My Lamp Died!

Simply as said my hobby lamp has died. It just flickers now.  I'm looking for a replacement lamp, it must be daylight and it must be cheapish.  Anyone got any ideas?

A decade of Beards and Ale

My current dwarf army

As you might have guessed from the multitude of posts with them in, I am a dwarf player.  I have been one just just over a decade, they were my very first army and introduction into the Warhammer hobby.  I am looking to expand my army this year, but I thought I'd have a look back at why I started them and where I intend to go from here.  So if you dislike ale and beards (GODS FORBID IT!), you might not like to read on.

Display time!

I have finally got my display cabinet sorted!  It has only been about three months, but finally I can get the dwarfs out for display.  This is all the dwarfs I have painted and based for the new look dwarf army.  I have also put on the top shelf the random minis I have painted and have with me (there are still some at the parents or need some repainting).

The LO Meet 2012

For the last eight years my home forum on the interwebs, Librarium-Online.com, has held an annual gathering at Warhammer World (WHW).  Each year we get members to turn up and just have fun playing games.

This year was no exception, we are missing the odd member her but this the gamers from the weekend.

Here is my account....

The Bucket List

A bucket list is a plan of things to do, usually used for life goals I have some for my gaming goals instead.  

Man at work...

Just a little post to show I am still about....

Moving time...

As I have previously mentioned in a few weeks I shall be vacating the county of Kent (it's a mutual agreement) and moving back to the cold north.  That being Leeds, Yorkshire.  This weekend all but two weeks worth of clothing has been removed and gone to the girl friends house, the flat looks decisively bare.  Unfortunately this of course implies that all my miniatures have also been whisked off. :sadpanda:

[40k] Space Marine Librarian - 2

So, for the last week I have been working on this librarian I previously mentioned.....

Return from the Meet

This weekend was spent at the awesomeness that is WHW in Nottingham.  The meet's turn out was not as good as it has been in previous years, being only fifteen members show up over the entire weekend but that did not stop us having a good time.  We had pretty much all the 40K stuff turn up with only three Fantasy armies making an appearance (including my dwarfs).  I would have liked/expected more Fantasy but never mind.

I managed to get two games in, one against an odd Beastmen list and one against my hated foe the Orcs and Goblins.

Beastmen
His list consisted of a sort of spam list with lots of small units of centigor, some chariots and dogs.  Needless to say I had deployed my entire army before his actual units had even touched the tabletop.  This led to his doing a refused flank and having his centigor roll up and sweep across.  It did not end well for the bearded warriors.  Some highlights were...

- Him using all his dice each turn to summon a gorgon on at my table edge.  It got off once and was promptly organ gunned off the table (10 hits), but his shaman survived the five toughness tests with a single wound left.

- The organ gun seeing off harpies, spawns, a gorgon and some dogs.  Not bad for 120pts.

- The doombull munching it's way through my units an me failing to even drop a few wounds on the beast.

- A cannon shot overshooting the doombull sat in the open on its own and only smushing a single centigor.

- The hammerers killing off two chariots and the BSB before failing their stubborn roll and being run down.

I learnt some stuff in this game.  Being as it was my first ever 8th edition game, I feel I did not do terribly.  I was guessing too close to models for the cannon shots and overshooting them, or in two separate cases hitting them but failing to do anything but a single wound to them!  Sucks.

Orcs and Goblins
This list was a lot of units.  Large blocks of goblins, some orcs and he was trying out some black orcs.  Overall I felt that through most the game I was not standing a chance.  Some fanatics battered up some hammerers my longbeards were munched on by black orcs and trolls in the flank.  My war machines exploded both turn three.  Overall it looked dire, having only a weakened hammerer block, some warriors and a few remaining dwarfs from my missile units.  Then his black orcs got a front charge on my warrior block.  Heroes of the game. 

- His black orc warboss had the Battleaxe of the last Waaagh, so was in every fight hitting me with between seven and eleven attacks that would be killing me on twos.  He'd kill make three dwarfs, if he was lucky. 

