"..the appearance of a gigantic, flightless bird."

A few months ago, I got the new Battletech boxed set. I played a lot of Mechwarrior as a teenager, and it's one of those wargames I just never got a chance to get into. The rules were always archaic, and the fluff seemed endless. There was just no good starting point.

After the BATTLETECH video game came out last year, I was able to have a more gentle introduction into the setting and was able to start digging into it.

Here we have a Locust LCT-1V. I've painted her in yellow, as for the 1st Canopian Curaissiers, Magistracy Royal Guards, Magistcracy of Canopus. The yellow isn't quite right, going from the examples at Camospecs or Unit Colour Compendium, but it might pass for an older, beaten-up scout. That's in keeping with a Locust, around 3085, I think.

She's been painted with a coat of Nazdreg Yellow from Citadel's new Contrast range, over a base of steel colouring. Iyanden Yellow might get me closer to the bright yellows we see on the examples above, especially if I bring the basecoat up to a brighter silver first. I'll try that next.

In the meantime, I'm open to feedback or suggestions for basing schemes. I was originally thinking of a pale grey, like a moonscape or a levelled city, but the Periphery has all kinds of biospheres.

Repost: Abate the Edge of Traitors

The Inquisitor and several of his acolytes, standing before the Mantis Warriors Razorback APC Dao Găm

The Inquisitor held his right hand by his side. Around him the air grew leaden, heavy. The charge that always lay in this place, that quiescent during his mundane works, a thrumming energy in potentia, began to crawl its way toward reality. His fingers arched into a complex pattern, a perfect geometric web. Points of jale light formed across points on his glossy protective gloves.

Behind the Inquisitor, his mortal servants shifted. Leth the Silent’s porcelain mask grew colder as the shadows began to flicker, blending from fuligin to sangoire. Beside him, sparks of dead colour flared on the Dimachaerus’s swords. The Exile ignored the prickling across its scalp, activating a gleaming rune on the deck panel; a holo-projector flared to life, showing a scarred planet.

Their Inquisitor master raised his left hand. Behind the soft gurgling of his rebreathing unit, he was speaking words in a helical tongue. Both hands now moved, exactly mirroring, and the unnatural lights dimmed on the hand; following a binaric chant, they were replicated, exactly, on the false-light sphere which hovered over the command deck.

The shadows returned to black. Lights returned to reds and blues; monitors to healthy green-on-black. Across the desk from the Inquisitor and his people, Lieutenant Commander Gwak Chae'u of the Mantis Warriors cleared his throat.

“I take it those are to be our targets then, Lord Inquisitor?” The distaste for the rank was concealed, to a point.

The Inquisitor’s inhuman eyes flickered. “Yes, Commander. You may inform your master.”

“I - he is uncomfortable…” Gwak’s expression flattened. “That is to say, we have made the error…

The Exile’s pointed ears flickered; some alien expression of amusement, although its oval eyes betrayed no emotion. Behind the Inquisitor, one of his more human minions coughed and shoved a cigar in his too-wide mouth.

"You have rather more recent experience fighting other Astartes than most, Mantis Warrior.” The rebreather unit hissed. “Ergo, you are perfect for this investigation. Dixi.”

Lt. Comm. Gwak held his eyes for a moment and then, bowing, withdrew.

The falselight globe spun lazily above the briefing table, witch-lights gleaming. The scarred world was in turmoil; icons indicating renegade forces blinked in and out of focus, pursued or pursuing their Imperial prosecutors. Here the crossed, sanguine axes of Orkish mercenaries grew brighter as they ravaged a promethium depot; there a white rose collapsed in pixel fire as a cathedral’s defenders changed their allegiance.

The witch-lights followed their targets’ icons, flickering only as the falselight projector’s machine spirit ran the inflow routines. Unlike the turmoil across much else on the map, the sword-and-wings icons remained steady as faith…

Project: Codename: Sothoth

When I was fourteen - o, lo! many years ago - and was first getting into wargaming, one of the local chaps showed me this cool spaceship game. This was before Battlefleet Gothic, and there was nothing like it in the local scene. It featured three different species of aliens, each more horrible and weird than the last. Humans hadn't unified, like in Star Trek, instead clumped into a handful of superpowers... which included the United States back under the rule of the British Crown.

The game was called Full Thrust and is completely awesome.

More Thrust, the first supplement book

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to get back into wargaming (or at least painting miniatures, as I didn't have any opponents and it turns out that being in your thirties doesn't prevent you from being awkward about introducing yourself to gaming groups). Ground Zero Games has always had very reasonable prices and shipping, so I decided to plump for some of those cool spaceships I'd wanted as a teenager.

I purchased two intro sets: the Oceanic Union, a federation of Australasian-Pacific states and the Sa'Vasku, an advanced alien species who use living bioships which consume their own bio-matter to power their systems and generate drones. 

Elder strike ship and strike ship See below.

I wanted the Sa'Vasku to have an organic sense, but still retain their essential alien-ness, so I looked to Terran arthropods for colour scheme inspiration. I'm hardly unique among the folks with Sa'Vasku ships for doing this, but I also wanted to avoid the drab browns and ochres that 'organic' often means in this context. Luckily, arthropods are super weird:

Blue swimmer crab. Photo from WA Fisheries.

Electric blues for the spikey bits, and white patterns for the core bodies. I went with a solid stellar black for the torso themselves. They're artificially engineered bioships, sure, but this lets me pretend that they have a natural kind of space camouflage. (Yes, I know that doesn't make sense). The underbellies are purple, as some swimmer crabs get a purple tinge. The overall effect generates a striking, science fiction colour pattern, while still showing a sort of organic realness.

Plus, I'd never worked with a bright blue, and I try to pretend to push my limited painting skills.

Drone fighters - finished 02 Aug 2019!

I've really enjoyed this project, and the folks on the Full Thrust Facebook group have been very kind each time I posted an update. During the unfortunate recent business, I managed to finish everything I had planned for this project, so I can reveal the results below. As you will see, in the past two years, the tablet I was using to background the photos perished mysteriously, so not everything looks as cool as it could.

+ excusationes +

Hey, you know how there are approximately 500 million blogs out there and in probably 98% of them, you see a single post or two, and then nothing, and then an apology for being absent for so long?

Weird.

okay okay okay

Look. My computer died, alright? I know, it's the oldest answer there is, but it's true. The poor old girl had been moaning and breathing funny (yes, that was indeed a warning sign) for months, but she gave up the ghost just after the new year. You know, about two days after I started this blog.

I had a laptop, but I find it really hard to sit and think and write with a laptop. I like a desk, and a keyboard, and two monitors and all the luxuries of modern civilisation (tea, whiskey) at my disposal as I write.

Sa'Vasku elder leader bioship, Vas'Sa'Rosh-class.
One of many miniatures completed in the last few months.

I have been able to get a lot of work done on my projects - and started or planned about twelve more, naturally - so now that I have a new computer set up, I'm hopeful we can try this again.

Onwards, as they say, and upwards.

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.