Filed Under: Hobby
Happy New Year! I’m thinking about what I want to achieve hobby-wise in 2022, so I’m making some goals and resolutions for the new year. I have three big goals, two resolutions, and some lesser goals.
Read more...Happy New Year! Here’s wishing you all the best for 2022 - may it be the start of something better for all of us. <3
It’s been a while and I fancied writing a little blog post, so here we are.
This weekend me and Nat are staying at a little holiday house in Dunkeld, the first time we’ve managed to escape Edinburgh all year. It’s good! (Unfortunately the internet connection is very bad.) We went for a long walk today in the Tay Forest Park and got very lucky with the weather.
It’s a welcome break from work, which at the moment is a bad combination of difficult and slow.
It’s been kind of a weird year, to say the least, and it has made me tired. I’m always mega tired around October due to the changing season, but this time it’s been particularly crushing. Hopefully I’ll finish adjusting soon and be able to do useful things like get out of bed on time and stay awake past 6pm.
Board gaming has resumed a bit. Me and some friends have been playing Oath, a big fat political intrigue game with absolutely gorgeous art. It seems really complicated, but is actually quite simple, and works as a very effective storytelling engine, albeit not a particularly strategic one.
Over the past few months I’ve managed to play Age of Sigmar a few times at home. 3rd edition is… okay. Is it better? Maybe? It’s probably not worse, at least.
Hobby-wise I’m desperately trying to finish painting a whole new army for the Rollmodels meetup next weekend, which I’m very excited about. It’s got 3 Steam Tanks, lots of Drakespawn Knights, a big block of dark elves, and two ballistas. (I’m excited about the meetup, too, of course!)
For the past few months I’ve been working on a game of my own, a simple small-scale skirmish affair with a cool (perhaps unique?) magic system. It’s been a slow process of playtesting, iterating, playtesting, iterating… I wish I could speed it up but it’s quite hard to find the time and energy for it, especially right now. It’s definitely the furthest I’ve got with one of my miniature game design projects, however, so I can at least be pleased with that.
I do playtests using Tabletop Simulator with a small cult of folks who are willing to sacrifice a bit of their free time on the altar of game design. If you’re interested in joining said cult, please get in touch!
I’ve been playing Enderal, a total conversion mod for Skyrim. It really is very impressive, managing to usurp Skyrim itself in terms of quality despite its sometimes amateurish trappings and zero-budget constraints. I’m not far in, having only just arrived in the big city (and been bombarded with a million sidequests), and it’s doubtful I’ll make it all the way to the end of the game’s presumably-epic runtime, but in the meantime I’m itching to get back to this weird German alt-Skyrim every minute I’m away from it.
I was playing Psychonauts 2, and loving it - it’s more Psychonauts, after 15 years, incredible - but haven’t found the time to continue.
I am reading Earthsea for the first time since childhood, remembering very little about it so that it is almost all fresh. Finding myself swept away, as I always am, by the understated beauty of Ursula Le Guin’s writing.
Meanwhile, I have run out of Genevieve stories to listen to. Maybe I should try Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series, which allegedly contains a character who is basically just Genevieve, and has a similar storytelling and worldbuilding vibe which I can only describe as ‘dark Pratchett’. I’m worried it won’t be quite as good without the silly Warhammer backdrop, though.
That’s all I can think to write for now. I hope I can get back into regular blogging, I do rather like it.
Filed Under: Hobby
Did you know this blog exists? I didn’t! Yet for some reason I have the keys…
Here’s a couple of Warhammer Underworlds warbands I’ve painted recently.
First, Khagra’s Ravagers. These are Slaves to Darkness - warriors and wizards sworn to Chaos.
I love painting gold. I’m always eagre to paint some, to try a slightly different recipe - in this case I wanted to try to replicate the gold armour of my Iron Golems but using Vallejo Metal Color paints instead of Citadel ones.
I’m fairly happy with the result. It’s not a perfect match, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.
As for the blue-into-orange fabrics… I kinda wish I’d just kept it simple and gone with purple.
Secondly, the Starblood Stalkers, who are Seraphon (AKA Lizardmen). A bunch of cute little skinks and one gnarly old saurus.
Lizardmen were one of my first Warhammer loves, having been gifted a moderately-sized box of them and the army book as a tween. I barely painted any of them, and I lost interest in the hobby shortly afterwards, but they made a lasting impression. One day I’ll do an Age of Sigmar Seraphon army, but not until they update some of the old sculpts. If the models in this warband are anything to go by they’ll do a stellar job. I mean, look at this Saurus:
He’s so much better than the old ones (but notably he has no golden angle for photographs).
Once again I had fun painting the gold on these, this time going for a more aged, but not weathered, style.
It’s been a while since I painted any Seraphon. I might make room in my schedule for more soon…
Since these two warbands, I took a brief trip into Reaper-land to paint up an Ogre and a Basilisk (which were both a lot of fun) and am now making inroads into the Stormcast half of the Dominion boxset.
Filed Under: Hobby
Phew! January has been a productive month, hobby-wise. After painting a worm, some netters and some spider riders (detailed here), I painted a big ol’ spider:
This is my 3rd Arachnarok, and first with a howdah (cool word!) on the back. The howdah, by the way, is detachable - my debut magnetization attempt - so that I can run the spider as another Skitterstrand if I want to. I’m pretty certain I built the whole thing correctly, but I can’t get the howdah to sit straight, so it looks a little wonky. Oh well!
I’m now up to about 1300 points of just Spiderfang goblins.
Following that, I did some Flesh Hounds:
Aren’t they cute? I’m not doing a Blades of Khorne army (although I do have a handful of them from the old starter set) - I’m not even planning a Warcry warband - but I just had to have some Hounds. Iconic and quick to paint.
I painted 30 very old goblins from the 1992 Warhammer Fantasy Battles starter box. They don’t look like Moonclan Grots, so I needed to come up with a lore reason why they fit into my Gloomspite Gitz army:
The sun-scoured steppes that border the Gloomwood are populated by a multitude of Gitmob Grot tribes. Though they are numerous enough to be a constant menace to the Plainstrider peoples who share the region, they are too disunited to stand up to the might of the Moonclan and Spiderfang grots who dwell in the Gloomwood. As a result, they often find themselves drafted into their armies as auxiliaries whenever the Dankroot Dastards march to war - be it against their external enemies or, more commonly, against themselves. Here they fulfil a useful role to their overlords, either as mere extra bodies to bulk out the teeming hordes, or as scouts and advance guard, roving ahead of the main force while the Moonclan gits cower away from the daylight in hidden caves and grottos.
I’m very pleased with how they came out. Some of the shields are from North Star kits, but the rest were designed and 3D-printed by a friend. Thanks, friend!
Sneaking in behind them came 10 last-gen Night Goblins. These models are SO different from the current equivalent, with their huge heads and enormous hands. The ‘Kev Adams’ look. As with the other grots, I discovered that highlighting with yellow is a pretty neat trick.
Finally, I painted the rather problematic old Forest Goblin Standard Bearer model:
He will be joining my Spiderfang as a Webspinner Shaman. He didn’t get the yellow skin highlights - I like my Spiderfang Grots to be pale and pasty.
I’m planning to spend most of February just getting models ready to paint. All sorts of different models are gonna be stripped, built or fixed, based, and primed by the end of February. This means I probably won’t be showing off a lot of painted models for next month, but it will be a productive one nonetheless. The payoff will be huge: when it’s time for me to paint a particular project, all I will have to do is grab it off the backlog shelf.
I’ve already begun this process and it’s very satisfying to finally give these miniatures a bit of the attention they deserve.