Gift of Tongues

Well, a little impatience and a quick shopping stop have intervened (see dropbox).

I'm now back in part time education, seeing as how nine years of being a student just isn't enough. I'm taking SFI classes, which stands for Svensk För Invandrare, or Swedish For Immigrants. Clever bit of acronymics, that.

My homework for today is to read a paper and listen to some news radio. I thought I'd try and justify a quick GW stop on the way home, and actually buy White Dwarf for the first time in years. But I'd make it into homework by getting it in Swedish!

I can now chat a little more fluently, and quickly discovered that Sweden doesn't actually have any of the rules or products in their mother tongue. This is disappointing, I wanted to know what Bloodcrusher of Khorne is in Swedish. Because that will be useful in ordinary conversation.

Seems a bit disappointing, that, and almost certainly a sales force thing. But ah well, I came home with the all new layout of WD to read through.

Changer of the Ways

Nooooo they've only gone and released a new army list a month and half after I've bought a new army.

Dagnammit.

It's impossible (for me, anyway) not to get excited at the amazing Warshrine model, although that's going to have to wait a long, long time before I spend any money on it. Good sprues for chariot conversions, I'm thinking, and it's a pretty good fighter in its own right, so I have my myriad unblinking eyes on one for the future.

It doesn't look like there are massive changes in the pipeline, as far as my guesswork goes. Lots of new models coming for some of the older character models, which are nice. My hope is that Marauders don't suddenly become more expensive, or that the way the Marks work isn't vastly different, or...

Nuts. There is no way of telling, is there? No plan ever survives contact with the enemy, as they say. Delightful that Spel Verkstad reveals themselves as the enemy in this particular scenario, and perhaps it would have been good to bloody my army in its current form first. Hey ho, it's all skulls for the skull throne at the end of the day.

Continued Maraudings

Nothing very wild to report in this post. But I couldn't let a whole week go by without posting up some more work-in-progress pictures of the Marauder Hoard: -

The Shaggoth is coming along - I'm going with a Black Dragon look, complete with copper spear staff, the better to draw down lightning with.

No longer WIP, this - pretty bearable for freehand, by my standards.
See what I did there?

Battle Report: Vampire Counts vs Empire

The second of this week's OffBoot matches. Same battlefield as before (minus the Wood Elves' extra wood), and if I'm more vague on the details, it's because it was getting late.

Deployment

Deployment - the grass has gone all spooky, like.

Vampire Counts - General Kasfunatu

1 x Vampire General on Hellsteed (Lv 2 magic; Heavy Armour, Shield, Additional Hand Weapon; Summon Creatures, Dread Knight; Talisman of Protection, Book of Arkhan, Dragonhelm)
19 x Ghouls
(including Vampire Lieutenant (Lv 2 magic; Heavy Armour; Red Fury; Sword of Striking, Talisman of Endurance, Enchanted Shield)
5 x Dire Wolves
5 x Dire Wolves
8 x Hexwraiths
 - 1000 points

Empire - General Stylus

28 x Spearmen (full command)
 - including Warrior Priest (Charmed Shield) and Battle Standard (Luckstone, Standard of Discipline)
14 x Halberdiers (detachment)
10 Free Company (detachment)
10 x Knights (full command)
5 x Pistoliers (musician)
1 x Wizard (Lv 2 Lore of Death, barded warhorse, Dispel Scroll)
 - 1000 points

Battle Report: Wood Elves vs Empire

This week, we played two off-schedule WoffBoot battles (an OffBoot?), with myself taking my Empire army against Generals East and Kasfunatu respectively.

Bear with me on these Battle Chronicler maps - it's the first time I've used them.

Deployment

Deployment

Wood Elves - General East

10 x Glade Guard (musician)
 - including Spellweaver (Lv3 Lore of Life, Hail of Doom arrow)
10 x Glade Guard (musician)
8 x Dryads
8 x Dryads
4 x Treekin
1 x Great Eagle
 - 1000 points

Empire - General Stylus

28 x Spearmen (full command)
 - including Warrior Priest (Charmed Shield) and Battle Standard (Luckstone, Standard of Discipline)
14 x Halberdiers (detachment)
10 Free Company (detachment)
10 x Knights (full command)
5 x Pistoliers (musician)
1 x Wizard (Lv 2 Lore of Death, barded warhorse, Dispel Scroll)
 - 1000 points

Shaggoy Dog Story

The last of my ebay buys has turned up now - for a grand total of just over £50 (including the parts of the postage that were included, rather than the bits I did myself), I got a box of warriors, a box of marauders and this splendid gentleman: -

It was a dark and stormy night, and this dragon walks into an ogre bar...

I've done some very limited conversion on him, not that he'll ever see the light of WoffBoot owing to points cost. I've always liked the model, though, I think it's a cracker. But close up, I found I wasn't as keen on the big axe as I was in the publicity shots. It's a bit... boring, really.

The option in the list is to leave him with either his basic fists (already S6), or give him an overkilly great weapon or an extra hand weapon. That latter option is worth the spare ten points I don't have anyway, I thought.

The resin sculpt was already glued together, not brilliantly.
After trying to improve on it, I've decided I don't like resin, it's not made for gluing. 

