Musings of a Green Man

The idea of the 40k Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum having dedicated assault troops seems ridiculous nowadays. Since 1996, the basic structure for the Guard has been well established as the 10-man rifle sections, 5-man command sections (now 4-man with the officers split off), and 6-man support units. This makes active sense, and has strong real-world parallels: in modern military, few units are armed primarily for hand-to-hand combat, and such has been the case for nearly 300 years.  Despite this, close combat has always been a significant part of 40k. Back in first edition, the game launched with the assumption that ranged combat would be the norm, as can be seen in the early army lists, but, over time, some time around the start of the 1990s, that shifted. Close combat had moved out of the shadows, and the Craftworld Eldar had the cutting edge of this, with Guardian Storm squads (with laspistols and powerswords), and Howling Banshee and Striking Scorpion Aspect warriors.  On ...

I have ADHD. It's not the funny side that you see in sitcoms. It's the type where I struggle to complete anything, and have more ideas than I know what to do with.  The company i design for is largely a result of the condition: i need to be creative, and that does the job; marketable output is a side effect. The last 2 years have been a nightmare of mortgage applications, bereavement, illness, injury, and so on, with a couple of weddings and pregnancies thrown in for good measure. My brain has reacted to that by diving headlong into full blown ADHD. I hadn't realised how bad it was until the latest batch of illness forced me to take sick leave. I have found 20-odd hobby projects that I've started, forgotten I'd started and so buried under the next idea that crossed my mind.  I'm slowly finding them and moving them on. I have, at present: * a small army half painted; * 5 more small forces primed and in boxes (one of which was scattered across my desk for a few mo...

I haven't played Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. There, I've said it. When the End Times blew up the Old World of Warhammer, a setting that had been developed over 30 years, and the new 9th edition came with a complete reboot, new system, new setting, new basing, some of the same characters, i drifted away from Warhammer Fantasy. This wasn't an easy decision, since over the decades I'd played with Undead, High Elves, Orcs and Goblins, Chaos Warriors, Beastmen, Daemons of Chaos, Skaven and  Empire, but the idea of having to reorganise all those armies and transfer often brittle old models to new round bases felt like far, far too much work. I'm sitting here, in my games room, with said Empire army filling 2 80×30cm shelves of tightly packed, neatly serried ranks, and a couple of large crates full of unpainted Fantasy models. With Age of Sigmar in the ascendancy i was unsure if my mighty regiments would ever see the table again, or if they were doomed to sit forever upon th...

I have a lot of terrain. Tables after tables worth, however dense. This is before adding in stuff from work.  I'm currently in the middle of reorganising my domestic terrain range (the tedium of sick leave is setting in), and so I'm shuffling around 26 years' worth of old stuff.  Looking at this older stuff the painting is ... juvenile ... on most of them, even pieces from a few years ago. Some of the stuff i churned out earlier this year has a minimum level of paint, just enough to get by as painted terrain. Beside this, the trenches that are painted for promo shots looks incongruously well painted.  I'm reorganising primarily to fit in a table's worth of urban terrain that ive been building and painting over the past year, all of which are built around cheap kits and bits box raids. During the course of building and painting them, I've painted a lot of terrain for show. That difference in detail and standard has carried over to the new kits: where before I...

Yes, I'm back on the subject of scale again. This time, though, it's not about range, model size, bases, or the various other factors that we, as gamers, don't have a direct say in. This time I'm talking about the camouflage schemes that we apply to our models with paint.  With the huge variation in terrain across even a small country like Ireland, camouflage schemes are a vast and diverse range for any historical force. When we take our games to other planets, or, more mundanely, our forces to different warzones, the range of camouflage, by necessity, has to expand. Consider, say a dark grey Panther in North Africa during WWII,  or an olive drab vehicle in the enclave of West Berlin: to a limited degree their scheme will work because it's a nondescript bland tone, but that's a very limited degree.  As modellers we want to recreate those schemes, in part for appearance, in part for immersion, and in part in the hope that the camouflage will work and make our opp...