Spriggan: The Untold Story

"When Queen Ayn Vanar ordered the Mechaniks Assembly to give her a warjack that would turn the tide of the Motherland's ongoing border wars, they provided her with the Spriggan." - Forces of Warmachine: Khador

MECHANIK:	"Your royal highness, for years the Khadoran military has relied on the iconic Juggernaut, with its powerful MAT7 POW19 axe, and the humble yet beloved Destroyer, with its simple yet effect RNG14 POW14 AOE3 bombard cannon. Well, I am proud to present to you our latest and greatest creation, the mighty Spriggan!" "With its MAT6 POW18 lance it is less accurate and not as hard hitting as the Juggernaut. But it has two guns; not giant cannons that take advantage of the size and weight of the platform, but tiny little RNG10 POW10 AOE2 guns that could easily be carried by infantrymen. Also at ARM19 it has less armour than the ARM20 Juggernaut chassis - but we gave it a shield. Of course it's a POW14 shield that is much worse than the POW16 shield the Devastator chassis the Spriggan was built on is already equiped with. Oh, and the whole thing costs 50% more to manufacture than the Juggernaut." "As I'm sure you've realised by now, I am a Cygnaran agent who has infiltrated the Mechaniks Assembly in order to sabotage your production of war materials. I'm sure you will execute me now for wasting so much time and money on this nonsensical design, but I proudly sacrifice my life for my..."
QUEEN VANAR:	"IT'S AMAZING! PUT IT INTO MASS PRODUCTION RIGHT NOW!"
MECHANIK:	"Wait, wat?"

Fin.

---

I believe that a model's rules should be consistent with the model's story. A knight in shining armour should have a higher ARM value than a peasant in rags, and a sniper with a scoped rifle should have more range than a guy with a bandolier of throwing knives. So for me the Spriggan's strangely compromised stats are at odds with the fluff that served as its introduction.

Back in Mk2 it had the same MAT as a Juggernaut, and I could accept the lower POW on the lance as a tradeoff for the lance's longer range - even though other armies had warjacks that did not make this tradeoff, with expensive elite warjacks having straight-up better melee stats than the cheap beaters (for example the Mk2 Ironclad with its MAT7 RNG0.5 P+S18 hammer compared to the Stormclad with its MAT7 RNG2 P+S19 sword), and Khador even had an elite warjack with the weapon range of the Spriggan and the power of the Juggernaut in Beast09.

But I never understood the lower base ARM; why build a new Khador warjack (that according to the fluff was like 50% heavier than the existing chassis) with less armour, just to give it a shield? A shield which, despite being described in the fluff as being "heavy enough to deliver a crushing counterattack", is less powerful than an empty fist? I get that, rules-wise, an ARM22 warjack can be seen as a problem. But remember we had ARM25 Devastators at this point, and unlike other factions Khador had no ARM buffs at the time. I'm just saying it doesn't make much sense fluff-wise.

Then in Mk3 the Juggernaut chassis received a MAT upgrade to 7, while the Spriggan stayed at MAT 6 despite being an expensive melee jack (it also received a nerf to the guns, which unlike before - and contrary to the fluff - could now be crippled). Supposedly this was to keep it in line with the Devastator chassis, which also remained at MAT6 and now had a base ARM of 19 (the Spriggan was also buffed with the Devastator chassis' Steady rule, but for some reason not its Sturdy rule).

But why would it need to have the same MAT when it was built for different purposes? According the fluff the Devastator was build to use lower-grade cortices due to Khador's difficulty making high quality cortices, while the Spriggan was specifically designed as an elite warjack to present to Ayn Vanar herself! Also, partway through Mk3 the Berserker chassis, which in the fluff is described as a REALLY old, practically obsolete design that still used ancient cortices that had degraded with time, got upgraded to MAT6. Surely at this point the MUCH newer and more expensive Spriggan should have a MAT7 cortex, if not the entire Devastator chassis (that, remember, had previously had the same MAT as the Juggernaut)?

