Dark Millennium Monday

Well the 40K bug has somewhat taken over here at Blacksteel Manor. After digging back into it a few weeks ago with news of a new edition on the horizon I definitely have the fever and have been haunting the web forums and articles of various 40K sites to see how to bring my forces back up to date. I've also been  encouraging the Apprentices to get their stuff a little further along.

First up, relying on terrain I built 10 years (and several moves) ago is just not going to cut it anymore, so there's a general terrain upgrade going on at the same time as all the rest of this, mainly in the "buildings" category. I'll post pics once I'm happy with them.

Apprentice Red is now exploring the shiny happy world of the Necrons since we picked up that army on the cheap a while back. He has the new codex, a leader, some destroyers and scarabs, and a whole bunch of warriors. Once he gets a few games in we will look at what he needs to add to make it more interesting. The good news is that it's almost 100% painted, decently, so he's already way ahead there and we can focus on doing something interesting with the bases. He's also working on his Orks in between.

Apprentice Blaster isn't sure what he wants to do for a second army yet - he's mainly interested in making his Space Wolves even nastier and getting more of them painted. It's a pretty strong army already and he has the units to go to around 1500 right now as he just added a Land Raider Crusader to his forces, which I suspect is destined to hold a bellyful of Wolf Guard Assault Terminators because that's all the rage right now. In his first game with it it carried a mob of Blood Claws led by a Wolf Priest and did pretty well so he's already pleased with that choice.

Apprentice Who is interested but I don't think he's old enough to get into painting yet and if you don't care about painting I'm not funding an army. Let's practice with our legos a bit more before we tackle glue and $50 models...

As for myself my gamer ADD is worst when it comes to miniatures. My painted Howling Griffon marines are playable (and have been since the 80's) but I need more parts to make them into the force I want them to be for the modern game.

Since those parts aren't free I thought about working on my Chaos Marines because I thought I had all the parts I needed - Perversely I was going for a force with no armored vehicles in it, none, to annoy the melta-heavy armies I see nowadays, but I decided it just wasn't going to work all that well without more bikes. Plus I want to dump Rhino's full of Berserkers on somebody and that means I need more parts.

I thought about going back and finishing my Orks as I have multiple Battlewagons in various stages of construction, but I have a pretty good footslogger horde now and that's what I've played the most the last few years. Don't really need parts, but I'm a little tired of painting black-red-white-green over and over again.

So I came back around to my Crimson Fists, started a decade ago as a second "faster to paint" marine army who have never really been finished. Awhile back I decided to make them my "mechanized" marine army and I'm sticking with that plan. I've redivided my squads (rom the old 6-man las/plas of 3rd edition - sigh - into 10-man tac squads with Rhinos, Razorbacks, Terminators, Attack Bikes, and Predator support. I'm finally finishing my command squad too. The command group will be on foot/Razorback for now because that's what I have but I am intrigued by the possibilities of the biker command squad too so that's next on my list. The good news is that I have all of the parts I need for the entire force, 2000-something points at least, so I don't have to go acquire stuff - I can just build & paint.

Anyway, thats the state of the universe for today. Back to the RPG's tomorrow...