Warhammer -1313 (skirmish thoughts)

 

I previously posted some thoughts for a Warhammer -1313 setting/campaign/project. Years ago. Because I have a habit of coming up with ideas but never following through.*

I am currently revisiting this one. In my head, at least. For now. But I am itching for some fantasy gaming & painting again, so maaaaayyyybe.

I've been enjoying a Five Parsecs from Home campaign (which I am WAY behind on updating here) and have been thinking about fantasy gaming again. So I'm thinking about a Five Leagues from the Borderlands campaign set in the above mentioned Warhammer -1313 setting. I've also thought about this as a Sellswords & Spellslingers campaign as well. I really like the card & combat mechanics of that game. But I also like the additional campaign detail of the Five (units) From (place) series of games.

Current thoughts on factions include:

• Humans. Pre-Sigmar exploration by primitive tribes. This would be my warband and a small number of competing warbands as opponents.
• Fimir. If I do this as a skirmish now, I will switch to the Satyr Art Studio Fomorians and maybe some plastic Heroquest Fimir, so they're on the smaller (25mm) bases vs. the Citadel and homemade conversions I already have on 40mm bases.
• Skaven.
• Drachenfels. Daemons, undead, undeadish.
• Goblins.
• Wood elves & forest spirits.

A couple weekends ago I spent a couple hours walking around the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. The walk gave me a lot of inspiration for making some new terrain representing the marshy portions of the Wasteland!

The wildlife refuge is, well, home to various wildlife. Especially birds. Along with various waterfowl, I spotted a pair of (vocal!) bald eagles. Not a great pic, but I didn't want to get so close that I disturbed them and these are all take with my phone.

So now I am thinking about various ways to create some modular-ish wetlands, dead trees, and other living flora for my small table!

*See also: Kings of Old/Zogmar, Anabasis/Jackrabbit Trading Company, Vengeance of the Witch Blaster, Beers Unnumbered, Wheel and --- Whoa! (this one doesn't even have an entry, but has a big outline, sort of a refinement of law/chaos to life/death/change), and Plain of Thieves among others. But seriously, for most of these I have a bunch of fluff, outlines, etc. written out. Just need to actually DO them.

Overdue Update Pt. 1- Fantasy

It's been 4.5 months since my last update. But I haven't been completely inactive. Just not posting much here. I post pics more regularly on Instagram, probably because it's easier than sitting down at a PC to update this site. And I spend too much time in front of my PC every week for work, so I've also been trying to enjoy the summer & fall outside, before winter hits.

I have actually written and re-written a post about revisiting my idea for Warhammer -1313 and now working it into a solo skirmish campaign. But more on that later. For now, here's a potential warband teaser pic. :D More on that later, as well.

I've mostly been painting sci-fi figures lately and playing Five Parsecs From Home. But I just got an itch for some October spooky terrain & painting a week or two ago. It started with the idea of using some cheap craft store pumpkins for a bit of terrain -- a pumpkin patch. Then I thought of doing a pumkin circle, like a fairy circle, but spooky. Naturally that meant I needed someone to inhabit/emerge from the pumpkin ring realm. I've got a small batch of others partially painted, hopefully finish this week.

I will follow up shortly with some sci-fi posts next. I have been updating the Five Parsecs page here, even if it doesn't show up on the front page/main blog section. So there are more battle reports and painted figures to share. Coming soon! Probably.

And Just Like That... Three Months Go By!

 

Apparently it has been three months since my last update. There has been a bit going on lately. For one, I had some down time due to a thumb injury...

I have also done a bit of travelling (survived a tornado near Chicago, an earthquake near LA, and less dramatic visits to Palm Desert/Joshua Tree NP, and Miami) for work. On the topic of work, I have also made a significant career change and taken a new job. To be honest... I've also been a bit uninspired lately. I think my head has just been elsewhere with everything else going on. Really, I'm not terribly good at keeping up with this blog lately either.

But there has still been painting going on, though no real gaming.

I wasn't very successful with my "Five Months From Painted Factions" but I did make some more progress. I built and painted some mutants!

I also painted Ambassador Khan Cern. He has no patience for your shenanigans.

Following up on my previous Five Bananas entry, I purchased my crew. Just tonight I started putting a bit of paint on them. More to come on that soon. "Soon." Like maybe in a few months again?

For now, I have also returned to painting the mercenaries that I had started working on before my thumb injury.

On the fantasy side....

Satyr Art Studio zombies...

...and some old Ral Partha zombies.

The middle figure is my D&D character, if the family D&D campaign ever gets started. Nettie Coldwater, middle-aged empty nester forest gnome turned druid. This is the second time I have painted this figure from Reaper Miniatures. The one on the left is the "stock" figure, and Nettie was converted a bit to more accurately reflect my character. The dog on the right was painted previously but I was thinking that it would be interesting if she brought her dog along with her.

