Progress!

I finished up quite a bit over the past few days, putting me back on track to be ready to go for Sunday.

First is the Venerable Dread, which sadly didn’t photograph so well – the golds are quite a bit richer than this in person.

So that’s two dreads to stomp face, and I have to think about what to do about a potential third (because I love dreadnoughts, and love the fact that they’re actually dangerous this edition). A Redemptor would fit with my moving-towards-primaris-heavy theme, and be fluffy for the Scythes, but I’m still not too fond of the model. For only like 1000 yen more I could get a Leviathan from Forgeworld, which would be a big stack of killy and wouldn’t fit with the Scythes fluff for at least two different reasons – but a Narrative could be Forged, after all. OR I could just get a second venerable with the “start collecting” set and also get a second tactical squad to use the heavy plasma guns I have lying around after building my devastators. Decisions decisions!

I also finished up these big fellows.

This was taken before I got them mounted on their clear acrylic bases, which does a lot for making their feet distinguishable. Really, I’m pretty chuffed with how these guys turned out, mold line embarrassment notwithstanding. I feel like I’ve got this color scheme down nicely, and I’ve got the edge highlights on the black popping and a very nice, and relatively low-effort, yellow too. Really looking forward to getting my hands on my half of a starter box (finally!) on Sunday so I can get working on my Intercessors and Inceptors. (And, sure, another squad of hellbasters and some footsloggin’ HQ.)

Days ’til game day: 5

Models to paint: 1 predator, 1 sternguard sergeant

Painting update: On the workbench

Just a quick update on what’s on the workbench at the moment – this is all stuff I want to finish up by the next big game meet at the end of September, so lots of time to get it done. This’ll give me a solid and hopefully fairly well-rounded 100 power level of dudes, which seems like a reasonable place to be.

Hellblaster squad with heavy plasma incinerators, just for some fun long-range punch. (Nice models, but anything with hoses connected to backpacks really throws a monkey wrench in my painting system, since I like to leave the backpacks and weapons off for painting, but since each backpack – hose – arms – gun set here is unique that’d leave way too many opportunities for screwups, so I just put almost everything together.)

Venerable dread. I’d have picked a twin lascannon, but the guy who gave it to me for half price didn’t still have that bit, so one makes do. I’m not at all sold on the utility of the plasma cannon, so I think I’ll field it with the assault cannon and have it tool around together with the Ironclad and shoot infantry and punch tanks together.

A quad-lascannon predator for some anti-tank killyness, and just because I have the model a replacement sergeant for my sternguard, with power fist and combi-flamer instead of just the bolter the current one has.

I don’t really anticipate this taking all that long, unless I hit a low-motivation period (as I am sometimes wont to do). I’m taking a business trip to the States for a week next week, which will interrupt things, but overall I’m confident I’ll be able to field these fightboys at our September meetup.

Interlude: Games I Play Part II: Fantasy

It took me kind of a surprisingly long while to get into fantasy wargaming – I mean, I started with D&D in like 4th grade and the old Erol Otus-cover box set, I re-read the Lord of the Rings every couple years, all that jazz. But all the same it took me a while. In high school my buddy Jon and I, in our quest to play Every Game GW Made, got deeply into Man O’ War, but that was actually about as far as we went into fantasy. When I played in Fukuoka (between about, oh, 1999 and 2005) the guys there played a bit of fantasy, and I started up an Undead army, but just never got very far into painting it. I also played a lot of Confrontation when I was in the States for grad school after that, which was a lot of fun (and fun to paint) but when Rackham went kablooie I sold off my armies. Then I was into Hordes for a bit, but had trouble keeping up with the power creep on a grad student’s budget and gradually lost interest, and sold those off a couple years back too.

Here in Nagoya, though, when people were playing a lot of Warhammer Fantasy it just happened to be a time when it was very easy to get a whole lot of plastic goblins very cheaply indeed (since the Goblin-versus-Dwarf starter set had just come out), and I’d been interested in trying out this “dip” everyone had been talking about, so before I knew it I put together these bad boys:

Yes, friends and neighbors, that is my very cheeky indeed Smurf-themed Night Goblin army, including actual Smurfs to use as Mangler Squigs. As a Night Goblin army, they were terrible but a lot of fun to play, and I did until GW decided to blow up the Old World and Warhammer Fantasy, and if you think I’m going to play a move-models-individually skirmish game with 200 night goblins, you have another think coming. There’s talk of using Osprey’s Dragon Rampant to get our fantasy armies out of the box, and I wouldn’t object to trying out Kings of War, but really there’s just not too much interest in mass-battles fantasy locally these days. So these guys sit in a box and wait for their time.

What we do play a relative lot of, though, is Malifaux, and at the beginning of this year I made a push back into 28mm gaming (which I’d been avoiding for a bit) and got a crew together, partly since Malifaux is so popular here. Not being a huge fan of Wyrd’s particular brand of cheesecake, I picked a crew that would have that only minimally, so went with Zoraida, who is an ancient witch who likes hanging around in a swamp with tree-dudes and frog-dudes and weird depressed skull-faced obese fairies.

