WW#14 - Finished Scenery. Tau Leak. Indecision.

Monday 11th - Sunday 17th March 2013

Finally, a week where some reasonable hobby shit got achieved. I'm still not making as much headway on the backlog as I'd like but I didn't buy anything and actually finished a couple of bits.

My focus on scenery continued with me managing to not only complete the Aegis Defence Line I bought ages ago (sans quad gun though, that would be pushing it!) but also finished off the Honoured Imperium set. Both were a treat to paint and it's been a nice break from all the fine detail of actual models.

Now I think of it I did make a purchase at the very start of the week. I was listing my old bed on gumtree and thought I'd have a nose at what GW stuff people were offloading. I managed to find a bulk lot of White Dwarfs locally, £25 for almost a hundred issues. A few were duplicates but they were fairly tatty anyway so I don't mind. The issue I now have is storing them. I didn't take that kind of rapid expansion into consideration when I was planning the warrior lodge (Yes, that's the name I've settled on this week for the gaming room).

My tickets for Forge World Open day arrived and this sparked off my thoughts of rekindling a plan for a Heresy Army. I'd planned to just do Ultramarines, but got thinking about my friend starting a World Eaters force and how cool it would be if I did a legion from the Istvaan setting so we could use the campaign in Betrayal. I spent a couple of nights care fully planning a 1000 point list. Deathshroud, legion Contemptor etc. Then I finished Brotherhood of the Storm, the limited time BL novella. I'll try and do a review of it this week, it was great. This meant I could start on Know No Fear, which I'd been meaning to read for ages. Well this blew all thoughts of Nurgle out of the way, the blues in blue all the way! Another couple of nights planning a new 1k list and I was happy. Would be pricey but there wouldn't be any pesky postage.


The list was as follows -
Praetor with Thunderhammer and Boarding shield. I also gave him Pride of the Legion giving me Terminators and veterans as troop choices. This meant I wouldn't have to spend so many points on the basics and could pack in the good shit!
A five man Veteran squad with minimal upgrades. I was thinking that I could get some more exotic weapon choices when the list expanded past this mark.
Five Cataphractii Terminators. Again kept very basic.
A relic Contemptor with twin linked Autocannon.
A squad of 3 jetbikes. These are just plain cool.
Finally, a Land Raider Proteus. It's old school and pretty beefy.

A quite a nice all-round list I thought. I was all settled on it until I woke up on Sunday morning and checked the Shellcase, Tau photos had been leaked and they looked. Badass. Blurry, but most definitely badass. Well that was a fucking spanner in the works. They've rekindled a long time plan to use plenty of FW suits and drones, so that's my mind (probably) made up, a few XV-9's and and extra treats. And just in case you haven't seen them a million times already, here's the leaked shots.

The final bit of news was the preview of a new Black Library novella. Not limited edition, but direct only. It's called Shadowsun: The last of Kiru's Line. By a relatively new author, from what I can tell, it's some bit size blue goodness. I'll be reviewing it as soon as it comes through the door along with the new Fire Caste novel.

As always, cheers for reading.

WW#13 - Forge World, Scenery, and an actual game.

Monday 4th - Sunday 10th March 2013

Back to work this week, but the usual horridness of Monday was made better by the knowledge I'd be going home to play my first game with the Dark Angels. We played the kill points mission at 1500. I took Belial, deathwing, deathwing command, deathwing knights, a tactical squad and a dark talon. I was up against a hive tyrant with guard, trygon, some warriors and ravenors, a tyrannofex and lots more mini nids. I didn't record the whole match but here's the highlights. Belial did well deep striking but got taken down by the warriors. My plasma cannon blew himself up. The rift cannon was great but didn't get a chance to use the stasis bomb. The knights are a total beast in combat. We finished at the end of the fourth turn as it was getting late, we ended up drawing.

With that out of the way, what else happened this week? I got tickets for the ForgeWorld open day, I'm really excited to be going again this year to check out the Fall of Orpheus and whatever new Heresy goodies they've been working on.

