Endless Hobbyist

Halflings and Blood Bowl

I enjoyed a trip down to Warhammer World in Nottingham UK this last week. It is a really fun place to visit for Games Workshop fans. Some friends and I have been a couple of times in the last few months, but this time we decided to play some Blood Bowl in Bugman’s Bar rather than book a table. It was the right decision. Sitting comfortably, occasionally popping to the bar for drinks, and eating…

It’s been ages…

Well, what a lot of time has passed. I haven’t looked at this blog since 2019, and then, in early 2020, we all had the …thing that happened. Since 2019, I have had a few different hobby activities. Just before the first Lockdown in the UK, I’d started a few projects, including some Vikings for Saga, a Halfling Team for Blood Bowl, and I picked up Star Wars Legion. I will try and remember to do…

I didn’t take that many photos, because it took so long to do everything as we don’t have Apocalypse rules yet. There was a lot of dice rolling and walking the length and breadth of a 12′ x 6′ table!

Here’s some from the 2 days though:

The entirety of my infantry was spread across these 4 tanks.

This Terminator Assault squad killed 12 boys in one round of combat, then died to a Nob Squad charge in the back.

Hordes of Orks vs some Imperial Finest Armour.

The Killer cans cometh!

OPEN FIRE!

The High Marshall and his retinue advance to slaughter the Xenos!

The biggest Ork Tank on the field was blocked in by this heroic Land Raider, until it was destroyed!

My zealous warriors advance.

Keep moving forward!

There’s was a good showing from the Ork’s finest airforce!

This is almost the entire board after setup on the first day, it got very bloody very fast.

My Landspeeders! Out for the first time since…6th edition probably!

It was a really, really fun time, and the allied and enemy generals were a fantastic bunch. It did really make me want to try Apocalypse now that GW have made that ruleset so streamlined. Will have to see what it’s like when I have the rules in my hands.

I painted a few bits up to make up the numbers for this, so pictures of them will be forthcoming eventually. Right now I need to build a Sicaran Battletank!

Had a few more bits and pieces completed over the last couple of weeks. Had lots of stuff going on both in the hobby world, and out of it, including an excellent time at the UK Games Expo.

Heresy Slow Grow

Finished both the Javelin Landspeeder and the Praetor in time for my 1000pt game, which resulted in new painted model syndrome, and everyone failing their key roles. Was still lovely to have a…

So I’ve not posted here since August last year. Mainly because I spiralled into some mental health issues, and lost all interest in a lot of things, including my hobby. This isn’t a post about mental health, but I do want to make a point, don’t suffer alone, get help.

On that note, I want to share what I’ve managed to do since getting the help I needed. So here it is.

Alpha Legion Horus Heresy…

The Kharadrons are still getting the love at the moment. I plan to get enough done for a solid 1000pts game, with 2000pts not far behind. Then…I’ll probably do some work on Shadespire warbands. Then…maybe some 40k.

“Finished” Aether-Khemist, needs more highlighting

I rush finished the Aether-Khemist for the game I posted about last time, and looking at it now, I feel he needs some more…

The forces were Order vs Chaos, with 1500pts Seraphon and 1500pts of my Kharadrons, vs 1500pts a piece of Khorne and Tzeentch.

The battle lines!

We were playing Scorched Earth battleplan, so there were 3 objectives a side. The intention for our forces was to stomp/fly across the board and grab their objectives, then burn them and run back across to our lines. If it had gone on to the full five turns however, we might not have had anything left!

Chaos got first turn, the Bloodthirster got a charge in, and decimated an entire unit of Saurus Warriors. Things looked a little stacked against us already!

I spy a greater daemon!

There used to be a Saurus Warrior unit here…

Then the whole game became one sweeping brawl, with the two battlelines clashing, and my fairly average shooting plinking off lots of Bloodreavers and the odd monster.

Bloodreavers got charged, and my Frigate jumped in to ‘help’

“Skywardens” plinking off some Bloodreavers

At the end of Turn 2, we’d made a positioning error and missed one objective point, so our opponents beat us 6-5. So many units had died that the Khorne Blood Tithe almost produced enough points to summon 2 Bloodthirsters. As it was, one came back, ready to charge into the Saurus Oldblood again. Plus, Karanak used his special ability and summoned another unit of Flesh Hounds to kill his Saurus prey.

There was some serious carnage, and we felt that turn 3 onwards would have seen us lose the entire left flank, my Admiral, and possibly the Seraphon Oldblood too, after being faced with another Bloodthirster. I discussed summoning with my team mate, and we’re not sure if it’s too powerful or not yet. While he does have Seraphon, he had been awaiting a Slaan, and needed some extra units so he’d actually be able to take part in Summonpalooza, so we’ll probably have a better idea either way in future battles.

