Musings of a Green Man

I've been gaming for rather a long time. I know that i bought every issue of White Dwarf from December 1991 until June 1998, and my collection spans about 5 years further back in bits and pieces, with back issues and second hand copies to fill some of the gaps. So, more than 28 years, certainly.  There's a long standing joke that a dedicated miniature gamer will drop dead once they have finished painting every model in their collection. This joke comes from the backlog we all develop. We buy miniatures or are given miniatures that we want for forces we're building or components we want, and then life gets in the way or we find a new model or line or game that's just so much better/newer/fresher, and we have a pile of stuff that hasn't been painted and is now being ignored. I have years and years and years of that, without interruption. I also have inherited a few armies, when people have been clearing out their old gaming stuff, most pressing, at present, for me is ...

There's been a lot of fuss made over the past couple of years about 40k's new Primaris marines, about existing characters being upgraded and the doom of the traditional space marines.  There's some validity to it all, but, something most people forget, or simply don't know, is that a similar change happened almost 30 years ago.  Back in first edition, in Rogue Trader, marines started with profiles barely advanced from the humble Guardsman, with power armour that gave a 4+ save. A 4+ save was a big thing back then, and the other means of getting it - Carapace armour or layers, such as mesh and flak - came with movement penalties and other downsides. Back then, the S4 of the bolter made it an enviable weapon. Marines were a  powerful force. The miniatures, dating from before or around the time that marines became superhuman giants, were small by modern standards, about shoulder height to a modern traditional marine, mostly single-piece (except  for backpack) and wearin...

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 ...

Today sees the pre-order release of the latest Gotrek Gurnison figure by Citadel, his first appearance in styrene. Gotrek grew out of a character in the play tests for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and, over the years, and 30 years' worth of novels, novellas, short stories and audio dramas, he met, or his stories even introduced, almost every major character in the World That Was. Thanquol became a running nemesis. Felix Jaeger went from a young buck looking for adventures that he could turn into stories, since he was an author, to a middle aged veteran, with more stories than he could ever write. Through all of this, Gotrek continued to be the best, or worst slayer dwarfs had ever known. He slew trolls, giants, dragons, daemons, some say even gods, and still refused to die. The world ended. An apocalypse literally tore the planet apart in a magical explosion. Still he kept going. BoLS, Spikey Bits and so on have coverage of the rules side of things, and can comment more meaningfu...

I like using obscure units. Army lists that aren't seen on the table often fascinate me. It's an underdog thing. A year or so back, after finally making it to Static Games in Glasgow, after 8 years where i was, for the most part, reliant on the internet, and the local Games Workshop store for connection to the wider hobby, I discovered that the old Warhammer Historical had become a range of games by Warlord Games. World War 2 has long been an uncomfortable subject in my family: on my father's side, his father was a protected trade, and so couldn't enlist, his brother, my great uncle, dodged the draft; his mother's house had a tank crash through their front garden; on my mother's side, my gran, in Northern Ireland, found the Emergency great fun, since US service men brought with them money, records and other things that were nigh unknown in isolated Catholic communities; across the border, in a Donegal cut off by partition, the Civil War was still more of a con...

Nowadays we think of mortuary monuments as being limited to tombs, crypts, gravestones and occasionally commemorative statues, plaques or park benches. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, however. Many cultures have or have had mortuary practices that seem alien to the western mindset, whether collecting the heads of fallen foes to honour them, pickling the heads or other body parts of deceased kin so that they are always with their family, or collecting the severed hands of hanged criminals for magical protection, and that's just examples from Europe. One such practice, although rather less gruesome, arose in the 16th century and continued through into the 18th century: the mortuary sword. Mortuary swords sound a lot more funereal than they were. What they were, and many still are, isn't a sword to be buried with, rather they were weapons (usually swords, but other types do exist) featuring a depiction of a deceased notable, and/or inscriptions in their honour. The most famou...

No, this isn't a dyslexic post about the glories of video cassette recorders. It's a post about a much overlooked element in many games, often referred to as vehicle design rules. Within the hobby, we rely on army lists and points to try to ensure that the game is fair on a competitive front. As such, we constrain ourselves to vehicles and units that have preset rules and stats when building our forces. Turning up to an organised event with something with home brew rules and stats rarely goes down well. That being said, the diversity of vehicles that exist in the real world is huge, even before we start adding alternative weapons to existing tanks and such. During wartime, most countries have developed new technologies to try to outdo the enemy. Even the "tank" name we use to refer to a wide range of fighting vehicles has its origin in wartime counter espionage. These new vehicles often would see little action due to flaws in design that manifested only when they w...

Looking around on-line, one thread seems to keep surfacing: that, whether tools, glue, paint, or whatever else, you should always buy the best product you can afford. The implication being that the more expensive, the better or something like that. It's got me looking at my tools, glues, paints, etc., and looking at old articles from decades ago (some in publications that predate my entry into the hobby by a number of years). What I've found in those articles is that the current advice, to buy the best, is in direct contradiction to a lot of the advice from 30-40 years ago. There are articles saying that you should buy cheap tools, because, with any significant use, the tools will soon be broken and need replaced. Of course, back then, most terrain packs for gaming were cardboard cut outs. Back in those days, companies wanted you to spend as much of your hobby budget as possible on miniatures and products they produced. These days, the same can be said, but most companies hav...

