I began the year by finishing up my first batch of Sequitors.
These are from Soul Wars, the current main Age of Sigmar starter box, which I bought the Stormcast Eternal half of from a friend. There are 8 of them, with 5 different sculpts: 2 different Sequitor-Primes, and 2 each of a guy with mace-and-shield, a lady with mace-and-shield, and a guy with a big mace. These are push-fit mono-pose and mono-build figures, so unless you start chopping them up you can only build them one way.
8 is a bit of an awkward number because in the game they are supposed to come in multiples of 5, so until I paint a few more (which is exactly what I’m doing next) I can only field one unit of 5 instead of 2 units of 5 or a big unit of 10. I’m not sure when I’ll get them on the table anyway.
There are some things about them I could have done better.
The green cloth looks great but my method for painting them doesn’t scale well to batch-painting, so I ended up being a little messier with them than I would have liked. I should figure out a more efficient way to paint these that looks similar.
The gold lacks contrast, a problem I’ve noted about a lot my Stormcast. I need to investigate ways to make it richer, shinier, etc.
On the beige cloth I was experimenting a little, so these look a bit inconsistent across the unit. I did find a simple way to do them that I’m pleased with, though, so I’ll be using that method going forward. The beige is still a little too similar to the yellow-white of the parchment some of them have.
I’m quite happy with the red bits but I’d like to find a way to make them punchier and do them faster.
The early stages of painting these models, just getting the base coats down, was a slog. They have so much extra detail and different materials compared to Liberators or Judicators. I’m looking forward to painting the remaining 4 I have to do, a more manageable batch.
Oh, but I did paint a lot this year. 2019 prove me wrong about the extent to which hobby could take over my life and, coming to the end of it, I regret not having managed to do more. How is this possible? I should have blogged about it as I went, but I didn’t because apparently blogging is too much effort for me now? Fortunately I mostly did a decent job of documenting my progress on Twitter and on my portal-to-hell personal Trello board. So this post will mostly consist of links to those, otherwise it would have about 50 photos in it.
I began the year by working on some of North Star’s recent additions to their Frostgrave range, like this Barbarian, Templar, Apothecary and others.
I also made a boar! This lil’ guy is a spare who comes with the old Orc Chariot kit. There are two more piggies I could make out of that old kit, but they require a bit more work (their lower jaw pieces are attached to the chariot).
I based some old Warhammer models. I painted these in 2018, I think, but didn’t base them. They look great with decorated bases, each brimming with their own character. There are bats and snotlings. These were some of the first models I ever acquired, and it fills me with satisfaction every time I see them in their current well-painted, well-based state. I think I will make some Warcry rules for them.
February/March/stretching into April was goblin season. When Natalie’s parents discovered I was getting into the hobby, they were more than happy to foist her and her brother’s old collections upon me. This inundation of old, mostly-unpainted models included all the models from a copy of Battle for Skull Pass, the starter box for Warhammer Fantasy Battles 7th Edition. The Dwarf side of that box is still waiting for my attention, but I managed to paint my way through the whole Night Goblin half. This included:
A troll. Sadly for this guy, there’s no analogous model in AoS for him anymore since Sourbreath Troggoths were discontinued.
Some small scenery pieces.
With these came a couple of metal goblin shamans. Lovely sculpts, painted them up later in the year after the goblinmania had passed. Here’s one of them.
Late March: I painted the Chosen Axes from Shadespire.
Needed some more Skinks as allies for my Stormcast Eternal army, so I did 5 of ‘em. I know how to paint these in my simple scheme very quickly. Personally, I think these models hold up a lot better than most of the Seraphon/Lizardmen range, and I hope they keep this kit when they do a refresh. (Saurus Warriors, on the other hand, could desperately do with a new kit in my opinion!)
April/May: With a £40 gift voucher to spend, and needing some more terrain for games of Frostgrave, I picked up the 3-box of Osgiliath Ruins and bashed them out, unlocking a newfound love of terrain painting. It’s so fast and simple!
May: Oldhammer Chaos Warrior. This guy was encased in about a centimetre of enamel paint, and it took a lot of time to strip it off him. Dark Elf Sorceress, acquired from a friend’s clearout. I think this model came free with a White Dwarf? Dark Elf Assassin, acquired from same friend. Probably contains lead, it’s that old.
July: Khorne. I painted the whole of the Khorne half of the OG AoS starter box. Contrast did a lot of heavy lifting here, letting me do the skin, the vibrant red and the bone-coloured trim on all of the mooks super quickly. Here is the Lord.
August, September, onwards: Warcry. The big box. Excellent game. Excellent big box. The terrain. Took until November to finish painting all the remaining Iron Golems, but here’s the whole gang. Furies, more Furies and chickens. Untamed Beasts in September.
