[Update] Battlereport - Skaven gainst The Empire

I will try the first time to give a short battlereport of a 2400 points game of warhammer fantasy battle. It was held at my place following the actual ETC (European Team Championship) draft at this moment. The opposing armies where my Skaven Warhost and The Empire Army from Talabheim (with the rules of the old Empire book). Since the game was held some time ago, I can only recapture the match and will therefore sum up the battle. I only shot a few pictures because my camera went insane on this day and messed the pictures.

The battle begins

[Update]: I just found my played Skaven List and put it in the post down below. Perhaps this makes the battle a bit clearer than before.

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 3

It's terrain thursday (nah just kidding, atm I am in the mood to do so) so I will post another part of my modular gaming table series. After preparing the six basic modules and shaping some with hills it is time to get dirty and put some paint onto our modules. Therefore we mix our own structure paint (the paste/paints you can buy are WAY too expensive). Besides a big bucket (~5l bucket is big enough) we need:

Bucket of PVA/white glue:

Approx. cost:  ~ 8 Euro

Bag of bird grit:

Approx. cost: ~ 90ct

Bottle of brown paint:

Approx. cost: ~ 5 Euro

Pour everything together, in the end we used a mixing ratio of about 1:1:1:1 (water, paint, sand, glue). Just try it out what suits you best. The structure paint should not be too runny and should not be as thick as toothpaste. You should be able to spread it out easily without the paint beeing transparent or only gluing sand...

Applying the structure paint 

Blog Babble - Pingbots

Anger Kitty is dangerous

Again a more personal ramble about something what pi**es me off at the moment: Ping/Spambots.
I think every blogger has this problem: You have an eye on your statistics and are happy that your views are going up. But then you are looking closer and realise that some views are not real viewers but ping- or spambots which are not filtered out by Google. If you have millions of views this is a mere trifle but if you have only a handful of views a day, it messes everything up.

For me this is pretty annoying because in working life I have to deal with these *** bots (but can beat the crap out of 'em) and now they are messing up my blogger statistics without being able to do something against them because only Google can filter them out. Feeling like a hamster in his wheel is what angers me the most. You have to wait until somebody else fixes this problem. Or am I unaware of a solution to this problem?

How do you deal with the problem of pingbots? Is there a good solution without hosting everything yourself? Perhaps another statistics tool for blogger?

Questions above questions... Perhaps some of you know the answer.

An angry but helpless,
Paradox0n

WIP - Plague Furnace

After some terrain making and a big motivation leak while painting my Verminlord, I switched to painting my Plague Furnace. Only bad thing about this modell: I bought it used and everything is glued together which makes it not as easy to paint as it should be.
Nonetheless I will give it a try since I want to use it in one of my next battles :)

Primed and ready to paint

Damn this thing is so big, its even too big for my photo bucket! I will try some things and will look how it will turn out in the end.

So long,
Paradox0n

Video tutorial from Massive Voodoo about weathering techniques

Just a short post in between. I think weathering could be very interesting for everyone of us, so I have to post this really good video tutorial from Massive Voodoo. Sadly the MV channel on Youtube has no playlist for all the videos from the series, so I put one together (hope they don't mind). The video is in german, but on their blog, they also have an english text version about weathering.



So long,
Paradox0n

HowTo: Building a tower - Part 2

Ok, after showing you how I build the foundation for my tower, now it's time to paint the stone carvings. This will be only a short part, because I think I can't show you some wicked magic here, it's just good old handywork.

After the core was build together I primed everything black. At this stage I didn't have my airbrush yet so I was forced to do everything by hand.I used some cheap black color from the hardware store to cut down the expenses. After three layers everything was completely black. The three coates of paint had one side effect I noticed when everything was dry: The carving was much more stable than before.

Primed everything black

Free magazines about tabletop & miniatures

Ok now, since I'm in a big motivation hole, I thought of collecting some of the free magazines and fanzines that I read and share them with you.
For me these free magazines are a great contribution to our wargaming community and they deserve every support possible.

