September Motivational.

 

Getting ready for Orktober/Dreadtober!

Until next time, have nice day...

A Little Place at Home, Building a Gaming Table - Part 4.

 

"When last we left our heroes"...

See now you know you're playing D&D because...erm...wrong thread...

"When last we left the table build"

That's better...

Last post, we'd gotten to the exciting part of putting the entire table together and making sure it all fitted somewhat neatly and wasn't loose or wobbly and would survive the feline attentions it would gather.

The next step was to stain the entire thing with Walnut Wood Stain so it matches with the rest of my furniture in the living room.

This was something of a non-negotiable from myself as it had to match, end of...

Staining in progress, the masses of cardboard at the bottom are to protect to wooden floor at my friends house where we were building the table:

Once we'd finished and moved it in pieces to my house, I began we the work of cat proofing the legs.

Being soft planed lumber and just the right size for a scratching post, I was worried that they would "have a go", and ruin the lower woodwork. A browse of Amazon procured a roll of "Sisal Cat Scratching Material" for less then a tenner and would protect the legs and give the cats something to work on instead (this was combined with a new scratching tree which is now screwed to the wall in the room as well).

There is meant to be a joke about Women wearing long socks here...but I couldn't find a good one!

Once we'd gotten the frames together, as an extra strengthening measure, we added these steel L brackets to the table.

This will pull the corners together and hold them (hopefully) regardless of how much jostling the table takes over time.

And here she is, built up and installed in my house. Not quite as dark as the bookcase behind, but certainly matching somewhat:

The magnetic handle in place as I lift the topper:

(I've no idea where the playing card came from).

And finally with the topper removed to prove it works!!!!!

We'd fed the cats recently before this photo was taken, hence the bowl underneath.

So, this project has been enjoyable, the pure unadulterated joy of just making something and seeing it come together has been extremely rewarding.

The fact that it's turned out better then expected by everyone is an added bonus. When I told Fraser about the gaming area being 3'*4' his response was:

"What can you play in that area?"

Quite a bit, but more importantly, I will make the hobby work for me!

I have a gaming table at home and (unless meeting up with friends) I won't have to drive nearly an hour to get a game in of anything now. I've already had a quick game of 40k on the table last night to celebrate my birthday (more to come on that).

I started these posts by talking about the professionally made table Fraser had bought and it now costing over £750.

In the interest of fairness, this table has cost me roughly £240 in total, that's adding in the extras like the Sisal and extra planks we needed after B&Q not knowing what "straight cut" means!

Granted not everybody out there has a good set of woodworking skills and knows what to look for, so I definitely saved the most money on labour costs, as we could measure (twice), cut (once) and build it ourselves.

But that's still a massive saving in cost.

There are some things which I would have liked to add, but would have been major headaches to either install or get working properly.

Example: A phone charger, either wired or wireless. Would have been useful for when people put their phones on the table surround.

LEDs, we did talk about it, but hiding the power cables from the cats would have been a painful experience, same as with the charger idea above, as the Furry Bio-titans will always find what they're not supposed to!

That aside, I'm happy with the table. A personal 40th Birthday present to myself, one which I will use regularly now.

I'll leave you with this photo:

Until next time, have nice day...

Hobby Spending - September 2024.

 

September has rolled around and it's time for another hobby Spending update...so here we go.

September is a funny month, as my birthday is at the end of the month and everyone encourages you to spend a little and treat yourself.

I picked up this unit of Khorne Berzerkers early on, which gives me a second unit to work on, for when I get to the Black Crusade in full force, the are already built, but a quick cut with a knife will get them off their bases and I can work them up into a warband:

With the gaming table I have been building taking up most of the hobby month, I got to thinking about what to play on it and the size of armies (covered in the next table update post).

Using the Old World army builder webpage, I knocked together a 1,500 point Dark Elf army as I had a fair few boxes of models lying around from an aborted AoS project.

