Those Who Protect

Following on from animals: space cops.

pigs are a kind of animal, after all

These were all hell of great sculpts to paint, even if being armed kind of puts the 'civilian' aspect of this project as a bit of a lie. But I've done armed folks before and I will again. 

These are mostly Crooked Dice pieces from Colony 87: Wave Four, while the Judge is a Kev White sculpt from Diehard Miniatures. I'm pleased with how they've all come out, so let's show 'em off!

Colonial Police

These are great little guys. Crooked Dice have had them done in darker colours, but I saw these guys and immediately wanted to go for a dusty, Moebian look, using pale blues, pinks, and oranges and whites to try and do things I didn't usually do. Mixed luck, I think, and the orange was a real nuisance, but they turned out okay. They feel a little French, too.

I love that they have dorky little flashlights. These are not well-equipped Arbites in black body armour.

Not really a lot to say about them!

Caravan Guards

These guys were a DELIGHT to paint. I knew I wanted to go for boney, dusty robes, bland black masks and the like, and they've turned out basically exactly as expected. The trickiest part was deciding how I wanted to do the mounts.

I've got a dot-point mini-tutorial below the cut, partly to share but mostly so that I can remember if I ever want to do more like these folks.

Guard Captain

Like a lot of the folks around here, she has dark skin. They're a desert people! Feathers are from a Roc mount.

LOVE the masks on some of these guys. They're not dissimilar from the modern Necromunda wastelanders (one of which I used on a Mantis Warrior scout biker) so we'll see this sort of thing again. I loved every moment of painting these.

Can barely see his skin tone, but I aimed for a vaguely Middle Eastern, deep tone without quite hitting Black.

First Roc mount! Look at this great sculpt, hell yeah

And here's the second one! Only criticism is that it's hard to get a brush into the front detail on the rider/saddle so it's mostly 'push in some paint, hit it with a heavy wash and hope nobody looks closely'.

Love these guys. Can't wait to have them as a set-piece defending a caravan while space marines shoot each other around them or whatever.

Marshal/Sherrif/Judge

I have been looking forward to this one. She was a Kickstarter only (although she's still on the website at time of writing - so more a limited run than an exclusive) miniature from one of Tim Prow's Diehard Miniatures kickstarters. Tim's sculpts are great, but they often feel a bit large, so I tend to only go for the occasional knockout these days. This one's by Kev White and feels a bit more oldhammer-y in dimensions.

While Tim's paint job is a bit more cop-y, with whites and blues, I wanted her to be an Adeptus Arbites Judge... while also nodding to where Games Workshop nicked those guys from without even bothering to file off the serial numbers. This meant that I almost painted her belt and some armour elements in lime green but decided at the last minute (I had put green on the brush) to stick with the scheme from White Dwarf 169, in black and yellow, while nodding to the white with some ceramite accessories.

I had undercoated her white for some insane reason, which made getting the base colours down way harder than they needed to be, but it worked out because the non-dark parts are quite vibrant in the end. Incidentally, if you want an easy tutorial for all-black Arbites, check out Mengel Miniatures. See below for my notes on the red hair.

Windshield is my usual blue glaze over silver, but the really fun part was giving her red-and-blue siren lights and a brake light, because sometimes you have to make your own jokes.

That's it for these guys! I have a lot of civilians and two accidental projects on my painting table, as well as more scenery and the actual projects I wanted to concentrate on this year. But work is also keeping me incredibly busy and my son turns two at the end of the month, so let's see how we go...

Below the cut for some painting notes!

Advertisements and defensive postures

 Just a couple things.

turret and cages

advertising

As part of undercoating a huge pile of civilians, I also built and/or undercoated some of the giant, overwhelming pile of terrain I've built up over the years. Hopefully I can push through procrastination, stress, and decision paralysis by just doing stuff. Of course, doing stuff also results in getting inspired and buying more stuff. Especially with the 28 scene really thriving lately, with tons of small games and tiny cool collections coming out. (Damn you, Ana Polanšćak.)

Anyway, here are a couple easy things. The billboards are from a Fogou Miniatures kickstarter from a while back (before he retired from model making). Not sure where they are now.

