Couple More Banshees

It had been almost a month since I had picked up a brush, which was too bad. I had those older third edition models half done. With the craziness of the holidays aside I had a quiet weekend. Also I wanted to be able to participate in this so I decided to gain some small triumph over my slacker nature. The triumph was indeed small, but perhaps it will gain in momentum.

I have been playing my Eldar a lot more than my Tau of late, and even landing a couple of wins here and there. I don't like one better than the other, they are both different. What I am enjoying about the Eldar is being able to participate in the Assault phase more than just jet-packing.

The down side of the Eldar has been two Landraiders, which Travis plays pretty regularly. I have been having a tough go getting them opened. I have a few of the tools, but going from railguns and piranhas with melta to bright lances and monstrous creatures is a big switch. Also the list I have been using does not include fire dragons. I will persevere to keep it as thus, as I already have a few squads of the aspects warriors I like, and am trying to adhere to the Ulthwe theme.

All in all I have been having a lot of fun playing, and painting hasn't been like driving nails in my knees. Here are some pics of the minimum banshee squad I finished. I don't run them like this, I have actually been running a full squad, but it was enough to meet the criteria for the local challenge.

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

Also, while I was playing my last game my good friend Mike swung by and asked me to post the list I was using. I am nothing if not obliging:

HQ: Eldrad, Avatar

Elite: Striking scorpions x7 with exarch (scorpions claw, Shadowstrike), howling banshees x9 with exarch (executioner, Acrobatics)riding in a wave serpent (tl shuriken cannons, star engines).

Troops: Guardian defenders x10 with warlock (Conceal) and star cannon, guardian defenders x10 with warlock (Conceal) and brightlance, storm guardians x11 with warlock (Enhance)riding in a wave serpent (tl shuriken cannons, star engines).

Fast Attack; Vypers x2 (starcannons, shuriken cannons).

Heavy Support: Dark reapers x3, wraithlord (two flamers, eldar missile launcher, and bright lance), and warwalkers x3 (two scatter lasers)

In total it is like 22 points short of 2k.

Thanks for reading,
T

Gettin' Back Up On The Haus.

See that right there? That is some banshees I was able to get a little more paint on yesterday! After a month of not being able to put my brush on anything it felt pretty friggin' good. My neck is still not 100%, hell it is hardly even 50% but I was able to paint for an hour long stint, then another 45 min one after a long break, before my shit started getting all sick and achy.

Those are not the current banshee models, as some of you may well know, but I was going for two things with the aspect warriors of my Ulthwe army. First off, I already owned smatterings of last edition shit, as illustrated above, and I wanted to use it. That coupled with the fact that aspect warriors are packaged really stupidly. I can't finish a squad of ten without either buying another box or direct ordering through GW. So the first thing I was going for was to do the squads on the cheap. I am using the crap I have in hopes that it will not stand out too much. I think theses sculpts will be pretty noticeable next to the others though, as the helm is like the size of another banshee.

The second thing we were going for was to make the squads look ragtag. I like that Ulthwe doesn't have a lot of aspect warriors. I tried to communicate that the ones they did have had been around for a long time. The saltiest of them had survived and new blood had been added when it could be spared. I hope to achieve this by having a few models from the various previous sculpts in all my squads. Fortunately I was able to work a swap with Magnus as he has some RT era Eldar stuff that he is gonna dig through and see what he can spare.

Speaking of Magnus, a bunch of us headed to Coeur d' Alene, Idaho for a 1,500 point tournament this weekend. It was a lot of fun. I didn't bring the Tau, figuring a little trial by fire was a good way to mess with my second army. My army was Eldrad and six warlocks in a wave serpent, eight scorpions with an exarch, two squads of guardian defenders, one squad of storm guardians, two vypers, and three warwalkers.

My first game was against a 1k sons army. It was Night Fight the whole fuggin' time, and reserves, so neither one of had much to do, or down until late game. That games over in less than an hour. The second mission was against bugs. The objectives fell randomly, and right into his lap. I eeeked out a tie with a little luck as a wave serpent that had moved all out and then some sat between two objectives in the last turn. Despite a tyrant, his guard, and a squad of genestealers, the serpent weathered the assault. The last list I played was an ork army that was like a every special character in the book. I think he spent too much on names, and not enough on boyz. He killed a lot, but I was able to pull it out in the end.

