Every February, York hosts Vapnartak, the first major wargames show of my calendar each year. However, more importantly, the Regular Opponents and I have used this event as an excuse to run a big game. In the past, we’ve seen large What A Tanker and our massive (and spooky) Chain of Command game. Deciding to stick with the theme we’ve been making, the plan for this year was to run a large game of Chain of Command V2, playingthe new rules after our initial game went as well as it did. The question, however, was where to set the game.

Well, seeing as the Dastardly Regular Opponent has been reading books all about the British Airborne on D-Day, and seeing as that between us we have a company of Paras, it made sense to play something from Operation Tonga. We settled on the defence at Ranville, giving a chance for the aggressive paras to dig in and defend against assaulting German forces. The plan was also to play using the Big CoC rules that came out around Christmas, playing a deep and wide game – multiple platoons on multiple phaselines. We also decided to play around with adding in some armour (we do enjoy playing with all the toys) – the Germans would have a Panzer 4 platoon and a scattering of Stugs and armoured cars (fitting for an armoured counterattack). The British, on the other hand, historically didn’t have armour at this point, dealing with the tanks with 6 Pounder AT guns and PIAT teams.

However, the Corporate Regular Opponent has been playing with his HeyGears 3D printer and printed off a platoon of Tetrarchs, the air-portable light tank much beloved by all Company of Heroes players from its glider-based deployment back in the day. On paper, the Tetrach is kind of terrible – lightly armoured and only equipped with a light AT gun with no HE round and a coaxial machine gun (the close support version is marginally better thanks to actually having some cover-defeating HE). In fact, based on calculations for an armoured platoon in Big CoC, a Tetrach platoon is actually in the negatives, below the value of a regular paratrooper platoon. However, I am very interested in seeing how effective a light armour platoon can be – it’s going to struggle against armour in head-on engagements, and the lack of HE and a single MG turns it into barely more than a Bren gun in a pillbox, but there is some potential due to its fast speed. It also helps that the tanks look incredibly cool and, as you can see above, the Corporate Regular Opponent has knocked it out of the park, painting up his Tetrachs with a mixture of British WW2 camo – not the most historically accurate, but I know he had a lot of fun painting them.

With our armoured sorted and two of the three Para platoons being delivered by the Dastardly Regular Opponent/Ally, my part in this escapade was to prepare the final British Airborne platoon. For this, I’d be using the rather excellent Paul Hicks sculpts from the two Kickstarters they ran (Arnhem Heroes 1 and Arnhem Heroes 2) that Empress Miniatures ran. Now, technically, these figures aren’t 100% suitable for D-Day; for example, the Sten Mk V wasn’t particularly common on D-Day (although a few people, such as the Glider troops at Pegasus did receive them) but the collection is packed full of them. I bought Deal 1 in both sets, focusing on the basic infantry figures for each release (I don’t play Bolt Action, so I have little need for the larger support weapons), but also added a few additional packs (mostly expanding the riflemen and Bren guns that all British Airborne need). I also picked up the glider pilots from Arnhem Heroes 2 – I have always had an interest in the Glider Pilots since seeing them as a unit in Flames of War, and seeing the cool and unusual weapons among the equipment, I just had to include them.

Overall, I ended up with a pretty handy force. Three sections of regular Paras (including the option to have a second Bren gun team in one of them), with an additional section built around the Glider Pilots (and an added LMG). The Platoon Command (two senior leaders) and integrated sniper team were filled out, but there are also four PIAT teams and two heroes (including a landlord and a VC winner). This then left me 11 additional figures with a mixture of weapons (including a Bren gun), so I could potentially add a fifth section if more bodies are needed – alternatively, I have the building block of an engineering section, including a flamethrower operator.

As someone who has gone full 3D printing for my hobby, it takes a lot for me to invest in metal figures anymore. However, Paul Hicks sculpts are some of the exceptions. Each figure feels unique, with subtle differences in body and face that you often miss with digital sculpting. There is also a weight to them – not physical weight, but the feeling of weight to the clothing and in the poses that few manage to capture digitally.

While I wax lyrical about the quality of the sculpts, much of the extra equipment (such as the 6pdr) did drive me to drink. The 6pdr gun and Vickers are both metal assemblies, and frankly, I had an awful time with them. There didn’t seem to be any guide marks or slots for pieces to fit into, meaning that attaching parts in place has either very little material to glue together or so much space for things to slide back and forth. Frankly, I think next time I would still buy the Empress crew (because the sculpts are fantastic) but replace the Anti-Tank guns with W3Gaming’s offerings – I think I will probably do this with the jeeps, getting crew from Empress (including their versions on foot with the Vickers K) but then printing my own vehicles.

Painting-wise, I went with a slightly modified version of the scheme I used back in 2021 to paint up the first of my WW2 British Infantry. The only major change was the colours I used for the metal, as I am slowly moving away from GW paints toward Army Painter Fanatic paints.

• Khaki Grey (Vallejo 880): Denison Smock basecoat
• Dark Green (Vallejo 893): Denison Smock camouflage, helmet and neckscarf
• German Camo Medium Brown (Vallejo 826): Denison Smock camouflage
• English Uniform Brown (Vallejo 921): Trousers and canteen
• Russian Uniform Green (Vallejo 924): Helmet camo strips, PIAT, mortars, guns, Respirator Bag
• Scarlett Red (Vallejo 72.012): Beret
• Khaki (Vallejo 988): Helmet camo strips, gaiters, webbing and backpack
• Army Painter Fanatic Plate Metal: Metal pieces – Base colours for gun metal
• GW Rhinox Hide: Rifle Wood (although I will vary this to have a mix of looks)

As for the painting experience, it was lovely coming back to this style of figure – it’s been a while since I picked up a traditionally sculpted figure, and there are definitely differences between painting 3D printed resin and prepared metals. I don’t think either is necessarily better, but each feels different, and I honestly found painting the metals quite relaxing, with big details that were easy to paint but still with smaller pieces for the wash to catch. In addition, I managed to find a good routine, one that worked with a massive batch size of ten (a full section), working through colour by colour before having a final touch-up phase. It was relaxed enough that I could do it late at night while watching some YouTube, and it reminded me how much I actually enjoy painting figures and seeing the final result.

Overall, I felt like I was doing relatively well as we came into the final week before the big day. Thanks to the painting process being relatively quick and those mad 10-man batches, I managed to average a section an evening. However, real life threw a wrench into my personal plans, giving me several evenings where I didn’t have the time (or desire to paint). Worse, the wrench kept going and slammed into the overall planning. We had several people drop out, reducing us to only four players (all of whom were the various Regular Opponents). Combine that with us having not playtested the map or scenario, and the fact that everyone was still getting big chunks of prep the night before, led to me realising that, frankly, I was reaching a stage where I was dragging myself around, going through the motions, and not actually that excited about the idea of gaming. Combine this with real-life stress, and there was only really one proper course of action.

I made the call and dropped out.

Not what I really wanted to do (I usually very much enjoy my wargaming time with friends), but sometimes you can be trying too hard to make the fun and ignore what you actually need. I ended up having a far more relaxed day than planned, a chance to sit back and gather myself.

And that’s it. No game day, no tales of daring do, not even any photos of finished and based models. I had to put the project aside for a moment, moving on to take a look at my upcoming Necromunda campaign (there is a printed vehicle waiting for assembly) while also still working away on all things Ultramodern.

However, things are not all that bad. The decision to delay the game has given all of us all the time to get things ready, to plan and prepare. Of course, we did need to pick an actual date… and then we realised that this year June 6th falls on a Saturday. The Dastardly Regular Opponents and I have pencilled that in the calendar, and I intend to have all my figures painted and ready by then. Combine that with more time to get players ready (and give them time to make sure they can attend), and we should be able to see a company of British Paras (accompanied by their light tanks) defending against the German offensive.

It has been a while since we got the big stompy boys out and put them on the table. In fact, over two years (and fast approaching three), something which probably comes down to my lack of mechs, a wargaming calendar filled with other games and, if I’ll admit, my own issues with BattleTech. While I can appreciate the fact that Battletech has barely changed since the 1980s and I do love the sensation of ticking the boxes on a Flechs sheet until the DESTROYED marker pops up, I think that BattleTech is still maybe a little bit too crunchy for my taste, far too focused on the specifics rather than the vibe I remember from MechWarrior 3 of groups of mechs clashing together, vehicles caught in the cross fire as walkers owned the battlefield. I didn’t want to run a couple of mech – I wanted to run a platoon of them, along with supporting elements as jets scream overhead.

The good news is that Catalyst Games has long had a ruleset for this – Alpha Strike. With cards for this game included in every BattleTech box I’ve seen, this doesn’t seem to be a small side show. However, we hadn’t got around to playing it – Alpha Strike requires a larger area and ideally, terrain. It also requires more mechs than I own, but luckily, the Creative Regular Opponent has a pile (as he all too frequently happens to do so) while the Dastardly Regular Opponent (who bought me my own lance) managed to get two fully painted groups together. We then journeyed North on a grey Sunday in January to get our figures on the table, originally with a plan to also try Star Wars Legion, but we were kept enraptured by our clashing mechs.

The battlefield was enhanced by the fact that both I and the Creative Regular Opponent brought along some terrain. I had my Lazy Forger buildings I had set up for the previous game day (you can find more here and here) while the Creative Regular Opponent had printed off a load of stuff from Thunderhead Studios, including a pretty impressive central base right out of Mechwarrior.

The gameplay was a rescue mission – one of my Lances was the local defenders, who have now found themselves under attack by a “Mysterious Force” (it’s the Clanners) and called for aid. My other Lance and those of the Dastardly Regular Opponent Ally would come to assist them. In reality, the mission was an all-out brawl, a chance to get mechs on the table and have a good fight. It was also an excuse for a cheese-and-meat platter assembled by the host, which was enjoyed by all (even though I’m not a cheese fan).

As for the game itself, the first point that hit us while playing was just how good the game is with all the terrain. Sure, the flat mats with their terrain details written down and easy reference are better for pure gameplay, but come on – seeing the mechs moving through dense urban terrain really helps to show off the size of the different fighters, selling them that they are stomping through dense urban areas. The Medina buildings from Lazy Forger are especially cool, with even the tiny Raven looking cool moving past them.

It was also fun to see the mechs stomping around. The Clanner mechs are horrible combinations of high armour and heavy damage (not helped by the fact that many of the mechs we were fighting were Assault Mechs, ready to kick ass). However, the assaulters managed to set up a second turn where the delayed activation of the lance in the centre led to a potential meltdown of the Warhammer in the gap. Unfortunately, it was only a potential meltdown as some horrifying rolls led to only the armour points being chipped away.

As you’d expect, the central fortress on the board was the focal point, with the Clanner Assault mechs ploughing into the centre even as we scuffled around it. The speed of the game was much faster than BattleTech’s main game, letting us play with a massive number of mechs without much slowdown. The simplifications of weapons down to a simple damage number and the INCREDIBLY detailed armour and structure locations reduced to single numbers for armour and structure is definitely a major reduction in complexity but it still has enough variability to make things interesting. The critical hits system did sprinkle in some of the madness you’d expect (at least one mech exploded due to the ammunition cooking off) but I can see why some people may want more of a crunch.

Fighting over the central bastion eventually led to my Dastardly Regular Ally and me deciding to make a break for it, with one of the defenders staying behind to cock off the base’s reactor. HOWEVER, it was a trap! Instead, we lured in a Warhammer before jetpacking in my Victor to perform a Death from Above attack to take out the heavily injured mech. There were quite a few fights like this, such as a Highlander Mech picking off our little guys with the Gauss cannon, while we also had a duel of the Mad Cats/Timber Wolves (as you might expect) – however, the funniest battle was how both the Dastardly Regular Ally and myself reacted to the arrival of the Creative Regular Opponent’s Kodiak. In the end, though, this did feel a little bit like the tutorial you’re supposed to lose – not that we had a problem with it, because honestly, we had a great time. And next time, we’re going to kick the Clanner’s heads in.

So, what’s the end result? And more importantly, are we going to see more Alpha Strike on All Systems Nominal?

Honestly? Yes – the end result of the game was all three of us saying how much we enjoyed the afternoon, especially with how we were able to have a full board of terrain, packed full of mechs and ending our hours of gameplay with multiple mechs getting slagged. There are a few rules I’d maybe want to adjust – for example, the fact that you roll once for if an attack hits can mean that you end up with “nothing happens” dice rolls. However, I have heard about a variable damage rule, something that I think will help to end up with less disappointment at those epic shots and many more shenanigans. However, before we dig into those rules, there will definitely be some more exploration of all the special rules that we hadn’t touched on. Elements like electronic countermeasures are definitely interesting (and not just because I have the Raven whose whole job it is to perform electronic warfare) and I think might help some of our minor complaints about the system. I also might need to get some more mechs – I like the lance I have (its a good mix of capabilities but I do want a Mad Cat…

The other downside, of course, is that I’m now eyeing up the other Lazy Forger items I’ve been wanting to print for a while. The Tower Blocks are cool but perhaps it’s time for some more industrial areas, ready for all the pipelines and detritus that would be needed or the awesome electricity pylons to frame the mechwarriors against. Better warm the 3D printer up.

Welcome to 2026! The New Year was brought in with a new tradition (a momentary pause from hanging out on Discord with my friends) and now I’m back to work, both at the day job and on the hobby table. So let’s talk about the plans for that hobby table.

Also, by happy coincidence, this post is coming out on my birthday!

Looking Back

How did 2025 go? Well, the good news was that I managed to be pretty consistent with getting the blog’s main post, “The News Stand”, out each week. I hit 100 editions of the post and, aside from a small number of weeks where I had to delay/skip the post (including one where I had just been in a traffic collision less than an hour before I was supposed to start writing), I managed to get the article out with a level of detail I was happy with and covering a significant chunk of the space, charting it’s changes and keeping the folks updated. It’s responsible for a considerable amount of the views on the site, so I guess it’s doing well? It does also partially work to get some of my opinions out there – most of the time when I make comments about the Spectre Patreon not updating in The News Stand, we see an update the following day (which I’m sure is entirely coincidental the 5th time it happens).

However, I was also able to get out 30 other posts, a mixture of PAINT-REPs, Patreon updates, Old World updates and the ongoing adventures with trips to the Underhive. Honestly, I was surprised I managed to get that many out – one of the things I’m not always happy with is seeing how often the front page is just a taxi rack of The News Stand, so I was surprised to see I actually got posts out. This was doubly surprising because I have really felt that this year’s hobby output was not enough, with barely any models painted (the PAINT-REPs showed that wasn’t quite the case). However, I did manage several Patreon posts while covering the games I played (more below) did manage to get a sizable chunk of coverage. I did also attempt some generic bi-monthly hobby updates, which, once again, failed to continue – I feel like I just need to be more specific with my writing.