I was missing an assassin though, so this 3D printed miniature was perfect:

(The curse of the so-so eBay 3D print seller struck though, and it took nearly the entire month to turn up*).

From a better eBay 3D print seller, Ruins of Ashelina, I picked up this Calidus Assassin, as he was offering her for a fiver to the first twenty people who bought the print as she was a new STL and on promotion:

I follow a blog called "Mogsymakes" you can find it in the Blog list on the right hand side of this page.

One of his last posts was a battle report using the Red Book of the Elf King rules. The whole setting intrigued me from the get go, being more Norse/Celtic based rather then Tolkien elves. The fact that it's more warband sized and you need roughly 19 models per faction was another selling point.

For £12 a used copy in very good condition was too good to pass up, just got to look for the second book now:

And finally, on one of my days off work this week I took a trip through to Mirfield Miniatures for the first time in a couple of years.

Being good, I stuck to my prepared shopping list of what I wanted, but I was tempted by a Dwarf army Mark had on the shelves.

Instead I kept to what I was looking for and picked up these four 4th/5th edition codexes, in an aim to complete the collection and make playing 40k fun again:

Next time I go through I'm going to pick up a second copy of the 5th edition rulebook so I have a "game" copy and a "good" copy.

World Eaters Berzerkers Unit: £11.

Dark Elf Assassin: £6.

Callidus Assassin: £5.

Interior Filler: £5.

Red Book of the Elf King: £12.

4th/5th edition Codexes: £16.

Total for September: £55.

Budget for September: £50.

Over/Under Yearly Budget: under budget by £42.90.

So £5 over budget, but a reasonable month overall, and purchases which I wanted or needed for collections, I think the only "on a whim" purchases were the Calidus and the Elf King rulebook.

Until next time, have nice day...

A Little Place at Home, Building a Gaming Table - Part 3.

 

With shift work there are often times when you can't find a decent block of spare time to carry on with a project that you've started...this was one of those.

If you recall, I started the table build, and had to leave it for a few weeks because of conflicting work commitments, but with a slew of days off I managed to crack on with on the table some more.

First job was to get the tin of wood filler opened up and fill some of those unsightly gaps and along the backs of the shelf sections.

This stuff was nasty, definitely an outdoor job, especially as it set the smoke alarms off when the tim was initially cracked!!!!

After about an hour of work, I had all four sides to this stage:

That's the sides all filled, once cured about thirty minutes after application, I got the sander on them and got them nice and smooth, especially important as these are the visible sides once the board is in use.

The next big job to tackle was the felt covering for the game board itself. I had bought a big two meter by one and a half meter sheet of dark grey felt in readiness, and spent a good hour ironing it to get the creases out from how it was packaged.

Once done, I layed it flat on the big table at my friend house where we've been building this, and we used spray fabric glue in a generous fashion on the game board soft foam tiles, the pressed it down firmly, slipping over and smoothing out the main surface.

We flipped it again to use the weight of the board to press it down and left for a late breakfast.

Upon returning, the glue had done it's job and the felt was secure, so we moved onto the next stage which would be adding battening to the underside for strength, marking it out with the woodworking mantra "measure twice, cut once".

And underway with the outside frame in place, at this point I took the time to go round with the knife (not cutting my hand open this time) and removed the excess felt. As we screwed the battens over the folded excess and used them to help secure the material.

"Belt and Braces fashion" never use just one, when two or more is stronger! The central and cross battens were added for extra strength and rigidity.

Flipping it over again to check and it was looking good.

A little tidying at the corners...

And she was ready to be test fitted into the frame... SUCCESS.

At this point I remarked how nice it was being at the stage where you start to see real progress and the end in sight.

He was that confident in the woodwork strength, that we threw a couple of eye-wateringly expensive Forge World models and a piece of terrain down...

Removing the games surface, attention was turned to the topper, a battery was glued and nailed twelve millimetres below the surround surface. This was to act as the base for the topper when it was on the table.

And the topped itself got some strength battens added, these are only crossbeams because the main frame is the one attached to the table which it rests on. The battery's on this piece are placed against the frame and the weight is cantilevered out into the frame for strength!

