Back From Adepticon with some Coverage

Traveling down to Adepticon was not bad, the travel home on the Interstate 90 however sucked due to all of the construction and tolls, thanks Illinois, a simply dreadful state to visit. 

The Warhammer Ancient games were good, the people in the event friendly.  I saw so many people and ran into so many people, many of which that knew me and unfortunately I don't remember names well.  That's embarrassing when people come up to you knowing who you are and you remember their face, but not a name. 

I do want to mention a number of the people that run blogs and other such things, its always good catching up with the people you maintain contact with on the Internet and who's work you admire:

Mike Butcher of the "The Butcher's Bill", I spent basically the whole weekend with my buddy.  Mike ran the big Hastings Redux game on Friday night where 8 of us went at it with large Dark Ages forces for good fun.  And unlike history, the Saxons actually won the game.  I'm sure that there will be some pics posted up on that big game, this will probably become an annual event in different time slot.  Mike was playing Flames of War with these Stugs below:

All of the terrain for that big game was built by Mark at "Baddogz Engineering", Mark's blog link Bad Dogz Engineering.  The terrain's craftsmanship was gorgeous.  If you do not follow his blog I urge you to do so.  It was my pleasure to team up with Mark on the Viking side of things.  Unfortunately we could not get passed the dang river.  Below are pics of the various terrain pieces that Mark made.

I also ran in to Chris Borer of  Full Borer Miniatures .  It was good to see him, just did not get to talk to him long.

I spoke with Alex Akers of Akers Minis and Battleroad Games.  Good to see Alex.

I got to listen to Dave Taylor of Dave Taylor Miniatures  discuss cricket with a friend of mine, I don't understand the game, but it was good talking with Dave who was covering things for Wargames Illustrated, I'm sure we will see some great pictures of the big Civil War game that he ran.

I ran into Dave Pauwel's and Jamie from Gorgon Studios.  It was great to catch up with Dave.  We're all going to try and get people to play SAGA next year.

Mike and I had the pleasure of playing one of my local good buddies who was teamed up with Rich of the Chicago Terrain Factory.  Rich is one of the Adepticon guys organizing many things, it was good fun to get in a game against him.  Chicago Terrain Factory

I played against Bennett Blaylock-Doane of Bennett's Blog.  Bennett's Huns engulfed my poor Vikings, too fast, too many arrows, and a big 0 points for me in that game.  Although it was a pleasure to look at his beautiful Huns.   I think I only killed like 5 of them in the game.  Bennett's paintwork is fantastic, and he puts on many seminars on his painting.

I also ran into Domus, Ryan, and Tom of the   The Magnificent Bastards blog      playing some fantasy.  Below is the funny army that Domus and Caius were playing. The minis have a strange resemblance to Domus

Ryan aka 'Bear' in action, with the infamous uninterested bearded fellow known as Legend.   I'm not sure who bought Ryan that shirt, but I would not wear those hideous colors.

And a pic of Tom on the right next to Alex who has ran the Fantasy Tournament in the past.

It was good to catch up briefly with these guys.  Ryan is actually Bear on Pointhammered Podcast: http://www.pointhammered.com/.  Also a pic of Ryan's ogres.

I also ran into these guys: 

Ben Cone looking very happy from Madison, WI who does the WiscoDice podcast: http://wiscodice.com/

Cool Mini-or-Not was there and running the Crystal Brush mini painting contest, some amazing stuff in the cabinets:

 



When I got on-site Friday I took a walk around and shot some pics of the Big Hall, where all of the 40k madness was going on.  This hall is simply crazy and packed all weekend long.

Friday was team tourney.

I was surprised to see a contingent of Star Wars games being played all weekend also.

Above you had already saw some of the Fantasy Team play on Friday.   That hall had 100 tables set up for the Singles Tournament.  Not sure how big the 40k Hall was.

Flames of War had a huge presence also at the event:

And Bored of the Rings still gets played??

I'll be quite honest that the main Warhammer Fantasy tourneys are nearly too large for me and the 40k main events have gotten way too large for me.  Not pictured was the Warmachine games being played and dozens of small games and demos that were going on.  I played Warhammer Ancients Battles, the singles and doubles tourneys.  It is always a smaller event, much more to my liking.  Even though the game is no longer supported, we still have a good core of players, but it is clearly dying as the doubles tourney only had 4 teams, singles had 12 players, 14 registered and two did not make it.  Its clear in my mind that Hail Caesar, while popular in some regions for being a friendly get together, is not a good game for tourney play as its rules are way too loose and open to interpretation to my liking.  And quite frankly I personally don't like the game at all, I very much prefer the warhammer based rules systems. 

Adepticon Bound

Well, I'm off to Adepticon for the weekend.  Finishing touches on this batch of Vikings are done.  I'm happy with the looks of them.  Played some practice games with them a few weekends ago they are hard, but have quite a few faults in the army build.  We'll see how I do.  I have preordered the new Gripping Beast plastic Dark Ages box, and begun building a few Saxons also, in addition to some new Viking characters.  My expansion will be into some Bondi and Saxon allies, all of which will double for my playing of some SAGA in addition to WAB and hopefully some Clash of Empires.

