This week saw a full mixture of hobbying activities – gaming, painting, writing, 3D printing and even blog work, which is amazing as I even found time to get just a touch of video gaming in too (which won’t be covered in this post). For the rest, let’s read on!
Before that though, a quick sidebar.
The MDF sales are still up – I’m going to do a larger push to try and get more of these things sold so drop me a message if interested.
First up, a big change earlier this week was setting up the blog to properly integrate with the ChargeBlog Patreon. The original plan to use a password system was fine (and great for showing people previews) but was clunky as hell and a pain for everyone involved. Because of that, I’ve switched over to a dedicated plugin. This means that, if you’ve signed up for the Patreon, you can now log into the blog for access to the locked posts. If you want to test it, the post above now requires a Patreon login and also provides a link to the right page and tier to sign up to get access. There are going to be a few more Patreon posts coming soon, including more updates for the first ChargeReal update and also a few more posts like the one above – there are some fun things I want to write about.
This week I was visited by the Former Housemate Regular Opponent. After a longer-than-usual chat (as we haven’t hung out properly since April) we finally got around to hitting the board with my recently printed Necromunda terrain. On a little board, we decided to play a simple head-to-head between his Goliath and my new gang, both as a chance to see how they play but also to remind ourselves how this whole Necromunda thing works. The game was a reasonable intro but was also on the short side – 1000 points of the new gang gives me three figures and a few unlucky dice rolls led to two dead figures and the final breaking. I’m still understanding how they work but it’s always fun to roll some dice.
That new gang? Yep, it’s the Spyrers I mentioned last week. These guys went together on Monday and Tuesday evenings, assembling each box each night (including a quick spray) before spending Wednesday lunchtime frantically drybrushing white over the black basecoat and then slapping on the Leadbelcher for most of the figure (as you can see in the picture of the game). I’m going to blame their bad luck on the fact they didn’t have a touch of colour on them, so later in the week I painted on some Turquoise contrast. I’m going for a similar colour scheme to my Battletech guys, mostly as I love the look of the contrast on metal. These guys aren’t finished but I’ve got a much better start on them than I had expected to have. Plus, having a gang of only six figures which is pretty reasonable to paint is definitely refilling the painting mojo.
And good, because I’m really ready to jump back in on the Ultramoderns. Writing about Shyluz and the factions for Supplement 1 is getting me excited to look at what is available for figures. I spent a little time putting the CO Bundeswehr together in Blender, including flipping leg pieces around for even more variations. The Scout Platoon in the supplement is going to use the same base figures as the Airmobile guys but with a different head. On the other hand, the opposing faction is much more varied – not quite insurgents but not quite a uniform military. Luckily the latest Spectre releases are pretty great, almost ideal in fact. So I got the printer going again, reset my support heights (after a failed print or two) and finally got these guys. Tomorrow night is going to be assembly and undercoating time, with the intention of getting them ready soon. I’m already planning a little border-crossing raid…
In addition to the actual figure printing, my FDM printer has been hammering out these little guys for my sister. It’s one of those nice features of having a printer – there are lots of little things that you can print that are incredibly handy or just fun to print out. These articulated octopuses should be fun to play around with and they are a good test of the printer. Plus I now have some purple filament to play around with!
That’s it for this week, with a new update coming next Sunday.
