Ghost Nebula

Hey everyone,

So I'm in Bratislava, Slovakia now and about to begin the exciting job of teaching English for the next year. It's been very fun so far and I'm relishing the opportunity to soak in a new culture and get new life experiences.

Big thanks go out to Old Shatter Hands for his networking to get me the job over here and giving me lots of insight into places to go and things to do while here. Props also for his helping me start learning the complex and very multi-layered Slovak language.

Later today I will be taking a bus with my new colleagues out to a summer camp the language school is running for children. During a meeting with the owner of the school, he asked me how I came to know Old Shatter Hands. When I explained that it was through wargaming and explained the basic premise to him, he thought it might be a fun activity to play with some of the kids, if I'm willing to bring the models.

Now I only have my Deathwing and there are only a few of them (27 total). Given that the children are going to have variable comfort and skill levels in English, I'll need to bring the rules waaaaay down from their current level so that we can have fun games but not get completely lost in the combination of poor rules and language barriers :-)

So my thirty second rules ideas are something like this:

- Giving regular terminators a 5+ save, SS termies get a 3+ save.

- Storm bolters are 2 shot. They need 6s to cause a wound (skip the hit and then wound mechanic)

- Assault cannons are 4 shot, needing 6s also. Cyclones are 1 shot needing a 3+ to wound.

- If TH termies get into combat, they need a 3+ to wound (again, combining hit and wound rolls). LC termies wound on a 5+ but get two attacks. Regular termies need a 6 to wound with one attack.

- I'll probably include the run rules so the assault termies can rush up a bit.

- Each team/player has to choose if they want a shooty or an assault squad.

I will be leaving out Belial and the Librarian from the game (or use them as objectives maybe) to keep it simple, which gives me 3 assault squads and 2 shooty squads.


So tell me what you think people. Does this look like a fun game that will interest the kids and give them a chance to use English, without completely confusing them?

Any and all advice is gratefully received.

All the best

Pete

Hey everyone

So my Deathwing are fully assembled now, including Captain Lysander as the command squad sergeant (superglue still hates me but pinning sorts that out). Just waiting on my Army painter Bone White spray before I get to actually tying together my divergent models with a colour scheme.

Of course, being a wargamer I wouldn't be considered 'normal' within our community if I didn't have an extra project in mind. It hit me when I was reading through the unnoficial Kroot Mercenaries codex that came out in 3rd/4th edition Chapter Approved and then was updated for 5th edition. It's completely unofficial and not endorsed by GW, but I think it would be a blast to play and model for.

Essentially it takes the Kroot of the Tau codex, those put in the Imperial Armour 3: The Taros Campaign, adds a few more and ties it all together into a fun codex. It's not a powergaming choice by any means, but definitely has character. To represent their mercenary nature, the kroot shapers who lead each squad can be equipped with a variety of guns (storm bolters, flamers, melta, kroot rifles etc.) and other weapons (power swords, eviscerators, various kroot charms). Ultimately it's an army that puts a lot of Kroot on the table, with their attendant strengths and weaknesses. Put a few flame templates down and I'd be pulling models off left and right but let me get the charge through a forest and I'll hit hard up front.

How about some heavy support to start us off?

Greater Knarlocs are a nice way to munch up your foe. Now if only they didn't cost £40 each form Forge World


Jump infantry kroot and their shaper wielding a chainfist equivalent...fun.


You can have squads of sniper kroot. Deadly until your opponent flies his heavy flamer land speeder next to them.


Kroot shaper council with kroot hounds. Like a unit of nobz except not as diversified, limited to a max of 5 members, cannot get invulnerable saves or FNP, no furious charge and get Instant Death from Strenth 6. On the other hand, you can get a buttload of attacks on the charge and they are just plain fun. Bring it on you greenskins.


The downside of the fun codex is that you are stuck with one box of plastic kroot, metal krootox and hounds, and forge world's expensive resin selection to make it all work. I put together a 1500pt list and I think that I could make it, with a bunch of converting from 5 sets of Kroot (80 figures total), 4 krootox, a set of LOTR Wargs for hounds (OSH's idea) and some Dark Elf Cold one knights to give me knaroc mounts (after a Greenstuff sculpted beak). Relatively affordable and with fun conversion options. It wouldn't have all of the cool kroot choices (Great Knarlocs, vulture kroot) but would be fun to play and quirky to convert. A project for another day perhaps.


What are your thoughts on codexes like the Kroot Mercenaries or the Lost and the Damned? Have you collected them or played against them? Would it benefit Games Workshop to bring them back as playable?



In other news, when I'm not working on my English Language teaching course's pre-course homework (somehow that doesn't seem fair), I've been putting together a novel pitch for Black Library Publishing. Until I started this I'd never considered writing detective-type fiction in any setting but I've found that 40k and the Inquisition suit me just fine. I'm enjoying taking a lowly interrogator who's recently bereft of his master and putting him under the command of an Inquisitor who doesn't want him, doesn't much like him and has tasked him to bring an escaped psyker to justice.

I don't want to give away too much on my setting and plot as I think it's quite creative and could (hopefully) pique the interest of the submissions editors at Black Library but I can tell you that this interrogator is working in an environment that is anything but comfortable and is worried that he can't trust his own mind. For the first time, I'm making a conscious effort to have every character I introduce to the story be critical at some point in things. I've written too much before where I would add characters like "a soldier", "the ship's doctor", "a henchman". That's not to say there isn't a place for such characters, but if they only warrant a title, then they should only warrant a small place in the proceedings.


