January 2023 hobby update

I've decided to switch to monthly rather than the weekly updates which I did for all of 2022.  I'll still be posting when I complete something, but time is very precious at the moment so this works much better for me.  

Completed

This month I've completed the following:  

  • A regiment of 10mm Ogre Ironguts for my Ogre Kingdoms Warmaster Revolution army which you can see here.  

  • Six 28mm Norse warriors for my Ragnarok project.  You can see more of them here.
  • I prepared a load of 2ps to use for bases for 28mm plastics.  This involved giving the edges a good thick coat of Humbrol Khaki enamel, followed by a couple of coats of Vallejo German Camouflage Black Brown, then varnished in Humbrol Gloss and finally a coat of  Vallejo Satin varnish to tone the gloss shine down.  

In progress

The following are on the table as January ends:
  • A regiment of 36 10mm Hobgoblins for my Chaos Dwarf Warmaster Revolution army.  These are very nearly done, just some details left to complete.
  • A regiment of 9 10mm Ogre Leadbelchers.  These are also well on the way and will be completed in February. 

Research & Reading

It's been all Roman for my reading this month:
  • I read Brigantia, the third and final book of Adrian Goldsworthy's Vindolanda trilogy.  I found it as enjoyable as the previous novels and a worthy ending to the series. 
  • I then read Osprey Roman Legionary 284 to 337.  This is one of the Warrior series.  I found this a really disjointed read, with lots of references breaking up the flow of the text.  Surely these would have been done better as footnotes?   The colour plates are nice though!  
  • My final Roman read was The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero about the battle of Adrianople 378.  This was an easy read, not academic in style at all.  It had some good background, if the section on the battle itself seemed somewhat underwhelming.
  • I've been looking through my vast collection of PDF rules.  I have far too many with the reality being that I'll never get round to playing most.  It's just as well that I don't have them all as hard copies as I'd need another room to store them in!
  • Leading on from the above I've been looking at what's available for Sci-Fi gaming.  This is the only main genre that I don't currently collect.  As I've been looking at this it's reminded me of all the great games of Laserburn, Spacefarers and Steve Jackson's Ogre that I played in my early teenage years.  I still have my copy of Spacefarers from 1981.  When going through my PDF rules I found a copy of the original Laserburn.  Blimey all those charts and modifiers look so complex compared to how rules are today.
  • Following on from looking at Sci-Fi I've discovered One Page rules, which has led me to add even more PDFs to my collection!  I'm mulling over whether to use them with my Warmachine figures while Mk4 gets properly tested.  A downside of this of course is that I've been looking at all those superb 3d printed figures you can get from Only Games.

Incoming!

  • No purchases this month.  There's been plenty of sales and offers but I've managed to resist.  By and large I'm keeping to the plan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City ruins scatter terrain

Image
2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul
Read more

28mm Victrix Late-Roman Archers and Slingers

Image
When I first embarked on my Late-Roman project a year or so ago, I bought a few sample sprues from Gripping Beast, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix.  The Victrix one was from the Late Roman Archers and Slingers set.  The quality of these convinced me to choose Victrix for the project and I duly ordered up some sets.  After working my way slowly through these I finally went back to this original frame.  These are absolutely lovely models.  There's loads of variety and they go together beautifully.  The instruction sheet which I got from the Victrix website makes a massive difference in this regard.  I really enjoyed working on these.  They were quick to assemble and quick to paint up being in a uniform of sorts.   I only have the one frame, but I took a couple of the bodies from some of the Dark Age Archers that I was working on at the same time ( here ) and added some spare arms to make another pair of staff slingers.  This worked pretty well adding variety to the poses.  I'll do
Read more

More 28mm Dark Age warriors

Image
As a bit of a palette cleanser while working my way through the 15mm Landsknechts, I started on a half dozen Victrix Dark Age Archers.   I'd completed a  first batch of these in January and it was good to get back to them.  The original intention was to use these as Norse warriors for my Ragnarok project.  Since then though I've been looking at making them more useable for a longer period of history.  Therefore, with the exception of the sword armed warrior who is very Viking, I've tried to make them quite generic.  As before nearly all the parts came from the Victrix Dark Age Archers set, with a few extras from the Victrix Viking sprue.  These were used to make the sword and seax armed figures.  There was the usual amputations and other bits of minor surgery to make things fit and that's all part of the fun with these plastic figures.  I followed the same process as before and methodically took notes of what parts I used for each figure.  This helped to make sure that
Read more