The Battle of Chantilly - Bolt Action British Commandos

Last week I met with a  friend in Oslo and we played a smallish (1000pts) game of Bolt Action in Outland in Oslo. We'd chatted plenty in advance and decided on our armies and mission as well as a narrative around the events. So we set up a nice looking wooded board and got to it.

In early August 1944 a small force of well equipped British Commandos from No. 4 supported by a Matilda infantry tank infiltrated the forest of Chantilly in Northern France and began an aggressive scheme of disruption from behind the German lines. at 14:00 on August 11th the Germans launched their raid on the British camp with an elite Waffen SS force.

Chantilly Forest

The light green order dice marked the objectives.

The Germans came in hard and fast over the rough terrain, they quickly won the battle of the snipers although the STuG III never managed to get a bearing on the Matilda as it quickly found some light cover behind a tree. The Pioneer's rode their Hanomag into the centre of the British, scattering them for cover, and unleashed a torrent of flame that killed many men, although a heavy retribution was laid upon them afterwards.

Heavy casualties caused by the Pioneer's and the ADKFZ 250/9's autocannon during the middle of the battle left few Commandos to retaliate, soon it was just a few men left trying to hold off the horde. The officers were amongst the last to fall, the SS officers even ordering that the medic was a valid target.

The Germans took the forest before 15:00, although they paid a cost in lives for the victory.

We had a great game as we always do, it made for a change to not be spearheading an attack against German held lines with my Commandos. I'm not sure when we'll play again, but I'll try and get myself a heavier mortar next time to lay down some more pain, perhaps even a bigger tank. The Matilda survived the game through thanks to some poor roles by the STuG, but it wasn't very effective either.

It Came From the Stars... A Slann's Tale (Part 1)

"Lord Soquala-Astrain left Lustria in his great temple ship enraged. He, and his Slann breatherin, the greatest of the Old One's creations had failed to peotect this young world from the vile eye of Chaos.

Soquala refused all contact, remaining within his ship's command chamber focusing his entire will upon travelling deep into space. He was determind to find the Old Ones, his burning rage had cooled down to a cold fury. He would find the Old Ones and demand of them an answer as to why the Great Olan failed.

For weeks, years and eventually generations none of Soquala's Skink aides saw him. Eventually they all passed away, and almost passed entirely from memory Soquala was so focused on his quest for an answer. No other Slann traveled out in to the depths so far."

From the First Orbit of the Lord Solar, Poldrakens Heart​

This is the start, and currently the extent of the fluff I've dreamt up for my emerging Seraphon force. I imagine them, as the Battletome describes, as a force of celestial power, imagined into being by the Slann that leads them and fading away outside of battle. But I think he summons the same Seraphon to being each time, and through his experiencing their actions in one campaign they come back different each time, slowly developing a greater capability and understanding. Somewhat like Pokemon and their Pokeballs.

To capture some of this on the table I'm going with a starfield pattern on the skin of the Seraphon, which will hopefully show them to be 'made of the stuff of the stars' and give a nice uniform look to the army amongst the different colour of their scales. I also see the star pattern showing how Lord Soquala lost touch with almost the entire physical world on his journey and coming to battle now his mental constructs are not as solid or bound in tradition as many other Slann's are.

Obviously I have a way to go on the background for my army, I want to next write up some details about how Lord Soquala found his way to the Mortal Realms and what now motivates him to fight. For the time being I intend to leave very vague what he may have met out in the far reaches of space.

I hope you enjoyed this little look, please let me know what you think and any ideas on where I could take the theme.

Busy Few Weeks With Dinosaurs

Hey, a couple of weeks missed and I apologise for that. I've been pretty busy in the evenings so the spare time I have had has gone towards painting not writing. Tim also promises a new game write up soon. :) I have got in a couple of good sessions whilst I've been an author-absent.

I've built up a bunch of Seraphon now, beyond the Ripperdactyls I begun with I've made enough models to equal the new Starter Set (Old Blood on a Carnosaur, eight Saurus Knights and 12 Saurus Warriors) I alos got a chance to get out to the garage and undercoat a bunch of models. So here comes a photodump of what I've got done since last we met. Enjoy and please comment.

First off I finished building Sol-Qlor on Starror

The 9v battery is in the giant base, it was quite the challenge getting the wire

and LED through the whole figure

Here are the Seraphon so far, Skink Priest was kitbashed

After a few goes I found a nice way to do an easy Lava Base
Tutorial coming!!

