Why We Fight - Making An Obejctive Marker For Warhammer 40,000

....would leave us alone and virtually surrounded, facing enemies ten times stronger than ourselves.

One can play wargames simply as an exercise in massacring the opposition - especially in historical/fantasy games, the tactics of the time mean whoever kills the most people usually wins.  However, more modern and science fiction games tend to have more complicated win conditions to reflect the nature of modern conflict.  Fighting over vital buildings, rescuing prisoners, trying to break free, stalling for reinforcements.... there's plenty of ways to play a game that sees victory measured in criteria other than megadeaths.

This becomes more true if, like me, you're an RPGer who enjoys building stories around the events in your wargame.  Two random armies shooting each other isn't quite as engaging if they aren't fighting over something interesting, such as a location which must be held for tactical reasons, even at a bloody cost....

You people will not die on me in combat. You fucking new guys will do everything you can to prove me wrong

....or an interesting object which must be taken from the enemy and brought to high command.

...I can't give you this case, it don't belong to me. Besides, I've already been through too much shit this morning over this case to hand it over to your dumb ass.

To that end, most Warhammer 40,000 games use objective markers.  You can buy functional but dull counters from Games Workshop - in the past, I have tried to make my own from odds and ends I had lying around.

Left is an ammunition crate, right is the fragments of a Space Crusade Dreadnought.    These were painted a couple of years ago when I started back on Warhammer 40,000

This time round I tried to make another one by painting up the cool base a Scibor figure came with to represent a chaotic magic circle type objective to be fought over. Pictures follow!

The whole thing was sprayed black first of all.  The stone circle was painted Dheneb Stone, the skulls Ceramic White and the scarabs a bright Sky Blue from Vallejo.  (This ties them back to the Thousand Sons figures I have which are Mechrite Red armour, Sky Blue weapons, since they're the Egyptian themed Chaos Space Marines.... and also has shades of Scorpiana?)

 

The previous objective markers I made were unflocked but this base already came with texture, so I painted it Mechrite Red.  The whorl thing was given a good layering of Quick Shade, especially in the cracks to give a nice exaggerated feel there.

 

The perimeter of the base was given a "hazard tape" style yellow and black colour scheme -0 as experienced painters will know, however, Yellow is a particularly awkward colour to work with and particularly difficult to paint over dark colours.  Games Workshop's latest paint range has quite a good yellow colour, Yriel Yellow, but it can still do with a bit of TLC to make it work.  

To do yellow over black I first painted Taucept Ochre blocks first - this brownier colour took fine - then mostly overprinted it with Yriel Yellow. I left a thin banding of Ochre visible on either side.

After all that, it was time for highlighting.  The skulls were given more white to brighten them up after the wash, and a drybrushing of Dheneb Stone was used to exaggerate all those lovely bits of detail on the stone circle.

I also applied a wash of thinned down blue Enchanted Blue paint over the scarabs to make them "pop" even more, and also to bring out some of the details on their small forms.  With that, things are basically finished.