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.

mortem tyrannis: walkers

  ..qui sanat contritos corde, et alligat contritiones eorum
    - Psalmi 146:3

rule of three

As I intimated in the last post, I went a bit crazy in the end of winter, converting up bio-mechanical horrors for my Death Guard project. I decided I wanted to have a trio of dreadnoughts, but wasn't pleased by the idea of them all looking more-or-less the same. Chaos in general - but Nurgle especially - should lend itself to mutability and change. Plus, I'd been staring at moldmoldmold's work way too much, and had some Ideas...

mortem tyrannis: flesh and steel

augebit Dominus plagas tuas, et plagas seminis tui, plagas magnas et perseverantes, infirmitates pessimas et perpetuas

    - Deuteronomium 28

Mars-pattern Rhino transports (corrupted; Death Guard affiliation)

A few months ago, winter put a halt to undercoating and therefore painting, but that freed up my hobby time to allow me to finally convert the trio of second-hand Rhinos that I had accumulated. I may have gone a little overboard...

Project: It's About Turnips

 I actually hopped on the #turnip28 bandwagon when Max FitzGerald first started putting it together a few years ago. I went all in, got several boxes of historical plastics, converted and went nuts with muck and slime and weird little helmets. I got my partner to design some cool banners... and then we just straight-up weren't able to print the damn things.

Триста Тридцать Третий Репки Родины
[trans. 333rd Turnips of the Motherland]

In late September, we finally did it. We painted 'em. I finished another project!

All it took was gluing four pieces of paper down and adding a little muck to them, photographing them and posting them. Managed to do that for Instagram -- but of course I forgot to post anything here...