Warhammer 40,000

40k Ork Army Project: Grimmguttz’ Lads

This project has been a funny one, and an oddly therapeutic one. Accidentally therapeutic. Weirdly therapeutic.

Anyone who has been around this ramble factory for more than a minute knows of my love/hate/adoration/ambivalent relationship with Games Workshop. I freaking love 40k, and have for nearly 40 years.

And I kinda hate what it’s become, and the all consuming capitalist machine GW has become. I’ve been consuming GW media for nearly as long as there has been a GW, and while the games haven’t always been perfect, they were always pretty free spirited and anti-establishment.

Early Warhammer 40,000 was brimming to near overflow with the kind of punk energy that came to life to counter the Thatcher/Reagan political machine, and thumbing through a book or White Dwarf was sometimes akin to putting on a Black Flag album and knowing you weren’t alone in being pissed off at the direction the world was going.

Now, I look at GW and it feels a bit like running into someone I used to know in the old scene, but they’re sporting a suit and clutching scripture while desperately trying to fit in to the corpo world.

ICKY! It feels icky! Modern GW is pretty much everything classic GW was making fun of. Those guys weren’t worried about stock dividends and shareholder satisfaction. They wanted toy soldiers of comically fascist orks, disposable infantry, and uber-men that poked fun at the macho swagger that polluted the entertainment sphere of the time.

So, where does that leave an old-timer like me? I still love that space. I still enjoy the franchise. But it’s a lot like Disney era Star Wars– You’re playing my song, you’re hitting the right beat, but I’ll be damned if you aren’t much more than a pretty good cover band…

This Ork project was one I went in to with pretty open arms and a fairly open mind. I love miniatures, I love painting miniatures. Sometimes, I even enjoy playing the games that are out there that I use to justify loving miniatures. But I’m not a fan of the modern holders of the license, and their interpretation of the rules and I don’t mix well.

But, if I want to play a game with anyone, I pretty much have to have some grasp on 11th edition. So, my solution is to have a Combat Patrol sized force, with an army that hasn’t changed much unit wise since the edition I did like, which was 4th. Again, I know it has problems. But I know how to work around those problems, and it feels like properly cinematic wargaming to me.

Grimmguttz is my Warmaster, and he’s the dessert portion of this painting project. He’s also a little nod to my situation, as I use Grimmleigh* as a pen-name, and my guts tried to kill me. So, Grimmguttz. You’ll see him in a couple of weeks.

Grimmguttz in 11th will be leading a couple of squads of Boyz, a squad of Grots, a Weirdboy, and a buggy. In 11th, I’ll probably put some other goodies like Killa Kans and Dredds, but I’m not in a hurry.

Here’s the first squad of Boyz, lead by Skullpuncha. He’s the farthest up the leadership ladder this squad has with the Deathskulls, so he gets a little blue tattoo action. Everyone else has a little blue worked into their wargear, but they have to earn anything more.

I wanted to lean into a little pirate look for these guys, so there isn’t a unifying color scheme outside of the blue bits here and there. But I did do some stripes on some of the clothes, and plan on doing some other fun marking on boyz that have more clout in the gang.

The rule of thumb I’m trying to go by is that gear bigger than basic shootas should be stolen, so I’ll be stealing lascannons and other goodies from my bits box. I want these guys to look like they’re really only out there fighting because krumpin’ is the best way to get stuff to pinch!

The other rule is that nothing else is getting worked on until this Combat Patrol is done, which is driving me crazy… I like to have a buffet of projects in front of me, but I’m hoping that the desire to paint other stuff will help me buckle down and finish all the Orks I currently have!

The best part of this project, for me, at least, is that these guys translate pretty cleanly into 4th edition 40k. While 11th doesn’t let you do any gear shopping, I can clearly buy extra goodies and gear for my troops in 4th. So, while they don’t have a heavy weapon option for their squad yet, there’s room to buy one later, when Skullpuncha has earned the Teef for it.