- My reply against some wounds from the black orcs was to kill eleven - the unit barring the BSB and lord - who then failed their break test and was run down by warriors.  This saved me the game and actually put me up to 382 points ahead.

- Three fanatics hot my lines, went through two units and killed a total of three dwarfs.

- The doom diver hot every time, killed a single dwarf every time.

- Goblin hordes got smashed in combat, then broke but outrun the dwarfs.  A theme of the game, my inability to roll higher than four for my pursuits. 


The rest of my weekend was taken up by watching the 40K games and wishing I had brought my Orks.  So I took a load of pictures instead (album at the end).  Our yearly raffle was a great success, raising £70 for the prizes, most of which wnt to the guy who brought £28 worth of tickets!  Overall, despite to low turn out it was a great weekend, and I look forward to next year.


The LO Meet 2011

Moving on....

OK, it's not as serious as it sounds.  I haven't updated in quite a while, this is because I haven't done any painting for a bit.  After the Longbeards I realised I had a Dwarf king and an Organ Gun to paint, but had a very busy couple of weeks - spent most of last week in Leeds for my girl friend's graduation (yay her!), and last weekend I had a bunch of friends down.  Thus no time to paint.  Luckily I already had what I needed to paint from a previous army version. 

With this my Dwarf army is complete to about 2000pts.  I am overall quite happy with how they look, the scheme is quite easy to do and I have been discovering new methods of painting Dwarfs.  I have plans to expand them further soon to give me more options to play about with.  However in the meantime I will be getting my first Dwarf, and indeed first 8th edition games in this weekend.  Quite sad that I haven't been able to play it before. :( 

This weekend sees myself and fellow gamers from Librarium Online are going to Warhammer World for our yearly Meet.  A weekend of gaming.  This time around I am only taking Dwarfs, this being because they are the only complete and serviceable army I possess (the Orks got battered on my move down to Kent and I never fixed them. =/ ) and for ease of travel.  Looking forward to this, and have been for some time.  :)

I have had a good time recently with my Orks, been on a run of 9-0-2 (W-D-L).  I have been recording my gaming progress in an excel chart, it is quite nice to be able to see my progress.  And I am enjoying playing about with excel a little.

The final thing I have to say is this... I am moving again soon, myself and the girl friend are moving up to Leeds (she's doing a Masters there) and her parent's are kindly bringing some stuff up to Leeds from Kent for us.  Then we get to house sit their place for a month while we look for our own flat.  EXCITING.  This does mean that for a short period I might be out of contact with the internet, either due to their house having bad signal or when we move and have to set everything up.  I am hoping to get one mini done over the next few weeks before my stuff all gets packed up, not sure what yet but I will be tracking it.

Just thought you'd like to know...

[Musing] Painting!

It's been a while since I posted on here, nearly a month in fact.  I have been quite busy, well... sort of.  Got some painting done, and not done. ...

"Dice is Our Vice"

As you might have guessed from the title, I have been listening to a certain podcast recently.  Can you guess which...?

Is Variety the Spice of Life, or do Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth?

Used without Permission

In this article I look at having lots of variation in your gaming is good, or whether it is just too much.

A Dwarfs Tale: From King to Clansman. Part V - The List

It has been a little while since I posted about my dwarfs, and I have made some decisions about the army.  I realised that I wanted an army that was playable and done for this year.

Moving the hobby along

 So, as I discussed in a previous post I am trying to advance my hobby a bit more.  This year I want to complete my Dwarfs and at least get started on my Space Wolves.  To help with this, I copied a great idea from Warpstone Pile.  I have not copied his format exactly, being as I don't want to use the painting or modelling points but I have found that it is a great idea overall.

Goals for 2011

I decided to follow the trend and post up some aims for 2011, however I decided to avoid the term 'resolutions' and instead go for 'aims' or 'goals'.  I think last year I had nothing to drive or guide me, my hobby was a little bit disjointed and I had little aim.

Rethinking Orks

So, I have managed to get a few games in with my Orks and I enjoying playing them, however I feel like I need to re-work my list a little.  First of all, here is my current list I have been using (1500pts).

