Warmaster Revolution v1.0 Released!

Warmaster Revolution has hit v1.0 and been released to the world!

WMR is a mighty tome combining Warmaster, the updated rules in Warmaster Ancients, plus siege and campaign rules. This amazing work was brought together by Aleš Navrátil and the Czech Warmaster community.

Plus you'll notice my name in the special thanks section for help editing it. :)

I've been starting to clean up some of my many many undead forces, and want to start painting up the Chaos force I have and get some games in because as you may have guessed, I love Warmaster a lot!

My Painting Desk - 12 July 2017

I have mostly finished the 40K Chaos Cultists I showed in the last post, but for a change I decided to switch to my 6mm Marhaf Legions, miniatures by Plasmablast Games in Greece.

It's been far too long since I've done any 6mm scifi gaming, and I really want to get these minis painted before Polyversal is released. So at the moment my desk looks like this while I watch season 1 of The Expanse.

A bit hard to see the minis among the newspaper. Maybe I'll get a plain colour dropsheet next time. :)

But here are the progress pics of the stages for these tanks. First prime in black, then drybrush the tank treads in light grey (Army Painter Ash Grey), touch up the bits of armour I greyed out with black, after which they look about like this:

Then I paint the raised parts and panels in GW Khorne Red, which I found a nice solid base colour. I leave all the recesses black. At one point I tried dry-brushing the red to save time, but I found that I was losing the shading. These minis are just too small, or my hand is too heavy.. Either way, I went back to manually painting the base colour.

From there I use Army Painter Dragon Red as the main highlight layer. This covers most of the original Khorne Red, but I leave some parts to produce some contrast and depth.

You can see here that the ones with the Dragon Red highlighting look a lot better. I'm toying with a subtle final highlight and have done one with orange (a bit of AP Daemonic Yellow added to the Dragon Red) but it might be too subtle.

My last force (Plasmablast Progenitors) are a beige colour and use bone as thee main highlight and white as the edge highlights, but I'm worried white might be too much of a contrast to the red. I'll do a few tests and see...

Either way, I love the way these are turning out. They're fantastic minis and Plasmablast are my favourite 6mm manufacturer.

Getting back into 40K

Where does our time go?

Earlier this year I started getting into Age of Sigmar with the Storm of Sigmar boxset. I feel that it's a great system for skirmish games, and that prompted me to look at 40K when that was re-released.

I'm pleased to say that I really like 8th edition, and I like that the rules are also free. I haven't found a reason to go out and buy the full rulebook because I just play for fun. I'm not sure that it would add any value to my games at this stage.

A couple years ago I sold most of my Legion of the Damned and Chaos minis, so this time around I have very few to play with. Basically it's one carry case of LotD Marines, a dozen Necrons, a drawer full of Orcs, and a handful of misc Tyranids. Plus 2 squads of 7 metal Plague Marines which I have wanted to turn into a full Nurgle army for several years now.

But then there's also Genestealer Cults. I friggin love me some Genestealers. So. Damn. Much.

Alas, my disposable income and the local price of GW minis here in New Zealand, means it will be about a year before I can have one full army of whichever flavour. And that's just too long to wait.

So I'm very happy that this edition plays well as a skirmish game. I can take one or two units and get playing much sooner.

I've always wanted to field an army of Imperial Fists, but have never been happy with my attempts at the yellow armour. So recently I pulled out a few unpainted lego marines (you know the click together cheapies) and tried out a few paint schemes, trying various shading techniques and colours, and still not sure I've got it down how I want it. I like this one in the foreground, and maybe that's how I'll settle on a whole unit.

My other WIP unit is a squad of Chaos Cultists. I got these guys because they're fantastic miniatures and they're reasonably priced (i.e.; stupidly cheap by GW standards) at NZ$17 per pack of five. They will complement my Plague Marines, and at some point I will have to get a force commander, but not sure what I want yet.

I showed the new Battle Primer free rules to a guy at work. He has some Orcs he bought cheap years ago and has never played. When he looked into it around 7th edition, he balked at the rules (having a family with one recent addition this wasn't practical or realistic), so shelved the idea. When I showed him the new rules, he couldn't stop talking about it. Eventually another guy whose dad used to play Fantasy Battle, but has himself always preferred science fiction, jumped on the idea. He ordered himself a small army of Necrons from an online auction.

Word got around, more and more people started talking about it and now I think there are seven people around the office who are keen on playing. One just bought a huge Tau army pro-painted for super cheap. In fact, there were so many models and postage was going to cost so much that he drove 5-6 hours across the country each way to go pick them up personally.

Another guy has gone to Australia and is going to get one of the starter boxes while there.

So it seems that GW are making moves in the right direction. Now if only they'll bring their prices down to be saner. NZ$75 for the new (plastic) Primarch models? Um, that's over 10% of the average weekly wage in this country.

And for that reason I'm going to be buying the cheaper lego versions of their models when I buy new, or I will be looking at the second hand market. :)

Has this edition motivated you to jump (back) on? Or jump off? What do you think of the concise rules?

[VIDEO] What could we expect from GW's Specialist Games in 2017?

In this video I analyse what's out and what could be coming out in the future for Games Workshop and their Specialist Games line.

[VIDEO] Is this the Golden Age of wargaming?

I made a Youtube video where I talk a bit (a lot) about the current era of wargaming and what it means to me.

I will try and do more discussion videos like this in the future too, so stay tuned and subscribe to see more there.

Blood Bowl Games and a Review of 5th Edition

(scroll down past the pics for a review)

It started last week when my good friend Grant succumbed to the tricksy wiles of a games salesman at a Bring-and-Buy table. Grant ended up buying a cheap copy of Blood Bowl, which I think was the 4th release--I won't call it 4th edition because The Marketing Team(TM) will probably just insist on it being called Blood Bowl, and because the game hadn't changed (and still hasn't--mostly, I'll get to that).

So anyway, we set it up and went to start reading through the rulebook to play. It's been a while and so naturally we forgot all the rules, and I myself have never owned a copy, having just played with a few friends over the years. But it had been a long, long while. As we were rolling our first dice to determine kickoff order, a nice chap (we'll call him Al), who was a super, super, hardcore Blood Bowl fan (was? nay, is) rocked up, eyes all aglint, and helped us play through our game. Al remembered every rule and every stat from every team, and if I'm honest, is quite probably the reason I won the game.

Credit where credit's due. Thanks Al. :)

The teams were Ogres with snotlings (with Grant as coach), vs Undead (coached by myself).

I didn't take notes throughout, so here are just some highlights of the game. This was the first time I took down one of the ogres: