Bad things...

Well, I’ve talked enough Iron Hands, so I’m going to let that lie for a spell.  Next up: Malifaux chatter.

I’ve been interested in this game for over a year now, but it’s only been relatively recently that I’ve actually been able to get into it.  I had one test game at a club in North London and got on with it fine, although that was mainly down to luck and Hans the sniper.  It was only a couple of months after that that I was able to assemble some sample crews and get a couple of test games at my club.  Naturally, I stumbled at that point too, seeing as most of the rules were still a mystery to me.  Some of them still are, quite frankly.

Thankfully, it resonated well with a couple of the guys at the club and we’ve been playing semi-regularly for the past couple of months, although we’re only just getting round to using the special terrain section of book.  Another spot of good news is that we all have a different favourite faction which leads to a handy natural division for games, rather than having to deal with mirror matches.  One of us really likes the Guild, another goes for Resurrectionists in a big way and me; I’m an Outcast player.  I realise I may be getting a little ahead here, as some of you may not know much about the game, so such information is pretty much meaningless.  Let me explain.

No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.

It’s the turn of the century.  The 19th century, just edging to the 20th.  A rip in the fabric of reality occurs in California and a parallel dimension is discovered.  This dimension has interesting natural resources called ‘soulstones’ which allow genuine magic to be enacted on both sides of the rip (called the ‘Breach’.  A town is discovered just inside the rip, fully built, but utterly empty.  A town called Malifaux.  This is used as a base of operations and general conurbation for mining expeditions to recover soulstones, and the assorted businesses and hangers-on that go with this kind of prospecting operation.  Then the Breach closes inexplicably for a number of years.  During this time, a society used to using soulstones in a variety of ways struggles to adjust to their ever-increasing rarity and an unfortunate discovery is made: that when someone dies near a soulstone, it recharges.  Take this factoid through to its logical conclusion.  Thoroughly unpretty.

Anyway, suddenly the Breach opens up again.  The town is just how it was, but there are no people again.  No bodies either.  All deserted.  Naturally, people being people, Malifaux is soon repopulated and the business of mining continues ever onward.  That’s the rough idea.  Now the factions.  You’ve got five factions in this game.  The Guild, who are the forces of law and order in Malifaux, but (naturally) corrupt and tending towards fascism.  Resurrectionists, who are your necromancer types.  Very easy to see why they’re not liked.  It’s the smell, I think.  Then you have the Arcanists, who are unsanctioned magic users railing against the rules of the Guild.  After that there are the Neverborn, who are basically demons and nightmare creatures.  Pretty much the native inhabitants of Malifaux.  They don’t seem to like the humans being around.  At all.  And last you have the Outcasts, who are the oddities and mercenaries hanging around the place.

Most of the Outcasts can be hired by other factions, but you can have a full Outcast crew, and that’s what I focus on.  That said, I’ve got a crew for all the factions other than Resurrectionists as I wanted to get a variety of crews to give intro games and such.  And I don’t particularly like Resurrectionists.  Zombies are overplayed.  There, I’ve said it.

Anyway, I’ve very much got a favourite Outcast crew, being the Freikorps, who are basically steampunk special forces.  Military outfit, gas masks and a lot of clockwork guns.  I’ve been doing fairly well with them, and that’s actually a bit of a problem.  I’m worried that they may be a little overpowered.  It could well be that my opponents both favour spell casting leaders, and a big plus point for the Freikorps is that their armour is very good at shrugging off a lot of magic and renders them pretty much immune to area-of effect damage.  This tips the balance very much in my favour versus my two regular opponents.

They don’t seem put off by it though, which is good.  Nevertheless, I’m exploring a different sort of Outcast crew now.  I’m think the Viktorias, maybe with some Freikorps backup.  Whether or not this works out for me remains to be seen.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  So long readers!

Iron Hands: In with the new Clan

As I said a while ago, I had put a massive amount of work and words into my Iron Hands Codex back in the day before jingles and ugh, ‘40k power’ ^shudder^.  It’s a project that I was quite proud of at the time, and I still have a soft spot for now.  Some good ideas in that book.