Here’s the unit in 4th edition, clocking in at 70 points:

Here’s that same unit for 11th, which is 90 points no matter what I do equipment wise:

Like I said before, I like to shop for my toys. So even though the first unit actually cost the same 90 points as the second one if I buy the kombi-weapon, the fact that I can field 9 basic mooks and a nob for less points and build them up as I like them is a huge win.

Plus, the 40k rules for Killteam mean I can pick bits and pieces from a larger Ork army to make a cool action squad, which is always aces in my book! I’ll show that off as I get closer!

*Grimmleigh is a nod to The Damned song ‘Grimly Fiendish’ from the ’80s, which in itself was a nod to a long running comic strip in the UK… I’m not British, but my name is Leigh and I like that damned song, hahaha!

Workbench

The Workbench: Finished Models for September 13th, 2026

With last week being dominated by Trench Crusade, I thought it would be good to check back in with the overall backlog and see how things are moving along!

Black Templars Project

My friend Jackson is just about the best person you could hope to know. I’ve been fortunate to have quite a few friends like that, which is great for me! Jackson has a huge Black Templars army and I was happy to get in there and start painting them up. It’s funny, because this batch is the latest in a project that has been going on for about 7 months, I should probably post the rest of them sometime!

The Battle Standard Bearer is a fun one, still a little over-wrought with fiddly detail for my liking but I can’t deny the final product looks pretty spiffy. (Jackson has his own basing scheme that he likes to do, so that’s why the bases are unfinished)

I have no idea what this tank is, it’s a transport of some sort, but I stopped paying attention to what worked with Space Marines when Primaris stuff came out and made Rhinos useless. Getting rid of Rhinos would be like taking Space Mountain out of Disneyland. I’m against it. Still, the transport does look cool, it’s floaty, and reminds me of my Uncle’s El Camino.

Also not sure on the rest of these dudes, they have swords and shields, and I like knights. So I guess they are knights now? Fun to paint regardless.

And this last guy looks like a Chaplain. A big, grumpy chaplain.

Dracula’s America

Still plugging away at this warband, which I’ll be using Gangfight rules for when they’re ready to rock. There are two Draugur gunslingers and the vampire boss, all are 28mm metal casts from Northstar Military Figures in England. After painting a metric ton of Space Marines, I am really loving the opportunity to paint a classic feeling sculpt. I know they’re lacking in detail, but they just ooze personality, and I love knowing someone sculpted these by hand and cast them the old way. Not a knock against modern production methods, but I love the old method. It puts me in a very happy place!

Marvel Crisis Protocol: The Living Mummy

This guy makes me so damned happy. As previously discussed, I am a sucker for the old 70’s monster craze that hit Marvel and DC. The Living Mummy made his debut in I think 1974, and had sporadic releases for a few decades. He’s never been anything more than a minor character, so getting a really good miniature for him is part of why Marvel Crisis Protocol keeps me in its thrall. Fun stuff.

Warhammer 40,000: Orks

This is the project I’ll be working on the most for the next week or two, just getting the Orks from the new Armageddon boxed set finished. The New Antioch warband project from Trench Crusade was really satisfying to finish, and now I’m thinking that I’ll be approaching most of my projects like that. Just getting into a squad or two and getting them done, and being satisfied that they’re not sitting in the queue waiting forever for me to get to them.

I’m painting these guys up as Deathskulls, which will be fun since they steal everything they can get their hands on. That will help me keep off the boredom once the box set is done, I’ll be taking bits from other armies and adding them to kits to make it look like they’re just booting around with looted gear.

As for 11th edition 40k, I owe it a little debt for the freedom it gave me. I played a couple of games, bounced right off of the rules, the terrain layout, and the constant re-rolls (constant re-rolls feel like sloppy writing to me). This led me to pull out my old 4th edition books, and I remembered what I liked about 40k at the turn of the Milennium.

I like choice. I like fussing about with a list, buying wargear, building out the flavor of the unit. I could care less about meta, I just want to tell a story when I play a game. There is not a single person I know that’s interested in trying 4th out, so I’ll be doing anything I do with these minis on my own.

Which is freedom, frankly. 4th edition is far from perfect, but it’s fun for me, I know what I need to fix to make it work a little better, and I can build narrative lists that tell the kind of stories I want to tell with dice.