And flipped out we get "dining table mode" as I'm calling it. This is what the table will love as most of the time when I'm not gaming on it, so we've got to be able to use it everyday.

And then work had to stop, but we're in the homestretch and she's nearly finished!

The next steps are to stain the entire piece to match the dark wood furniture at my house and to sort the magnetic lever which will lift the topper out of the table. 

It shouldn't be too long now until I have her at my house and I am throwing dice across the tabletop.

Soon soon...

Until next time, have nice day...

The Solar Watch - part 4.

High in geosynchronous orbit above the Imperial Palace, the cruiser 'Incarnadine Angel' hung like a predator of the void, held as it was amongst the bustling space lanes of the Throneworld. Huge whaleships of pilgrims jostled for space with the bulktraders of the Administratum, and threaded through with the patrol vessels of Battle fleet Solar. Sleek and dangerous, the 'Incarnadine Angel' bore the colours of the Solar Watch and the heraldry of the Talons of the Emperor, it's engines dark and lifeless for the moment.

On the bridge, the crew worked at their stations relaying information from their servitor machines and calling out flight paths of passing ships. The two hulking figures stood on the command diss tuned all this background noise out and watched intently upon their own data streams within their helmets.

Far below, the Allarus Terminators and Blade-Champion Desh were dealing with a corrupt ritual. The closest to the Imperial Palace for seven thousand years and the rest of the force was on standby in the Teleportarium.

Custodian-Vexilla Castivar Sanish reviewed the reports again, the numbers, the details were what mattered. Questions of how this had happened would come, but the priority was stopping the heretics and killing the cult from the head.

At his side Custodian-Serjant Gallimadean Calax suddenly stood up straight. He had been reviewing the same data streams as Sanish, noting the efficiency of the Terminators and that the cultists were all but destroyed in a matter of moments, when a vox-link had been pushed through on a secure channel.

Calax had reacted first to this and accessed the vox before patching Sanish into the link.

"This is Yor'Tar Dawne, Solar Watch respond" the faint crackle sounded in their helmets.

The second Blade-Champion of their cohort was calling, he had been called away on a long sweep of the Solar System and wouldn't have voxed through out of schedule if it wasn't important.

"Serjant Calax responding, report Blade-Champion, where are you?".

"Mercury, we have a problem. You are destroying some heretics on Terra correct?"

"Remember security protocols, that is not the subject for discussion over vox!" Castivar Sanish spat with venom, loathing the lack of security protocols.

"We don't have time, they belong to the Cult of the Eye, their leader Herath has just translated through a warp portal and rouses the masses here. We need the cohort to respond to the Mercury Command Hive, I'll do what I can and shunt a data-packet with what intelligence I have gathered, but I fear the upper reaches of the hive may be lost to corruption before we respond in force" a blast over the vox knocked out the signal.

Sanish and Calax looked at one another, then without saying a word broke away.

Sanish leaving the bridge to rouse the Shield-Captain from his training meditations and Calax calling out orders to recall all planetside units from their cohort, to bring the engines up to power and to plot a course to Mercury in as little a time as possible.

The race to Mercury, the race to stop the heretics and the race to support Blade-Champion Yor'Tar Dawne we're all just beginning...

*****

After a hobby break over the school summer holidays, and after finishing the previous Armoured Car, I have now managed to sit down and a nice painting session with these three characters from the Solar Watch army.

The first is the second Blade-Champion of the force, this time dual wielding his weapons:

He follows much the same as the previous Blade-Champion, I unconsciously followed the previous model and painted his cloak the deep red, when I had originally wanted to do this one black instead for some variation.

The biggest divergence is that he is bare headed. When I got the army from Fraser to paint, every model apart from the Shield-Captain had a helmet on and it looked odd for just that one model to be bareheaded.

So a pair of clippers and a little leverage cleared off some helmets and allowed me to replace them with Custodian bare heads.

