40K Friday - The Eldar Expansion

Eldar were the first figures I bought for 40K. They didn't look like anything else out there and I thought those helmets were really cool. I still have them:

I painted these guys around 1988-89.

I had an Eldar army back in RT & 2nd Edition, then ended up trading most of them to a friend in 3rd to really build out his Eldar army and my Ork army. As far as I know he still has them too. After letting them go for a few years I decided I ought to have at least a small Eldar force, especially as the Apprentices were starting to get interested. I picked up a few here and there and had a force in a box but never sat down to get it into playable shape. It's been a back-burner project for about 5 years now.

The Harlequins are of a similar vintage

Once Apprentice Blaster dug into the new Eldar it occurred to me we might be able to ally if I built out my space elves, so I started playing around with the options. While acquiring some new bits I ended up with some units painted in the Iyanden paint scheme and decided I could do that. I also decided to make this an all-new force - none of my old legacy metal stuff, unless that's still the current model. Much like my Dark Angel force, I wanted a fresh start.

At the moment it's still fairly small - a wraithseer, some wraithguard as my 2 troops units, some fire dragons in a falcon, some dark reapers, and a wraithlord. I have also added some jetbikes to give me an additional troop unit and some speed. Down the road I see more wraithguard, another wraithlord, some warp spiders, and a wraithknight as important additions. I will probably end up with a pair of wave serpents too. It's a rough plan, but it's a plan. I see it as a wraith-heavy force with a few aspect warriors and bikes thrown in.

My old alien paint-scheme Eldar are still around as a separate force. They have a more traditional structure of farseer, warlocks, guardians, jetbikes, wraithlord, dark reapers, and harlequins. That's all stuff I already have, and a lot of it is already painted which is why I'm not combining it all into one force. It did suffer somewhat because I gave a lot of the unpainted stuff to Blaster when he started his army, which meant I needed to start acquiring units again and that's when the whole Iyanden thing came up. I see this one as a guardian and aspect warrior heavy force with a few tanks added in.

It's a teal-turqoise-ish color plus pink. It's a little different.

It's stupid, frankly, to have two smallish Eldar armies like this sitting next to each other in the cabinet.  I originally started writing this earlier in the week and was still thinking I would do them as two separate forces but as I thought about it more, I started to change my mind. I may have to sacrifice a nicely painted Iyanden model or two, but the last thing I need is two Eldar armies. So after working through the thoughts above I have come to a different conclusion: unification!

Old-School Eldar Dreadnought. He just needs a little glue and he's all good!

I'm trying to learn from my Space Marine example: I have marines painted in five different schemes, all with a different mix of units. If I had stayed with, say, two marine armies, I would have a whole lot more options in each than I do with any one of them right now. There's no easy way to change that situation so I'll live with it but I can at least learn from it.

So the priority list shifts around a bit. A Wave Serpent or two is pretty high on the list to allow me to go mechanized, while an Avatar would help if I go foot-dar. Options are good, right? This will ensure I have everything in one big pile rather than silo'd off in separate teams.

Further updates to come!

Overreaction Wednesday - Release Dates!

D&D Next/5th/Yet Another Edition coming on 7/15? At least in starter set form it does seem likely. Article on ENWorld here, furious discussion about it on ENWorld here.

Warhammer 40,000 7th/Surprise/Gold-Plated Edition is definitely coming 5/24 (no starter set til August most likely, but the big rulebook will be drop-podding in within two weeks! Here is a video with Jervis Johnson talking about the changes. That's shockingly modern of GW - good job.

Yep, only two things! Isn't that enough? Are you not entertained?

OK fine, here is a funny video for 40K fans - Link. There is harsh language, a lot of harsh language, both audio and printed on the screen. Some familiarity with the universe will make it much funnier.

I don't have a funny D&D video, but WOTC has a bunch of D&D-related videos here. If you're bored and need 12 hours of video of other people playing D&D I'm pretty sure it's in there.

Boundary Tokens

It really started in 3rd edition D&D - is there an easy way to mark the area of effect on a spell? Our answer was to draw it on the battlemat, but that can involve some erasing and redrawing as spells come and go and when I took the time to draw up a map in advance, on paper (as in the picture above) you can't really erase something once it's down, and if you're playing on a poster map then no one's drawing anything anywhere. Then 4th Edition made it even more complicated with zones and other effects that move with the caster becoming much more common, and heaven forbid they overlap - now it's really tricky to track these things. We've used pipe cleaners bent into a rough square but it's a very loose solution.

Armorcast briefly had a set of tokens for marking corners that had some style to them - the white ones looked like clouds, the red was like fire, the blue was like water, etc. but they went out of business so fast I never had a chance to acquire them. Litko though has a set of colored boundary markers that are inexpensive and should work just fine.

They come 4 sets to a ... set. Now these are in the end brightly colored bits of plastic, but since I play 40K I am used to paying ridiculous amounts of money for brightly colored bits of plastic and these are relatively inexpensive. This set of 4 runs about $6. It's ideal for 4th Edition because every effect in that game is square, but it works for Pathfinder too:

Yeah, I picked up two sets. We play enough Pathfinder here (and we're not done with 4E) that it's worth it.

Now if you don't play with miniatures or tokens on a grid then you don't really need this but if you do play a game like this then here's an option for handling this particular issue.

Monday Update - Litko Bases

On Friday I mentioned my difficulties in changing my fantasy daemon army over to a 40K daemon army, mainly in changing from square bases to round. There are a lot of ways to acquire bases - especially online. There are a lot of companies making special custom bases with built-in details like ruins or lava, but if you just want plain flat bases Litko is a solid company that makes a ton of them. They are laser-cut wood, precut to a bunch of sizes that fit popular games and options for some custom work as well. The prices are good too. I've been buying stuff from them for years and I've never had a single problem with them. They make some other interesting gadgets for games, RPG's included. More on that later.

The batch above is mainly going to help fill out my Chaos Marines as I have a plan for a set of custom bases for them. More on that later too. Whatever is left will likely fill in the remaining gaps in my Daemon army.

Motivational Monday