Anyone interested in a convention report covering five versions of the same RPG scenario, with no pictures of the actual content (because I was too busy running the games to faff around with any of that Instagramming-pictures-of-your-dinner nonsense), plus a single insanely casual game of Hordes vs. Warmachine?
Also, an obnoxiously British gatorman and his friend.
I hope so, ’cause that’s what you’re getting.
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
Because the first thing you do when you’ve paid off your overdraft and credit card is naff off to a one-day festival. Obviously. Johnny Rose (Thirteen Shots/Undead Artists) and Tommy Creep (Lupen Tooth/Graveyard Calling Records), the left and right ventricles of the UK horrorpunk scene, hoisted the Travelling Morgue banner over Birmingham three weeks back and your correspondent wasn’t going to say no to nine bands for a tenner.
I bleed you for one and the edge, but what more can I do?
Give in to the hunger and savour the best parts of you
Meat and metal, all must die
All but I…
In the comments to the last of these little diatribes I hinted that the imminent release of Codex: Necrons might stick a spanner in my Orky workings, and this has turned out to be true… up to a point.
editor – this article was originally posted by Von on his blog
This post follows on from a discussion of unexpected quality on Your Dungeon Is Suck of all places: start here, then skip some crap when the thread winds down and resume here. Try to look past the Bad Words that are used and engage with the substance of the arguments and I hope you would get the sense that everyone is thinking about what they’re saying for once, even if they happen to be Wrong from a given point of view.
Talking this issue over with Hark, she brought up the oft-mentioned point that while not being A Woman, I have seldom wanted for female players in my own games. I’ve had three all-male groups in my lifetime, one in a single-sex school and two derived from wargames clubs. I suppose the game I hosted at FanBoy3 in Manchester is an oddity in that everyone who responded to the ad was male, and there was only a woman in that group because I brought Hark along. For me, an active roleplaying game WITHOUT female players is the anomaly: according to Her Harkship I can pull hot female roleplayers out of my ass wherever I go. Either I’m some sort of Intellectual Love God, or I’m doing something appallingly basic that your average podgy bearded gamer dude isn’t
You do realise, don’t you, that goth came from punk? If you were transported back to 1984 you wouldn’t recognise the goths. And they’d laugh at you. Particularly if you told them how everyone would revere the Sisters as the One True Goth Band.
– The Box of Delights
This isn’t an origin story. This isn’t the first record I ever bought (it’s actually a couple of years older than I am, for one thing), not is it the first thing I ever heard by Leeds’ finest export. This is not the “I heard this for the first time and it totally blew my mind” post. This is the “I heard this for the first time and it made up my mind” post.
We shoot without a gun,
We’ll take on anyone,
It’s really nothing new,
It’s just a thing we like to do!
You’d better get ready to die
You’d better get ready to kill
You’d better get ready to run,
’cause here we co-o-ome,
You’d better get ready to die!
2015 arcs toward us with all the subtlety of an anvil in flight (in fact, by the time this gets posted, it may well have hit us head-on), and a new year invariably means a cack-handed attempt at pledges. You know how it works. Hand on heart, we stand up and swear that this year will be different. This year we’ll stick to our budget, we’ll do the whole open-accounting thing, we’ll decide on our projects NOW and we’ll see them through the year…
… and then, like a vegetarian who smells a bacon sandwich, we come around, covered in crumbs and grease, stomach churning and yet vaguely satisfied, wondering if there’s any ketchup left after what we just did to ourselves.
Can’t you see my death-fear?
I can hear her voice
Shoutin’ everywhere
Who knows what I’ve done
It must be so bad
That a witch does care…
Who fancies a walkthrough of a Warmachine army list? I hope it’s you, because that’s what you’re getting. If you’ve sat through my boring video you have some idea of how the rules work, and if you’ve encountered the Warmachordes community before you’ll probably know that we’re a very game-focused lot. That’s not to say that we don’t care about background at all, but when it comes to the crunch we’re not here for the fluff.
Punk: a style or movement characterized by the adoption of aggressively unconventional and often bizarre or shocking clothing, hairstyles, makeup, etc., and the defiance of social norms of behavior, usually associated with punk rock musicians and fans.
Of course, we all knew that around here, didn’t we?
A few years back, hobby blogger and all-round thoughtful bloke Dave G posted a very well considered post about the… not to put too fine a point on it, the saminess of the high-end paint-jobs that you see around the place. The point was not to deny the skill, talent and bloody hard work that goes into learning to paint the Serious Business way, but to ask whether we can or can’t and should or shouldn’t be doing something different, just because… well, you see one realistically-done lovingly-weathered pseudo-historical not-a-brushstroke-in-sight Khador army, you’ve seen ’em all. Is it good form to pursue the Golden Daemon or Cool Mini Or Not style, or is it better to follow your heart and realise your own vision?
High tide
Wide eyed
Dread in monochrome
Denied in spite
Disliked in monochrome
Panic in their eyes
Rise
Dead and monochrome
Well now, that ‘once a month’ thing ain’t quite working out how it should be, but I have been busy, I promise. Check this out.
It turns out that being a lazy bastard and not painting your figures properly (under the pretence that it’s in some way artistic) yields positive results; I’ve cranked out about 75 points of Cryx including two warcasters at a fair old rate of knots.