Fanzines:

Skavenblight Gazette: A Fanzine about the Skaven Hordes of the Underempire
The Bellower: Fanzine from Ogre Stronghold about... Ogres. Hope it will be continued...
Word of Hashut: Fanzin about Chaos Dwarves. he current issue could be found in the forum

There are some more, e.g. the Druchii Herald, but most of them I know have been discontinued.

Free Magazines:

Portal Magazine: Magazine mainly commited to painting and converting stuff
Irregular: Community driven magazine about our beloved hobby
The Ancible: Magazine specialized to scifi and fantasy wargaming

Others:

Tabletop Insider: A german print magazine about wargaming. But(!) the first issue is available for free download.


That's it for the moment. If you know some other magazine, please share them via comment. I will update the list if there are more magazines you should know of.


So long,
Paradox0n

Oh nooooes - Motivation leaked

Motivation leak

Have you ever been in a situation similiar to this:
You prepared a miniature you wanted to paint for a long time. It was stripped from paint, glued together, the base is prepared and everything is primed. You arranged your working place, readied a new audio book (I LOVE listening to audio books while painting) and put the first colors on your wet pallete. You load your brush with paint and after the first layers of paint: BAMM!
Your motivation to paint is gone with a single blow. It comes so aprupt that you want to throw your miniature against the nearest wall.

This happened to me with my old vermin lord. I had painted him in the old colorful scheme and wanted to give him a new, somewhat darker look. But with the first layers of skin (unfortunately I hate painting skin) my complete motivation to paint him vanished... At the moment I really regret stripping him from the old paint.

How do you overcome such situations and get your motivation back?

So long,
Paradox0n

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 2

In the last part of this HowTo series, I explained how I build the base for the gaming modules. In this part I will describe how the hills were made and how I prepared the board to get the first layer of the structure paint.

I suggest you listen to this song while reading the next part:

[Updated] Another warped tree

I couldn't resist to buy another aquarium decoration tree. After I had some nice results with my first one, I found another one in my hardware store. And with a price of ~3 euros it was again difficult to do something wrong by buing it.
They really fit into my warped, beaten up ad dark concept for my gaming table. And I play Skaven so warpstone trees are even better!

No long chit chat, just a short shot from my photo bucket:

Tree from the front

Tree from the back

Baking time

Today I took advantage of the beautiful weather outside and went to a walk with my wife. We both looked out for our collectibles: She for herbs and plants like elder flower or wild strawberries and I myself for basing materials. I was very lucky to find an uprooted tree from which I could scrap of some bark. Therefore it's baking time!

Baking the bark

HowTo: Building a tower - Part 1

Again I'm keeping one of my promises, I start the second planned series of my HowTo's. Today I will talk about building a  tower from scratch.
As you have seen in my other HowTo's I like building terrain pieces from spare parts or even garbage. But in this case all my thoughts about how I could achieve a decent result failed. Therefore I started planning a complete building from scratch. Thanks to some research and one REALLY good tutorial from Gidian Gelände, the concept grew fast. So I collected the needed material and started to experiment with things I had never done before (again).

Chips and Selitron

Inspirational music

Again something I listen to while painting/building. With this score I can close my eyes and drift to other realms, imagine kingdoms far away and get some inspiration from my own visions. Screwed up, isn't it?

Blog Babble - Motivation?!

Its (blogging) weekend and I just started to write at my two new HowTo series when I realised that sometimes while writing I think: Why I am doing this sh**?! I'm running the blog now for about two months, wrote about twenty real articles and will try a short resume of the last weeks. If you now think: "Oh noes, no babble about personal stuff!" I'm completely fine with it, skip the post, but it's something I have to do :-)

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 1

As promised I will do a HowTo-series about how I build my gaming table. The gaming table was build last year, toghether with a close friend of mine and has seen now three battles (one you can in my first battle report). We had enough of playing on a normal dining table. The Citadel board was too expensive for us (since we only play on an irregular base) so we researched a bit and planned our own modular board.
Modular because:

• we wanted a table which looked different when we wanted to
• I have not enough room to store one or three big plates
• and we wanted to save some money :)

So we made a masterplan and went shopping in the local hardware store. After the first tour we replanned everything because we didn't want to spent as much money for material as we would have to pay for the Citadel board... Therefore I will do a Step by Step how the boaard was really build and will give an overview how much the material had roughly cost.