However, it fell into disuse for a while and I never resurrected the project.  But recently (since BLL at least), I’ve been working on an alternative.  You see I didn’t want to bring the old fandex out of retirement just in time for 6th Ed to spring up and force a rewrite.  So instead I decided to just do an Iron Hands expansion pack of sorts to add to the regular Space Marines Codex and add their (woefully underrepresented) style to those other fine Chapters.  The idea was simple enough, and the alteration needed to be small enough to rattle through them quickly pre-game.  After lots of umming and ahhing (and probably erring as well, while we’re at it), I finally reached a solid conclusion.  Seeing as this is my blog, I’ll rattle through them now, just so I’ve got them written down somewhere.

Chapter Tactics:  Iron Hands gain “Relentless-Bolt Weapons” at the cost of Combat Tactics.

Wargear:         Non-Terminator-armoured Independent Characters can purchase a servo-arm for+25 pts and a full servo-harness for +40.  This cost does not include Artificer armour, which must be bought separately (if available).  Models with either a servo-arm or harness gain ‘Blessing of the Omnissiah’ as per the Techmarine entry in the main codex.

                        Veteran Sergeants may purchase a suit of Terminator Armour for +30pts.  The armour itself comes with one of the following loadouts: Storm Bolter & Power Fist, Storm Bolter & Power Weapon, Two Lightning Claws or Thunder Hammer & Storm Shield.  For +5pts, a Terminator may replace its Storm Bolter with a Heavy Flamer or its Power Fist with a Chain Fist.  It may not choose both. Scout Sergeants do not get this option.

Force Organisation:     The Iron Hands count as a Codex Marine Chapter for all forge-world entries, including the Storm Eagle Gunship and Contemptor Dreadnought.

                                                The Iron Hands may use the Storm Raven as a Fast Attack choice.  All options and rules are identical to the Blood Angels entry, except that the Bloodstrike Missile are replaced with Multiple Rocket Pods (as per the Imperial Guard Valkyrie) for no change in cost.  This exchange is not optional.

And that really is it.  I’ve also been thinking about giving the Command squads the option to upgrade to Terminator Armour, as it would look cool as all hell and tie in nicely with the theme.  However, it opens up a bit of a can of worms when it comes to equipment loads and points costing.  However, if anyone has any ideas, suggestion or objections on that score, let me know.  It’s all grist to the mill.

The key shift I think is the Chapter Tactics.  I initially thought to give them Stubborn, as they are meant to be singularly unyielding and focussed, but the Imperial Fists and their successors already have that.  Having read the Iron Hands novel and Chris Wraight’s stuff, the steady, relentless advance with bolters really seemed a prominent part of their fighting style, and reflects well on the tabletop without tipping the balance too far.  Plus, extending the relentless ability to the Heavy Bolter guys as well makes clearly the worst heavy weapon option available into something cool and usable.  It will never be as effective as a missile launcher, but the ability to move and fire, to reposition and still keep the pressure on enemy infantry really elevate this weapon to a viable choice.  Plus cinematically it looks cool as well (in my head, anyway).  Naturally, in my clan, Heavy Bolters abound!

Speaking of which (and seeing as I’ve clearly gone of the deep end at this point) I am creating my own Clan, both in concept and in models.  This is clearly a stupid idea, but I have plans to have a full Clan deployment sorted out by the end of the year.  I’ve worked it at about 5,000 points.  It’s going to have back-story and everything!

Behold the rise of Clan Drükkskar!

Purge the weak! The rest is secondary!

There’ll be more to come on this theme later.

So long, lads.

Iron Hands: Compare and Contrast

The Iron Hands novel and the short story ‘Flesh’ both present very different views of the Iron Hands.  So I thought I’d compare and contrast and provide a brief review of the two works.  The first is ‘Iron Hands’ by Jonathan Green.

