Project: Imjin War

Those who seek death shall live. Those who seek life shall die.
   - Admiral Yi Sun-sin

Korean 'bushi' for Ronin

Little project, done over I think three evenings. Which is very funny, because I think I bought these like five years ago. Jimmy and I were talking one day about how cool it would be to play Ronin, an Osprey Games blue book for Samurai skirmishes. My interest in samurai-era wargaming is generally muted (although I did watch a bunch of Kurosawa movies last year...) but I've always been interested in the Imjin War - and Ronin includes Koreans!

Most Samurai rulesets don't, by the way, even including Warlord Games recent supplement for Pike & Shotte, Wars of the Samurai. Which is good, in a way, because it means I don't wind up buying an entire Perry Miniatures Korean army only to have nobody to fight.

Anyway, these guys have languished in a box since then, but we were talking about it recently, so I decided to dig them out. I had forgotten that I'd based them on hexes - must have been in an old-school mood.

A brief sunshiney day a few days ago let met get them undercoated, and so these were a nice little bit of 'finishing something off' juice for the brain.

I mostly aimed for art close to the box set art, although a little casual reading seemed to indicate that the peasant soldiers should mostly have white belts and that the commander should have black, as well as possibly orange/red robes. I spent a little of time looking at the Perry range for details, as well as this good wikipedia article on the period army and these pretty pictures. Basing was done in the same way as for my cowboy vikings.

Detailed pictures below the cut. I need to bully Jimmy into painting his Ronin, but a work colleague also has some Chinese and martial artists...

Project: Hag28

 For a witch stands on the very edge of everything, between the light and the dark, between life and death, making choices, making decisions so that others may pretend no decisions have even been needed. Sometimes they need to help some poor soul through the final hours, help them to find the door, not to get lost in the dark.

    - Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown

The Hunt of the Death Hag Mother Skaïth

My friend Jimmy is the artist on one of the latest games to come out of the 28 Movement - Hag 28, written by TM Cibelius and currently on Kickstarter. Each player takes on the role of a Hag, be she of the Wode, Death, Desert, Brine. The Hag collects a Hunt of various creatures, and they battle over the soul of local villages, treasures, ancient arcane whatevers. The tone is a mixture of Terry Pratchett, classic folklore, the folk horror trend, and the 'kitbash whatever the hell you like' ethos of the 28 crowd. 

I love the idea, and I love even more the idea of supporting my friends... plus, I have all these horror miniatures I've bought over the years burning a hole in my backlog. So I bashed up a gang and got very lucky a few days ago with some weather clear enough for priming and here we go.

    Hunt of Mother Skaïth

    Mother Skaïth
    Death Hag
    Hex: Death is No Excuse
    Hex: Evil Eye
    Weapon: Basher (wand)

    Terror/Spawn
    Weapon: Basher (or maybe a Poker) (staff)
    Damn Spooky; Make your Entrails your Extrails
    Pretties: 9

    OR if Spawn
    Hex: Nightmare
    Mutation: Where There's a Whip, There's a Way

    Mercenary (x2)
    Heavy armour; Scarred veteran
    Weapon: Chopper (sword & knives or axe)
    Pretties: 4 (each)

    Goblins (x4)
    Ramshackle weapon: Choppers (scratchy claws and rocks)
    My Handiwork
    Mutation: Vicious OR Where There's a Whip, There's a Way
    Pretties: 2 (each)

The above is a 25 Pretty warband based on the 2.0 playtest rules. I think some of the models can be flexible, depending on what's more fun to play with. The Hex Death is No Excuse is a little redundant with the Whip mutation, and similarly with the My Handiwork trait, so we'll see how they interact in a game.

On to the miniatures!

Old World Army Challenge: VI: Necromunda: Failure Redeemed

 How many subtitles can I fit into a blog post?

ladies doing it for themselves

2023 was the last time I attempted the Old World Army Challenge. I was excited - the first year we were doing Specialist Games, I had all this old Necromunda and Gorkamorka metal to paint up; it was going to be good. Alas, I succumbed to the way of all flesh and only managed to get two gangs painted up - my Skavvies, Smilin' Jack and the Bitter Dregs, and my beloved Pit Slaves, Helreach United Miners, Fabricators, Haulers Local Θ-26/20.