OK, I did get a Doppelganger, who is nominally sexy, but in an icky body horror kind of way, so she gets a pass. I’ve only got a half dozen or so games in, but I like the system and love (most of) the models, so I’m hoping to stick with it a bit.

Aside from that, though, there isn’t too much in the fantasy wargaming world that tickles my fancy. Frostgrave is pretty big here, but leaves me a bit cold with its D20-based (and therefore pretty swingy) system, and while I’d take up Fantasy Flight’s new Runewars game in a heartbeat – cool models and specialty dice, count me in! – nobody else locally is interested so I’m resisting the urge to get a starter (ridonkulous shipping charges to Japan help there, to be honest).

Some Games!

I got the chance to play a few games of 40K over the past week, and it was pretty fun. The pictures above are of a power level 65 game I played against a friend’s (absolutely beautiful – sadly I didn’t think to get too many pictures of them) Eldar Exodites-counts-as-Craftworld, in which I managed a win, although we were both pretty well decimated by battle end. The Ironclad was definitely a star, mostly through being both scary and tough enough to draw a lot of Eldar fire and still not die, although the hurricane bolter is scary effective against T3 eldar up close. The captain also managed to be a wall of pain, stopping the shining spears that up to then had been tearing through my left flank like a hot knife through butter. Good fun!

And these pics are from our local gaming meetup this past Sunday – we had only an odd number of 40K players, so 3 of us did the “carnage” scenario from the rulebook at power level 50. Fun again, but I suffered from choosing my quarter first and thus being stuck in a tyranid – sisters of battle sandwich, which did not end well. The ‘nid player taking half her points in a 20-strong unit of genestealers with a broodlord was hella scary, too, although massed firepower from the surviving sisters managed to stop them in the end. The Ironclad again managed to prove his worth, chainfist-ing a hive tyrant to death pretty handily. (I also picked up a venerable dread a friend didn’t need, so I can expand my dreadnought party by next month’s meetup.)

Overall, I’m pleased that 40K 8th edition is turning out to be the quick, simple and fun ruleset people have been talking it up as. It’s still not particularly tactically deep by any stretch, but it’s fun enough, and a lot of people play, which is always a bonus. Whee!

In Which: Dave surprises himself with painting speediness

Here I’d been thinking I might not even get it done by Sunday for game day, but oh well!

I could stand to clean up the scythe a bit, and probably will in future, but as it stands it’s more than up to my typical tabletop standard. I’ve mounted it on a 60mm x 30mm clear acrylic base to match the rest of the army (the local acrylic cutters I order from charge a lot for rounded edges). I went with the box o’ bolters because the Scythes being an Ultramarines successor chapter, the ability to fall back out of a combat with a mook tarpit and shoot them a bunch seems like it’d be more generally useful than the ability to reroll 1’s to hit (which I can get by spending a CP anyway). But these arms aren’t glued on, so I can always paint up the CCW if I don’t like how the loadout I have works in practice.

Now on the bench are some good old 2nd edition boxed set gretchin I rescued off eBay to fill out my Advanced Space Crusade roster a bit more, then some bits and bobs for 40K – a couple non-primaris lieutenants I bashed up, a terminator sergeant (as the one I have doesn’t have a power sword, making him not-technically-legal) and a thunder hammer terminator (as I only have 4 of ’em with CCWs just now, so I’ll be able to field a terminator assault squad).

Reivers Complete!

Today I finished these fellows up:

My first actual street-legal squad of Primaris marines in the bag. The guy in the middle in back is suffering from a primer / sealer mixup, so his yellows are a bit dark, and I should probably touch that up eventually – but on the other hand I only need 5 guys to actually field the squad, so he can probably stay at home.

Next up is an Ironclad Dreadnought I picked up from a buddy yesterday – the goal is to finish it up by next Sunday’s game day and give it a spin. Knock on wood!

Interlude: Games I play part I: Science Fiction

OK, I’m sort of on a roll, so I’ll let myself get a little bit expository with this one.

You could probably get the idea from looking at this blog so far that I’m a “40K guy”. A year ago, though, if you’d asked me if I played 40K, I’d have basically scoffed. While 40K was what got me into wargaming, and I played it a lot in the past, I’ve been away from the game for a good… 7 or 8 years at least, as I think of it. The last time I played a lot was with my group in Fukuoka, up until 2005 when I went back to the States for grad school. I played a bit there as well, but began to drop off, and by the time I came back to Japan in 2008 it was pretty well back-burnered. I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but being a poor grad student and unable to collect and paint probably had a lot to do with it.

