Firing the blog up again

Having come home from BOYL 2019 all revved up to do more hobby stuff I instead got fixated on the then newly-released World of Warcraft Classic.

I've been keeping tabs on the hobby via social media and hopefully now I'm slowly dragging myself out of computer gaming to proper gaming again...! Social media has been a bit of a roller coaster over the last several years, there are older posts on this blog which reference discussions on G+, now sadly long gone. I had a decent hobby feed on Twitter / X for a while, and now I'm pretty active on Bluesky since Twitter and its owner became unbearable.

The lesson from all of this seems that your own blog (or whatever) is pretty important as a long term record, and also that it's worth using it to make decent notes of stuff that you liked as the originals may go away at no notice. So I thought I'd fire up this blog, and I was pleased to see that a fair bit of my old blogroll is still active (so there's another bunch of stuff that I'd been missing).

Trying to get my head around this tech again. One of my guys from the long-ago Fallout game

I need to work out my actual gaming and painting plan, but back in October I made a start on some Orks, partly for a longer-term project that I have in mind but also to check I still knew which end of a brush to hold.

 

Two fairly basic 40k Orks. Not proper Oldhammer but I had them to hand

Hoping that 2017 is more productive...

It's slightly odd looking back on my 2016 goals post, as the year didn't turn out anything like I expected. I played a lot less Frostgrave than I was expecting, but rather more Warhammer and a fair bit of Dragon Rampant so I'm happy on the gaming front. But I was concious for most of the way through that I wasn't painting enough - I never really got into gear with painting my SAGA vikings and it was all downhill from there. As I know I'm a slow painter it's difficult to motivate myself when I'm in the early stages of an army, which is a big part of the reason I'm not attempting to go with dwarves for Snicket's challenge.

Painting

I managed 20 figures last year, which is my worst total since I returned to the hobby in 2013 (and even then I only started painting in the spring). I'm refusing though to learn the obvious lesson from this, and since I'm aiming to have painted 33 figures by the end of July I'm hoping for a total of 45+, namely -

• 1000 points of chaos (33 figures)
• Finishing touches to my 1000 points of orcs (5 or 6 figures, and maybe a second stab at a few I'm not happy with)
• As many vikings as I can manage

I'm hoping the target of BOYL and the small and varied units will see me through the first part, and the prospect of "finishing" a force the second part. But given that this year is looking rather hectic on the Real Life front then time will tell...

For the first time in a while my forum avatar is not even on the list - but probably 2018 will be the year of the dwarf.

Blogging

Looking back it seems somewhere in the 20+ articles range is about my limit for a year. This year I'm trying a different approach - rather than have a target number of posts I'm trying working to a schedule. My limiting factor will be preparation time, so I may well revert back to just "this is what I've painted", even though that's something I'd rather avoid...

Things I'd like to be writing about

I'm hoping that at some point Real Life and the remorseless paint queue will get to the state where I've time to blog about subjects beyond my latest paint job or wargame that I've played, as I'd always planned to do. If that ever happens there are four main topics I'd like to spend more time on:

• The early medieval period as a game setting
• The WFRP careers system in an early medieval setting
• Wargame campaign systems
• A grimmer Logan's World

The early medieval period as a game setting

I've seen Warhammer's Old World critisised as unoriginal and derivative but to me it's a genius piece of world design. The design criteria appears to have been "how do we fit all of our historical miniatures in" but I enjoy digging into the real world history that it draws from, be it the Holy Roman Empire or the Spice Road. Currently a lot of my gaming is Dark Ages early medieval related so naturally I've been reading up on that, and in many ways it's as much of a breath of fresh air from the generic pseudo-medieval setting that I grew up playing D&D in as a more exotic setting such as Tékumel. For example, what happens when there are no inns (or pretty much no towns for that matter)?