They then went into mass production

I've started putting basecoats down to test the colour scheme, please so far

Did I say 8th Company before, I meant 9th. Devastator Command

Hobby Progress Week 4 2016

That's another week gone by, how fast they pass. I've not made any progress on the Seraphon discussed in the last post, but I haven't been idle. I decided to finish up a couple of small parts of larger projects before cracking on with the new army, and I converted up a 1st Legion Praetor from the Betrayal at Calth set too.

Project one was to get some models ready to use in a small game. My Dark Angels, as discussed were built mainly in the summer of 2013, before "Basegate", meaning they were all standing pretty on 25mm bases. So although I have built all 107 Astartes for The Feared, I technically only had one completed, as I mentioned on Twitter, that is less than 1% of the Company. Well that's changed, now I have 32 completed. These were the models that preciously were finished, so rather than ditching the (I think) quite nice bases I had, I bought 32mm converter rings from Eccentric Miniatures and was very pleased.

 

With some other characters that's 38 32's

The rest of the Marines are unbased so far so they will go straight on 32's to begin with. Soon I'll have a complete Demi-Company as all of those models are painted already. I also took the opportunity to muddy up their legs a little, perhaps oneday I'll add some battle damage too. 

A Dirty Dark Angel

Project two were the two tanks that make up the Space Marine HQ Command Tanks set. The Land Raider Excelsior and the Primaris Rhino. These are lovely, super detailed models that I'm very pleased with. I applied a light coat of kit bashing to them to let them show their Dark Angel roots and will be painting them up as Eighth Company assets. The pose on the Company Master in the Excelsior is perfect and reminds me very much of a popular meme. :)

I'm really pleased with how these are turning out

So onwards and upwards, I'd like to finish building a couple of half started kits and perhaps at least get bases ready for carrying on project one (perhaps that should get a better name), before I start anyday now in ernest on the Seraphon

Nicodemus, Praetor of the Monitors
The First Legion's 88th Company

Age of Sigmar - The Poldraken Rex Constellation

Because I find myself with so much free time on my hands (not at all true), and most of my other projects are wrapping up now (also, surprise surprise, not at all true) I've decided it's time to pull out and dust off some WHFB boxes and turn my Lizardman sprues into a Seraphon army. I know most of the reviews of the new Battletome have been less than stella, but I find the new space faring reptiles of the imagination quite appealing. Mostly, as before, because of the great big dinosaurs, but also the freedom the Slann now have from the Old Ones plans make them a less predictable and more exciting force.

I've spent a few days now thinking about colour schemes and modeling posibilities, reading through all four pages of rules for Age of Sigmar, looking up more rules, such as the Clash Comp., HeelanHAGG and the Norwegian Masters comp to help me structure my army and considering a story and style to my 'Constellation'. One of the great, yet insignificant aspects of the Seraphon (don't Google that at work btw) is the army structure is based upon a comstellation model, each with a Slann at their centre.  With this fact in mind, I went to work. I found an image of a starscape and drew a dragon on top, this was a much better result than my attempt at drawing a dragon myself. 

The Poldraken Constellation

The mighty Poldraken Rex Constellation has plenty of stars, and a good few of them are nice and large to represent all of the big dinosaurs I want to field, now on their beautiful round bases. The initial list I'm going to work on is the models you now find in the Starter set, a Carnosaur, 12 Saurus Warriors and eight Saurus Cavalry. This should give me an opportunity to see if I like the game, army and paint scheme enough to continue. Then, as an example based upon the local NM comp I'd be looking to build something along the lines of the following: 

Plenty of big monsters and some tough space lizards running between the legs, great fun. So as I plan to start work on these next week, if I don't have the sense to push further in one of the earlier projects, I'll be posting some updates here soon. 

Getting to Know the Unforgiven

I've been a Dark Angels player for only a few years. With the launch of 6th ed. I jumped on board with the Dark Vengeance starter set. Tim and I played through the intro games, he hadn't played since 2nd ed. and I'd fallen out during early 5th. We loved the games we had, the feel of the rules, the 'Forge the Narrative' attitude to play and in my case, the  Deathwing Terminators. I got a hold of the 4th ed. Dark Angels codex and made up a 1000 point list, I joined a campaign being held in my local (Oslo) GW and had the first 1000 points painted in about three weeks. The Dark Vengeance set with the Ravenwing and Company Master replaced with Belial and five more Deathwing. This was just before the 6th ed. codex release so I even converted up my own Belial.

