NEWS AND RUMOURS: Rogue Trader

This is going to be quite brief as I haven't really had a chance to surf the 'Net in the past week.

40k roleplay
Apart from the Imperial Guard summary sheet which I blogged about on Thursday the only other news I've received is about the forthcoming release of Rogue Trader. It's the second role playing game based upon the Warhammer 40,000 universe after Dark Heresy. Fantasy Flight Games inherited the projected releases for this system when they acquired the rights from Games Workshop. In Dark Heresy gamers play Inquisitorial Henchmen while the Rogue Trader RPG has them step up in power and explore the fringes of the Imperium as Rogue Traders and their crew. My understanding is that the third iteration of this game system will allow players to become Space Marines.

Rogue Trader will be released at Gencon 2009.

Meanwhile, news from the front
I've made my 150th blog entry over on my battle reports blog. It's a 1000 point game with my Imperial Guard versus Space Marines. Check it out here.

NEWS AND RUMOURS: Imperial Guard leaks!

Teh Internets is awash with news of an Imperial Guard leak from the Games Workshop French website. They posted up summaries from the new codex and although they were taken down very quickly, they have surfaced on numerous websites and forums. I read all about it over on Warseer.

Speaking of Imperial Guard, I have posted up a battle report on my other blog. It's yet another game against Gary's Chaos Space Marines. Haven't they got the idea yet? You're not welcome in the Skolarii Sector!

NEW MODEL FUND: Insert witty pun here

One of my New Year resolutions regarding my New Model Fund was to sell two items per week on eBay. I haven't kept that resolution at all but I have managed to add £51 to my fund. I sold a handful of Praetorian Imperial Guard in a private sale and the rest came from my penny jar.

I still plan to keep my resolution in the long term as I'll put stuff up for auction at the rate of four or six items per week until I catch up. Fortunately I have kept the other main promise to not buy any new models. My resolve will be tested to the limit in the coming months as the Imperial Guard models are rolled out. So to sate my desires by proxy, and to give me something to look forward to, I plan to keep a list of the models I want as they are released. It will no doubt include the Stompa and Valkyrie, but what else will appear on it by the end of 2009?

Anyhoo, here's how my New Model Fund stands today:

• Total income from sales (and my penny jar) £794
• Less models bought £537.12
• New model fund £256.88
• Models bought None

Over the halfway mark already!

NEWS AND RUMOURS: Imperial Guard extravaganza!

The big news over the past week came from the Games Workshop Design Studio open day held over the weekend on the 15th February. My main focus is 40k so I'll only talk about that.

40k
GW themselves blogged about the open day as it happened and you can read their take on it here. Philbrad2 provided us with photos of the Primaris Psyker, Ratlings and the plastic Valkyries over on Warseer. Meanwhile, Syph on heresy-online gave us an absolute ton of photos of Imperial Guard tanks, Command Squads and the Land Speeder Storm. Bell of Lost Souls posted pictures which look like they're from a copy of White Dwarf (or maybe from the super secret seminars) outlining the new IG advisors such as the Master of Ordnance and the Officer of the Fleet.

So, just to round up what was revealed:

• Ratling models
• Primaris Psyker models
• Plastic Valkyrie
• Plastic Cadian command squad
• Plastic Catachan command squad
• Imperial Guard sniper models
• Photo of Master of Ordnance
• Photo of Officer of the Fleet
• Photo of Astropath
• Photo of Commissar Lord
  
• Photos of Sentinel variant weapons in plastic (Multi laser, Heavy flamer, Plasma cannon, Lascannon, Autocannon, missile launcher)
• Land Speeder Storm model
• Photo of Wolf Guard with Lightning Claws
• WIP Tyranid Broodlord with Feeder Tendrils
• WIP Tau Farsight
• WIP Ork Flashgit

There were also loads of Warhammer Fantasy Battle bits and bobs (such as the plastic Steam Tank) as well as Lord of the Rings things but I'm not so into those games...

GENERAL: Short and sweet

It's my girlfriend's birthday this week, as well as Valentines Day yesterday, so I made the rash promise not to post on my blogs all week. She's out shopping at the moment so I thought I'd sneak on and link to another battle report I've added on my other blog.

It was a short and sweet write-up of a game I played with my Imperial Guard against Tyranids on a four foot square, very heavily terrained battlefield. Guess who won?

Find out here.

PAINTING: Get ready to Assault

Despite the fact that they are unfinished, I've submitted my Assault squad to the Tale of 40k Painters pledge on Warseer.