I have some Red Corsairs, Space Wolves, Inquisition, and Eldar Raiders that I’ll be building out to help tell those stories, but since this is just for me and NOT something that has to chase new rules collections, I’ll just be taking my time and getting this stuff together as the urge hits me.

After the orks, I’ll be tackling the new Trench Crusade two player box, and rounding out my Konflikt ’47 groups as well.

Until next time, friends! May the point of your brush remain ever sharp!

Workbench

Oops, I Did a Trench Crusade

Really, folks, I tried. It wasn’t for me, I said, fooling no one. It’s too gross, I said, not seeing past the butchered bits on some of the minis. It’s just another game, I said…

Then I looked at who had made Trench Crusade, and it’s literally a who’s who of designers that built my favorite game of all time, yes, the glorious brains that made Mordheim had assembled again, like the Avengers but probably more middle-aged and myopic. I thumbed through the rules, and the mechanics of the game system rolled over my eyes and directly into my brain.

This is the first time in nearly a decade that the rules to a game system have stuck with me just from reading the book. I know there’s some fine-tuning I’ll need to do, but the system is ridiculously simple and elegant at the same time.

I was still safe, though. I’m trying to stay away from resin minis because we just don’t know the long term health risks, and my doctors have encouraged me to just maybe not mess with something potentially toxic. Sadly for my wallet, that all changed when I stopped by my FLGS last week.

Glorious, beautiful, and down right dynamic plastic Trench Crusade figs were sitting there, playing a high-stakes game of chicken with my wallet. My wallet lost. I won.

Everything I love about plastic miniatures is front and center with the troops choices. You can put the weapons and heads you want on the bodies you want. Even the elites and command have a number of options, so you can just make what you want.

And as opposed to the modern GW system of “this is your dude, you get EXACTLY this and can’t change the weapons!”, you can put together pretty much whatever you want within certain limits. The Old World and Necromunda seem to be the only games that let you shop for gear, and that’s one of the reasons why I seem to like those two games… I want to shop, dammit!

This is the first time since Wild West Exodus that I bought some boxes of minis, went home, put them together, and just painted everything in a few days. It was amazing. I had the best time, and now I have 90% of a finished warband.

It’s also the first time ever that I’ve painted the entirety of a plastic range of miniatures, but that’s just because these just launched and there aren’t that many out yet.

Archon Studios did an amazing job with these minis, and the command and elite models are as good as anything I’ve picked up from GW.

My leader, the Hauptman I’ve name Karolina Katzenbach, has a tank-splitter sword and machine gun. She looks like she laughs in the face of danger!

The Feldkaplan (Field Chaplan) has wooden wings and a huge breaker sword, and literal Holy Hand Grenades. The fact that this warband is from New Antioch is not lost on me, either.

Sniper Priests blind themselves and let The Almighty aim their guns for them. They look so freaking cool.

Strosstruppen (shock troopers) come with a variety of weapons, my favorite is the guy with the sword and shield. I painted a praying skeleton with halo on the shield, just for fun.

And the yeoman are just basic cannon fodder, but the unit musician has a glockenspiel, so I imagine he’s got to be the first to die. Just thinking about someone clunking away on one of those while you’re trying to fight makes me laugh a bit…

Overall, great models, great game, and only as gross as you want it to be. And best of all, I’ve actually managed to talk a friend into coming up for air from 40k to check out the game, so I’ll make sure to let you all know how it goes!

Workbench

The Workbench: Finished Models for August 23, 2026

Another week down, and another check in with finished models off of my workbench!

Projects that are ON the bench but not yet finished: Heroclix Kingpin and Sin, 6 Black Templars, 1 Black Templar Land Raider, and some pickup-truck for hillbilly marines or something. Not sure, the Black Templars are for a friend, but they’re cool looking knights in my head! Also, Gladiator from Marvel Crisis Protocol.

This week’s finished models!

Elsa Bloodstone, Marvel Crisis Protocol

She has super-strength, loves guns, and considers being British a super-power! It’s Elsa Bloodstone, ass-kicking Monster Hunter and all around fun character to paint. This mini has been sitting in my back-log for years now, and the Midnight Sons faction is one I’ll be holding on to for MCP.

