Painting at a Tournament?

I was meant to be at a LARP event this weekend which was sadly cancelled. As it was St Albans Smackdown on Saturday, I headed up to act as a reserve player in case of a drop out. In the event, I wasn't needed, so I wandered around taking photos, fussing the dog and getting a little painting done. While I put all the photos up on Facebook at the weekend, I plan to put them up on the blog a bit at a time on a schedule.

I managed to finish my Shasvastii Nox Troopers. I'm happy I'm getting my Shasvastii scheme dialled in. Next up is the rest of the Wildfire Shasvastii.

While I was at Dark Sphere last week for the Warmongers meet up, I picked up a few bits and bobs of the recent releases. The Corpse Grinder Necromunda cards I picked up as there's a bunch of generic cards in the set. Meanwhile, I've been intending to play Warcry for a good while, so I grabbed a selection of warband cards where I already own models (admittedly not assembled yet).

There was also a rep from Chaosium at Dark Sphere raising awareness of the various games they produce. We had an interesting chat, and was given some introductory rules for Runequest, which I've not looked into before. I'll be interested to give it a read through.

I also managed to get in a practice game for the European Infinity Championship. I've not had much chance to play Power Pack so wanted to work out how it plays. I had an interesting game against JSA. which I may write up depending on what I have time for.

I've got a restless feeling at the moment that I'm not getting everything I want to done. I may need to have a bit of a think about my time management. I suspect a lot of the problem is underestimating how long things take. Not sure how to fix that...

Necromunda: A little firefight with the Cawdor

Our Necromunda campaign continued with me receiving a challenge for some new turf from a Cawdor gang.

I finally managed to get my Heavy Stubber ganger to shoot! He's not managed to do that yet.

A couple of Cawdor got shot up pretty bad!

Meanwhile, a Cawdor with a long rifle was taking shots at people.

Meanwhile, my Squat bounty hunter managed to miss and run out of ammo on his first shot.

One of my new juves got caught in the cross fire and got properly mangled up!

And then my Heavy Stubber managed to miss and run out of ammunition, and I decided it was time for the gang to peg it before it got any worse!

I need to find some time to have a sit down and sort out the gang as we're now going into a downtime period and I need to work out what to get.

Necromunda: More Orlock on Orlock action

A while back, I got another game in at HATE in the Necromunda campaign. This was against one of the other Orlock gangs in the same campaign, but a slightly more experienced players.

They used one of their territories to infiltrate a bunch of their fighters, which was super good.

They all came out behind a door and opened fire on the gang.

My champion who'd run out of ammunition decided to charge in and try and punch them to death...

But then the gang bottled and all this lot ran away, the cowards.

This seems to be part of the swingy nature of a Necromunda campaign. Sometimes someone will get lucky or unlucky and suddenly a gang will bottle out early and lose a campaign. This swingy luck on the individual games is less of a bother when you've got a longer campaign because it will average out over time, but I could see it being super annoying during a one off game.

Still, I'm having fun, even when I'm getting flanked, shot up and running away!

Necromunda: The Van Saar Gang Attempts a Rescue

I got an opportunity for another game of Necromunda the other week, with a rescue game against my first Van Saar opponent.

I still had my Bounty Hunter available after my last game, and I drew him as one of the guards. It turns out that you should take hirelings like this in addition to anyone else in the gang, but we only found out afterwards.

Here's another of my gang, guarding the prisoner.

And another guard, wandering about.

I was pretty unlucky with my guard control rolls, and they wandered off all over the place.

The Van Saar gang snuck up on the prisoner...

My juve models hadn't arrived, so I'd grabbed a couple of goblin models to represent them. They then played like goblins really well, completely failing to notice a Van Saar sneaking about in the open.

Nope, still don't spot them..

The prisoner then freakishly managed to break their own bonds and, due to the way the sentry rules are written, peg it from under everyone's noses without them noticing.

The bounty hunter proceeded to badly shoot up the Van Saar leader.

The gang start pouring back on.

The Van Saar will be in trouble now! To cap it all off, a hail more bolter shells take the gang leader out of action, and he's killed - complete with botched doctor roll!

The vengeful hail of energy weapons messes up the gang quite badly, so, the prisoner already rescued, they peg it before someone gets badly hurt...

Learning Necromunda

A while back, I managed to pick up a small painted Orlock gang for Necromunda, bundled with the Orlock gang cards which were otherwise out of stock. Coincidentally, shortly after that, the HATE Necromunda group started a new campaign, and I thought it would be rude not to.

Learning from their last campaign, where people playing tons quickly overtook those who only played a bit, there were two campaigns this time - one with the keeners, in the North map, and then a campaign for newer people or those with less time, where each cycle was limited to only a couple of games set in the South.

I enthusiastically challenged someone based on looking at the map and deciding which direction I wanted to go in, meaning I was attacking "The Techy People" Van Saar for their Stinger Mould Sprawl. It was our first game for both of us, so we probably made a ton of mistakes.

