GENERAL: How clean is your games room?

Today will be a day when I get things done.

I've been suffering from a little post-holiday ennui regarding my gaming activities, largely because I have so many projects rumbling along simultaneously. This is also in part due to a six day working week I just finished last night. Hey ho, at least I got back in time to see Newcastle United slot four past a hapless Ipswich team. We are top of the league, say we are top of the league!

Ahem.

I've taken a few pictures of my games room so you can appreciate my plight. I bought all of my Planetstrike terrain, bought Planetary Empires, I got a tonne of stuff out for my selling splurge on eBay, then the remainder of that got Mighty Empires tiles piled up on it while I painted them, then Space Hulk arrived with some Planetary Empires tiles, then I bought two IA books, then I got all my Orks out to build my next 40k army then I came back from holiday and dumped all my stuff on top of all that.

This is the result:

I need a major tidy up.

The main focus of my efforts will be on the 'island' tabletop surface in the middle of the room. This is formed by two long Ikea cabinets where all of my models live. It also forms the surface where I can place my gaming table and play games.

You can see my table in the photo above, in 4 foot by 2 foot sections, on end wrapped in bubble wrap just to the left of my painting desk. They have never been unwrapped since we had the conversion done on our house two years ago. The island table has never been clear in all that time.

Today that will change.

I hope that by having a good clear out I'll feel more like I have my projects under control.

I plan to blog again later in the day with my progress, and also with some news from UK Gamesday which is taking place today. Early reports say that the Tyranid codex is confirmed for January 2010 and is to be written by Robin Cruddace.

Okay, I have stuff to do.

NEW MODEL FUND: Over the line!

I'm off to Sheffield shortly to see U2 play Don Valley stadium so I thought I'd drop in for a quick update first.

I had planned on accomplishing lots of hobby related stuff on Tuesday night but in the event I felt ill and curled up on the sofa to watch Aliens for the umpteenth time. It must have been all this talk of Space Hulk which made me think of it. Cracking film.

I was out at the Newcastle match last night to see Shola Ameobi score his fourth goal in two games. At one point the crowd starting singing 'same old Shola, always scoring' and I burst out laughing. We won the match and are unbeaten so far in the Championship. Good stuff.

As I've mentioned I'm out tonight and I'm also out on the lash on Friday night back in Newcastle.

All this socialising means my battle reports, eBay selling, Planetstrike terrain and Planetary Empires painting will have to wait until this weekend. I do plan to get really stuck in on Saturday and Sunday, fitting in Inglourious Basterds and maybe a drink or two on Saturday night as well.

One thing I did manage to achieve this week was to hit the £500 target for my New Model Fund. Hurrah!

I took some coins out of my penny jar and was surprised to find £11 in change. A swift run down to the bank and my grand total now stands at £501.09.

I have two options at this point; one is to revise my target up to £1000 by the end of the year and two is to start spending on models.

Of course I have made a resolution to not buy any more models this calendar year so I'll probably opt to raise my NMF total. Given that I have a load of stuff ready to hit eBay I could see an immediate boost to the Fund over the next few weeks anyway.

Watch this space!

GENERAL: Back of the net!

I was at the Newcastle match last night, our first at home in the Championship, and watched Shola Ameobi score a hat-trick(!) to give us a comfortable win. I just don't know what to expect from NUFC day to day, match by match. One thing is for sure - it won't be dull!

Anyway, I went out to celebrate, got totally smashed, fell asleep in the taxi and woke up this morning with a raging hangover. To blow the cobwebs away I'm going to walk into town and pick up a copy of Planetary Empires and hopefully the Battlescape scenery piece with wrecked Rhino.

Before I set off, though, I wanted to point you towards a couple more of my Destroy the Gargant campaign battle reports.

The first game, game 5 of the campaign, saw the Daemonhunters surrounded by Orks and trying to break out of an ambush.

The second game was twice the size at 1500 points and had the Daemonhunters making a bunker assault on the Ork bastions.

GENERAL: Heavy weather

We've had some scary weather up here in North East England over the past couple of days with extreme cold followed by very high winds. It was bitterly cold at the match yesterday where Newcastle were unlucky to scrape a draw with West Ham when we should have won it. I was kept awake during the night as the wind blew our bins around the garden and some tiles from the roof. The wind hasn't let up all day so I haven't gone out at all.

Instead, I've spent most of the afternoon painting highlights on the first five marines from my assault squad. I'll hopefully get some photos up tomorrow.

In the meantime you might like to check out another Imperial Guard battle report. It was a big old 2000 point rumble with me using Daemonhunter allies to take on Gary's Chaos Space Marines. Scope out the action here.