Then in Mk4 they dropped the base ARM on the Devastator and Demolisher to 18, so the Spriggan is no longer consistent with the chassis anyway! So why not bump it up to MAT7 now? At the same time, PP introduced the new Mk4 Khador warjacks that were ARM20 with access to shields, so ARM20+2 became normal. Yet the poor Spriggan is still stuck at the perplexing ARM19+2 statline that just doesn't make sense fluff-wise. Bear in mind Khador's new Great Bear is ARM20+2 at MAT7 with access to a RNG2 POW19 melee weapon alongside a POW 14 cannon with the pistol rule for the same price or cheaper than the Spriggan, leaving the sad old Spriggan completely outclassed. Hell, the new Avalanche, which is the same cost as the Spriggan and also has a RNG2 lance and a shield, has the Great Bear's MAT7 ARM20+2 statline, but at SPD5!

Yes, the Spriggan has some nice rules on it, but so do the Great Bear and Avalanche. For a while I continued to argue for the Spriggan needing at least a little bit of help; a single extra point of MAT would go a long way. But SGF just released their annual balance update, and it became clear that SFG/PP don't give a damn about classic Khador anymore. So yeah, even I have to admit there isn't even the tiniest grain of hope anymore for the Spriggan's rules making sense in the context of its fluff.

I still love the look of the jack, being one of my personal favourite models in the game, and I still think it's capable on the tabletop with all the utility if brings - if a little expensive and outclassed in several important ways by other options. I just hate that it just always seems to have been short-changed for no apparent reason. Well, that's the way it goes sometimes; some stuff is great, some stuff just does not work on the table the way it's supposed to. Still makes me sad when I think about it though.


--EDIT--
I forgot to mention that the original text seen above specifically says:

"... an impenetrable shield in addition to its tremendous underlying chassis armor".

This is Khador, ARM20 is standard. Yet somehow "tremendous chassis armor" is only ARM19. Like I said, the stats DO NOT match the fluff. Sigh.

Winter Camo Disaster

The Khador Spriggan is the only warjack so far that I actually really like. It reminds me of 16-bit video game characters; specifically Sonic and Knuckles. Who I was planning on naming my Spriggan(s) after.

I've been putting a lot of work into my Spriggan over the last couple of months. I spent  something like six hours or possibly more assembling and magnetizing it - I put over thirty magnets into it so I could use any of the frame options, I re-positioned and supported the arms so it looked like it was actually doing something rather than just standing around looking bored, and I sculpted Sentinel Eternal symbols over the Khador ones (like my Sentinel Eternal space marines and other 40K models, I wanted my own "chapter" in Warmachine, and I decided to just stick with Sentinels Eternal rather than try to think up something iron-kindoms-ish. They transcend space, time, and gaming systems!).

So far I've just thrown paint on my Warjacks in the quickest way possible as I don't really care about the models. But because I actually like the Spriggan model, I wanted to take the time and effort to give it a paint job that I actually liked. I've painted lots of blue and the rest of my jacks are red, so I thought I'd go for a white colour scheme. I thought a winter camo scheme would be interesting.

Well, it seems that winter camo tends to use light grey as a base, so I mixed up about two parts white with one part light grey to try to get a really light grey, then I spent hours and hours building up to a smooth coat. But first I had painted the metal parts as I was planning one washing and drybrushing them first, plus it helped me "block out" the model so I would know what colours went where.

But because I figured I would end up washing the rest of it in the same colour, and the model has some rather hard to reach nooks and crannies, I decided I would wash the whole thing in one go at the end. So I ended up drybrushing the unwashed metal to little effect, then spending hours and hours painting multiple layers (it took at least three) of light grey in between the metal details (when you paint this thing you start to realise just how many bolts and screws it has scattered around...) in an effort to get a smooth coat.