The Saurus Oldblood takes on Bloody Boy!

Saurus Knights getting tar-pitted

The Soul Grinder happily ground up some Saurus Knights

The Endrinriggers wiffed a few rolls, so Admiral had to save the day!

I just like this model.

At this point, he’d taken out two sorcerers.

So much blood had been spilled, enough to summon Bob here.

I for one felt slightly left out in the cold, I can’t use the new fancy endless spells, I don’t have summoning, and points wise, things didn’t really change much in 2.0 updates for me. I still love the aesthetic of my Sky Duardin, and I think I might pick up some Fyreslayers as allies, maybe even Dispossessed and Ironweld Arsenal stuff, make a truly multi-Duardin army. I hesitate to stoop so low as to pick up a Knight-Incantor, which seems to be the easy win magic wise, but I also like the idea of running the Aetherstrike Force Warscroll Battalion. At the end of the day, I’d much rather play thematic, narrative style games than straight up competitive ones, but I can see the difficulties Kharadron players have if they want to be even remotely competitive.

Arty shot of my brave Keisotsu

Ryuken-9, The Major

Keisotsu moving up

Domaru showdown!

The rest of the photos are all on the website, but you can see they mostly only have base colours on. I normally don’t like playing without fully painted armies, but the weather here in sunny UK has been so warm, painting has been difficult due to paint drying in minutes on the palette. Also, this campaign is running until July 23rd and I struggle to fit games in so I needed to get stuff on the table. Hopefully the weather will cool down and the gang will end up painted up by the end!

In the last post, I showed my progress on some Test of Honour miniatures. So with that in mind last Saturday, I played my first proper game of Test of Honour, with my newly finished six(!) models. The games went well, nice and fast, good fun, even if the second game ended in a stalemate of Samurai heroes lying on the floor. Here’s some pics:

Masahiro, Warrior Monk of the Faceless men

Spear-armed Masked men group

Bowmen of my Samurai Clan

We played the first two scenarios of the Battle Guide, in which I won the first, and we drew the second, as you will see…

Battle 1: First Clash. Victory to me!

The masked men march up the road

This guy will never hit…probably

Masahiro encourages his hired bowmen

Dishonourable Samurai uses a temple to hide behind

Masahiro humiliates a Samurai

Battle 2: Seize the Outpost. Draw!

Masahiro protects his vases

Stay away from my vases!

Masked men protect their valuable…vases

The Masked men take on the retinue of the pompous Samurai

Masahiro tries to finish off some Ashigaru

As you can see from this final shot, our Samurai were heroic at the end:

Both our Samurai managed to end up knocked down in the last turn of the scenario

What you can only just see in this last picture is that I had reinforcements for the battle, which were a group of Ninjas. However, I hadn’t painted these, so kept them out of photos. When I got home however, I quickly finished three so I had less to paint for the next battles!

Ninja group

Kama at the ready

Ninja poised for silent death

Ninja with two swords

These were actually super easy to paint, and allowed me to go to town on highlighting black. I used a very dark grey with a blue tint to highlight the cloth, using a mid-grey as the very top highlights. These guys did almost nothing in the game, as they have short ranged throwing stars and swords, and coming on as reinforcements in the second-to-last turn meant all they did was contest an objective. Still, held the draw because of them.

And finally as a bonus, my two completed Blood Bowl players:

Hornhold Hammerers Blitzer

Hornhold Hammerers Slayer

So, this last week, I’ve been working on both my Dwarf Blood Bowl team, and some Test of Honour stuff for a game at the weekend.

WIP on a Dwarf Blitzer.

I hoped to have the Dwarf team at least up to some sort of table top standard by Thursday, but time is running out now and I still have two or three base colours to get on. So maybe…

Keeping a nice selection of beard colours.

As for the Test of Honour miniatures, I still have a couple of days to get them to some sort of standard, so I think I might manage it. The plan is to play through the scenarios in the Battle Book that comes with the core game, so for this Saturday I only needed a leader, 3 spearmen and two archers.

Masahiro from the Masked Men expansion

Spearman from the Masked Men

An archer from the Test of Honour Core box

This is probably the most prolific I’ve ever been since restarting big time in the hobby, so hopefully it will continue for a while!

Check back soon for the completed models!

I have been working through some of my Kharadrons as a group of us decided we’d attempt a skirmish campaign, which would in turn, lead to a Path to Glory campaign, which would hopefully lead to the ability to play full Age of Sigmar games. With that in mind I, for the first time ever, am ahead of schedule.