Finally, and I was honestly shocked, I managed to actually get a reasonable number of games on the board. I almost doubled the number of games I played over the previous year (34 vs 17). Part of this was down to playing several multi-game events (such as the Old World days and Necromunda) and also several smaller games (such as Halo Waypoint, where the sessions were usually a tutorial game followed by an active game). As I’ve said in the past, playing games is the reason I hobby, so getting stuff on the board is always positive. The only negative is that, honestly, there are 0 Ultramoderns on that list. As much as I’ve opened up my interests to other games (and become a much more rounded and happier gamer because of it), Ultramoderns are still the lifeblood and focus of the blog. I really missed not playing it this year, although I think part of that was not feeling ready to play due to wanting to redo my terrain and figures. Luckily, this is something I can fix.

As an aside, I wrote up a big post after Salute earlier in the year that covered some of my plans (after the hobby adrenaline rush that is Salute). It split my blog output into three parts – Personal Posts, Development Projects and Ultramodern News. The good news is that all three saw advancements this year – I managed to keep up to date with my hobby going ons, I advanced both the ChargeReal and Project Elements stuff in the background and finished off the year launching SPOT-REP to cover the industry. The only downside was not doing AS MUCH as I intended but sometimes the hobby stuff doesn’t come as easily.

Looking Forward

The first big news to look at in 2026 is how I do The News Stand. It’s a feature that I enjoy doing, and if I were to be a man whose life depends on following what the numbers say, it’s the reason this blog exists. However, last year it had some issues. Overall, releasing on a Tuesday was causing problems as the Tuesday to Tuesday cycle meant any weekend deals (such as around Black Friday) would be over before the next post came out. There is also the fact that Tuesday is a busy day for me, with little wiggle room around it – Monday is my hobby night with the Regular Opponents, Wednesday is often when I hang out with my sister and attempting to do the news on the weekend before is even worse. For this reason, I am shifting The News Stand to be released on Friday Evening GMT – this means I can usually catch any last minute sales before the weekend, and if for some reason I am busy, then it just comes out on the weekend. This should hopefully mean I can work through the post during the week, making me far less stressed about it at the last minute. It also opens up the time after Friday each week for releasing alternative versions of The News Stand for other platforms, but we’ll see about that as I try to make it work.

Next up, although I managed to get plenty of games last year, I missed out on doing much with Ultramodern Wargaming across all aspects (hobbying, playing and writing). This is changing this year as I’m aiming to do at least one big piece of Ultramodern content each month, in addition to whatever other project I’m working on at that time. This is just to keep things ticking over, as well as making sure I can keep up with Combat Octopus’s wonderful monthly releases.

Speaking of other projects, there are a few already on the go. January is going to be getting a platoon of British paratroopers ready for our big WW2 game in February, using the Empress Arnhem range. April is going to see the start of our next Necromunda campaign, and it’s going to be a change with us playing using the Ash Wastes. I’m still taking my Spyrer with Enforcer retinue, but I have a vehicle to print off and a Taurus Venator to paint up. Then there is the Project Elements plan, as I assemble a set of figures and terrain for my work-in-progress ruleset, which should also set me up for more Ultramodern games. I’m especially looking forward to this as many of them are being kitbashed from Combat Octopus’s releases, leading to a lot of fun when it comes to making the various types of figure I need.

In terms of Patreon content, the main focus is going to be getting the SPOTREPs category updated. Ideally, it should be quarterly big picture updates alongside rolling updates on the companies. I’m also aiming to have some more articles on Project Elements out to patrons soon, but I’m also very aware that I’m in the Catch-22 state – I need patrons to make locked content worthwhile, but I also need content to turn people into patrons. This is something I am working but nothing specific yet.

There is, however, one big storm cloud on its way that I need to mention that is going to put a wrench into all my plans. This year is going to be a major one for my professional career – we are reaching the final stages on a major project that has been years in the making. I usually try to keep my hobby career and my real career separate, but unfortunately, this year the professional career is going to win out. This means that there are going to be disruptions as we go through the year as I’ll either be working in the slots I’d usually hobby or be recovering from working. The last time we released a project was 2018/2019 and although I managed to continue writing through it, it was also the year that you can see the weekly projects and the sheer momentum die off as I was exhausted. This time I’m hoping it will be less brutal but I’m preparing for the worse. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep up my posting all the way through.

That aside though, I am ready for the new year. There is a lot to do and a lot to work on, but I feel that last year was me starting to get back into my groove and this tear is a chance to nail the key parts of what I want to do. Now it’s just a case of getting to it!

So I have a slight embarrassing confession to make – before last weekend, I hadn’t actually managed to get Chain of Command 2 (released in May last year) onto the board to play despite the fact I was genuinely excited for. The reason for this is pretty simple – last year was a poor one for getting games on the table, especially games that didn’t have “Necromunda” or “Old World” in the name. However, with the Christmas season upon us, and a hankering for some WW2 action amongst our group, we decided to get a game in.

As this was a learning game, I volunteered to be the rulebook reader/quick reference man while the two Regular Opponents would provide and, in turn, command the forces on the field. On the Allied side, the Dastardly Regular Opponent’s British Paras would be on the offensive, the return of his very nicely painted Warlord Games figures. Across the table, the defenders would be the Creative Regular Opponent’s Panzer Grenadiers, a platoon made from the new Victrix boxes and painted up in less than a week thanks to the wonders of Contrast. The terrain was all done by The Dastardly Regular Opponent, with his farm complex and surrounding buildings something he has been working on in between his various other projects. Frankly, I think he’s done an excellent job, although he is already planning the finishing touches (such as vegetable patches for the back of houses). It was also impressive to be presented with when I turned up – something that has been nice with these home games is that we’ve been slowly building up a terrain collection that is starting to look pretty damn good (although I do need to start work on upping my own game on this front).

The Dastardly Regular Opponent’s helper assisted in rolling off how the assault would go, and in this case, we ended up with a playing across the short side of the board, allowing for an assault along a wide front. The good news was that the British wouldn’t get stuck in the open fields at either end, but the bad news was that instead, they would just be within close range of almost every weapon in the German arsenal.

The two objectives would end up being the back bedroom of the large house (obviously, the war room of Herr General) and the workshop behind the (thankfully) inactive Tiger tank. The patrol phase was a pretty brutal affair, the sides locking in relatively quickly with the British centred on the row houses while the Germans were around the main farm complex. Both sides did have an outlier to assist in flexibility – the Paras managed to get in close at the woods at the bottom of the map, while the Germans seemed to have been camping out in the large field at the top. However, thanks to equal force morale at the start of the game, the attacking British would be able to make the first move.

Support-wise, the British managed to take advantage of the new toys in Chain of Command V2. The British Airborne has lost the integrated PIAT and 2-inch mortar in their list but has gained the ability to upgrade their sections in two ways (although only one section per platoon can get each upgrade) – this includes a marksman that increases the section’s chance of injuring leaders, and pulling a Bren gun from the arms room to create a double MG section. The Dastardly Regular Opponent decided to build a Weapons Section, combining both upgrades into a single section (obviously that Corporal is very popular or veteran enough to know what works). His other three options were all about keeping the assault going: an Adjutant to keep the reserves coming with both Senior Leaders on the field, an additional Para section to take over and keep the pressure up, and a set of WP Grenades (either for its intended purpose of popping smoke or for burning its way through the structures thanks to a pretty nasty set of rules).

Across the board, the German support was a classic combination for the limited points they had – a second Senior Leader (useful as most German platoons only come with a single one) and an entrenched MG42 on a tripod.

The opening of the game was incredibly brutal. While the British support section and sniper setup in the windows of the attic overlooking the farmyard (and praying the Tiger didn’t suddenly gun its engine), the first section deployed into the copse by the old house. The problem was that before they could actually get moving, and despite sitting tactically among the trees, the tripod-mounted MG42 in the first-floor bedroom opened up, helped out by the German Senior Leader and the Maschinengewehr dropping Storm of Steel like it was going out of fashion. To make things even worse, the German player received a grand total of four consecutive phases of activation, the multiple 6s rolled by the German player causing great concern to the British. Unable to activate or reposition and already hugging the ground, the Paras found themselves whittled down, made worse by the Junior Leader being stunned and rendered incapable of command just as a new turn started. Truly, the nightmare of any soldier – under a machine gun’s fire, leadership unable to command, pinned in place.

(The good side of the turn ending was that the objective in the building was discarded as per the rules for the mission, saving a close-quarters bloodbath through the structure.)

One reason why the Paras were unable to reposition was the use of the new Command points to React Fire to the Germans seeking to move into position around the Tiger. As you might expect, two Bren guns are nothing to sniff at, and the burst managed to put suppression and kills down on the Panzer Grenadiers moving into position. The smaller of the teams in the exposed unit would eventually be taken out while trying to rake the attic with MG fire chipping away at German morale.

At this point, we got into a little bit of a two-way firing range across the board. With the Paras in the woods being shot up to the point of being combat ineffective, the MG shifted fire to put suppressing fire down on the Paras in the attic. However, this fire wasn’t continually maintained, leading to a little bit of back and forth as the Brits attempted to gain fire superiority (something that’s hard to do against belt feds). However, the position did manage to keep the fire on the Germans in the yard, slowly whittling them down as they popped in and out of cover.

A double phase for the Brits allowed for a pile of admin work and deployments to prepare the Paras for an actual assault, rather than getting shot up. The two other sections entered the board, with one forming up alongside the Weapons Section on edge of the building while the other… entered into the copse. In what must be a pretty grim scene, the newly arrived Paras would see their comrades reposition to the back of the woods (thanks Command Points) before taking up position among the positions their friends had just occupied. Unfortunately, they were about to suffer a similar fate, as the MG directed by the German Senior Leader opened up and started dropping bodies, as well as suppression. This copse was obviously a bad place to be, but occupying it was causing the German player to hold a section back, just in case an assault came from that direction.

The other section also found itself mauled by the machine gun, its Bren team reduced to a single soldier within moments of deploying. However, the focus of the MG on firing for effect (rather than suppression) meant that the weapons section in the attic could whittle the defending Germans inside the yard down to just the Junior Leader, wounded from a Bren gun hit and now alone.

The Junior Leader rearranged his damaged section, bringing the lone Bren gunner into the rifle team. Joined by the Platoon Leader, we then saw some of the most balls-to-the-wall action I’ve seen in Chain of Command.

The pop of a white phosphorus grenade put up enough of a smoke cloud to let this assault team (with two Sten guns, a Bren and two leaders packed full of initiatives) push across the street. MG fire ripped out, but the only hit was to the Junior Leader. Seeing as it caused no Force Morale change, I can only imagine the Platoon Commander kept him upright with a stiff upper lip response before getting into the defilade caused by the roof of the yard buildings. After clearing suppression and with covering fire from the pair of Bren guns above them, the assault team was then given an order that was specifically to “take up position in the yard”. Now, anyone who knows Too Fat Lardies movement will understand the specificity of wording when it comes to movement – many an infantry command has declared they are advancing, rolled up their movement, overshot the nice solid wall and found themselves in the field beyond. In this case, a truly colossal amount of movement allowed the assault team to round the corner, get into cover behind the Tiger, keep going across the small gap behind it and then burst through the door into the objective (and presumably a shed full of terrified mechanics, surprised tank crew and various spare parts). Not even German React Fire could halt them, putting the assault team on the objective and sat in a defensible position.

Now, at this point, we had (for the first time in my Chain of Command career) actually had a unit fulfilling the objective of the mission (as opposed to simply giving the enemy a hard enough kicking that they leave). This also meant that, if the Brits gained one more Command point, they could begin the Final Countdown. The Germans had actually been getting a kicking on the morale side, with injured leaders being the biggest blows (thanks mostly to the sniper and the Weapons Section hammering anything they could see with Concentrated Fire and its Storm of Steel) and had now reached two on the force morale chart. This meant that once the Brits started the final Countdown by spending the Command Points, we’d have two phases before the game ended with an objective win. The German player saw this and decided to join in the shennighans. Using the German Handgranaten special rules with one of his Gruppe (accompanied by the surviving Junior Leader to provide SMG support), the group attacked the shed. A grenade landing short was a bad start, but then came the close combat dice.

The British ended up with such an overwhelming number of dice to roll in combat (16 to 3) thanks to their LMG, Stens and two leaders, that the Germans bottled the assault and broke – presumably the collection of pissed off Paras firing from the hip like it was a Commando comic made them realise getting into that barn was going to be a bad idea. This caused another Bad Things Happen roll that put the Germans to 0, ending the battle with a very bloody British victory.

This was truly one of our favourite games so far, and not the ending we expected a few phases in. The Dastardly Regular Opponent was even considering calling off the assault when it bogged down (planning to come back once the Shermans turned up). However, in the end, it was incredibly exciting to play and shows how the right moves at the right time can carry the day. The creation of an assault section in the final few phases was something out of the history books, a senior leader pulling a shattered section together to do something heroic. The downside of this, especially if we turned this into the first mission of a campaign, is that this force of Paras had been absolutely shattered – 19 figures across the four sections removed as casualties means it’s above the values that the Post Game Casualties table in At The Sharp End covers and while the CO would be happy with the progress, the Men’s Opinion is already in the toilet.

The Germans also had some great moments – the MG was perfectly positioned and accounted for the bulk of casualties in the game, helped by a Senior Leader literally sat behind hit pointing out targets until he took a shot from the Para’s sniper team that, put politely, reduced his effectiveness. Additionally, with a few more phases, the Gruppe in the field would have managed to vault the wall and joined in the fray which would have brought an almost intact unit into an area filled with the under-strength. It was also impressive how well they managed to lock down sectors of the map, really pushing the British to expend men and smoke grenades to get the job done.

The best sign was what happened afterwards – as we packed up, we discussed how things could have gone differently. Maybe the Paras should have brought a Sherman, using it’s HE and smokes to cover the advance, at the loss of the extra section. That would have forced the German player back a little bit, although the pile of Panzerfausts would have given the tank crew pause for thought. We left the game day already thinking about the next one, as well as possibilities for our big game in February – turns out someone else (me) might need to paint up some Red Devils for an operation.

How about the rules? Well, V2 of Chain of Command isn’t a complete revolution, and frankly, I wouldn’t want it to be – Chain of Command was already in a pretty good place. It’s great to see a lot of the changes from 12 years of supplements making its way back into the main rules (such as the Red Dice, the Leader variants and limited ammo rules), while the simplification and removal of major sticking blocks (Elite/Green ratings have much more focused effects than lots of little small ones, while mortar barages are far less a “fuck you, I win” button) means that a lot of the house rules people have come up with are gone. Command Points are also a fantastic addition, giving you more to do during your enemy’s phases, while being easy enough to gain that you use them, while also not being an infinite resource. Storm of Steel was another rule that we really liked – it’s basically adding the concept of exploding 6s when rolling to hit, usually linked to special rules such as the National Characteristics. The British player especially found himself using it, helping to turn the Bren guns into more of a damage dealer.

I also like how the force lists have been changed up – Panzer Grenadiers are still a nightmare with two MGs per Gruppe but they now don’t also have a pile of rifles chipping in, while the Paras being able to get more machine guns and removing the odd additional sniper in Section 3 (as well dropping them back to Regular rather than Elite) makes them feel like the more aggressive alternative to the regular Infantry. The book is also far easier to use, with a clear index at the back and a layout that makes finding specific rules far quicker.

