Greetings friends! Welcome back to the Collardhammer Special, my write-when-I-feel-like-it blog of progress in 2025. I’m sure you all have many questions about what I’ve been up to over the last 5 weeks or so, and I can only answer that it has been jam packed! I’ve managed to get quite a lot of gaming in and some hobby work (mainly on Emperor’s Children) although progress is slow as always. I’ve got a few relatively quiet weeks ahead of me until the middle of August. My partner’s parents are coming to stay with us, and we are both attending a wedding and tying the knot ourselves towards the end of the month (and we should hopefully be completing on our new flat soon), so until then I’m hoping to make some more hobby progress and write this blog a bit more consistently.
Progress wise, the main backlog hasn’t really moved since the last update. I’ve made a start on a batch of Night Lords, some skeleton warriors and the Deathwatch Veterans are nearly there, but all require more work. I think both the negative reception to Heresy 3.0 and the (more positive) reveal of the new Deathwatch has knocked the wind out of my sails on those projects, and I ran out of one of the base paints for the skeletons and haven’t been able to pick up a new pot yet. On the issues with Heresy, it’s obvious that unit removals and losses of wargear are very bad, and people are rightly upset. However, I think complaints about changes to the rules are a bit overblown. I didn’t play much 2.0, but did play quite a lot of 1.0, and I think that the change between those editions was comparable in scale, although obviously I don’t have the new rules on hand currently. Moreover, people reacted quite badly to the launch of 10th edition, but it seems to be largely regarded as the best version of the game in the modern era now. I am certainly interested to give the new edition a try at least.
Coming back from that tangent to my actual hobby progress, I
finally finished a unit of Noise Marines:
 |
| Noisy bois |
Although they’ve been quite slow to paint, they’ve also been really fun, with lots of different textures and effects. The slight issue is that at this rate, I might have finished the box set by the middle of next year, by which time 11th edition will likely have launched. I guess it will be nice to play a new army for the new edition, even if it’s not what I intended. I’ve also made a start on a unit of Tormentors, painting a meltagun and a bolter, with the unit leader nearly finished too:
 |
| Frag out! |
 |
| Skin tone and face could definitely stand for improvement |
I essentially applied the same paint scheme as on the Noise Marines to these guys and similarly enjoyed painting them. I also decided to add even more mud to the bases while working on these because the swampy hellscape idea just wasn’t coming through enough for me. Overall, I am really enjoying this project and have lots of ideas about how to expand it - I have an idea of adding wings and lots of Slaanesh symbols to the new Saturnine Praetor and mounting him on a slightly bigger base for a winged daemon prince. I think that the EC range plays quite nicely visually with the heresy stuff, so at some point I’ll probably look at adding heresy land raiders and rhinos to the army too. Of course, I also want to add some Flawless Blades and Lucius as well. You can see how the scope of my projects can grow…
Since the last blog post, I’ve managed to play quite a lot
of games, so I’m not going to talk about all of them in this blogpost. I am
however going to talk about the Old World, for which I finally managed to get
some games in last weekend. I played 2 500-point games with the Royal Host:
 |
| B O N E |
I hugely enjoyed the games that I played. Going into it, I was really worried that the game was going to be very complex, and it would take a long time to learn, but it was actually quite straightforward once we started throwing dice around. I’d recommend giving the game a try to anyone who enjoyed playing old fantasy battle. The first game I played was against Warriors of Chaos, playing a Norsca themed army with some awesome 3d prints for skin wolves (I wish I’d taken a picture of them). The game was super close, leaning towards me until my Hierophant unexpectedly died in a duel and my army crumbled. In the end, I scored about 50VP more than my opponent, which was a draw. For my second game, I played against Bretonnians. This was less balanced, although admittedly I did do something a bit sus when I forgot to remind my opponent that I could get extra movement with My Will Be Done. A good set of rolls later and my skeletons had charged 12 across the board to completely blunt the charge of his knights. To add insult to injury, I then caught them while they were falling back, meaning that my skeletons had managed to move 22 inches across the board in a single turn and completely nullify their best unit. On the whole, it was still a funny moment, and I think everyone had a good time.
 |
| Welcoming the forces of chaos to the bone zone |
With that, I am going to leave it here for this week. I haven’t decided what I am going to be working on next week yet, although it will likely be determined by looking at the new rules for Heresy and working out how to make game-legal armies. I also have a game of 40k tomorrow, either against Ad Mech or Tyranids, so I’ll probably report on that (and other 40k games) next weekend. Until then, have a great week of your own hobby!
Ben
Comments
Post a Comment