I’ve already put pictures of my first few units that I did for this endeavour, but I now have more complete!

The main thing I’ve achieved this last month or so is completing my Arkanaut Frigate, from start to finish, in under 2 months. For me, that’s a big deal!

A beauty of a ship!

This is the most intricate model I’ve painted to completion. I’ve done some the same size or bigger (see my Black Templars posts or my Imperial Navy Thunderbolt) but not with this much care. Doing this model was both a delight, and a hefty test of my ability to pick colour schemes that work across such a large model without it looking too bland. I am pretty pleased with how it came out.

Frigate’s Captain

Endrinmaster, checking all is working

Navigator, doing his thing

Alongside this, I completed two more Endrinriggers to bring that unit up to the minimum three. So, for now, I have enough models complete for my first Path to Glory mission. More of these Duardin to come!

Kharadon Team, Assemble!

I have been plodding away at various bits of hobby goodness, as my main aim at the moment is to get as much stuff built and basecoated as possible while the weather is nice here in sunny UK. (At the moment it’s actually too hot! My base coat is drying too fast!)

The idea is that by having a lot of stuff at least basecoated, I can pick and choose what I work on when the weather gets worse later in the year, and hopefully get through some backlog!

Bagh-Mari and Nagas for my Infinity Acontecimento force

Bagh-Maris

USAriadna backlog

I also managed to squeeze in a game of Infinity last month, which went… not great for me, but was good fun.

Bipandra was prepared to heal everything. She didn’t, she got shot.

My Fusilier Missile Launcher watches for targets. He did shoot a lot!

So, working on my massive backlog was quite satisfying, so of course I bought more stuff. Namely, Test of Honour, a Japanese Samurai skirmish game from Warlord Games. I was given a demo game by a friend of mine, and instantly wanted it. A very simple skirmish system which plays fast and has cinematic style. A nice short evening game, which fills a niche in my availability.

Test of Honour, I borrowed some cool models.

My Samurai was injured all over and eventually fell to this Ronin

So after the demo game, I dived right in!

In addition to working through my big Warhammer 40k project, AoS Kharadrons, and multiple Infinity armies, I now have yet another system to work with. Woops.

Other than a couple of games I also took a pilgrimage to what is now Warhammer Fest (used to be Games Day when I was younger.) So off I went to Coventry to see what goodies Games Workshop were rustling up for the near future. I didn’t take many pics, but I have to say it was great to see how many staff were there chatting merrily away about all things hobby. GW have really upped their game when it comes to engaging with the community.

Forge World’s latest Primarch model Alpharius

Design studio have these cool up-scaled models of some of the releases.

The new black coach from the upcoming Nighthaunt update.

Adeptus Titanicus is returning in August! This is AWESOME

I was so excited by all the goodies that I bought a Forgeworld Open Day ticket for July, so pics of that when I’ve been!

In continuation of my previous post, I have more pics of my Kharadron Overlords that I’ve completed. I’m now up to 10 Arkanauts, and Arkanaut Admiral, an Endrinmaster, and work has started on some Endrinriggers. The Barak Urbaz colour scheme is actually very satisfying to paint. It takes a little bit of patience and careful application to get the green wash to look uniform across all the models’…

I have done a fair bit!

I am actually hobbying quite hard at the moment, but haven’t taken the time to post anything here. Mostly because this takes me way longer to post than say, a quick Instagram or Facebook post. However, lots of things have been sort of moving forward. Since going to a proper Infinity tournament, I have not actually played much or any Infinity. However, what I did do is pick up Warhammer…

A Tournament – Infinity Style

So I went to my first ever competitive tournament. Not just for Infinity, but for any miniatures game ever. This was table 2 at the tournament. I’d taken this shot to show where my Hexa was hiding. Sneaky! I really enjoyed it. I was apprehensive at first, as I am big into the modelling, painting, and narrative side of miniatures gaming, but was never a huge fan of competitive gaming. The main…

So a bunch of us local gamers made a jolly again down to Warhammer world down in Nottingham. It was the big Games Workshop 40k Campaign event, and so tables were limited. We managed to secure the Zone Mortalis table, which meant corridors! We had myself with Black Templars, a Crimson Fists battle brother, a filthy Tau commander, and a damned Khorne Demons player. We quickly made up a scenario…

Prepping for a tournament.

So, I have an Infinity tournament coming up, and that means I needed to crack on with the models I showed last post. I have chosen Neoterran Capitaline Army Sectorial for my list, which meant I had to get some Bolts painted, and various odds and sods. This is the progress so far: Some more work since the last time. Here’s a couple of individual models: Aquila Guard, with a neat coat on. Black…