WW#15 - Tau, Tau, Battle Systems

Some time ages ago - Now

Well, I've got no excuse like moving house this time. I've just been plain fucking lazy on the blogging front. And now I think about it, in the hobby overall. The good news is that I've got a few posts lined up and my hobby batteries have been recharged.

So, what have I been up to? Certainly not playing any games, although I have got one lined up for at the end of the week which should be cool. There'll be more details about what I've got planned later in the week. I've read a couple of Black Library books and reviews should be coming out at some point this week.

The trip to Nottingham which I wrote about last week was epic as always and I've been slowly building some of my purchases. The XV9 hazard suits are a treat to put together as always, but there's issues with the night shroud bomber where a couple of bits seem to have shrunk. I'm sure Forge World will be able to sort it out in their normal super friendly way.

The Tau codex has been my bed time reading for a while now and it's a fantastic codex. I didn't pick up any of the new models, expect the Cadre Fireblade, since I'd gone a bit mad the week before release and picked up loads of the existing kit.

At the moment I'm still painting my first Devilfish and also building all 24 Fire Warriors. Hopefully I'll get round to building the Piranha and Kroot squad this week too.

There should be another post coming soon with my thoughts on the codex, and also for the White Dwarf that came out the other week. So that is what's coming, fingers crossed I can stick to it.

The final thing I wanted to write about was Battle Systems. If you haven't seen them on the interwebz yet, or seen them mentioned in my blog before I urge you to check them out. Up until now they've been producing some great print-and-build sci-fi interior terrain. They're now gearing up for a kickstarter for a boxed, ready to build set which looks incredible. The box looks like it'll contain tons of pre-printed sections that slot easily together to create space ship interiors or military installations. They're currently still in development but the updates and WIP shots on their blog and facebook are very promising. The multi-level setups really grabbed my attention as they'd be perfect for Necromunda and kill team games.

That's about it folks. I'm not sure I'm going to be continuing with these "weekly" updates in future, I might just go back to posting stuff up as and when. Might mean smaller posts, but a lot more frequent. Cheers for reading!

Forge World Open Day 2013

For the third year running my friend Dean and I headed off to Nottingham at 5:30 this morning with much excitement about the resin treats they'd have in store for us. Sadly our usual accomplaice and guestbook defacer couldn't come this year, what with being off in Ireland.

We arrived at around nine and the queue had already formed. We were around 50th in line and the time flew. As we were let in almost everyone made their way to the sales stand. I'd ummed and ahhed for weeks about my shopping list but in the end made some snap decisions and got a bag full of goodies. Managed to pick up the Fall of Orpheus, a Night Shroud Bomber, three XV9 suits and the Death Korp event only model.

With that out of the way we went straight for the studio area. I'll let the photos do the talking!

Legion Praetor in power and Terminator armour

Praetors from the rear

Reaver Squad (Sons of Horus possibly)

More Reaver Squad

Heresy Era Whirlwind

Minotaurs Contemptor from Fall of Orpheus

And a better shot

Minotaurs special heavy bolter guy

Fellglaive Superheavy

Necron Baby pylon 1

Necron Baby pylon 2

Emperor's Children Palatine Squad

Necron Baby pylon 3

Heresy Landspeeder, from the next book.

Note the weapon options!

Squig lobber!

Dread Maw

So with those out of the way onto the scraps of information I managed to find out...

• Imperial Armour 3 - the taros campaign is getting a second edition. It's already at the printers and will contain all tau units according to Talima.
• Simon Egan has only got a couple of hours more work to put into Fulgrim then he's ready for release at the Horus Heresy Weekender.
• The next Primarch to be done is Ferrus Manus. It's related to him and Fulgrim that he's up before Massacre comes out.
• Will is working on an unspecified Mechanicum unit at the moment.
• Massacre (horus heresy book 2) is hopefully going to be ready for this years games day.
• When I was chatting to Trish about the Warhammer Fantasy stuff, she said that all work on the Battle for Black Fire Pass is halted until further notice.
• Simon is solely working on Primarchs for the foreseeable future.
• Once the heresy landspeeder is complete, that chap (sorry I've forgotten his name) is hoping to resume work on a new Tau suit, it's size will be between an XV8 and a XV25.
• Will Hayes has been working on some Heresy Tartarus pattern terminators. They don't have the aquilla and will have full Betrayal weapon sets released.

Think that's about it really. Now for the random/cool stuff. Thanks for reading folks. Was an epic day and well worth the ticket price. Oh and on non-FW news, High Elves and Lizardmen were missing from the fantasy cabinets. Loads of different 40k armies and units were also absent. The only thing that I can think of that would warrant that would be another campaign, or a universal expansion such as apocalypse!

Standard tourist shot

The Fat Bloke!

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!