TheChirurgeon's Road Through 2026, Part 15: 11th Edition Curveballs

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and competitive progress through 2026. Last time around I was talking about my time at Adepticon and a quick game I was able to get in to test the rules on the new Defiler and Kravek Morne. Unfortunately, I then spent most of that week traveling again, cutting short my time and ability to get in more games, plus it was Easter weekend, which was mostly occupied with family time and egg hunts.

So this past week was more of a hobby progress week. The good news is that I also get to talk about some ongoing projects which finally hit their embargo date.

Kravek Morne and the Mutilators

This isn't just a sick band name; its's also something I've been working on from a hobby standpoint. The new Kravek Morne model was the first thing I painted out of the new Eye of Terror models, in part because I really liked the model and in part because it was one dude and I could finish painting him fairly quickly.

Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

I'm really happy with how he turned out, and I'm glad I did some extra work on his base. My Iron Warriors are notably on different basing schemes from my other Chaos armies, in that they're on muddy wasteland bases painted using Blackfire Earth texture paint. I like the look this gives them but it doesn't lend itself as well to adding tufts and snow. I'm still figuring out what I want to do when I'm not adding rubble to those bases. Maybe I will do tufts; not sure yet.

The only downside to painting Iron Warriors is that while I think he turned out great and the model looks great in person, the army just isn't flashy enough to pull awards. The upside to knowing this is that it frees me up to not put quite so much work into them, but that doesn't amount to much time in the grand scheme of things when I still have to paint an entire army of the guys.

For the Mutilators, I'm painting them with the same scheme I did for my Helbrute and Heldrake; namely, doing their flesh a deep red. This gives a welcome pop of color to the models which I think looks great and makes them appear more sinister. This is just Word Bearers Red > Mephiston Red > Evil Sunz Scarlet with some occasional shading of Carroburg Crimson. The Mutilators seem like they're going to paint up faster than the Obliterators, owing to not having nearly as many protruding bullets and doodads from their armor.

That just leaves the Defiler, and spoilers: I'm doing him as an Iron Warriors Defiler. I've opted for ectoplasma chest, eviscerator nipples, and baleflamer + electroscourge arms. I don't think the Defiler can do enough with melee if he doesn't have the scourge, so that one's always sticking around.

I'm also still making small headway on my Red Corsairs, and plan to get a few of those done this week.

11th Edition Terrain

Games Workshop unveiled 11th edition at Adepticon a few weeks ago and have been drip-feeding us tidbits about the game ever since. This week they dropped a fairly big bomb with the new terrain layouts, showcasing what they'll look like and what new area terrain templates we'll need. Specifically:

Four large rectangles – 7” x 11.5”
Two large right-angle triangles – 8” x 11.5”
Four medium rectangles – 6” x 4”
Two long lines – 10” x 2.5”
Four short lines – 6” x 2”

I'm glad they've released these so early - it gives players, tournament organizers, and third party manufacturers a ton of time to prep for the new edition and make sure they have the right materials on hand, even if I have some qualms about their placement on the table.

I decided to go ahead and start working on my own set. My local GW store made terrain mats by cutting apart folding 40k boards; I think this is a great idea and I have so many kill team boards lying around that it made sense to do the same.

The big four-fold mats like the one which came with Kill Team: Shadowhunt are ideal for this, as they offer big areas to be cut and fewer folds. Of course, as I started on this I immediately realized the big issue: The folded sections even on this mat are 11"x15", which means they're too short to cut into two 11.5"x7" boards. This is absolutely hateful, and there's no reason GW couldn't have made these area terrain mats 11x7 instead. Had they done that, I could have made an entire table worth of mats using only a single kill team board.

As-is, the odd man out is the 11.5"x10" middle piece, which gets cut diagonally with an 8" and a 2" side. It's important to note that this Kill Team board is reversible, so if for whatever reason I need to flip these triangles, that's already set up.

Otherwise after I cut the other three 11.5"x7" mats I'll need to cut a fourth out of a new board, which will annoyingly have a different visual texture. I cannot tell you how much I hate this.

The upside is that I already have four 4"x6" terrain mats from my 9th and 10th edition game board, so those are covered. Once I have the cuts done, it's just a matter of laying them out and trying to match the GW terrain diagrams. I'm not quite there - it looks like the Sector Manufactorum ruins are a bit too large compared to whatever GW set is being used, but I like the amount of blocking they do for line of sight.

Prometheum pipes make for great terrain on the narrow pieces, and I'm going to need to do more small ruin chunks, both for the corners of the bigger ruins and the smaller bases now.

This feels smaller in a lot of ways than the existing terrain layouts, but from a "seeing through or around ruins" standpoint it's more dense. It'll be interesting to play on, that's for sure. I have some games queued up for the next few days and I'm contemplating trying one with the new 11th edition terrain rules and some of the other things we've been told to see how they feel. If I end up doing that, I'll let you know.

Final Thoughts

That does it for this week. It was light on games and heavier on hobby but I'm trying to stay on top of things so I've queued up multiple games before next week. I don't have a ton of events on the schedule yet - Dallas is my next target, and it's not until late in May, so a lot of what I'm doing right now is just trying to keep up on my game counts and know how the meta is shaping up. Having based two Defilers, I'm considering going back to Death Guard and trying Mortarion's Hammer again. I have no idea if that's a good idea yet, but we'll certainly find out.

See you next week.

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