Once I had a smooth coat I was quite unhappy as the colour ended up being very similar to unpainted plastic, which I hate - I don't want a model that I've spent hours painting to look at casual glance like it isn't painted at all. Plus, I was regretting using grey rather making the basecoat white, as I liked the idea of it looking very bright and clean. I didn't have much choice but to press on and hope for the best though.

The next step was the camo pattern. I first thought to use the camo pattern I had used on my scouts, but I did a test on some spare plastic and I realized that would be far too crowded. At this point I started to understand the problem: most of what we do when painting is to make the form and detail of a miniature "pop", but the purpose of camo is to break up the form and hide the detail. So what I needed to do was find some sort of camo pattern that did the opposite of what camo actually does.

After a number of test and internet searches, I settled on using large simple spots of colour with lots of empty space between them. Because the spots were larger than the "scale" of detail, they don't interfere with our ability to resolve that detail. Plus, I found that by drawing the spots on edges and corners so they "cut off" along those edges, it actually helped to define those edges - at least it didn't hide them the way the it would if I stayed away from the edges or continued smoothly across them.

Painting spots in a darker grey was easy, but building up to a pure white was as expected very painful, even over a light grey it typically took four coats or more. But eventually I had the main body and all the armoured bits painted up. The hands and weapons I had already painted in simple metallic tones and even varnished, so all that was left was to shade and hightlight.

I had tested some methods of shading on my test piece, and wasn't happy with anything. Quickshade gave everything a warm tint, while I was going for cold winter colours. I tried various mixes of black wash with medium or varnish, and in the end I settled on a 2:1 mix of medium to wash as being the best compromise; it seemed to flow well enough over the flat surfaces without darkening them too badly, while being dark enough to shade recesses.

I considered adding shade directly into recesses and cleaning up the mess afterwards, but I thought it would still look flat and I just didn't think it I would be able to do it without a ton of cleanup needed afterwards. So instead I decided to go ahead and just throw it over the whole thing, then edge-highlight afterwards.

I started applying the wash on the small bits; the shields and shoulder pads. The results were encouraging,although it didn't spread out quite as smoothly as I had hoped, and the grey shades ended up too close together, the results I felt were acceptable. Then I moved on to the main body.

It was a disaster. I'd used up all of my first batch of wash on the bits, and had to mix up another lot for the body (two actually), and I don't know if it's because I got the mix wrong or if it was the larger area of the armour plates, but it came out very splotchy. It looked awful; after all my work it just looked a mess. I was extremely dissapointed.

It was late at night on a sunday at this point, so I had to leave it be. But I couldn't sleep; I'm not sure if it was the disappointment or the caffeine I had drunk to give me the focus to keep painting all day, but I gave up and decided to have another look.

After mulling it over, I thought that perhaps a light white drybrush could help somehow - it's not like I had anything to lose at this point, right? Well, the results were terrible. It now looked like a model that had been painted grey and heavily drybrushed white and nothing else; all my work just disappeared into a mess that looked like it had been thrown together in five minutes by someone who didn't give a damn. I couldn't even bear the thought of putting something so ugly on the table, so I ended up spraying a heavy layer of white primer over the whole thing just so I could use it while I tried to decide what to do.

You can see the camo pattern on the shields, which don't look too bad even after the wash, but the main body looked much worse and after a drybrush was just a complete disaster.

Close-up: you can still see some traces of the camo, but if anything it just makes it look worse.

Bleh.

You see, normally I would strip the paint off and try again. But the problem is stripping the paint usually weakens and dislodges superglue and softens and damages greenstuff, and there was so much gluing and greenstuff involved in this model that the idea of trying to put it all together again just made me want to give up on the whole thing. Even if only a few parts seemed to come off when stripping, I would not be confident about the strength of some joints (like those stupidly spindly upper arms), and the last thing I would want is magnets slipping out of place and stuff after the model is painted.

Anyway, I hit the internet in search of a way to strip paint without damaging the greenstuff or superglue, and it looks like I may have found something, so I'm going to give that a go soon. It's just disheartening to put so much work into this thing only to have it come out so poorly.