Monthly Archives: January 2016

January Kickstarter Round Up

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Once again, I am going to bravely wade into the festering swamp that is Kickstarter and pull out a few shining nuggets of pure gaming gold.

First up a little gaming mat that’s cheap as hell:

SubF-X Gaming Mats

SUBFX

The second gaming mat Kickstarter from Ceri Designs, he returns a lot tighter with a more focused campaign. Last time was a similar deal £19 for a 3’ by 3’ full colour gaming mat. Great value, these are felt and through some sort of magic have really colourful designs on them. I got one of his last ones for X-Wing and its really bright and clear and at that price, you can’t really argue! This time the focus is on mats for a little game you might have heard of called Guildball. Last time he was quick as hell to get product out and didn’t over promise, a great way to run a campaign. He’s also really receptive to ideas, so if you don’t fancy Guildball (but you should) let him know what else you like and see what he can do.

Representation is Corehammer’s word of the week, so this project is right up our collective alley: Continue reading →

And They Shall Know No Fear: Female Space Marines in Warhammer 40k

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Warhammer 40k is the most popular wargame on the planet, full stop. It is a sprawling franchise that encompasses novels, video games, a theatrically released film, RPG’s, board games and miniature games (that happen to dominate its industry). The grimdark future world created by the Games Workshop design team decades ago still captures the imagination of gamers across the world and drives sales of a massive product line and supporting hobby supplies. This doesn’t surprise me; the world of 40k (and 30k) is pretty fucking cool. Even as I’ve aged out of their core demographic, Games Workshops dark vision of space has a lot that can draw me back in. Powerful imagery, insane power struggles and every aspect of military cultures turned up to 11. Massive hive cities where 100’s of millions of inhabitants live on top of each other in Dickensian despair, in their midst hide alien conspiracies and brutal gang warfare. Powerful manifestations of chaotic gods pour forth from a rip in space and time so massive its swallowed whole planetary systems.A devout order of space fascists, sitting in a fortified monastery on a surviving chunk of their destroyed planet, secretly hunting traitors from their own order. This world is batshit crazy and insane in some of the best possible ways. It’s a Tolkien fantasy world ripped to pieces, thrown into deep space andstitched back together with a punk rock ethos, space opera drama and a heaping helping of gothic trappings. Warhammer 40k is without question the showpiece game of the hobby (for better or for worse). It is the most popular, best selling, widely known and most visible game of the entire wargaming world. Sadly, it’s a game that is still lacking in female representation, and that’s some shameful shit. It’s a world that quite frankly deserves female Space Marines.

WDmarinecolours Continue reading →

40K Battle Report: Iron Warriors v Craftworld Iyanden

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IMAG0587Who misses the battle reports in White Dwarf? You know, actual hobby content. I’ve always enjoyed typing up a rough after action report for the email list, but wanted to do something better for the blog. So, when Brinton announced he was travelling overseas, and making a pilgrimage to Nottingham, the shout went up and a game was arranged at Warhammer World with Matt. Yes, Warhammer World, the location of *that* Apocalypse game, and the 40K spiritual depantsing for a good handful of the Corehammer crew. Hopefully a good game would get us back into it, so I wrote a narrative, we chose our armies, decided to play an objective game with the mission cards, and rolled some dice. A gallery of all photos taken can be found here

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Oath of Moment – The Dwarves no more shall suffer wrong – Part 1

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“The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.”

This time of year breeds resolutions like a fetid swamp spawns plague carrying mosquitoes. Gyms, health food stores and libraries get packed as legions strive for self-improvement after the decadent and sometimes soul crushing holidays. A newer better version of your life is tantalizingly close if you just change these small things, form new habits and check boxes off a list. Easy as can be right? Eat less, exercise more, be kinder, care less about work and more about friends, value experiences over things. Now resolutions rarely work, and often if you look back at previous resolutions you could just carry them forward year after year and nothing changes. Honestly, when you catalog what you don’t like about yourself, these are usually those things that don’t change, so you find some outward trait to attach meaning too. A month of pushing off hard in all directions, trying to do everything at once as part of the new you, crashes out, and by March you’re cheating yourself and by June you’ve forgotten all about it. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try though. This hard look in the mirror at the lazy bastard staring back at you is important, and can be quite positive, you just have to do it more than once a year. So this is the 1st of what I hope to be a monthly update where you have visibility into, and hold me accountable, to my gaming goals. Instead of just talking shit about all the things you should or could be doing, I’ll have to actually step up and produce. God help you. Continue reading →

Coremachine – Marching On A Dead End Road

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Been a while, hasn’t it?

