TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 24: Finishing an Invictor Tactical Warsuit

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing log of personal, hobby, and competitive progress for Warhammer 40,000. Last time around I talked about having COVID (wouldn’t recommend), planning my next step, and painting some Night Lords. Unforunately, I didn’t end up testing Negative until late Thursday, so that basically put weekend games of 40k out of my list of options, since I needed to mask up and avoid people for a few days following. That said, I did manage to do some list planning, so I’ll talk about that process before jumping into the hobby update.

Doing Some List Research

I’ve been talking about running a Renegades & Raiders detachment with my Night Lords for a while now and while I had a general idea in mind for what I wanted to run there, I hadn’t really cemented a list to bring yet, either competitively or for the Narrative in November. The good news is that I had to spend some time last week updating the Detachment Focus for Renegade Raiders and that both gave me a refresher on their rules and also an opportunity to look at some top-performing lists for the faction.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on netlisting – I think it’s fine to do and gives you a great guidance for building lists, and the important part is practicing with a list anyways. On top of that, in tenth edition making adjustments around the margins is nearly impossible, so it’s really more about the units you take and for some factions and detachments there just aren’t that many units to work with. And finally my list decisions will always be driven by what I have painted so most of it will come down to finding a list which already mostly aligns with those.

The big list target I’m looking at this week is Josh Roberts’ Renegade Raiders list. He ran this list at the Sheffield major a couple of weeks ago, finishing 2nd after a close loss to Hypercrypt Necrons in the final round that was very winnable late in the game.

Josh's Renegade Raiders List - Click to Expand

I really like this list conceptually – there’s a lot of power here, both in terms of the Vindicator Shooting, melee threats from the Chosen, and short-range ranged threats from the Rubrics. I identified Rubrics in our initial write-up of the Renegade Raiders Detachment focus as the perfect tool for the army and that was correct – they benefit tremendously from AP-2, already want to attack targets on objectives, and don’t have to worry about Dark Pacts since they mostly don’t roll to hit anyways.

If there’s a downside to the list it’s that I don’t want to paint a pair of Night Lords Vindicators – ironically I’m already most of the way to this list with my Black Legion, though, and I may just focus on fleshing out this list with my Black Legion first, then coming back and hitting similar notes with my Night Lords. At the very least, I’m not likely to actually paint Night Lords Rubrics – that just doesn’t fit the vibe I’m looking for with the army, but the snow-and-ash bases I’m doing for them are the same as what I did for my Black Legion. So I’ll likely split the difference, painting another unit or two of Black Legion Rubrics and lending one or two to my Night Lords as needed and painting the rest as Night Lords, though I may substitute a a Predator Destructor or two for the Vindicators, or do one of each. It’s less consistent but it looks better and doubling or tripling up for consistency is against the spirit of what I want to do for the Narrative – those are less competitive games and one of the easiest ways to make the army feel more casual is to take a singleton approach to most units and avoid doubling up. I did that last year when I took one of each cult troop (Rubrics, Plague Marines, Berzerkers, Noise Marines) for my Black Legion and I’ll likely do something similar this year with most of the army’s units, and that’ll include trading out a unit of chosen for Warp Talons or Bikes.

I’m also going to drop Cypher. I need to paint him up, but bringing named characters to the Narrative is lame and I don’t need him in those games anyways.

Hobby Progress

I’ve been making some progress on my Night Lords but I don’t have nay new finished models to show off this week so those will have to wait for next week. This was a rough week, generally – although I’m able to leave the house again we’re in that limbo this week between when summer stuff ends but before school starts and so that means my son Bryce is home all week. So yesterday we decided to take another big swing at his hobby progress and head over to the local Warhammer/GW store to finish his Invictor Tactical Warsuit. We primed it gold in the morning, then took it over to start working on it.

I’ve been slowly working Bryce into the hobby – something you can see over the past three months of posts – and even with help form his ADHD meds he’s only able to go for so long before he gets bored/tired of it. Usually that time limit is about an hour which makes projects like today a delicate balance – he wanted to get his Invictor done but that’s more than an hour job, even with the kind of painting he’s doing on it, and so that meant we were there for around two hours. That’s not the end of the world, but it does mean he gets pretty antsy by the end of hour 2 and is ready to go.

We started by covering the areas we missed with primer with Retributor Armour, then I had Bryce cover the model in Agrax Earthshade. After that comes some light drybrushing with Liberator Gold to give the model some depth and make it look like more than just primed gold. Bryce has gotten pretty good at working with paints and brushes recently, to the point where I let him paint mostly unsupervised last week when he wanted to repaint one of his hot wheels cars as the mystery machine. He has his own paint starter set now – the AOS kit comes with clippers and an edge line remover – and he’s gotten good at cleaning brushes and closing paint pots when he’s done.

Bryce opted to do red guns and blue armor plates, going for a bit of a weird Celestial Lions look on his model, and because we’d already been there an hour or so, he decided he was done painting at that point. He’ll likely come back to this in the future without me, but I could tell he wanted to be done with it. So we painted the base in texture paint, waited for that to dry, and did a drybrush of it before adding some grass and rocks. It still turned out pretty solid:

We also got five plastic Terminators primed. With the Invictor done, Bryce got a new stamp in his Battle Honours book – the little booklet of hobby progress GW gives to new hobbyists – and as soon as he paints his terminators he’ll get the final stamp in that section and be eligible to get the free brush case they give out (he’s very excited for that, as he is for all free stuff). The only other thing he needed to do was fill out the “wish list” section of the booklet, so we took a look around the store and he picked out what he wanted next for his army.

He’s got a birthday coming up soon so that’ll be a good thing to grab him. I wonder what he picked…

…ah fuck, I’ve failed as a parent.

That’s it for this week. I’m on a bit of a vacation next week but I’ll still be back next Thursday with more hobby progress and possibly a battle report! In the meantime if you have any questions or feedback you can 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.