In anticipation of the world’s first Fallout: Factions tournament at the Goonhammer Open, some of the Modiphius team have been documenting their preparations over on their site. But the Goonhammer team aren’t going to let them waltz to glory without a fight! Lenoon, Moogus, Cronch and Neon are also attending the event, and hoping to come away as Fallout: Factions’ first-ever official Top Dog.
Last time, we were frantically trying to construct our gangs with the help of the Fallout: Factions Rulebook and the C.O.M.P. Kit. At the time of writing some of us still are, while others have moved onto trying to get models ready for the big day.
Lenoon
Ok so last time we ended up with three models and about two thirds of my caps spent. That’s not great, is it? Even with the cheapest grunts in the Brotherhood list (the recon rifle equipped initiate at 19 points), I’m not going to have a lot of pieces to play with. As I have the option of taking some power armour as well there’s absolutely no way I just spam as many initiates as possible either, so building the rest of the crew has to be all about activation efficiency.
Enter Brother David, a Knight armed with Machete and Laser pistol. That’s another big slab of points, but with a good melee and a good (if short ranged) shooting option, he can do a lot pretty well. There’s ways I can make that better, using the C.O.M.P kit rules for Factions tournament play, buying David the Charge perk for a mere five caps. Charge is going to give me some great flexibility, giving me two actions (get moving and brawl) for the price of one. If an enemy survives that, they can either back off and get shot or charged again, or they can stick around in combat with a power armoured brick shithouse – either way I’m feeling good about my chances.
There’s not much else I can fit in, so I’m going to go cheap – two initiates with laser rifles (going very fifties here with Sandy and Betty) come in at 46 caps. With Laser Rifles they’re not half bad on offense and come with a native perk – Sprint, allowing them to get a few more crucial inches on their move actions. If they can pal around with Scribe Barbara with her Spotter perk, they can pick up caps for chems, with one getting to any rummaging spots in range while the other picks off opposing gangers with literal laser precision.
There’s just enough caps left for one or two little upgrades or perks, but with the core of my force purchased, I’m going to let that decision settle in my mind for now!
Josh
So, a sweet and simple gameplan. That went totally out of the window. I built tall on my Rocket Man & Wonder Boy, absolutely filling them to the brim with goods. Wonder Boy is a Party Boy, meaning every time I feed him up with Chems he’s going to either heal back an injury, which is already ridiculous with someone that tough, or he’s going to clear his Harm (which thanks to being in Power Armour, can go up to 4) in addition to getting the Chem benefit.
It’s a no-brainer. Alongside that, I upgraded his Perception to 6 so he can swing even harder with the Combat Rifle.
Rocket Man on the other hand was all-brainer. Since the Missile Launcher is Slow, and can only fire once per round, I decided that he should be a utility piece on the side. Strong Back lets him Rummage for free alongside a movement action, and the real cheese comes with him having an Informant. At the start of deployment, I can redeploy two of my raiders.
If you’ve read anything 40k competitive, you know redeployment is just good. I expect it to be good here too. I’m going to deploy Rocket Man aggressively, and if I win the roll-off, I redeploy him to get an amazing alpha-strike, and if I don’t, I redeploy him behind cover like a sniveling coward.
There’s nothing much else special going in my list – one of my raiders with the baseball grenades is Hidden, so I can scout deploy him into a nasty position to lob grenades at scared weaklings, and my Veteran, the man simply known as The Jones, is carrying the perk to bring my Protectron.
I’m coming up with some struggle on painting up my power armour, but I got the Protectron out of the way first and foremost to establish my gangs theme – black, and slap-dash red. I quickly sponged up the Protectron and gave him some quick and dirty highlights that gave him a real ‘painted in the field’ look.
I like to imagine they stole it from Lenoon’s brotherhood of dorks.
My full build is ultimately fairly simple, with a full compliment of Chems thanks to Personal Stash. I leaned on having more Chems than not to really abuse Party Boy on my boss to just make him tank nasty amounts of damage.
Other than that, I’ve named my entire band of psychos from entirely picking things off of my liked list on Spotify. Some fit the mood of my psycho-scum death-dealers more than others but I love ‘em none-the-less.
My last update before we get to GHO is to present to you a fully painted gang of dudes who I’m gonna’ try my best with. I’ve no doubt best painted will be a tough category but I’m gonna do my hardest to be a consideration.
It’ll make getting absolutely owned in the actual game less ego-murdering if I win it too.. Always be thinkin’ three moves ahead folks.
Cronch
It’s been a pretty busy week for me, but I did manage to get my Wasteland Raider plastics built. They’re a great kit! I absolutely love the design of the power armor in particular. For the second Butcher and third suit of armor, I turned to the X-01 Power Armor plastic kit. This comes with a few options, and fortunately one of them is the flamethrower that I’ve chosen to arm my Butcher with. I did initially toy with giving them the flamethrower arms from the Raider kit, to break up the X-01 silhouette and make it look a bit more hacked together, but in the end I just built the suit as-is other than swapping the head around with one of the raider suits. That plus the paintwork will be enough to sell it as a Raider, I hope.
I also got everyone primed, and did some gentle volumetric shading with the airbrush on the models without power armor. On my three champions, I got a bit further. The models were based black, then highlighted through the airbrush with a blue-black. They got a coat of gloss varnish, then a messy all over oil wash of a burnt umber colour. This brown recess helps to break up the panels, and also add some grime and texture. I’ve then hit them with an ultra-matt varnish to get a surface finish I like. Now it’s just a case of picking out metals and details, and getting everybody else painted.
Most importantly, I came up with names for the gang! They are, in no particular order:
- Minigun Boss – Warthog
- Flamethrower Butcher – Croc
- Missile Launcher Butcher – Katyusha
- Short Hunting Rifle Scavver – Springfield
- Sawn-Off Scavver – Trench
- Molotov/Bat Psycho – Poncho
- Pistol/Wrench Psycho – Python
I started off with the plane reference for the boss, then that evolved into various tank, vehicle and gun references. I thought about trying to keep it fairly WWII-themed, given Fallout’s setting, but ultimately decided a bit of incongruity was totally fine given the somewhat fantastical nature of the Fallout universe.
Oh, I also remembered to buy some D10s in two different colours. Lists are in, and now it’s full steam ahead on painting until the event this Saturday!
Neon
Unfortunately this week the fates conspired to kick me right in the ass, getting a week on the late shift at my day job severely cutting into my painting time and massively slowing down my progress. I managed to get some basecoats down in the hour or two before I passed out, and I’ve made some good progress with both my gang’s Champions and my finalized list for the Open.
One of the big challenges with painting Raider Power Armour compared to say, the Brotherhood’s, is that there’s a LOT going on there. These hunks of junk are covered in mismatching pieces, patchjobs and bolt-ons, and there’s a lot of textures and tones in there to pick out. If I had more time I’d be giddy to pick through each piece individually, but with about a work week’s amount of time to play with, I had to get a little experimental.
Oils and enamels have become my favourite toys when mini painting over the past few years. It’s very, very satisfying to block in the colours on a figure then let the wash do all the work of blending and shading it all together. While I’m not 100% happy with the corroded metal look I was hoping to achieve, a few spots of rust will get these thrillkillers looking fit and ready for Saturday.
War Never Changes…
So that’s it, the next time you hear from us we’ll be post-event. Will one of us be the champion of the wasteland, or will we all be Radroach bait? Check back in with us to find out!
Keep an eye out for updates from Modiphius too, and if you’d like to join us at the Goonhammer Open on Saturday March 22nd, tickets are still available here.
Are you excited for Fallout: Factions, or even joining us at the Goonhammer Open later this month? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