Yesterday I rambled on incessantly about what units/periods work best on an open field gaming table, where scenery is scarce. Rather than slowly build up the terrain, today I'm going to jump to the other extreme, where there's little of the table that isn't covered in terrain. There's a huge middle ground, where most games will fit, and most games tables too. Hyper-dense Terrain This extreme of terrain is something most associated with small skirmish level games, like Games Workshop's Necromunda, Space Hulk , Shadow War and Kill Team, and other games that limit floorspace to a much smaller table than most company level games require . Infinity is also famous for dense terrain, but the actual density seems to vary between Europe and the America. For the purposes of this article, when i talk about hyper-dense terrain, I'm referring to the density of terrain in an American game of Infinity. I have always liked the challenge of a table absolutely crammed with...

Yesterday I rambled on and on about how important terrain is, and how it's nice to have a fully painted table of terrain, over which you can play games with your fully painted armies. In that article, i mentioned being able to cram a few large tables full of terrain. By that, i don't mean dressing the table with more than the required minimum of 2 items per 2' square, or whatever. By that i mean crammed to the point where there is little to no table visible, just terrain with occasional cracks where pieces meet. This got me thinking on what is the topic of today's post: terrain density. The amount of terrain you put on a table, as well as the type and size of such, can greatly affect the game in terms of how units move, where they deploy, and how they fight. To explain this further, I'll take 2 extremes, and look at how they will shape the game. The first is the open field, with maybe a few knolls, hedges and such; the second is the hyper dense terrain, say the B...

Yesterday i rambled on and on about our nostalgia for old systems and miniatures, wistful memories of glory days when everything seemed so much better, when it actually wasn't. Today's topic is the homages to years gone by that are still shaping our hobby. Like those nods and winks to older pop culture that we see in films and television, games and miniatures are full of similar. The most obvious is the Chainsaws. These began as references to Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead , but s pawned miniatures with such, including Citadel's LE23, Chainsaw Wizard, and numerous models for Warhammer Fantasy and Blood Bowl armed with anachronistic chainsaws. It even spawned a game , Chainsaw Warrior. The homage's continuation should be fairly obvious, but for those who haven't had their coffee, there are numerous examples of chainsaws in modern sci-fi battle games, from the chainsword of 40k, to the chain bayonets on many of the guns ...

The miniature gaming hobby is old. The original Dungeons and Dragons came out 45 years ago. The first tabletop wargame is far, far older. Even if we ignore games like Chess and Go, which could be considered wargames, because they are played using set pieces, and on a set board, early, commercially available, variable wargames have been around since the late 18th century, the first commonly credited being introduced in 1780. That's nearly 240 years. With this long history, games have come and gone, scales have shifted, design ethoses have changed, and so on. Most gamers have fond memories of the first games they played, the first miniatures they bought and built and painted. When we first encountered the hobby, everything was new, games were so much better than the disorganised play we knew as children, miniatures seemed so detailed. Essentially, for those of us who stayed in the hobby, we fell in love with one or more aspect of the hobby. As lovers, it's all too easy to view...

At the moment, I'm in the middle of building and painting an Imperial Guard artillery company for 40k. I'm using a Spearhead detachment, and so I'm looking at 1 or 2 HQ , up to 3 Troops, up to 2 Elites, Fast Attack and Flyers. At present it contains a Company Commander, the compulsory HQ, a command squad with a mortar, medic and standard (to keep the crews of the field guns alive and in the fight) and a Master of Ordnance, filling the optional Elites, and a battery of 3 Heavy Mortars, a battery of 3 Thudd Guns, a battery of 2 Basilisks, a Griffon and a Deathstrike. I have plenty of other units, should I choose to make a Battalion instead, and plan to have a Brigade beyond this, so this Spearhead can remain stand-alone, so I have the option of adding Troops  another HQ, some Fast Attack, some Flyers, and another Heavy Support, and i can add another Basilisk and another 2 Griffons within the slots already occupied. Of those, since this is a Grand Battery, the extra Heavy Supp...

I live in a house built in the 1930s, as part of the interbellum urban expansion. After the second world war, what Ireland termed the Emergency, the building was converted from 2 single bedroom flats into a 2 bedroom house. It has left its mark on the building: our living room has a picture rail that marks the old cornice of the ground floor, with mouldings buried under layers of paint and wallpaper, girders across the old walls and such. This may seem irrelevant to a blog on gaming and scale miniatures, but it is all too relevant. In the late 1950s and the 1960s the craze of "modernising" hit, and numerous crimes against architecture were committed in the name of Modernism. This new trend stripped huge swathes of those buildings that survived the Blitz, and the possibly overzealous retaliation that wiped out huge amounts of the 19th and early 20th century buildings across western Europe. Buildings that were older that were recoverable were restored; more modern buildings we...

Let me take you on a trip back through time... In Rogue Trader, 40k's first edition, the Grimdark was new, and finding itself. Back then, the Imperial Guard had access to Rhinos, Predators, Land Raiders, even bikes, jetbikes and Land Speeders. They got a proper army list in White Dwarf 107. The list was riddled with problems, foremost amongst them, the profusion  of lascannon. Every command squad had 2, every infantry squad and conscript squad had one, and every support squad, back then squads of 10, had 4 and a missile launcher. They could be swapped out for Conversion Beamers for free, but those heavy weapons were compulsory, and had a movement penalty. It made little sense to have so many, and they were next to useless in Assault platoons - platoons whose squads had pistols as standard, and could have jump-packs - and Beastmen Attack platoons - where squads of beastmen were the squads. There were, as i said, a lot of problems, but that's a rant for another post. One thing ...