Project: Servants of the True Emperor

A few weeks ago, I started a project for 'deadcember'. Today, I finished it. That's a pretty auspicious start to a new blog!

rrr... mmrr..nrr.

Deadcember is one of those slightly silly hobby challenge things that people do. Orctober is probably the most obvious one; Serftember is another. I think my favourite is the Month of Marsh, which I first heard about via ZeroTwentyThree. I'd had my Mordheim undead miniatures lying around for the better part of the last two decades, and I'd never gotten around to painting them, so #deadcember offered a perfect opportunity to do it.

What really kicked me into gear was the work that some of the guys in the AOS28 community were doing. While I've never gotten into Age of Sigmar (a subject for a different time), the AOS28 are just incredible. The movement generates really evocative dark fantasy, sometimes quite intimate and detailed and always with an incredible aesthetic.

Steam trading card: Decay of Society

Alexander Wirnberg of Echoes of Imperium fame has recently been starting a project called Mordheim 2019. Slightly later than the original game's timeframe of 1999, with Mordheim having festered for twenty years and the Empire's anarchic civil war allowing corruption to blister across the continent, Wirnberg's project features the kind of horrible, intricate detail that you'd expect. He takes the weirdness vein already running through Mordheim and turns the dial up to eleven. It's fucking great.

My project was more humble...

An Introduction

It is traditional to do an introduction post as the first post. This is that post. I will keep it brief.

This blog is intended as a replacement for my Tumblr blog. I had been intending to move away from Tumblr for a while now. The interface is not designed for serious blogging or engagement (comments basically don't exist) and the tagging system is useless. Recent policies they've enacted hurt a number of people, notably sex workers and fandom creators, so my half-hearted unhappiness with the network now has an incentive to leave it.

Bretonnian Questing Knights

Roughly concurrently, I've been reading a tonne of OSR and Oldhammer blogs lately and they are literally all on Blogspot, with maybe one or two exceptions. The Oldhammer Facebook communities are great and all, but I still want to have my own blog space for hobby nonsense, and preferably one where I can engage with the rest of the community. On Tumblr, pictures of Space Marines or (terrible) discourse about Sisters of Battle gets you some engagement, but post a photo of a Bretonnian knight and people look at you blankly.

Kids these days.

So, let's move to Blogspot. Does this mean I'll transfer over all the posts from the two years or so of the Tumblr? No. That would be ridiculous. Nobody needs to read WIP posts about finished miniatures. As long as the Tumblr servers are active, it can stay there as a quasi-archive. Instead, this place will be somewhere to start afresh and be more expanded in focus.

I'm about to join the Old World Army Challenge, so having a Blogspot to link to helps, I reckon.

+ contents +

Miniatures and wargaming. Possibly some actual blogging instead of 'here is what I am painting today' posts, as Blogspot allows for the actual engagement I'm after. I despise the state of gaming discourse, so we'll try not to have any of that, thanks.

The Cult of Splintered Sight, Dark Eldar

I'll put up a page of my current projects. At the time of writing, they include Mantis Warriors Space Marines, Full Thrust spaceships, Dark Eldar, Bretonnians. I am about to start on a Wood Elf project. In my drawers and boxes, I also have Lone Wolf miniatures, Warhammer Empire, at least two historical wargaming projects, 15mm SF, 40K Squats, and, somehow, a growing pile of mutants and renegades, both in fantasy and science-fiction settings. Insane.

Two years ago, I wasn't even in the hobby. I hadn't played a game of Warhammer since 2010? or so, and a game of Warhammer 40,000 since 2004. (I lost the first game back, of course).

A lot of these projects feature, or are entirely, Old-to-Middlehammer figures, although I mostly play modern games (8th edition 40K, Kings of War). Not that I play very often, and mostly against the one opponent.

No Age of Sigmar, though. I don't mind if you like it, but I... don't. The AOS28 guys, though, they fuckin' rule.

+ dungeons +

"Hang on," you say, "didn't you say 'OSR' a second ago?" Yeah. So, I played AD&D in high school, 3.x afterwards (that's where the goblin paladin comes from), a bit of other things here and there, largely online. I had a job which annihilated my social life for four years, so no gaming for me.

I was half-heartedly putting together a 3.x setting + game, but it kept twisting in my hands, changing what I wanted it to look like. Running a game (kill some goblins! loot a thing!) just didn't feel right. So I shelved that. Since then, I've played in two Blades in the Dark games... and didn't like it. Still can't quite articulate why.

I have, however, loved pretty much every OSR thing I've read, so I'd like to read stuff there, maybe give that a go. We'll see.

+ lies +

This has been light on information about me. That is deliberate. Nobody cares.

Also, I lied when I said I would be brief. I am not good at brevity.

From Warhammer Armies, p.134.