To cut a long story short: I ragequit Warmachine and Hordes in January of last year like a right little stropper, and a few months later I bumped into Jon Webb (who runs SmogCon) and he said “oh hey, I’m calling in that favour, I need someone to run an IKRPG demo table this year”.

Iron Kingdoms Unleashed was the last big release for the IKRPG, and I had the Skorne Empire book as well (because I’m cheap for the sadistic little nutters), and because it’s a demo table I can’t really get by with cardboard markers and empty bases – models are called for. And if I’m doing something with models, I might as well do something like a proper army, and then a nice chap on Facebook had a Skorne all-in-one army box and Gargantuan he wasn’t using… you can see where this ends up. Continue reading →

Oath of Moment: Anvil of War

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My name is Tanya and I have a bucketload of shame. I have many models, shelves full of them, but almost nothing is painted. I know, I’m a monster. As someone who doesn’t play tournaments and barely gets to play due to living in a relatively isolated community, painting has always taken a backseat to my other nerdy endeavours. I’m also a very relaxed gamer; I love to play but I do not care if my opponent needs to proxy some stuff, or his/her models also aren’t painted, and certainly I don’t care if marines are in mix and match power armour. Seriously, let’s just play! I’m a busy woman: I am training to play my first roller derby game, I am a full time pawn broker, and I have other hobbies too(like RPG night once a week, and squeezing video and board games in every once in awhile). That being said, I want to work on painting more in 2016.

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2016 Oath Of Moment Challenge aka My Yearly Attempt To Eat My Hat

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Painted up for me courtesy of Chris Mcgreevy. A GW oldhammer Red Redemption cultist, a Wyvern from Reaper Miniatures and a Barrow Warden from Reaper’s budget Bones line.

Over the past couple of years we’ve developed a bit of a Corehammer tradition that we like to call The Oath Of Moment. At the dawn of each new year we take stock of our respective piles of shame. With sober and unclouded eyes the participants in this cleansing ritual swear a solemn vow to make a significant dent in reducing said pile. More often than not these well intentioned boasts of change and progress fall to the wayside by March but for some amongst our number these Oath’s have motivated some serious hobby development. Continue reading →

Unfinished Projects: Embracing the chaos of my mind

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If you have a hobby, you have projects. Honestly it doesn’t matter if you’re into miniatures, rpg’s, fishing, music, ridiculous cars or quilting, you always have things you want to be working on if you just had the time. Now the nature of our modern lives means we never have the time we think (or want) to move this stuff forward, which creates a backlog of unfinished, sometimes only dreamed of projects. This is the chaos of your mind. That disheveled area were wild ideas are left to roam. Now there are two methods of dealing with this chaos, especially in gaming.

  1. Complete each project you start methodically, focusing all attention and thinking on one thing at a time. Don’t even consider other creative endeavors until you’re at a finished stage on the previous item. When people ask what you’re working on, it will be the same thing as last time and you always complete what you start.
  2. Keep those dreams alive. Embrace your hobby wobbles and tangential flights of fancy filling your life with mental explorations of those things you’re passionate about. Love the chaos.

So if you can do method 1, congratulations, you’re probably a robot. Seriously, look at yourself hard in a mirror, try and remember the last time you got sick, have an expert ask you cross referenced questions about empathy with a Voight-Kampf machine, because you might not be human. If you can seriously tell me you never think about something new till you’ve finished the old, I don’t fucking trust you. This article is for the rest of us. Those that fall more squarely into method 2. It’s about the rich landscape of the mind and how planning projects, dreaming of armies/systems/terrain and games is an important part of the hobby that should be acknowledged and celebrated. Continue reading →