The Magmahold

  Here’s a quick blog on how I got on at Barleylands Brawl, a one-day Age of Sigmar event I went to a couple of weeks ago. Normally I cover Age of Sigmar events on my podcast (Three and Two: A Matched Play Age of Sigmar podcast), but my fellow podcast hosts and I have been to more events in January than we’re going to be able to fit into a pod, so I’m going to cover this one here instead. Barleylands Brawl is a recurring one-day event held at the Offworld Outpost store in Essex. It’s further away from me than I’d normally go for a one-dayer (I had to leave my house at about 6:15am to get there for a 9am start), but it’s run by some of my friends and I’ve never managed to make it to one before, so I wanted to make the effort. After a trek across London I made it there in decent time. The event is held in a function room above the store. It had natural light and a reasonable amount of space, excellent toilets, and even a little kitchen space, so 10/10 for facilities. I was runn...

2025 hobby goals review It's time to look back at my 2025 hobby goals and see how many of them I forgot about. Get my narrative Seraphon army to 2000 points I'm calling this one done. I'm not sure I technically made 2000 points, but I painted a bunch of new Seraphon and took them to the Shadowcon narrative event and had a lot of fun with them. I'm really pleased with how they came out, and my bastiladon is my favourite mini I painted in 2025. At some point I'd like to paint more and make it into a viable competitive army, but that's not going to be my main AoS hobby focus for 2026. My bastiladon Play some games with Kruleboyz I haven't done this. Looking back at my hobby goal post, I said I was planning to play some games with Kruleboyz and with Slaves to Darkness and see which I enjoyed most, and I'm pretty sure I got as far as the Slaves to Darkness bit, decided I was keen to play them more, and never did the Kruleboyz bit.I think this is probably the ...

  Following on from my 2024 wrap-up blog , here’s a quick post on my 2025 hobby goals. Get my narrative Seraphon army to 2000 points. This one is carried over from 2024 when I painted a grand total of zero Seraphon. It will hopefully be my main hobby project for the year, and I want to get stuck into it from late January once I’ve finished off a few bits I need to do to get my Kruleboyz on the table. I have around 1000 points painted, so it shouldn't be too difficult to add another 1000 points, and I love the Seraphon model range so I'm excited to paint more of them. Play some games with Kruleboyz My excitement for getting some matched play games in with Kruleboyz has been dampened slightly by my getting a vaguely competitive army painted up coinciding with the new Orruk Warclans battletome bringing with it some significant nerfs, but I still want to try out the army and get some games in. I’ve kept this goal intentionally vague so I’m not committing to running them at an e...

 It’s time for the obligatory end of year blog when I look back at the hobby goals I set myself at the start of 2024 , and think ‘oh gosh, I did mean to do that, didn’t I.’ Finish painting a useable 2000 point Kruleboyz army I think I can just about say I did this one. I started the year with around 1500 points of Kruleboyz and I did go back and paint some more bits to take it over 2000 points, but then AoS 4 came along and I was suddenly woefully short of Gutrippaz. I then forgot all about Kruleboyz for a while as I was focused on my OBR army, but there are twenty Gutrippaz on my painting table at the time of writing this, and I’m planning to start using the army in matched play in early 2025. Paint a Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game warband and play a few games with them This one I definitely did, no generous accounting needed. I painted a bunch of dwarves for the Army of Thror, and played some games with them. I enjoyed the system a lot and would have liked to have played m...

 I’m going to my first AoS 4 th edition tournament next weekend, so I thought I’d write a short blog about the lessons I’ve learnt from my first few games with the Ossiarch Bonereaper list I’m taking, in the hope that writing about the mistakes I’ve made drums them into my head enough that I don’t make them again at the tournament. The list I’ve been running is: General’s Regiment Katakros (500) Kavalos Deathriders (360) -           reinforced Regiment 1 Mortisan Soulmason (160) -           Lode of Saturation Mortek Guard (260) -           Reinforced Mortek Guard (130) Regiment 2 Liege Kavalos (210) -           Diversionary Tactics Kavalos Deathriders (180) Kavalos Deathriders (180) The artefact on the Soulmason is a 5+ ward, and the heroic trait on the Kavalos is -2 to ...

It’s time to look back at my year in the hobby and reflect on what I did and didn’t do. The TLDR version is: I went to a whole bunch of events, I painted a fair bit but not as much as last year, and I did about 50% of the things I started the year saying I was going to do. How did I do against my hobby goals for 2023? I didn’t write a blog about my hobby goals for 2023, but a search of the Discord archives revealed that I set myself the following hobby goals: -           Finish the Blood Kraken Reavers Done. I finished off this army, and took it to two events: one competitive and one narrative. It’s been a few months since I last did anything with them, so writing this blog was a nice prompt to take a look at them and remind myself how happy I am with them. I think they’re my best painted finished army, and I’m really happy with how the narrative elements and conversions worked out. I’d like to play more with them, so one project I’m ...

I’ve been struggling to figure out how I feel about the new Cities book, so I figured I’d blog about it and try to get my thoughts into some kind of order. At the point of starting to write it I don’t have a nice neat conclusion in mind so it might be a bit stream-of-consciousness, but we’ll see how it goes. Point 1: change in AoS is good for the game Before I get into the specific context of the new Cities of Sigmar battletome and range refresh, let me say that the pace of change is one of the things I like about Age of Sigmar. I like that the lore moves on in a reasonably meaningful way each edition, I like that Games Workshop are gradually replacing kits designed for the Old World with new more out there model ranges, and I like that the rules and the competitive meta evolve frequently. So regardless of my personal feelings about the new Cities stuff, I think that replacing the older Empire models is a good move by Games Workshop, and while I was very fond of the old Cities batt...

  Hey folks. I've been to a whole bunch of events since I last got round to blogging, so this month's blog is going to be a wrap-up of all of them.  A Crown of Salt and Shadows - AoS28 narrative event I did a full blog on this one already, which you can find here . It was a blast! I had a great time and would love to go to other similar events in future. As well as playing in the event I also had a lot of fun practicing my mini photography skills, I used my camera's macro lens and tried to get some atmospheric shots with very low depth of field, which was a good challenge. War in the Mortal Realms AoS narrative event This was a 2000 point AoS event run by Bad Moon Cafe back in June. I took my Living City army, which I painted back during lockdown but had never taken to an event before because it is terrible. But I figured a narrative event was a good opportunity to get it on the table. I'm still not sure how I feel about this one, it was great to see Bad Moon try to do ...