I'm not sure where the cages are from. The turret was a free gift from Knights of Dice when a friend sent me a pile of mdf as a birthday present years and years ago. I forgot the cardinal rule of painting something with moving parts, so it is now fixed in its current position, but I took that opportunity to do a lil battle damage and field repair to it, as you can see with more photos - below the cut.

Those Animals: Tame (and weird)

 Couple of things mixed together here!

animals tame (and other)

Alright, getting some things crossed off the list. This lot have mostly actually not sat in the drawer for too long - in fact, two of the models only arrived a few weeks ago! Not too bad. But then again, the Necromunda Wyrd was in the pile for the failed Old World Army Challenge from 2023, so let's not brag.

melty men

First off, some melty men. Like last time's mootants, these are Thunderchild Miniatures. A few layers of yellows, contrasts, washes, drybrushes, glazes, picking out the white teeth and eyes, varnish. Fun and easy. Sorry they're not in the group photo, this is what happens when you break up the painting and photography but not the blog post (also are they even really in the animal theme? eh)

Those Animals: Baggage

Share the load.

green transportation alternatives

I haven't gone anywhere, I just haven't had much to share. It's been either too hot or too wet to paint, and I'm so busy at work - and consequently exhausted - that I haven't been able to schedule any games. But I have assembled, cleaned, and based a ton of new additions to the civilian project (and just in time to receive more Colony 87 from another kickstarter too, so I feel very embarrassed not to have done the last one...) -- and last week I was finally able to get out the spray undercoat. There are a couple of different things in train.

Let's start with a baggage train, eyyyy

After Action Report: Second Squats

 I have noticed that a cat will turn up her nose at a piece of meat if I hand it to her, but she will devour it with gusto if she has "stolen" it. The meat is the same, but the difference lies in the predator's delight in recognizing itself.
   - Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

Ruins of Saint-Mina-Outre-Eaux, Finistère

Scouting action, withdrawal, feint, cautious probe, flattening artillery barrage, feint. The bastards were dug in pretty well - a tacky and reductive thought, not worthy of the son of a pâtissier - and so far the Guard had been unwilling to commit fully. Nobody wants to try and dig out a 'dwarf.

Command was getting impatient with the slow pace. Finistère was as fringe a world as the name implied. Once at the outstretched fingertip of Imperial colonisation efforts, the rotting world had been left to ferment by the contraction of the empire from coreward space since the sack of Badab. This was the first Commissar the world had seen in three generations, most like.

And now here he was, crawling his delicate son-of-a-pastry-chef arse through some backwater grass analogue that reeked of petrichor and ozone and whatever the hell those abhumans used in their anti-plant munitions, Betsy hooked over one shoulder. The Saint-Saëns CXLIV had brought in their ratling auxiliaries, along with a platoon of hulking "Southers" from Đại Du'o'ng. Who knew if those pale barbarians even had a regimental number. It wasn't like they had uniforms -- wait. Was that a motortrike engine?

No whole-of deployment photo, oops.
I deploy on the left of this photo!

Friend of the blog Mangs has a new 6'x4' table and when I asked to help him break it in, he suggested a game of second edition! Neither of us have played a game of second in decades, but he still has all his templates and cards and such, while I've painstakingly reacquired the rulebooks (no templates, though) - so why the hell not?

I suggested some initial minor modifications to the Squats army list in Codex: Army Lists to bring them more in line with the Rogue Trader-era Brotherhood list, as that's what I've been using to organise my collection (as per my old tumblr post on the subject), to which he readily agreed. I then counted up more-or-less what I have painted and arrived at 1560. Mangs put together about the same in Imperial Guard (he didn't deduct points for stripping the Leman Russes of heavy bolters) and we were off.

We avoided psykers to keep it simpler, still got half the rules wrong (Leman Russes have targeters! and I probably had my bikes do hit and run attacks very wrong!), and used way too much terrain, as we usually play each other in skirmish games.

But we set up, deployed, and played all four turns with very infantry-heavy armies in around three hours flat and had a blast (sorry) the whole time. Hell yeah. Second edition is back, baby.