Random daemon. Daemonette. Had the figure, figured I would paint it for my mixed-daemon horde. 

D&D figure, Grick. 

Dwarf With No Name.

Giant flies/stirges.

Painted a couple of tiny bunny toys, inspired by the Black Rabbit of Inle.

Fungus infected ant swarm.

I was fortunate to live within the path of the recent total eclipse in the US. I could not get a good pic during the total eclipse, and really didn't want to spend that brief time messing around with my phone trying to take pics instead of fully enjoying the experience. But here's the closest thing -- I got a couple of decent pics of the approach to totality.

Warhammer The Old World Ramblings

The new Warhammer: The Old World seems to be making a big splash. I've only been keeping up with it a little bit, and while there seems to be quite a bit to like about it, I'm not really sold on it.

Instead of getting into some of the heated social media discussions, I'm just going to put my general opinions here. By opinions I possibly mean the grumblings of an old nerd. ;)

Like I said, it seems like there's definitely some things I like about it.

• GW going back to a "ranks & flanks" battle game.
• Incorporating some old mechanics that I missed from later editions.
• Bringing back players who won't play non-current editions of the game. (I have never understood why players would stop playing a game that they enjoy just because it's not being sold new anymore!)
• Putting old models into production again. I already have two of the Marauder giant, but I love the idea that more people can get their hands on such a classic!
• Exploring a different time period of the in-game history.
• I actually like the idea of scaling up bases to 25mm, even if I have a ton of old 20mm based figures. Plenty of easy ways to deal with this since it's ranked units. This probably would have been difficult to do previously, but this "reboot" was a great opportunity to make it happen.

However, there are some things I'm definitely not crazy about.

• The format of the game/rules. I think it originally went downhill after 3rd ed. where you bought a rulebook and an armies book and you had everything you needed to play, and could spend the rest of your cash on shiny, shiny miniatures. Those days are long gone and the new edition seems to be continuing the later trend of a constant stream of army books in order to "keep up." So far there is a $70 core book, plus two $50 books for the basic lists. So that's $170 for 3 books just to get started. Then the stream of additional army/faction books, two of which are already out now (bringing the actual starting rules-only investment to $224) with more to come.
• Or $156 for all digital. I actually buy more digital books than physical books these days But they better have a decent price break.
• Figure prices are insane, especially given that they've already been sculpted & molded long ago. I hope the artists are getting a fat commission! :D
• "Legacy Factions." 🙄
• As long a history as I had playing Warhammer (3rd ed. through 8th ed.) it was ultimately never a great "wargame." It always seemed stuck somewhere between a battle game and a skirmish game, but didn't do either thing well. I feel Warmaster was a much better large battle game, and Mordheim was a great skirmish game. Still are. I'd play either of those any day! And there are also other games on the market, made by (*gasp*) other publishers that also do what Warhammer does... but better. It's a golden age of wargaming, with a ton of options available. It will take more than nostalgia to get me to invest in WFB again, and from what I've read/seen I'm not sure there's enough here to bring me back.
• Competitive play. Highly competitive play and an obsession with tournaments, winning at all costs, and *shudder" "the meta" seemed to dominate from at least 6th ed. onward. I've had my fill of that. Narrative play, campaigns, and "fun" scenarios were almost completely missing. This is something I've rediscovered in newer solo games, retro wargames, and a possible re-entry into RPGs with my kid. This may not be part of the game as sold, but I expect this to continue, especially since it's the focus the big post-WFB/AOS successor games took (9th Age, Mantic, Kings of War...)

I think the only way I would buy into the new game would be if I could get a bootleg PDF to "try before I buy" the physical game and find at least one, if not more, players interested in non-tournament gaming. The idea of picking up some old figures I missed back in the day seems appealing, but based on the prices I've seen so far, that's not terribly likely either.

This is 2024. There are a lot of options for both games and figures. 

New Year New...?

2023 ended not with a bang, but a whimper. But over the last week of the old year and the first week or so of the new year, I did get a little painting time in. 

I did some more painting and basing of "unaligned chaos daemons." I've been thinking about that idea since I received the Drachenfels figure a few years ago. It/he has long since been painted, and I even (finally) finished the novel! Lately my mind has turned back to the idea of chaos as chaotic, like in old Moorcock novels & early fantasy gaming. Not a bunch of organized, uniform creatures.

This will be a slow, ongoing project. I'll just keep adding any odd figures that seem like they belong as I continue to work on other projects.

