Fragmented but busy week

It's been a busy week hobby wise! I got a few things finished, but then I start looking at all the other things I got done in the same time and realise I've been super productive!

First up we have these MDF templates I'm going to be using for Blizzard Templates in Infinity. The current season of ITS includes some missions that require you to put down circular templates of difficult terrain where there's particularly strong blizzards. We constantly forget to do this, so I thought having my own pretty templates might mean I remember more often. I may throw up a "how I made these" post later depending on my mood.

There's also a huge positive thing here that I ordered these at the end of May, got the bits in, prepped them, added the basing material and snow effect and finished them all by the end of June. I need to have more hobby projects like this!

I finished this fantasy character holding a potion I bought from Encounter Terrain. I'd got him 80% done a few weeks back and he'd been sitting around, so I got him finished up. I've also been working through the Beastgrave Scenery Pack, of which I don't currently have pictures. They're six quite detailed bits of terrain, and I've got four of the six done. I'll show them off when they're all done.

I've also got one of the two Horus Heresy characters I have fully assembled. For a single pose model, there's a lot of bits, and an awful lot of mould line scraping! I am definitely having a lot of fun with this model so far, which means there's a good chance there will be some more Horus Heresy on the blog in the future...

The "general Combined Army" assembly batch got their basing paste added, and hopefully should get undercoated soon. With the Defiance Platinum Pledge all ready for paint, I'm now sending off the Combined Army Reinforcement Packs for assembly. I've stalled out a little on painting them, but hopefully I'll get the Nox and Cadmus currently on the table mostly done soon.

Meanwhile, a model I ordered back in February has finally arrived! It seems that there was some delay at the distributor and they didn't make it to the UK for a while. The plan is to get him assembled and painted for a review some point in July, although I have a few things I need to get finished on the paint table first...

Meanwhile, my Dungeons and Lasers Kickstarter turned up. I decided to grab the Townsfolk Starter Set. Archon Studios used to be Prodos Games, who messed up some Kickstarters very badly. They seem to now be delivering reasonably consistently, so I thought it was worth a go. In this case, it was even slightly early!

I decided to pick up the Stretch Goals for slightly less than the Townsfolk box, and it includes a lot of Stuff. This has blown my count for the year completely out of the water as I have no idea how many of these I'm going to keep and how many I'll sell, so it's all up in the air until I get them out and assemble things.

I also got a spare set of their bases, as these will be great for all sorts of Frostgrave and D&D models. The detail is really crisp and nicely done.

The sprues are packed and have a reasonable amount of variety. There's duplicate sculpts of all the town guards, which I'll be offloading as I'm not a fan of duplicate sculpts. The quality is crisp and detailed, and they look like they'll suit a wash and drybrush or Contrast approach to getting them all painted quickly.

My big critique is that there's not a huge effort done towards diversity. There's one female Knight and all the other women are either "token woman sculpt in the guards", a female version of a male sculpt (Male Dwarf, Female Dwarf) or super stereotypical roles like doing laundry. There's one obviously non white character, who is a female snake charmer. It's not bad, just a mediocre, low risk approach to get obvious figures they're confident people will want to use without making much effort to get a good range of diversity involved. I'll be supplementing these with a better, diverse range of characters, but that's effort I'm going to need to put in that I shouldn't need to.

On the Games Workshop front, I've got the Age of Sigmar and 40K seasonal updates, and the new Skaven Battletome for my still in box Skaven army, so I can decide if I'm painting it up or selling it.

On the more productive side of the Age of Sigmar hobby the rest of my Stormcast made it back from Squiggle's Studio. I've now got a pretty chunky job of photographing and putting them all away. I've got a pretty sizeable force I can game with now, once I find the time to learn how to play...