Plans for 2025

My plans for my hobby this year are a bit different. It's looking like we're going to be moving house this year, and I really want my focus to be on making the move less painful rather than painting a few more figures. The blog may get a little quieter in a bit, but I've got plenty to do before then.

I do need to buy less stuff. I say this and fail many years, but I really need to not mess this up this year, as the cost and the time of the move is really going to exacerbate any failure. I've updated my tracking system, and the goal this year is to buy less than I've sold and painted. I'm excluding anything pre-ordered from previous years, because nothing ruins a system by punishing yourself for something that happened before you instituted it.

With the new edition and a move coming up, I've decided to focus in on just the Combined Army for now. HATE is holding a slow grow League, where I'm playing my beloved Shasvastii, while I'm planning on getting Vanilla up and running for tournaments and so on.

The club is also running a Frostgrave campaign, so it's time to dig out all the random bits and pieces I've painted over the years to put together a warband. I don't need to paint anything new for this, it's more a case of using stuff I've already painted.

I've been trying to improve my miniature photography, particularly using the Jon Hodgson background books. I'm likely to take a weekend some time to do a whole bunch of photography so that I can schedule a bunch of cool photos to "hold down the fort" on the blog as house moves happen.

. . . and really, that's it as far as planning goes this year! Between "sell stuff" and "move", I don't want to over-commit. I'm hoping that by Autumn I'll be able to pick up some new project, but I'll look at how the world looks then and work out what I want to focus on. No point in over-planning right now.

Lyran Guard Battlemech Lance

 

After spending way too much of 2024 on my painting desk with a simple basecoat on, I've finished up this Lyran Guard Battlemech lance for Battletech. It's a pretty simple tabletop quality paint scheme, but it means they're done and sorted.

I now have six painted Lyran mechs overall, and that's plenty to learn the game with. I'm not going to be jumping into that straight away - I've got an Old World campaign day and my first game of Infinity N5 next weekend, and I expect the combination to leave my brain as total soup.

Product Review - D&D Icons of the Realms - Ship Scale Boxes

 

For the last of my "Wizkids boxes I bought in the Black Friday sales" reviews, here's a review of some Spelljammer "ship scale" miniatures. The first one I picked up is the "Astral Elf Patrol", which consists of two dragons and two ships - a Star Moth and a Dragonfly.

The dragons are fine, meant to represent Ancient Dragons in the ship game. Ironically, their base sizes are quite reasonably sized for a normal Adult Dragon in normal miniature scale, with the miniatures only a little too small. Miniature scale creep has gotten ridiculous of late, and they may end up being useful gaming pieces for normal D&D.

The Dragonfly (the smaller ship) is fine and does OK for what it is. I'm less fond of the Star Moth. The huge plastic wings don't fit particularly snugly, so will come out if you so much as breathe near them. This leaves you with the dilemma of gluing them in, which makes the whole thing an absolute nightmare to store - there's a reason they were packed separately in the box.

The Star Moth also feels a little bit "plastic toy", as well? The big see through plastic doesn't help with that, but the bold, blocky colours go on to make it worse rather than better. If you compare it to either of the dragons, they don't necessarily feel like they come from the same line? With there not being many other options for the classic Spelljammer ships, it's a bit of a disappointment.

The next box, "Threats from the Cosmos" is a monster box with four creatures. First up, we have the Cosmic Horror and the Tyrant Ship. The Cosmic Horror is excellent. It's a spooky Far Realm monster that has been painted up all gribbly. I don't see it's normal state line will see much play - a CR18 space gribbly isn't one for regular play - but in 28mm scale, some summoned horror could easily be represented by this.

A Tyrant Ship is a Beholder ship, carved out of rock with disintegration rays. The paint job is deeply disappointing - while it's canonically carved out of stone, the colours they've chosen to represent that look more like the model has been roughly undercoated rather than a good stone texture. It's a swing and a miss, really.

