The World Turns

After the longest, strangest year in history, the first semblance of normality has begun to creep back into the lives of everyday people. The rulers of the Old World's nations can finally begin to look past the needs of immediate survival and plan for a future which, whilst uncertain, is more filled with possibility than ever before. 

Read The World Turns

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.

King Folca of Rohan

It's still too hot. And I miss travelling.

So I've been thinking about places with soaring snow-clad mountains. Rohan!

The new King Theodon model is a lovely sculpt. But all all of the Middle Earth range, it suffers from being tied to a film. And a colour scheme that looks good on an actor might not look great on a 25mm scale model.

So I gave him a different colour scheme. And at first I thought 'well, that's fine then'. But I primarily come at this hobby from a narrative perspective, so I decided he should be a past king of Rohan. 

I knew it shoud be a king from Rohan's second royal line (to explain why he looks like Theodon). Off the top of my head I can't rememeber if the Rohirrim kings carried Herugrim since the days of Eorl, which was another reason to play safe and have it be a second line king. I went with King Folca because he has a cool name and a cool story: he went about, Sigmar-esque, hunting down all the Orcs in the Riddermark. 

Also, I didn't want to choose Fengel (he was a tool) or Thengel (he spent half his life in Gondor, which is very open minded but not quite as Rohan-y). So it was a choice between Folca and Folcwine. I like the name Folca better. 

Forth Eorlingas and so on. 

Shameless promotion time: 'From the Rooftops'

I think it's more important than ever to understand the challenges that under-represented people in the UK face, and their experiences (good and bad).

'From the Rooftops' is a collection of theatrical pieces which can be watched online. They examine the experience of British East Asian people in the UK. The link allows you to register free to watch.

My bro Yvonne is one of the writers of this. She's a fantastic writer and actor, which makes me quite excited about this. I think it's well worth everyone's time.

Genestealers

I'm back.

Genestealers fascinate me. I like how they satirise different things: they satirise grassroots movements, but also the authoritarian perception of those movements. You could well imagine McCarthy accusing someone of being a Genestealer.

The 40k universe at its best is filled with moral complexity, but in a simplistic sense we generally consider Genestealer Cults as 'bad guys'. But I'm not so sure. We should remember that the Imperium which they seek to subvert is almost absurdly brutal and callous, particularly to the working classes of industrial worlds which Genestealers seem to favour. To use a completely random example off the top of my head, you could see an Imperial Governor ordering his workers back to the manufactorums in the midst of a deadly pandemic against which he had taken no real action.

Then again, the Imperium is famously brutal to anyone who doesn't look like their ideal. It's little wonder that there are populations in the hives who are open to the call for rebellion. Imagine living in a world where you work hard, pay taxes and the Arbites still treat you worse because you look a bit different. It's no wonder that the Genestealers can sow unrest. 

I didn't do any conversion to these models because they really don't need it. They're really beautiful sculpts. I decided to use the same flesh tone as I would for a caucasian human because I feel that visual familiarity enhances the innate horror.