Since I started this entry a week or so ago, I've added some more. Most are actually for a potential D&D campaign, but I feel they will fit the chaos vibe. The undead gnoll things I just got because I thought they looked cool. :)

The ochre jelly is homemade from some wire and melted hot glue, similar to some I did previously with different paint. The flameskull is just a plastic skull with some crudely sculpted flames. I liked the floating skull thing I did the same with a Bones cow skull painted blue. The rest are soft plastic D&D figurses

I also finally painted a pair of figures to represent our current two dogs. I had one but had been searching for the other for over a year before painting. On the left is Moji-Tater, our Corgi-Sheltie mix. He's the youngest. In the center is Cookie, a shelter rescue dog who we think may be a mix of Boxer & Border Collie. On the right is Sasha aka "Muffin Butt", another shelter dog who passed away almost 10 years ago. She was a German Shepherd-Husky mix. Cookie was the tough one to find, but since I was recently looking at D&D figures I found a pack of three dogs, one was a pointer with a pretty close body & head shape, but I had to cut off the ears and re-sculpt them to fit the real thing.

I've also painted a few sci-fi figures of mixed quality & complexity. The first is an Eru-Kin and jagual figure from Knightmare Games. I will be using Eru-Kin for K'Erin in Five Parsecs From Home. You can almost rearrange the the letters to shift between teh two names. Maybe the apostrophe is for the "u"? This one will be a member of my crew. 

I also finished the space goblins/Malig from Alternative Army's Ion Age range, which will serve as pirates in Five Parsecs. I painted a test figure earlier in 2023, but never got any further until December. One more faction down, and another month of "Five Months From Painted Factions" under my belt!

Lastly, my slacker painting from this week. First is Orbus, a sentient sphere of what appears to be some sort of plasma like matter. No one knows for sure. Orbus is literally a pearlescent bead on a stick. I didn't even paint it. Just drill a hole, make a base, and glue it on the stick. Next to that is the second of the two D&D nothics that came in the pack. One is for D&D, the other I thought would make a good sci-fi alien or mutant. Super quick paint job, mostly just abase coat, wash, then a few details. I almost want a whole squad of them now.

Warhammer -1313

 

 

I've had this idea lingering for years, and it has bubbled back to the surface. Oldhammer. No, not like that. This is Warhammer set in the in-universe past. Sort of like the War of the Beard campaign & lists published in WD long ago. 

 

Based on my interests and collection, my setting would be sometime after the War of the Beard, but before Sigmar, and set in my favorite place in the Old World: The Wasteland/Westerland.

I like the idea of setting it in the time just before and after the cataclysm brought about by the strife between the Fimir and Skaven. Arbitrarily I'll set this around the year of the Imperial Calendar...

 

-1313

 

Two major factions would be the afore mentioned Skaven & Fimir. Two secondary, or maybe more like something between primary and secondary (prime-and-a-half-ary?) factions of humans and dwarfs. Dwarfs would be at a bit of a low point in their history, suffering not only from the toll of the War of the Beard, but supposedly the natural (or Slann and then Skaven/Fimir induced un-natural) disasters that came after, and the goblin incursions the followed that. Humans would be from the early migrations into this region, which (according to what I could tell from Warhammer lore) lagged behind the earlier human settlements in the future neighboring lands of Bretonnia and Tilea to the west and south respectively.

Tertiary forces or supporting characters could include goblins, undead, giants.

I've got a lot of this thought out already. The big, undecided portion for me is the humans. I fluctuate between envisioning them as early Celtic or Germanic tribes, and somewhat later Migration Period Germans (Goths, Vandals, or early Saxons). The depictions in Warhammer art & books seems to favor the former, but I feel that's a bit out of place. Maybe just "modern" in-world source biases of "everyone a few hundred years ago was a primitive barbarian" bias?

For the dwarfs, I definitely want a look that's different from my puff & slash mercenaries. There's quite a few options for dwarfs with an early medieval "dark ages" aesthetic, and that's what I'd probably aim for.  These would all be fairly small army projects.

Sellswords and Spellslingers (Game 1)

It's been about a year since I bought the game and started prepping for it, but I've finally played a few games of Sellswords and Spellslingers. For those not familiar, it is a cooperative (or solo) fantasy skirmish game with a bit of an RPG feel to it. I downloaded the PDF from Ganesha Games, and bought the printed cards. You go through a points based party/character creation and then dive into scenarios. There are "between games" campaign activities and progression as well.

I originally had a some other plans, but ended up creating a team of four barbarian adventurers, from left to right... P-Stash, Bowie, Stabbie, and Yubie. I'll get back to the other ideas after running this group for a while.

There is no order to the scenarios, but I started with the first one, "Through The Badlands" because it seemed like a good learning scenario.