Orange is not a color I play with often, and I think I’m going to have to change that!

Carpathian Gunslinger, Dracula’s America

I love the concept of the game, but the rules are just not my thing. Still, great concept. I’ll be using these models for Silver Bayonet instead, which is great. I have had these guys sitting on a shelf for years, so it’s great getting some paint on him. Plus, I’m really enjoying these hand-sculpted casts, there’s something incredibly charming about painting the old-school stuff.

Austrian Paranormal Investigator, Silver Bayonet

Another rescued straggler from the back-log, I seriously love the no-nonsense look of the guy. Like I said a little earlier, there is something really gratifying about painting up something that isn’t 5,000 skulls bolted to a headpiece. This mini is solid pewter, one piece, and cool as hell.

I have some shacks and blasted buildings that would go really well in a Silver Bayonet game, so as soon as I get his unit painted up, I think I’ll be diving straight into this as my first solo game/battle report.

Hawkeye and Enchantress, Marvel Heroclix repaints

You can tell how simple these sculpts are, especially after seeing the Elsa Bloodstone mini above. These presented different challenges, and you can tell the newer Hawkeye mini has a lot more going on with the sculpt. But there is something really unexpectedly amazing going on with the Enchantress mini; she’s a very good early sculpt for Heroclix, and just radiating personality.

The Enchantress mini is proving to me EXACTLY what I was hoping to find when taking on this Heroclix repainting project– these minis are much better than they initially look, and with a little love and a little more work, there’s a world of cool toys that can be had for a very small amount of money.

There is no denying that the Elsa miniature is a better sculpt, and she was an absolute joy to paint for completely different reasons than Enchantress. But I find myself really proud of the Enchantress miniature, she was a challenge, and she rewarded my work and patience.

This was an absolute joy. What an amazing hobby we have!

Workbench

‘Clicking’ Into an Intervention

I have been a collector my entire life. My earliest memories are going from store to store with my mom, looking for Mego action figures to finish out my Star Trek and Super Hero teams. I grew up with a single mom, and even after she married (when I was seven) we still had some pretty lean years, with the early ’80s being particularly brutal.

Me with Scotty and Uhura at the pool, 1975.

My parents did their best, though, and somehow I always had a couple of D&D books for holidays, and my dad always made sure I had a few dollars every month to get my comic books. Sure, it was easier with comics only being thirty-five (then fifty-five) cents, but he was only making about four dollars an hour, too. Still, we made do.

That may have led me to compulsive collecting. I’ve never been chill about it; when I had money for Star Wars figures, I had an end goal of collecting a hundred Storm Troopers, because that seemed really freaking cool. When I stumbled into miniatures in the mid-eighties, I wanted everything… which wasn’t too hard to do, since everything was sculpted by hand and cast in lead. So there really wasn’t a warehouse of temptation waiting for me whenever I found a store that stocked minis.

My favorites back then were Ral Partha minis, especially those sculpted by Julie Guthrie. She did some brilliant sculpts, and when the industry shifted to pewter instead of lead, the miniatures were just a little crisper in detail, which made her work pop even more. I learned to paint with those early figs, and had a few dozen monsters and adventurers lined up for my D&D games.

Classic Julie Guthrie Skellies from Ral Partha, still available for purchase!

When my local comic shop started carrying Games Workshop stuff, I bough my first box of Space Marines, which was 30 plastic dudes for about ten bucks. I also got a copy of Rogue Trader, and man, was I hooked.

If you had this, it’s time to book your colonoscopy…

Here’s the thing about being hooked on 40k in 1989, though; there were probably less than a hundred models at first. Fantasy was the bigger franchise for Games Workshop back then, and they were still making stuff for Dungeons & Dragons. So being hooked wasn’t going to put me in the poor house, and I could afford a fresh blister pack every payday and still keep up with the sporadic releases.