All I managed to get done of the third gang, the March gang, was the four juves. Alas, alack, and other a-words that mean: dangit.

Still, this year is seeing me finishing a couple projects up, and then I was out of undercoated things for those projects, just as winter bit in and it got too cold and wet for spraypainting. I scavenged for some undercoated things to paint - with some success so far - and remembered the Escher gang. Let's fucking go.

The Gleaming Falls Ghasts  

 

Leader: bolter, laspistol, twin knives (170 creds)

Heavy: heavy stubber, stub gun,* sword (200 creds)

Juve: autopistol (40 creds)

Juve: stub gun, sword (45 creds)

Juve: autopistol, club (50 creds)

Juve: stub gun, pick (45 creds)

Ganger: autogun, stub gun (80 creds)

Ganger: shotgun, autopistol (85 creds)

Ganger: bolt pistol, sword, frag grenades (110 creds)

Ganger: plasma pistol, pick (85 creds)

Ganger: twin swords, stub gun* (80 creds)

Ganger: autopistol, sword (75 creds)

Ganger: autogun, stub gun* (80 creds)

Ganger: autogun, stub gun* (80 creds)

Ganger: lasgun, laspistol* (90 creds)

Ganger: laspistol, flail (75 creds)

Ganger: shotgun, sword (80 creds)

Ganger: autogun, sword (80 creds)

 

TOTAL: 1,550 credits 

*or some other kind of pistol; it's in a holster. 

This is enough for a starting gang and a half! I'm only missing three of the original sculpts (the other leader, heavy with a plasma cannon, and the chainsword and autopistol ganger). If I see the other three on eBay or something, I'll have to pick them up.

I went with a relatively classic look, because the original style of the Escher --- well, first of all it, it can't be beat anyway, but it's also one of reasons I got into Necromunda in the first place. Punk glamour in all the right ways, black leathers and bright yellows, with a variety of hair colour that never goes away.

To give myself some guidelines, I decided to follow the original colour scheme a little - if a sculpt was painted with blue hair originally, she got blue hair - but all the hair had to be different. I also tried to keep roughly on theme with the loincloths, but wanted everyone to be unique, so those got played with more.

Also: pink gun casing. Because hell yeah, but also because I want to use pink more often. Shoutout to Stahly at Tale of Painters for doing it first and better.

After Action Report: Sheepherding in Cist

12 Маиуса 7533 года от сотворения мира

Любимая моя,

Пишу тебе после битвы...

the would-be shepherds meet

Reduced to squeezing slugs for nourishment, our two forces pushed into this slime-green valley, filled with towering pustules, gleaming with noisome sludge, and hungry, open-mawed pools, shifting in trackless swamps. Триста Тридцать Третий Репки Родины, the mighty 333rd Turnips of the Motherland, clashed against the snivelling dirt-eaters of Jimmy's Earl of Slough Feegle's Regiment of Foot.

After literal years of having turnip on the mind, Jim and I coincidentally finished big piles of terrain in the same month and managed to organise a game! Of course, that was two fucking months ago, because my brain then immediately froze on writing the after action report. I gotta work on this.

Those Who Were Undercoated

 Winter has come, and I am once again unprepared.

Undercoated Family photo

It's too cold to undercoat any of the projects that I want to concentrate on, so I've dug up a handful of already-undercoated models from projects I stalled on - most from years ago - and done a little brushwork on them. Not included here are three models finished from my Age of Sigmar Flesh Eater Courts, because I'm going to do a big project post for those when the whole army is finished. I also have the original Escher gang that I didn't finish for the last Old World Army Challenge I was in, but I haven't been able to do much on those yet.

I'm also working on some terrain, and I'm prepping a bunch of miniatures for when the weather warms up so that I undercoat tons at once. I really ought to plan these things better. Maybe next year...

