Rocketmen tomorrow

Well I'll finally be able to get a game in of the new Rocketmen game from WizKids. I've had the cards for a few days now but due to scheduling complications I've not been able to actually get a game in. look for a quick review of the game here tomorrow or Friday

Painting Khador

So the first set of figs I need to paint for the Khador army are Scorcha and the Kovnik. All the solos in the campaign need to be painted and I rather rashly build a 500 point Khador army that basically requires a Kovnik to Jack-Marshall the Bezerker I have. I've just got the main Russian Green base coat on them both and I am then going to do a green ink wash to blend the colour together and fill in the shadows a touch. Especially necessary on the Kovnik I think as it has a wealth of small lines and creases in the armour that will look better with a deeper colour in them.

Pictures will be posted as soon as I progress a bit further

Comments gone

Due to a dramatic increase in comment spam I have removed the ability to post comments to this blog. Not a huge deal as not that many people posted comments but yet another example of money grubbing assholes ruining yet another public function for everyone else.

Hordes info

Quite a lot of new info posted about Hordes on the Warmachine site today

According to a post on the Warmachine forum from the designers the
current planned contents of the Hordes boxed sets are:

Circle of Orboros
Kaya
2 Argus
1 Warpwolf


Trollbloods
Madrak
2 Impalers
1 Axer


Legion of Everblight
Nyss Warlock
4 Shredders (small warbeasts on 30mm bases)
1 Big thing with an undetermined name


Skorne
Paingiver Warlock
2 Cyclops
1 Titan

As well they posted 360 views of the Argus and the Warpwolf.

Khador Assembled

So I am now done assembling my Khador force for the start of our Warmachine Builder campaign

Just a helpful note for others, while using green stuff and some super glue works for the arm joints on the Man-o-war figs it does not work for the Kovnik. He requires pins in each of the shoulder joints.

The Khador force includes

• Sorcha
• Juggernaught
• Destroyer
• Bezerker
• Kovnki
• full Man-o-war unit (five figs)

For 500 point games I will have to leave out a Man-o-war fig but it all seems like a decent starting force.

Now I just need to start painting Sorcha aand the Kovnik as all warcasters and solos need to be painted for the campaign.

Gale Force Nine new products

Pictures from Gencon (Via the Gaming Report website) show that GF9 is going to be expanding their product line into some interesting new areas including Pirates terrain, Rocketmen terrain and Warmachine dice sets.

The islands for Pirates look very nice. Certainly better than the ones I was planning :-)

Khador expands

We're going to be starting a Builder campaign locally for Warmachine. For those not familiar with it the concept is that you start with a new army and each month you are required to paint new units in order to continue in the campaign.

So I have purchased a few Khador figs and started assembling a 500 point army for the campaign and also to serve as the second boxset I need in order to apply as a Press Ganger. Currently I have the Khador boxet assembled and a Man-o-War Shocktroopers box.

The Khador jacks are massive. So much so that I am troubled as to how I can hold on to them while painting. Its going to be an adventure I am sure.

First on the painting table is Sorcha and then the two Jacks from the boxed set. After that...well lets see if I get that far first :-)

New Warmachine casters

Gencon is in full swing and people are already posting pictures from it. One of the things I have been looking forward to, aside from Warmachine's NBT, are the new Epic Warcasters.

Some folks are already posting pictures of the figs from gencon on the Warmachine messageboard. I'm just the slightest bit POed that I just finished painting my regular Asphyxious figure last week. Serves me right for being so darned slow.

Confrontation slowdown

So my assembly of Confrontation figs has stopped rather abruptly due to my lack of appropriate wire cutters. I've been pinning all the figs and it has shown just how woeful my current wire cutters are. Not too surprising since I also use them to trim pewter and lead. I have no-one to blame other than myself.

At least I have my Griffin figs assembled in case there are any takers for a Confrontation game this week during our regular Warmachine gaming night. I've still not been able to pick up a Khador starter box so I'll be using my Cryx force again. Hopefully I'll have my Mechanithralls and Asphyxious based in time.

CSM 3.5 is now online

Version 3.5 of the CSM list is now available online in the Experimental Rules section of the SG website.

The company you love to hate

One other thing I find interesting about GW and the people that play their games is the "love/hate" relationship that sometimes gets created amongst fans of the games.

And its important here to distinguish between the games that GW produces and the company since there are people that are fanatical about the games and yet hate the company. Sometimes in equally passionate measures.

The biggest examples of this are, to my mind, Epic and Blood Bowl players. During a relatively enlightened era at GW the company produced Space Marine/Adeptus Titanicus and Blood Bowl. Both of these games have current versions produced (in a rather half-assed manner) by GW but there are probably as many fans of the older versions of the games as there are for the current ones. In fact some gamers went so far as to create unauthorized online versions of Blood Bowl and their own fan created version of Epic in response to GWs lack of support for both of those games.