Now, keeping up with just about ANY miniature line is going to put you in an interesting financial predicament. If you want to collect an army for 40k or Age of Sigmar, you could easily spend a thousand dollars, and that’s just for funsies. I know tournament players who spend even more, as they try and chase the meta and stay on top of the most competitive releases.

And that’s not even getting into the fire-hose of releases GW puts out every week. Luckily, I’m not a huge GW guy (even though they’ve still managed to get some money out of me in the last few months).

Marvel Crisis Protocol was another beast altogether, though. These are super dynamic miniatures, and they’re big, beautiful, and fun to paint. The release schedule isn’t as robust by any means, and if you were only interested in one team or faction, you could get the ten minis you needed to play the game for anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dollars. That’s downright cheap in the miniature wargaming hobby!

But, if you’re a collection minded sap like me, MCP is dangerous. I love that world. I grew up in that world. I built my adolescent moral compass reading comic books, so I’m not going to be so good at resisting the temptation when new kits come out each month.

I gotta catch them all, dammit!

I’m trying not to be that guy anymore. As I mentioned earlier this year, I’m finding more and more examples of how rampant collecting can be devastating for families when that collector dies. I’m also trying to have an office that doesn’t look like a pinata stuffed with war dollies exploded in it.

The new Nimrod box almost got me. Actually, it did get me. I bought it, after selling off almost my entire collection of MCP minis. And once I had that, I had that monkey on my back again, and I was making plans on how to aquire that old collection again. After all, it was only $65 for that Nimrod box, how bad could it be if I spent a year or two getting the old minis back? I still haven’t completely talked myself out of it.

Luckily, they’ll be easy to return if I choose to go that route…

What a junkie I am. Luckily, I managed to have an emergency intervention with myself before it got out of control… yet.

I realize that it would be silly to deny myself the fun of collecting and painting super hero minis. There really isn’t anything wrong if I wanted to go whole-hog into MCP again, either. At the end of the day I wouldn’t be endangering anything other than my discretionary income. So I’m going to allow myself to collect supers. I’m just trying to pull back on MCP.

They are big, for one, and take up a lot of space.

Second, they’re expensive. Not in the “get a squad and you’re set” kind of way, but definitely if you want to collect the entire range, or at least get all the characters you like… which in my case, is most of them.

At an average of $15 per figure, the minis would get really cost prohibitive, really quickly. And stay that way, too, since Atomic Mass Games tends to release at least two boxes (at $65 each) every month. That math tells me my discretionary budget would be just a Marvel Crisis Protocol budget.

Luckily, I already had a solution to this issue. And it’s a fun one, because I’m stubborn and really enjoy ridiculous challenges. And it’s a solution that is about 1/15 the cost!

Yeah, I’m talking Heroclix. And yeah, I know they look like ass for the most part. But, with a little work, you can make them look like a pretty acceptable kind of ass, which is where all the fun comes in!

(And honestly, they only look like ass compared to modern mass market sculpts. Compared to a lot of the indy studios, or the stuff I grew up with, they look great.)

Plus, they take up about a third of the space of the Marvel Crisis Protocol figures. Here’s a couple that I already had painted up!

I placed an order for some used Clix, which came in at about a buck a figure. I got some heroes, a couple of standard goons, and a few of my favorite goofball villains from the silver age comics that I love. This is what came in that box when it arrived yesterday:

That’s 29 miniatures, which came delivered to my house for a total of $35 when shipping was added in. That’s about half of the price of a box of three MCP models. I totally get that I am intentionally getting a far inferior sculpt, and that there’s some work that will need to be done to get them looking good.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of work that goes in to making any miniature look good. The MCP figs need to be assembled, mold lines need to be cleaned, and the mini needs to be primed. The Clix? Well, they’re assembled. Sometimes poorly, but assembled. The mold lines need to be cleaned up, but for all intents they only need to be primed if you want to prime them. The factory basic paint they come in is primer enough.

This will be a fun project! And even better, there are tons of costume variations for the characters that have been made over the last 26 years of production. For folks like me who are really tired of the Jim Lee X-Men costumes, this is welcome news!

I’m not saying I won’t buy more MCP. If I do, I plan on just sticking to mutants or characters I really like, and using the Clix project to tame the wild collector in me. My wife is already laughing at my really convincing resolve with this idea.