Fists of Gork

Due to an surfeit of decorating chores (the needs of the skirting board outweigh the needs of the miniature army... apparently), there is very little 'P' in this 'WIP' post.

But since it may be a while before I get to paint these painted savages, here is the latest on my two infantry regiments. In terms of gameplay, these will be the hard-hitting units that will carry the biggest punch - the two 'Fists of Gork', you might say...

Big 'Uns with additional hand weapons

This unit gets its distinction from the front rank (which may be the second rank, once they've had to shove aside to make room for Shamans, Battle Standards and Warbosses). The ones that aren't *actual* command models are converted standards and musicians - and fortunately command figures were sculpted just a little bit bigger than regular boys (which fits into the fluff of Orcs so perfectly, I'm almost tempted to think it was deliberate).

They inherited two painted command models from the original unit
- so basically, they're done.

The front-rank conversions also have two hand weapons, which gives me plausibility to arm the whole unit that way. The others are just ordinary boys, but I filed away their shield 'nubs', so their left hands are now empty. About half of them have big stone knives in sheaths, so I'll assume they just haven't drawn their second hand weapon yet.

I'm keen to try a 6-wide formation (24 boys in total; 18 if I'm scrimping for points). It looks a bit unwieldy, but with the 5-model minimum frontage, it means that even against 20mm bases, every Orc will get to fight. With Frenzy and Choppas, that's a total of 24 x S5 attacks. It's krumpin' time!

The Order of Bone

Another job-packed week in sunny Sweden, so the painting bay has been bearing fruit: -

Most of the Chaos Warriors I've seen on GW or other sites have a tendency to go for a dark palette. This makes a lot of sense, and looks good, but I wanted to do something different. I thought I'd go with something to match my Archaon model, just in case he ever gets fielded as an army general. Or we change the WoffBoot to 5000 points, or something.

Haven't tidied the bases yet. But I will! I do that now!

Hold me closer, tiny Viking head

Made to Marauder

I'm aiming to put the big marauder units together fairly quickly. The plan is to have two. One will have with shields and a mark of Tzeentch, the other will sort of have flails and a mark of Khorne. I'm doing the first one at the moment, although I'll probably shuffle a few models around later. 

Here's the ten I've done so far, using spares from the Chaos Warrior set: -

The first two ranks of the Tzeentchian Shield Wall

All ten of these have a conversion somewhere about their person. Most of these are small things, like a different head or the inclusion of a larger, spikier weapon or shield than real Vikings tended to use. 

Shield walls are much easier to form when your shield is as tall as you are.

These two may yet turn to Khorne.
Especially if my wife notices the horns on the left-hand helmet, that's a definite authenticity breach.

Chaos Orderly

Box number two was retrieved from the hunchbacked cripple who doesn't deliver my mail this afternoon. For a 75% saving, I got a box of twelve Chaos Warriors, missing only a couple of arms, heads and four bases. What kind of wasteful lunatics are out there? Who buys a set just to use that much of it? Is Carlos Slim a Warhammer buff?

Anyway, in what felt like no time at all, I had the first eight assembled: -

Virtually 25% of a WoffBoot army, and they aren't even a legal unit until there's ten of them.

I reconnected with my cellar-dwelling teenage years doing this. The smell of the plastic glue, the roar of my disinterested loved ones - it's all coming back to me. Three hours vanished in blissful silence as I sliced axes off the sprues using my traditional Stanley knife and nail clipper combo.

This is Bruce. You won't like him when he's angry.
Luckily, he's taken up Tai Chi recently. 

Champions are extra horny, which is sad for them.
The Chaos Warriettes haven't been greenlighted yet. 

War Games On t'Telly

No project updates, as I've been busily painting all week (the boring kind, that involves walls and stepping in paint trays). But Kraken's mention of how BBC 2 once tried to make Total War into a viable gameshow got me thinking about the few and failed attempts to put games on the gogglebox.

Game of War

A Channel 4 pilot series. Broadcast in 1997, with the production values of 1970s Open University and the strategic insight of Hungry Hunrgy Hippos.

It was hosted by Angela Rippon, whose main qualification for the job was that she could look directly at the camera and say, clearly and loudly, at the beginning and end of each episode, "It was just ... a GAME of war!"

She didn't even do that thing where she kicks her legs
and sings about facing the music.

The premise of this show was an interesting one (certainly enough to draw in a War Studies undergraduate): two opposing commanders (actual ex-military officers), each supported by a pair of advisers (usually military historians) would re-fight historical battles: Balaklava, Naseby and Waterloo.

To recreate the 'fog of war', each team would be sequestered into different rooms with two different tabletops. They knew where their own armies were moving, but they could only guess (or find out, from reconnaissance, or people shooting at them) where the enemy were.

... because if you're going to recreate history, it's important to be as boring as possible.
And also to wear a tie.

In a central room was Ms Rippon and a third tabletop, where the 'true' battle was taking place. This was monitored by a pair of gamemasters – straight out of geek central casting – who made the decisions, and rolled the dice, and whose word was law.

For they wore the Cardigans of Authority.