The fleshtones add some painting variance into what becomes an essay in details as you have the work on the embossed filigree of the armour panels as you work around them.

In this case it is Cadian Fleshtone with a wash of Earthshade, a highlight with Cadian and then a wash of Riekland Flesh shade to finish.

Here he is next to the previous Blade-Champion:

The second character I finished off was this Vexilla:

I really like the imperious pose on this model, with the Vexilla held high for all to see.

Again it was just a case of sticking with the base palette of colours and working from there, no need to introduce extra colours into the scheme as it would just look messy then.

Lastly I finished off this Custodian Guard:

Another model down from the army, I know that Custodes don't have particular unit leaders, but this is the one featured in the story text above.

He follows all the usual colour scheme for the army and will be accompanied by a unit in due course.

With these three done, it brings the total count to:

To do:

• Shield-Captain 
• 8 Custodian Guard
• 3 Allarus Terminators 
• 6 Venatari

Done:

• 2 Sword-Champions
• Vexilla
• 6 Custodian Guard 
• 3 Allarus Terminators 

Twelve models down, Eighteen to go, I am planning on visiting Warhammer World at the end of the month (27th September) so am thinking of taking whatever I've gotten finished with me and getting a few photos on one of their lovely modelled terrain tables if they're free at the time.

Anyway, Until next time, have nice day...

Paul Sawyer - Fat Bloke.

 

I'm sure most of you, in the wargaming circle at least, will have seen the announcement by Warlord Games about Paul Sawyer recently:

The esteemed "Fat Bloke" when he was the editor of White Dwarf (arguably the best period of White Dwarf) and went on to become a co-founder of Warlord Games:

It's odd to write a post about a person you've never met, but this felt familiar somehow.

Paul Sawyer had such a lasting impact on the hobby, especially over the turn of the millennium and throughout his time with Warlord Games that I don't think a lot of people realise how much influence he had during that time. His legacy is such that it can dredge up memories which are over twenty-five years old and have such impact that I go back to reread the articles I talk about...

I remember as a kid grabbing White Dwarf each month and reading through it in the back of my dad's car on the way home from town.

My first issue was WD214, the Gorkamorka issue, and the very next issue, WD215 was the first on edited by Pauk Sawyer and it's often held up as a lot of people's favourite:

I still have my old battered copy, which I kept for the Piscina campaign in it, but looking back you could see the start of the inimitable style which would be the feature of the magazine for the next several years.

His fondness for self deprecating humour, infectious enthusiasm for the games and worlds, and of course, bacon butties all round:

The key of this time was having fun, and making what you could, which is what I think Paul Sawyer brought forward into everyone at the time.

WD222 with the Praetorian Vs Orks, Glazer's Creek scenario (Rourke's Drift, a scenario he would historically recreate with a Warlord Games box years later) is a fan favourite:

The bunker assault scenario with his White Scars Vs Graham Davey's Black Legion is another game which is up there which I remember devouring the article and going back to reread it again and again:

For me personally, I think the crowning achievement of his run with White Dwarf was the two issue battle report during the Armageddon campaign, issues WD248 and WD249:

With all the interacting tables and armies on display something I have always intended to do, but can never organise as I don't have enough friends:

The photo of him rubbing his hands before the carnage starts is a lasting memory, just how enthused he is in the middle of it all:

There are a lot more articles I could mention, like his Beastmen army and his Chaos army building series. Sadly I don't know much of what he got up to at Warlord Games as I never really followed the company, and during my late twenties/early thirties I sort of drifted in hibernation in the hobby for a while before getting back into it when I started this blog proper.

His own post, not the company one at the start of this post makes for sobering reading, even if it is lit through with his sense of humour:

What I do know is that whilst he will be missed by the community, we as fans will not understand the same level of grief that his family and friends will have. My own grief at loosing my dad to cancer won't compare to his family's as everyone is different and deals with things in their own way.

I wish him well to his end and for his family afterwards.

Thank you for the memories Paul.