You can expect to see plenty more Chain of Command V2 over the next year as all three of us have things planned for it. It’s also a chance for me to finish off some of my other projects, as well as giving my Winter Brits (who I truly love) some Germans to fight – the Volksgrenadier list seems especially interesting…

With my refocusing on Ultamoderns, I’ve started to assemble the collection of figures, vehicles and scenery together for the theatre I’m working on. As much as I may attempt to leave the MENA style settings with Shyluz and such, there is so much material (inspiration, research, figures, vehicles and terrain) to fuel the ideas – Bazistan has been part of this blog’s DNA since it was a mere imagination in the real world. I am, however, keen to expand beyond playing the most common scenario – a horde of poorly trained insurgents vs a small number of highly trained, well-equipped and well-supported Western SOF. As much as this was definitely a situation that has occurred multiple times in modern warfare, it is only one of the possibilities that players can get on the tabletop.

Something I’ve always been especially interested in are the forces working alongside the Western units, partner forces from the region itself. The last 20+ years of conflict in the Middle East (and in other regions across the world) have seen Western (and in some cases Russian) special forces and regulars working alongside various levels of trained and motivated fighting forces. Some units gained a reputation for their failure to work as a fighting force (such as the Afghan National Police), while were of questionable allegiance (such as the Popular Mobilisation Units that notoriously received instruction from Iran while technically under the control of the Iraqi Government). However, for every suspect unit, there would be others that would become some incredibly hard fighters. Two group in particular that come to mind are the Triples in Afghanistan, which were trained by the British for counter-narcotics operations, and the Golden Division, key in the battle to reclaim Mosul, was formed out of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces, a unit that was stood up in 2005 for counter-terrorism with US assistance before having to expand for other more conventional warfighting roles. This doesn’t even begin to cover the group formed from governments in the region that major forces have found themselves working alongside, such as Jordanian Special Forces or the Armed Forces of the Philippines in the Battle of Marawi.

All of these forces are interesting for an ultramodern wargame. From the point of view of someone exploring the history, partner forces became an incredibly important part of the GWOT in the later stages. With both Afghanistan and Iraq seeing gradual drawdowns of conventional forces (through processes such as Afghanization), these were periods where operations were shifted from being purely Western with limited local support to locally led but with Western enablers to cover gaps that local forces were yet to develop (such as medical evacuation or fire support). The war against Daesh took this to another level, with Western support being mostly limited to Special Forces, advisors and airpower. To understand the era, it’s worth attempting to play scenarios with this adjustment.

On the tabletop, they also present a challenge. Partner forces can share equipment (or be armed more closely to the opposition) but there are other factors that shift how they should play out. In general, these units are utilising lower quality equipment and fewer force multipliers (functional optics, night vision and body armour) and are more commonly less skilled. They will commonly lack the support that most Western forces rely on, such as heavy strike aircraft or a rapid ISTAR system that can keep the troops on the ground aware of their current situation. Even if they have weapon systems such as the armoured vehicles, they will often be less well equipped than Western counterparts, such as the Iraqi units in the war against Daesh using the M1A1 Abrams rather than the M1A2 in its various upgraded forms that was in service with the Americans.

This may seem purely like a bad deal, especially having less toys to play. However, there are other factors when wargaming that can make partner forces interesting to play. For a start, these units are often deployed in larger numbers than their western counterparts, especially when using the more milita/paramilitary units. I don’t like to talk too much about point values, but seeing as partner forces are lower skill and less well-equipped than the more usual forces, you should be able to get more of them for your buck. You can also get your hands on various equipment not used by more traditional forces. Technicals, improvised and up-armoured patterns of older equipment, many of the toys that you might see in Milita forces find themselves being used by western-aligned paramilitaries. In some cases, partner forces might receive specific equipment for their need, such as the M1117 (an armoured vehicle used in the US as a Military Police vehicle but more commonly seen as a frontline vehicle in Iraq). If you really need to include some operators, then Partner Forces would often work with Special Forces attached – United States Army Special Forces are explicitly designed for this task as part of their “Foreign internal defence”, but MARSOC and other teams have seen themselves working alongside local elements. As well as the highly trained individuals, their presence can also allow for additional lethal and non-lethal support, and can also lead to mentoring bonuses depending on the ruleset.

However, what I think is more interesting is the difference in attitudes. Western forces have to worry about more than purely fulfilling the objective, with both the political and media landscape at home needing to be taken into account – every casualty has the chance to massively affect the situation in the long term, be it for a soldier returning home differently to how they left or for imagery of civilian casulities appear on the front of newspapers and shifting opinions on a conflict. Partner forces, in most cases, do not care about this. In most cases, there is a very limited need to keep the general public happy (which can be for both positive and negative reasons), leading to them being much more likely to utilise every tool in their arsenal. If we look at the Battle of Mosul in 2016, that was not the usual counter-insurgency but a full-scale war, with massive casualties on both sides and the usage of fire support to reduce the city to rubble in the process of reclaiming it. When building scenarios to accommodate using Partner Forces, players should be punished far less for taking casualties or collateral damage. Similarly, what many of these forces lack in skill, they can (and I swear the word “can” is doing a lot of hard work here) be far more motivated to do whatever is needed to achieve victory – these forces are fighting over their own land in many cases, which can often affect the motivation. Now, this doesn’t mean every force is a fanatical group of killers (many are noted for shirking their duties), but this variety of motivation can lead to some interesting scenarios.

With that setup, how am I implementing them in my current wargaming plan? Well, the initial theatre I’m working on is Parezgehan, a region sat between the Albion Commonwealth and the bulk of the Bazi Empire. Although ostensibly aligned with the Empire, the Princedom of Parezgehan (split between the various scions of the Parez lineage) has been double-dipping, taking advantage of the unusual structure of the Empire (not to mention its current level of infighting and problems elsewhere on its borders with the Tsardom) to also talk extensively with the Albion Commonwealth and enter into a deeper level of co-operation with them. This has included bringing in the Albion Commonwealth to train up forces specific to the Princedom, with capabilities ranging from high-end special forces to armed units reporting directly to the Princedom, down to establishing a framework for self-defence militias.

With this setup in mind, this gives us three levels of local forces to work alongside Albion SOF and Regular troops (which will be predominantly pulled from Spectre’s SAS and British Infantry). At the highest level, we have the newly formed Regional Security Echelon (RSE), intended for Counter-Terrorism and internal security forces – these guys are inspired by the Iraqi CTS-ISOF, even down to their paint scheme. The Parez Guard will function as an expansion of the Princedom’s household guard, adjusting them from merely protecting the royal palace into a more general self-defence force – publicly they are to assist the Bazi Imperial Defence Corps (BIDC) with tasks but in reality, the Parez Guard are moving to take responsibility for more key locations, negotiating to take control of more military installations. Finally, the Parez Militia is a self-defence milita, raised by important personalities within the region in times of emergency before being put under the control of the Guard or the . Of course, preparing large groups of armed fighters within a nation planning to break away from an Empire and under the control of specific individuals may be the setup for some… unforeseen consequences.

For the Special Forces, I’ve printed off some of Combat Octopus’s Navy SEALs from roughly 2007. The advantage of these figures is that they look reasonably high speed without matching the vast array of Crye Precision and Fast Helmet wearing operators we all love to collect. My main goal for these guys is to keep them mostly consistent, sticking with US-style platforms and utilising a common colour scheme for BDUs and web gear (although elements such as helmets, kneepads and boots can be slightly different to show personal purchases). The intention is to outfit them in fireteam organisation, with groups of four soldiers including at least an MG and ideally with a grenade launcher as well. The two Navy SEAL kits include a mixture of weapons, with a selection of M4s, M16s and MK18s accompanied by SR-25s as marksmen rifles and Mk48 machine guns. Each weapon system has multiple poses for it, meaning you can mix and match setups to make a variety of figures (something then enhanced by the addition of the piles of pouches Combat Octopus has released). The only comment I’d maybe make is the lack of 40mm grenade launchers – one of the loaded bodies comes with a slung M79 while a teammate carries his ammo. Although this setup is suitable for a light recce squad, it does limit options when kitbashing. Luckily there is a holstered M320 elswhere in the Combat Octopus range that can be mounted to gear or I can digitally kitbash the M4 with M203 from the US Army release (but more on that later).

To begin with, I simply grabbed the non-modular figures from the releases. I’ve spoken in the past about my feelings on these additions to the last few Combat Octopus releases, as they are a net positive to those purchasing these sets. It allows anyone who just wants to print the figures to get the best version, getting you through the door without having to sit down and customise each figure (especially on figures with molle panels that need the pouches placing. In my case, I just wanted to get them printed as test core to the force, figures that I just had to scale up to my chosen scale before hitting print. For heads, I went for a feature you commonly see among Iraqi CTS units – face coverings to hide their identity. This is a distinctive look (and saves me painting faces) so naturally I grabbed two of the heads from the SEAL releases and a baseball cap head from the September 2023 PMC release and got to printing. I went heavy on the more plain of the helmets, leaving the stacked “goggles + shades” head as a unique one for the squad leader.

For the paint scheme, I leaned heavily on the Iraqi CTS scheme – black BDUs and tan webbing. This is easy to paint up, especially using Black Templar contrast over the black spray/drybrush white basecoat. This was then combined with a Valejo US Field Drab for the tan parts, such as shoes, kneepads and helmets. While attempting to keep them pretty uniform, there are definitely places to add a little personality – I’m planning to subtly tweak each of the helmets, using the base colours tan and black before drybrushing more camo on.

After doing these first eight, I will definitely get another set printed with some more custom setups. I’ll definitely need at least one more machine gunner (although more likely another three of them to allow for four fireteams), as well as a few more marksmen and grenade launchers. I also want to use some of the M16s and M4s to really sell the mixed quality of these guys, as you can see in my first test guys above. I do need to do a few tweaks to make the bodies line up a little better, as well as add on extra pouches for all the gear they may need. Luckily, my collection has a vast number of pouches I can reach into, as well as a few slung weapons for extra firepower.

I’ve also broken out of just the Navy SEALs set to look at what else Combat Octopus has. These three guys will end up being part of the Parez Milita, showing how some of the high-end gear ends up finding itself in the hands of the less well-trained troopers. The first figure uses the legs from the US Army Infantry set combined with the torso and rifle from the Navy SEALs. The second is a little more involved, tweaking the unusual cut of the US Army set to fit better on the US Navy SEALs legs. Finally, the last guy mixes the US Navy SEALs torso and gun with the legs of the new MENA Freedom Fighters set, ideal for that rough and ready look. These are only the first guys, but I’ll definitely be delving into more of the Combat Octopus range – not every pack goes with every other release, but there is usually plenty of crossover to really combine and create. The fact that we’re seeing two more Freedom Fighter releases should extend the collection even further. I’m also intrigued to do some more aggressive tweaks, such as combining the PASGAT helmet from the Indian release (back in November 2021) with the recent head sculpts.

This is a bit of a first glance into what I’ve been up to in my hobby time, as well as my return to Ultramoderns. Hopefully, this has been an interesting read, and hopefully sets off some ideas for you as well. For now though, I need to go assemble some more figures for The Parez Guard – bulky body armour and assault rifles will be the name of the game, now to decide who for…

Despite finishing our Necromunda campaigning back in July, somehow I’ve found myself continuing to play Necromunda. It seems that York squad, after being dragged kicking and screaming into the Underhive at the start of the campaign, has latched on to a resurgence of gaming on that dammed planet and gone in hard. Or perhaps it’s just that the Dastardly Regular Opponent has a pile of Dragon’s Rest Sector Fatalis that I printed for him and now he wants to get proper usage out of. Either way, we have returned to the Underhive in our usual monthly slot and someone even celebrated his birthday with Necromunda.

I’ve already covered one of our weekend games on the blog before, but this post will cover a trio of events that sees me take out my Enforcers (in various forms) and put them on the table again. So let’s run through them!

Event 1 – The Introduction

First up, we have a rarity – a game hosted at my house! Yep, the sea of unpainted/rattle canned terain is my own set of Sector Fatalis, using the thin tiles that they include complete with the studs to hold things in place. I will be writing a full blog post about this set (as I’ve printed a fair chunk of it by now, but it’s definitely a set of terrain that is ideal for my usage. I still need to do a lot of work on it (and get more doors and barriacdes printed) but it’s going to be a very useful part of my collection.

Across the table from me was the Creative Regular Opponent and this was his first game. Over 2020-2021, most of us in our scattered hobby group had built Necromunda gangs in preparation for a blowout campaign once we all got out of lockdown(s). This included the Creative Regular Opponent, whose impressive speed of painting and skill meant he hammered out a very impressive Cawdor gang using Bretonnian parts. Cut forward to 2025, and he hadn’t yet managed to play Necromunda. With the prospect of a large event on the horizon (we’ll cover below) he decided he should probably put some figures on the board.

To ease him in, I decided to do the just and honourable thing of using the Secundian Enforcers on him. Led by my favourite power-fisted Spyrer Vi-olence, I backed her up with a solid block of Subjagator Enforcers (and a single Palanite Rookie). This included a Champion with Maul and Shield, a Specialist with the SLEDGE and a grenadier with the frag and choke launchers. The Rookie had a pistol (but at least I gave him flak).

The other side of the table was a horrible mix of the great unwashed masses of House Cawdor. And I mean masses – even after the scenario rules for gang size, Cawdor gets to add a single extra ganger and D3 juves. Additionally, The Creative Regular Opponent’s chosen flavour of Cawdor was all about doom and gloom, meaning one of his acts of faith was to bring even more friends to the part. Cawdor gangers are garbage statwise but there are some nasty surprises in there – long rifles, blunderpoles and a leader more useful dead than alive.

And how did the game go? Well I messed up by grouping up in a small area, then Cawdor pulled some shennighans and took a first turn blunderpole template. This went VERY poorly for my troops, burning one enforcer down and setting the other two on fire for almost the entire game – liter. Additionally, later turns would see the long rifle (and a careless disregard for shooting past your friends) to absolutely slam down fully armoured enforcers, while a krak crossbow bolt managed to ding my Spyrer and take her out.

Things didn’t go all the Cawdor ways though. Before my Spyrer was taken out, she managed to smash her way through several of the Cawdor Gangers and Juves (and even delivered a blow to the leader to take him down). The Subjugator Sergeant also worked hard despite being on fire – with his armour protecting him from the flames, he managed to eat the pile of stub and auto rounds coming his way, distracting them a little bit. On the whole, it ended with a Cawdor victory but there were a lot of dead peasents on the board.

This was my first time fighting Cawdor (despite it being one of the more popular choices among our groups). Sticking close together set me up to receive a template on my force at the start of the game, while my small numbers let them achieve board control and riddle me with bullets. It was, however, still a ridiculous game and a good intro to Necromunda for the Creative Regular Opponent. It was also amusing for another reason – the CRO has been learning how to play Infinity recently, so he had to stop himself from thinking in the ways of reaction fire and overwatch and try to refocus on the specifics of Necromunda.

