servitor blister
• Elimination Servitor blister
• Reflex Servitor blister
• Gold cards for Axis, Aurora, Syntherion and Prime Axiom
• Convergence of Cyriss Faction Tokens
• Convergence of Cyriss Faction Patch
• Stormblade Captain Blister

It is a glorious haul, and I know I am hell-bound by bragging but I am just so excited and wanting to share with everyone!!  Bask in the clockwork glory of the Convergence!

 

First up is the battle box, a great starting place for any player wanting to get into a new faction or even into the game for the first time!  This BBox contains Warcaster Forge Master Syntherion, a Cipher Heavy Vector, a Mitigator Light Vector and a Galvanizer Light Vector.  Much like the earliest Battle Boxes this is a nice Warcaster, double-light and one heavy set which totals 9 points after Warcaster points are subtracted (6). So it does need some beefing up to play in a 15pt format, but it’s a nice place to start the faction from.

 

Next up is the essential guide for anyone wanting to play a faction; the Forces of Warmachine faction book.  This weighty toe is going to be a staple in my life for the next while and will travel with me to work, to the bathroom, to bed at night and certainly to the shop this Thursday when I hope to play my first games with the faction.  The intro fluff has been read already, and it introduces us to a character some of us thought we knew from the Witchfire Trilogy: Father Lucant, The Divinity Architect.  A nice bit of fiction detailing the completion of the process by which the Convergence leaders transfer their minds and souls into mechanical vessels, this was a great read and had some surprising insight into the origins of a Cryx Warcaster as well….  I highly recommend this book to all fans of the game and fiction from Privateer Press.

 

So many people have asked me about this guy since I got him, via text, e-mail and tweets.  Let me just say I was saving him for a special occasion, waiting until I had made some progress with the rest of the models before cracking the plastic coverings off this box and peeking inside.  Here’s what I discovered when I finally rewarded myself Sunday night:

 

 

So a clamshell packed full of bits and parts, and some nice sized resin components under the cardboard, but what does it all translate to?

 

 

 

 

59 pieces, varying in size make up this amazing Colossal for the Convergence.  He is a priority for me because I love the big guys as much as anything else, but I have other parts to this army I want to work on before going crazy on the Prime Axiom.  If you were wondering what the weird thing is he was seen sitting on in some of the pictures or art online?

 

The grooves in the middle are actually quite nice and allow the abdomen section to sit nicely on the rocky outcropping which will help with painting this guy I think.  The abdomen, torso, shoulders and some details will be able to be assembled and painted while the three legs and massive arms are painted separately.  Some pretty sweet design if you ask me.  My favourite piece of the whole kit from what I have inspected so far?

 

This superstructure weapon is an amazing Range 13, ROF 2 POW 11 gun that has Auto Fire [3] on it so that you can make 6 ranged attacks and shred some infantry nicely before using his other two ranged weapons, the Tow Cables to pull something beefier into his waiting grasp for rendering into component pieces.  This guy is an amazing piece of tech for the game, and I think may give Bernard the Stormwall a run for his money as my favourite Colossal.

But enough about Axi!  What I have spent my time on over the past weekend is the battle box, because I have committed to play this faction fully painted right from the get-go, and therefore have been working hard on prepping the models to play for Thursday night.  That being said, let’s take a look at what you can find in the battle box.

 

The first bag I pulled from the box contains an assortment of pieces that I could barely recognize since the faction is still so new and exciting.  I see the lower half of Syntherion there, 3 medium bases, and a whole mess of parts for the Vectors and Warcaster.

 

Here we can see more jumbled pieces and a large base, presumably for the Cipher heavy Vector we know should be contained in the battle box.  This at least is good news, as we have likely discovered that one bag of mystery parts is a Warcaster and two light Vectors whereas the second mystery bag is a heavy vector in a single bag.  It’s a small thing, but my CDO loves it when things are organized and compartmentalized for me to process easily.

 

Here we have the warcaster and his two light Vectors in all their component pieces after sorting through the contents of the mystery parts baggie.  Quite a few ofd the Light Vector pieces are the same, but Syntherion seems to have a lot of pieces for what should be a happy-go-lucky construct Warcaster….

 

17 pieces total make up our Warcaster, and the picture doesn’t do any justice at all to how small and fine the little arms are for this guy.  Most of them are between 2 and 3 cm long, and so very thin I couldn’t even measure it without some expensive calipers.  One must be very careful when cleaning and assembling the arms to our new Warcaster….