Built some zombies from Fireforge games. I’ll paint these eventually. Good for when I finally get around to Rangers of Shadow Deep, or something else requiring zombie villagers.
I spent the last couple of days sprucing up some MDF buildings I inherited when my Frostgrave-playing friend moved away. It looks much nicer now, although I feel like it could still do with a bit more attention. They’re excellent kits, but I don’t know if I’ll get more MDF stuff in the future unless I have a clear idea of how to make it look less flat, thin and textureless. Mind you, TTCombat’s new Savage Domain kits look really nice…
And that wraps things up for 2019. Phew! I am extremely proud of how much I’ve painted and how much I’ve improved, tried new things and honed in on how to paint better and faster.
In 2020, I will try to document my progress on here, because in 2020: I’m going to clear my backlog.
I have been working on a little tool for making fighter cards for Warcry, GW’s new skirmish game (wot is very good). Using a template, you can set how many wounds your fighter has, how far they can move, the stats of their weapons, etc.
The page saves its state after every change so it can restore it if you close the page and come back, but this functionality is incomplete. For one thing, it doesn’t restore user-provided images. For a second, it would be good to have save slots the user can name.
The page is ugly. Even if I don’t manage to make a pretty background or find a better typeface or whatever, I’d like the interface to be clearly broken up into sections.
Pageview tracking? I think I should already have this but I’m not sure.
Working on this I’ve learned a fair bit about front-end web programming. I grew my familiarity with JavaScript, picked up some JQuery, touched a little Bootstrap. Hosting is handled by GitHub Pages the same way this website is, using Jekyll to build the final HTML from templates.
It was pretty well received on Twitter. Once it’s a bit prettier I’ll find other places to share it.
I hope to round out the feature set by the end of the year and start working on other tools and neat things. Now that I know how to make little web applications, my head is full of ideas for things to try.
I noted back at the end of 2017 that one of my favourite tabletop games I’d played that year was Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire. That was the first edition, or season of content, or whatever you want to call it, of Warhammer Underworlds, and since then we’ve been through 2018’s Nightvault and now here we are with season/edition 3: Beastgrave.
I’ve been playing the game fairly regularly since 2017 and mostly loving it - I think it’s a very robust system which persistently provides players with perplexing puzzles to parse. While I have some reservations about how certain powerful cards have affected the game (mostly solved by the rotation introduced with Beastgrave), my main complaint has really been simply not having enough people to play with. To address this I’ve helped to set up Warhammer Underworlds: Edinburgh.
Our goals:
1) Weekly meetups.
2) Regular tournaments.
3) Ladder league that resets quarterly.
4) Inclusive and lovely. Towards all kinds of play and all kinds of players.
5) To raise awareness about the game and teach it to people who’re curious about it.
At the moments our weekly meetup is on Tuesday evenings in Edinburgh Games Hub on Lauriston Place. I have a few reservations about this arrangement (Tuesday night is super busy at Games Hub and tbh Games Hub is a little shabby!) but it worked pretty well last Tuesday so we’ll stick with it for now at least.
The next thing is to organise a tournament. This’ll probably be in late November at Red Dice Games in Leith. (Trying to spread the love a bit.)
Anyway. I’ve never organised anything like this before, but I’m mostly following the advice and examples of other gaming communities that I’ve observed both locally and from across the internet. Hopefully it’ll go well and if I do screw up a bit it won’t be too bad!
If you wanna learn Underworlds then get in touch with me or come along to the weekly meetup on Tuesday at Games Hub, I am more than happy to provide a demo game or two.
You know how I was working on that pseudo-3d game engine, Quiver? That I was so well stuck into that I even did a presentation about it? A whole year and a half ago? Well, it may be no surprise… but it ain’t really happening any more.
Making stuff in your personal time is a big challenge. You’re at the mercy of:
Your dwindling energy levels when working in the margins of a day’s work or a busy weekend day.
The cruel march of time. It can be so hard to find enough, and even if you can, can you find the long, unbroken stretches of time you need to really get things done?
Your own whims. As your enthusiasm for an existing project dwindles, new interests take flight. And you’d be a fool not to pursue them, really. Life is short.
The last thing I did on Quiver was very satisfying, however. All I did was break apart the game, Quarrel, from the engine, so that it now lives in its own repository. While I’m not sure I’ll ever return to Quarrel, I’m still attached to the idea of returning to the engine and seeing what else I can do with it, or expanding it a little1. This separation will make that return easier.
It’s past time for me to finally say farewell, then, at least for now. Bye-bye little project!
The outstanding major features I wanted to implement were textured walls, ceilings and floors, a scripting system, and a pathfinding and navigation-graph-generation system. ↩