The army was a lot of fun and left a lot of room for error with Eldrad there picking up the slack. I won 2 games and tied one. All in all a pretty good day. Also a good day for Da Mommas Boyz as our guys took half the prizes with Travis winning painting and Magnus winning Best General.

Hope to have those banshees finished this week, time and neck willing.

Thanks for reading,
T

Injury Report

We took a crack at painting with little avail. I have another session of physical therapy tomorrow morning and I am hoping that he will possess some sort of magic that fixes my neck so I get to work on my friggin' banshess.

A little of the beaten path for what we got going here thus far, as it is a project blog, and I can't do much of the projects I was working on, my project has become firing up a D&D game here in Spokane. By game I mean, Travis and his wife have gracefully decided to learn how to play, which is nice...it will keep me sane.

I started playing D&D when I was seven and never looked back. 22 years later it is still a big passion of mine. Like most of my diversions, sometimes I am way into it, and other times months can go by without me throwing a d20. I decided to grab something new-to-me for this round of dalliance. Also, since Travis and his wife have never played before, it was going to be new to all of us.

Anyway, I grabbed the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms setting since Travis was somewhat familiar and Kathy had played Baldur's Gate. I was pretty surprised to see that they had kind of turned the world on its ear. The whole Spellplague thing is pretty cool, and I don't hate on any attempts to change things up. I am just curious if they wrote it happening? I remember really enjoying the Avatar Trilogy and liking that I could see the effects that the books had on the game world.

We are going to run the adventure in the beginning of the book for now. So everyone can get into the new setting, including myself. I will give a holler here occasionally and report how it is going.

I would ask if any of the folks who subject themselves to my nonsense are aware of any novels covering Cyric killing Mystra and the efforts to imprison Cyric afterwards to post in the comments what their names are. I would love the chance to read them.

Thanks for reading,

T

Sept World Belsbeth Primus

Just wanted to give a quick "thank you" to everyone who participated in the experiment that was the Planetary Empires Campaign. In a lot of ways it worked, but in others it failed. Nonetheless myself and a few others had a great deal of fun devising rules and painting tiles. So there is that.

Also I feel like a schmuck for winning my own campaign, but I figured we may as well stamp this one "done" and try for something that will work.

What did work? For the last four weeks, at least a few of the guys in the six man group were actively seeking games with another. I submit that a few of us are in a perpetual state of game seeking, however it was able to scare up a few more games than usual and even cause our Sisters player to blow the dust off his chicas and burn some heretic ass.

Another victory was the likely hood that if I hadn't ran it, my Planetary Empires set would probably still be in the shrink wrap. Needing to use them lit a fire for me to complete them, and I am glad I did.

Lastly, the rules are pretty slick. They seem a bit simplistic, but they are pretty inclusive of the things that could happen in a campaign. In all, I think my house rules were a little too much. And got in the way of the rules set.

What didn't work? Not having a central location to store the map. No one ever made conquest rolls because they couldn't ever make it to where the map was. Despite gallant efforts, it never seemed to work out. The map really needed a location where all the players had access to it in their own time. In the future it would almost be better to hex grid a map out and list the attributes of the "tile". That way players could say they are attacking tile 6 and roll when the game is complete. Also this hex map could be stored on the interwebs so people always had it available. This of course, defeats the purpose of spending fifty bucks on the tiles, but the purpose is all ready defeated if no one is coming to see the map anyway.

On the painting front, this "whip-lash like" thing is becoming increasingly annoying each day. The ten days it was supposed to hurt were up yesterday and I am still a little achy. Granted it is less, but I still can't really look down for any amount of time without my stomach roiling and my head swimming.

One always wants what they can't have. I have painted crap a thousand times in my head over the last two weeks, eager to be able to realize it on a miniature. I have even been building crap that I "may" use at sometime so I can still feel like I am doing something for my hobby. All in all it is asinine and the more I talk about it the more I am infuriated, so I am gonna stop.

Thanks for reading,
T

Excuses Are Like...