Project: It's Still About Turnips

 There were worse things than crucifixion. There were teeth.
   - Stephen King, The Strand

action shot of the teeth swamp
(in a forthcoming battle report)

Having finished the Death Guard a few months ago, I decided that the next project would be making some terrain for Turnip 28. I've got mountains of terrain-making supplies, but it's something that gives me a lot of anxiety, being so far out of my wheelhouse. I've been planning terrain for the desert board that my Mantis Warriors would fight over for half a decade, accumulated tons of stuff for it, and am frightened like a little baby.

Turnip provides a way to do this kind of work in a fun, relaxing way, knowing that it's okay to screw up -- that's what the mud is for! Of course, it's still taken me like four years to turn teeth and horrible fingers into actual stuff that goes on a board. In that time, the 'swamp teeth' aesthetic has turned into one of the cornerstones of the Turnip 28 vibe. You see it everywhere - well, fuckers, I had the idea very early! Probably not first, but very very early! I'm just chicken!

cyclopean shepherd stands atop a sunken house
(in a forthcoming battle report)

Anyway, the time finally came to bite the bullet. I snuffled through the rulebook and scenario pamphlet that Max has put together and put together a list of core terrain and a few would-like-to-haves. Some of those haven't eventuated (I wanted to build a sunken windmill and a few terrace houses), but I now have a core list of pieces, which will cover the generic scenarios and some of the weirdo ones:

Impassable Terrain (6x6")

Rotting Fish

Drowned Tower

Defensible Terrain (6 x 6")

Sunken House

Ruin

Dangerous Terrain (9x 9")

Finger Forest

Tooth Pits (in three pieces)

Tooth Bog

Normal Swamps but with Weird Guys (in three pieces)

Walls/Cover (6x1")

Regular wattle fences x2

Tooth walls x2

a pus sheep hangs out at the edge of a tooth wall
from - that's right, a forthcoming battle report

As is traditional, I will go through these in the order I actually finished them. As is not traditional, I'll include a bit more discussion on how I made them and include some WIP photos as we go - so this is going to be a long post!

After Action Report: Reconnaissance in Steel

 A weak sun flitters through the grey dust. Shadows obscure the degraded hills around the township, itself little more than a scattering of concrete blocks hurled against the stone of the settlement like dice cast by a dissolute gambler. An empty god of chance. 

A wasteland planet named for horror fiction is the perfect place for the Canopians to hide a shame that beats in the heart of every liberal empire. Slaves, cast aside for their crimes, labouring to bring minerals to fuel her decadent wealth. Minerals that Lord Ethan would enjoy - but more than that, the labourers sharpen against their bleak stones an urge to revenge that is worth far more than gold or yttrium...

Freetown, Hastur
1100 Lockdown Time 4 May, 30[79]

A couple of weeks ago, Lord Ethan and I decided to throw down again. Actually, we were supposed to play Kill Team, but it's been a while for me and the new rules are different enough that I realised the night before that I wasn't confident in my understanding to play a game. So Mangs was kind enough to pivot twelve hours before deployment to Alpha Strike. A very nice guy.

'Hellhound' in his Archer ARC-2R back-to-back with a Canopian Commando COM-2D

"Remember those scenarios in Mechwarrior 2 where you had to scan enemy buildings?" I said. "Let's do that one with your beautiful city terrain. As you won the last scenario and I have a Recon lance, your pirates can be Defending and my mercenaries employed by the Magistcracy are trying to identify your caches or sympathisers or something and Attacking."

I think the Canopians and Goblin's Paladins are attempting to identify buildings containing partisans loyal to Lord Ethan's Exiles, or possibly access and download caches of information from these buildings - while being careful not to flatten the city. It's a bit much for two entire companies to be going head to head, but I wanted something that felt a bit more tactical than 'can we shoot each other to death'.

Two Exiles assault 'Mechs straddle an administrative building

The scenario is Reconnaissance. This is on p.193 of Alpha Strike but the short version is this: Defender picks 1-6 buildings that secretly are targets. Attacker has to spend a combat round in base contact with a building scanning, or otherwise use an active probe ability (which I forgot). Destroying buildings messes with this, but we avoided shooting them so that's fine. 

