How do I do this, again?

Hello!

It's a... it's been a minute.

Some stuff has happened since my last post.

I mean, I went to NoVa and played toy soldiers, had a good time. Ended up coming home a day early because I'm a homebody and missed my kiddos, but overall got what I wanted out of it. I'll post in more detail below.

Between going to NoVa and now, I've only really played a few games: I've been in a consistent D&D group, I've played a handful of games of Star Wars Legion, and then I've played some various things with my sons.

Painting... eh, really I've just managed to work on a sizable Star Wars Legion commission (pics below).

Hobby in general: I made the leap into 3D printing! It's truly like just adding an entire second hobby onto the primary minis gaming hobby, though, when you consider everything that goes into it. It's quite fun though, and has consumed a fair amount of my time.

What else, what else... Oh, the Mandalorian series came out and finished season 1! It was incredible. Everything I want out of Star Wars. Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker also came out. It was not incredible. It was not everything I want out of Star Wars. In fact, it was the first time I've ever experienced that negativity I've seen so many times before in other nerds for myself. I mean I still like Star Wars, and it was fun enough to watch, but whew man was the story and pacing/editing painful to endure. You have to remember, though, that Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is probably my favorite of the 9, haha!

Oh, and the pandemic.

No, like the real pandemic. "The coronavirus" or, by its proper name, COVID-19.

As a recording for posterity and a note to my future self: March 2020 is a dark time, made to seem even darker by the heavy shadow of the immediate future. Tennessee is behind in its efforts to quarantine and order "shelter in place" guidance to the public, but many other states and larger cities have already gone that route. Aside from the grocery store and fast food places, pretty much everything is closed. No game stores, no movie theaters, no restaurants, etc. The economy is devastated, with hundreds of thousands not working in an effort to slow the spread of the virus and keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. Being part of the "essential" services (construction), I'm still at work every day. Well, for now, at least. It's a crazy time.

Anyway, back to the game stuff... ?

So, NoVa:

NoVa consisted of two main events for me, with a bit of other games sprinkled in at night with my travel companions (namely "Betrayal at House on the Hill" board game and learning to play Battletech with a starter box I purchased), which were Horus Heresy 30k Zone Mortalis, and Guild Ball!

The area of 30k room set up for Zone Mortalis. 

My Chaplain leads some Word Bearers to their inevitable doom. But, like, gloriously. Of course.

The Gal Vorbak prove  to be an ample distraction to a Dark Angels Dreadnought before the Breachers can flank in to save them.

My Miner's Guild learning how to play the game against some Cooks.

My Miners won Best Painted for the event!

As far as painting at home, I've really only been working on a Rebel army commission for a good friend. I'm hopefully going to wrap it up this week, though. (I'm a slow painter. I really shouldn't take commissions.)

Commission Star Wars Legion piece. Yes, it's a trap. Fishman gon' snipe you.

On the gaming front, mostly it's been playing games with the kiddos. We're several games deep into a Warhammer Quest Silver Tower campaign, as well as a Star Wars Imperial Assault campaign and a few games of X-Wing.

Soon, Alec and I will get our Rangers of Shadow Deep / Frostgrave hybrid game going, where we'll be able to play the campaign together against AI. I'm working really hard to get together nice terrain for it, though, so that it's a premium experience.

I can't remember if this is merely my son putting up with my constant character-voiced narration of Warhammer Quest, or him dealing with a particularly rough roll of the dice. Probably the former. :D

Flynn's badass murderdudesman for Warhammer Quest

Alec's sneaktastic elf assassin for Warhammer Quest.

Really 3D printing should be its own blog post, but considering how long it's been, I'm going to shoehorn it in a little bit here. This whole thing kinda snuck up on me, as I'd ignored it for years as being too expensive, but then another good buddy of mine showed me something he'd printed and related how low the cost had gotten, and now I have another addiction. I'm running an Elegoo Mars currently for my resin printing, and while it's got a small initial learning curve to get things printed and into your hands, the art of perfecting the supports for a model and positioning and all that is definitely taking a while longer master.

Also, seriously, the availability of fantastic sculpts from a multitude of different artists out there is truly astounding. And so affordable!

A fresh print!

Mandalorian Militia - converted speeder bikes for my personal Star Wars Legion stuff. 

A fantastic Arbite miniature from the patreon Monstrous Encounters, that I will use in Necromunda at some point.  "I AM THE LAW!"  

 As for what the future holds, especially with the ongoing pandemic, I'm not too sure. At least I've compiled an incredible backlog of stuff to work on should I find myself unable to continue adding to the pile of minis.  What's immediately next, though? Oh, probably just this little project of football playing frogs I've been waiting on for the past year from Kickstarter. :)

Hippity hoppity, yo.

It's been a busy couple of weeks!

Q: Are you still working on those Orks? 

A: Yes, of course! I even managed to finish assembling the team and prime them in order to get them on the table!

First, another Loota Spanner, upgraded to a Rokkit Launcha or however they spell it. This is Scrote, another lovable grot who's earned his way into the big leagues by constructing a custom machine.

And this is the Combat Specialist for the team, named Stryfe. For... reasons. No resemblance to anything. Nope. None at all.

Q: Are you still working on the forest/trees/whatever-the-shitty-title-of-that-blog-post-was?

A: Yes, of course! But, like, not right now. Because it's been extraordinarily cold, which means it's cold in my garage, which is where that work is occurring. So the trees are currently all just bare trunks and twigs waiting for greenery.

Q: Are you working on anything else? You seem like a lazy hobbyist that can't even make a blog post on a regular schedule.

A: Yes, of course! And that's super judgy!