Take care all,

Pete

PS: I'm a responsible wargamer. Despite being seriously tempted to add an Infinity starter set to my Wayland Games spray paint order to make the most of the shipping cost, I refrained. Doesn't mean I won't pick up some Haqq'Islam when I get to Bratislava and start earning some money.


PPS: If anybody has some of the metal krootox models they don't want and would part with for a modest price, please get in touch with me.

Hi folks,

Just a quick update since I found a good spot to get in-focus pictures of my models. The new apartment doesn't have the best lighting but with a combination of the wall lights and a lamp, these pictures came out in good focus.

In the meantime, I also sculpted a corpse marker. This was brought up on the Lead Adventure forums as an idea for Ramshackle Games to start making. Since Curtis is busy sculpting many other things, I thought I'd give him a hand and try my skills at making a good corpse.


Here are the two models in all their glory.



Another view



The corpse has a few empty bullet cases on the right of the base, though they aren't so easy to see at this angle.




Here is a better view of the Harbinger of Menoth Base I sculpted and painted. There is a little bit of red bleed from one of the symbols that I need to deal with but otherwise i'm happy.




And here is the base along with the Harbinger herself. I've stopped after the first layers of paint because my white and bleached bone are getting old and gunky. I just bought some P3 paints to replace them so we'll see how they shape up. If nothing else, they are a bit cheaper than GW paints (18ml vs 12ml) and have the nice old flip-top lids that you used to get on Citadel paints.

Well I imagine that most wargamer will understand the bizzare, yet undeniable, compulsion that afflicts most of us and causes us to go out and buy more models when we have limited need for them.

I know all of the arguments: I want to have variety, I need to reach 1500/1750/1850/whatever points for my games, I need to get the next powerful unit, I want a different model/model set to paint, I feel like trying a new army, I WANT IT I MUST HAVE THE ......... MODEL NOW.

I've used most or all of these at various times. Mostly now I'm driven by wanting to try something new (gaming and painting wise) and so my purchases are lessened somewhat. My marine force is sitting fairly solidly somewhere near 3000 points and so I have no need to add to this and only a few left to paint. My Tau army is closer to 1000 and so will need a fair bit of investment to make it up to the typical 1850 points for games that are generally played around here. I'll get there eventually but at the moment I'm trying to control my spending because I feel bad (my wife is glad of my internal spending guilt-o-meter) and because I hate having unpainted models around.

I will be buying up a big stash of Nuclear Renaissance models as soon as they are out (new rules version in a week or two, can't wait). I'll do a more complete post on them soon but check out http://www.ramshacklegames.co.uk/nucren2/boxcontent.html

After that it's Tau on the shopping list and maybe a few fun units for the marines (land speeder storm anyone).

A little bit of me wants to branch into fantasy but that is way off for now. I've got a stack of dwarf models from when I played in my teenage years but I'm not sure about them. If anyone wants a reasonable sized painted collection, please let me know and we can work something out.


ANYWAY...to the point of the post.

How does model acquisition syndrome spread to writing?

Well basically I got a good idea for a victorian fantasy steampunk novel (I hate genre labels but it gives you the flavour quickly) about 18 months ago and have been working on it ever since. It's gone fast at times and slow at others and I've definitely chopped and changed my way as I went. Characters have been added, other removed, roles shuffled around, challenges introduced and overcome and I'm still not done. It's currently running at around 96,000 words (that's 157 pages in word give or take) and I'm really trying to bring it to a conclusion.

Now my problem is that while I'm rightly proud of all that I've done with it, I am getting creatively tired with these last few chapters. It's not that the story is any less good (it's a LOT better than the first outline I came up with) but just that I've spent so much time with it and not finished yet. I'm sure anyone who has painted a large army for warhammer understands. After a while, no matter how good the army is and how much you like it, you just need a little change.

My problem is that I have three (and a half) ideas competing for my attention. Three novel length pieces (and one short story/novella) is no small amount of work, especially going by my speed record with this current book. I think I'll be faster on my next piece as I've learned a lot but each will require a lot of though and investment of time and effort.

My issue is just that I don't know whether it is better to finish Wind and Steel (the current one, working title) and then start a new piece, or whether it would work for me to branch out and start the next work to give myself a break from my current struggle. I'm a bit torn at the moment and it's tough to find the right way. I feel like it would overall be better to finish typing Wind and Steel, print it so I can read/edit by hand, and then start typing the next. That way I only have one thing on screeen at any one time.

Alternatively I'm thinking of taking a whole day one weekend to shut myself away and push out a huge (5000-10000 word) chunk of the next book idea, not worrying about good writing and just vomiting the story onto the page. That might get my creative juices flowing and let me go back to Wind and Steel with new enthusiasm. In fact, Secrets of the Noctis came out of just such an exploration when I was stalled on my enormous Grey Knights/Inquisition piece for the Black Library Forums.

Anyway, enough rambling. This was partly to put my thoughts in order, partly to discuss the interesting parallel, and partly to ask for any thoughts. Based on your gaming and/or writing experiences, what do you think would be best?

Pete