If the attacker scans any buildings and finds a target, they get 100 VP. If they find all objectives and get off the board with a lance worth of units, they get a bonus 500VP. If the defenders prevent this, they get 1,000VP.

This is actually incredibly hard for the attacker, as I have to spend half the game not shooting my opponent's 'Mechs. I mean, that's probably fine if I win initiative enough, right? (I win initiative like once all game.)

Exiles assault 'Mechs

Working on this after action report several weeks after the fact, I have once again forgotten most of the details. While reviewing the photos for the blogpost, I further realise that nearly all of the photos taken are of deployment and the literal first turn. I'll do my best with what my 'my child just turned one' brain can manage to sift out.

Exiles Battlemechs take up positions in the mining colony's administrative centre

Mangs set up the board before I arrived at our local game store, as per our tradition of 'first arrives set up' and 'he owns all the 6mm scale terrain'. As he picked a grey landscape, I've since decided that the fight is set on Hastur, a penal colony within the Canopus district of the Magistcracy and therefore deployment distance for the First Canopian Cuirassiers. The terrain is a scruffy village, including a power plant and a sequence of skyscrapers, set against grey hills and open pit mines that look a lot like craters in a different scale.

Today the Cuirassiers deploy their Recon Lance while Goblin's Paladins mercenaries deploy their Command and Fire Lances. 

Lord Ethan's vermin deploy a company worth of ramshackle old spitbuckets that definitely don't beat the tar out of me.

Mining Settlement 37 'Freedom', Hastur

After Action Report: Resistance Training

 I'm working on a project that's taking longer than expected -- partly because I ran out of mud after procrastinating for four days and then hit the weekend, partly because Arthur has been sick, and then my partner and I were sick, and then Arthur was sick and look parenthood is fun but it never ends.

Bakunin Sectorial (c) Corvus Belli

I have a handful of Infinity models because I've been toying with getting into it for a few years now. My friend Musterkrux is a big Infinity-head, one of Goonhammer's subject matter experts on the game, and he offered to give me an intro game back in early April...

After Action Report: Perish in the Pit

 The ruins still gleam in the falselight cast by the engines of the gods, the spacecraft blasting the worldlet's atmosphere with artificial light. It gleams on the ancient temples built above the death-water-from-below, shadows obscuring the ancient, pre-Imperial glyphs and ritualised warnings. Pale-armoured warriors cluster in the dead temple, their plate clicking with the sacred signs that the death-water-from-below always whispers around their gods' wargear. The semi-man hisses a ritual of thanks, his bristling fur colouring with the proximity to the old, old water. The gods war, and death comes. His will be a place of honour once again.

the battlefield. some Death Guard are deployed

Another skirmish last Sunday, a 1000-point game of Horus Heresy against my old friend Camille, last seen in Vicchièneche, one of the chief cities of Saint-Saëns, where their Sisters of Battle were slaughtered by (but defeated!) by the Death Guard. This fight was ten thousand years earlier, with their Adeptus Custodes against my (less mutated) Death Guard.

Death Guard

Siege-Breaker, power axe, combi-flamer, phosphex bombs.
Contemptor with assault cannon, fist, twin-linked bolter
14 Tactical Marines with attached Apothecary
14 Tactical Marines with attached Apothecary
7 Marines with missile launchers

Adeptus Custodes

Helena
Several Squads of Guard
Contemptor with Spear Thingy

We set up the terrain, sort of accidentally creating a ruined temple with several crumbling fortifications and the War creeping in on the grounds. We were joking around that the temple seemed to have once been a nuclear reactor, and the lake and river had formed from the pool - so that's the setting now. Some pre-Dark Age nuclear site that had fallen into ruin and become a place of worship and that civilisation had itself collapsed, and then Compliance and now civil war. 

It's fun making maps and then accidentally creating layers and layers of history to a place.

look at this huge battlefield we don't use (spoiler)

After Action Report: Revenge!

