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

More ideas than time

Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that the internet is a good thing.

The Monsters Know What They're Doing looks fun and useful, but even just the blog title is wierdly both amazingly insightful and self-evident. It's bad enough when elf or dwarf characters are just disguised humans, but worse still if giant spiders are. A lot of the content is naturally D&D-centric, but even if it's only the title concept that stays with me then it's helped my gaming (negliable though that is currently).

Cthulhu Dark Ages seems like it would be a great leg-up if I ever do get to properly thinking about a Dark Ages WFRP (as presciently commented by Andy Bartlett at the time).

And is it just me that takes that thought, and then starts thinking about Dark Ages genestealers?

BOYL 2019 - some thoughts

BOYL has been and gone and I've finally found time to catch my breath. Given nearly two weeks have passed there's not much point in a pics and appreciation post so instead to cover that off I'll link to Asslessman's review on his Leadplague blog and an overview of the Saturday on Shadowkings (the only day I was able to attend this year).

I wanted though to set down my main impressions of the day. It also set off some broader thoughts about the games that work well and not so well at BOYL but that's a topic for another post. First to mention Warmaster, which I'm sure most people reading this have heard of, as indeed had I. Seeing it in action on this magnificent table was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. I'm increasingly becoming convinced that I want to treat WFB as a large skirmish game so I'd be keen to give Warmaster a go at scratching the "ranked up units" itch.

The thing I actually played though was the Realm of Chaos table, which was a good game but not the one I expected. There was lots going on on the table, with warpstone lumps bringing in extra mutations, shrines and other landmarks to interact with and civilians to capture.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves with fun goings on, outrageous dice rolls but mostly just a background for admiring little lead people and generally sharing the hobby with other like-minded gamers. My regretful conclusion though is that Realm of Chaos isn't the game for me... I love the extra detail and background the books bring, and the warband generation and advancement aspect is undoubtedly fun. However the battles are what sink it for me - with the small size of the warbands and the relative power of the champions after even a couple of rewards or mutations it very much fits into the Herohammer mould, which just isn't my thing.

Rather than ending on a negative note I wanted to mention in passing one magical aspect of BOYL which is that of having the creators wandering the venue. Tony Ackland was there with some of his portfolio, John Blanche judged the painting competition, Rick Priestley and Nigel Stillman watched games being played with their rules (sometimes several editions at once!), Kev Adams was sculpting for charity and of course the Ansells host the whole thing. It makes for a slightly surreal but very special day.

Are we the baddies?

One of the warbands I rolled up for BOYL has a dark elf champion. Since he gets chaos armour as a reward I needed to find an elf-type figure in heavy armour which was a bit of a struggle. I settled on the rather lovely Evil Knight from Midlam Miniatures. He's slightly too tall which I'm doing my best to get over, a bigger issue was the theatrical raised fist which I resolved by repositioning it slightly, drilling through it and giving him a halbard to hold.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to paint a classic Khorne colour scheme - usually I try to go for generic schemes to give me flexibility but I can't see me using this figure for anything else, as a non-Khorne elf champion (without chaos armour) I can represent with the figure on the left.

I don't think I've put him up on the blog before, I finished him off after BOYL a few years ago but forgot to post about him when I got back. I see dark elves as embittered exiled sea / high elves so he's a standard elf warrior with gloomy, but again generic, colours, and a shield design out of the high elf list in Warhammer Armies.

Let's see how my new Khorne champion fairs tomorrow!

Four human followers of chaos

So I did manage to finish these in time for BOYL... now I have just one champion to complete and I'm ready!

Comparing the Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned followers tables is interesting. For humans the former gives the option of light or heavy armour, a spear or a bow, and a shield. The latter table is "slightly different ... and better reflects the current range of Citadel Miniatures" or, to put another way, better reflects our setting.

Previously when I've generated human followers I've gone with the heavy armour option so I could use my chaos warrior miniatures. I wanted instead to get some bow-armed figures painted to give me more tactical options, as running a very small warband can be a bit dull.

The only humans I have with shields and bows are Khan on the right from the C01 Barbarians range, and a chaos thug which I didn't want to use as he has a near-identical posture. They're a bit of a mixed bag but I think that's fair enough for the collection of followers who might end up in a champion's retinue: the Marauder thug is clearly headed down that path while the two Renaissance archers are probably more recent converts from one of the backgrounds that the Lost and the Damned table provides - brigands or unemployed mercenaries perhaps.

They're very different sizes - the classic Citadel / Marauder figures being much bulker and the Front Rank archer (third from left) noticably skinnier as well as slightly taller. The Foundry (ex-Citadel) archer on the left is really quite tiny, after I first bought these my feeling was that actually they were too small to use but I'm coming around to the odd sizes being natural human variation. He's been modified with a dark ages warrior head to make the historical figures look less orderly, of all of them I think I'm happiest with how he's come out.

Now to try and finish my spare champion...

Why do they play Khorne's game?

In preparation for BOYL I've been playing the best bit of Realm of Chaos - rolling up some warbands. As is my way I've been over-thinking the setting, rather than just enjoying the game as it's presented.

My thought is, it's clear why Khorne draws his followers to a big mosh in the chaos wastes, testing them to destruction, but what are the rest of them doing there? It's a question for stronger minds than mine how Nurgle or Slaanesh would test their followers to destruction, but following the theme of the Blood God (and presumably strengthening him in the process) surely isn't it?

Three (very slow) chaos dwarf renegades

My first painted figures of the year...

Progress on these has been painfully slow, at times due to low motivation but mainly because life has been really hectic. I look with envy at people who can say "work's been really busy... here's a platoon I've finished", but that's not something I can manage at the moment.

I'm quite pleased with how The Master turned out, and Marik on the right is a nice simple job, but Pulper on the left is a very busy figure that I'm not totally sure about visually. He looks OK in these pictures but from a tabletop distance he's a bit of a mishmash. He's an iconic figure though that I'm glad to have painted, in fact this whole set has been a favourite of mine since admiring the ones my mate Ed owned back in the day.

A minor milestone is that I now have 5 chaos dwarves, which handly is an average roll of 2d4 for the Realm of Chaos followers table. It's also a convenient number for another project I have in mind.

Next stop is some humans for my chaos warband for BOYL in a month's time - I'll need to be a lot quicker painting those than I managed with these dwarves!