With the test game down, I had to start thinking about what I would be running for the Necromunda day. Naturally, I’d be taking my Secundian Enforcers, but a starting list of 1500 creds meant I could get a few toys out. Additionally, the new Bastions of Law book changed a few things about building Enforcers, something that I hadn’t really taken advantage of for the first game. For the event, I decided I wanted to try and get as many enforcers as possible while still keeping the list themed around two heavy hitters. While my beloved Spyrer would be one pilar, the other would be a new arrival – a Sanctioner Automata, the Enforcer specific brute. The loadout I went with was definitely slightly more silly (it has both a webber AND the assault ram) and definitely not a cheap member of the gang (coming in at 345 creds). The postive side is that it was both a webber AND an assault ram AND a ram grenade launcher AND a grenade array, giving it a pile of weapons, some special rules to make it suitably robotic

One major change in the new book is that Enforcers no longer come with a pile of toys – that lovely flak armour, undersuit and stub gun all have to be paid for. While initially not something I was a fan of (it’s fun to have the Enforcers as the most armoured boys), being able to ditch the armoured undersuits saves 25 creds that can go elsewhere. Additionally, you can now purchase Rookies/Juves from the start (rather than only receiving them as replacements), letting you fit a few extra bodies into the team. The weapons were a mixture of bolters and shotguns, with the Champion and Specialist bringing a concussion carbine and sniper rifle, respectively, while yes, one of the rookies got the autopistol and stub gun combo.

Now let’s see them in action. I was very excited to play at a higher starting credit account – if you’re not playing a campaign then 1000 creds can limit your ability to take all the fun toys. 1250 or even better 1500 lets you bring in the weirder side of Necromunda, especially as you’re not thinking about long-term economics and can really max out the hitting power of what you bring. We didn’t go with allowing anything off the trading post (which meant less absolute madness), but even the extra bodies would change how things played.

I also included another toy – the Trazior Pattern Sentry Gun. This is something I’ve always wanted to pick up for Necromunda, and I spotted it when I picked up the final figures for my Enforcers. These guns are special terrain items, complete with some perfect rules to really evoke the Aliens sentry guns feel – very powerful (with either twin heavy stubbers or twin grenade launchers) but liable to overheating. They can be bought normally, but they also have a habit of appearing via tactics cards, something I fully intend to take advantage of. And speaking of…

Event 2 – The Birthday

The second Necromunda event of the season was all due to the Dastardly Regular Opponent and the celebration of his birthday. We’ve previously played a selection of games for this event (including Chain of Command), but with the recent focus on Necromunda, it was natural that it would end up being this year’s extravaganza. We were invited along to the local administrator’s birthday party, complete with our 1500-point gangs.

The first game for me was very much a teaching game – another player with the original Spyrers (which are tiny compared to the new models) needed running through how they work in the new version. I got to play around with the webber on my new automata and other shennighans, but overall, it was mostly showing how best to use the rich bastards in the new version. However, I did win, meaning I recovered a present in preparation for the final games, which would take place after a delicious pie from the butchers near the scout hut.

We split the group in half, with each group of four taking a table. I ended up on the same table as the Creative Regular Opponent (with his Cawdor), a Former Housemate (with his Cawdor) and another Enforcer player. The goal? To deliver our presents to the gift-giving table in the centre… the one right next to the big fan. I’m sure nothing will go wrong.

It went immediately wrong. I attempted a gentleman’s agreement with the other enforcer player to make sure that we’d be able to focus on the horrible Cawdor gangs. This held for a chunk of the game until an accidental webber spurt into a group of other enforcers led to a break of the truce, not helped by the Spyrer then piling in. I managed to keep the Creative Regular Opponent in check with one well-placed Heavy Stubber turret, which hammered away hard enough at the horde of Cawdor to overheat at the end of the first turn.

The main trick of the game was the literal pile of hazards around the board. I traditionally play on the more sane boards, so being exposed to the Badzone tiles (complete with all sorts of horrible things) always throws a curveball. In this case, we got three pieces taking centre stage. Between myself and the Creative Regular Opponent was the Chaos icon, which managed to drive a considerable number of our figures insane. Between the other Enforcers and the Former Housemate was a lava pit that got absolutely packed full of dead bodies during the game, usually after having been forced to be on fire even before they fell in.

The biggest killer (and ever-present danger) was the fan in the centre of the board. Blocking shots, sucking people towards the blades, and EVEN chopping a sump croc apart after it got knocked in by an Automata. It wasn’t intended to be the centrepiece of the fight, but it really became the standout fighter once the objective was put next to it.

Overall, I do feel that multiplayer games of Necromunda are one of the best ways to play. It’s madness, complete and utter madness – sure, it takes the whole afternoon to play, and there is some aggressive weirdness that you occasionally have to step through, but it’s a fantastic way to spend your time and roll some dice. It also helps that, thanks to The Dastardly Regular Opponent’s rules, he wrote and my habit of rolling terribly on “don’t suddenly blow up” tables, I ended up with a colossal number of points.

Meanwhile, I discovered this graffiti on one of the Dastardly Regular Opponent’s wall pieces.

Rude.

Event 3 – Finding The Madness

With the big weekend over, you would assume I’d want to take a break from the Underhive. However, the Dastardly Regular Opponent is absolutely hosing it and ONCE AGAIN, I found myself heading over to York to play Necromunda. After initially planning to play another Tunnel Skirmish (and after discussions around picking balanced 1000 credits lists), I decided to crack out the weird scenarios and drag him kicking and screaming into a Gang Moot. This scenario starts with the two leaders as the only active models, the other joining in as shots ring out or they get closer to the fighting (we did play it that using sidearms in close combat would also have a chance of alerting people).

Speaking of leaders, I decided with this game to try something different. Rather than going with my Secundian Enforcers, I went with a regular Captain (and his dog). This then meant that I was able to roll pretty hard with the rest of the list, including a Subjugator Champion with a Heavy Bolter (we opened up the trading post) and the return of my Automata. Action kicked off with our two leaders face-to-face, with both of us bringing pets to even the odds.

And then the game didn’t go anything close to how I expected it to. The initial fight between leaders turned into more of a slap fest (rather than an immediate victory I had expected), which meant the battle continued to escalate. In fact, all my careful plans ended up being thrown out as neither of my fire support (the autoturret and my heavy bolter enforcer) ended up being effective due to poor positioning and ammo rolls. In fact, this entire game was filled with awful dice rolls across the board, with everything that could go wrong going wrong. Constantly fluffed close combat rolls lead to dead enforcers, most of the people actually shooting ended up out of ammo, and even the Armsman of the Orlocks ended up getting popped by a plasma bolt to the head.

In the end I technically won as the opposing team bottled out but there wasn’t much left by the end of either side. It was an absolute bloodbath, the perfect combination of brutal combat, improbably awful dice rolls and more. Personally I think next time I’d use a different model for the captain and bring my beloved cape-wearing Subjugator as the sergeant he was always meant to be – leave the admin work to someone totting a plasma pistol.

Overall, it’s been a fun time with Necromunda at the moment. It’s definitely a game that is better the more you play and remember it, with a lot of the clunk stripped away by repetition and instead focusing on the fun action that Necromunda can provide. I’ve had great fun playing around with my gang. Although it’s obvious that the Spyrer’s are in control of my heart (dual power-fist Orrus is my true Necromunda love), I’m also excited to play some more with my Enforcers, especially with some of the new toys from the updated list.

That said though, I fancy a break from it – it’s been really fun, and I have a lot of stuff to build up ready for some future ash wastes shennighans. However, maybe it’s the ArmA Reforger I’ve been playing with my group, or maybe it’s Battlefield 6, but I’m feeling the need for some CQB action, some fire and manoeuvre and some vehicles rolling around. Time to plan some BPRE games and continue writing some ideas of my own.

As I previously mentioned in the epic saga of my last campaign, it appears that my Dastardly Regular Opponent has been truly bitten by the Necromunda bug – seemingly bitten hard enough to not only paint up his terrain (unlike someone) but also play multiple skirmish games with his Orlocks. Well seeing as I haven’t rolled some dice in a bit (and I had a pile of terrain to deliver to him), I decided to jump in and get a game in. Unfortunately, the best time for him was early on Sunday morning, a time which in my opinion shouldn’t exist. However, I set my alarm, dosed myself with a suitable amount of caffine, and headed over to introduce him to my new list.

Yes, my new list.

Well, more like two lists combined into one. As I mentioned last time, I was intrigued by the concept of the Secundian Incursion, a list variant where you combine a single Spyrer with a regular house gang, Venators, Squat Prospectors or Palanite Enforcers. You miss out on your regular leader (and need to pay a considerable part of your starting income on one of the Spyrers themselves), but in return, gain a solid, hard-to-kill core to the force. The Spyrer still keeps all their fancy rules (such as double activations, ignoring pinning from non-damaging hits, ignoring break tests from friendly casualties and the Kill Count upgrade system) but you only get one – if they die (be they 66’d or overcome with glitches), then that’s it, you don’t get a replacement. Frankly, I love this idea – the noble in their finest armour being assisted by a gang of paid mercenaries, the classic banter back and forth between two very different groups. For this skirmish game, I went for my favourite breed of Spyrer – the Power Fist-equipped Orrus. She was the MVP of the last campaign (able to stomp through gangers, statues and more) and so it makes sense that she’d make a reappearance.

So with 400 credits spent on one model, it was time to build the Enforcers to go with the noble brat. Unfortunately Enforcers share with their noble overlords the unfortuntate trait of being very expensive. This is still using the Book of Judgement rules, where each enforcer comes with all the gear they will need (armoured undersuit, flak and stub pistol) and therefore costs 70 points each. This meant I was going to have a pretty limited number of guys to assist (especially as the Orlocks would be clocking in at 45 before any gear). The advantage of all the equipment though it that you can run them pretty slick and they are effective – 5+ save and pistol is far better than most of the underhive.

For my champion, I went with a Palanite Sergeant with a Concussion Carbine (a must have for its ability to bounce enemies around the map) and also gave him a Hardcase Cyber Mastiff. Now, technically this is 130 points that would probably be better spent on another ganger, giving me another ranged attack. However, the Hardcase is a unique toy for the Enforcers and it’s abilities inclujde such delights as “still getting to have a final activation in the round it’s killed” and “whoops, you charged my owner, I get a free move to enter combat” made it such a MVP of my first campaign. It’s a good way to deal with anything close combat-y something that (other than the Spyrer) the gang isn’t designed to deal with.

The rest of the gang were pretty standard. One Patrolman with an Enforcer shotgun, one man with an Enforcer Boltgun and the last one with an Autopistol paired with his Stub Gun (because I already have the model and it’s cool). This give me six models (technically only five gangers) which is not a great starting point but should give me enough to push forward and secure. It also JUST hit 1000, meaning i’d managed to get as much as possible out of the points.

Now it was time to see how well it would do.

To make sure we finished with plenty of time, my opponent set up the board before I arrived. We also decided on a simple scenario, Tunnel Skirmish, and got to playing. His gang was a good mix of classic Orlocks – leader, champion, cybermastiff, gangers and juves. A good mix of weapons meant we were about to have a gun fight, with a few close-quarters weapons hiding among them.

I deployed on the front edge of the central tile on my side. The Dastardly Orlocks took the far left corner, out of my line of sight but in cover. This was going to be a firefight across the central area so my goal was to stick to the cover, and take advantage of my ace in the hole.

As you might have been able to predict from the list, said ace would be the Orrus. I had planned my game around her – with the long corridor at the side combined with the Bulldoze card, I’d be able to push the flank and get in behind the Orlocks, without having to charge across a gunline. This did unfortunately mean he’d need to smash through a pair of Juves – not the highest priority or best immediate use of points BUT if I could get the flank, I’d be in a good position to do some real damage by smashing into the Orlock attack from behind.

And speaking of real damage, paired power fists can lead to some devestating attacks. As you can see above, the first Juve I charged at ended up taking 11 damage dice from the special rules (especially Power) – even without Pulverise to turn all those flesh wounds to serious, that is still one very dead Juve.

The other Juve however decided to introduce the Orrus to one of Necromunda’s great levellers – fire! Only a single wound from the hand flamers (and in fact they would soon run out of ammo) but for two activations, all that my 400 point gorilla could do was stand up, run around, roll back and forth on fire. Not the most cinemate response. However, once she managed to get back to her feet, one heavily singed noble brat decided to give the jetpack boy both barrels – with an incredible dice roll for two short range Bolt Launchers going guns blazing he got shredded.

However, before I could really get the Orrus to smash through the wall and unleash the master plan, I had a slight problem with my centre – it was getting absolutely torn apart. An attempt to counter the Orlock advance with a Concussion Carbine Sergeant and his dog led to some bouncing around of the Orlocks, but then resulted in some absolutely terrible dice rolling in combat. This then meant that the Sergeant went down hard while fighting the Orlock Leader and Champion (a bad situation for Enforcer Sergeants who focus on ranged combat due to their lacklustre melee stats), taking one of my key figures off the board. The centre was also a shooting match, with the Orlock armed with a boltgun, causing my own fighters to stick to cover and pin down any Orlocks crossing the gap.

There was one glorious moment of Necromunda Shennighans showing how well the ruleset captures the madness of the underhive. When the shotgunner (whose gear seems oddly similar to my own airsoft set) went click on his salvo shotgun, the Orlocks pushed forward. My Patrolman pulled his sidearm (remembering Gaz’s instruction), pointed it at the advancing ganger and took him down hard with a stub round only for the slide to lock back empty. And then took a round through the cover that knocked him down with an injury.

Seeing as I had the grand total of three figures still standing (and one of them was wearing a poncho for Emperor’s sake), my Orrus decided we needed all hands on deck before the Orlocks mopped up. So I pulled him back, coup de gracing one Orlock before preparing to assist his fallen comrade at the end of the turn. Turns out power fists are very bad for medical work – he rolled two Out of Action dice, meaning no chance of the patient getting back into action.

On the other hand, rushing back to the centre meant we got one final round of Spyrer murder, even able to put some serious wounds on the cybermastiff when it attacked. The Orrus was able to fight through the attackers, dropping another ganger but found herself way out of position and unable to deal with the remaining Orlock leadership.

The game came to an end with a stand-off. The Patrolman, armed with two guns and already dealing with an early game flesh wound versus the Orlock Champion. It was a quick shoot-out, the Patrolman blasting away but unable to find their mark. The return volley took ripped the gunslinger off their feet, leaving the Enforcers almost entirely out of the fight. The end phase brought a failed bottle check and the Orlocks won, keeping the ground. But at great cost; you can see above the sheer number of markers placed for fighters taken out of action and many of the lasting injuries would have resulted in pretty banged-up fighters going into the following week. The Rep for winning would also go to the Orlocks, although seeing as this was our first meeting of the gangs, the loss of rep for bottling would have been balanced out

Overall, it was a fun game. There were some appalling and incredible dice rolls on both sides, with some glorious combat and much fun had (even while half asleep). It’s also definitely a time slot that I should be using more – sleeping in is lovely but between the Dastardly Regular Opponent often having the slot free and the collection of PC gaming friends who can use the time, I’ll need to keep my lie-ins to Saturday and make Sunday be the chance to be social. I also love how much Necromunda has taken the Dastardly Regular Opponent. Between the walls he’s printed up, the doors I delivered to him and multiple games, he’s fallen a little bit in love with scrapping in the underhive. He has also managed to control himself and currently has only one gang (a rarity for Necromunda players – even I have two mostly complete gangs and two more in construction). We have both agreed we want to keep Necromunda at the forefront of our minds, especially as the next full campaign is probably going to be adding even more rules through the addition of vehicles.