 

I’m still learning the names and differences between the Light Vectors, but we can easily see that it’s the Galvanizer who has the lovely long saw blade for a nose.  Not sure what, if anything, this Vector can smell with that but hopefully it smells like cherries when he’s cutting into the flesh of his enemies.  This light Vector is made up of 13 pieces and share a lot of pieces with the other lights, noticeable difference being the saw blade arm from his head.  Six of those pieces make up the legs, three pieces for the body and the rest are arms and base.  Where the arms go is also a difference between these Vectors.

 

He we have the razor bola launching Mitigator light Vector, and he has a lovely launcher that he wears on his left side as well as a double-jointed arm on his right side.  Whereas the Galvanizer has arms coming out of his head, this guy has them positioned more accurately on the torso section, although they double up on the right side after giving him a launcher on the left.  They’ll get it right one day, maybe….  14 pieces total for this guy, with the only addition being the tiny little joint that attaches to the torso and both arms slot into.  Parts are sort of laid out where they are going to go.

 

24 pieces came out of the second mystery bag and make up the Cipher Heavy Vector.  This guy has a ton of little pieces and without a guide it took me a bit to look at the box and test fit things until I got it worked out.  The legs are the most frustrating part, but they seem to have worked out in the end.  Let’s look at some of how this goes together.

 

So each of the arms is made up of four pieces; the shoulder, a shoulder connector, the lower arm and the spike itself.  You can see here the huge issue I had with the pieces from this Battle Box: Flash and Mold Line HELL.  I spent the entirety of Saturday afternoon & evening just cleaning all the pieces up for all of these models before washing them so that I could assemble them on Sunday.  It was laborious and utter crap work, and more than once I may have uttered some deprecation about the injection machines that cast these parts.  Once again the lines travel through detail, down important parts of the models and are absolute hell getting off, involving a whole lot of scraping with the back side of a very sharp GF9 Hobby knife.  This was by far the least pleasurable part of the whole experience of getting these models.  I am no expert when it comes to models or casting these miniatures, but I would love it if these were either white metal or just plain old plastic.  Much easier to clean and file than the stuff these models are made from.  I love the details and craftsmanship of Privateer Press’ models, but man this resin/plastic stuff is the WORST in my opinion.  Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but serious, all evening until midnight?  Ugh.  Anyhow, 2 arms that are pretty easy to get together, so hooray for that!

 

The torso and head of the Cipher are composed of 4 pieces; the torso back and base, the front panel, the top covering and the face plate.  I use the term “face” loosely here, because these guys sure don’t seem to have any discerning features.  Pretty easy to put together, with grooves for the front and back to fit into tightly without any pinning or effort, the top covering sits flush onto the body and the “face” has a peg that fits nicely into the front panel and sits on top of the top cover to make a nice middle to this sexy bot.  No real complaints, again you can see the flash and mold lines on these parts and may better understand my frustration.  The line runs down the front of the “face” and through every one of those gears slots on the underside….. several times over on the models.  Lots of gears and cogs….

 

Here you can see the abdomen/waist of the Vector, and the easy way to tell which legs go where.  Slots are configured to make it pretty easy to sort out which one goes where.  The hard part, that I whinged about above, was that two of the front legs are sort of wider and don’t have any easy connection to the abdomen, while the back two are smaller/thinner legs and easily peg into their slots of the abdomen once you attach the connecting joint.  The front legs require you to glue the “extension” pieces to them before they slot into the abdomen, while the back two legs just require a little connector before they slot in.

 

These are the little knee joints that glue onto the back of the back legs before attaching to the torso.  Seems like an unnecessary extra step for assembly, but I imagine there are good reasons for it.  As you could see from an earlier picture, I got two of the baggies for this model as they were stuck together, someone out there is going to get a heavy kit without one and blame me.  I can take it.  I’ll trade you for the missing half to my Ulk from Lylyth3….

So there you have it.  A brief glimpse into what I got from Lock & Load via a super friend of mine who doubles as a Ninja as well as some component pics of the models that I was brave enough to open and share with you.  Lots more to come in the next few weeks, but I will likely update you next with pictures of what I have painted and progress on what I am assembling for play.  As to where I left off before sitting to write this article?  I have the battle box all primed and in the pieces as per the suggestions from Rob Hawkins’ painting article in NQ # 48, so Monday to Thursday will be following the steps in that article to get these guys all painted up for play.  I also have the Heavy Vector kit open and the pieces to make an Inverter Heavy Vector cleaned and ready to be washed and primed, as he is what I will be adding to my force before I go to any higher points levels of games.

Hope to have a battle report and some thoughts for next week after a few games, so stay tuned and keep on reading!

May all your blades be sharp,

– NB