MODELLING: Blood Angels Tactical squad one

A fantastic but nerve-wracking game at St James Park yesterday as Newcastle edged out Wigan 1-0. We threw everything at them and had two goals disallowed, hit the woodwork and played the best part of 45 minutes against 10 men. It took a towering header(!) five minutes from time from Michael Owen to win us the match. This was the kind of game we would have drawn or even lost last season. I hope it's a sign of things to come for the Toon.

Back to the gaming. I have put together the first of two Tactical squads for my Blood Angels army. These models came from the Battle for MaCragge boxed set. I didn't have any choice in how to arm these models; there is a missile launcher, flamer and the sergeant has a chainsword and bolt pistol. I'm okay with this because I know I'll use these weapons in my future army lists.

They are obviously aimed at younger/beginner players because they only have three parts per model and they all snap together. I glued them, of course. My main complaint about these guys is the amount of preparation they needed. Although there were far less pieces to each model, every one had horrendous mould lines. They took so much filing and scraping that I obliterated the surrounding detail on more than one model. You might be able to make out all the scrapings on the photo below.


Another downside of using the MaCragge figures is that they all have a similar pose. My solution to this problem is to add extras from my bitsbox to differentiate each model, and to spread the models out over several different squads. I know I will need to purchase some more models to round out both squads anyway (veteran sergeant, special and heavy weapon) so I may take the opportunity to actually build three squads.

In any case I plan to build all the squads first before I start to paint them, so I'll let you know how I get on with Tactical squad two tomorrow.

The Skolarii Sector

I've had a good weekend. Two full days off without a massive to do list of 'drudge' housework, I felt like a schoolkid again. Newcastle United beat Tottenham Hotspur 3-2 away, with Obafemi Martins scoring an absolute screamer. And I transferred him into my fantasy football team just before the match! I'm really looking forward to the next three games, which are all at home.

Gaming-wise, I should have been painting my Chaos Warriors but I just couldn't be arsed, so I got out one of my old 'background' books and leafed through it.

I've got about a dozen of these A4 pads crammed full of my gaming ideas. Everything from campaign systems to new rules to sketches to short stories is in them. The particular one I grabbed was my scribblings on the Skolarii Sector. I began writing about this little corner of space, far away on the Eastern rim, as a setting for my games. Of course, from a fairly modest beginning things spiralled out of control and the sector became more and more detailed. I drew a map showing all of the main planetary systems and the warp routes that connected them. I created the populations of each planet and subjected them to alien invasions, natural disasters and sector-wide wars as I wrote up their histories. I began to scour my old collection of rulebooks and Black Library novels, trying to piece together such esoteric information as the structure of the Inquisition in a sector to the hierarchy of the Ecclesiarchy.

As I played games, especially with my Imperial Guard and Exigators, I fleshed out more and more of the sector and this soon spilled out onto my website. I built a page for each Imperial planet and detailed it's tithes, it's population, it's stable warp routes and it's history. My lofty ambitions came crashing down to earth when my hard drive crashed and I lost a lot of information as well as my web building software. My site is back up, after a fashion, but the the Skolarii sector stuff hasn't made it yet. Reading through my notes and ideas really inspired me to start over again, so I spent most of Sunday getting my writing into some sort of order.

My plan is to post articles on this blog and then transfer them to my 'proper' website following any comments. Anyway, without further ado, here is my first article; on the Titans in the Skolarii Sector.


Titans in the Skolarii Sector

The Legio Avernus are the only Titan Legion present in the sector. They operate out of the Forgeworld of Manil in sub sector two. When the Adeptus Mechanicus came to the sector in M.29 they used the Titans to conquer the planet. Many of those same Titans still defend Manil today. The current leader of the Legio Avernus is Grand Master Sayyam.

As of 950.M41 the Legio consists of 46 Titans. There are two Emperor class titans, 1 Imperator and 1 Warmonger, and they are usually deployed singly. There are 24 Warlord class titans, deployed in 8 groups of 3 titans. Next come the 12 Reaver class titans, generally found in 4 groups of 3. Finally there are 8 Warhound class titans, arrayed in 4 groups of 2.

The tactical deployment of the Legio Avernus is based upon the Legio, Demi Legio and Quarto Legio.

The Quarto Legio consists of six Warlord titans, three Reavers, a pair of Warhounds and possibly an Emperor titan. These twelve titans would be the typical detachment for large campaigns.

The Demi Legio would include 23 titans, fully half of the Legio. The deployment of a Demi Legio is a very rare occurrence and has only ever happened twice in the Skolarii sector.

The Legio is largely a notional deployment as it would consist of all 46 titans in the sector. This has never yet occurred.

My (crazy) plan is to build the entire Legio if and when I get into Epic 40k. Gulp. Given the list of unpainted models I've already listed on this blog, and the cost of buying the models, I might get round to this project when I'm 70. Hey ho, you have to dream. Just look at what happened to Newcastle yesterday...