As for the gang, I think it’s definitely a very strong start that plays to my style (elite, armoured, packing a punch) without straying too far from the original setup of a Necromunda gang. Spyers were great fun, but very quickly you realise that they do not engage with many of the systems in the game. In fact, due to the inability to earn credits, most missions become more focused on Rep (not always very important) and Kills/Terror level increases. Instead of a variety of objectives, you realise most missions become Team Deathmatch – highly appropriate for the gang but can be unpleasant for another player to deal with (especially if you find yourself locked in ONLY playing a Spyrer player).

By taking a Spyrer leader with a regular gang, you get to have an incredibly powerful early game figure (and one with a cool custom ruleset as you still level up via kills), combined with still playing the same campaign as everyone else. And with Enforcers, you get a gang that fits both thematically (perhaps a young noble has come down to make sure his house’s enforcers are doing what they should be) and mechanically (focusing on shooting alongside a close combat monster). It was great fun to be back using actual Necromunda tactics of using the cover and relying on only a single activation, rather than simple eating shots with high levels of armour and moving super fast. I will definitely be doing more with this gang.

Now, there was an elephant in the room when playing this game – this would be the last game using the old Enforcer book as the new one (Bastions of Law) had been announced with no release date. That was until, obviously summoned by my blood ritual of scarifising enforcers, that evening we got the announcement that pre-orders would be going up the following week. I got my pre-order in with Leodis Games (always buy from your FLGS) for several pieces – I expect I won’t be collecting the Enforcer Weapons and Upgrades spure this weekend due to an issue that has cropped up, but there is plenty to play around with. I was also tempted by the Haunts (because Psychic Cops) but the prospect of Forgeworld Resin makes me far more tempted to convert my own. The big changes are in the rules and I’m excited to play around with the new list building.

Now, if only I had some kind of game day that I should be preparing for. I hear the Dastardly Regular Opponent has a birthday coming up and there have been rumours that I may be busy in a few weekends time. Time to prepare a delegation from my noble house to ensure the workers aren’t slacking too much. The fun police, if you will…

Been quite a while since I did one of these painting updates huh? Time to come back with an interesting one.

Earlier this year, Combat Octopus released his SSO sets (two packs and a support set), giving us a set of modern Russian/AK-equipped operators with a variety of weapons systems and a literal shit ton of pouches. The packs even include some Western gear, making them a great intro set for Ultramodern wargaming. However, sometimes people want weapons that aren’t on the list – such as modernised rail-equipped versions of prototype Russian rifles from the 1990s. Luckily, someone paid to commission a brand new figure for the range, and so we got another release out of CO.

The Team Leader set, as you can see, is a little unusual for a Combat Octopus figure in that it comes with one complete body, rather than being split at the waist or with exposed MOLLE loops so you can set up your own selection of pouches. It also comes with a new head design and NCO pointing hand, as well as four weapons – for the Western fan, there is a short AR-15 rifle but for those who do care about the weapon matching the mags then you can pick between an AK-12SK, an AK-74 and a modernised AN-94. Yep, the Akbakan, beloved of gamers and feared by those who need to deal with the mechanical system hiding beneath the handguard to give it the two round hyperburst feature. Additionally, this one is actually based off a unique variant which has been adjusted for modern use. The stock has been replaced with a buffer tube, a rail alongside the top of the receiver (complete with an Aimpoint-style red dot) and a suppressor. It’s definitely a unique looking rifle, but also incredible cool.

Of course, I couldn’t simply take him as he comes out of the pack. I found myself delving back through the literal massive pile of heads that Combat Octopus has released over the last few years. While scrolling through, I found one of the heads from the Anti-Material Sniper Loyalty Reward, a balaclava and headset combo. Putting the head and body together, I suddenly had the vibe of Obi-Nairboi – the balaclava head and pretty impressive tactical gear with a full-featured rifle with all its attachments.

So then it came down to painting up my version (Qui-Gon Bazi if you will), and I started off by almost immediately ignoring much of the clothing underneath. Technically, he is wearing a set of tactical clothing, with Crye-Esque shirt and trousers. However, it’s been a while since I’ve sat down and painted so I decided to go for non-camo clothing. I ended up taking the iconic purple top from Nairobi, mixed with a solid colour set of tan trousers. All the tactical gear was painted in my usual tan colour. For the weapon, I ended up sponging on some rough desert colour to help break up the pure black and make it look suitably “veteran operator-y”.

The end result is something I’m pretty happy with. It’s not my best painted figure, but as someone who hasn’t painted in quite a while I’m happy with how it came out. I may go back and add some additional touches later (some extra highlights) but I could quite happily put him on the table.

Speaking of putting him on the table, I quite like the idea of using him as a mentor for less well-equipped forces, someone directing the local milita around while able to make sure they receive the correct support from above. He is definitely not deniable – even in ChargeReal I doubt the AN-94 is rolling out of the arms factories at speed.

Outside of the Regular Opponents subsection, I am lucky to be in contact with a larger wargaming group. From the Tyne in the North to Wakefield in the South, from York in the East to the wrong side of the Pennines, I have found myself with a solid group of friends interested in sharing the wargaming hobby both online and in a weekly hangout session. And despite my own eclectic mix of games (matched only by The Creative Regular Opponent in his desire to play everything), the group has narrowed down on a pair – The Old World (as I’ve written about in the past) and Necromunda.

I’ve written about Necromunda in the past (having run through a previous campaign with my Enforcers). I really like Necromunda as an experience with friends – there are very few other games that can provide quite the same mixture of excitement distilled from list building, scenario planning, campaign-based madness and general shenanigans that happen when you unleash the madness of a game where characters being bounced around a room with shotguns and grenades. going insane and being controlled by another player and dropping into a big pit is not only normal but actually expected and welcomed (usually with a chant from the others around the table). While the core of Necromunda is relatively easy to learn (especially if you grew up with older GW games), I do find that I can end up being quite a heavy mental load – there is a lot going on when you play a game of Necromunda, with everything from the basic rules (designed to cover lots of different situations), the pile of wargear in the game, tactics cards, scenario rules and more to all keep in your heard when trying to plan your moves. This is made worse by the big gaps in the time between play sessions, meaning the first few games usually end up being spent frantically relearning the game. However, despite all of this, when my former housemate over at Dreadquill announced a new campaign was in the running – time for Emperor Falls, pitting various gangs (controlled by various friends) against each other in the interior of a spaceship-sized statue.

• Planning
• Game 1 – Familar Foes
• Games 2 and 3 – Weekend Madness
• Games 4 and 5 – Dastardly Danger
• Games 6 and 7 – The Grand Finale
• Wrap-Up

This is going to be a big one, so grab a drink, take a break and use the contents to jump around if needed.

Planning

For this campaign, I had a few choices for who I would be deploying. The Enforcers were complete and all ready for the table (as well as some extra sprues for when additional recruits were needed). There were also two other new gangs I could go with – either Eschers (needing to be started from one or two assembled figures) or my Outcast gang around a rogue psyker (all models completed by still needing a few final touches). However, a new player entered the scene with the announcement of Spyrers returning to Necromunda. Spyrers, noble assholes wearing suits that upgrade the more they kill, have been a favourite of mine from the lore, even when the old models were slightly janky and the old rules aggressively overpowered to the point of being banned. The new version of the rules are at a much more sensible power level while still keeping that vibe of hunters deep in an untamed place, jumping targets in the depths of the underhive, spreading terror as rumours grow. I really like playing this style of list – very powerful when used correctly, but vulnerable to being swarmed or taken out by high damage, high penetration weapon systems (such as a melta bomb).

The other bonus is that Spyrer gangs are tiny; while everyone else is looking to start the campaign with 7+ figures at least for their 1000 creds, I entered with only three models and with very limited chances to expand the gang or buy new items (the noble assholes don’t really engage with the local economy except to remove workers from the streets and keep the sausage man well supplied with injuried juvies/meat). The other upside to me was that it wouldn’t take much to get them painted… and yet I entered the campaign with them at least obeying the three colours rule and not much else (as you might have spotted, I’m suffering a little bit of a drought in my painting). It doesn’t help that new GW models are dripping with detail, meaning it can be hard to focus up and finish painting a figure while also trying to hit all the details and I REALLY want to capture all the details.

For my list, I went with one Hunt Master (mixing Malcadon and Jakara weapons to be a pretty nasty close combat machine) and then a pair of Orrus hunters. These brutes are both fantastic models and absolute nightmares to fight. Both started off with the basic loadout but I specc’d one to be more smashy (with Flurry of Blows) and the other to be more shooty (with Gunfighter to make them better at blasting way with both hands). Overall, it’s a small list (and not ideally kitted out as I had to save money to fit two big guys in), but it has the potential to do some massive damage and be pretty hardy against return attacks.

Unfortunately for me, the campaign managed to drop right at a busy moment in my day job schedule (boy, I hope you enjoy hearing that phase for the next 12 months for some reason). This meant I had to miss the first few weeks of the campaign (also not helped by me falling ill on the first weekend session), leaving my gang of noble miscreants behind in terms of rep and XP versus the gangs who managed to play a load of games (many of which had the sneaky habit of living closer to the Arbitartor in the frozen north). However, there was some good news. First up, the Campaign Arbitrator decided to bump me to Terror Level 4 (only 1 point away from the first tier) to make sure I could start getting the fun stuff before the campiagn ended. I also did well through the campaign system (every character gaining 2XP in the first week, 1XP per week from the following weeks even without playing) and managed to rejoin the game during Downtime.

Which was good news for me because Spyrers are weird and Downtime is the only point where you actually get to spend money – it’s unlikely Rich Folk would be engaging in the local Economy other than to suddenly cause a massive labor shortage so you only collect and spend credits during the Downtime Phase (presumably to represent some rich patrons uphive sending down gifts for their darling offsprings). This meant I had 250 credits to spend, which got me a few minor tweaks to the list – these included one of my Orrus’s getting a pair of power fists (a loadout that would be very handy in the games I played), gave my leader a lucky flying baby as a pet (Necromunda continues to be delightfully weird) and then made sure the entire gang all had bioboosters to make sure injury rolls were less of an issue. This meant I was good to go for the campaign when my first opponent arrived.

Game 1 – Familar Foes

Turned out I wasn’t the only one struggling to get games, as my Former Housemate (and arch-rival during the last campaign) also had the world pile on top of him during the campaign. I ended up being one of only two games he played, and seeing as how he was playing the Delaque with their god damn webbers again, there was probably much rejoicing at the absence of those bastards (less so for him not being there, hopefully we’ll get more games next time).

For this game, we decided to go thematic – a public execution. An imperial scribe had found himself in deep trouble with the Delaque and now a group of Spyer’s were here to horribly interrogate rescue him. The Delaque managed to set up in the centre of the board with doors and plenty of cover (as well as a patch of darkness to stop them getting sniped), with the only easy access being via the vents.

And then I got to introduce them to the Spyrers’ party trick of “Ooops, all activations all the time”. With 2 activations per turn, the Spyrers were able to move out rapidly, setting up positions to breach in a single turn. Once turn 2 started, I was able to utilise the Bulldoze card to Koolaid man his way through. That Orrus’s following activation then saw him utterly annihilate a poor Delauque danger. My gang leader also got to show off how destructive he can be, utterly shredding the enemy leader in a matter of moments thanks to the naga blade/poison whip combo.

The problem, of course, was that I forgot I was facing the Delaque. The other Orrus found itself taken down very early in the game with rounds flying through the vent (you can see it even before I breached into the corridor) and I had to burn a tactics card to get him back on his feet. However, the next gun shoved through the vent was a webber that flued him to the floor, followed up by a teleporting Delaque ganger who managed to curbstomp him while he was wrapped up in the web. The other Orrus (not pictured) found itself bounced by the reinforcements, webbed and then stomped by a sneaky boy.

And as for the objective? Unfortunately, my success in shredding Delaque put them on edge, leading to the timer rapidly ticking down. By the time we got to the end of round 3, the ticker reached zero, and the unfortunate imperial servant found a stub round in his head. Victory to the Delaque.

Not a great start for the Spyrers, their first mission failed and a reminder that, as much as the Spyers can be incredibly destructive, it doesn’t take much to knock them out.

Games 2 and 3 – Weekend Madness

One excellent feature during the campaign was that we had use of the Scout Hut thanks to the Dastardly Regular Opponent for four weekends. This gave us a chance for the group to get together and play, allowing those without terrain to have a go and for the newer players to be coached through their first few encounters. Unfortunately, I missed the first two (one due to illness and the other being unable to spare the day other than to drop in to deliver some prints), so by the time we got to the third I was raring to jump in.

This was also the first week of the Damnation Phase, meaning things were about to get very grim. Unlike a regular Necromunda campaign, where credits and trips to the trader are the aim of the game, the Uprising campaign shows the decline of a community as Chaos’s tendrils sneak in. I had missed the whole of the “regular” stage of the campaign and so leapt feet first into hell. Now, the goal is hunting for meat as rewards (often by taking out rival gangers or working territories), with the choice to eat into your supplies to keep your fighters in the best condition. If you don’t feed them, then they have less strength and a nasty habit of chowing down on the downed enemies mid-battle.

The good news for the Spyrers is that they are very cheap when it comes to food portions, with a full gang needing only a handful of meat. The lack of The Trading Post also meant that everyone else was now limited to scavenging for gear (while I was running a pretty useful set), so much of the power increase had slowed down. There was also the slight problem that this week’s event meant every game had zombies running around.

The first game of the weekend saw me going up against the campaign master himself (while my Corporate Regular Opponent had his intro game with gang far less unusual). Mr Dreadquill brought out his Beast House gang (a team assembled using the Venators inspired by the criminal group from the Dark Hersey game), which meant I got have encounter some interesting creatures, such as a big Ogryn lad and some horrible flying things. The scenario in question was Meat Harvest, with the Spyrers attempting to take a slice out of the Beast House’s supplies. This is actually a very fun scenario for the Spyers, giving them a chance to speed around the board, mutilating civilian figures with ease and building up the stockpile of meat to run through the rest of the campaign.

It didn’t go all my own way, though, as the Beast House were pretty effective at getting their civilians off the board (blissfully unaware they are about to end up beast chow). I once again found myself having to use a tactics card to bring one of my Orrus’s back to life, but we did also see a flying baby (also known as a Caryatid Prime) curbstomp an Ogryn. The end result was a close Spyrer victory, but more importantly, it set me up for the rest of the campaign in terms of supplies.

The Big Event of the weekend was a four-player game at the end of the day. We had all been dispatched into the depths of the statue, looking to find the source of the cannibal zombies that had been distracting us all. Turns out we had a chaos icon in the depths that needed to be destroyed, playing the Urban Renewal scenario. Two groups of Escher (including a corrupted gang), my Spyrers and of course, the House Party entered into the arena to destroy the icon and stem the flow of horribly hungry fellows.