Jonathan Green has written various bits and pieces in the 40K universe, but I think this has been his only novel.  I read the re-release but the original was published in 2004 (I think) and this is very telling.  I reckon we can all agree that the shape of 40K fiction now (particularly in the case of the Astartes) is very different to how it was 8 years ago, and it shows in the book.  The depth to the characters that we almost expect now is just not there.  Most of the characters are just names attached to suits of power armour and only a few of the cast are fleshed out (apologies for the pun) beyond their combat role.  The only four actual characters in the book are Iron Father Gdolkin, Librarian Melchor, Magos Omega Thule (no relation to Davian, although it would be strangely awesome if that were the case!) and the final antagonist, a Word Bearer named The Iscariot.  Oh, and an Iron Hands Shipmaster called Strake.  So make that five.

Now, I realise that the previous paragraph may have sounded a little harsh.  The novel is by no means a bad book.  The fight scenes are very good and there are plenty of them, across a variety of opponents which helps keep things interesting.  The prelude involving a reading of the Emperor’s tarot is excellent; easily a high point for the book, even if there are no Iron Hands in the scene.  There’s an epic fight with a defiler and an encounter between a squad of Cadian guardsmen and some Death Guard makes for excellent, albeit highly queasy reading.  But I feel that this book, in common with many Space Marine centred works at the time focussed on action to the detriment of character, and a lot of the personalities end up feeling flat and one-note.

Gdolkin himself, the protagonist, does not come across at all sympathetically.  He’s just a very angry, humourless individual with a machine fetish, which is a very common view to take of the tenth legion.  In fact, minus the whole cybernetic angle, the Iron Hands are interchangeable with almost any other Astartes Chapter.  It was the way of things at the time.  Even in the established chapter series of books, it was more that individuals were given more personality, rather than adding personality to the chapter as a whole.  As the individual characters in this book aren’t lavished with attention, then little is gained in terms of chapter insight. That said, although the character of the Iron Hands isn’t really built on, there is a lot of detail about them included and referenced in the book.  Their training exercises, the selection process of the novitiates, the clan system, the rules and strictures.  Iron Hands Dreadnoughts for example always have a close combat arm.  No irritating riflemen dreads in the chapter.  You can still gain a lot of information about the chapter from the book.  You just don’t get into their heads.

This moves us on to Flesh, the short story by Chris Wraight.  It was originally in an issue of Hammer & Bolter (no idea which one I’m afraid) but released as a mini e-book by Black Library for £1.50.  One of my mates (who is an avid reader of Hammer & Bolter) recommended this story to me, and he was damn right to do so.  So; thanks Alex!

It’s not a long book.  It’s a short story concerning a Chaos-plague epidemic in an Imperial Hive and the mutant uprising it causes.  Think of it like a zombie virus scenario.  Except Chaosified and with mutants.  Lots of disgusting imagery going on, which certainly plays as a strength in the story, the explicitly fleshy nature of the infection and enemy involved making a perfect counterpoint to the Tenth.  The story is told from a variety of viewpoints, a prospective Iron Father, a relatively fresh Iron Hands tactical marine and the commanding officer of the local PDF.  All contribute very well to the atmosphere of the story and contribute greatly to the major strength of the piece; the Iron Hands themselves.

For such a short story, it really packs in a lot of detail.  The relationship between the chapter and the Mechanicus, the trials of the Iron Hands aspirants, the hand-amputation rite of passage; all of these are touched upon and briefly explored.  Various interesting elements and ideas are brought forth such human reaction to the Astartes.  The description of a Space Marine from one of the human officers to another is a high point in the story for me and really helps portray the fear that the Astartes can inspire in the common man.  You hear various rumours circling about the Iron Hands from the human troopers and, brilliantly, these are neither confirmed nor denied.  It lends a further menacing aspect to an already scary concept and is aided by the already inhuman nature of both the Astartes in general and the Iron Hands in particular as portrayed in the work.

