Quiet on the Hobby Front

Not much blog worthy has been going on the last 2 weeks so I've been remarkably silent. I keep dragging out potential projects, working on them for a few minutes, and then getting distracted by something that's not hobby related. I have been following the 5th Edition reports feverishly on BoLS and Warseer but that's about it.

Two Monday's ago I pulled out my Orks and administered a sound beating. I've been playing a mostly foot slogging force with 2 Warpheads and I love the way it plays. Its a little unpredictable but it works really well with my play style I think. It also makes me think I'd really like to switch my DA army to a Multiwing format. I really want to try the Ravenwing/Deathwing combo.

Anyway, last night I tried an experimental DA tournament list that isn't Multiwing against Eric's completely vehicle-less Blood Angels force. I played a strong game despite some terrible dangerous terrain rolls for my vehicles (I had my Landraider and a Vindicator both roll Immobilized results in the same turn!). It clearly wasn't strong enough as the Blood Angels won by 600+ points.

Here are some photos from that game. The first one is my favorite. It screams photoshop me with some sort of cool background and some drifting smoke. I'm definitely going to try and get more dramatic pics like that in the future.

These two Highland Lion's (Blood Angels) more than earned their points, popping the Dreadnought and then dragging down several marines from that Rhino in the distance down with them.

Impending Campaign = New Scenery

This weekend involved a trip to Home Depot to pick up some supplies. There was a brief concern that I wasn't going to have enough gaming area if we have our possible 8 campaign participants so I decided to pop in and get some more 2'x4' sections to paint up. While I was there I became inspired by this:

My immediate thought was to make it into a monument, so I added a suitable base:

I did attempt to seal with watered down white glue to reduce the amount that the wood grain would show up but it failed to make an impact. Down the road I may go back with some spackle and then do a complete repaint of the piece. It looks good, but too obviously wood:

Inspired by the statue in Cities of Death, I added some bird shit. I think it came out fairly well:

While I was working on this, I did all off the drybrush work on the temple I made a few posts back. Here are all of the photos from today:

Thanks for reading!

Full Circle

In four days I will have had the blog for a full month. My opening post discussed that the reason for this blog is to help keep me focused. So far you've read about me playing both Fantasy and 40K. You've seen pictures of Imperial Guard I was working on, a bunch of scenery, a scenario generator, and read about the excitement I'm having about our upcoming Monday night campaign. The things you haven't seen, behind the scenes, were the couple of nights I spent drybrushing table sections to blend with my existing city terrain, the day I spent going to GW to buy some of their plastic scenery to prepare for an off night game of Fantasy, the 1 hour I spent working on painting my Empire army, and numerous nights clipping sprues in front of the TV that I never actually did anything with.

Considering, this is all in 30 days, the one thing this blog has certainly not helped me with, its my focus. At the very least, it did keep me on track with some city scenery since I wrote a poll about what scenery should I work on next, and I came through. Otherwise, its been a total failure when it comes to focusing me.

A couple of nights ago I dragged out a new Ork trukk I was working on diligently back in January and is at least half way complete. I did some quick highlights on a couple of areas and now I'm bored. Considering I even paint 40K infantry piecemeal, I'm going to go back to Ork boyz for a little bit. Working on an arm, a set of legs, or a torso each day allows me to at least get something done and stay a little focused when I'm only getting anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour of hobby time a night.

I'll report back on how I feel my focus is coming in another month... You know, when its 1 month away from Games Day and I'm in a panic to get an army ready, haha.

About Last Night!

Here's last night's Nerd Night in images. I'll save my wordy tirades for another day.

Necron Advance!

The Highland Lion's turn rogue. The Varian 10th and the Redemptors of Golinar bear down upon them.

Advanced Rules of Engagement

I started work on something similar to this during our preparation for Adepticon. I would throw together a series of charts for Deployment, Special Rules, and Objectives in order to emulate the structure of their scenarios, which have definite identifiable trends that could be categorized and put into chart form, creating a variety of circumstances that would could expect to have thrown at us. I felt like it worked pretty well even if I generated the rough charts anew each game.

