40K Friday: Orks, Grey Knights, and Dark Angels

 

The focus has not been super-strong lately but I've accomplished a little bit. 

The Grey Knights have been one main area and, feeling that I have enough infantry to play something fun for now, I have mainly been working on the Dreadknight situation. This is mostly because I have 3 of them sitting on the table not-finished and 2 more in boxes waiting to be built as shiny new -Grandmaster- Dreadknights with some of the new bits. It's been a fight in trying to figure out how far I want to go with each one versus what is "good enough" to call done and move on - and this army needs a lot of that last part. Hoping to get at least 1-2 of them into the case this weekend and then knock out the rest soon. That will make for a somewhat top-heavy force but I still have some Purifiers, Purgators, and Terminators/Paladins to build so it will even out. The real question is "how much of this can I get to DONE before their codex comes out and changes up a bunch of stuff?" We will see.

These heads are perfect for what I was thinking but once they are on ... man ...

The Orks were getting a fair amount of attention before and now with the Armageddon set having arrived they've been getting a strategic rethink. As I mentioned here I've been contemplating making a new separate Blood Axe force with a mix of older and newer models. I had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted to use in it - most of which I already had - so with a theme and the units it was just a matter of building some of the parts. I started sticking my 3rd-party heads onto my older boyz torsos and ... I do not like the way they look ... at all. It's rough. The alternate heads make the hunched-over ork boyz look even more off-kilter. I'm going to try building some from scratch and see if I can make them look better as I was adapting some already built models. I'm also going to see if I can make the heads work with the older monopose boyz or with the Armageddon monopose boyz as some of them have separate heads. If that doesn't work then the Blood Axe heads may get set aside into the Ork Bits box and used for vehicle riders or drivers or something and they all get rolled into the Goffs. It's disappointing but not every plan works out.

Digging through the Armageddon box also got me to thinking about the Marine half. For the first time in a while I really had few specific plans for that side of a big box. I figured the heavy bolter guys would probably go into the Crimson Fists because that's a thing with them but otherwise it was pretty open. I'll find a home for them eventually but there wasn't really any urgency about it. 

The intercessors in the box are especially ... mundane. My core, modern (meaning primaris-updated) forces are the aforementioned Fists, my Blood Angels, and my largely-unbuilt-but-always-in-the-back-of-my-mind Black Templars. Team Blue and Team Red already have multiple intercessor squads and Team Fanatic doesn't really care about them as I prefer to focus on Crusader squads as a unique Templar thing. So what was I going to do with a squad or two of a unit with no obvious home?

I thought about whether I could convert them to something else but that's more challenging with the monopose stuff. Even making them additional Sternguard could take some work to make them look right.

Then the wandering mind pulled down my Ravenwing box while moving stuff around and a new virus took hold ... 

"At one point you had an active Dark Angels army ... earlier this year you  set up a Ravenwing force and counted up enough terminators and Deathwing Knights to make a Deathwing army ... why not fill in some Greenwing units and just Primais-ize your Dark Angels?"

I mean ... I have the other stuff already - built and basecoated - and I wouldn't be buying anything new since the Armagedodn box was a done deal ... sure, it could actually work ...

I think they will look good in black. I like to use power swords in my DA army anyway so these will fit right in.

So now the latest distraction for 2026 is tweaking the kinda-sorta Dark Angel "wing" elements and bridging them with "regular" space marine pieces. I was also trying to figure out what to do with the Vanguard Vets as I don't really want them in the Fists and my Blood Angels are already well-supplied with jump assault squads of various types - where could I put them that they would make a difference? Well, they would make for a nice flexible element for a reborn Dark Angels force now wouldn't they?

Then of course the next thought is "maybe I should get another squad too while they're cheap - NO!

Regardless I already have a bunch of older characters in the Dark Angel box, plus some modern dreadnoughts, plus these new models, plus some other uncommitted newer units (Hellblasters?) and suddenly that's a pretty solid army. I'll save the potential structure for another post but it feels good to find a way to actually use some of the new units I was undecided on. Fortunately my Dark Angels paint scheme is pretty simple too so I might be able to get them painted up fairly quick - well quick for me anyway.

More next week as I chronicle this poorly-focused journey into hobby madness.

A Quick Anecdote on AD&D 2E and the 1993 Origins Convention

 

Mike Mearls posted an article today referring back to his introduction to AD&D 2nd Edition and it triggered a memory I do not think I have shared here before. 

As far as 2E goes my friends and I at the time thought it was pretty good - yes it changed up some things from what we had before but some of those we knew were going to be changing (thank you satanic panic) and we liked a lot of the rest. The Dragon Magazine preview booklet had given us time to digest some of the new before it officially arrived. We rolled up new characters, translated a few, and made the jump without much angst or drama. We played it a lot through the 90's.

Right, that one

The memory deals with the '93 Origins Game Fair which was held in Fort Worth that year. I had heard of Origins for many years at that point but had never been to one. We had a bunch of smaller local/state cons in Dallas and occasionally one in Ft. Worth but this was going to be a big one. I played in the Star Fleet Battles tournament - briefly. I went with my best friend at the time and I believe we also played in a big Battletech game and a decent sized Warhammer Fantasy fight. The dealer's room was a big draw of course and I spent a fair amount of time at the GDW booth as Traveller: The New Era was a big new thing in our world at the time and I was interested to see what was coming next. 

This one is probably worth another post.

The most relevant part to this memory spark was later in the con when the live auction hit. There was a lot of cool stuff - remember we didn't have eBay available at the tap of an app back then - and I don't think I won any of it. Near the end though the 1st edition AD&D books started to show up - pretty much an avalanche of 1E books I would say. Lot after lot - and no one was buying them! 

Dominating - in 1993 anyway

I saw PHBs, DMGS, MMs, and all of the later hardbacks - in all of the various covers and in everything from "perfect" to "run over by a cement truck in a rainstorm" condition - showing up with opening bids set at 1$ and even lower, stacking up at the auction table as book after book came up with no takers. Every once in a while someone would drop 50 cents on one, but no one was paying significant money for any of them. 

Some were pristine, some were far rougher than this. Ripped, torn, chewed, submerged at some point ... 

I know a lot of the retro crowd likes to make a big deal out of people who never stopped playing AD&D but standing in that room at that con it was very evident that the time of 1E was over. At last as far as the people at the convention were concerned. I assume a lot of people held onto their books - I know I did - either out of nostalgia or sure, maybe thinking they might run it again someday, but 4 years in Second Edition was the version people cared about. It was a shock to see how things had turned around where books that were such a huge part of our lives were now effectively worthless. Edition changes were still somewhat new then. How that has changed!

The Water Gardens, right next door to the convention center.
"You may remember me from such films as "Logan's Run" ...

Postscript: Yes it did occur to me years later that I could have made some money if I had jumped in and bought up some of those books.

Post-postscript: That said, even circa 2010 when I was outfitting the boys with the full set of Basic/Expert/AD&D/AD&D 2E/D&D 3E player books* it was not difficult to find examples of all of those online or in used bookstores nor were they priced like a "collectible". So I would have been waiting for a few more years to make my fortune with the "Origins Haul".

*We were playing 4th at the time after playing a lot of Basic D&D and I wanted them to be able to join any game they ran across with friends or whoever. Hey, they were interested and I had the chance to do it so why not?