#hobby2021

HOBBY

I fell apart a bit towards the end of last year, but an upside of that was being able to look back through the blog and see I hadn’t made any goals to meet for this year.

So let’s start on a high: I finished my first army. Ever. Considering they weren’t even my first choice when I started with Age of Sigmar, I’m more than happy with the selection of Sylvaneth I’ve managed to put together, however basic it may be. I even got them on the table this year (more later).

Since they have dropped points-wise after December’s Battlescroll update, I have some room to add another unit into my 2000 point army. I was already planning to expand the range of units I have to choose from next year, I might bring some of those plans forward.

With the push to get things ready for the November meet-up, I also managed to get my Space Wolves up to a reasonable standard for the tabletop, now including my Redemptor.

It’s amazing how just doing something simple like finishing the bases helps tie everything together. I’ve still got a bit of work to do on this army - finish some details here and there, and also transfers.

As part of both of these projects, I also painted my community secret santa gifts from the last two years, Aestasia and Ragnar. Speaking of secret santa, I managed to finish mine and send it out in time for Christmas this year (choosing not to paint it helped!), and I got this absolutely incredible model this year:

I even managed to get her on the table nearly straight away. Speaking of which…

GAMES

I managed to miss my November post, which would have included a roundup from the community meet in Bathgate. I wasn’t planning on going into detail with the games (two comprehensive defeats in 40k, and a win in AoS by playing the objectives), and more go into what I learned about my armies and how I played them.

Space Wolves

I still need to learn how to use certain units at their highest efficiency. I love Reivers, I love rolling lots of dice for their attacks, but they always seem to struggle. I did manage to wipe a Repentia squad with them, but then got wiped in return thanks to their fight-on-death strat. Consistently failing 9″ charges (re-rollable as well, thanks to an accompanying Phobos Lieutenant with Wulfen Stone) is also a bit demoralising.

To a lesser extent it’s the same with the Fenrisian Wolves. I appreciate they’re useful for screening, but I’m not quite tactically astute enough for that. Like the Reivers, they’d be effective against light infantry, but I haven’t had a chance to try that out yet. And, as the fastest unit I have available, I need to utilise that speed better (counter-attacking maybe?). I could also do with adding some more units with high mobility; 9th edition seems to be the game that needs it.

On the plus side, I’ve found Intercessors with Auto Bolt Rifles extremely effective, especially coupled with the Rapid Fire strat. Again, I love rolling lots of dice! I can also see that there’s a lot of utility that I’ve barely touched on in this army. More games will mean more familiarity, especially with stratagems.

On top of the games in Bathgate, I also got in a three-way fight on Boxing Day. I had the same issues with the Reivers and Wolves, but my army was now led by Herja Shadowhammer (name TBC), who had a whale of a time chopping up Astra Militarum Sentinels.

Sylvaneth

I only managed to get a single game in with these this year, but it was incredibly satisfying to do so. It was only a small points game, so I only had one Treelord on the table, but it was a good job I got a further set of Wyldwoods painted up because they ended up sprouting all over the place.

It was also my first game of 3rd edition AoS, so there were lots of things I needed to remember (and inevitably forgot), but I did get a lot out of it.

One thing I do need to be better at is positioning my line-of-sight blocking Wyldwoods, that’s for sure.

Other than using the Wyldwoods to move around the table, I once again didn’t have a lot of speed available. Finding myself now with some points to spare I have my eye on a unit of Tree-Revenants - their ability to teleport around the board with their Waypipes is extremely enticing.

I feel like getting the best out of the Wyldwoods is key to getting the best out of the army, considering the number of buffs each unit gets from them. I’m looking forward to playing more games with them and finding out!

2022

So what about next year? I have some things I’d like to achieve, but these are strictly ideas, not goals - I’ll not get hung up on whether I manage to do them or not.

At a basic level it will be Sylvaneth and Space Wolves: More Of The Same. The joy of being a mono-faction player!

With an army already complete with the Sylvaneth, I’m free to pick and choose what to add to it. I had a bit of a building frenzy earlier in the year, and I’ll add some Tree-Revenants to those. It’d also be nice to add another set of Wyldwoods to the collection. Then it’s a case of waiting for decent spraying weather. Painting a god would sure be an achievement too.

The Space Wolves need finishing up. I going to have to learn how to apply transfers having never used them before, but I’ve got plenty of models to practice on. I also already have a squad of Reivers (with bolt carbines - can’t fail those charges if you don’t charge with them) and another of Incursors part-built on my desk. The idea is similar to the Sylvaneth - get the rest of the units I want for the army built and ready for spraying. Once these are done, it’s moving on to the Blackmanes, and putting the Contrast away and getting the other paints out.

And there’s a couple of other projects I’d like to get my teeth into, but more on those when/if I get to them.

All in all, a pretty good year, and hopefully more to come.

More on her in a moment. Here’s how the actual list is going:

Get the Space Wolves up to the ‘details’ stage

Build Alarielle

Prep and send a pitch for an article on a hobby site(!)

