Amazons

As with everyone who found themselves suddenly goggling at the lack of right-angled bases in 2015, I've been something of a connosieur of different miniature companies. My first love is Warhammer Fantasy, not necessarily Games Workshop. Titan Forge is one of the companies I would consider 'GW equivalent' in the sense that the scale and sculpt quality are comparable. When I heard last year that they were doing an Amazon Kickstarter, I fell over myself to get there. Amazons are cool: who doesn't like no-nonsense arse-kicking woman women? I wasn't familiar with Wonder Woman until the recent film, but in my teenage years I was a loyal viewer of Xena: Warrior Princess and I don't care who knows. The amazons in Xena have always stuck with me when I bring the idea to mind. From the descriptions we got, the mysterious Lustrian Amazons in the Warhammer Fantasy World were similar to what I imagined, having picked up the trappings of Lizardman civilisation.

Now, Titan Forge clearly had the same idea. Not only did their Amazon sculpts have a decidedly Aztec theme, the different units had some suspicious analogues to Lizardmen units, almost as if there was an expectation that they would be used as an alternative.

After a few months, my models arrived. The sculpting is beautiful, though it's worth noting here that they do need to be washed and cleaned up. As a sidenote, this is one of GW's greatest strengths: they have very user-friendly plastic kits these days, ideal for getting into the hobby. Titan Forge is cleary ot for beginners.

Slightly ridiculously, I purchased an entire army, but I decided to start with some warriors and a couple of characters I decided to give them really bright, vivid colours. Two reasons for this: firstly, because I think it suits them. Second, as you might have noticed on this blog, I have a tendency to default to grim, grimy Blanchitsu-ism if I don't watch myself. But as hobbyists, we need to try new things sometimes to keep our skills fresh and I thought I'd go vibrant. It's more work but relatively happy so far!

For the bases, I decided to go for a verdant forest floor effect. First I did the usual sand, based Rhino Hide, drybrushed XV88 and then Ushabti Bone. Then it was a mix of static grass and different forest floor basing effects.

I'm looking forward to painting the other units up!

Indomiturd

*Spoiler: nothing in this post has any importance, I'm just venting.*

I've been skulking around the dirty world of marketing for enough that I actually appreciated GW's hype campaign for the new 40k. I've always found the concept of Primaris Marines absurd to the point of satire, but the models in this set were so much better and the variety of articles so diverse that I got hyped. Even decided to pay the GW premium as opposed to going through resellers.

Here's what happened. At 9.45am, I ensured that the website was open and I was logged in. I made sure nothing else was open and kept refreshing. At 10.00am, the site announced it was down for maintenance. Bandwith issue, methinks. I keep refreshing. At 10.07am, it finally refreshes. I whack the pod for Indomitus, and add to cart. I click 'go to checkout'. The site goes down for maintenance as I'm being redirected. At 10.09am after constant refreshing it comes up. The site proudly tells me my order contains out of stock items. Indomitus is out of stock.

9 minutes.

Right, a few basic things. With Sisters of Battle, this happened. That was very recently. This edition they hyped to high heaven and yet apparently did not take the precaution of hiring backup servers. Alright. As a second point, they actually didn't mention that this was a limited edition set until quite late in the process. And when they did, they assured us all that they had plenty of copies.

I was there before the webstore opened, and by the time it let me go to the checkout, it was no longer available. Based on what I'm seeing online, I was far from the only one.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

Resellers probably sold out even faster, but I checked anyway. Then I went to Ebay to have a look. Credit to the price gougers, they moved fast. Full and partial sets were being sold at significant markups by 10.20am.

And this is where I get really pissed off. Because... I don't want to give the price gougers money, but the pragmatist in me says that the prices they're asking are still well below what GW will want for the individual units when they come out. But first, let's have some clarity: let's make sure that GW really mean it. Except GW have remained steadfastly silent. On the day of their biggest release of the year, their social media team does not seem to be working. Now bear in mind that due to Covid, they will have the set up to work from home in place. Even if they were bafflingly not scheduled to work, a quick phonecall could have got someone logging in and making a statement, either saying 'that's your lot, go talk to Ebay' or 'hold on, we'll do more in a month' or whatever. But nope, nothing. No clarity, no statement, no answers.

But someone is working on the digital side of things. GW's website is built on a CMS caled Wordpress. View source and look at the URL if you want to confirm. Now, some of the functions can be automatically built in, like the 'no longer available' graphic and the functionality which blocks the ecommerce side of things when the stock counter goes to zero. But since this morning, the layouts have been changed and additional graphics added to the sold out entries. So someone is working on the CMS. Now I don't expect that person to field queries - I bloody wouldn't - but it means that they are aware of what has happened and are quite happy to let people make guesses. The only winners here are the price gougers, who are making a killing on Ebay.

The animated banner advertising Indomitus is still up, mind you.

This is amateur hour. Their biggest release of the year, and I don't think they could have bungled it more.

UPDATE: they finally got someone in. That someone deleted all the complaints and didn't say anything.

Anyway, I'm done grumbling.

Interlude the second - Unexpected heroes and unseen peoples

 Being stuck in the warp is rubbish. But that's what you get for trying to ruin everyone's day. And as this former villain is about to find out, the path to redemption can be outright bizarre...

Read the second interlude.