25 February 2016

Warriors, Beastmen, Audio Books, and Kings of War



I've been working on a few figures for other people recently.



More beastmen. I hadn't paid too much attention to the Citadel beastmen since the old RoC days, but these and the other two I painted recently are pretty nice figures.



I still have a few minor touch-ups on these medieval/fantasy warriors, and then on to six more to go with them.


Audio Books


I've discovered LibriVox. Public domain audio books. About once a week I commute to & from an aviation museum I do some work for. It's a little over an hour drive and I have listened to a few audio books before (The Silmarillion, and a lengthy interview with Robert Anton Wilson) but mostly listen to music. But now that I've downloaded an audio library, classical history it is!

I'm currently listening to Xenophon's Anabasis, which I am enjoying quite a bit. I've read/studied a lot of Roman history, but have only touched on Greek history before. So this is new to me. I have Thucydides' Peloponnesian War and Herodotus' Histories lined up next.

With this in mind, the obvious question is: when do I start painting Greeks & Persians, right?


Kings of War


I read over the first edition of Kings of War when it came out and was unimpressed. I glanced at the second edition when it came out but didn't give it much attention. But with the suicidal implosion of WFB, a lot of people have been moving on to other games, and KoW seems to be a popular one. One of my old gaming groups is among the converts, and I've been invited to play a few times (again, recently.) I've now given the free rules a read-through, and looked at a few of the free army lists. I've still got some mixed opinions

Pros & Cons: It's nice that the rules seem streamlined & simplified, but I do wonder if that was taken too far. It seems to lose a bit of depth. On the other hand, that also does make the rules pretty clear from what I can tell. Maybe not so much arguing over the rulebook as with WFB? One of the complaints I've read about from people who seem to primarily play WFB is that they don't like the fact that you don't pull off individual figures, but I think that's missing the point that the game is dealing with units as a whole, rather than individuals. That's something that a lot of other games do, as well, and I think it frees a set of rules from a lot of the oddities that stuck with WFB over the years. (So that's counts as a "pro" from me.)

At any rate, I'm willing to give it a shot, provided I can actually make it out for a few games.

4 comments:

  1. I look forward to seeing your Greeks, Persians and other ancients. ;)

    In this scenario, would you go with Vixtrix plastics? A couple of boxes of Mercenary Greeks and a box of Pelasts, and you would have enough figures for most intra-Greek battles (and a solid core to build the 10,000 or mercenaries in the pay of Persia/Macedonia). And with the £ at such a low right now...

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    1. Haha, I haven't gone as far as comparing the available figures. As much as I would love to return to ancients, I'm not sure it's practical or logical to start another project. Not that those are likely to factor into most wargamers' decisions when starting a new project. ;)

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  2. Exquisite work -- those beastmen are just amazing. And thanks for the tip about Libri Vox... I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I paint and work to work -- but I usually pay for them (from Audible -- which I'm generally happy with). I'll have to check out L.V., because some months I really burn through the books (luckily/unluckily I am now trying to work through Proust, which has the advantage of burning up many hours for not much money, and the disadvantage of being supernaturally boring. But I guess any encounter with the supernatural is interesting in its own way).

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    1. Thanks.

      I've only looked through some of the history section of LibriVox, but the selection was pretty small. Not sure what the rest of the catalog is like.

      Do you like Tolkien? I found this a while ago and it is a great recording/reading:

      https://archive.org/details/J.r.r.Tolkien-TheSilmarillion

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