For Adepticon, I'll be playing the big Hastings game against some Saxons and Normans Friday night.  On Saturday, I will play the WAB singles tournament.  Then on Sunday, Mike Butcher and I will team up in an attempt to win the WAB Team tourney for a second straight year. 

Friday night coincides with the first open practice for the kart season, which I'm going to miss.  Is it ever going to warm up, forecasted High of 43F, and we are supposed to have snow most of the days this week???  Well, my dad is going to shake-down my new racing kart, I helped him finish up his kart this past weekend.  We still have all the body work repair to do on both of them, just ran out of time with too many things to do.  Season begins May 3rd.

So if you are at Adepticon, swing by and look for my Vikings.

When I get back I'll probaby take a short amount of time off, recharge my batteries by doing some racing.  Then I've decided to take a spin down the road to doing some Flames of War with a couple of buddies.

WIP on the Desk....er.....Table: The Vikings

Well, we have not seen these guys for a while, I've moved them to the Kitchen table for my work area is a mess.  I did manage to finish up the basing.  I'm packing them now, preparing for Adepticon.

Book Review: Death of Kings

Death of Kings was published in 2011, and I just got around to reading it. It is the sixth novel of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales series, a series that I have enjoyed immensely. The story continues to follow the Saxon warlord Uhtred of Bebbanburg who keeps fighting against a new Danish invasion of Wessex and Mercia. All of the tales are historical fiction, researched by the author.

This story is to me a rehash of previous plot, just with the change of King Alfred the Great is dying and we have Viking Warlords threatening once again. The previous novels in the series are much better than this one, but I still enjoyed the book and it still has the interesting characters that I have grown fond of. If you have not read any of the Saxon Tales, the novel is written as a first person narrative told by Uhtred the main character who is reflecting on his life story, a very violent tale, as basically the sword that is wielded by Alfred and eventually his son who becomes king. Uhtred is one of those Saxons who likes the Danes and their religion, dislikes Christianity, and struggles as a pagan in the Christian Saxon world, almost always being mistrusted by Alfred’s followers.

The novel was also published with a family tree of Alfred the Great and a historical note from the author regarding his research of the period. I must say that I did not know a lot about this period until I started reading this series of novels, the very first of which really hooked me. Since reading them in order, I’ve developed a desire to further study the period and especially the Vikings that invaded what was then England from that period. In the past I’ve generally been someone only really interested in the Roman periods and the Crusades. This has also lead into my current army build of Danish Vikings, and I am glad for that has been a tremendous amount of fun, and something that I will definitely be expanding upon in the future with some Gripping Beast Saxon Thegns and with their forth coming plastic Dark Ages miniatures.

So if you are like me and you are looking for some good historical fiction novels to read, I suggest giving the Saxon Tales a try.

The Red Knight or the Bull

The Red Knight is one of Werner Klonke's Reaper Minature sculpts.   I have painted most of the knights that he has sculpted.  This is perhaps my favorite of the group.  I went for my standard red configuration with the so-called NMM scheme for the metals.

The head dress on the helmet is....well a bit over the top....not much different than Brets.  The rest of the model is very well done and smooth.

 The cape has a nice subtle flow to it, so it was a bit of challenge to get the paint to look alright on it.

Yea the head dress looks rather corney.  I'll be happy to move on to Fireforge's knights.

And this miniature has been sold....no longer in my collection.

Enter the 40k Inquisition: Inquisitor Alpha

Showing that space wolf recently, I ran across a picture of this inquisitor that I built a few years ago.  Not one of my better builds and the base is rather boring.

For the most part this model was left over from the building of my Cerulean Templars, basically it did not make the cut.  There are elements of it that I like, for instance the book and the draping on the shoulder pad.

 I believe I later dumped it on Ebay.  At the time, I was building a bunch of pieces that were just cluttering up my desk and putting them on Ebay, if I remember correctly this piece went to a buyer in Alaska who was at the time winning alot of my auctions.

Old Stuff Wednesday - April: Blood Angel OSL

Circa April 2004.  I believe this is the only Blood Angel Space Marine that I have ever painted.  I fondly remember doing this as an experiment around the time when light sourcing was just really taking off on miniatures, and seemed to be the cool thing to do.  Well I think its still a cool thing to do. 

I borrowed the so-called NMM techniques that I used on my beastmen in 2003 and the red scheme.  I also used a bit more subtle highlight scheme from Cerulean Templar Spacemarine army.

 Back then I really struggled with bone colors in painting.

The pick below I think is really cool.  The green glow effect that I did back then was a series of drybrushes from dark to light green.

Another angle.  If I remember right, I did go back and paint in some sharper green highlights.

Red and green always work well in my opinion.  This was a cool experiment.  The miniature is no longer in my collection as I sold it years ago.