T is for Toy Fair 2020 Reports - The Age of Sigmar

It can't have escaped the notice of those concerned - gamers and specific fans of the Nottingham Mafia - that Games Workshop changed their entire business model a year or two ago (and did very well out of it if their share's performance is any guide), for which changes, another of the 'freebies' at this year's Toy Fair 2020 was a starter kit for the Age of Sigmar in the shape of a magazine, which we're going to look at quickly here.

Again, like yesterday's erasersaurs; no hurry, and this has probably been out for a while (© - 2018), and will be around for a while to come, but you get a White Dwarf type publication with a free figure attached. My sample being a show-freebie is printed with a blind price panel, so I can't say for sure what it costs, but you get 108pp with covers, and a frame-runner for a 'Stormcast Eternal'.

It's one of the more basic such frames, with no extras for the spares-box . . . shock horror! As far as I can tell it's a perfectly good sculpting, up to GW's usual standards of detail and build-quality, and from what I can see, the whole game is set in a 'verse somewhere between Warhammer 40,000 and the older LotR stuff, having both the interplanetary element of the former, and the fantasy olde-worlde Norse mythology of the latter?

No surprises here; it's exactly what you get in any issue of White Dwarf - army building guides, protagonist guides, potted histories, modeling tips, painting hints, a move-by-move sample game and lots of professionally-painted miniatures in wonderful technicolor.

But that's the thing . . . if you've ever bought into any sector of the Nottingham Mafia's systems you don't need this, won't need this and can move straight to the rule-book and army lists for your chosen faction, but for younger readers coming into the hobby from the hype surrounding Game of Thrones (or the Hunger Games maybe?) it's probably a good place to start.

F is for Follow-up - X-200

Brain Sent this as a follow-up to the previous post, it's s cracker! Games Workshop Cybermen I believe, in the classic (to me) layout/physiognomy! They work well!

And a nice side-shot of the ship which was absent from the post the other day!! Silver overalls and giant ear-muffs, they're the Cybermen I hid from behind the sofa! Cheers Brian.

V is for ‘Vyper’…or; it was!

For reasons beyond my control which I will digress in the fullness of time, I’ve been rather kicking my heels for a while now and in a moment of supreme boredom this weekend I took out an old kit by ‘mine nemesis’ the GW franchise. A kit I bought some time ago and almost immediately regretted as it cost about as much as three Esci/Airfix AFV kits and contained almost nothing, surrounded by a lot of runner ('sprue')!

Turning the bits over in my mitts I was struck by two things, firstly there’s nothing there to power it! Some cooling vanes (?) under the seat and four straight-through engine tubes/venturi, but nothing substantially capable of calling itself a power system or motive force, call me a pedant, but I like my sci-fi grounded in the laws of physics!

Bringing me to the second obviously pointless design element; a guy mounted behind the pilot waving a ten-foot off-centre weapon [presumably] of some weight. Now I’m guessing most of the visitors to this blog haven’t been called upon to carry a .50 Cal Browning, but if you had, you’d know it’s about half the size/bulk of the weapons in this kit, and takes two men to carry a few yards!

In other words, this tiny vehicle would be almost impossible to fly and totally incapable of hitting a barn door in a straight dive, as it is supposed to be built (and woe betide anyone turning up at the local store’s evening game with the wrong configuration!), even if it had ‘magic’ thought-fed power-systems and a complete BAE Systems/Segway self-righting/levelling suite! – Oh how modern technology is dating some sci-fi faster than it can be re-written…give the crew of the Starship Enterprise some iPads and a Kindle – for god’s sake!

Deciding on a colour scheme before I’d got the glue out, I then rather tore into the ‘project’. There were - on the weapons sprue - two pieces of cowling or bodywork, which were of no consequence, so presumably it was designed for other kits or taken from another kit? Something which should bring the price down, not leave it three times the cost of a similar kit elsewhere!

Anyway; this allowed me - with a short piece of cocktail stick – to dispense with the stupid gunner-cradle and turn my ‘Vyper’ into the patented Waltii Industries TC Gunship (© Waltii Industries* 2830NS) you see developing before you with – if I say so myself – some high degree of accuracy, it being (as I’m sure you’ve already noted); the Mk. IIIB model much favored in the rim-worlds!

The cradle (© GW 1996), now looked remarkably like the anti-gravity ‘Speeder-bike’ of Darth Maul in the film - Star Wars I of IV ‘A Franchise is Reborn’ (© Lucasfilms 1994?), not that GW would copy other people would they, I mean; it’s not like the new ‘Prince Apophas’ (© GW 2010?) from Citadel Finecast is a straight lift from the living Scarab-pillar in the comic ‘The Exterminators’ (© Vertigo 2006?)…is it? So I decided to make it up as just that, a light, floating ‘wing-man’ with a heavy punch. The thing is; they then both ‘looked’ better than the GW ‘whole’.