Still thinking about the recent Blanchitsu articles I went for it and got myself a Cairn Wraith to convert into something Inquisitorial. Although I'm quite tempted to make him a Cryptek. Either way it's a neat little kit with plenty of potential. Whilst we're covering the purchasing of hobby supplies, I don't think I mentioned it last week but I grabbed the Honoured Imperium scenery set. I put it together but didn't get around to slapping any paint on it.

Speaking of painting I tried to carry on with the Tau gun drones and got half way through doing the guns then hit the wall, they're going to go back on the shelf until the new codex comes out. I then proceeded to work on some scenery. I dug out the moonscape craters and managed to finish them in a day. Also got a load of basecoating done on the Wall of Martyrs. So that's finally something finished!

To finish up, I thought I'd include some of the awesome stuff that FW has previewed over the past couple of newsletters. On the Warhammer Forge front they've finally put out the Dwarven Command unit, they look really cool, proper grim and grudge-bearing. The biggie though only got previewed today. The Necron Night Shroud Bomber. It's basically an uber-croissant! I like that it's pilotless, or at least that they're not on show. The finale is the Realm of Battle Tomb Citadel. It's been shown a few times previously in WIP form but we finally get to see the finished thing. It does look mighty impressive, but so is the £90 price tag. That's a whole 15 over their existing RoB section. I'll reserve judgement of it's value for when I see it.

Until next time, happy hobbying!

WW#12 - Mancave, Tau Gun Drones, Razarhawk.

Monday 25th February - Sunday 3rd March 2013

Yep, it was time for another week of annual leave! I was hoping that I'd be able to squeeze in some hobby time, but knew that most of my days would be taken up with finishing touches to the house.

The biggest thing to happen this week was the completion of the war room. Or mancave, I still haven't decided on its final designation.  My initial plans for an 8x4 table fell through when I realised I hadn't taken into account the door being able to open and close. A 6x4 it was then. The next hurdle would be obtaining wood that big. Wickes wouldn't/couldn't home deliver it so I went for three pieces of 4x2 chipboard and a shit load of legs from Ikea. Construction was really easy, and although the end products don't look like much on their own, when covered in my painted Realm of Battle boards I think it looks good.

The other project in my room was to finish unpacking all of my armies into the converted wardrobes. They're a lot deeper than my previous shelving solution so everything has space rather than being piled on top of each other. It's quite dark towards the back of the shelves, but no one is really going to be viewing them so it's all good.

With all of the housework out of the way it was time for some fun. First on the list was downloading Magic Duel of the Planeswalkers on my PS3 (my PSN should be either dijital_llama or dijitalllama if you'd like to add me). This sucked up a lot more time than I'd expected, especially some of the trickier problem solving games. By the time Thursday rolled around I still hadn't picked up a paintbrush, it was time to rectify that!

I got up way too early for a holiday and went into Cardiff with my girlfriend, did some loitering until GW opened up at 10. I would've gone to Firestorm but they don't open until 12 on Thurdays. I picked up a few paints I needed to work on some terrain, I also picked up one of the painting trays, as my old wooden version doesn't fit between the arms of my armchair (and it's used for storage of the growing collection of paints and tools. New equipment in hand I headed off home to work on the Honoured Imperium set, or maybe some more Wall of Martyrs. I couldn't find my large brush anywhere, disaster! Plans scuppered I grabbed the nearly models to hand, 13 Tau Gun Drones and set to work getting this random choice painted up. For such small models they took ages, and I've still only completed the 'shells' with the guns outstanding.

Saturday rolled around and I woke up wondering where my week had disappeared to. After a quick tidy up my mate picked me up and we headed to Cardiff Comic Expo. Our friend Ian was back from Ireland with his girlfriend Dani, they were launching issue #1 of their very own comic Razarhawk! We had a lovely chat catching up on all things geeky, and on life in rural Ireland, even contemplating playing 40k over skype somehow, and picked up a copy of the comic. After an hour or so looking round I also went for a book called 7string, from another (possibly local) artist. After one last visit to Razarhawks stand we returned home where the new reading material was digested and amazed at. If you have a minute please head over to their blog to see just how good it looks, here.

And so we reach the end of the week. More hobby progress made than in the preceding three weeks but still not a lot. However I do feel refreshed, and it's only about a month until my next one! Happy hobbying folks, catch you soon!