Now you may notice a trend in these photos, and that’s because the ungrateful little git known as Corporate Regular Opponent decided that he wanted to directly engage the man who helped bring his House Party to life (you can see the process on making them elsewhere on the blog). When the first round of shooting took out the Orrus attempting to do the objective (while shouting HULK SMASH with his power talons), I took that personally and proceeded to introduce him to the Spyrers. This included their nasty habit of multiple activations in a turn and the rather horrifying effect of their weapons – my gang leader managed to chew his way through several of the pink bastards.

I had managed to ally myself with the Escher gang on the other side (the only other non-corrupted gang on the board (I am always keen for gentlemen’s agreements in these games), and so was able to focus the most effective building destroyer (the other Orrus with the Power Fists) on getting the job done and purging the heretical icon.

This success (accompanied by the first game’s setup) definitely had me feeling like this group is less of a group of nobles on a jolly and more of a team, sent in to perform specific tasks for their House. So yes, once again, I find myself controlling a Special Forces team, just one full of arrogant, noble assholes.

Games 4 and 5 – Dastardly Danger

Of course, the Dastardly Regular Opponent may have been unable to join us for the multiplayer day but I was able to get over the following day for a tussle or two. His Orlock gang was built over Lockdown around 2020, 2021 and only just managed to get itself on the table. However, he has since managed to leap in feet first and get stuck in, playing far more Necromunda than I have in the last year and even keeping it up after the campaign is over.

At this point, however, we were mid-campaign. Just in time for me to jump in and pit his guys against my Spyrers. The other thing was that I was getting closer and closer to the next tier in the Terror level tracker. I had already added a second lucky flying baby to the gang and now I was looking to try and add an additional low cost Spyrer to the group. With a few good missions, I’d get myself over that threshold.

And then I got a good few missions.

The first game (and original plan) was for us to play a game of Search and Destroy – Spyrers hunting down the arms caches that the Orlocks have been laying around. It started off poorly for my gang, with one Spyrer being knocked down after smashing through a wall to avoid a hail of heavy bolter fire, while another found himself on the wrong side of a melta bomb. It looked like the Spyrers were about to be taken out very early on. But then the winds changed, Bio-boosters and tactics cards coming into play.

While the revived Leader found himself hunting cannibals, the power fist Orrus went into full-on smash mode. He grabbed the heavy bolter gunner and knocked him out cold (hitting him hard enough to be captured) before proceeding to rampage his way through the Orlock back line and knocking out a couple more gangers. The Orlocks had started with a fraction of their total gang size (literally only four defenders for the caches), so they ended up bottling as the first reinforcements

Seeing as I’d just managed to capture one of the Dastardly Regular Opponent’s hottest items (a heavy bolter and suspensor) and seeing as the game ended so quickly, I decided to offer him a chance to get his boy back. Time for another round of Public Execution! This time, the Spyrers were on the defensive, and worse entirely surrounded by horrifying cannibals. The Orlocks also brought the whole gang out (including the leader and his dog) AND managed to setup in a big enough group to potentially cause me problems. Surely nothing could go wrong?

In fact, everything went wrong. It seems my opponent’s dice were cursed, leading to dud demo charges, gangers getting 66’d (meaning dead dead dead) and even a rescue attempt ending with a jetpack trooper plummeting into the pit. Seeing how much the Orlocks were getting kicked, I decided to offer my opponent a deal – let me take out his leader, thus giving me enough terror to recruit a new spyrer, and in return I would bottle voluntarily, costing me 1 Reputation but gaining me far more. The deal was signed, the Orlock Leader got stomped but the Heavy Bolter (and it’s gunner) was saved.

Overall, a fun morning of games, but also a pretty nasty blow to my Dastardly Regular Opponent’s meat stockpile, thanks to playing two games in a row. There was definitely some consternation about needing meat to get his leader healed up after his beatdown, which unfortunately meant that several blasting charges ended up in the inventory of a certain Ogryn. Surely nothing bad will come of that.

Games 6 and 7 – The Grand Finale

Alas, all good things eventually come to an end. By the start of the final week, all things narratively were going to hell in a hand cart, as the starvation mechanic had changes into a bonus to strength rather than a negative. The end times were upon us and so, we gathered for one final weekend of Necromunda.

The first game of the final day was against the hordes of The House Party, as blobbies and spyrers clashed in a round of Slaughter. This was all about the murdering, with special rules making shooting less effective and a bloodlust roll for each activation that meant the stronger fighters found themselves charging enemy and friend alike, outside of player control. It ended up being an absolute slaughter fest, with plenty of blood being drawn and the horrifying Blob-oth unleashed. This was also my first taste of just what a full-powered Stimmer can do, with something like 10 attacks in a single round at a horrifying strength. It was amusing to play against these creatures, especially with the comedy pinned markers featuring Mr Blobby in peril.

However, the big finale saw five gang on the board yet planning to try and get the hell out of there before the station was destroyed by the Imperial Navy to prevent the spread of the horrors inside. Alongside my Spyers and the House Party was the Dastardly Regular Opponent’s Orlocks stuck in the middle of a two-way shooting range with the religious zealots from the two Cawdor gangs that had spent the morning scrapping.

The objective? Get to the centre of the board, climb the landing pad, get into the lander when it arrives and then get the hell out of there. There are a few minor problems – every turn we played things are getting worse and worse, so random events are in full effect. Everyone is rolling to check for insanity as they move across the board (this will be important later. Finally, the Arbitrator is rolling a big dice every turn and not telling us what it does.

Oh, and did I mention that one of the Cawdor players (controlled by my Other Former Housemate) had dumped a load of mines around the objective? Yeah, I sure hope that’s the only trick he pulls.

The game itself was a glorious slug fest of a match – a game with 5 players takes a while to play (Necromunda works with each player taking an activation and working around the table in priority order), especially when two of the forces are made up of the unwashed masses that are the Cawdor gangs. I again made a gentleman’s agreement with the Cawdor next to me (because there was a pile of them and I really didn’t fancy getting into a scrap on the deployment zone) and even managed to (for the most part) hold off fighting the House Party (who had been joined by a hanger-on – perhaps the mysterious Noel?). Instead, I focused mostly on securing the objective, clearing the mines (or at least playing with them) and getting ready for the final fight.

However, a game this size had no chance of being sorted peacefully. The conventional fighting saw the Orlocks, both sets of Cawdor and the House Party start beating the shit out of each other. The Orlocks, caught in the middle, found themselves pretty beat up, barely able to get out of their deployment. The House Party also got stuck in against the Other Former Housemate’s forces, leading to some absolute bloodshed on the other side of the board. And then a literal demon stepped out of the darkness right behind the Other Former Housemate’s Cawdor gang, leading to even more bloodshed.

For me, however, the bigger threat was madness (something only the non-corrupt gangs had to deal with). I ended up losing two of my very expensive Spyrers to losing their minds, failing willpower checks and then rolling badly to end up losing their mind. In Necromunda, this can result in their coming under the control of another player, allowing them to do all sorts of aggressive actions to remove them. And unfortunately, my hunt master ended up in control of the Dastardly Regular Opponent (who had spent the game being pummelled and fresh off the previous weekend’s game), and the Yeld found herself dunked in the fire pit by the Other Former Housemate, a man whose Necromunda gameplay is best described as no holds barred. One of my Orrus also got a little mad, leading to an accidental fight with the Blob-oth as the Cawdor fighter waded in.

When the lander arrived, my Orrus were among the first onboard and I was fully prepared to take control, fight the others and make sure I was in control. I even had a tactics card to drop a template attack on the craft, to hopefully clear out the single Blobby and the trio of Other Former Housemate’s Cawdor that had managed to claw their way onboard. However, my activations were not friendly, and so I settled for merely forcing the ship to take off quickly (heavily armoured nobles with power fists can be very persuasive), extracting my surviving Spyrers, the trio of Cawdor and the Blobby we assumed was hanging off the edge of the ship. Mission accomplished!

(until the Navy blows the shuttle up to prevent corruption because 40k)

Wrap-Up

Something I think is worth mentioning before I wrap up is just how much a campaign game like Necromunda brings out some of the best parts of the hobby. The gangs had a fantastic mix of set-ups, each one unique to the player running them (even if we didn’t all manage to get them painted). However, there were also other elements that are awesome – the MDF wall pieces that Dreadquill and the Other Former Housemate brought along looked awesome, really setting the mood (and including some incredible artwork by the Other Former Housemate’s partner and some great posters). There were also conversions galore (such as the Caged Heretic using a GW zombie) and the return of an old favourite, the Arvus Lander (or The Pig).

Additionally, I want to also call out Dreadquill for running an incredibly fun campaign. Being the campaign Arbitrator isn’t easy, requiring a pile of work behind the scenes – organising game days for players to actually play the game, keeping track of territories and advances, keeping everyone informed through weekly updates (all delivered by MailChimp to our inboxes each Monday) and answering the literal pile of questions every Necromunda player will find themselves asking. This was increased by this campaign being the first for quite a few people, with lots of new players learning their ways into an aggressively newcomer unfriendly game. But thanks to Dreadquill’s hard work, the campaign was a joy to take part in.

If you want to see more from Dreadquill, you can find more hobby stuff at his blog and on his BlueSky page.

With the campaign over, I have plenty of thoughts:

First up, Necromunda is still awesome to play. The game is a little clunky with the sheer number of pieces to it (especially in the larger multiplayer games), and there is still a load to learn even for me. But as I said at the start, there is no other game quite like. No other game has had the mix of excitement, glee and inevitable disappointment from a single day of gaming. We also got to play around with a whole load of new toys with all the different gangs, and Dreadquill really rolled out the shenanigans with weekly modifiers and multiplayer games. It’s actually made me really interested in looking at the other ways of playing, including some weirder campaigns. As much as I may have enjoyed my Necromunda time, this campaign really got me excited to play more.

Second, turns out playing games with friends is actually really fun. This year has been a little light on games due to a variety of factors (including work) so having an excuse to actually put time aside to get out there and play games. Having access to the Scout Hut really helped us to have a common space that we could get to (especially one a simple stroll from the local Co-Op) and with plenty of space to run a stack of games.

Third, Spyrers are 100% the gang for me. In contrast to their original version, they are far less overpowered and far more in the glass cannon category. You are always going to be outnumbered (although double activation helps) and by late campaign, you’re also going to be outgunned. In fact, even a starting gang can cause some serious damage to a group of rookie Spyrer. There are lots of tricks and toys to keep them in the game (including a tactics card that literally brings them back when taken out of action, which is basically mandatory), but if you mess it up, you’ll soon eat the curb. On the other hand you can also absolutely rip and tear. The campaign economy for the Spyrers is also odd – in some ways, it disincentivises actually doing the missions in favour of simply pulling the enemy gangs apart to keep the terror level ticking up. I’d love to see how they do in a full campaign, getting a chance to really tick up the nightmare. The Orrus are definitely my Spyrers of choice – with a few upgrades and advancements, they very quickly become a high speed monster that hits like a freight train while still being able to take a hit or two.

So what happens next? Well, as I said, I’m really excited to keep playing Necromunda – it seems like multiple people in the group will be continuing to play even during the downtime. This includes the Dastardly Regular Opponent who got a whole set of terrain printed ready for the future. It also seems like we’ll be taking a look at the Ash Wastes version of the game, exchanging the cramped hallways for the open road (and potentially needing to get some vehicles).

For me personally, I’ll need to decide what gang I want to run next. My Spyers still need finishing off, but there is also an update coming for my beloved Enforcers, which I’m very interested in seeing. I do also have two other gangs in the work in progress state (Escher and Outcasts), so there are lots of possibilities for the Underhive next time. Maybe I’ll even combine them – after all, you can run a Secundian Incursion gang where you combine a single Spyrer with a regular House or Enforcer fight. As someone whose man of the campaign was a big lad with two power fists, what better commander for the next run?

As I find myself writing a truly massive post about my last Necromunda campaign, I find myself looking at the monstrosities that I unfortunately helped create. Much like a certain Doctor seeing his creature rampaging through the local town and deciding it might be best to get ahead of the bad press and get his version of events out there.

I am, of course, talking about The Blobbies that you may have seen online after Mr Dreadquill posted about them on BlueSky (and then Instagram nicked it).

For those not in the know, Mr Blobby is a horrifying entity beloved part of 1990s entertainment, appearing on Noel’s House Party during its 9 seasons from 1991 to 1998. There is something inherently terrifying comedic about him, from his appearance (including the staring eyes), ridiclous way of speaking and the habit to fall over and smash things. So when my Corporate Regular Opponent (who helps keep me sane at work) found a set of Mr Blobby STLs available online, he quickly asked me to print some for him, with no particular plan in mind. And me being me, I agreed and then never got around to printing them. This continued for a little while until the topic of Necromunda came up. And a plan was formed.

The Corporate Regular Opponent decided this would be the introduction to Necromunda, and he wanted a suitably whimsical gang to match his personality and play style. The Mr Blobby STLs were dug out, the gang decided upon and sketched out (Goliaths were chosen and my Former Housemate selected the list) and then it just became a matter of how to turn those ideas into models to be 3D printed, while also making them suitably armed and equipped.

Initially, the idea was to look at the weapons included in the blobby set, but none of them really fit for Necromunda. One key element of a skirmish game, such as our trip into the underhive, is some level of WYSIWYG – I don’t hold it as key as some people, but it’s handy to know that one person’s big hammer is different from someone else’s. Additionally, they also looked a little bit weedy, not really fitting for the 40k style – half the fun of putting Mr Blobby into a game of Necromunda is giving him a boltgun after all. Luckily, a few people are making Necromunda-inspired STL figures, and Print Minis have their Fleshforged gang as stand-ins for Goliaths (with both a core set and a female expansion).

Now it was time to jump into Blender and get to work. The first step was to make sure the Blobbies were the right scale (both to match against GW’s Necromunda figures and make sure they are to scale with the Flesh Forged who would be giving them guns. The next step was to prepare the weapons – this meant the careful application of a cutting cube (an object used with the subtraction tool in Blender to remove unnecessary bits of a model) to trim away the hands and then re-attach a pistol grip. Luckily, there was an exposed pistol grip on the female expansion set that was perfect. Although not perfectly matching the original designs, they worked out perfectly for the next stage – rigging the Blobby hands to properly grip the guns. The end goal didn’t have to be perfect, but flexing the fingers just enough for them to fully connect and keep the new guns and axes in place.

After a few evenings of messing around (and plenty of swearing at Blender), I managed to assemble the full gang. The list from my Former Housemate included a good mix of Goliath fun, such as the muscular Stimmer and a weird mix of guns. I also tried my best to make up a set of poses that weren’t just standing there. However, once you start assembling the arms onto them, you realise the same thing that the poor performer who had to wear the suit did – the blobby form is not designed for action, with the rotund body and short arms limiting the ability to do such useful poses for wargaming figures as “aiming” or “using a stock”. Even attempting action melee poses was tricky, especially with trying to grip a weapon across the body. So instead, I went for a few other poses, weapons held aloft to make it clear what’s being used.