The WFRP careers system in an early medieval setting

WFRP is my favourite system of the admittedly relatively few RPGs I've played, and one of its great strengths is the way the careers system embeds the character into the world. However it means that to use the game in a different setting the careers system needs to be tailored to that setting. There are a couple of settings that I'd like to try it in one day: Middle Earth (which despite the Peter Jackson films should be Anglo Saxon in flavour, or so I understand) and the "time of Sigmar" (which seems to be early medieval / Ostrogoth-ish, both according to the Brief History of WFRP Time and this fantastic concept piece by Stefan Kopinski).

Wargame campaign systems

I've rambled about this before, and I'm looking forward to any insights that Tomahawk Studios forthcoming The Age of the Wolf offers.

A grimmer Logan's World

I'm trying hard to avoid being drawn back into Warhammer 40K, not least because of the paint queue implications but also that the the setting's not very attractive - but in a certain way it's also deeply fascinating. I've various ideas milling around in my head, the most recent of which was triggered by thoughts on the Oldhammer forum about a Logan's World game at this year's BOYL. The thing I find interesting about the game universe is the technology-as-religious-dogma aspect: science has been discarded, artefacts are built via ritual, and fear and superstition are positively medieval. To my mind, if a world was cut off from the Imperium then it wouldn't spawn an 80s mirror-shades view of the future, it would result in something much grimmer (and far more interesting).

Belated goals post

I intended to write this in January - not a good omen...

Painting

My main motivation for this post is to keep me focussed. Having fallen very short of my target last year I'm hoping that a regular diet of gaming this year will keep me painting, so on pure numbers I should do OK. However I have a tendancy to be distracted by fascinating new projects and so waste time planning rather than executing and also not getting far down any one road (as my "goals" posts for the last few years will attest). There's loads of things I'd love to spend some time on but they'll have to wait for another year...

• Complete my SAGA Viking warband (25 further figures)
• An apprentice to go with my chaos sorcerer to enable me to field a starter "evil" Frostgrave warband
• My Oldhammer forum avatar (still!)
• An orc warlord, 7 orcs with crossbows, an archer, a warrior and 3 wolves to field up to 36 Dragon Rampant points (or a bit of variety in my 24 point warbands)
• A wizard and apprentice, 3 dwarves and a Norse "thug" to allow me to field a dwarf / Norse Frostgrave warband

And depressingly, that's all I'll likely get finished this year - and that's assuming I paint twice as much as last year!

Rab's rather impressive Geekstarter tracking also inspired me to add a couple of stretch goals -

1. A spare Viking warlord - even now he's painted my existing one is bound to get killed eventually, so for narrative purposes it'd be good to have some options. And as SAGA likes the warlord based differently I can't really substitute one of my other troops
2. An orc apprentice and some lesser armoured orcs for a third Frostgrave warband. My challenge here is that Frostgrave is geared towards a number of lightly armed and armoured soldiers bulking out the warband, and pretty much all my orcs would be at the more expensive end of the scale. I could always do "counts as" but I don't really like doing that at the warband scale, which means seeking out appropriate figures or doing conversions, both of which are time consuming

Blogging

I'm going to try again at my "more than weekly" target. My other main goal is to have at least ⅓ of my posts not be either "here's something I painted" or battle reports. Not only are there other things I want to write about, but also posts in the former category tend to get delayed while the painting is finished, so scuppering my goals.

Speaking of which, the reason this post is finally seeing the light of day is that I've painted the orc champion given to me by Erny over two years ago

And with some of his minions -

And that's about it for goals. My gaming is ticking along nicely at the moment, with plenty of dark ages and fantasy stuff going on at my club, and hopefully some Oldhammering lined up for March. And I daren't collect much at the moment, given how slow my painting is going...

My 2015 - hobby review

The second half of 2015 didn't go quite as hoped for me from a hobby perspective, but fortunately looking at the year overall is a somewhat rosier picture.

Gaming

The highlight of the year for me was BOYL, and within that (amongst lots of other good stuff) the Fallout / Rogue Trader game.