The metallics are 99% complete on the Space Wolves, the same with the other colours (apart from the red, still need a new pot) and the bases all have texture paint on at the very least. Still a way to go, but happy with where they are currently.

I need to decide what I’m doing with these bases as well - my standard scheme is Astrogranite Debris, two washes of Nuln Oil, drybrush with a lighter grey, done. In order to save on Nuln Oil I tried to be a bit clever by using neat Black Templar Contrast instead, since I bought up a few pots after it was in short supply when it released. This means the bases have turned out a bit, well, black, so I now need to work out how I’m going to drybrush them back to something a bit less monochrome. I’ve prepped three 25mm bases with texture paint so I can have a play around and come up with something.

The Branchwych up top was in part a treat for ticking the Space Wolves off my list, but also came about from looking at the new core battalions in the just-released 3rd edition Age Of Sigmar Core Rules. Using the (leaked) updated points, my 2000 point army still weighs in at 2000 points, but only if I drop the warscroll battalions. Great, I thought, but when I tried to plug my units into the core battalions I found myself at a deficit:

I needed to find a sub-commander (leader model with less than 10 wounds), and the points to fit them in. The second part was easy - dropping a Dryad unit down from 20 to 10 would mean I had about 100 points to play with. As for the first part, well, turned out I had three sub-commanders primed and ready to paint so that was easy too!

Deciding which one to paint was also easy - the one I received for my Secret Santa was so inspiring I picked it up straight away and so Aestasia, the Herald of Summer, was ready in just a weekend. I still need to varnish her and add basing details, but I also want to incorporate a detail from the excellent short story that came with her - a garland of flowers on her skeleton friend.

Space Wolves successor chapters are thin on the ground in the lore - they typically fall to their bestial side and are mysteriously never heard of again.

The Wolfspear are different - a purely Primaris force born from Belisarius Cawl’s secret stash of space marines, described as brooding and brutal as opposed to their bullish and bellicose brothers.

I was immediately drawn to them. The plan for my all-Primaris Space Wolves was that they were from Erik Morkai’s Great Company - lots of Phobos armoured marines, an emphasis on being the hunters and scouts of the chapter. I even had the idea to paint the models that have the Concealed Positions abilty in white/light grey armour to differentiate them. If I’d held off a year or two, I think I would have fully commited to making this army Wolfspear instead, so close was their lore to my idea of what I wanted from the army.

Indeed, I positively yelped with joy reading this particular paragraph:

“Erik Morkai was particularly struck by the focus and killer instinct the Wolfspear displayed during their early deployments. The Chapter showed a preference for swift terror tactics and brutal executions such as Morkai favoured himself, and in a rare gesture of respect the taciturn Wolf Lord seconded some of his most experienced wolf scouts to the Wolfspear to impart their deadly hunting methods.”

So I have already planned my Wolfspear Kill Team. Actually, who am I kidding, I’ve planned out an entire army, but I’ll proxy a few games in the mean time. I’ve already arranged to generously relieve members of my hobby community of their unwanted Wolfspear transfer sheets.

It turns out Alarielle isn’t just an intimidating model on the tabletop, she’s also pretty scary to put together. I’ve never built anything this big before, so I was interested with the thought process I went through as it went together - namely “should I leave this as a sub-assembly?” and “what colour could I paint this?”. The beetle is still split in the middle, and the face is also only tacked on. I ummed and ahhed about the soul amphorae on its back, and whether to glue them on or leave them. In the end they were so delicate it was impossible to blu-tac them on so they got glued, but I’d also left them to the last piece which meant actually fitting them around the rest of the beetle proved hellish. Alarielle is mostly glued, but plenty of blu-tac there as well (and her wings still separate, obviously). Oh, and also not glued to the beetle.

I’m looking forward(?!?) to painting this model - it’s going to be like nothing else I’ve done before but the thought of the finished model is spurring me on. But not yet! Plenty of time for that.

One thing that did come out of finishing the Alarielle build was the feeling that nothing else I attempt to build will be as complicated or huge or as big a job.

I picked up a Drycha model from eBay for a decent price, but unfortunately that was just prior to the amazing deal that was their Broken Realms battalion box.

So I got to work.

This was a great model to put together, but I haven’t committed to which bug swarm to have emerging out of their hives yet. They are also mostly glued. apart from the cover for the soul amphora in her log, and her body itself in order that I can pop it out to paint.

Then when I was finished with Drycha, I moved on to:

The two Sylvaneth Warhammer Underworlds warbands. Two very distinct sets of models; the Kurnothi are all action and motion, while the Revenants are extremely fiddly looking. These are mostly just pushed together while I try to work out the best way of approaching how to paint them.

I think I’ve said before about which Warhammer army I was considering for collection back in the ‘90s. It was Dwarfs that made the cut (albeit briefly) then, but it turns out it was Wood Elves that won out in the long run.

But it wasn’t just Alarielle’s tree-kin who were answering the call to war;

I’ve long thought about expanding out to a Living City Cities of Sigmar army, and this is the starting point - a Nomad Prince with his personal guard of Eternal Guard spearman, and some Sisters of the Watch archers, accompanied by what will be a Ghyran Guard Stormcast Knight-Questor.