In terms of the personality of the Legion, Wraight manages to get a great deal across to the reader in such a short space.  The Legion have changed greatly from how they were in the Heresy, becoming increasingly removed and disinterested.  Far from the hair-trigger temper of their Primarch, they present as singularly cold and dispassionate.  It would be easy to write them off as emotionless automatons, but Wraight has done a very good job of portraying them as suppressing emotion rather than simply removing it.  He has done an excellent job of injecting a note of sympathy into what could be a very cardboard archetype, and it’s exactly what I wanted to see from the Tenth.

I advise anyone with even a peripheral interest in the Iron Hands to give this a read.  It’s cheap, quick to get through and provides a lot of character and atmosphere as well.  Highly recommended.  Seeing as Wraight is the guy who’s written the upcoming Wrath of Iron (the Iron Hands entry in the Space Marines Battle series), his short story has made me very excited about what that book will bring!

Anyway, lunch is over; you know the drill.

With any luck, soon I’ll go through a Tenth Legion minidex I’ve been cooking up and hopefully help in adding some Iron Hands character to the tabletop.

So long!

The Iron Hands: A little back-story

Ahem…

Hello everyone.

It’s been a while.

How are you?

Well, that’s nice/unfortunate (delete as applicable).

Anyway, back to it.

Ages back, I wrote an Iron Hands fandex for a codex competition.  I possibly wrote too much, as the word count for that little project topped that of my University dissertation.  There might be something wrong with me.  The Iron Hands are, I think, the least representing of the loyalist Legions.  Even now, I believe that’s true, although the White Scars are similarly under-represented (but at least they get a Special Character in the Marine Codex).  The Iron Hands get nothing.  They don’t get a Special Character, they don’t get their own Chapter Tactics, they don’t even get a larger than average chapter description in the codex.  They are paid as much heed as the Mentors or the Death Spectres.  Nothing against those two chapters, but as one of the original Legions, I would expect a whole lot more.

Especially as they were one of the things that got into 40k in the first place.  The idea of genetically enhanced super-soldiers in hulking power armour was cool enough to the fourteen year old me, but ones that voluntarily cut off their own limbs and replaced them with robot ones?  That was just creepy.  In precisely the right way.  Anyway, this is all just a roundabout prelude to what I actually wanted to talk/write about today.

Chatting with people at the Black Library Live event last month got me thinking about the tenth legion, and I decided to invest myself in them a little more.  The epically overblown fandex had been lying fallow for yonks and I thought that if I wanted to make the Iron Hands feel right in the game, I’d need to find out a bit more about them before crafting rules.  So I picked up the Iron Hands novel, which was available there in its reprint format.  It helped that the book is very nice looking to boot.  There is precious little illuminating back-story for the Iron Hands (until Wrath of Iron comes out, I think that they only have one novel), but this has the side-effect of almost allowing me a greater sense of authorship in deciding (at least in my own head) what this chapter is like.  Wow, that was a crappy sentence.  I’ll try to phrase it better.

It’s one thing to be told that a chapter does this thing and that thing and have these habits and so on, but another thing to be told why.  With little pre-existing written about them, I was relatively free to make up my own personalities to give the chapter.  They favour Dreadnoughts; they prefer the mechanistic to the biological, considering the latter to be flawed and inferior.  They don’t brook weakness and (in the 41st millennium at any rate), they are relatively outcast; partially due to unacceptably close ties to the Mechanicus and partially of their own volition.  They are looked down on by most of the other chapters and they look down on most of the other chapters in turn.  But these are all superficial aspects, all effects rather than causes.  What type of personality would be the root of all these quirks?

That is one of the things that I had most fun with and that I found most gratifying in creating the Iron Hands fandex.  Constructing the personality that I felt best fit the preferences of the chapter and I found that personality fascinating.  I understand that this may seem like egregious self-praise.  It’s not meant to be.  I’ve always been good at rationalising things so, when it came to the bizarre nature of the Iron Hands in the grand scheme of things, the personality I hit upon was a mix of self-loathing and arrogance.  A constant striving towards improvement, to overcome perceived weakness in themselves.  A lot of this reaches back to the Heresy.  The value of replacing the ‘flawed’ biological system with machinery was something that had existed since Manus, so that was not new.  However, back then it was in emulation of a father figure and according to a creed of instruction.  The Heresy, I believed, had turned this into a full-on psychosis.