Project: Scabby Terrain

On moonless nights, when the air is still, vessels from across the Turnip world disappear, sucked down the rusty plughole of death to a forgotten ship’s graveyard far below the world known as the Abyss.
   - Scabz, Apocrypha_Now and Max Fitzgerald

normal oil refinery

Ages ago, famous internet miniatures weirdos Max Fitzgerald and Apocrypha_Now collaborated on a game of rusted hulks fighting each other on an oil-slicked black ocean. It's called SCABZ. I got very excited about it, along with the new Turnip-universe game Max was working on called Swill - and then Swill got put on some kind of indefinite hiatus and I lost a lot of emotional impetus.

I still haven't built the ships I intended to buy, although I have gone through a lot of cans of fish.

But, somewhat unusually for me, I did build a lot of scenery first (wild, I know). Some of it I mentioned in my year-in-review for 2025, where I decided not to count it until I finished the final piece. Which I did, a few weeks ago. It's the normal oil refinery, above.

Scabz calls for 3-7 pieces of terrain measuring roughly 5”x 5”, representing wrecked ships, sunken row houses, corroded naval mines, decaying docklands or islands of rotting fish. I've made:

Project: Wet Ømens

 I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.
   - "Dagon", H.P. Lovecraft

Church of the Fleshkeeper

Welcome back to another installment of "I made a small warband as a break from my larger projects." This time, it's a gang of horrible fishy friends for Ømen Tide. Created by Paolo Boracchi and Simon Schnitzler, two of the luminaries of the Inq28/weirdos-on-Instagram world, Ømen Tide is a tiny skirmish game of salt-soaked body horror, religious fanaticism, and that icky feeling you get if you accidentally touch seaweed while at the beach.

You can find the rules and much more for free at the Patreon.

I found the aesthetic and the inq28-inflected 'make your own' bit as inspiring as always - plus, technically, you only need three models for a warband. I got carried away and made a miniature of every role in the Church of the Fleshkeeper, but I do have some things wrong with me.

I may even make a terrain board, but only if I wind up doing a Mordheim-y waterfront - I've got too long a to-do list to commit to that sort of thing... discipline is boring

Repost: After Action Report: Skirmish on Qyzylqum XLII

+ + + TRANSMITTED: Ootheca
+ + + RECEIVED: Badab Primaris
+ + + DESTINATION: CLASSIFIED
+ + + DATE: ERROR. Ref. 00-00-0-CHRN/1
+ + + TELEPATHIC DUCT: Zechariah-n008808
+ + + REF: Inq/06048102||0891-40-42/MNRN
+ + + AUTHOR: CLASSIFIED
+ + + SUBJECT: Qyzylqum XLII, Skirmish, 880.41
+ + + METADATA: Mantis Warriors; engagements; Malachi; heretic astartes; renegade astartes...
    Cross-ref extended metadata file 0891-40-42/MNRN-α
+ + + ACCESS GRADE: Sangria

+ + + Thought for the Day: Non vi, sed verbo + + +

+ + + ACCESSING + + +

c.880.M41, the Maelstrom. Nomadic space pirates which had been using the Sinistral Gate to launch raids on Imperial shipping were growing bolder and more savage in their attacks. Intelligence from Ordo Hereticus quisling units among pirate factions report the growing spread of Chaotic influence. Several bands of human and sub-human renegades had fallen under the sway of demagogues spreading the worship of Malachi the Surly, a Daemon Prince of Khorne and Wielder of theBanesword (cf the Cruor Event; the Caedis Incident; Sanguis VII; the Neco City Massacre;
+ + + ERROR: REFERENCE FILE IN EXCESS OF MEMORY
+ + + TERMINATE SERVITOR AND RE-ACCESS + + +

+ + + ACCESSING + + +

2025 in Review: Literature

 Alright, let's do it. Last day of the year!

2025: In Books

Last year was a little tough. Lots of life stuff. This year, despite everything, I somehow managed to do way better in terms of reading. I think having a regular pattern helps, making sure I prioritised reading helped, but also I read some really fucken cool stuff this year. I experimented with Scandi-noir, I read some things I'd been meaning to read for years, yeah. Good things.