For example, my advancing "Toast" way too far forward on his own so he ended up getting shot up and spending most of the fight lying on his back trying to hold his insides in.

The close quarters of the Zone Mortalis board really favoured the Orlocks over the Van Saars with the weapons we'd brought on the day. While a tunnel fight was perhaps sensible for being easy to learn, it wasn't the greatest for a balanced game between a short ranged shooty gang and a long ranged shooty gang.

The paperwork seems pretty onerous for the campaign, but I suspect it will get easier over time. It certainly seems great fun, but best if you're not going for a single competitive game - one unlucky roll could lead to the gang bottling out super early on and feeling unsatisfied.

Rather, this suits well for a narrative campaign, where a short exchange of fire leading to one gang losing their nerve and pegging it isn't unreasonable. Rather, it's part of the ebb and flow of the action. I definitely enjoyed it and am looking forward to my next game.

In the end, we'd both had a ganger die and I'd captured one of their champions. I'm not selling them to the Guilders straight away - they'll get a chance to manage a Rescue first - so they'll get a chance to get my gang back soon enough!

Warhammer World New Year's Open Day: Staff Displays

Remember that New Year's Open Day I went to? There was a ton of cool staff hobby there, and I haven't posted the photos yet.

This is Andy Hoare's Space Slann army, which is rather obscure and pretty darned cool.

I think this is an early Confrontation / Necromunda playtest figure.

Some models from Jervis' collection, I believe.

Annoyingly, I didn't make a note of whose figure this was at the time, and now don't remember. It's a nice conversion I still wanted to share, tho!

Warhammer World New Year's Open Day - All The Gossip

Without further ado, I'm going straight into the assorted pictures and nonsense I managed to pick up at the Open Day. There's no real revelations here - there's prettier pictures over at the Warhammer Community site - this is more about what I saw and what I thought about it.

Lets start off with Blood Bowl. The new stuff here was some additional Goblin Secret Weapons, including one with wings, one with a pogo stick, and an 'Ooligan with a bunch of noise making gizmos. These are the sort of thing I expect my darling wife may pick up at some point...

There's also an alternative troll sculpt if that's your thing. This one seems to be wielding someone's leg, which is pretty cool. Some extra variety is really nice to see.

Helmut Wulf and Karla von Kill had already been announced (and can in fact be ordered from Forge World now) but it was great to see them in the flesh. Karla is a bad-ass female character whose background is simply that she's a great Blood Bowl player. That she's sensibly dressed is a relief. Meanwhile, Helmut Wulf is a lunatic with a chainsaw. What could possibly go wrong?

On to Necromunda. If this figure looks familiar, that's because it was formerly available for the now discontinued Forge World Renegades range. The discontinuation inconveniently made it a little harder to get a Rogue Wyrd for your campaign, so he's getting a repackage and rerelease into Necromunda. Which is kind of sweet.

The Am-bot is a robot designed to look like an Ambull that any gang can hire. It looks like either there's more than one way to build the kit or more than one version going to be available. I love these to death, they're great.

Wait a second. A Blackstone Fortress expansion . . . called "The Dreaded Ambull". Surely not?

Apparently so! The Ambull is back in 40K as a monster in Blackstone Fortress. I cannot foresee a circumstance where I won't be buying this. It's amazing!

They also had an early copy of "Urban Conquest", a new campaign system for 40K. I really like this, it looks well thought through and rather clever.

You make a "map" of the city by dealing cards into a five by five grid in a wallet. It's designed for four players, with different starting map layout options. Each "campaign" turn can be after any number of games, including none if you've missed a round! You rank the players depending on how they did, then they do stuff like capture territory, select strategies for the next round of games, and accumulate their victory points.

This would be a lot of book keeping if there weren't reusable stickers supplied with the back so you can just fold the map up and get it out next time, with all the player positions and stratagems all neatly laid out. The designer also said it should work quite well for Kill Team. I'm not sure if it's designed for it or if it would need a little modding.

The pack is designed to handle the usual campaign woes of people missing weeks, or getting a drubbing and ending up near the bottom - it's intended to be quite forgiving of that and give people who are significantly behind ways to catch up. It's not just a case of winning the most games - if you outmanoeuvre the other players on the campaign board, you might win the campaign without having won as many games as them.
 

There were a bundle of other releases - this was a Mechanicus who'll be in a Kill Team expansion box. I'm assuming there will be 40K rules for them as well. There was also a ton of Genestealer Cult stuff, an announcement of a Ghoul vs Skaven box, and various other things I didn't have time to find and photograph.

The goblins, or "Gloomspite" were also out in force. Jes Bickham has been making an all troll / Troggoth army. I'm resisting things one for now - I had a few good talks about what I'm looking to get out of Age of Sigmar and I'm getting slightly more concrete thoughts about what I want to collect. I'm going to keep those to myself for now.

I'm pleased to say that a weekend away seeing amazing hobby stuff, and hanging out with awesome people has really ignited my hobby keen. I can't wait to get underway with various projects, and then tell you about them on here.