 Reylissa brushed away the still-blistering scrap of pseudofabric. It was warm, wanting to glue itself to the back of her glove, but she shook it away, scowling as it disintegrated into ash. Danika hadn't really needed to torch the thing - it was no face-hugger - but the thick-armed heavy liked burning things. The juve squinted across the ruined stonework they were crossing at their ward. This von Cage, dressed in robes and carrying a very fine staff. There was something Danika should burn. The old man stank of blood, even to Reylissa's inexperienced nose for these things. But he also stank of money, so here she was, escorting the old fool through the rotting domes of Rustwater Gulch...

deployment - a long-abandoned dome

This Sunday just gone, I had my second game of 2025 against long-time usual opponent Mangs, half of over half the battle reports here. I should make some more friends.

Mangs is always a good opponent, generously letting me take lots of photos and notes on our games. This was Necromunda, an opportunity for me to finally bring out the ex-Slave Ogryns which I painted -- in 2022, sweet lord. These are a really fun gang to use, being incredibly daft (as we'll see) but also very hard to stop (as we'll see). Plus, Necromunda is always a great game, especially if you play it like Mangs and I do - starting gangs only, no fucking Tactics cards, relatively WYSIWYG. I'm sure we'd both like to do a campaign one day, but this style avoids a lot of the Modernhammer problems with the game (scale creep, Tactics cards, etc).

Mangs brought Valeria Sly and the Nightshade Crew, who we've met before over in Ghast Grove:

Nightshade Crew

The mission? Escort Guilder agent von Cage. Should be easy money, unless there are ex-slaves in the area who are looking for revenge...

Kanathion von Cage (from Mangs's collection)

Project: Kúrekar

 The nature of the country was, as they thought, so good that cattle would not require house feeding in winter, for there came no frost in winter, and little did the grass wither there. Day and night were more equal than in Greenland or Iceland.
  - from Grænlendinga saga

heathen cowboys

About a year ago, a friend of mine went off the deep end about cowboys. He had some criticisms of Dracula America's timeline and setting (which I'm still not clear about - I'm looking forward to doing some Congregationists once I can convince someone in this town to play it with me), so he pitched a different kind of weird west occult horror game.

I, mostly joking, suggested a Viking cult gang, like some sort of half-century early Heathenry movement, or as if the German Romantics got started early, or if the Norse settlement in Newfoundland had survivors who then wound up in... America? for some reason. It wasn't a very serious suggestion, but I did have a box of cowboys (I really do want to do Dracula's America!) and a ton of Viking bits, so - why the hell not. Let's bash up some silly cowboys, a berserkers with a six-shooter, that kind of thing.

A year later, my friend is no closer to rules or a coherent campaign but, despite my generally slow pace and a thousand other things to do, I spent this week painting up the warband. At the bottom of this post are some notes on converting them to Dracula's America, too.

It got the unpainted miniatures outta my head, I get to show up my friend, and it's a palate cleanse from a ton of grimy future space marines. Pure victory.

After Action Report: Asphalt and Blood

 A bleak and meaningless skirmish on the edges of a galaxy-spanning civil war...

an abandoned bunker amid the ruins of a worthless city

Early 006.M30. Nomirhast Minor. Nomirhüüs-Б. A crumbling suburb leeching off a nowhere township on a minor worldlet, in a meaningless sector of a self-defeating war. The dust of orbital bombardment and the curling after-effects of rad-phages drift over the sludge-grey ruins. Sergeant Caliel Gloss waves a pale gauntlet through the murk, leading his patrol through the silent rockrete guardians. The traitors are here, red-mouthed revenants in their old colours, loyal to the masters who betrayed their oaths. He will find them.

Across the square, past the empty eyes of an abandoned redoubt, Classya-Lablas licks blood from his athame, witchlights burning in his pale brow.

mortem tyrannis: finis

 Thus, all tyrants projects.