*ahem*

A quick update, I have not been very active recently for various reasons.  The foremost is because the bulb in my light blew, and I am waiting a replacement to arrive; so no painting.  My current painting project is Mannfred Von Carstien, the older version.  This guy:

My thoughts on LOTR

I was wandering about the blogsphere and I remembered this post over at Cursed Treasure about why the Lord of the Rings games lacks gamers.  I viewed the comments and there were many interesting points raise, and I felt like addressing my thoughts on these points.

To start, I thought I would drop my thoughts on the original posted question.  Why don’t I play LOTR?  I have been thinking on this, and I think I fell into the same pitfall of most people.  When the game was announced it was on the back of the film trilogy, and GW just seemingly threw it in the face of gamers proclaiming it to be their third ‘Big Game’ alongside the ancient Warhammer Fantasy and its younger brother, Warhammer 40k.  It just didn’t sit right with me.  To me a game becomes popular by the gamers and supporters, not because the company ‘Says so’.  However, up until early this year I had never even read the rules to the game.  I unfairly judged the game, just like pretty much every other gamer.  I jumped right on the band wagon of “this game sucks” and grabbed the tail of the “its stealing time and space in the company” donkey.  I think it also came down to the idea of how GW first pitched it.  It was seemingly marketed to begin with as just a way of replaying the famous parts of the novels/films, seeing if you could change the outcome of the series.  This worked while the films were new and interesting, but as they waned, the idea stuck that this system was limited.  We all know the outcome of the game, and all know that nothing changes when we replay these ‘famous’ events.  I think this was a big pitfall for me.  I like games that have wider range and its ending is not set in stone.

There was also a point brought up in the comments above about lack of customisation, and I agree.  The other two ‘big games’, and even the spinoffs, are very open ended.  You can pick a generic hero for you faction and fashion a whole history for them, arm them how you wish and let them grow.  In LOTR, most characters are known and even then if you can take unnamed ones you can’t really make them a great hero of their faction because Tolkien’s world is very set and lacks any great manoeuvrability for this purpose.  So instead you end up with characters leading factions, but from what I understand race doesn’t matter.  By this I mean, you could have a dwarf character leading elves or visa versa because they are in the ‘good’ faction.  You can have northern orcs being led by evil southern men. And so forth.  It just seems a little bit like having your cake and eating it, leaving very little to skill or having flaws in the force if you can just take other models to fill in those gaps.   One other thing, it kind of goes hand in hand with the lack of customisation comments above, the heroes, or the models in general, they give you little freedom when it comes to equipment - as far as I can tell. 

My final negative point here is the scenarios.  I have nothing against scenario wins, except when they are “if X faction does achieve Y criteria they win.  If they do then Z wins”.  These bore me and strike me as one sided.  However this isn’t my gripe, as I am sure there are different ways to play the game, but it is rather how GW marketed them.  The whole “replay the LOTR and win for evil” etc is fine, but has limited appeal.  This is something I feel has put a lot of gamers off picking up the rules and actually having an opinion that is not just built off of instant dislike or hearsay.  I think win games people like the idea of it being set in a well known surrounding (LOTR, or Star Wars for example) and refighting these epic battles are interesting but after a while, it gets boring and you need more exciting things to do with your minis rather than replay these scenes.  I am sure there are more scenarios and more varied ones available to play, but how GW made them come across has always seemed like there was just the replaying of the story.  Not fun.

So what does this all mean?  Well… I am going to put my money where my mouth is.  So to speak.  I intend to buy the LOTR: SBG rules and have a read of them, to see what my real thoughts on the matter are.  I have read them before, but I want to re-read them.  This does not mean that I’ll be starting up a force for the game (though, I have already considered some options already) but I will definitely read and comment back with actual opinions based on fact and discuss my thoughts on the topic of the game itself.  Look forward to this in the future. 

Where does it go...?

Well, I am sure you'll all have noticed that I have not posted much, this last week I have not had any internet access; a slight problem with our connection.  This has now been finished, as you might have gathered.  What have I been up to?