It was brutal.

This is what I was up against... Orcs, Orc Brutes, and a Troll. At least to start with. The way the mechanics of the game work, each character rolls between 1-3 activation dice. Roll 8+ on a d20, and each success is an action for that character. Fail, and you draw a card which means enemies activate, more enemies join the game, or one of a handful of events happens.

I failed at least 2/3 of my activation rolls throughout the game, which meant that the Heroes didn't get to do as much as the Villians, and more of them kept spawning around the table. Stabbie the shaman fumbled (rolled a 1) his first spell roll, which meant no magic the rest of the game. Bowie fumbled (rolled a 1) her shooting early on, which took her skills down a major notch as well. The scenario involved my group getting from one side of the killing field to the other. It was a flight for survival.

After many rounds of activation, at the end of the slaughter, this was my deployment area. Yubie got bogged down in combat and almost never making an activation roll. She lasted longer than expected, but eventually fell from her wounds, comatose. She could have been carried to safety by her "friends" but by this time they were in a panicked sprint for safety, far far away.

Here's a shot from the other side. You can see the others (Stabbie and P-Stash each down to their last hit point) making a dash for survival, corpses, pursuing foes and their abandoned friend all on the distance (and to either side, off camera.) This is right at the edge of the table. You would think they were home free.

You'd be wrong.

Here's Stabbie, the inept shaman, mere steps away from "edge of the world" safety. He's already been lapped by his companions because he can't roll above a 5 throughout the game. Just one activation and he's free... nope. Failed, resulting in another orc (just to his left) ambushing out of the bushes... er, ambushes? Just an orc, not a difficult combat at least... right? Nope again. Fumbled, lost his last hit point. But at least he's got a roll to see what happens... aaaaaand he's flat out dead.

The carnage at the end of the game. We started on the left, and 50% of The Low Rollers (they have a name now) exited off the right.

Since Stabbie and Yubie didn't really get much of a chance, I added their twins back into the party for the next game.

Next game? Yes. I thought it was worth another try. I like the mechanics, though they seem like they fluctuate between extremes. And the dice really had a heavy part in the game. But that's also what went wrong here... A large majority of my rolls were 5 or less on a d20. No rules are going to mitigate that. The game deserved a second try.

Back to that in the next update. (FYI, I just finished Game 4. Give me a few days to catch up with updates...)

Kill Team & Memories

Over the weekend I played my first two games of Kill Team and enjoyed it quite a bit. There's a lot to like in the game. It was also great seeing old friends as well as meeting some new players. I'm looking forward to playing some more.

My 40k minis are all gone, and I have not yet painted my Meat Hating Robot Pirates -- and from the look of it, they're not very suited to proxy for anything in Kill Team. BUT, I did have something else, something old. My old Nurgle chaos cultists, which were built from old Skaven. I used them as proxies for the Genesteal Cult. Thus: Cheese-stealer Cultists. I just needed to paint two large aberrant (didn't get the second one completely finished... yet) and a model with a mining laser (old half finished jezzail conversion.)

I played two games, one against Eldar, the second against Tyranids. Opposite styles of play, and my Cheese-stealers were right about in the middle it seemed - not overwhelmingly good at close combat or shooting, but decent at each. So they did well.

I'm now looking into acquiring some legitimate Adeptus Mechanicus minis. (Though I may turn them into AdMech renegade meat hating robot pirates...)


In addition to playing a few games and visiting with friends, I rummaged through my friend Rich's collection and pulled out a few things to take home. I picked out some wormie things and some beat-up chaos knights, and a pair of old warriors. But the most important thing to me was to have one of his WWI planes. He's the reason I got into WWI aviation, both in terms of gaming and history. I chose an Albatros D.V -- my first love in planes of the period. I never had much luck with it, but I used this model many times over the years (decades!) in games of Blue Max & Canvas Eagles. It's a fine looking model of a fine looking plane. Maybe someday I will finish my own planes (currently stalled... haha) and play some more. Until then, I'll have this one out on display.

I couldn't pass this next one up...

The Grenadier giant on the right was on display in Rich's living room at both houses he had while I knew him. In the latter, he was on a hill facing a dwarf giant slayer (I should have looked for the dwarf so I could recreate the scene at home!) situated on a table beside the TV/entertainment center. He will obviously have a place of honor in my giant collection. If not for the memories, then possibly as the heaviest model I own! I'll need to find a spot for him in our family room.

I also picked out the second giant, on the left as well. It's based on a Larry Elmore painting, a print of which hung in Rich's game room alongside many others.


One final, totally unrelated item. I picked up this from the local craft store...

The Marienburgers need an airship. The basket will be replaced with a suitably sized armed & armored gondola.