These are still very much tacked together. I will be attaching shields to the spearmen but it was so fiddly to achieve for the picture, and I also need to work out the best angles for the heads of the Sisters. They look a little awkward currently.

I’d always wanted to use the “He-Man” head from the Space Wolves sprues on a Stormcast, and this one seemed a natural fit. The only change I still need to make is to swap his sword out for either a spare from the Tree-Revenants or one from the Kurnoth Hunters, depending one which fits best size-wise.

And I hadn’t finished there!

I’d had this as an idea for a while, and was able to complete it on the cheap thanks to the Mortal Realms magazines. This is a Grand Convocation battalion of Stormcast (a Lord-Arcanum on Gryph-Charger at the back, and then from l-r a Lord-Exorcist and two Knights-Incantor), who will be from the Hallowed Knights Stormhost because of their ties to the Living City and Ghyran as well as Alarielle herself. I liked the idea of a small army of daemonhunters consisting of this Battalion with some Sequitors and Castigators, and I managed to finish roughly putting these four together just this evening.

Now, I don’t actually have any plans to paint any of these any time soon! I will be moving back on to the Space Wolves for the time being, and working on finishing the Primaris and making a start on the rest of the army. These will be ready for when I need them.

So, not in the order I put them together, the nearly 1500 points I’ve built and mostly primed -

These are the mainly phobos/Vanguard elements - a second Reiver pack (with a load-out that was legal in 8th but not now in 9th edition, forgot to check!). In front of them a Phobos Rune Priest with a chunky necklace and a new rune sword, and a Phobos Wolf Lord with glorious top-knot. Then, I had initially only built the Infiltrator Comms marine (playing Snake on his wrist computer) to give me that option as required, but I then built the rest of his squad after i’d primed him.

Also:

The Gravis armour units. The Inceptors at the front were built for the last meet-up, hence one already being partially painted. Back left are the Eradicators with the odd extra wolfy bit, back right the Easy-build Aggressors (which were a pain in the arse to build. Cheap though!). Dead centre is the man who will be the warlord, my Gravis Wolf Lord. He was already mostly put together, but I finally finished him off, the back banner being a last minute but ultimately excellent decision.

And not just those, but also:

The Suppressors lazing around at the back were some of my initial builds when I was aiming for 400 points. I was toying around with the Assault Intercessors at the front and they slowly came together in the end, big fist lad in the middle looking so good helped spur me to finish the unit. The Firestrike Servo Turret was also a “let’s see how this goes together - oops I’ve built it” project. My old army used a Space Crusade Tarantula, and this reminds me a lot of that. Lastly, at the back, a Finecast Cyber Wolf, which was horrible to work with, and needs a lot of gap filling before it’s ready for spraying. It’s making me cringe thinking of the other Finecast models I’ve got to put together in the future, especially the two characters riding Thunderwolves.

After all of these, I was thinking of putting an additional Lieutenant together. I got part-way through carving a wolf pelt off the back of a small marine model so it would fit on a Primaris marine when the thought struck me - this wasn’t the intention of this army. It was supposed to be a quick project (it was meant to just be 1000 points, but look how that turned out!), but simple weapon and head swaps, and little additional details were fine, not wholesale re-sculpting missions.

With this, I thought of the Lieutenant models in the Dark Imperium box, and was about to put one of those together until I remembered I already had the perfect model to hand:

My secret Santa Ragnar Blackmane! I’ve made a handful of minor additions to the initial model - a wolf pelt on the pistol like the original metal model, a clasp for the chains (probably one of my favourite bits, from the Terminator box) like the current model, and bulked out his back a bit so his backpack fits better. No banner - I felt that would detract if he’s masquerading as a Lieutenant, but the model is still fancy enough for me to run him as the man himself. The base detail finishing the look off is from the Eliminators kit.

This is what I’m working on currently, the Primaris I had tried to prepare for a previous meet-up. This little lot (excluding the axe wielding Battle Leader front-right) makes up a battalion of exactly 1000pts, mainly thanks to a decision now long-forgotten to build a sixth Intercessor for one of the packs.

The plan is to finish the base colours (mostly metallics), and get the bases done so they are at a stage where they look reasonable. There’s a small setback in that one of the dogs chewed my painting handle, which makes doing the base rims tricky, and the same dog also chewed and emptied my pot of Blood Angels Red.

Once I’ve worked past those issues and got the models to the next stage, I’d feel comfortable leaving them to work another project, and them come back to them again to finish. That other project is feeling right now like getting Alarielle built and primed, we shall see!

The other plan I had was to set myself some goals for the coming months. Normally I hate setting goals like this, as I barely ever manage to hit them. But I think aiming for something fairly achievable and getting it done and ticking it off a list could be just the boost I need over the summer. So to that end:

Get the Space Wolves up to the ‘details’ stage

Build Alarielle

Prep and send a pitch for an article on a hobby site(!)