The Iron Hands were hit early by the Heresy and hit hard.  In practically the first full engagement against the fresh traitor legions, their Primarch was cast down and desecrated and much of the Legion was destroyed.  This had caused the self-loathing of the chapter, the belief that they were not strong enough, that they were imperfect.  Their father had told them that through the Creed of Iron after all.  Their contempt for the other legions though was probably because the betrayal of Manus by Fulgrim was that much more personal.  Anyone who’s read the Horus Heresy series (or pieces thereof) will have figured out pretty quickly that a lot of the Primarchs don’t like each other.  In fact, full-on friendships between them were quite rare.  The friendship between Fulgrim and Manus was one of the rare, honest ones (at least before it all kicked off).  And Fulgrim tore it up, killing his friend and brother brutally.  And if a friend can do that, it is natural to shy away from such bonds in the future.

This happens (albeit less hyperbolically and more metaphorically) in real life.  If a good friend betrays you if you perceive that s/he has done so, then it’s not only that friendship that suffers.  The seed of doubt has been planted in all your other relationships too.  Are they really you’re friends?  You thought this other one was your friend and s/he betrayed you.  Why are these other friendships so different?  It’s natural to close yourself off, to isolate yourself from future possibilities of betrayal.  It’s a variant on the whole Night Lords ‘betray before you are betrayed’ ethos, but focussed more on preventing betrayal by never giving anyone the opportunity.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on a little, and lunchtime is definitely over.  So I’ll leave this cod-psychological analysis where it is.  Next time, I’ll go over a couple of pieces of literature about the tenth legion and review and compare: Iron Hands (the novel) and Flesh (the short story).  Who knows, I may even try and wax pseudo-psychological again.

So long!

Black Library Live Review (for realz!)

I had a great time there.  This is truly an excellent even to attend if you’re into the fiction (from all aspects of BL, not just Heresy or 40K).  It was loud, crowded and busy, but I’ll give a brief rundown of various things I saw/attended/harassed while I was there.

On the Friday, my friend Alex and I headed to Warhammer World at about 6 and I have the fun task of showing him round the place.  He’d never been before, so it was nice to be able to see the place through fresh eyes.  Spent far too much time in the Miniatures Hall which, although small, does have a tonne of beautiful stuff crammed into it.  After that, we went to Bugman's for some light drinking.  Doing so, we fell in with a couple of other guys (Nate and Steve) by teaching them how to play the Bugman’s board game.  We spent about three hours just drinking, playing and chatting bollocks.  That’s one of the great things about this hobby.  It may (not) surprise you to learn that I am fairly shy amongst strangers, even to the point of being socially awkward.  It comes with the Aspergic territory.  However, having the framework of these games and stories that the hobby really helps me talk to people I don’t already know.  As it happens, it was a great few hours with those guys. (Yes, I won the game:  in your FACE, Alex!  You and your Elven Wine!)

A short time after we met up with Dagmire and went for a Chinese, so it was a pleasant evening.  The big deal was on the Saturday though.  The queue for book-buying was manic and definitely the kind of thing that would reward the patient purchaser.  I really should have waited until about 12 or so before picking up the books I wanted, because queuing at 9.30 with an armful of varying grades of literature almost made me late for the first seminar that I’d booked: Writing for Black Library.

Very interesting seminar this one, approaching the dos and don’ts of the BL writing trade (no squig POV novels, damn…), but had a bit of a disheartening air when they started laying statistics on us.  Their previous submissions window at 1,800 entries, out of which only 12 saw any kind of daylight.  That’s roughly two thirds of a percent success rate.  Well, balls.  I’m gonna try anyway.  Nothing to lose, eh?  They’re also accepting Gamebook submissions as well, which is certainly an interesting prospect, although far beyond my capabilities.  I’ve been trying to make a gamebook since I was 8 and well into my Fighting Fantasy.  Never managed it.  I can’t deal with the non-linear plotting.