With our campaign coming up, Scott (the organizer) suggested we might use the Rules of Engagement ( http://uk.games-workshop.com/warhammer40000/rules-of-engagement/1/). I like the idea of random scenarios, but looking over the options the Rules of Engagement presented, it really left off a lot of cool stuff and means of variety. So I present to you the rough draft of my own Advanced Rules of Engagement. Look them over and tell me what you think!

I. Roll Strategy Rating.
The winning side can modify 1 die roll by the difference they won by during the following steps (II.-VI.)

II. Deployment Zones (Roll D6):

1. Quarters
2. Strong Point
3. Diagonal
4. Board Edge
5. Surrounded
6. Apocalypse

Notes:
Strong Point. "Attacker" gets 3 board edges, the "defender" gets a 12"x12" square on the open edge. See BGB P207.

Surrounded. "Defender" gets a 12"x12" square in the center of the board, the attacker utilizes the board edges. See BGB P213 for the closest example.


III. Separation (Roll D6):

1. 12"
2. 15"
3. 18"
4. 24"
5. 27"
6. 30"

Note: If one side gets pushed off of their board edge their forces move onto their board edge on Turn 1.

IV. Special Rules (Roll 2D6):

2. Night Fighting
3. Hidden Set Up
4. Fortifications or Preliminary Bombardment*
5. Concealment
6. Deep Strike
7. Infiltrate
8. Dusk + Dawn
9. Random Game Length
10. Obstacles or Preliminary Bombardment*
11. Divided Force and Reserves
12. Sustained Attack

Optionally, both sides can choose 1 City Fight Stratagem.

Notes: * Roll off. One receives Fortifications or Obstacles, and the other side receives Preliminary Bombardment to counter them.

V. Objective (Roll 2D6):

2. The Gauntlet (Set up a 12" wide exit point in your deployment zone. Exit off the opposing player's exit point. COD P48)
3. Hold Out (Occupy more area terrain than your opponent. COD P43)
4. Sabotage (Blow up objective in opponents deployment zine by getting into base to base. BGB P206)
5. Enemy Lines (Recon BGB P83)
6. Loot (Objective markers. Secure and Control BGB P82)
7. Table Quarters (BGB P81)
8. Annihilation (BGB P82)
9. Field of Battle (BGB P83)
10. Plant the Flag (Move through scenery to claim it, most flags wins. COD P42)
11. Capture Vital Building (COD P43)
12. Assassins (Kill enemy HQ. COD P51)

VI. FOC (Roll D6): (Optional)

1. Raiders
Required: 1x HQ and 1x ELITES
Optional: 1x HQ, 2x ELITES, 5x TROOPS, 3x FAST, 1x HEAVY

2. Breakers
Required: 1x ELITES and 1x TROOPS
Optional: 2x HQ, 1x ELITES, 4x TROOPS, 3x FAST, 3x HEAVY

3. Hit and Fade
Required: 1x HQ, 1x FAST and 2x ELITES
Optional: 1x HQ, 4x ELITES, 2x TROOPS, 2x FAST

4. Standard
Required: 1x HQ and 2x TROOPS
Optional: 1x HQ, 3x ELITES, 4x TROOPS, 3x FAST, 3x HEAVY

5. Siege
Required: 1x HQ and 3x TROOPS
Optional: 1x ELITES, 6x TROOPS, 3x HEAVY

6. Defender
Required: 2x TROOPS
Optional: 1x HQ, 2x ELITES, 4x TROOPS, 1x FAST, 2x HEAVY

Note: All of these alternate FOCs are taken from the Dark Millennium section of the BGB and from COD.


I think this would create an amazing array of scenarios.

What do you think?

Impending Campaign!

The Nerd Night crew are beginning a campaign in June put together by Scott from Citizen Nick Hobby Center. Inspired by a number of Black Library and Forgeworld books, he's started throwing together images for the campaign using Photoshop. I'm always interested in ways to push the limits of the hobby and I feel imagery is huge, but not all of us can draw, let alone produce anything as inspiring as the GW artist stable. Scott used Photoshop to produce this image and I feel it instantly adds a feeling of depth to the campaign.

Governor Bellavos, Lord Governor of Alpheca III.

Very cool if you ask me. When he produces more I'll probably show some of them off as well.