So I thought I should review that aspect first, and actually things were pretty good -

• The aforementioned BOYL, and especially my caravanners' outing there, was about the perfect gaming experience
• Back in May I had a great day chaos warband-ing with a fine bunch of Oldhammerers
• As hoped I spent a bit more time at my local club and got drawn into SAGA amongst other things
• And in October I got to visit Tékumel courtesy of Barry Blatt

There's always room for improvement, especially in the quantity of gaming, but on the quality front it was spot on. 8/10

Painting

Actually things aren't so bad here, if I take the long view -

• Inspired by the guide over on Lead Plague I finally made myself a wet palette, and they really are as game-changing as I'd read repeatedly that they were.
• As a result my blending has greatly improved - the wet palatte making the mechanical aspect almost trivial, and my technique is getting better with practice. Still no where near some of the beautiful work I see out on various blogs, but maybe 10 years from now...
• On the volume front the year was a bit of a failure though. Depending on how I count my progress with the Vikings I've done about 24 models for the year, or 4/10 of my target

Purely on the quantity front I was going to give myself a much lower score, but allowing for the first two points that would seem a bit harsh. But the second half of the year was seriously unproductive, and my colour mixing often doesn't result in what I had in my mind's eye (although that too is improving). 5/10

Collecting

I'm thinking I should drop the collecting category - in a way I now think of it as "increasing my list of things still to paint"! But for the sake of the review -

• The hobgoblin thing didn't get very far. I basically want to create a force of Fantasy Tribe hobgoblins, without paying through the nose on eBay. And unfortunately FT hobgoblins don't really look like anything else. My current conclusion is that it'll require a fair bit of converting (and hence time), and between the time factor and the draw of the Fallout game I shelved my plan to get these ready for BOYL, since which they've been firmly on the back burner. File as a project for some day...
• I've also not yet had the One Ring come to the top of my acquisition list

Score: 1/10

Blogging

I was no where near my target here - a bit more variety early on, but decidely thin on the ground throughout. I have plans here for the coming year, but the limiting factor will always be time / priorities. I am finding it really useful though to look back and see the journey. 3/10

My gaming 2014 - not quite as planned

Apparently this sort of post is meant to be written on New Year's Eve - instead I was trying to get a group of savage orcs finished... and in fact didn't manage either. I'm still going to count them against my 2014 tally though!

So, how did I do against my so-called unambitous goals from this time last year? It seems I wasn't unambitious enough!

Collecting

Buying stuff continues to be the easy bit of the hobby, although rather haphazard - partially due to the vagueries of eBay, but also down to inconsistent focus.

It looks from the figures I've bought as though I'm focussing on Empire and hobgoblins, and for hobgoblins that's true - although with several false starts. The Empire figures are just down to a splurge while at Foundry for BOYL 2014, it's just possible they'll become my first "good guy" army, although I'd prefer for that to be dwarves. My firm preference for the old Perry dwarves, and the eBay prices for these, mean that stunties are still a distant dream.

On the RPG front I've picked up a lot of the older books I was after - Death on the Reik and Power Behind the Throne, as well as Moldvay's D&D Basic and Expert rules. The last of these gave me quite a nostalgia trip when it arrived in the post, well worth the relatively modest outlay. On the new-but-old front I signed up to the Bethorm Kickstarter, so now have a toe-hold in that setting as well.

Score: 6/10

This year - more of the same -

• On the figures front I'm going to let myself dabble a bit - more in my projects post to come. But at a minimum I need to put together a hobgoblin force for this year's BOYL
• On RPGs it's time to focus on stuff from this decade - in particular The One Ring has caught my fancy.

Painting

My colour mixing has improved somewhat, mostly thanks to help from my wife who knows what she's doing on this front. I'm often not ending up with exactly the colour I was looking for, but at least in the right direction. I'm feel doing better on the planning side of things as well, although by leaning heavily on ideas from others in the community.

In terms of output it's a bit of a failure though - I'm only really at the 1000 point mark of painted orcs, and my avatar's not seen a brush in over a year. I've gone through productive and stagnant periods, although the latter often down to life being too busy rather than lack of motivation. Hopefully this will improve this year.

Score: 5/10

This year -

• Move to using a wet palette
• Blending not dry brushing where practical
• 60+ figures painted, including my forum avatar and some "good guys"

Gaming

A much busier year on the gaming front, but still it didn't seem full enough. I didn't manage a game of 2nd edition, and am still rather mixed up on the rules front, but I did manage both days of BOYL. 

