Beyond the Gates of Antares - what's in the box?

I made a video the other day showing off the innards of Beyond the Gates of Antares, by Rick Priestly and Warlord Games. For those who don't follow my Youtube channel, here's the vid:

Rebasing some Warmaster minis

My collection of Warmaster Undead is fairly large. I bought a few thousand points worth myself when they were available in the stores and I have picked up a couple of collections since.

One haul netted me figures from two very distinct collections. One set were beautifully painted and based, and the others were... well... less so.

I call this latter lot the Kibble Collection, partly because it looks like they were based with crushed kibble--glued down with a hot glue gun no less. The heat from this and possibly from the modeller wiping the metal part of his or her glue gun on the bases, many have warped and bent and have sections that look like they've been melted.

Perhaps they have journeyed for centuries through the Chaos Warp. The result looks like a dog's breakfast. Hence the name.

Because I have so many minis to play with though, and when we do play it's rarely over 1000 points, I figured it was high time to do something about them. It was time to rebase the Kibble Collection.

Here are the photos of the start of the work. Dave helped me by cleaning the strips after I had mauled them off the bases. He helped me finish them off last night. The next step will be to order some new bases and mount them. Phwoar.

Shadow Storm - Hail Caesar Fantasy conversion

Someone called Ady has converted Hail Caesar for fantasy. It's not the first, as a friend of mine here in NZ released one a few years back, but this looks pretty good nonetheless.

It's called Shadow Storm and is presented as a PDF which updates/modifies certain sections of the HC rules. And he has army lists. Lots and lots of army lists. Looks like really great work and I can't wait to have a proper read and perhaps try it out to get a game in soon. I'd be angling towards Hail Warmaster. :)

When was the last time I played Warmaster?

It's been far too long since my last game of Warmaster. Looking at the posts on here, the last one I talked about was just over a year ago! Has it been that long? I'm really not sure. Sometimes time flies. Sometimes we plan on playing games, and may even get to pulling all our figures out, and then just start talking and lose track of time.

Surely I've played since then. No idea to be honest. But Dave and I spoke about it over the last few weeks, and he's moving back to his hometown in a couple of weeks, so we decided to try harder this time. Plus, he painted some Empire knights specially. If you look closely at the minis, he actually hadn't finished painting a full 1000 point force, so he used some of my Dwarfs as stand-ins.

It was nice actually, because we're usually playing Warmaster Undead vs Undead, so this was a pleasant change. Although, we had to try and remember (and find them in the rulebook) the terror rules because we'd been so used to ignoring them before. :)

I didn't take any notes of the game, so this isn't a battle report, but I took pictures of notable points in the game. Warning this is very image heavy.

First, the precursor, pulling out some (yes this isn't all of them) of my Undead before I prepped the table.

We begin...

Painting desk - 13 Dec 2015

Well, here are photos of what's on my painting desk today.

I finished the British redcoats...

Officers

Standard bearers (these will have their hands cut away and have flag poles stuck in them)

And while waiting for paint to dry, I did some work on some of my Citadel miniatures. They were still sitting on my table from the playtest game last week. Not really too much done with these guys.

Just put one layer of highlight on the clothing

Undercoated a couple of minis

...and put a highlight on these guys' jackets

But now I've had to clear the table because we've got a game of Warmaster today.

Oh yeah, and that means I've completed 300 miniatures this year! Achievement Unlocked!

GW History Article

There's an excellent two part article on Unplugged Games covering the history and inception of Games Workshop. The first article, called Games Workshop: the humble origins of a global gaming empire has an interview with Ian Livingstone, and the second, titled Blood, dice and darkness: how Warhammer defined gaming for a generation, has an interview with Rick Priestly.

Well worth reading, and has many insights that I had no idea about, even having bought their toys since the late '80s. First and foremost that Citadel Miniatures, headed by Bryan Ansell bought out Games Workshop, and the main reason they appear to have kept the GW name was because they were too cheap to get new signs for the stores made up.

Chaos Warlord by wiggers123

I had always figured (haha geddit?) that Citadel was a subsidiary, not the primary driver. How comfortable that kept me in all these years of blissful ignorance.

I wrote an article recently about GW's reboot of their specialist games studios, and what that meant to me. Since then I've been looking into more of their history and it's led to a few eye-openers. One of the most interesting is that the mass exodus purported to have happened a few years ago, doesn't seem to have been as reported. Many of the people I had assumed to have left still work there in different capacities. Some, like Gav Thorpe, still appear to be working for GW as freelancers, and Mantic Games doesn't appear to have been started or staffed by ex-GW employees.

Whatever the future holds, I think we're now seeing the birth of a new Games Workshop--one which is more in line with what they had planned over 20 years ago with the merger of GW/Citadel brands.

Or will this usher in a new age of chaos?

Playtesting one of my board games

My friend Dave recently bought Battlesystems' modular cardboard terrain (see the unboxing video on my Youtube channel) and we were hankering to play a game using it. While cleaning out some boxes in the garage I found some notes and test cards for a board game I started developing a year or two ago. It's called Spacejunk: The Forsaken™ and it's a sci-fi game set in my Freejacks™ universe, in which players fight to take control of starships or space stations. One player acts as Game Master (like in a roleplaying game) and the other players take on the role of characters fighting their way through their missions.

The game is a bit of fun that includes rampaging robots, enemies that teleport next to players in the hopes of stopping them from achieving their goals, and waves and waves of spawning enemies.

So we grabbed a few random miniatures I had lying around, gave Dave a mission to shut down a computer allegedly being used to run experiments on mutating captured sentient beings, and he went at it.

Because the mechanics are still in note form, we played with a few ideas back and forth during the game, so there was no real consistency between turns, but I think that it's progressing well. And most importantly we had a lot of fun playing it, so it's a winner already. Not that I'm biased or anything. :)

So here are some photos of the day's excitement.

Almost finished first batch of Redcoats

A couple of weeks ago I posted that I had started a commission of British Redcoats from the American War of Independence. Well, I've almost finished. The main body of troops are done and the incomplete ones are the standard bearers and the COs.

As usual, the owner is going to base them.

These figures are unlike any I've ever painted, and I have to admit that I didn't paint them very efficiently, especially given the basic flat colour scheme. But I was quite worried about getting the pin striping done correctly, and as it turns out, I'm not really that happy with them.