I’ll keep you updated on this silly new project… oh, and another thing! The Clix are 28/30mm scale, so they’ll fit with my existing minis and terrain. I even have some ideas on how to work powers into my game engine!

More soon… I’ve gone on long enough!

Workbench

The Workbench: Finished Models for August 16, 2026

I’m trying a little change-up here, realizing that adding some substance to my blog posts like a couple of my favorite bloggers do would be a good thing. Still plan on posting pics, just maybe a little more thought into the context as well!

First off the block is Moon Knight for Marvel Crisis Protocol. One of my favorite characters from the Marvel comics of my youth, he’s like Batman, but the insanity is surface level instead of suppressed. The challenge with a character like him is that white is a bastard to paint convincingly without looking like you had an accident at a chalk factory!

I went really slowly and deliberately with Mark, starting with a pretty bright undercoat of Wolf Grey, then doing a zenithal highlight with White Blue, then layering in some very subtle white glazes. I’m pretty exclusively using Pro Acryl paints these days, the pigment count seems to be pretty high, and very finely ground as well. This really helps a ton, and I’m really happy with the result!

Another MCP figure, this time a mutant menace named Avalanche. He’s also part of the super-hero A-Team, which is guys that have an “A” on their costume, like Apocalypse and Animal Man.

Avalanche also has a bit of white to him, so I used the same technique as with Moon Knight, then my standard super-hero blue. The water was painted with the same blue, just different highlights and shading. I also had some fun with the fire hydrant, which was just blocked in quickly over a dark red undercoat. Sometimes, simple is best!

On the skirmish front I painted up another couple of soldiers to use with Warhammer Empire themed groups, the first is another Witch Hunter. I’m calling her Grizelda Kaine, and she has some of the same bright color choices as my Witch Hunter captain. I’m really enjoying bright color pops in my fantasy!

There’s also a Gallant, which is a type of lesser knight from Age of Sigmar. He’s cool, and has a weirdo frog on his helmet. Since I’m really not caring much about AoS, he’ll see action in skirmish games like Frostgrave and Five Leagues from the Borderlands.

With the new edition of Necromunda coming out yesterday, I wanted to have a color test done for House Orlock. Normally I’m not a fan of this gang, but I wanted to try something quick and dirty to see how it looks.

I underpainted the mini blue with a red zenithal highlight, then went over the upper part of the mini with a lemon yellow drybrush. The bottom part of the figure is mostly washes, with metallics picked out to show some contrast. I spend some extra time on her skin and shirt, and I’m actually looking forward to painting more Orlocks now!

I’ll be playing some Necromunda solo, so if you’re interested in my thoughts on the new edition, let me know in the comments! I was going to try and arbitrate a game with some friends, but I never know week to week if my health is going to play nice with me.

And wrapping things up for this week is Marley the Ghost, part of the Moonstone Shades line that I backed a few years ago. Sadly, that all happened right around the time I got sick, so I didn’t get a chance to get any painted while recovering. Happily, I have a really cool collection of ghosts and zombies to paint now, and plan on having these done for Halloween this year! Goals are good!

Marley was really fun to paint, I used Jade and light Jade from Pro Acryl, and shaded up from there with white blends. The eyes are yellow, layered up from orange, and the robes were terra cotta with lemon yellow mixed in for highlights. This is probably my favorite mini from this month so far, and I’m really looking forward to painting more!

For this coming week I have some Black Templars to finish, as well as more MCP figs. I’m hoping to get some of the new Escher minis from Necromunda on the table as well, but we’ll see how things go!

Until next time, I hope your projects go well and you treat yourself kindly!

Workbench

Coming Down with a Bad Case of The Old World

There I was, minding my own business at my FLGS. I had stopped in to pick up some of the new (to me) utra-metallic metallics from Vallejo (which are freaking amazing) and then everything went fuzzy.

When I came to, I was sitting at my hobby desk, with a freshly assembled unit of Chaos Marauders from Warhammer: The Old World in front of me. Holy hell, I did a nice job putting them together, too!

