GENERAL: Give thanks, men, to lone pilgrim and the brave 300!

lone pilgrim is 300 blog entries old today!

As another milestone has arrived I thought I'd take the opportunity to look back at how things have gone in the past and look forward to the future.

This time last year I came up with a masterplan to organise my gaming activities over the 2007/2008 gaming season. Regular readers might remember that blog entry; everyone else can check it out here. I refined that plan in my 200th post in November of that year here.

So how did I do?

I had originally planned to build and paint 1500 points of Forgeworld Renegade Imperial Guard. Later in the year I changed the plan to put back my Renegade IG and concentrate on my Blood Angels instead. I decided to carry on with my Exigator Chaos Space Marines as my current army.

This new plan could still potentially work. I'm just finishing off the last of my Chaos Space Marine models now (the Brass Scorpion and 8 Khorne Berzerkers) and when I complete them I will be totally finished with the army. If that takes two months, until the end of July and the end of the tournament season, I can then move smoothly over to the Blood Angels. This will be just in time for the new fifth edition of 40k. It will mean that my Blood Angels will have missed virtually the whole of 4th edition but it means they can be optimised with 5th edition in mind.

The only potential problem is with their army list. There are all sorts of rumours flying around as any new edition of 40k is followed swiftly after by a Space Marine codex. Will the Blood Angels use this new codex or will they continue to use their White Dwarf list? By October we will know for sure. My aim is to build and paint what models I already have until the Space Marine codex is released and then reassess.

Other rumours state that the revised Imperial Guard codex will be released in 2009. Again this fits neatly in with my plans as I'll hopefully have my Blood Angels finished just in time to start working on my Renegade Imperial Guard next year.

On the scenery front I had aimed to finish my trench gaming board (which is currently half built). I haven't done any work on this yet but I do plan to complete it so that Gary and I can play an Apocalypse game or three. Ideally I'd like to do this just after I finish the Exigators and before I restart the Blood Angels. I'd also like to add some more moveable terrain pieces like craters, trees, bunkers, etc. Here's hoping.

I had also planned to expand my blogs starting with subsector 1 (the Salazar systems) for the Skolarii Sector. I have got nowhere with the Skolarii Sector but I have added another blog; the Old Albion Premier League reports on my Blood Bowl games. It's likely that Gary and I will have finished the 2500 season that we are playing currently by the end of July and I will have added lots of my old material from my old website. Swings and roundabouts.

My other computer based project was to get all my battle reports up on my website, around 150 of them. I've done pretty well with this; since September last year I have added about seventy battle reports. The only reason I haven't got the rest up there is that I played the Pheonix 40k campaign against Gary and it took up so much of my time writing up new battle reports for that that I couldn't add the older ones. Now that campaign is over I can begin again.

I love painting models but I have had my ups and downs over the year. Mainly this was due to time, and conflicts between updating my blog, playing games and painting. Just recently I tried to address this by completely revamping my painting set-up. I re-organised the storage of my paints, basing materials and tools and added the new Foundation paints. This has led to a resurgence of my interest in painting models and I hope to carry this forward in the coming year.

So what have I painted since last year? A quick tot up shows I painted 52 figures. 48 of these were rank and file (16 Marauders, 9 Plague Bearers, 9 Bloodletters, 5 Blood Angels, 8 Plague Marines and a Khorne Berzerker), one Greater Daemon, one tank (the Baneblade!) and two character models (Abaddon and a Terminator Captain).

That's pretty good - it would add up to a decent sized 40k army if all the models were for the same race/game. As it is I have all but finished painting every last Chaos Space Marine and Chaos Daemon model I own.

Still, I'd like to improve that total - double it to over 100 models - next year. That's only an average of two models per week. Easy peasy. Errr...

To recap, here are my aims for the coming year.

• Paint 100 models.
• Paint 1500 point Blood Angel army to a high standard.
• Complete the transfer of all my battle reports to the blog.

I've learned from my previous masterplan and reduced my aims to make them achievable. Anything else is a bonus. I'm hoping that by leaving a little bit of a window I have enough room for 'fun' projects that will refresh me without impinging too much on my 'core' goals.

Games like Aeronautica Imperialis fall into this category. I could paint up two squadrons and play some AI with relatively little financial outlay or taking up too much painting and modelling time. I have to remember to enjoy myself; it is a hobby and not a job after all.

Here's hoping I make it to 400 posts.