Another long hiatus and a New Blog

I'm not dead, and neither is my gaming.

In fact it is alive as ever, but in a different direction, slightly. I have succumbed to an addiction to plastic crack. For about a year or so I have been bitten by the Warhammer bug and most of my attention outside the normal responsibles are directed at that.

As I have touched upon in another post, I got into 40k before, but due to negative play experiences I never really stuck with it. Then my brother James decided he wants to play and bought a Necron battlebox. At first I was resistant, with 40k not being on my gaming radar. But I wasn't one to quelch his gaming desires and decided to give it another go. I knew my brother in-law, Caleb, is really into the game and its tournament scene, and he was coming down from Washington to visit his parents. I wanted to meet with him and play to get to know it once again. He is a very nice guy and said he would love to bring his Chaos Space Marines to teach me.

So I dusted off my old Tau, brushed up on the rules (as at this point, 2 editions have come and gone) then built a list. That game with Caleb was amazing, even though it was unremarkable. I really believe in the power of having a good teacher.

From that point on it was about 2 years of getting back into the hobby, meeting new friends, and enjoying Warhammer again. The game that never truly left me.

So to commemorate my passion in the hobby, I decided to branch off into another blog:

I do plan on coming back to this blog on occasion, but any updates here will be non-warhammer related. I do hope to see you there as I have done a lot of neat work with 28mm wargaming miniatures.

Minis Showcase: Misc Warhammer

Just a few experiments I did with painting and color schemes.

I had just watched a video on creating a rust look, and this was the result of that. I went out and bought a single Necron metal blister to try it out. I figured they should look a little rusty after being buried for so long. Highlighting the face white was another experiment. The head should be the center of the miniature, to show the emotion (or lack thereof). Still the gun pulls the attention away, but I like the head being slightly different from the rest of the body.

The experiment here was the basing, which this would be one of my best base jobs ever. I saw a video mention using baking soda for snow instead of expensive hobby snow flock, and it blew me away. Sometimes the best solutions are the cheaper ones. Also I have always thought Grey Knights were some of the greatest looking space marine variations, so it was an absolute pleasure to paint this guy.

This miniature came in the special collectors edition box set of Warhammer Online: Age of reckoning. The set included an awesome artbook and comic book, and this mini. My college roommate had bought the set, and gave the mini to me because he didn't ever want to get into painting miniatures. It would take me many years before I worked up the courage to paint it, and then I gave it back to him. He graciously received it.

Minis Showcase: Warhammer 40k T'au

Before I started building my Dwarf army for Warhammer Fantasy, back in college I started building a T'au army for Warhammer 40,000. I have a lot of it built and painted, but only played it once. I played them against a Chaos Space Marines army and was steamrolled with little hope of survival. It was my very first game, and the opposing player was more concerned about stomping me than teaching me how to play. That was my first and last game of 40k. But I hold no ill will, these were fun to build. Since it was my first army, a lot of the painting is pretty shameful, and several of the pieces are broken over years of storage, but here are a few of my better turn-outs. I may have to dig through and find more to show.

I already showcased some of this army, in the form of the Lizardmen Kroot.

It is no lie that Games Workshop is expensive. And about this time I had already started to feel the effects of it on my student wallet. So I saw somewhere on the internet how a guy made his own stealth-suits, and tried to emulate it. A box of Fire Warriors converted to Stealth Suits was cheaper than buying an equal amount of Stealth Suits.

I really love the look of the crisis suits, but I wasn't opposed to spicing them up a bit. The cables on the sides are piano wire. In college there was no shortage of that lying around.

Minis Showcase: Engineer's Guild Army

I love dwarves. During the Reaper BONES Draft you will notice I took all the dwarves. There is just something about them that's so awesome. It could be their stalwartness, their precision with crafting and engineering, their manly beards, their xenophobia; Dwarves are just really cool. So way back in the day (pre-marriage) I decided to collect and build a dwarf army for Warhammer Fantasy. Never got to play the game, and I really didn't care. But I loved building, modding, and painting the little guys. So naturally when I make something I like to customize and mod it. Having read up a lot on dwarf lore through a VERY good book, I was fascinated with the Engineer's guild, and wanted to make an army based on that theme. Here they are:

These are my unit of warriors. A few things on their mods: I wanted there to be a hammer theme (forges, crafting, etc.) So all of the warriors have hammers instead of the normal axes, and I modded the leader to dual wield hammers. What's more macho than dual wielding hammers like a boss? And true to dwarf ingenuity a few of them have axe blades atop their hammers. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be awesome.

Also you will notice on most of my dwarves they have shoulderpads (normally they don't) and the shields on their backs have notches cut in them to make them look like giant gears. Fits in with the Engineer's guild quasi-steampunk theme.