Anyway, the next seminar I went to was about Black Library Audio, which has been generally very impressive over the past couple of years, so it was cool to hear about the behind-the-scenes stuff that have to happen to get one of the audio-dramas to print.  We also got to hear some extracts of forthcoming audiobooks/dramas, all of which I think were on sale at the event.  Convenient, eh?  Suffice to say, Butcher’s Nails sounded feckin’ awesome and I’m looking forward to giving Eye of Vengeance a spin as well.  Gotta love Telion.

The final big seminar was on Xenos writing, given by Rob Sanders (who wrote Atlas Infernal) and Andy Chambers (who wrote the sqeesome Path of the Renegade).  There was a lot of technical talk from both speakers referring to story structure and alien mindsets, albeit with a heavy Eldar/Dark Eldar focus.  I have to say that I’m now really curious about reading Atlas Infernal, as a lot of the ideas that Rob put forward were great food for though and I’m curious to see how he put them into practice.

Then there were the signings.  Being the 21st century denizen I am, I eschewed the passé signature-on-paper bullshit that so dogged our civilisation in aeons passed.  I got them to sign my Kindle instead.  I even bought some permanent markers especially.  I wound up with four signatures after the day was up, only two of which I had to queue for.  Just as well.  The queues for some of the authors were downright crippling.  One of the great things about the authors for BL and, well, BL in general is that they’re all enthusiasts.  The love the background that they help to craft and can talk about it happily for hours.  Which, in a book signing context, is mildly inconvenient to say the least.  The queue for Andy Chambers was nice and short, because it was for a book that either hadn’t been on general release yet or had only just hit, although quite a few of the guys wanted their old edition 40k rulebooks signed.  Wish I’d thought of that.  Or had my stuff in such a state that I would be able to actually find things.  The queue for Gav Thorpe was a different matter.  It was forty-five minutes of solid trudgery.  I’m glad I went for it near the beginning of the slot; otherwise I wouldn’t have got my Kindle defaced at all.  Perish the thought.

The other two signatories were Sarah Cawkwell (of course!) and Josh Reynolds, who I was surprised to learn, actually listens to the Overlords!  Presumably of his own volition.  I don’t normally read Warhammer Fantasy novels, having tried one or two of them and finding them to be too generic (with the notable exception of the Blood Bowl novels), but I think, with my new Beastmen army taking vague and fuzzy shape, I may have to get a bit more into the background and I have heard good things about Josh’s Knights of the Blazing Sun.

The rest of the evening was taken up by drinking, food and more Bugman’s gaming with Nate and Steve, who managed to earn my ire and jealousy by nabbed a couple of the posters I was really interested in.

The Sunday was a good and borderline relaxed affair, with a brief meet up with a couple of folks at Warhammer World before nearly missing my train home.  There was also an ill-advised trip to Forge World, but at least I’ve now got an Iron Hands force to assemble.  That’s actually one of the last impressions that the weekend left me with.  I’d forgotten just how much I like the Iron Hands as an army.  The Primarchs book had a neat Ferrus Manus story in it and the reprinting of the Iron Hands novel is an undeniably cool looking book, so I’ll be chewing my way through both of those in the forthcoming days.  In fact I’ve already finished the Manus story in the Primarchs.  It was cool, but doesn’t seem to affect the broader narrative, which was a shame.  Never mind, though, because I have the story of Gdolkin to get through, and that is definitely going to be fodder for the ol’ Codex!

Anyway.  Capsule review of the event: Awesome.  Would go again.

Roll on the weekender!

Black Library Live Review : Preamble

Last weekend, I was at Warhammer World attending their Black Library Live event.  I had a very good time there, a lot of fun.  I’ll do a proper write up later in the week.

