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Showing posts from August, 2013

The Banner of +1 Standardness

Ahhhh yeahhhh, my Hochland army finally has a battle standard bearer. It’s amazing how many different meanings some words have in the English language, considering that we also have more actual words than most European languages. For instance, the standard standard of my standards is one of fairly elaborate designs (see here , here and here ) but this time, I wanted to keep things simple. This is the flag of Hochland, not the quirky iconography of a specific regiment. Also, it was only after I’d started painting that it occurred to me that Hochland literally has the Swiss flag , but whatever. Cheese, chocolate and mountains are all excellent things. Now unlike most battle standard bearers, I wanted Captain Thiele here to be usable with or without the banner so that she could be used as either the army's general or its ensign. To that end, the banner simply slots into a very snug hole in the base, and can be replaced with a rock on a stick. Yes really:

Breaking my own rule

There is a rule I try to stick to for each game that I play: no more than one scenery project, regiment project and character project can be started at any one time. This way, things get finished. For people with willpower, this rule is not very important. For idiots like me, it’s damn-near essential. This is what lies at the bottom of the slippery, slippery slope when I fail: The sheer size of the Warhammer Fortress makes the rest look irrelevant, but when you paint as slowly as I do, five concurrent character projects isn’t very clever, never mind two concurrent regiments (well ok three, technically), two monsters, some cavalry, a piece of artillery, and a fortified manor. Oh, and a genestealer. Don’t ask about the genestealer. If you’re wondering what the point of this post is, it’s this: I don’t have any pretty pictures of new shiny things to show you, because my brain has been replaced with a butterfly. But I am doing things. Fifteen things. At once. This is wha

Book review: Thunder and Steel

Since Thunder & Steel is an omnibus, this will technically be five or so mini-reviews. I could go meta, and review the omnibussyness of the omnibus, but all you need to know about it is that it’s a collection of Dan Abnett’s forays into Warhammer Fantasy. The trouble with book reviews (along with film and theatre reviews) is that they’re inevitably tinted, if not full-on coloured, by the reviewer’s personal preferences. For instance, narrative and character is more important to me than stabby-death-kill, which is why I haven’t bothered reading all that much from the Black Library. They’re good at publishing what they do, which is a head-on collision between pulp fiction and the baroque kitschosity of Games Workshop’s storyworlds, but for the most part this leaves me bored by page fifty. There are some glorious exceptions to the rule, and most of those exceptions come from the mind of Dan Abnett, which was precisely why I picked up this book – I’d read the Eisenhorn and R