None of these groups have any great reason to love GW since the company sees fit to cut them loose and stop supporting the games seemingly on a whim. But at the same time both groups exist and continue to create new content because of GW. Both groups rely on the background and settings that GW created and in some sense have been able to continue simply because GW doesn't care enough or can't be bothered to sue them for trademark and IP infringement.

Maybe its due to differences in IP and trademark law in the UK but I am not sure that either group of fans would have been able to create and distribute the material they do if they were using material created by American companies. There have been enough examples of US companies suing fans over mods for 3D shooters that it seems a certainty that something like the online Blood Bowl game or NetEpic would have been shutdown by a company more zealous in protecting their IP or required to by more stringent trademark laws.

Now the question as to why a company would ignore a market that is as loyal to a set of games as Epic and Blood Bowl fans are is beyond my ability to even begin to answer. I'm guessing that the sales for each title are a minor fraction of GWs sales from 40K and WFB. Or even, I am lead to believe, BFG. But still, how much money does it really cost to support a niche market? If fans have proven that they want to buy and play games what is it that motivates a company to ignore that market?

What it is about GW?

Now lets begin this discussion by agreeing that in general messageboards tend to generate a lot of material that isn't very mature. In fact I'd go so far as to say that messageboards are probably an inherently flawed communication medium and that they are not useful for any sort of communication other than short messages. Reasons for this are fairly apparent and posted in many other sites so I'll not bother with reiterating them.

That said, what is it about GW and GW games that seems to generate such a confrontational attitude between the company, gamers and fans of GW games?

As puerile as some forums can get (for every good post on TMP for instance there are three or four of less than stellar quality) it seems to me that GW forums (or non official forums that discuss GW games) tend to devolve into... well into something that makes one not want to participate.

Now contrast this with the Warmachine or the English Confrontation forums.

Both of them have the same sort of posts one tends to see on messageboards from eager fans. The "this is so kewl" type of thing that is inevitable and sometimes rather endearing since its always nice to see people enthusiastic about their hobby. But in both of these messageboards I've never seen the type of arguments, pissy comments and flames that seem to define GW messageboards.

So what is it about GW games that creates this difference?

It can't be age. Some of the oldest gamers I know are Epic gamers.

It might be that the very popularity of the games means that the audience that comes to a messageboard is greater and thereby generates more bad posts and more poor posters. Its an easy argument. Usenet became almost unusable once large ISPs like AOl started to funnel millions of new users into it. So there is something to be said for the argument that popularity will generate more assholes posting to your messageboards.

Part of the problem might be GW itself. The company either inspires loyalty or hatred and in those sorts of conditions people tend to take their positions more seriously than they need to. In some places that term "GW Fanboy" gets tossed around as a pejorative term when people say anything positive (or not suitably negative) about GW as well so is not just GW fans that can act like imbeciles online.

But I am still left with the reality that almost every negative online experience I have is in relation to a GW related messageboards. And I know that I can be just as annoying and confrontational as the next person but given that I am the single "known" factor in all my experiences with these other online communities it still makes me think that the motivating factor in this case is GW.

So why does the company generate such hate?

No longer an SG Forum Mod

I've seen a few posts in other places asking about it so I thought that I would put a quick note here to indicate that I am no longer one of the Moderators for the SG Forum. I actually stepped down about two weeks ago but with Andy being on vacation and having a serious backlog of mail and work it took a while to make that official.

On the plus side it gives me more time to work on the CSM on OGBM lists.

Lead is soft

Categorise this under "You Don't Say!" but its surprising just how soft lead is. So for I have drilled holes through Sered and one of my Griffin Conscripts.

I'm just lucky that I haven't ended up with a pin vise in a finger.

Its really quite startling how much harder pewter is than lead. It also makes me want to not work with pewter again as it is a breeze to clean up Rackham figs.

Black Legion v3.5

Version 3.5 of the Black Legion list has been sent to Andy and Jervis at Fanatic. So look for it in the vault some time next week

The main change is that Summoning is now done from a central pool of daemons that are purchased at the beginning of the game. There is an upper limit to how many daemons an army can generate so if you get high dice rolls it just means that you go through your daemons quicker

This should also help to make it a tactical decision to decide whether to retain daemons or not. As well, daemons now return to the warp at the end of the turn unless you have a unit in the formation that has the Daemonic Focus ability. The CSM Icon Bearer has that ability (which should hopefully end those interminable arguments about the IB not being like its 40K counterpart) and units in the LatD army will also have the ability.

So you can still tool up a formation to summon and retain a lot of daemons but you won't be able to do much else with it as that will take three upgrades, Daemonic P{act (which allows access to summoning), Chaos Champion and IB.