This is obviously what happened, since the reality of just seeing these amazing minis in the shop, shrieking like a schoolgirl at a BTS show and deliriously buying these beauties in a state of delirium doesn’t sound as cool. I’m a super manly man, mind you. I don’t swoon at just any war-dolly.

Just most of them. Here’s the first finished minis, looking damned fine and ready to kick some teeth in:

The unit leader is called Karga, she’s from a Warhammer Underworlds warband, but she looks cool with this group, so she’s the leader. The mini might even be a dude, who cares. She’s Karga. The Ruinous Powers care not for the gender binary.

She’s backed up by Hjork, who is wielding a banner of the Carrion Crow. The Carrion Crow is definitely not Nurgle, or any kind of Chaos God. Just a freaky cool crow who brings disease and laughs at mortals whilst they sleep.

The other three dudes don’t have names yet. Karga cares not for names until these milk drinkers earn them. Then Karga might stop calling them Meat.

The long term on this project is going to be a full-on Chaos warhost, supplemented by some Nurgle duders from Age of Sigmar because those sculpts are sweet as hell. I also have a bunch of stuff from Darkwater that’s going to fit in really, really well.

And for once, there’s no time limit on these guys. I’m just going to have fun and paint. Fun is good.

As for The Old World? It’s a good time! As I was thumbing through the rules I was really happy to see how much they had streamlined the old ruleset, which was pretty bloated and cumbersome. It’s still a little bloated, mind you, and you could bludgeon a small contingent of halflings with the FAQ alone, but it feels a bit like home.

Uncategorized

Disability and the Art of Hobby Maintenance

After several years of processing and waiting, the United States Government has decided to agree with a panel of doctors and medical professionals, and has declared that I have indeed been attacked by several traitorous organs and am not capable of sustainable, “meaningful employment”.

In other words, I am disabled.

This is an interesting thing to be in the United States right now. We are largely governed by venture capital bros who believe in meritocracy above and beyond anything else, and the meritocracy crowd doesn’t look too keenly on disability. The feeling is that if you are disabled, that you are a drain on society, even though I have been working and paying into the system full time, often with a second job, since 1984.

That’s 42 years. And somehow, I’m struggling internally with being entitled to benefits that I have been paying in to my entire damned life.

So, what does that have to do with hobbying? At the end of the day, everything.

I have about three, sometimes four, good hours of energy every day. Hence, the not being able to sustain a profession bit. Of that three to four hours, I have to exercise for at least 30 minutes, if not an hour, or the vein feeding my liver could collapse and kill me, since my abdomen is so jacked up after five surgeries that there’s no way to fix that vein without potentially killing me.

Defusing the bomb is as dangerous as the bomb.

Doing my hobby helps me turn off the gibbering horde that takes up residence in my psyche, the Doomsday Chorus that likes to remind me that every day is potentially borrowed time. That’s fine, though. I’ve had a remarkably cool life and have very few regrets.

That doesn’t stop the Gibbering Horde, though. Painting, on the other hand, does. So… I paint. Literally, I paint, therefore I am.

I am calmer, I am more at peace with this stage of my life, and I am able to focus on adoring my wife and rejoicing in my time on this (currently burning) rock as it careens about the universe.

There is a lot to be said about hobbies and mental health. And there is a lot to be said about stilling those voices that influence us and steer us away from our better selves. This has led me to deleting my social media accounts, stepping away from the podcast I have been part of for 18 years, and fine-tuning my YouTube content to exclusively hobby based channels.

It’s been liberating. And because of that liberation, those few hours of energy that I have became more restorative. Every brush stroke or assembled figure is a hard-won symbol of serenity for me. A sign that I am weathering my own personal storm, and maybe can show the way for others struggling as well.

The hobby, as it is, can be maddening. There’s a million people out there screaming about “the meta”, and debating the merits of this list, that model, the new game system that’s potentially going to pull a David on the Goliath in Manchester. It doesn’t have to be this way.

We can find peace in our wargames, as ironic as it feels to say that.

I hope you all find some time to rejoice in our hobby today, to escape our grim reality and fire off some joyous endorphins with whatever worlds bring you happiness. It’s an amazing hobby, full of amazing people.

