Crusade characters, work on the Noise Marines and a handful of games

on

Greetings friends! Welcome back to the Collardhammer Special, my increasingly sporadic blog of hobby progress and gaming in 2025. I must begin by apologising for the lack of an update, May and June have been absolutely jam-packed. Since the last blog I wrote, I’ve been to Berlin, back home, to Edinburgh and looked after my partner while she has been sick over the last week or so. I’ve also managed to cram in some hobby time between all that and work, but unfortunately this project has fallen a bit by the wayside. Given that my partner and I are going to be having a small wedding (we got engaged in Edinburgh) and buying a flat within the next 3 months, I can’t really promise much improvement in the timetabling of this blog.

In terms of how the painting project is going, this is what my Trello board looks like:

Getting there!
I have completed a Dialogus, a Navigator and Morvenn Vahl and made a start on the unit of 5 Deathwatch veterans. I’ve also painted another Noise Marine and based all the ones that had already completed. This has been steady progress, and I do believe I should be able to comfortably get everything outside of the Emperor’s Children done by the end of the year, with room for progress on the EC and other projects and additions. I am essentially accepting at this point that because I don’t want to rush out my EC, they are unlikely to see the tabletop before 11th edition. I certainly won’t be buying anything new for them until at least the end of this year, although I assume there will be a battleforce box with Fulgrim on discount at Christmas. I am also flip-flopping on Cathay at the minute, particularly as they are my favourite Total War faction.

Moving on to showing off what I’ve painted (the purpose of this blog), here is the Dialogus:


Bony Boi

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that she is technically on the wrong base size, mainly because I am not very smart. This was a fun little project, although I am still not sure about her hair. Hair texture is something you can add to the long list of stuff I am not very good at painting. In this case, I painted it using several thin coats of Bad Moon Yellow over Wraithbone, and drybrushed over this with Wraithbone. Overall, even though most of the model is black, I think these little splashes of bright colour really help. I also had a lot of fun painting the banner. Alongisde the Dialogus, I painted the Imperial Navigator I had sitting on my desk:


This wasn’t so interesting to paint, but I am quite pleased with it regardless. This was the only other Agents character I wanted to paint for now, and between this, the Dialogus and Morvenn Vahl, all of the characters on my crusade roster are painted, which is nice for the narrative.

Moving on to a more recent project, I painted the Morvenn Vahl I’ve had in my case for a good while. She is also part of my crusade roster, taking the role of the spirit of my martyred Canoness (Isabelle Pyreheart) from our 9th edition crusade. She is therefore more in the colours of my army than the GW version:


'I will not allow such shame to befall our order again!'




This model was really fun to paint. It has loads of details and a few different textures, and a sweet base sculpt that fits quite nicely in my army’s basing scheme. I am looking forward to playing with her alongside my Paragon Warsuits, particularly as they themselves are very powerful, having ranked up from Repentia.

On Emperor’s Children, I painted a fourth Noise Marine:


*Another one!*

I also settled on a basing scheme. One of the things that draws me to the Emperor’s Children is their obsessive desire for perfection, and how that lead to their downfall in many ways. One way I imagine this manifesting is the desire to perfect all types of warfare, or war on all types of terrain. It becomes quite easy to see how they could find themselves embroiled in trench warfare across a toxic swamp (the kind you might associate with the Death Korp), despite the fact that the army would be visually very out of place. I liked this so much that I decided to run with it. All this to say, I’ve given them wet, swampy bases and spread out some muddy mess to try to help immerse them:

I really like the bright pink contrasting the dark browns and greens on the base

I’ve also found some time to get a couple of different games in over the course of the month. I played another game of Warcry, which was both fun and extremely tense, essentially coming down to the priority roll on turn 4 of the game. I also played a crusade Boarding Action game with Sisters against Ad Mech, which was less close, but I hope a learning experience for my opponent, who hadn’t played the faction much. We finally moved into phase two of the campaign, where I’m trialling a system loosely based on 20-0 scoring from teams events to incentivise actively playing and finishing full games. The next campaign day is on the 21st, and I am looking forward to another big clash with Orks and doubtlessly some fun narrative developments.

I think I am going to leave it there for this update. For those of you who enjoy reading academic science, the second paper from my PhD is now online here:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2025.113448

I think it’s only fair to warn that the maths is a bit involved and obviously it’s a research paper, but I am very proud of this as a contribution and want to share it with people. For the coming week, it’s looking packed out, with a stag-event for my friend and my brother’s wedding, alongside the game day a week on Saturday. I think I am going to struggle to get any hobby work in, but I will aim to write another post the following week/weekend. Have an awesome fortnight of your own hobby!

Gotta pay the cat tax

Ben


Comments

Post a Comment