Colonel Schaeffer’s Last Chancers – “Fingers” and “Scope”

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Fingers" and "Scope"

It’s been quite a while since I’ve completed any of the Last Chancers, and so I took the opportunity this month to get this pair of models finished and off the desk after having been there for a loong time. One of the two continues the historical aspect of this group of models. “Fingers” here, who appears to from the “Bushmen of Serica” regiment is inspired in my opinion by Australian WWII troops. Lore-wise, “Fingers is an expert forager and petty thief who can get a hold of just about anything for a price.” I guess this is because to an unfortunately large number of people in the UK and US, Australians are all petty criminals who ride Kangaroos to work and dodge man-sized spiders and drop bears on the trip. Much like all Americans wear cowboy hats and walk around with an AR-15 and all Brits wear monocles and walk around with a cup of tea, and all Frenchmen wear those stripey shirts, a beret, a necklace of garlic while halding a baguette, and all Scots are kilt-wearing drunkards… 👀

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Fingers" and "Scope"

Anywho, the second model, “Scope” is a trained sniper and expert marksman. “His crime was going AWOL, for reasons unknown, but it is suspected to be related to the assassination of Chief Arbitrator Abraxtes.” So basically, he’s a sniper who snipes and maybe he sniped someone a bit important. Basically a Tabula Rasa/blank slate. Since he’s a sniper, I gave him a nice camo pattern loosely based on Flecktarn.

Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers - "Fingers" and "Scope"

And that’s that for this pair. As a collection of models, Fingers has some rockets in his backpack so he would have originally functioned as a loader model for Rocket Girl, though when these models were released that woul dhave had no actual in-game effects as Heavy Weapon teams were composed of two distinct models, one of which was the gunner with the big gun and the other funcitonally just being a rifleman in the squad. Not sure how that works these days with the multibased weapon teams. I haven’t played 40k for quite some time and Imperial Guard for even longer.

Hopefully it won’t take another 14 months before I get the next pair of these painted! There’s just Rocket Girl, Ox and the Colonel left – so a chance I could get them done before the end of 2023!

Cthulhu: Death May Die – Sergeant Ian Welles & Alex Parker

Cthulhu: Death May Die Investigators - Sergeant Ian Welles & Alex Parker

Once again I failed in my “two per month” quest to get these Cthulhu Death May Die investigators done – with only Sergeant Welles finished in August. This meant I needed to paint three in September to catch up. So I’ve only now just finished the model I was initially painting alongside Welles – Alex Parker. This also means to get back on track I need to finish two more of these things in the next four days. No pressure, then!

Cthulhu: Death May Die Investigators - Sergeant Ian Welles & Alex Parker

The first of these two then is the previously mentioned Sergeant Ian Welles. He’s a U.S. Army Veteran of The Great War from Maine who now fights against the gibbering eldritch hordes. No relation to any other U.S. Army Veterans who hail from Maine that frequent this blog, I’m sure. The artwork shows the model wearing puttees, but – once again in this series of models – the digital sculptor, while talented, didn’t know what he was looking at in the artwork and just did a bit of “whatever” and sculpted Welles with essentially long socks (and another webbing belt with no eyelets), so I had to “paint them in”. The blame also has to fall on the CMON Art Editor for this project as well for the regular sculpt mistakes, but

Cthulhu: Death May Die Investigators - Sergeant Ian Welles & Alex Parker

The second of these models is Alex Parker, who comes from Brisbane, Australia. Alex’s backstory is pretty uninspired, as I’d expect from a token Australian character. He apparently was a curious child who became a curious adult who got involved in various criminal investigations and eventually unearthed a cult. I enjoyed painting his (military?) clothing with the exception of his argyle socks, which are inexplicably visible with his weird short-legged pants. Huh. Over the two models I based their clothing colours on the artwork, rather than trying to match early 20th Century uniforms.