The First 1000 points

Six-nine months later, my Dark Angel collection had grown, I'd painted most of it and was happily playing fairly often (Norway has ten weeks of paternity leave). Then with the announcement of a re-release of Apocalypse coming I cracked, the only thing that would do me was a complete Company, the Fourth would be complete. As it turned out I only needed to order a few Dark Angel and Assault Squad shoulder pads and buy another Devastator box, a good rummage of my bitz box(s) provided the other 60ish marines I lacked.   It was good times. I decided that with the Dark Angels reputation for stubbornness I'd get them terrain to stand in during Apoc games rather than transports, this had the advantage of cutting down on time I spent moving the mass of single models around. Games Workshop released some amazing terrain pieces at the time, so my Unforgiven manned a Wall of Martyrs centred around an Aquila Strongpoint (that reminds me I should get one of those Fortress of Redemption kits) and one place or another I played a good few Apoc games over the next few months. 

The Fouth Company 'The Feared' with support from the Deathwing and Ravenwing

Then came 2014, I was too busy with my son and home life to make any regular games and I felt a little cheated by the quick release of 7th edition after investing in 6th. I went from playing regular games to having one game of 40k in January over the while of 2014. :(   However, I didn't stop hobbying, just gaming. Most of the painting I did was for Bolt Action, I started a British Commando force. And the Dark Angels still got plenty of hobby time devoted to them, it was just mostly on my iPad. I'd built up the Fourth Company, now it was time to detail them, build up their fluff and turn my models into characters. The following pictures are from what I have now, details have been added over the past two years, and they got a good re-haul with the release of the 7th ed. Dark Angel codex. That involved a new Company Master name, a rank given to the character I had already leading the Dark Angels fleet, a whole extra Tactical squad in the company as I before had used Veterans in the first squad position and the new title of The Feared to the company.

I use OneNote as it allows for easy formatting on my iPad

As story, battles or the models dictate
personalities get developed

By setting my army in the recent past I can have small changes to the fluff as suits me
Like returning Belial to the Third Company and reviving Amadascus

The Destiny Principle of Rocket Cars

I managed to get back into some gaming last year after not having to travel so much for work. These games are all on the PS4, as that is my preferred gaming platform. The console works best for me as having to use a PC during the day it’s nice to sit back and be further from the screen.

Basing this on the most fun I have had two games come out equal top are The Talos Principle and Destiny.

The Talos Principle really hit the spot with the a great story, think Matrix levels of introspection. Its got nice tight handling controls when combined with the first person view point giving a good feeling of interaction, the level of freedom given in the game world means you get enough choice not to feel enclosed and have enough to do but not so much free reign as to feel lost. 

The game world works well with the many puzzles there are to solve, as when played over time you up skill and learn the systems so you get a great feeling of success from beating some of them and a sense that you yourself have improved. The personal feeling of progression with wanting to learn more about the story really are the two key things which push you through to see the end.

I saw the latest version of Destiny on sale on the Playstation store, and after reading the feedback on the latest patch and expansion thought it was time to give it another go. This is after getting the original release on the xbox 360 then getting it again in a bundle with the ps4. The graphics upgrade from the 360 to the ps4 did make this worth it.

Originally after reaching max level then getting bored of the grind for light levels it fell out of interest and I stopped playing before any of the expansions were released. They did not seem to offer good value or much content. 

The current version of Destiny is the original game plus three expansions, with the latest The Taken King being the largest, altogether it is a much larger game then when first released. The amount of content makes it great value now, they have also rerecorded much of the in game voice work and redone the cut scenes, making the story more detailed and easier to follow.

Its said that the Diablo 3 team gave advice to the latest work done on Destiny (Diablo 3 Team) and it really shows. Both Diablo 3 and Destiny are much better games than when they first released.

Basically if you liked the old Halo games or Borderlands 2 or Diablo 3 you should get on well with Destiny.

The last pick from the last year goes to Rocket League. I got this inclusively from Playstation plus, or I don’t think I would of tried it but it really is a little gem. The prequal for this, by the same developer, had such a great name, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars.

 

It’s just a nice game to play, the clear graphics with the style of little remote control cars suits it well, the matches are not too long and even when on the losing side its not annoying and you can still feel good. Its much less annoying than being on the losing side in Destiny PVP. For a quick blast of fun it really hits the spot.