According to the rules of the challenge I can do this to avoid having to use a joker (I only have one left for the next six months). It means you can make progress on large models or units a bit at a time. It's the one upside to the sheer cost of the Assault Marines in the Blood Angels codex. When this squad is finished it will cost a whopping 300 points!

I'm hopeful that I'll finish the squad entirely during my next painting session which will probably be in around two weeks time. Then I'll move on to either my Terminators or Captain. My Land Raider Crusader will follow shortly after them. That will hopefully take me a lot closer to the 2000 point target of my pledge.

I just need to knuckle down and get some painting done.

Guard conflict rumbles on
I'm still ploughing through my old Imperial Guard battle reports and you can read my latest instalment here. This was another game against Gary's Chaos Space Marine army when he brought his newly painted Obliterators (which, due to a strange quirk of fate, now reside in my own Chaos Space Marine army).

NEWS AND RUMOURS: Brass Scorpion

Forge World
Literally the big news this week is the unveiling of the new Brass Scorpion by Forge World.


You can see a 360 degree view of the beast here.

I think it is a great model...but not very Khornate. I first saw it without knowing it was a Brass Scorpion and I honestly thought it was a Dark Eldar vehicle, maybe a Talos. It's a ginormous model, there's no doubt that it's a super-heavy vehicle. The cost is not small either; it's £127.23. It's out on the 23rd February.

40k
The Plastic Legions blog has posted photographs of the new plastic Valkyrie for the forthcoming Imperial Guard codex.


The pic is in White Dwarf 350 which the blog author has already received. Lucky get! This model is seriously going to test my resolution not to buy any new models during the year. It looks so good.

GENERAL: Holy alliance

My latest battle report was again fought against Gary's Chaos Space Marines. I used a combination of Imperial Guard and Daemonhunters to take on the Khornate Daemon heavy traitors. Despite playing this game many years ago I still remember it clearly. Maybe my brain isn't quite as addled as I'd thought.

Speaking of Imperial Guard and Daemonhunters alliances, I haven't really mentioned the outcome of my little poll to decide the army I will play over the coming months. The results were tied at 29% each for Imperial Guard and Daemonhunters.

What are you guys trying to do to me?

Those armies are probably the worst two in the current game. Guard bleed kill points all over the place and have even less close combat prowess than they had in 4th edition. The Daemonhunter codex dates right back to 3rd edition and much of it's wargear and rules have been superceded. Plus I can only use a fraction of the book because I have no Grey Knights.

What to do?

Well, why not use the allies rules from the Daemonhunters book and use both armies at once? It'll certainly be fluffy and I must be able to cobble together a decent 1500 point army out of two armies, mustn't I?

Off the top of my head the things that might be handy against the Daemons will be mystics, some Inquisitor wargear, and the holy trio of the Leman Russ, Demolisher and Basilisk.

Hmmm, some thinking required...

PAINTING: Play stopped due to light

I'm reluctantly having to stop my painting challenge prematurely.

The natural daylight has now failed completely and the artificial light I have to paint by is just not up to the job. I have slathered Adeptus Battlegrey all over one unfortunate marine and then almost thrown him out of the window in frustration. I found myself stabbing the paintbrush into the deep shadows around the model hoping to hit the bits I was aiming for. Aaaarrrrggghh!

God knows where this leaves me in the Warseer painting pledge - I'll probably have to play another joker.

Not exactly how I would have wished to make my 400th blog entry.

I think I'll bugger off, calm down and try to finish off Dead Sky, Black Sun (only 80 pages to go).

PAINTING: Black, like death

I've really struggled to blackline these fellas without a decent light. The winter light is failing and I only have my energy saving main light and a small desk lamp for illumination. The replacement lamp is too small to have on the desk so I have it perched up over my right shoulder on a bookshelf. The problem with this is that it creates very strong shadows on the models so I have to sit at a very unnatural angle and keep moving the model around to see everything. I wish I lived in LA.

Anyway, I have blacklined the cracks and crevices in the armour as best I can and painted the jump pack harnesses black. These five models are now in the same state as my first five. I'll try and highlight the black next, if my pot of Chaos Black paint holds out - it's almost empty.

Podcasts listened to: This Week in Wargaming, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews, Dice Like Thunder, The D6 Generation
Food and Drink: Water, Vitamin C, Probiotic Yoghurt, Appl, Chicken and coleslaw sandwich, crisps, chocolate, a big mug of tea

PAINTING: Third and final highlight

I've completed the third and final highlight on the armour. It was a50/50 mix of Fiery Orange and Skull White. It probably looks a little too much at the moment but I will go back over the armour with Blood Red to tidy everything up.

