Death and Shadow

"Is he dead?" the masked man asked.

"The Pharoah is avenged!" the second one replied, holding his bloody hammer aloft. The announcement did nothing to prevent the panic of their fellows, running amock over the many tiers of the Deliverance Engine. Whirling pistons and shrieking valves did nothing but add to the picture of bedlam. A man balancing in a large copper dish in the middle of it all really wasn't going to make any difference, even if he was waving a gory hammer and yelling about revenge.

"His body!" the first Shining Sun cultist asked. "What's happening to it?"

The hammer-wielder looked down. At his feet, the corpse of the shadow wizard was folding in on itself. He could feel it melting under him, collapsing like a bag of snow in an oven.

"I don't understand," he managed to say.

And then there was light.

Roaring He Shall Rise

Bruno walked down the ruined street in silent awe.

The witch hunter Schorsch Undrache paced warily alongside him, axe in hand. Their feet scraped on the cobbles. It was the only sound after the battle. Running through the streets behind his master, unable to keep up, they'd heard the roar of the fight. Screams, the clatter of steel on steel, clarions trying to restore military order.

Then a great blaze of light, a great grinding sound like the rolling of massive millstones, and silence.

Dying of the Light

The Pharoah's head exploded with a sound like a hippo biting on a cabbage.

Skarloc and Pals

Let's start the Wood Elf army with an Oldhammer classic - the legendary Regiment of Renown: Skarloc's Wood Elf Archers!

Originally came with "runesword with runes of swiftness, armour and protection"
(whatever the hell that does).

"The Hooded One"

'Slotta Decisions

As well as painting up my Wood Elf leadpile, I'll also be rebasing my existing army (as part of my obsessive-compulsive therapy mass-magnetization process).

Before that can begin, there is the matter of basing. What kind of flock and what colour slottabase should I choose? This will require some thinking: the slottabases will be the only constant colour in the project, and will define its character and theme, the very nature of the whole army. Such a weighty choice...

Calm down Ollivander, it's only a pot of paint.

Awakening Of The Wood

Frequent visitors to my general's page (I know you're out there, those traffic numbers aren't just from me checking my spelling on a daily basis) may be aware that I've pledged to field Wood Elves for WoffBoot IX.

Champions of WoffBoot II - the Twang! Gang are back!

After several months going round and round the magic circle of my Empire wizards, I thought I'd better crack on and actually paint the army.

If I start early enough, I can avoid my usual habit of frantic painting sessions in the last few weeks before the tournament.

(SPOILER: I am going to be frantically painting Wood Elves in the last few weeks before the tournament).

...and the Predictable

The poor old Gargoyle from Heroquest, lord love it. A well-intentioned model that hasn't really stayed abreast of current monsters. Still, it's a good sculpt at heart.

Guess who's back? 

...The Bad...

Right, that's more than enough sickly goodies.

Stripes are slimming, you know.

The Good...

Heroquest isn't the only golden oldie who's presence still haunts my collection.

Age twelve, I remember going to the after-school wargames club. There was no room at table for me, so I watched over the shoulders of four players as they tried to make their way through the deadly maze below Dragonfire Castle.

Fantasy Jigsaw 

Nobody made it. Nobody even made it to the Dragon's chamber. Everyone died, falling down bottomless chasms or being mugged by goblins. Or the best one, being trapped against a board edge by a rotating room.

I speak, of course, of Dungeonquest.

Dare you Face the Dragon's Challenge?
Hell,  no.

I like to Move It Move It

General Stylus kindly donated some scraps of board to my hobby cause a few months back. Like all my basing projects, it got stuck at the back of the queue and left to malinger.

Wizards' Cup Semi-Final 2: Merlin's Beard

We now come to the second of the Wizards' Cup semi-finals.

In the qualifying heats, the Shadow Wizard lost his spells and his army, but still managed to impale the Life Wizard against the run of play.

Meanwhile, in a high noon gunfight, the Light Wizard's burning wrath proved more than a match for the searing spells of the Gold Wizard.

Who wins? You decide...

Disclaimer: you don't get to decide.

Shadow and Light

I shall not smile, thought The Pharoah.

Members of the Shining Sun stood round him in overlapping circles, arranged all over the many decks of the Deliverance Engine. He had personally instructed the acolytes in its use. Not that user error could be entirely eliminated, of course.