What with all the pre-releases and artwork there, I actually spent a lot less than I expected.  I was in control.  I’d only blown about £60 on stuff, so I was feeling like, you know, a responsible adult who has the self-control to stick to his budgeting.  Half an hour before I take my leave of the place and take a taxi to the train station, I decided to have a brief look round the Forgeworld store, see if they have anything new and interesting to look at.  Ten minutes later, I was told this:

“That’ll be £95 please, sir.”

Well… fuck.

Broadening My Scope

Hi everyone!

Recently I’ve been looking outside the 40K game a little.  Actually, it’s not really all that ‘recently’.  I’ve been on and off Fantasy for ages now (I’ve still got two decent-sized armies from previous forays).  Having played a couple of games of 8th edition, I do have to say that overall I prefer it to 7th.  It causes fewer headaches and seems geared towards a more fun game.  I understand some of the objections to it, what with uncounterable spells forcing gigantic blobs of death onto the field, but I don’t really play that kind of game.  Or, more importantly, my regular opponents don’t.  So this latest bout of square-basing has been brought on by one of my friends, Alex.  He (for some reason) seized on a Vampire Counts army book and then set to army listing.

Naturally, I couldn’t let one of my friends wander down this dark path alone, so I bought an army book for a force I’d been thinking about doing for a while and starting researching Beastmen.  I was initially uncertain about going for Beastmen, as the other two armies I own are Lizardmen (a lot of Stegadons) and Warriors of Chaos.  There is a common theme running through these armies as you may well notice.  Pretty much bugger all in terms of ranged combat.  That and the worrying level of anthropomorphism that runs through a lot of these forces.  Thank god I’m not doing Skaven as well.  I’d need to report to some body dysmorphia specialist or something…

Anyway, the new load Beastmen (if I ever collect them) will pose a bit of a challenge, painting wise.  One of the main problems I had with collecting Beastmen was from a painting standpoint.  They are just so, well, brown.  It’s kind of unavoidable.  I don’t particularly like brown, or many hues that fall into the earth tones range of utter tedium.  And the Beastmen, being Beastmen do tend to be focussed around one of my least favourite colours.  I have, however, stumbled upon a colour scheme that may well work and keeps the brown-ness to a minimum.

I plan on painting my army very pale.  Almost albino-style.  Certainly for the skin.  The fur I haven’t settled on the colour.  However, I plan to go for very pale flesh and some woad tattoos and plenty of blood splatters on them as well.  It think the deep red and blue will contrast nicely with the anaemic pale flesh and provide a distinctive look for the herd.  That’s the plan anyway.  To add to the challenge, I’ll also be trying out a different style of painting in general, namely wash-painting.  I love washes; they’re an excellent substitute for talent and patience.  I tend to go through a good amount of wash whenever I paint.  Undercoat, basecoat, wash the hell out of it.  But working with washes as the base of the paint job is not something I’ve ever done before.  Fortunately some of the guys at the local GW are going to show me how to do it (hopefully without needing airbrushes or anything that silly), so that’ll be another string to my unimpressive-looking bow.

It’s not just Beastmen on the horizon for me though.  I’ve finally started making inroads into Malifaux.  Down at Manufactured Conflict, we’ve got some of the very nice WorldWorks card terrain.  The only criticisms I have about it is the length of setup (it took two of us about 25 minutes to set up before we could start to use it) and the area of coverage.  The setup length is unavoidable given the amount of customisation inherent in the terrain, so I can’t realistically complain about that.  However, we found that we were just not able to cover the recommended area of ground for a game.  The rulebook states that small games should be played on 3’ x 3’, but we were just not able to cover that with the one box of terrain and one box of clips to hold them together. We got close (2.5’ x 2.5’), so maybe it’s just splitting hairs, but it’s still a bit of an irritation to need just a little more of a really quite expensive kit to fulfil its purpose.  Nevertheless the stuff looks really good and you can get some very interesting skirmish terrain out of it.  Soon we’ll have to break out the other two sets!  I’ll address more Malifaux as I play it more.  I’ve only got two games under my belt, so I can’t really talk with any authority other than to say that I’ve really enjoyed the system so far.

And I’ve won twice.

But that’s probably not statistically viable!