Thanks for stopping by. Be good to yourselves, and happy hobbying!

Fantasy Art, Mordheim, skirmish games

Mordheim: The Song of Wretched Flanders

Flanders was, as the saying goes, gifted with the wits of a rock. That may have been from the stray stone that glanced off of his forehead as a small child, or it could have been from ingesting a steady diet of rats since being separated from his family at a young age.

Fear not, gentle reader. Rats are, of course, generally good for eating, as long as one knows which are healthy, and which carry plague and other foul humors of the blood. Flanders, being rather dim, did not discern between rats that were good eating or those that were best left to molder in the gutters. He was a hungry lad, and ate whatever he came across.

Which made him rather big, surprisingly. He was lanky, muscular in a sinewy way, and rather fond of crashing about the slums of the city. While dreadfully dim, he was possessed of a enthusiasm for living, and sang loudly of all the things he loved whilst he cantered about.

He was also easy to hire for odd jobs, and many a merchant found he would work tirelessly at any labor for the promise of gruel and a dry palette to sleep upon. Some found he worked even harder for heartier fare, and would pull a wagon better than a small team of oxen if fed well.

Flanders life changed during one such job, pulling a sledge through a neighborhood affectionately dubbed “Rottersville”. This area had suffered a withering blight, and the survivors shuffled about in the alleys and sewers, flesh hanging gray from their bones.

Even the rats avoided Rottersville, but it was the fastest way from the Merchant district to the temple. Flanders was attacked by nearly a dozen of the shambling denizens, who had succeeded in pulling him to the ground when one of them started eating his arm. Then the others, smelling the aroma of fresh meat, set to it.

Flanders screamed. He screamed and screamed. He screamed until his lungs burned and his eyes stung with tears.

And then, the Angel came. Mighty arms clad in mail swung a hammer with righteous enthusiasm, each blow ringing out like a thunderbolt from the heavens.

The rotters either fled, or met their violent end.

The Angel stood over Flanders, then called to his fellows, a rag-tag group of priests, hunters, and penitents.

“Tend to this Wretch’s wounds, feed him, and when he is able, bring him to me.”

Thus did Flanders find that he was Wretched, and his heart was filled with light and joy.

Wretched Flanders is an interesting kitbash project, which came partially out of desperation. The Flagellant from the classic GW Empire line is great, especially if you’re using them with other classic GW minis. But if you put one next to a newer model, they’re REALLY short. With a good portion of my Witch Hunters warband being made up of newer models, I needed a Flagellant that looked formidable and perhaps a little scary.

I took some bits from the classic kit, like the brazier clad head, weapons, and whatever the hell that book thingy is, and added them to a stock Kruleboy Orc body. Those guys are really stringy and muscular, and using them for a human really makes them look like they’ve been to hell and back.

The final product does the job nicely, I think! I also decided it would be fun to actually draw out his character card, which is something I loved doing in the ’80s with my D&D characters. We’ll see if that’s something I keep doing as the warband fills out!

Marvel Crisis Protocol

Marvel Crisis Protocol Project, Part One

A friend reached out and asked if I could take on his MCP project, and being as how I can’t really do much at the moment, I was happy to get to work! Plus, working on someone ELSE’s project means I’m not buying and storing the minis later, right?

There’s some that I’ve done before, like Beta Ray Bill and Ulik, but a number I’ve never set brush to before, so there was some refreshingly new minis to paint!

I tried some new stuff with Ulik and Bill, mostly with the electricity effects from Stormbreaker. Ulik’s scalemail got a little extra shine, since I wanted to try out the new Ultra-metallics from Vallejo, which are super tasty.

This particular Black Panther and I had never met before, and I realized I hadn’t painted an actual water effect in a decade or more, so that was a fun challenge! This was also my first time taking on Dracula, and I had a blast with him. Great figure all around!

I also got to paint another Abomination, which is one of my favorite minis in the line. He’s just chunky as hell, and you can dig in and slap a lot of paint and undertones onto him.

There’s more coming, so stay tuned!