I now have a job, finally.  Working in a warehouse making plastic items, it isn't a bad job.  I have shift work though, so for this week I am on earlies (6am-2pm) and next week I will switch to lates (2pm-10pm) and then back again etc.  This does mean that I will only be able to get a game in ever other week, which sucks but is better than nothing.  For some reason the guys at the group believes me to be a 'rules guru', and keep asking me questions.  It is odd considering that I have probably played less games than they have. But is quite cool still. =D  Life down in the south is quite cool.  It is a nice place, I have been to Canterbury a couple of times, it is pretty and the local area matches it.  I am yet to make many friends down here but I am working on it.  Other than this I am getting on with painting, along with playing on the X-Box some.  I have recently finally picked up Red Dead Redemption and Final Fantasy XIII.  I am yet to play RDR but I will do.  It looks fun.  I am not a huge fan of the GTA series but this is different.  It's COWBOYS.  I am loving FF13 so far, but the combat system is getting some use to. 

Well.  Painting wise I have finished my 16 warriors, hopefully getting pictures up tomorrow or later today.  I will discuss these more in detail there.  I have now also undercoated my cannon and crew, these will be going on a base of some kind.  I have also planned out small lists for various projects I want to do.  One of these is to touch up my orks, mainly add some detail work to them.  The problem is that when the squads gets close it can be rather hard to spot who is with who if they are all similarly armed - ie 2 slugga or shoota squads next to one another.  So, my plan is to go back and add some form of squad identifier to them.  Something like different coloured dags or checks on shoulders or cloth etc.  Something obvious that can be spotted in the confusion of melee and so forth. 

Almost...

And talking of orks.  I got an actual game with them yesterday.  Yes.  A game!  My first one at this gaming group and first since the beginning of August.  This was Capture and Control against a Chaos Marine force.  He had; 2 squads of berzerkers, one had Kharn leading it.  A small squad of plague marines.All mounted in rhinos  Two obliterators, a vindicator and a daemon prince with.... yes.  Lash.  In return I flooded the board with green.  This was pretty much all I have painted.  2x 20 shootas. 2x 12 sluggas in trukks, 8 nobs and a warboss, 2x rokkit trakks. And 13 lootas.

His objective was pretty much centre of his deployment, mine was kept back and aptly was placed in an ork village.  I won't go blow by blow, but it was very close.  Some highlights were my nob squad and his kharn led 'zerkers battering each to hell before kharn got smooshed.  His daemon prince charging my 20 boy squad alone, killing a few before getting charged by the warboss and remaining nob.  Who then caused only a few wounds with their claws before the weight of 20+ boyz attacks pounded him into mangled flesh.  The game stood on a knife edge as to whether I could contest his objective or not.  Mine was safe.  He was left with only a obliterator and a handful of plague marines to defend it.  I struggled to find units big enough to weather the storm and in the end we had a trukk and a trakk sat on it.  He JUST managed to take out both and stop a small squad of boys (at this point about four left) from sneaking onto it in the final turn.  It was great fun and very close.

Looking at it, I have learnt that the orks are OK in combat.  They win by virtue of weight of attacks, not hard hitting ones.  And they HAVE to assault to do damage.  I2 and S3 is not the best combination in tandem with a 6+ save.  The nobz are pretty good, they hit hard and have lots of attacks.  I need to be a bit more thrifty with the wargear options for them to make the most out of wound allocation.  The warboss performed OK, fluffed a fair few of his attacks though.  The lootas performed well as usual, getting some nice shots off and making the daemon prince keep his head down.  I also need to be more careful with the placement of my transports.  Two out of the three - including the nobz trukk - got taken care of quite quickly.  The last, I should have really tried to keep it hidden so I could have gone for a last turn boost for their objective.  Otherwise, I think it went OK.  I need more practice, but it was rather enjoyable.  I am considering next time, dropping three lootas and taking a single suicidal deffkotta with rokkits for outflanking and pot shots at vehicles. 

Finally, I think I might need to get a new carry case.  the one I have at the moment is good - A figures in Comfort case - but is rather soft and I fear the layers get knocked about a bit and in turn I have many orcs with broken arms or have come off the bases.  This will depend on money and so forth, but hopefully in the future I can see about this.