The Magmahold

 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’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...

It's been a while, but one of my hobby resolutions for 2023 is to get back into regular blogging, so here goes! Catching up Since I last updated this blog about 18 months ago, I've: finished my Sons of Behemat army finished my Ossiarch Bonereaper army painted a Slaves to Darkness army (see below for more details!) painted a decent chunk of a Kruleboyz army started a podcast. Check out the latest episode at  https://tinyplasticpeople.com/podcast/three-and-two-episode-8-bbb/ I'm going to skip over most of this, and focus on the hobby I'm most excited about right now, which is my new Slaves to Darkness army, the Blood Kraken Reavers. Concept The idea behind my Slaves to Darkness force is that they used be on the side of Sigmar, fighting for the city of Anvilguard. They were away from the city when it fell to Morathi and became Har Kuron, but rather than accepting that they joined the forces of the resistance, hoping to take back the city. They weren't strong enough to ...

  The run-up to AoS 3.0 was meant to be an opportunity for me to finish off my OBR army, and take things easy while I waited to get hold of some of the new Stormcast models. Instead, I started a whole new army project. There are two reasons for this:  - I played Sons of Behemat in a Tabletop Simulator game and had fun smashing things  - I got AoS 3.0 FOMO. AoS 3.0 has lots of new rules for monsters, and my existing AoS armies aren't big on monsters. I also got a bit demotivated for my OBR because the list I was building towards was based around a big unit of 15 Kavalos Deathriders, which seems unlikely to be viable competitively in the new edition. So I've made the decision to pause that project temporarily until all the new edition points and FAQs are out, and I can rethink what models I need to finish that army off. Instead, I've started a Sons of Behemat force. They'll let me play with all the new AoS 3 toys, should be pretty quick to paint, and will be a fun army to...

 I didn't get round to doing a hobby round-up post in March, so this is going to be a bumper post covering two months of hobby progress. Last month's goals 1. Paint the Mortek Crawler: done. This felt quite tricky to paint, because it features a lot of areas of bone colour which given the fairly dark scheme for my OBR could easily have been quite boring. I ended up introducing a second bone colour of dark grey tinted purple to try to make it a bit less plain, and am reasonably happy with how it came out. 2. Paint the Underworlds Seraphon warband: done. I'd been looking forward to these, but the colour scheme I'd planned didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, and I ended up painting them pretty quickly. They're probably my least favourite of the Direchasm Underworlds warbands I've painted so far, but at least I'm still on track with my goal of painting each warband before the next is released. 3. Convert and paint a Celestial Hurricanum for my ghost dw...

  I've not been great at blogging this month, but let's do a quick review of the last month's hobby, and what I'm hoping to get done next month. I didn't set myself any specific hobby goals for January, but I've ended up getting quite a bit done. I've painted a steam tank and a treelord for my ghost dwarf army. I'm really happy with these, I think they do a good job of conveying the army narrative, and also look cool. I've painted two thirds of the Bloodbowl starter set: all of the black orc team except the star player, and half of the human team. Nothing fancy here, but I think the colour schemes work well, and I'm pleased with the bases. What am I planning to do in February? I have an ambitious three goals for February: Finish the Bloodbowl starter set (ten minis remaining). Paint Khagra's Ravagers, the new Underworlds warband that's due out next week. Build all of and ideally paint some of the Ossiarch Bonereaper stuff in my shame pile...

 Let's see how I did against last month's goals, and plan what I'm going to work on this month. Last month's goals 1. Finish my Kharadron Overlords army: done! I did a whole blog post on it and everything. I'm really pleased with this project, and hoping to get a lot of games in with them once it is safe to meet up with people again. 2. Work on my display board: complete! I blogged about this last week . It was nice to try something a bit different, and I'm happy with how it came out. Because I've left it slightly more than a month between these posts, I had some time to spare so I also painted ten Mortek Guard as a test project for a possible Ossiarch Bonereaper army. I haven't fully made up my mind yet whether I want an army of them, but I'm definitely leaning that way.  And I also finished off ten Irondrakes who were left over from last month, and painted this dwarf thief from Bad Squiddo Games. This month is going to be about a few small project...

 I made my first ever display board for Armies on Parade this year. I really enjoyed making it and am very pleased with how it came out, so thought I'd write a short guide to how it did it. I found when I was researching that there were a lot of videos on making display boards and terrain, but not that many blogs, and personally I prefer written guides for this sort of thing. Here's a picture of the finished board. I'm pleased with it because: it meets my initial vision for it, which was my Tempest Eye army marching through a canyon; and I think it looks like the models belong in that world, the board fits with their bases very well. If I was doing it over again, the three things I'd try to do better are: take better photos - I really struggled with this; put the tree at the front - this is the bit of the board with the most detail (there are a lot of birds in and around the tree), but it gets a bit lost in the middle and was hard to bring out in photos; improve the loo...

 I finished my Kharadron army yesterday, so this week's blog is going to be a picture heavy army showcase for them. Here's the whole force. I have around 3000 points I think, which gives me quite a few list options to play with. It's a weird time to have finished this army: I'm not able to play games at the moment due to local covid-19 restrictions, and it seems pretty likely that Kharadron will see some points increases if there is a winter FAQ this year, so the army could be in quite a different place by the time I'm able to get it on the table. But I'm looking forward to when I'll eventually be able to get some games in with them, regardless. I started off painting just a few units to go alongside my Tempest's Eye force, and then decided to expand it when the Aether Wars box came out in early 2020.  Here are all the foot troops. The arkanaut company were probably my favourite models in the army to paint, they're a lovely kit, and I think my colour...

  Let's review how I did against the goals I set myself last month, and look at what I'm hoping to get done this month. Last month's goals 1. Paint a second frigate and repair my first one: complete ! I love painting Kharadron boats, so this was a fun project. 2. Paint 10 irondrakes for my ghost dwarf force: complete ! I even made a start on a second box, but ran out of steam on them partway through so they're sitting on top of my shame pile at the moment. 3. Plan my armies on parade board, and get together the materials I need to make it: partly complete . I have a rough plan (which I'll go into in a future post), but haven't picked up any of the stuff I need for it yet. I need to spend some time watching terrain tutorial videos to figure out how best to go about it. Not a bad hobby month though, all in all. This month the main thing I want to do is to finish off my Kharadron Overlords army. I have all the models I need, and they're all built, so I just nee...

  This is a quick run-down of the hobby projects that I’m working on, or planning to start working on over the next month. The plan is to make this into a monthly series to document what I’m hoping to achieve each month, and then review how much of that I actually got done. 1.       1.   Kharadron Overlords My Kharadron Overlords are my third Age of Sigmar army. I’ve got around 2000 points painted up already, but I have some more I want to do before I’ll call them finished. My plan is that they’ll be my main ‘competitive’ AoS army for the next year or so (I’m not a very competitive AoS player, but I’d like to go to some events once covid-19 allows, and this is probably the army I’ll take). They’re a very vanilla army with no conversions or anything, but they’ve been fun to paint. Ambition for September: Paint a second frigate, and repair my first which has a broken flying stand. 2.       2.   Ghost Dwarves My ghost dwarves...