To pick out a few of my favourites:

• The Stimmer was a challenge – not just to make sure it was the right size (Stimmers are a big, biologically enhanced freaks after all), but he also needed to look unique. We had originally talked about making his spots larger and more physical, but in the end, we went with the simple approach – increase the size, add two big spheres for the biceps, two big axes, done.
• I am notorious for using less obvious figures for the gang leader, and so I was keen to make sure that this gang it would be clear who would be in charge. For this one, we gave the leader the mowhawk off a regular Fleshforged ganger. Best not to think too much about where he got it from.
• Yes, that Blobby is racking a double-barreled shotgun. Yes, it makes no sense. Is it funny? Yes.
• With the grenade launcher blobby, I really liked the end result of him covering his face in embarrassment, a common occurrence with the actual Mr Blobby. It made sense for a grenade launcher user, as those weapons are blast templates and so have a chance to cause shennighans.
• My favourite model has to be the blobby with the boltgun and stub pistol. He is such a joyous figure, looking like he’s having too much fun.

Once all the figures were assembled and signed off by the Corporate Regular Opponent, I got them printed on the Saturn and passed them over to him to work his magic.

And I do mean magic. The Corporate Regular Opponent did a really good job on these guys, even during the early previews of him frantically painting them ready for the first weekend. He nailed the shade of pink, complete with the yellow dots. For the weapons, there was an original discussion about realistic stolen gear vs colourful. In the end, I loved how he went for the Nerf look, bright colours making them look like big chunky plastic and foam.

It’s the eyes, though. The eyes are a window to the soul, and dear god, the blank staring eyes of the painted Blobbies perfectly match the souless look of the original suit.

Which meant when I actually saw them on the tabletop, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. There is something gloriously gleeful about them – the pink and colourful weapons against the grime of the scenery, the fixed grin as they slowly amble towards you before doing some serious damage. You can almost hear the whispered “blobby blobby blobby” echoing through the hive.

Chilling.

Now, after an unfortunate ritual that occurred during the first weekend, the Blobbies would soon need reinforcement with a horrifying spawn replacing the Juve in his gang. For this one, the Corporate Regular Opponent decided to learn Blender (as he’d previously used 3ds Max in his day job). After much screaming and complaining, he sent me the file to print. Quite frankly, it was a horrifying file to open. I ended up printing two (one slightly enlarged) and crossed myself after peeling it off the build plate.

Yeah errr, that’s concerning. Chaos truly works in terrifying ways. He merged several of the Blobby bodies together (the different leg poses forming a writhing mass) with one oversized Blobby head on top. I do love that he also added a little collar over the gap, before marking it with the sigils of Tzeentch, the god that his gang had chosen to follow. I’ll talk more about it’s action in-game in my larger recap post, but lets just say it was a well-loved member of the gang.

With the Blobbies finished and the campaign over (more on that coming soon with my own results), the Blobbies have (luckily) disappeared into the underhive and so don’t haunt me any further. It was a really fun project – a chance to learn Blender, play around with existing models and have fun posing models which are different from purely a human man.

However, with talk already discussing an Ash Wastes campaign coming soon, perhaps the Blobbies will return to Necromunda. Perhaps we shall see more Blobbies, with dust goggles and a wider variety of headgear to hang off the side of ramshackle vehicles. Perhaps… Or perhaps we shall learn the true depth of the horror waiting behind those blank, glassy eyes…

I’ll see you later for a proper update on my own Necromunda time.

It’s been a while since we checked in on my 3D printing journey, and I’m not going to bury the lead – I picked up a second filament 3D printer. Let me explain!

Earlier this year, I sold off the last of my MDF terrain kits, with the intention of moving forward into an entirely FDM terrain environment. This process is (for the most part) going well. I’m much lighter on MDF and the boxes are slowly gaining filament replacements. The good news is that there is plenty of purchasing options out there and the vast majority of Kickstarters you see for terrain now are pretty damn solid. People like Multiverse, Tired World Studio and Dragon’s Rest have produced some projects I have hammered out and love the look of, while people such as Modern Miniatures and Patrick Miniatures are producing monthly sets which are ideal for Ultramodern Gaming. I personally have been slowly working my way through Urban Scatter’s MENA range (although at this stage it’s less about the printing and more about painting them up and getting them on the table). There is something glorious about the way it’s possible to reproduce designs in your own home, without having to wait for the arrival of a large kit. It’s not perfect quality (there are plenty of prints in my collection that QC would have probably flagged), but in many cases, it doesn’t really matter when I’m printing for myself.

However, that’s where the problems start – I am not just printing for myself. As I’m the only one in my collection of friends with constant access to run them entirely for my own purposes (the Creative Regular Opponent’s printers has other more commercial demands on their time) and because I’m a lunatic who enjoys providing plastic crack to my friends, there has been a pretty reasonable interest in getting items printed. So far, this has included paint racks, movement trays – all the little things that you could buy online but are easily printable at home for much cheaper. Previous projects have usually been modest, a day or two of printer time and usually on print beds I’m happy leaving overnight or still running when I go to work.

But there has been two projects which made me reconsider my initial approach. One for myself and another for one of my friends.

First up, Dastardly Regular Opponent asked for a full set of walls and corners for Necromunda. The complete set worked out to be 26 corners, 24 single pieces and 12 double pieces. Seeing as I print at 0.16mm layer height for the detail, this led to a pretty major print time, especially as I made the questionable choice to try and max out the print beds so I could minimise how much babysitting I would need to do. Overall, the project worked out to total about 7.5 days – and that is 7.5 days of constant printing time, including the sound of mechanical action and screaming fans overnight. As much as I can sleep through with the printer running in the background, a full week of it seemed a little too much. There have also been several discussions with people wanting other large projects, which has started me pondering about ways to speed up printing for them.

But I have also been thinking about some larger projects for myself, such as Combat Octopus’s CommieBlock. This is a massive project, one that will effectively lock down a single printer for weeks. Run two printers in parallel, and suddenly big projects take a fraction of the time, letting me more easily leap into new projects and try out new things. This applies especially for projects which are majority 3d printed, such as the CommieBlock or the Hexengarde projects (the city, the docks or the city walls), where to get anything done requires hours of print time. The idea of printing an entire board goes from a concerning length of time to actually quite predictable.

Something to consider in all this is how FDM differs from resin in terms of what happens when you try to print more. No matter how full a resin print bed is, it will only increase if you change the height of what you’re trying to print – after all, it’s just flashing up a series of images for each different layer. In contrast, a filament printer has to physically move the print head through every part of the plate that needs material applying to it. This means that when you start adding more parts, you’re adding all of that additional time to a print (as well as some additional smaller segments of time for things such as the extruder relocating for the next layer). Filament is also much more likely to fail, as it’s a much more mechanical process with a lot more variables to account for. So while the common wisdom is to fill resin plates if the printer is running, filament instead gains a lot more from smaller separate jobs.

Upgrading, however was going to be interesting. On the one hand, I could choose to step forward in terms of tech and get something like the Bambu X1, the current printer that everyone in the space is moving to. And with good reason, it’s an excellent printer with a solid design and plenty of features to make printing easier. However, it is just shy of £1000 (more if you want the AMS addon), and that is a little out of my price range at the moment. The Elegoo Centauri seems to be bringing many features to a lower cost level, but it isn’t out yet and frankly, this wasn’t a change I wanted to wait for

So I went with the cheapest approach – buying a second Neptune 4 model printer. This comes with several benefits: first, the Neptune 4 is an older model, meaning you can find plenty available second-hand on eBay, often being sold to fund the new Bambu printers. The second benefit is the commonality aspect – by getting a printer with the same parts, same print area and same controls, it saves a lot of time when getting stuff sorted for them. No need to slice the same plate twice; just run it once and then copy it onto both machines. Finally, two machines of the same capability means I’m not going to end up with one set of prints being of better quality than the other – the red-headed stepchild problem.

I managed to find a Neptune 4 Pro going for relatively cheap. I initially put in bids on both of them that the seller was listing, and for one terrifying moment had the image of having three FDM printers. Luckily, more sensible heads prevailed, so I ended up with a lightly used Neptune 4 Pro for a fraction of the cost of a new one. One very well packaged printer, a night of assembly (where the screws went missing due to my ineptitude), and printer number 2 was up. I did have to do a little jiggling around to get things to fit into my workshop room (my resin printers now sit on the top of 4×4 Kallax unit, even the Clean/Cure station that is still in the photo below) but now they are in place, it’s looking pretty great.

So having two printers must be awesome, right? Running them 24/7, cutting print time on a project in half. Sounds great, what could go wrong?

For the first few days, it was pretty awesome. I managed to get an estimated four days worth of printing finished in less than two over the weekend. The room was pretty unpleasant to be in with the pair running together, due to the volume of both sets of fans and motors running full pelt. However, it was super cool to be able to watch the two absolutely demolishing print jobs and churning out wave after wave of Necromunda terrain.

Then, however, I made the fatal mistake of picking up a large order of filament during Prime Day. The deal was too good though – I even sent back an order of five reels so I could get two extra for the game price.

If you haven’t heard, there is a longstanding rumour that Prime Day sales are literally them clearing stock for cheap. As someone who has bought a lot of filament over the last 18 months, I’ve seen the Creality filament change from plastic reels over to cardboard (a positive for the environment). So, when I opened up the box to find plastic reels, this was a sign that these filament sets had been sitting around for a while. The bags were sealed, but they had obviously had more time since it was produced to take in any moisture left in the bag despite the silica gel packet.

Out of the five rolls of filament from that order I opened, four of them immediately had issues. We are talking reels that snapped partway through, that managed to snag on themselves and eventually, joy of joys, completely jammed in two separate extruders where the filament has swelled and blocked the Bowden tube leading to the hot end. This took one of the printers out of action (as I was distracted from clearing the extruders due to other work), thus revealing the other bonus of having two printers – redundancy!

However, this didn’t stop me from finishing off the project for the Dastardly Regular Opponent. As you can see above, a big box of wall pieces for Necromunda all ready and good to go. These are from Dragon’s Rest and are one of my favourite sets – it provides pieces both designed for Zone Mortalis (games on a 2D plane) but can easily be upgraded to more vertical terrain pieces with the right ladders, stairs and walkways. Something like this would traditionally cost £90 in MDF, but materials-wise for the filament print, it was only £40 or so. This doesn’t account for the electrical cost (something I haven’t looked at just yet) or for having to remove all the supports or brim material but the real killer is hearing them running the entire time!

Of course, moving these printers around meant I was able to take them out of commission and do some upgrades to them. In the past, I left the Neptune 4 pretty stock even with the sheer amount of parts available for it. However, I had spotted a few parts that could be improved. My first port of call was the filament spindle; by default on the Neptune, it is a simple hanger, literally two pieces of plastic screwed into the top of the frame. I swapped it out with the Sunlu Filament Holder – this uses a bearing system to keep the spool spinning freely, rather than being angrily tugged by the extruder. So far it’s worked much better, although the light weight cardboard reels do occasionally fined themselves slipping off the bearing – a little bit of bungee cord just to apply some downward pressure without adding friction has fixed that up.

The other part was a mod to the extruder itself – adjusting the filament runout sensor’s location. Originally, it’s mounted to the top of the frame, which means when it starts bitching about the lack of filament in the sensor, there is a significant distance between where the filament is being used and where it says it’s run out. Luckily, you can 3D print a replacement part that repositions it directly above the extruder, minimising the distance. That said, I went for the taller version to make it a little easier to stick my fingers in there and get the remaining piece out. It has massively cut down the leftovers from each reel, meaning more filament getting used for the good stuff. There is a little bit of messing around with wires to reroute the filament sensor, but nothing too destructive (apart from bending some of the plastic cover pieces).

Overall, my FDM printing has entered a new era. By adding a second printer, I’ve improved speed of printing, adding redundancy against failure and opened up capabilities to print bigger and more exciting projects. It’s a positive step, and although not a significant technical step up, it should still be very useful as I try to stop just writing about hobby stuff and actually get back to it.

Now, back to printing this giant commieblock floor by floor, once I unclog the older printer and get her working again.

I am very lucky – not only do I get on well with The Sister, but we also live close enough that she can come and see me every other week. This has been going on since I moved back to Leeds, with a chance to cook up food and relax with a movie or TV series. However, there has also been discussions about returning to our tabletop gaming – we played some games back in 2021 (when I was able to work from home and therefore had more prep time) but then dropped off for a variety of reasons (I did buy a house in that time). Since then, we have been planning to play more, but for various reasons, we never got around to it (although we have been watching through a pile of films that have been inspiring our games).

However, the dice must be rolled, the tabletop wargaming gods must be appeased, and quite frankly, we were both looking forward to returning to the world of the Empress’s Hounds. A kitbashed fantasy setting I’ve pulled together with inspiration from all the usual sources and fueled by releases from people like Last Sword, Games Workshop and Highland Miniatures, this is a setting that my sister has enjoyed writing about on her blog, Wolfish Written and one I’ve enjoyed coming up with mostly because it gives me an excuse to buy more Dark Elves (not that I need one, I just think they are cool).

The difference this time is the choice of ruleset. We had been playing with Open Combat, but by the end of the campaign we played, we realised it wasn’t really the style we wanted – my sister is a wargaming newbie (although she has played a lot of D&D), and for her, Open Combat didn’t really click. So this time, we’re playing Famous by Our Swords. The last test game went really well, reminding me how much I like this set and being the final push to prepare for another game day. It’s the perfect scale and setup for a few hero characters fighting small groups or monsters.

Now, I did do a few little tweaks, the biggest one being taking the weapon special rules and playing around with them. All three of the heroes are involved with the Swordmasters (think Inquisitors from 40k mixed with Witchers mixed with Musketeers) and so are trained with the blade. To show this off, at the start of each turn, each of them could pick a sword fighting style to determine their special rules – Parry (bonus defence), Riposte (retaliate against an attacker) and At Bay (enemies can’t move within 1″ without beating their attack). This is still a work-in-progress idea (I need to give Parry and Riposte a weakness to make the decision a little more interesting), but thanks to the piles of rules that Famous By Our Swords includes, it’s easy to fit pieces together to build something new (quite literally in the case of the monster creator). I’m always cautious about rulesets that describe themselves as “oh it’s a sandbox, change what you need” as plenty of people use it to cover a half-finished rule set that hasn’t been fully tested. FBOS, however, feels a lot more sturdily constructed, with the hacking being more about using the systems there and then rebuilding off of them. I look forward to trying more.

The common heroes through all these missions were a pair of Human Swordmasters and an Elven guide. The Swordmasters were from North Star’s Ghost Archipelago range (and painted back in 2020) while the Elven Guide was printed from Vae Victis.

The first game saw the hero trio getting ambushed by cultists in the woods (the classic “so here is how the rules work” scenario). I staged it out into two waves to keep the activation times relatively quick, keeping a reasonable number of tokens in the bag. For terrain, I went with area basing rather than specific trees, opening up a few pathways. If either side had been using ranged troops, I would have probably stuck a few extra rocks and terrain features in to block line of sight. But for now though, it’s just a clash of blades/claws/spikes.

