So I took a week off...

 ...and achieved nothing much substantive! I managed to have a great game of 40K at the club and took one photo before we started and then forgot to keep going (!) and then had a very salutary lesson in Kings of War from clubmate Ryan who learned me that my all-Paladin Basilean list might be a bit rubbish. 

 I was trying to get this done for my 40K game last weekend and fell short by what I thought would be a couple of hours. It was closer to another solid day's work to get it done after finding some casting issues with the shoulderpads and a lot of patience with the putty to fix them well enough:

 This is a Knight Moirax, a Mechanicum version of the Armiger chassis. It's an interesting combo of tools that should go nicely alongside my two Warglaives and Helverin - the main gun is for popping Marines and the claw will rip vehicles a new one.  I wanted to add the small Mechanicum knight to the list before I add a Cerastus Knight Castigator to the list to have a nice mix of both kinds of knights.

Once that Castigator is done I'll be able to put a Knight army on the park. I've got a build with two large knights and four small ones that still leaves room for about 350 points of various Imperial Agents which I think should make for a lot of fun builds and also shore up some of the weaknesses of a list with lots of very big guns. 

More DnD hilarity

Our next DnD campaign is going to be a run through the Vecna: Eve of Ruin and our DM and I had a lot of very silly conversations about running a 'Suicide Squad' type party - I went as far as building Captain Boomerang as a Drow Ranger (because obviously Drow are Aussies - they come from the down the under(dark) place that's full of spiders!)  - but given the campaign hook it seemed an opportunity to go a bit mad. So I went off to Spelljammer: 

I give you Commodore Everett Storm, Giff Privateer. Commodore at least in his own head. A master of blade and pistol, he's been running cargo, legit and not-so-legit, from the back room of Clive's Den on Garden (that's a deep cut for the TSR Spelljammer game fans from the 90s) all over Realmspace. He's slain more Neogi than you've had hot dinners. He wears a cape made from the shells of Umber Hulks. He once escaped an Elven naval vessel hiding his faithful Hammerhead, Realmspace Dancer, in the landing bay of an abandoned Dwarven Citadel. 

Some of those stories are true. These days he's mostly retired, spending his days regaling travelers with tales of derring-do on the decks of all mannder of void-faring ships and hopefully getting them to pay for the drinks.

Character-wise, he's a Giff Rogue with the Swashbuckler archetype. The species / skill combos will make him a crack shot with his pistol and then a Zorro-like figure with his very worn cutlass at close quarters. He's surprisingly agile for an old Giff despite being an absolute unit. Personality-wise, I'll play him as a mix of the Han-Solo-esque lovable rogue (who definitely doesn't drop his cargo and run at the first sight of a Neogi Mindspider) and a gruff old soldier off on one last big adventure to save the multiverse. 

Next Time

Club day and more hilarity will ensue! 

It's been a while since I painted a thing...

 ...but with the followup arrival of my desk, that is to say the arrival of my chair, painting has begun again. 

First off, a couple of initiative markers for our current DnD campaign:

These are a neat little gem our friend Canny (of his Gambit) has printed before. He's made a specific set for this campaign. They slot over the top of the DMs screen so we can all see the play order. It's really cool. Obviously that's me (and Angrath Evenkeel) on the left and our resident merc with the mouth Arakiti Mat Uth on the right. 

In a slightly more significant effort, I also made some small progress on my Breachers:

The two robots were not exactly difficult but when you haven't picked up a brush in months and just been shoving polyfilla onto bases, it was nice to take an easy job to get going again. I've got some basecoats on more Breachers so will be getting into those now. Trying to clear the deck before I deal with some of the still shrinkwrapped boxes on the shelf....

Next Time

More painted things! 

Christmas is hard on the hobby!

There hasn't been a whole lot of hobby time in the run up to Christmas (surprising no one) so I haven't been doing a whole lot of hobbying as a result! But I have knocked off a couple of little things.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
I've posted the WIP of this model previously but I finally got her finished.

Saskia Waldlaufer - Amber Wizard

Saskia Waldlaufer will be an Amber Wizard for our next weekly RPG campaign which is, I think, hopefully going to be WFRP 4th Edition. But before we get to that, we need to finish...

Dungeons and Dragons! 
A lot of my hobby time recently has been going into DMing our weekly RPG group through the re-written 5th Edition of Curse of Strahd campaign. We've been making a genuine effort to get more RPG-y with our RPGs and that includes me! It's going really well too, I think, and the players are all working super hard to inhabit their characters and make decisions that make sense for the character, not the player.

I am really enjoying DMing CoS for two reasons - firstly that it's open world, but is still constrained geographically which means there is a lot less prep I need to do to be ready for where the party might go, which in turn means I can be more prepped for the places they do go. Secondly, Strahd is great. The authors have laid out what his aims for the campaign are in the introduction and so I, as the DM, actually have my own PC. And he's awesome. So far I've creeped the party out in a serious way and also punched one of them across a graveyard to express just how scary he is!

There's a bunch of really good material online to help a DM with CoS along with an amazing playthrough on Youtube that has given me some great ideas and material. It's easily been the most fun I've had as a DM in ages!

Warhammer 40K
I did a little bit of work on a couple of my Deathwatch models too. I've been doing a bit of parts shenaniganery to get a second Primaris Kill Team built and these two models got a bit cannibalised while I did it - mostly to sort out things like Terminator scale shoulderpads for the Inceptors and Aggressors. Anyway, they've now been repaired and repainted so get to be posted here. One 2020 task complete! HA!

Raven Guard Primaris Hellblaster and Black Templars Terminator

Next Time
I will be doing a bit of a 2019 retrospective and previewing a project that bloggers Pooch, Scotty and Tank Engine, clubmate BB and I will be taking on in 2020. It's really, really dumb but it's going to be so SO MUCH fun.