3-D Roleplay Con & House Mortimer

3d-roleplay-con

3-D Roleplay Con III

Poster by Pellet Factory

Every year in the month of May, my good friend Hank Richardson puts on an Oldhammer convention in Portland, Oregon, USA. 3-D Roleplay Con (now in its third year!) celebrates the boxed games, models, and tabletop wargaming systems published by Games Workshop, Citadel Miniatures, and all the associated designers, sculptors and artists that were active in the business prior to 1992.

It’s my favorite hobby gathering of the year and I am tremendously excited for the event. It’s scheduled for May 19-21st, 2023, and you can get tickets here if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, I was inspired to create a nasty bit of artwork promoting the event (I had a t-shirt in mind when designing this but it’ll make a nice sticker, too), inspired by drippy, evil-looking sludge metal logos. It’s all hand-drawn.

The inked pencil drawing
Vectorized, distressed, and prettied-up

It’s likely that some of you will recognize the Chaos Warrior and Space Marine characters from the covers of Warhammer Fantasy Battle (Third Edition) and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, respectively. They felt like the right ones to include, since the 3-DR Con crew’s love for those two games is tremendously great.


Imperial Knight House Mortimer

My most-recently completed set of miniatures is this five-man squad of Muster Privates from the Ion Age range of miniatures over at Alternative Armies. They are pictured here in the trenches of an absolutely beautiful terrain piece crafted by Hank; we’ll be utilizing the piece again at the convention for the big Rogue Trader scenario.

The Commissar is there to make sure the troops stay in line…

I’ve painted the troopers in yellow and purple, the colors of House Mortimer, an obscure Knight House referenced first (and only) in an article by Andy Chambers, published in White Dwarf magazine, issue 126 (June 1990). The article is a great read and introduces the concept of Knights, chivalrous warriors that pilot towering mechanical machine-suits. Interestingly, the rules portion of the article is actually for the first edition of Adeptus Titanicus, Games Workshop’s first foray into smaller-scale (very loose 6mm scale) ground combat. So Titans came before Knights, and both existed as models in 6mm scale before they were later scaled up to Warhammer 40,000’s 28mm scale. Some deep trivia, if you care for such things.

Down at the bottom there, see? House Mortimer. But that looks like… Genestealer symbols and iconography? Surely not, they’re an Imperial Knight House! I don’t believe anything further was done with the idea. I’m painting my collection of Genestealer Hybrid and Space Marine miniatures for use in games of Space Hulk and Rogue Trader, and I figured the yellow and purple scheme and questionable alignment of House Mortimer would allow me to field the Men-at-Arms with either the yellow Lamenters Space Marines or the purple Genestealers.

Note the hand-painted banner. 🙂

I will likely paint more of these fellas – the sculpts are beautiful (the prevailing theory is that they are by my all-time favorite sculptor, Bob Olley), but as I won’t be using these figures at the convention in May, they are moving down the priority list.

I’m also exploring the idea of using reference cards for games of Rogue Trader. I’ve designed this one directly after the classic Citadel Combat Cards, adding a handful of new stats and substituting new icons along the bottom for Leadership, Intelligence, Cool, and Willpower. Those icons (and the heart, indicating Wounds) were plucked from Google Images but I will end up replacing them with original illustrations at some point. I’ll do some more work for the reverse side, which will display the model’s equipment and its various statistics and special rules.


The Commissar miniature is also worthy of note. It’s a converted miniature from the i-Kore VOID range (a Junkers Enforcer, 11211b). I lopped off his head and snipped away his pistol and replaced them with old plastic bits from the classic Citadel Miniatures/Games Workshop Imperial Guard set (RTB7). I sculpted a new coat collar and some sunglasses for him, and voilà!

This is Commissar Arnold Stallone. His brother is Sylvester Schwarzenegger.
RTB7, sculpted by the Perry twins, I believe!

I could go on about all of this stuff, but instead I will end the post with an admittedly-blurry image of the first plastic Imperial Guard models that Games Workshop and Citadel Miniatures ever released. A friend kindly provided me with enough of these for a platoon for a very reasonable price, and I’m excited to get to painting them in the colors of House Mortimer at a later time. For now, when I sit down to hobby, I’ll be focusing on those Genestealers and the sad, sad Lamenters Space Marines. Until next time!

3 responses to “3-D Roleplay Con & House Mortimer”

  1. Excellent read. Glad to have something like this written up and supplied with beautiful imagery and models to help educate me on some old-school class.

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