Rules

Only physical books count - the rare audiobook or ebook do not - and neither do graphic novels, nor any re-reads. A 'book' is defined as the thing between two covers - so an omnibus of three novels and two short stories still only counts as one book.

I think that for 2026, I'll drop the graphic novels not counting part. Not counting them means that I have a small but growing unread pile - and they take about as long to read as a short novella anyway, and those count.

For the past couple years, I read in a pattern:

• No more than 1-in-5 books can be a franchise tie-in novel.
• At least 1-in-5 books must be authored, co-authored or edited (for anthologies) by a woman. 
• At least 1-in-5 books must be in translation. 

This results in a cycle of Woman-Translation-Franchise-Free Square-Free Square. It's fun to have a pattern - and ensured I read at least 20% of female authors, something that's challenging when you read books with dragons on the cover - but this year, I did something a little different.

Because January 2025 had accidentally had a theme of 'women and books in translation', I decided that each month would have a theme, mostly with really stupid and painful pun titles. I'm going to put each month below the cut, if you want details.

2025 Results

Everyone loves an analysis. How did we do in 2025? Did dropping the cycle rule make a difference? 

Total: 83 books (up from 35 in 2024)

Women: 34 books - 41% (up from 37% in 2024) [+1 NB]

In-Translation: 25 books - 30% (up from 20% in 2024)

Tie-in: 6 books - 7% (down from 20% in 2024)

Works in translation: 1 Arabic; 1 Danish; 3 French; 1 Old French; 1 German; 1 Greek; 1 Hungarian; 4 Icelandic; 6 Japanese; 1 Russian; 1 Serbo-Croatian; 1 Sumerian; 1 Swedish; 1 Yoruba; and 1 anthology with various languages of Africa.

So... pretty good. I read more women, I read more translated works (although having a 'noir' month combined with 'get into Scandinoir' made that pretty easy), and I read fewer Warhammers. An excellent result.

Unfortunately, my shelves are now groaning with unread books that either didn't fit into their monthly categories or otherwise have been deprioritised, so I have a feeling that for 2026 I may drop the rules... we'll see...

Okay, who wants to see some truly stupid monthly themes?

2025 in Review: Miniature Wargaming

 Well, I'm not going to finish anything in the next 27 hours, so let's wrap it up.

currently on the mat

My son's beautiful eyes still glow in the daylight, don't you worry about that, but now that he's running around and not a little potato baby I am less willing to post photos on the blog. Other than that, this has been as crazy a year as everyone always complains in these things - changed roles at work, juggling parenting and a far more stressful role (and for less pay, thanks inflation) without the ability to work as flexibly (see parenting) has meant that finding time for hobby things is very hard.

Also, I tried to be a bit more disciplined than usual, as mentioned in 2024's wrap-up post. How did that go?

Project: Exclusive

Sometimes I ask myself, what the hell are we all running around for, anyway? To make money? But what the hell do we need money for if all we do is run around making it? 
   - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

sorry about the square crop. stupid instagram

Remember back in March when I painted those silly Ásatrú cowboys? Well, my lovely friend has since convinced several of us that this time he really will do it, and this time it's Zona Alfa, the Metro 2033/Stalker/S.T.A.L.K.E.R/Roadside Picnic Osprey blue book game about ex-Soviet adventurers in some kind of Horrible Place post-Event. A lot of people read Event as Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster, although Roadside Picnic is not at all like that.

For me, I've been Zona Alfa-curious for years, and I'd recently seen tylerisalrightatpainting's really lovely go at the Eureka sculpts, so I was already teetering on the edge. When my friend said he wanted to organise some gaming in 2026, I popped in an order to Eureka (and then another order when they arrived and I realised that I forgot the sniper I wanted). I'm still not convinced my friend will be organised enough for me to make the trip up to see him, but regular guest Mangs says that he can put together a gang, so we'll see. And flaky friend has managed to organise at least one game since I bought these, so maybe I'll eat crow.