Here are the thunderers. All their guns have axe-blades attached (again dwarf engineering), and the leader is dual-wielding pistols, with axe-blades. Again I thought the shoulder-pads and gear-shields look very nice on them.

The lord of the army: the master engineer. Again mods include a shoulder-pad, a gear-shield, and an axe-blade attached to the gun. Little additions like these helped keep the whole force together in look and style.

I really liked the idea of the organ gun, but didn't like how it looked. So true to dwarf engineers bodging things up, I redesigned it.

Now, the great thing about Games Workshop sprues is the loads of extra bits you get. And I like to use those extra bits. All the rest of these creations are made with mostly extra bits:

The dwarf Steamsuit. I had no idea how I was going to stat it up, but I knew I wanted some mechanical power-suit. Inside is an engineer metal, and the legs and arms are made from a Mage-Knight metal brass golem. The rest are just bits and lots and lots of glue.

A little backstory about these guys: Around this time I was following the development of the MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning very excitedly. This was before it was released. There was a forum that followed its development in which I was an active part of. I remember that when they released the information of what the dwarf racial mount would be, everyone was infuriated. I liked it a lot because I love dwarf engineering stuff, but everyone else hated it. So I built the above gyro-pack unit as both my tribute to the idea, and also to troll the major fanbase of the game. Needless to say, I love these guys to death and how they turned out. No idea how they would be statted in game, but fits perfectly for a dwarf engineering army, don't you think?

Sadly I never got around to finishing the centerpiece. This would be my counts-as Anvil of Doom. I never finished it partly because I got a little burnt out on the project, and it also intimidated me a little. I knew it was to be the centerpiece and it had to look the best. I am not the best painter. The idea of these guys was their thunderous rock would cast the powers of runes across the battlefield. Imagine the kinds of songs you would hear in the great halls of the dwarves, combined with some electric guitar and wicked drums. I can't think of anything greater (outside of High King Thorgrim Grudgebearer himself) to get the army pumped for battle.

I never did decide on what to name the band. Any ideas?

Another AMAZING minis deal on the Internet

With all the excitement of Reaper's BONES Kickstarter, people have been raving about the excellent deal they had going on for miniatures. And rightly so. 240 minis for $100 is nothing to be quiet about.

Well let me point you to another great deal on the internet for miniatures.

Found here, this is a deal for 80 individually sprue'd plastic soldiers for about $25 USD + shipping and handling, which totals to just a little over $30 USD. That amounts to about 38 cents a figure.

Go to the website to find out exactly what miniatures come in it, but this is a very good deal for getting a ton of plastic scifi soldiers to play around with. The details are really not that great (signs of old molds and sculpts) and a lot of their poses are semi-rigid, but they are great for conversions. I know a lot who have used them to fill the ranks of Imperial Guard for their Warhammer 40k army, and I have plans on using them in scifi rpgs. Need a bunch of corporate security dudes represented for when your PCs heist goes terribly wrong? Done.

So I bought the bag. It took a couple weeks to get to me (overseas shipping and all), and I did up a couple of them just to see what I'm getting. The picture above is quite literally what you get. A clear bag crammed with 80 sprues.

First Painting

Jarom's creative use of 2 sprues. Dead counters.

So next time you want to fill your tub with even more minis and have some spare cash again, get this deal.

PS: I know they originally went to a game called Warzone, which I hear still has a following despite the original game company being out of business, and the original books are out of print. And I know that Warzone is also the Mutant Chronicles setting...sort of.

Minis Showcase: The Lizard Kroot

I have a dodgy history with Warhammer 40,000. I tried getting into the game a while back, but couldn't get past the overcomplicated rules systems and the 30 minute long player turns. Maybe I didn't have good teachers or was among the right crowd, but I never got into playing the game.

However I did really like painting and especially customizing miniatures. I found I enjoyed it more than playing the game. So that is about as far as I got with it.

I haven't painted much recently, so these Kroot are maybe 6 years old, but I am pretty proud of their conversion nonetheless.

I liked the Kroot and their story. They are a mutagenic race that evolve based on what they eat. In this case I got to thinking about that and wanted to go for some sort of more extreme evolution. I picked up a box of Warhammer Fantasy Lizardmen and a Kroot troop and pretty much smashed them together. You get a force of green scaly Kroot built for speed that ate a bunch of Lizardmen.

The extra fin on top of their heads, the long slender bodies, and long reptilian tales should show the Lizardmen half. The heads, quills, arms and legs remain the same. As a whole they definitely stand out from the standard GW model squad, and that's what I love about them.