I have always liked the universe, though, for all its ridiculous over-the-top silly grimdarkness, and 4 or 5 years ago I got it into my head to use Advanced Space Crusade (of all things) as an excuse to collect and paint some models. ASC was a game I’d bought in high school, right when it was released, and had fun with, and while its considerable warts kept me from playing it a lot, I always liked the idea of the game, and held on to the rulebook, counters and boards. So I figured, why not try to hammer it into shape? And a few years of houseruling and fiddling have put the game in a place where it’s good fun to play, I think! And it just so happened that a good-sized ASC marine force was also a solid core of an army for 40K when rumors of 8th edition suggested the game was going to good (or at least better) places than it’d been for a bit.

ASC in action

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But really, my first and greatest love in the 40K universe is Epic. Also when I was in high school, I split a box of Adeptus Mechanicus with a friend, and then Space Marine, and I was hooked. I still feel very strongly that Epic: Armageddon remains the strongest set of wargaming rules GW has ever produced – not perfect, but very nearly so. Sadly, the game is ten years dead, which makes it hard to get people interested in picking it up – but I have like 8 armies, so my solution has been to host an “Epicstravaganza” event every year or so where I loan armies out, and I usually get 7 or 8 people to show up, so that’s OK.

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Recently, a couple guys in the club and I have branched out into Hawk Wargames’ Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander games, and they’re certainly good fun (although the lack of a command and control mechanism in the former leaves a big gaping hole in my heart), but fundamentally it just hasn’t been able to get a critical mass going locally, so it’s basically me and one other guy who both play and show up to games days regularly. And he’s a nice guy, but playing the same matchup over and over starts to drag after a bit.

My Scourge for Dropzone

My UCM fleet for Dropfleet

And those are my big SF games. I have a couple Necromunda gangs kicking around, and recently sold off my Battlefleet Gothic fleet after noticing I hadn’t played in like 6 years, and am constantly low-grade tempted by Infinity, but fundamentally that’s sort of the limit for how many games of one genre I can juggle at once.

So that’s the first bit of the holy trinity of wargaming, and the one that I’m most heavily invested in. But historicals and fantasy wargaming do both have a place in my heart! Later posts will talk about that.

A bit of terrain

This morning I painted up a piece of terrain for my 40K table, a ruined habitation pod from Sarissa. A nice piece of kit, and very affordable (especially considering shipping to Japan), as all Sarissa kits are.

I’m a little leery about how it’ll stand up to gaming – that strut across the top especially is pretty flimsy – particularly since I’ll be throwing it in a box and bringing it to game day each month. But oh well, it’s purty! I also have a non-ruined version of the same hab pod, which I’ll get to work on after doing a few more marines.

At the moment, that’s all the science-fiction terrain I have at 28mm. I have lots and lots of terrain at 6mm for Epic, some of which – trees and hills and such – can be pressed into service for 40K, and a few bayou-themed buildings for Malifaux that I could use in a pinch, but really I have a ways to go before I’ll have a nice tableful of terrain for 40K.

In other news, the new marine pre-releases are up this weekend, and I was semi-surprised to see that the Intercessors and Hellblasters aren’t a dual-build kit. Ah, well, I could use a full squad of Intercessors anyway. I imagine that’ll be my next purchase after I get the half-a-starter-set I have coming, just so I have have plenty of troops.

OK, let’s just make this a hobby log

Seems like I can’t be bothered to make long posts without something concrete to focus on, so let’s try that. 🙂

Surprising nobody more than myself, I’ve found myself, with the release of the new 8th edition, getting back into Warhammer 40,000 after a roughly 10-year hiatus. It was made easier by the fact that I’ve been slowly but steadily collecting 40K minis for Advanced Space Crusade over the past three or four years, so getting a full-on 40K-sized army will only take a (relatively) little bit of collecting and painting. Here’s the start:

That’s 4 out of 6 Reivers I have, my first Primaris marines so far. (I picked up the “First Strike” starter set, and a box of mono-pose Reivers, at Yodobashi Camera the other week, so that’s all I have at the moment – but a friend will be bringing me half a Dark Imperium box worth of Marines later this month, which’ll get me to work.) Even these mono-pose dudes (and they’re only sort of mono-pose, as the Reivers at least let you move the arms around some) are really nice pieces of kit, and I’m looking forward to getting the rest.

I’m also quite pleased with how they look with helmet swaps. My “smallmarines” have a sort of ragtag mix of helmets and different marks of power armor going on, and to connect the new Primaris guys with them, I’m relying heavily on helmet swaps – the fact that it looks pretty darn good is just a bonus.

Also, yes, this is a “non-canon” color scheme for the Scythes of the Emperor, but frankly I think it’s superior to the “canon” Yellow Torsos Chapter scheme, so I’m sticking with it. (I’m collecting Scythes because, as I say, I started collecting these dudes for Advanced Space Crusade, for which the Scythes are thematic. That’s also why the square clear bases, because facing is important in ASC, and it’s basically impossible to match the psychedelic 80’s weirdness that is that game’s tiles with any kind of base decoration.)

At any rate, that’s that for now. I’ll share more as I paint more, and also hope to post some game reports (for 40K and anything else I happen to play – which is a lot of different things) as they happen.