Daemon engine. Defiler-class. Cognomen: 3-9-ϴ-27

This is it! The last model for the (post-heresy) Death Guard! Except for that pesky Lord of Poxes, anyway, but I can get him when he's released. This is the last planned model. I've finished another project! Exclamation marks!!!!

mortem tyrannis: lil guys (and an officer)

 I was misinformed the other day when I said I only had four miniatures left for the project...

squirmy wrigglers

Lord of Virulence

I have been going back and forth on including some Nurglings in the project. On the one hand, they aren't really Death Guard. On the other, everybody includes them in lists (not that I've played a game of 40k in 10th) for holding objective markers. They're also cute little guys, and I would be building fun little dioramas for each lot... but I could 'finish' the project quicker if I didn't do them.

In the end, I not only did some (nine!), I bought new bases and some extra models from eBay...

mortem tyrannis: engines, daemon

 Good lord, I've been painting this accidental project for over five years.

Second miniature of 2025: a second Plagueburst Crawler, a Death Guard-unique artillery and battle tank. It was challenging making this different from the other (painted in 2020, apparently - I need to focus better on projects), as the kit is quite detailed and unique, but with limited options to customise.

2024 in Review: Miniature Wargaming

I picked up Midgard: Heroic Battles today, after doing some shopping at CanCon. I now have ideas for about a dozen more projects...

stay focused: this is the current work-in-progress

Every hobbyist struggles with distraction, but the past year has seen the pressure ramp up even more than usual. Two sets of temporary promotions, personal issues - oh, right and my beautiful son, whose eyes glow in the daylight.

bad selfie from last week

Still, let's try to get more thoroughly back into the hobby that I, y'know, love. Let's review 2024.

mortem tyrannis: многоочитии

Not all daemon princes are ascended from human stock.

ꙮ, associated with + + + XIVE CO77UPT3D + + +

Probably not the Three-Eyed King in Yellow worshipped by cultists shuffling through reeking sumpwater at the rotting base of their hive cities, but an ancient and puissant creature nonetheless. Ordo Malleus archivists have determined that ꙮ brought about the fall of at least one pre-Imperial civilisation on Terra, and there are indications that the multi-eyed horror has been known for millennia, across many pre-Dark Age human peoples - called variously многоочитии, or 百々目鬼, or ^dŠul-pa-è-a, one of the so-called 𒀭𒐌𒐌𒁉𒀭𒈥𒆪𒉿𒅀𒀸 (trans. 'Dark Heptad'), seven fell lords of ruin that serve the Plague-God-that-Must-Not-Be-Written. The truest way to name this creature is the single character ꙮ.

Its blank eye enervates, overwhelms. Before it, healing stops, regeneration ends. Life drains away.

After Action Report: Confrontation at Crescent City

 2024 was neither a good year for gaming, nor for updating this blog. Lord Ethan sent his pirates at me in August and I never got around to writing this up...

Crescent City's power facilities

Borgan's Rift remains a backwater, or at the very least a marginal planet in the Magistcracy, but the fires of the FedCom civil war continue to smoulder. Pirate activity burns along such marginal worlds, and the forces of both the liberal Canopians and their more structured allies in the Confederation are stretched.

Following his defeats earlier at Old Port Town and on the mining demi-planet of Kallix-7, "Lord Ethan" has re-armed and re-equipped - shockingly fast for an old pirate king - and made a bold strike at Crescent City. One of the few metropolises on Borgan's Rift worth calling a 'city', Crescent City is home to a new Drop Port. Capturing or at least sacking the city will be quite profitable for the pirate - or his backers...

2024 in Review: Literature

Every year, I intend to join in on the year-in-review thing, and every year I forget. I just got back from a holiday, so we might as well...

what I read on my holiday
top: early 2025
bottom: end of 2024

Since 2024, I've been doing a thread of books I read. This lets me track what I'm reading, chew through the mountains of unread things in my house, and also provide Content for the Content Lords. Hilariously, I got permanently suspended late last year for joking with a friend of mine, so I haven't finished 2024's thread. It also means I can't do my end-of-year look-at-what-I-read... so let's do that here.