We all know how that saying ends. I have been in a bad way as far as painting goes lately. Nothing hyper-dramatic or anything. Last week we had our annual corporate show in Vegas so that took up some time...and money, and stamina.

I pretty much hate going to Vegas to work. It is like having a job at Disneyland. Everyone is out fuggin' off and having fun. And you have to maintain an air of professionalism. For those that have sat with drunk people until the wee hours of the morning while not being drunk yourself, you understand my pain. Turns out drunk people are pretty friggin' boring, unless you are one of them.

Dumber still is the fact that I have some how given myself, in the words of my doctor, "A whiplash-like injury." How you ask? Apparently from a leg-press weight machine. The trouble with all of this nonsense is that looking down for prolonged periods of time (Which is how I paint.) causes big headaches and makes me feel like I am gonna huck. I can stop this by taking the muscle relaxers prescribed to me, however they kinda make me all "loose" and I am not sure how conducive that is to painting any kind of detail.

What is frustrating is that I can only paint in spurts before I have to stand up or lay down in order to take the strain off my neck. It is re-god-damn-diculous! The doc says to give it ten days, but I hope it goes away a lot quicker.

Despite all this I have attempted to keep painting Banshees and I will throw the next two up as soon as I am done. My Tau call to me, but I do not want to leave that Banshee squad unfinished.

Lastly, I wanted to give huge internet props to Rodolfo, the Press Ganger for Spokane. I went into Hobbytown on the north side yesterday to play a Planetary Empires campaign game and there was at least ten guys there playing Warmachine and Hordes. It was pretty epic, and I can not wait for January to roll around where I get my new rules. Maybe those Rhulic forces will once again get some love? I think they are somewhere under that pile of dust on my bookshelf. Anyway, if you are interested in checking their scene out shoot an email to Rodolfo (rodolfopagsanjan@yahoo.com) and get the low down. It looked like a good time.

I will persevere to show off two more banshees here in the next couple days!

Thanks for reading,
T

Belsbeth Week 2

Just a quick update to show the planetscape of Belsbeth after a week of the campaign.

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

Right now the most real estate is held for The Greater Good. However I think at least three of those tiles are Chem Marshes, which our campaign can be lost on a roll of a "6" at the end of each round. I know later on in the week 5,000 points of Space Marines will be throwing down with 5,000 points of Chaos Daemons and Iron Warriors. Hopefully we will get some pics of that at Lord Infestus' blog (crosses fingers).

There is still few tiles that are unclaimed, including the ominous hive city Bloodholm.

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

Thanks for reading,
T

Flights of Fancy

Last night I took the highway to the danger zone. No I didn't watch Top Gun, but I probably should have had. Instead I decided to deviate from what I should be doing (Tau) in order to paint something that I just wanted to paint. While the practice of painting what one wants to paint is probably healthy to most enthusiasts, it is the pretty much detrimental to me. I only ever want to paint one of every model, and I end up with a metric shit ton of "one-off's" and not a single squad, let alone army, done. So, like the junky who has been clean and gave it all up because they thought that one time wouldn't set them back on their path; I appear at the methadone clinic of internet. Guilty, but not ashamed of what I have done the night before.

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

Oh my god, she was so worth it. This model was a friggin' delight to paint. I whiled away four and a half hours on her and didn't realize the time had gone by. There was cool areas for line-highlighting and other flatter areas for blending. She was like some kind of model painter's aptitude test where you could express all your techniques.

I did her up to look Ulthwesque. I have always liked Ulthwe, probably because I dislike Chaos so much. I remember back in the older editions Ulthwe had the cool guardians because they didn't have a lot of aspect warriors so I tried to make the armor look like an antique bone in an attempt to communicate that this banshee has been around for awhile, or at least the armor has. I also started out with the second edition black and yellow to denote Ulthwe, but the red of the newer edition looked better on the model.

My big trouble is that I don't know what colors to do her base. I have a feeling that if I do my normal colors, which are a lot of off-whites, the base will eat her. I want something that will let her pop off the base, but also, in the random event that I ever finished a guardian, would look good with a predominantly black model as well. If you have a second help a brother out. This black base is killing me.

Thanks for reading,
T