But anyway, one of the other primary projects on my desk is my warband for Frostgrave. I'm creating a warband with a Summoner as my wizard, so I also have to get enough demons ready to summon in alongside my soldiers (and the various NPC monsters I need to get ready). I'm working out a rough backstory for them being high ranking members of a royal court, but of a kingdom where results are more important than what it takes to achieve them, so less popular schools of magic such as Necromancy or Summoning are prioritized for their raw power. I wanted the models to have a "richer" look to them without being charactures of what they represent, so the wizard himself looks older and more worn, while the apprentice still clearly worries about how he dresses, the soldiers will look shiny along with their super-amazing-omg-can't-believe-they-make-these ATTACK PUGS, and then like a dirty apothecary healer and some other meaningless shit because let's get back to the attack pugs!

LOOK AT HOW FIERCE THESE GOOD BOYS ARE! So strong. So, so strong. Reaper Minis is the fucking best in the business (but also like 20 other companies I can name which are also wonderful but seriously guys if you want his kind of spotlight make some badass attack pugs and we'll see what happens)

Front row, left to right: the Summoner himself himself (Gamezone Miniatures), his Apprentice (Reaper Miniatures), the Apothecary (Alkemy Miniatures), three Imps (Wyrd Miniatures), and four soldiers (Rackham Confrontation).

Back row, left to right: two "crossbowmen" (Rackham Confrontation) and a zombie hiding behind the apprentice (Zombicide Black Plague), a Lesser Demon (CoolMiniOrNot's Wrath of Kings), a Lesser Demon (CoolMiniOrNot's Massive Darkness), and a Greater Demon (CoolMiniOrNot's Massive Darkness).

I've also just joined into the amazing Wargamer Ramblings's's's's D&D5e campaign, playing a character named Hankleford Glitterthumb, a gnome warlock folk hero. The miniature I found is pretty spot on except for being a halfling, so when it arrives I'll just need to replace his feet. Friggin' EXCITED.

My friends can call me Hank! (miniature from Alternative Armies)

Q: O-kay... well, lemme stop you right there, because you clearly have more to go you sick addicted monster you, so I'll just ask the next question. Do you ever actually do anything with these minis, like, you know, play games?

A: Yes, of course! I actually played games more than once this past week!

First, I played a game of Star Wars Legion against my good buddy Andy. I currently have a very tenuous grasp on the rules for the game and its mechanics, so while my typical inability to roll dice successfully is more to blame, I'm taking this defeat squarely on my current inability to know what the hell is going on while playing this game. My Rebels got murdered. It was ugly. And beautiful.

Luke leading around 700 points of Rebels to their horrible, horrible deaths. If you look closely under the landing pad, you can just barely make out Wedge Antilles flying his airspeeder like a reckless idiot, clearly on his cell phone (and probably getting yelled at by his wife for leaving his dirty socks in the floor when hampers exist for a reason dammit), just before getting shot down by a stormtrooper with a rocket launcher and Vader throwing his fucking lightsaber.

"This is our shitty backwater shantytown! We don't need no stinkin' Empire here!"

"Defend the trash, boys! This here is our trash!"

"Don'tchu let them get near this engine I've left layin' out in the middle of the road! I'm gonna fix it up one day! And I'll tell yo- ...oh shit, is that...?" *lightsaber noises and screams*

So yeah. SW Legion continues to be a super fun game that I'm consistently too lazy to sit down and read through the rulebook for. Which Andy is super happy about, I'm sure.

Speaking of reading rulebooks, I did actually spend some time reading through the Kill Team rules for the game this past Saturday (well kind of, my buddy Dingar came over and we worked through the rules and read most of them, so that counts).

You can see a slew of pictures over on Da Masta Cheef's blog of our battle between his ancient and awesome Tyranids and my Orks, named the Crushbone Commandos. We played a simple "kill all the things" mission since it was my first game of it ever and his first time fielding Nids, and shockingly I won the game? I'm not sure what happened either. The Orks were a ton of fun to play with, though, and my opponent was super fun as always, which is all I really want out of this hobby.

I still think those little Nids look like weird, angry alien cats.

So many little ankle-biters!

The Orks holding their own as each KT continues to hit eachother without ever dealing any damn damage.

Stryfe, Combat Specialist, trying to be awesome and kill the enemy Leader but ultimately failing. Like an Ork do, yo!

Q: And that's it? Or do you have something else?

A: Yes, of course!

Long story short, my oldest is turning the big 1-0 (that's 10, in case you're on the strugglebus) in a few short weeks, and he's recently taken a big interest in painting miniatures and wanting to play. So, of course, I'm thrilled.

He's had some Space Marines that he painted last year (just 10 or so) in a scheme of his own devising, but this past weekend decided he wanted to change them all to Crimson Fists after reading about them in the January White Dwarf and hanging the poster from it on his wall.

Trying not to let my enthusiasm show too much, I gladly agreed that we could go to HobbyTown and get him the couple of paints he needed to follow the painting guide in the WD. While we were there, they had those neat little single-sprue, random marines, and of course I got him one (yes I should have made him wait until his birthday but I don't care). He scored the super cool looking sergeant model, and immediately got to painting his guys when we got home.

Since he's just starting out, the mountain of knowledge and experience looming in front of him is quite daunting. He wasn't struggling with the tutorial, but he was clearly becoming frustrated with it. So, I decided having a real-life example of a Crimson Fist he could look at while trying to follow the tutorial would be helpful, and after he went to bed I hunched over the kitchen table way past my own bed time to get that sergeant finished up.

Behold, Brother Sergeant Alec:

*chainblade noises*

And because I'm sappy, I put a little note on the bottom. If the years have passed and you've somehow stumbled onto this collection of words I've placed here, son, I love you very much. You're the friggin' coolest, man.

Q: Alright, for real, we done yet?

A: Yes, of course!