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.

Those Who Work, Those Who Pray: Steel is Stronger Than Flesh

 I've had these finished for a while, intending to do a larger post with them. But I haven't updated since June, so let's do them now.

the Mechanicus has many tools

Here we have three new civilians from three separate ranges. More photos below the cut, including of the building.

Old World Army Challenge: Failure State

 Hello, friends. It's been a few months since I posted. This is partly because my non-hobby world has gotten real busy resulting in an absolute lack of hobby stuff. The other reason is that some of what I was working on was posted over at the Old World Army Challenge site.

a to-do list

Unfortunately, I have fallen and now lie in the Field of Bones. Quite the ignominious end to my third Challenge. I did manage to get some fellows finished though, which you can read about in detail at the OWAC site. I figure I might as well share them here!

Those Who Work: More

 The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

by the sweat on their brow is an empire built

A few months ago, most of these weren't even on my list for this civilian project.  I had vaguely conceived of the water carrier (a Wave One Colony 87 sculpt) as a merchant, so I painted him with the last group, but after the paint hit the miniature, I realised that he was a labourer, not the capitalist.

The dwarf sculpt came in with a Kickstarter delivery, and I already have a duplicate of the sculpt earmarked for my Squats project, so he got folded into the project. I then managed to acquire the Bob Olley servitor sculpts from eBay, and before I knew it I had another four workers to go with the last two groups. 

Under the cut for more photos and conversation about the paint schemes.

On Terrain

A hundred years ago, there was a great series of DIY terrain articles in White Dwarf. I forget the name and even the year the articles came out, but if you ask anybody who has been in the hobby since the late '90s, they'll remember them: a bunch of articles on Lizardmen jungle terrain, including a small village, a pond, some ruined temples on the edge of hills, and a giant castle to wrap the whole thing up.

The articles a smooth, easy to read, easy to follow and were at least one clear factor in my hoard of polystyrene nonsense that I collected in the last months of high school and early university, before a succession of moves meant that I scattered them to the four winds.

Now that I'm back in the hobby (and have been for about two years now!), I want to figure out how and what to build to get a similar end result...

A few pieces I finished in 2019, made from... stuff.

War as business: Warhammer 40,000 Squats

A while back, I was feeling a bit down and bought myself a Squat tricycle on ebay for too much money. Since then, I've fallen down a rabbit hole mining pit of space dwarf purchases, and collected the better part of an army worth.

Given that 8th edition doesn't even have rules for the recent Necromunda Squat releases (let alone these 25+ year-old models), this is the furthest I could get from a practical decision. Even in the world of hobby wargaming, spending money collecting an army's worth of figures that you can't actually play with is a bit... niche.

Space Dwarfs plastic kit box art, Paul Bonner(?).
© Games Workshop 1989

+ + Shoot-out near Fungapipe Forest + +

Local Orlock gun-runners the Harrier Bois had a run in with abhuman huntpack Undergangan out in the scrap-fields west of Fungapipe Forest.

Scrap-fields. Note the pipe-spawned fungal forest on the skinward side.

Remember Doc Renegade's? "A Renegade Doc at Renegade Prices!"? Well, here's part of him.