We then have an ancient red dragon, which is fine, and a murder comet swarm. And here's where there's a little bit of a rant coming. A murder comet is a medium creature - so the scale of the murder comets here is completely wrong. There's no stat block for a murder comet swarm, so you're left having to come up with something. And by having a non standard stat block, it's not much use for a 28mm scaled encounter either. At least if they'd had a "giant murder comet" miniature with a normal base, it could then be used as a normal murder comet at normal scale. The paint job is dire, too, using metallic silver to try and approximate the art of a glowing gas ball, where the whole thing would have been much better undercoated blue then an airbrushing of white over the top to get a simple but good effect. Just a catastrophic miss on every level.

Last up, we have "Attacks from Deep Space", starting with an Astral Dreadnought. This thing is huge and heavy. I dropped it on a metal miniature and the metal miniature broke. Lets get an idea of scale.

So yes, this is a Big Chunky Monster. The painting is great, the sculpt is great. Just excellent. It's another high CR monster (CR 21 in this case), so it's much more likely to be encountered as some kind of puzzle encounter rather than a straight up fight. You might be trying to escape it, or trying to trick it into swallowing you so you can recover something from it's magical stomach - donjon. You can definitely make some memorable encounters out of this.

The rest of the box consists of a giant gelatinous cube (again, lacking a published stat block for the current edition, but a nice concept for an encounter), and three smaller ships - a turtle and two lampreys. The sculpts of these are fine, but both of the lampreys fall victim to the "bold bright colour" paint job issue, making them look like children's toys again.

Spelljammer ships and creatures are always going to be incredibly niche purchases, and these boxes vary from "key to populating a basic ship table" to "forgettable", with unfortunate mixes of ships and monsters when you're most likely to want duplicates of the ships (if, you know, you're made of money). All in all, these are such a missed opportunity - some better choices with the paint jobs and different combinations of boxes could have made this a far more appealing product.

Review of 2024

 

It's been a bit of a weird year, all told. Work got catastrophically stressful, I got into a TCG, and looking back at things that happened in the first half of the year feels like some kind of weird other-time where things happened to someone else.

As far as "goals for the year" went, everything kind of fizzled out. Some large Kickstarters are the bulk of the miniatures that came in. There's a few limited releases or things that were going out of production, with a bit of a slip when Imperial Agents came out.

That said, I did manage to tidy the hobby room sufficiently that my dearly beloved has a table of her own in it, so it's not a complete wash.

I managed to run a D&D game in person for some friends, which was excellent fun. One of my long term ambitions is to run a long campaign in person with miniatures and maps, but that isn't something I'm aiming to do in 2025.

I made it back to Salute, which I mostly loved for seeing a bunch of friends who run small wargaming businesses. A trade show when you're trying not to add to piles of unpainted miniatures is a bit difficult to work out how to approach.

I also made the trip to UK Games Expo. It was a lot, but I had an amazing amount of fun. I found new games, like the card game Flesh and Blood. I got some Pathfinder Society games in so I got to play rather than be a forever DM. I would go again, but I probably won't in 2025, as I have a lot of other commitments then already.

I did successfully get some games of the new edition of 40K in - both with my Deathwatch, and signing up for a small narrative campaign with my Imperial Guard. It's been great fun, despite losing all but one of my games.

A got a cheeky game of Malifaux in. Not much to say about it beyond that I did play it, and I want to get my crew painted!

I also got my first ever game of Age of Sigmar in. This is something where I'm keen to try out Skaven, but that's a painting project away from happening...

Infinity has been a bit slower than previous years, but there's still been a whole bunch of it - I've done a few tournaments and a league, but the announcement and then the delay of the new edition, N5, sort of took the wind out of the sails a bit. The new edition has engaged a lot of keen, though, so I expect that to course correct shortly... That said, I did get games of three other systems in instead, so I think it's just a question of balance.

My local club, Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts (or HATE) has sadly had to move venue after the closure of Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. It's now running in a new venue that I haven't made the journey to yet.

When I sat down to write this I was thinking I hadn't gotten a lot done. It turns out, I have - but it's been going out and doing things rather than sitting down and painting miniatures. The review has been really helpful in a way, because it's helped me realise I've had a productive, positive year. Among a bunch of stress and distractions, looking back at the positives helps put me in a good mindset for the coming year.