I went with a ‘panzer-farb’ ambush scheme on desert pink for the speeder, and field-grey for the pilots, (they haven’t been issued their tropische uniforms yet!) although I allowed them a brighter green for their web equipment, belts and helmets. I used the sight/power-source from one of the other weapons in the box to balance the great big whatever (interplanetary ray-blaster? It could be an underwater riveter for all I know – or care!), that he now gets to wave about like a banker's sports car (you know what I mean!) without poking it in the TC Gunship pilot’s ear!

Those who have followed this blog for a while will by now have realised that the cynic in me won’t allow myself to take this stuff remotely seriously!

The TC Gunship ready to roll, or wobble like a Segway with a newbie! Keeping the WWII theme going I went with the contrasting double-outlined boundaries seen on some of the early M4 Sherman's in the Western Desert and tried to make the ammo-feed belt look like the slightly-green tinted, gold anodized links you get on the 30mm rounds for automatic cannon or belt-fed grenade launchers.

I didn’t paint all the little blobs like jewel’s, that’s just too GW for me! They’re only fairing for little bits of under-skin equipment, sensors and the like! One of the weird things about the GW universe is that people think a unit in electric blue with florescent pink vehicles covered in lights & jewels and flying 18-foot banners can ever have the element of surprise or creep-up on anything!

The ‘Speeder bike’ given the same 4-view treatment, of course it’s not a Speeder-bike, which would create issues with Mr. Lucas who’s as happy to sue as Carter Ruck! If the other platform is a ‘Gunship’, this must be a Cannon-canoe, yeah, of course it is -it’s a Nebillian Boat-works* PS Mk12! How silly of me not to mention that earlier…

Note to self - don’t play rugby with Eldar (©, TM, (R) etc...), those pointy-heads are going to do your chances of future progeny no favours!

The two together, waiting for the ‘Off’, if I had to do this again, I’d bin the bloody PVA’s and use enamel, it was like working with wet sand, I don’t know if it’s the weather, or just age, but my Humbrol is starting to get as granular as the old Airfix matt enamels used to be? Try copying the third image to your desktop and then enlarge by 50% you’ll see what I mean; great lumps and streaks of paint! I also rushed it, and would take more time next time. I didn’t think about markings, and now they’re ‘finished’ I doubt I’ll go back to them.

Also the canopy spars are too clean, but to try and weather them down to the same state as the rest of the vehicle would have risked mucking it up even more, so I guess the ground crews have kept the spars clean as they polish the Plexiglas…but why - in the year 2830NS - have they gone back to multi-panel canopies? Even we’ve evolved beyond that and we’ve retired Concord and the Shuttle! The ‘heads-up’ canopy display was just OHP pens, while other controls were marker pen on white paint.

I’d also fill the gap behind the seat and under the gun with stuff from the spares box, in order to have something looking like a propulsion system, roughly where you’d expect one!

But…they look OK for what was less than a day’s work, and apart from a piece of toothpick and an old hex-base; they used nothing from the spares box, and gave me two vehicles for the price of one, something to consider if you do play the GW way? I was going to give them both some old GW dogs heads I have somewhere, but the need to end the exercise was greater than the desire to go digging in the spares!

* Sole proprietor of Waltii Industries and the Nebillian Boat-works; H. Walter Esq.

E is for Elven Folk by Games Workshop and Mithril - Part 2, Tweaking

Thought I'd do a bit of detailing before I started the paint, tried adding the shields (in the previous post on this) to those figures without them but the cloaks got in the way, I was going to have them strapped to their backs in some way, but might have them lying on the bases or something?

I've strung the bows, the girl's - being fired - needn't be taught, but shouldn't really be so loose either, so I will try to tighten it a bit with a coat of dope. The LOTR guy is not too bad and were it not for the angle of my drill-hole he would be holding the string centrally, but both the GW figures suffer from the fact that they are 'pulling' through their heads, even with a bit of heat bending of bows and arms, the 40K guy is going to A) cut his own ear off, and B) shoot himself in the foot if he's not careful (hold the string high and the arrow drops - I used to do archery), while the LOTR dude would keep getting his helmet crest caught up in the string as he drew back.

Lack of thought from the sculptors!

E is for Elven-folk, by Games Workshop, Mithril & Mantic - Part 1, building the unit

Elves, I got the bug to paint some elves, and it's snowballed into a comparison, vignette (possibly?) diorama, don't-quite-know-yet, morphing-as-it-goes type project!

Top - this is how the Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) figures from DeAgostini/Games Workshop come/came, with issue two of a part-work, with below - the packaging for the new Mantic elves - sculpted by Bob Naismith. They seem to be using an old video box to market their figures, with double boxes for the larger items or 'army packs'.

We looked at the packaging for the Mithril figures the other day, while the two GW 'Warhammer' elves came attached to a copy of White Dwarf magazine a (fair?) few years ago.

Inset is a comparison of the various figures in approximately chronological order of first issue. The GW Warhammer's are vast in comparison with the other three ranges while the Mantic seems to reference the armour of the LOTR figures but with a waspish waist which stops them being my favorites. Their detail is better than the other two (DeAgostini and Mithril) but the anatomy makes them a little too alien...humans and elves are supposed to be able to mate, everybody knows that!

