Road to Deadzone: Third Edition – Jonny’s Marauders

4th Oct 2021

Rob Burman



Hi I’m Jonny, you might remember me from such things as “the pumpkin giant” or “T’ northern fleet” of blogs past.

This time out, we are delving into the world of Deadzone! Back when I first started at Mantic, I painted up a Deadzone force for the start of Second Edition (now I feel old) and I’m excited to be doing so again for Third!

As Rob the Goblin King has gone AWOL on some crusade to paint something different, it’s up to me to take the throne in his absence, consider me the Prince John of Goblins (until some hooded  Nottingham Yorkshire bloke scuppers it *ducks to avoid projectiles*).

I really love the Gruntbot, it’s one of my favourite from the whole Deadzone/Warpath Universe so this is the main reason to start a Marauder strike team.

I then had the idea of making it entirely goblin-themed. The Kings of War goblin sprues are some of my most loved sets we do, so I wanted to incorporate them somehow. The part of the hobby I enjoy most is building and heavily converting miniatures, as you may has seen from my other work. With this in mind I have taken the goblin sprues and the stunning new halfling sprues from Kings of War and made lots of adorable goblin snipers! With these and several Gruntbots, the theme has become very steampunk and so that’s where I plan to take the paint scheme.

So to make the list legal, I will also take enough mawbeast troops to allow for all the snipers, gruntbots and also a stuntbot. This will roughly account to around 300 points and give me plenty of options.

I have used the hackpaws from the Kings of War Ratkin army as Mawbeasts, as again I’m a sucker for a conversion or too.

I plan to theme the bases as run down parts of a large city, think rough back alleys or shady parts of town. The exact place you’d expect to run into a pesky goblin or two.

I’m still quite a way off having everything built, let alone painted but I did take them along to the London Grand Tournament to build in my downtime when not running the stall, so hopefully when you’re reading this I’ll have it all built!

As I’m a sucker for punishment, should I get these finished in good time I’d also like to do a Plague team comprising of infected enforcers, again heavily kitbashed but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, I’m a slow painter.

Tune in next time to see if I’ve actually got any further!