Score: 6/10

This year -

• Keep up the Oldhammer, while becoming more involved with my local club

Blogging

Not a good year - less than half of my target output, and while I did branch out slightly to looking at the Old World setting from an RPG rather than wargaming point of view, still focused exclusively on the Warhammer world.

Score: 4/10

This year -

• Try again at last year's plan. Focus on regular and structured blogging, that's not beholden to my painting output

A year's worth of painting

I'm in retrospective mode at the moment. To be more honest I was planning to be in 6-month retrospective mode in July, although as with so many other things it's been pushed back to "after BOYL".

I'm not sure I have enough stuff painted yet to qualify for the Army Shots thread on the Oldhammer forum, and my output (and quality) pale in comparison to Orlygg's three years' worth of output, but in the last year I've gone from this -

to this -

Not an army yet, especially as I wouldn't be cheesy enough to field two war machines in a force that size, but a decent allied force for a battle or siege.

At my current rate I'll be at my BOYL target (24 more figures!) by about the end of the year, and my year target by who knows when...? But progress is being made!

Looking forward and back

Maybe not the most original post subject ever. I'm even going to steal a topic list from Blue.

• Collecting 
• Painting
• Gaming
• Blogging

Collecting

Collecting isn't really my problem at the moment so much as painting...

Having discovered eBay and trades on the Oldhammer forum I've pretty quickly managed to get all the orcs I need for now to make a decent force. There's a few specific miniatures I'd like one day, but I'm trying hard to resist just orcs I like, and it's hard to justify that it's orcs I need.

I'd like to be building up a dwarf force as well but unfortunately I'm mainly after Citadel Perry dwarves and eBay prices seem steeper than I'm prepared to pay. The Skaven were a "too good to resist" buy - I'm planning one day to put together Gnawdoom Greyseer's warband from Vengence of the Lichemaster. In fact, about the only standard Warhammer armies I can't see myself collecting a few of one day are Brettonians and Slann (phew). But I'm luckily not an obsessive collector, and the most expensive sculpts I'm after are a few Jess Goodwin ogres so while it'll I wouldn't really like to think about the total cost involved it all ought to be managable one day...

There are also a fair few old (and not so old) RPG books and modules I'd like to get my hands on at some point.

Goals for 2014:

• Put together a 1000+ point non-orc force
• Acquire some non-wargaming stuff

Painting

I have an odd relationship with miniature painting - I like finishing a set of miniatures, and when given the chance I find it relaxing, but as so often it's the case of "I need to paint these figures for [reason]" I often also find it a chore. On the other hand, at least with a deadline I get stuff done!

As well as getting to the point where I have a painted force to play with, I'd also like to get to the point where the need to paint such-and-such is gone, and I can paint what I fancy at the time.

Goals for 2014:

• Improve my colour mixing
• Improve my colour scheme planning
• Finish a 1500+ point orc force with a few variations
• Finish painting my forum avatar

Gaming 

I played 4 games of Warhammer this year, which is about 4 more than I expected. The insidious thing about this hobby is it's easy to feel involved (collecting, painting, and reading) while not actually playing. But hopefully, having found other people who enjoy this little niche, I can get a few more games in this year.

Goals for 2014:

• Properly re-learn the 2nd and 3rd edition Warhammer rules, without mixing them
• At least one game of 2nd ed
• At least one day of this year's Oldhammer meet in Nottingham

Blogging

I wonder if there's anyone who resolves to blog less next year?

My output for this year has been pretty low, even with the artificial boost of a battle report. I also need to broaden out from wargaming / miniatures stuff, as it was an RPG article that got me hooked back into the hobby in the first place.

Goals for 2014:

• Fairly regular posting (more than weekly, excluding battle reports)
• Some stuff about other worlds and other games

I've deliberately tried to keep these goals unambitious, what with having a family and job as well as a hobby, it'll be interesting this time next year to see if I was unambitious enough...