Well, I started looking at doing four archers, but didn't have a Mantic archer, so decided to have a spear-man, then I photographed the packaging for the two big-sprued sets and remembered that my GW figs. had come with White Dwarf, so thought - I'll do both figures and add another each of the Mantics and LOTR's. So we have a mixed war-band of 7 likely souls.

Paint-job was going to be the daffodil yellow and azure blue of the Mithril girl, but I think she'll get a repaint and the group will get a bottle-green and deep red scheme which is an old favorite of mine. But...elves are supposed to be all light and airy? Or is that only post-Peter Jackson, some sources have them altogether darker and more sinister, while the Victorians put them in the same vein as faeries? Oh G..osh, you'd think colour would be the least of my problems!

Well, got to put them together first...

F is for Forthcoming projects

Sorting out some elves (as you do!) for my previously mentioned spurt of enthusiasm for a spot of painting, I encountered a couple of other little things I've been meaning to do, so I thought I'd have a go at all three.

At the back is the SAE box I said some time ago I'd renovate and put up as a post, to the left, some bottle/olive green carpet strands I pulled off the carpet under the leaf mould pile when putting this years 'soil conditioner' on the veg. patch, which I'm going to try turning into a couple of trees and a hedge! To the right a gathering of Elves (one female Mithril, two Games Workshop - 1x 'Warhammer' and 1x DeAgostini 'Lord Of The Rings' - and a new Mantic 'Games of War'), we'll have a bit of a paint session with them...Watch this space!

U is for Undead part 1 - Overview/Comparison

At this time of year, snow on the ground, family in our thoughts, friends round, cards, food, gifts and a real fire, carols on the radio in the background and your favorite comedy on the flickering Cods eye, I find there is nothing quite as festive as the blood-curdling screams of skeletal warriors hacking each other to the last scrap of DNA.

Being serious; when I did the unfinished projects a couple of three weeks ago, there were a few other 'back burners' I'd forgotten and this is one of them. I love the Undead, but I hate Games Workshop, so this group pulls me both ways.

They used to give you 8 warriors for around a fiver, now they give you 5 figures for what? £12-odd? Someone like HaT will sell you 40+ figures for £4.99, yet GW have the global empire...as the Americans would say - Go Figure!

The entire contents of one set, 3 poxy poses, no animation, no arm variations and; are the two on the right injecting steroids into their heads? The whole set appears to have been sculpted in Plasticine with a toothpick and GW are so sure you'll f**k-up the basing, the only spares they give you are 3 extra bases. The kids who buy into this stuff are being taken for a ride by an over confident, arrogant 'Corp', and I sincerely hope the proliferation of new 28mm producers spells the end of their (GW's) hold on the market.

The old sprue, gave you 4 poses, 5 weapon/arm positions (one a spare), separate shields, positionable heads, 5 weapons...did I say 5 weapons...

...sorry, I of course meant 13 different weapon arms, at various angles and attitudes.

The fact that I have a set of the new ones at all is down to GW's reliance on that Corporate American trick, the 'Contents are subject to change or may vary' type thing. I won't make that mistake again. The old one's I buy on eBay as I've tried never to pay full whack for GW.

U is for Undead part 3 - Cavalry

I don't know if cavalry were ever part of the GW 'vision' (another thing I hate about GW, it's their rules or no play today kiddo!), I've certainly never found mounted legs, but as they are skeletal all you have to do is bend the legs in a bit, add a touch of glue and Bob's your fleshless Uncle!

Defending against Cavalry attack, I wish now I'd left the shield off, it's going to whack his leg when he brings the sword over his head! The other guy cowers quite convincingly though.

If you're going to put a horned horses head on a four legged man, you might as well put the mans head on the horse/cow body...No?

More of the same, sadly there was only the one pose of this animal and I didn't try much with it until I started the chariot.

R is for Rogue Trooper

The G.I. or Genetic Infantryman was a fast talking, one-liner delivering, sardonic, cynical git with several pieces of fast talking, one-liner delivering, sardonic, cynical equipment! In short; My kind of people!!!!

Making his début in 2000AD comic so long ago it's beyond the capacity of my mind to remember when, but Google reveals it was 1981 3 or 4 years after 2000AD began.

This game was issued by Games Workshop, who sadly not only didn't expand the range, they couldn't even be bothered to design a second figure for the 'Traitor', so we get a 28mm figure for the (6) players' GI's and a 50mm card piece for the traitor.

It was a hybrid game, working on role-play with counter-based elements and card collecting to add to the over complicated rules, which probably point to one reason why it A) disappeared without much fuss, and B) turns up on eBay, mint or near-mint, for bugger-all money on a regular basis!!

The box lid has a fine piece of artwork, stirring the old nostalgia gene! Technically he was 'The' Rogue Trooper and his talking equipment contained the Bio-chips of his dead comrades, Venus Bluegenes was an occasional love-interest, lets have a model of her please!!