Right after I took this photograph my table lamp collapsed all over the models. I haven't found any obvious damage yet but one model was catapulted into my wet paint. Most of the paint went on the bolt pistol but very little damage was done. Lucky, I guess but now I don't have a lamp to help pick out those fine details. I'll soldier on.

Podcasts listened to: This Week in Wargaming, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews, Dice Like Thunder, The D6 Generation
Food and Drink: Water, Vitamin C, Probiotic Yoghurt, Apple

PAINTING: Highlights, the second

The second set of highlights are now done. I hope you can see the difference!

One more set of highlights to go and then I'll take a break for lunch.


Podcasts listened to: This Week in Wargaming, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews, Dice Like Thunder
Food and Drink: Water, Vitamin C, Probiotic Yoghurt, Apple

PAINTING: First highlights

I've finished the first set of armour highlights. It took about an hour and a half to get some Blazing Orange on all the hard edges. The next step is some Fiery Orange over that.

Podcasts listened to: This Week in Wargaming, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews
Food and Drink: Water, Vitamin C, Probiotic Yoghurt

PAINTING: Starters orders

Today will be a day when I get things done.

I have a day off work and I know I'll have little time over the coming week to dedicate to gaming so I need to get as much done now as I can. So, at 8:30 in the morning, I'm sat at my painting station reading to start!

My rather ambitious plan is to completely finish all ten of my Assault marines today. I need to finish the armour and paint the black details on five of them just to bring them up to the level of the first five, then I need to paint the yellow helmets, the kneepads, highlight the weapons and finish the bases on all ten.

When they're all done I need to take a decent photo of them and put it on Warseer to fulfill this month's painting pledge. If I can do it it will add 300 or so much needed points to my current total of 735 points and therefore take me over the halfway mark with six months of the pledge remaining.

I plan to keep posting my progress on the blog every few hours to keep myself motivated.

And here we go...

GENERAL: Use your vote!

Only an hour left in my poll to see which 40k army my readers recommend I play for the next six months. At the moment the Daemonhunters and Imperial Guard are in joint first place.

Speaking of Imperial Guard, I've posted up battle report on my other blog. It was another clash against Gary's Chaos Space Marines.

NEWS AND RUMOURS: Set sail for profits

Warhammer Historical
Trafalgar is released by Warhammer Historical this month. It is 1:1200 scale game of naval engagements. It is written by Mark Latham and you can check out the game developers blog here.

Black Library
The Inquisition War trilogy is in the shops now. It was written by Ian Watson in the eighties and nineties and tells the tale of Inquisitor Jaq Draco uncovering a galaxy spanning plot which will impact upon the whole of humanity. The books sharply divide opinion for two reasons; one is because they were written before a lot of the background material was defined so it jars with the ret-conned 'current' 40k mythos and the second is Watson's writing style. He has a style, you see, rather than the homogeneous Black Library house style we get from every author nowadays. This can be shocking for readers used to the way books are written now. For me this tome is essential even if just to see how damn weird the 40k universe can be.

Blood Bowl computer game
I spotted a new trailer for Blood Bowl over on joystiq. It looks great and I'm particularly happy to see that there will be a turn based recreation of the board game as well as the run about smash 'em version. I'll be getting it for the PSP but you can also get it for the Xbox 360, PC and Nintendo DS.

Games Workshop Interim Report
On the 27th January Games Workshop revealed their latest interim report. According to wiser souls than me who have posted on Warseer GW seem to have stopped the rot; they have reduced their debts and Forge World is raking in the cash. The figures cover the period up to November 2008 so miss Christmas. The report also misses the worst of the economic downturn when companies were going out of business in December in the UK. Still, it's positive news for all of us who wish to see Games Workshop prosper.

PAINTING: Daemon Hunters, by special request

I had a couple of requests to show photographs of my Daemon Hunters army so I rooted around my hard drive and found some. Here, in all it's glory, is Kill-Team Severus.

Kill-Team Severus


Inquisitor Lord Severus

Inquisitor Lord Severus and retinue


Inquisitor Kurven and retinue

Inquisitorial Stormtroopers with plasma guns

Inquisitorial Stormtroopers with flamers

Inquisitorial Stormtroopers with meltaguns

Inquisitorial Stormtroopers with grenade launchers

Death cult assassins

Daemonhosts

Temple assassins

Retinue