But these weren't cultists, hoping for quick power through risky means. Or acolytes, mere mules to haul energy. These were scientists, the finest minds of their generation. Some were his fellows of old from the Light College, men and women he'd graduated with. They'd all worked hard for this.

At the cardinal axes stood Foci, the senior elected members of the group. Not that all of them could really be considered senior, exactly. Somebody had been picking off many of the original founding members.

Somebody who had been dealt with.

Wizards' Cup Semi-Final 1: Kicking Oz

The Wizards' Cup enters the final four, and only two lores will face off in the final.

Before we get into the first semi-final, may I draw your attention to the podcasts of The Dwellers Below, an aptly-named group of Aussie tournament players who get together on a monthly basis to yammer about the 'hammer.

They usually last for 2 hours (it could probably be cut to a lean 45 minutes without the jokes, but why would you want that?) and the ones I've listened to I've found to be both informative and an absolute riot.

Anyway, their latest podcast discusses all of the Battle Magic lores in detail, as they debate which ones are the best. So this is clearly a common train of thought in WFB (makes me wish I'd taken notes before commencing battle here - it might have helped).

But enough of this ... on to glory!

Not pictured: glory.

Death and Beasts

They'd been at the inn for all of half an hour when the Witch Hunter turned up.

Bruno was so exhausted, he could barely concentrate on what the man was saying. He pushed his plate of stew away, glad of an excuse not to finish it. He wasn't hungry. He kept seeing the life drain out of that woman's face as his magic gripped her.

Unbearable Lightness

Schaeffer screamed.

The light was everywhere. It was everything. It was tearing through him, impaling him on brilliant shafts. His auric armour was being ripped away, taking hanks of hair and skin with it.

Around him, scintillating figures hammered at his golden guards, smashing them apart with hammers of pure white energy. The sky, if it was a sky, was painful to see. And the clouds of tidal magic that scudded underfoot reflected that same searing light.

The Pharoah was an impossibly vast figure, somehow both as bright as the midday sun and dark as its eclipsed corona at once. He seemed to flicker, although the flickers brought no shadow. He brought light to the world, he was the world. Schaeffer cowered at his annihiliating presence

And then he was gone.

Life in the Shadows

The Museum was near silent again. The tall ceiling drank up sound in the same way that the gloomy halls drank light. The distant drumming of the rain outside, that was all now. A gentle fire had started in one corner, where a dropped lantern had fallen on the foot of a heavy tapestry. If it was quiet now, it was the sort of quiet that promised worse to come.

Bad Guys

Someone asked me something the other day that I didn't have a ready answer for.

"Kraken," they asked me, inexplicably using my internet alias in an actual conversation, "in all the many wargames, roleplaying games and related hobby nonsense that you play, you always go for the bad guys. Why is that?"

"Don't ask me difficult questions!"

Break's Over

Back to the War. All these flying elves and manga robots - you start getting withdrawal after a while. I realise it had been over a month since I last painted either a horned helmet or a skull.

You know it's bad when you start seeing subliminal messages in a cushion shop.

I also had omens and portents, seen around Gothenburg as I wandered about. Things that told me I had strayed from the path and that the Dark Gods were not unaware.

Or when the Blood God appears to be behind building work at your local supermarket. 'Sweco' my ass.

EXT: Compact and Bijou

As you may have seen from some of the SkypeBoot photos, my terrain collection has recently acquired some nice new additions. Following a request from Kraken to elaborate on the grainy Skype images, let's look at them in some more detail...

"An attractive old building with distinct features."

Flappy

More for the armies of Mighty Kas!

Our recent High Elf romp clearly inspired Kas to get a Frostheart for his collection. I'm not surprised, it was a great big flappy thorn in my side. Anything that makes your opponent Always Strike Last is a worthy investment, frankly.

Despite still being bitter at having lost, I welcomed the chance to paint the bugger. Bluntly, I reckon the box job is (despite being crisply executed) poor. Why blend all the lovely snowflakes into the background of the feathers? Why paint the nice elven ruin on the base in boring grey? Why use pastel purple at all?

The dark mirror of offical schemes

I vaguely remember an old White Dwarf about the excellent Bretonnian Green Knight model, where they talked about warm vs cold greens. Perhaps some of it went in.