Hobby Guilt Post 3
Adam:
This probably isn’t the most interesting Hobby Guilt post that will be going up across the next few weeks, but there has been some progress, after a fashion.
With all my armies, I have always been a fan of large batches and going through everything in stages: Build everything, Undercoat Everything, Paint everything, Base everything. I think this stems from a misspent youth attending lots of tournaments (and doing very badly, may I add!), where I would need to complete one or two large armies a year. This Hobby Guilt season I am following this tried and tested method to maximise productivity.
Therefore, I have spent the last two weeks completing assembly of the majority of the models that will feature over the rest of the series and then getting a quick undercoat down. In some cases this has even stretched to getting colour on to the bases, another thing I like to do early on in the army building process, but no further.
In addition to the models that you saw in our last post, I have assembled the remainder of the infantry required for my Flames of War army and got these undercoated.
I have also gone wildly off track and dragged in a further element to my Hobby Guilt: the other half of my Soviet army which has remained in boxes for the latter half of this year. At least progress has been swift. Two full Rifle Squads are assembled and undercoated. There are a few more models which I need to tinker around with to round out other elements of the army, for example to create loaders for the Light Machine Guns I built when I acquired my core set (showing that assembling a full army without reading the rules first isn’t necessarily a great idea!), but a number of them are in a state ready to get some paint on. However as you can see, there’s still a few more to build!
I have also built but not sprayed a large anti-tank gun (ZIS-3) to help me out when facing those dastardly Germans. Anti-tank rifles just don’t cut it against big cats!
My first project for completion is probably going to be my ShadeSpire Knights as, being only three models, they should be fairly simple to do! I am also looking forward to painting some plate after a long time of doing chainmail on my Poles and Dark age armies. As an Empire player of 25+ years, this should be bread and butter.
Unfortunately, progressing in this direction has meant that the Pirates and Native Americans have remained virtually untouched over the last few weeks. My only progress has been to wash all of the pirates in warm soapy water, something that makes no difference to any photos I may post! Normally I do not wash metal models, this being reserved for Resin only. However, after painting my last set of models from Firelock Games, it was apparent that these models chip very easily. I don’t know if there is a specific type of mould release used, or whether it is just that the digital sculpts have very smooth surfaces that the paint doesn’t adhere to well, but I am taking no chances with this set!
Finally, one last distraction: November was meant to be Necro-month-da, and I was meant to get a gang completely up to scratch. That failed, so these have rolled over into December too, as the Silent Brethren of House Cawdor await weapons, heads and paint…
And that’s a wrap from me! Hopefully next time I post I will have some painted models to show you and can start to box off some of these projects, rather than adding more. At the time of writing, I have an afternoon painting planned but this has just missed my writeup deadline. damn those editors!
Have a great fortnight and hobby hard, people!
Dave:
Hobby guilt… well I missed the opening post of this series, so I feel guilty about that. Does that count? No? right ok, let me think…
A couple of years ago, a few of us in the B&B gang played the new (or at least, new at the time) version of Warhammer Quest: “Warhammer Quest: Silver tower”. I fell in love with it completely (despite the inclusion of a Sigmarine character, but I won’t go off on a WFHB rant here), I thought the rules were great, and simple to pick up, and the mechanics in the box to create randomly generated dungeons in the convoluted, arcane labyrinths of one of Tzeentch’s silver towers seemed to add a LOT of replayability.
Not long after we had played this, however, I moved away from the gang to go back to university (why have one degree’s worth of student debt, when you could have two?), and was faced with the daunting prospect of finding a new group of people to play games with. Most of the people I met were board-gamers rather than wargamers or tabletop RPG fans, which was frustrating, but then I remembered a fantastic game that combined elements of roleplaying and wargaming, with a boardgame format. That’s right: Silver Tower!
I immediately set about getting a set for myself, trying to find the cheapest deals possible on ebay and building the set myself (I think I ended up spending more than the base game would have cost from element or darksphere, but you live and learn…). Eventually, I had amassed the entire contents of silver tower, with a few extra models here and there from buying multiple job lots, and the rules for the “Shadows over Hammerhal” expansion, which introduces extra creatures and ideas for creating your own campaign; I was going to have some kind of ongoing D&D style campaign if it killed me!
So why am I guilty about this? Well, turns out that medical school is hard (who knew?!), and I actually had quite a lot of work to do. The stuff got packed away in its boxes and shoved under my desk, then promptly forgotten about with the acquisition of other projects (many of which remain untouched, and would also be candidates for hobby guilt entries!), and the impending exams. Couple that with the fact I eventually found a group to play D&D with, and Silver tower seemed destined to remain untouched… until now!
Two years later, and Silver Tower is dead (or at least out of print). Blackstone Fortress is the new hotness, and whilst it looks really, really cool, it reminded me that I have a stack of Warhammer Quest bits sat unused, so I’m dusting them off for hobby guilt. As I mentioned, I have a lot of extra bits and bobs for Warhammer quest, but I have decided just to focus on the Silver tower box, and not the extra miniatures that I have for Shadows over Hammerhal. Why? Because medical school is still hard, and realistically I don’t get tonnes of time to paint. I feel like the contents of the one box may be ambitious given my painting speed, let alone two; if I can get all, or even most, of one box done, that would be great. Besides, the miniatures in the box are great, and I’m looking forward to getting some paint on them, hopefully that’ll help me find the time to spend hobbying whilst project deadlines loom…
So far I’ve been busy assembling the models that come in the box, and I even managed to sketch out some base colours on the Kairic acolytes, although I’m not sure if they will actually remain this colour moving forward. I’ve been thinking about having the different acoyltes in different colours for wound tracking purposes, although I go between this idea and the idea of changing the colour of the base rims. I’ve also added some small squares of plasticard to some of the bases to simulate stone slabs (although I did this after the acolytes had been painted, so I need to go back and add some slabs to their bases), so that when the sand is added, it should give the impression of a particularly worn and damaged dungeon floor. These miniatures are likely to be pulling double duty as D&D miniatures in the future, so I didn’t want the basing to look too… Silver Tower/Tzeentch-y
So that’s what I have so far, not much progress, I know (certainly not compared to Rob, who paints like a fiend!), but the University Christmas break is just around the corner, so I’m hoping to make up a bit of lost ground then, and with any luck have the contents of the game finished by the new year, in time for the next B&B challenge… (watch this space, folks!)
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