As for the game itself, the Trio managed to fight their way through both waves of reinforcements. With the guide taking point, the Swordmasters were able to cut through the enemy, fighting off the first ambush before crashing into the second. However, it was not all going their way – some terrible rolls led to Benfrey taking an injury while duelling the enemy leader, giving him a terrible case of “Please test morale before charging an enemy”. There wasn’t a huge amount to write about as this was very much a learning game – both the mechanical “pulling actions from the bag->use actions in game” but also a lot of the more standard wargaming elements, such as working out areas of control and how best to wrangle your force around the battlefield.

However, she picked it up quickly, and so, after some food, we jumped into a second game.

For this one, I decided to go a little more “this is what wargaming CAN be”. Rather than a straight-up brawl, it was presented as a stealth mission – the Swordmasters and their guide have fought through the ambush and now seek the sanctuary of the ruined church in the woods. However, they’ll need to traverse the woods, sneaking past more of the cultists and their reinforcements. To begin with, until the alarm was raised, the cultists only put a single counter in the bag, letting the heroes navigate around the cultists tramping through the undergrowth. The only way to raise the alarms was for the turn to end with a cultist having a line of sight to a non-cultist – if you could hit them hard and wipe out an enemy in a single round of combat, then you could keep things quiet. Next time, I would probably have added some bonus for attack from behind or stealthily, but it seemed to work well enough for the vibe I was trying to get across.

There was, however, a twist. Inside the bag, there were four counters of a third colour, representing the activations of a mysterious third party. As each was pulled, I mentioned the deepening sense of dread among the figures on the board, the mist swirling in until finally the third force was revealed… a Vampire Lord. This is a monster profile and is an absolute combat threat – able to heal from the enemies he kills, terrifying to face and with a pile of actions, meaning he could shred through the poorly equipped cultists and would be a threat to the Swordmasters.

What happened is best described as a horror movie. At first, the Swordmasters and their guide managed to sneak around, moving from clump of trees to clump of trees. However, before the end of the first turn, the mist parted to reveal a monstrous vampire that snuck through the Cultist lines ripping them to pieces. The Swordmasters did manage to pull off some incredibly sneaky work, avoiding the attention of cultists and even wiping out a whole patrol in a turn. However, the alarm was raised when the Vampire Lord managed to leave one group of enemies alive at the turn end, leading to an all-out brawl (as much as one can be when facing a creature of the night). The Swordmasters managed to make it to the exit (with a Vampire hot on their heels) – only for the final reveal to be that the Vampire Lord is a fellow servant of the Empress, a twist that would have been revealed if they had encountered the vampire face to face. A fun little bit of world-building mixed in with the gameplay.

Overall, we had a great time – I was really glad when, at the end of the day’s gaming, my sister said she finally understood why I like wargaming. There was a lot more interaction and with plenty of choices around positioning and actions. The constant interaction cycle of pulling tokens from the bag to deciding which action to take, to very quickly moving onto the next activation. There is a rapid pace, avoid a pile of dice rolls all at one time which means it’s great to keep the focus on the table. FBOS’s ruleset is also flexible enough that it’s easy to quickly add stuff in – we’re already looking at how best to spread out to include the magic elements (as well as adding additional spells) while also expanding the forces out to include more ranged weapons.

And speaking of, we’re about to have a whole load of additional Swordmaster models thanks to a favourite of the blog, Last Sword. July’s releases (now available at the Adventurer tier) are for a set of Musketeers in the style of their other High Kingdoms releases. For someone who loves swashbucklers, these figures are spot on – Captain Alatriste (they are a Spanish company after all) mixed with D’Artagnan and the other musketeers. There are some great details in them to make them look like a set of hard-case individuals skilled at fighting and willing to use whatever tools they have. I’m very much looking forward to getting some of these printed off (as well as the older High Kingdom sets) to build up the collection of characters we use.

For now though, I shall finish off and direct you towards my Sister’s blog at Wolfish Written. She will be writing up some more narrative retellings of our adventures soon as well writing a new post pretty much every week so plenty of great things to read. For me though, I’m going to need to get the printers warmed up and then break out the leather and feathers paint schemes. FBOS continues to be my main ruleset for fantasy skirmish and I’m looking forward to what happens next! I can sense the Dastardly Regular Opponent needs an excuse to put more Dwarfs on the table. If you want the rules for yourself, you can grab them over on KoFi, including a PDF bundle.

Huh, somehow it’s June. Odd that.

March saw the big Old World Day, April was Salute, and then May has been a lot of real-life stuff (those who know my day job can probably guess what’s going on with that). One of the downsides to being hyper inspired after Salute is that at the end of the day, I am still constrained by the day job, which can sometimes be less than ideal. However, looking through my photos, I actually got a chunk of things well on their way.

In my head, the focus of the blog is still Ultramoderns, and I’ve been having a good time getting stuff printed off. The last few Combat Octopus releases have been absolute bangers (both the Russian SSO and the new female operators), and I’ve already got some on my desk to paint. The other part of my Ultramodern collection that I need to take a look at is my Black Powder Red Earth figures. There have been a few people talking about getting into the game, and I’d like them to be able to do it with a full set of painted figures (as well as the correct-sized mat for the larger Phaseline games, which I have just ordered). I have also been working on something that I’m not quite ready to share (in part because it’s got an embargo on it) but it’s been very interesting to look at something new for moderns (and fun chatting to a sculptor about their stuff before they are in the general public). More details soon from that particular project.

However, the big thing is I’m continuing to build up Ultramodern terrain. Having FINALLY sold off my last MDF at Partisan, I now have several large boxes waiting to be refilled. However, this time they will be using Urban Scatter Gaming’s rather wonderful MENA range. I’ve printed a big chunk of buildings from the modular apartment blocks up to the larger main buildings. So far, I’ve found USG’s staff to be very printable even on my Neptune 4, ideal for building up a large area quickly. I still have a few more pieces to print, but I should also start getting this set together..

Speaking of moderns, there has also been a lot of stuff behind the scenes getting ready with blog posts. Project Elements is continuing work, including writing up a prototype playthrough of it that is coming soon for the Patreon. This has been a fun article to write up, and I’m happy with where the mechanics are going – there were a few moments as I was writing through a concept and suddenly realised it needed more testing and major tweaks before finishing the post. However, as it stands, it’s looking like it will hit the goals I have for – something with a lot of flexibility for list construction without it being overwhelming and gameplay which incentivises the right sort of tactics. It is however still in very early stages – it’s going to need a lot of testing.

In terms of painting, I’ve not been too focused on getting figures to the tabletop. There have been quite a lot of Monday night hobby sessions (which are still continuing) where I’ve had to be working on blog posts or non-painting projects instead (including one I’m looking forward to). However, I have had a lot of fun ignoring my actual plans and painting up random fantasy figures instead. The two figures up there on the left are GW pieces but with some tweaks to make them something different (mostly involving trimming off the various hammers). As someone who writes for fun (and not just the blog), I really enjoy fantasy as it’s an almost blank canvas for coming up with fun concepts and strong ideas. It’s also usually fun to just paint as you’re not painting things like camo, and I’m clever enough to not do something like “painting black and yellow checked patterns on figures”. I still have a lot of fantasy pieces waiting to be painted (despite my best efforts to get rid of some) and so expect to see a lot of random things pop up.

Getting back into FBOS this quarter was also fun – the ruleset is a really good toolbox for building up all sorts of fantasy encounters and with plenty of existing rules to be repurposed for other things. Playing it against the Creative Regular Opponent and his Normans was a great start, but this weekend I’ll be hitting the table again with a return to gaming with The Sister.

There was also a lot of boxed games being played this month, with games of both Halo Flashpoint (against my old housemate/delque wrangler) and also an introduction to Fallout Wasteland Warfare over in York. Both of these games were great, a chance to play stuff I don’t usually and also take a look at mechanics I don’t use too much. It’s also cool to see proper boxed games – the Ultramodern space doesn’t really have an opening for it (apart from BPRE28) while even the wider historicals only have the occasional box, usually from Wargames Atlantic or Warlord. In the meantime, though I shall continue enjoying my brief games outside of the Ultramodern space.

So the final thing to talk about is Necromunda. As I’m writing, I was supposed to have spent Saturday hard at work with my Spyers cleaning up the riff raff of the underhive. Unfortunately, a vision problem decided to evolve into two two-day migraine, and so my painting, planning and gaming time turned into lying in bed wishing for death.

However, I have also been hard at work printing more of the Dragon Rest Sector Fatalis to get myself up to a full 4′ x 4′ table. This has included a metric ton of walls, and my Neptune has been getting its backside kicked (and I’ve been discovering some messed-up problems you can get when a reel of filament isn’t wound properly). But hopefully soon I’ll actually be able to host games of Necromunda for the latest campaign with the proper terrain.

Once I finish painting my models.

Yes, it’s true. I am now free of the weight I put on my shoulder over several years of buying the finest MDF buildings in the land and then never painting them, I am happy to announce that today at Partisan, I finally managed to sell the remaining items. Two of them went to a member of the Ultramodern Discord (probably as a contrast from his Favela bundle) while the big box of modular compound pieces has found a home with Peterborough Wargames Club. I hope they have a great time with a wonderfully designed set (and am also glad I’m not going to be painting all of it).

As I’ve said before, my reason for getting rid of my MDF was not because it’s bad or anything wrong with it. It’s just I’ve reached the stage where I much prefer the detail and texture 3D printed buildings can provide, much more than trying to get the same thing with flat MDF. It served its time, and now I shall refill those boxes with Urban Scatter’s MENA collection – I might even have space for some of the larger pieces.

I have kept one of my MDF houses though – you may have spotted it on my desk during my PAINT-REPs. This single-room house from Sarissa’s colonial range is the one MDF building I finished, spending all the time to get it textured and painted up. It has a place in my sentimental heart and so it will be the lone survivor, forever living on as a handy backdrop to what I’ve been painting.

As for the show itself, I did a terrible job of covering it; I arrived late, spent most of my time talking to people or selling MDF and then headed off at the end having not taken a single picture. Luckily, WSS and co were in full effect if you want to see what’s going on, and it is well worth taking a look – even as someone with a rather focused interest in wargaming, there were still some very impressive gaming tables around. In fact, the Dastardly Regular Opponent himself ended up playing two games (assisted by his sprog) and had a thoroughly good day.

I on the other hand, did manage to chat to a selection of people at the show. This included Westbury Wargamers, Spectre (although he was there on his day off rolling dice), Flank March, Empress and Under Fire. I also managed a quick chat to the Lardmeister himself as I picked up my Chain of Command v2 order including a little chat about Chain of Command for Ultramodern – it seems like this is very much not a thing they are interested in persuing at this time and was more than happy to see what those enthusiastic about the period would do with it.

As for my overall thoughts, I feel that Partisan continues to be the best and biggest Historical wargaming show in the UK (especially if you combine it with Other Partisan later in the year). Its rather central location means that you get to see groups from the vast majority of the country coming together, including traders that you might not see in person at other shows on the circuit. This also feels much more like an old-school wargames show, with the mix of display and participation tables on the floor and the traders who were there. In fact, one positive of Partisan for me is that it’s quiet enough to actually chat to people, while Salute can end up being a rush to get around everything. It’s also a pretty good layout – although missing the outer circuit so beloved by speed walkers such as myself, the split between trader and game locations is well done to allow plenty of room for browsing. There was also a set of food trucks outside, meaning you could enjoy the Newark sunshine in between picking up the latest stuff

My only negative comment was the distinct lack of Ultramodern games there. Perhaps this is something to fix in the next year or so? After all, I have gained plenty of space for terrain…

I’m a big fan of playing games where the OPFOR has a bit more gear than just a gun and a t-shirt, the type of opponent that causes a genuine threat through more than just force of numbers. That said, there are plenty of occasions where, sometimes, you just need a big block of militiamen to slap on the board and use the risk of being completely outnumbered rather than merely outgunned. The question is where to get the figures, especial when one day you suddenly decide to raise up the whole town against your force.

The good news is that last year, Combat Octopus ran a campaign based on Operation Gothic Serpent, focusing specifically on the Battle of Mogadishu. It didn’t go as well as many would have hoped (we only got the initial sets and a Christmas gift of some RPG gunners), but it did give us eight Somali militiamen among the starter set. The ideal figures for some civilian gunmen. However, as someone whose wargaming interests are (for the moment) more focused on the MENA theatre rather than Central or East Africa, I decided to swap the heads out for the MENA civilian heads we got all the way back in the first few Combat Octopus releases.

Each of the 8 poses can be used in several ways. If you want to get them on the printer, you can use the non-modular version, giving you a fully assembled figure that just needs a head attaching. However, if you’d like to expand your options, each body comes with 3 weapons (two variants of Chinese AK and a G3) and a complete body. But that’s not all – with something like Blender, you can use the digital kitbash pieces (separate torsos and legs) and merge them (thanks to digital models carrying little about pieces colliding through each other). For my first test, I simply went with the fully assembled figures – slap the pre-supported file on the build plate, add one of the MENA heads (and then set its scale to 110% due to it being an older release), tweak final scaling for my collection and we are off to the races.

And then some idiot left them undercoated and sprayed white for a couple of months. As he often does

However, having reached the end of March and seeing them hanging around on my desk, I decided to finally get them painted. And so, attempting to get them painted quickly, I decided to use some of Games Workshop’s Contrast paint. Despite the evangelism of my Regular Opponents (both of whom, coincidentally, also have a much greater painted figure output than I do), I’ve never really bought in on Contrast. It may be in part due to the fact I traditionally prefer to work from a black undercoat (like the old ways) as it means that when you miss something, it looks like it’s been shadowed. However, in more recent times, I’ve started adjusting my undercoat, first drybrushing on white and then spraying white. This has, of course, meant I’ve been able to try playing around with the few contrast paints I have and see how well they work.

To answer – boy, they were quick. It took me a couple of sessions to paint all 8 to completion (where in the past it would take me two sessions to get most of the way through half that much). Most of the figures are done in Contrast, except for the flesh (as I’m yet to find a flesh contrast that I prefer to Cadian Fleshtone + a wash). I did add a wash over the top at the end just to tweak the final look and bring them a little closer to the rest of my collection. The Contrast over a black/grey/white shaded comes out looking close to a base/shade/hightlight although it does look like absolute ass until it dries. It also felt like I had much less control when using it. I do feel that for the masses, where the details don’t have to be perfect, I can see myself using them, but for smaller groups, I’ll stick with my acrylics.

Overall, I really like these guys. I can already see myself preparing another plate for all the variants and seeing as later this year Combat Octopus is releasing some more MENA figures (with the upcoming Freedom Fighters), then I’ll have even more additional heads to vary up the look further. With a few additional tweaks, I could also see some more parts being mixed in to add more weapon systems, such as PKMs or RPKs. For now though, it’s time to get that next plate going so I can fill the streets with OPFOR.

These two have been on my painting desk for a while, but I thought it was time to get them finished off and talk about them. For those unaware, Breacher is a game from Black Site Studios which pits one player as a small team or single operative (unsurprisingly known as Breachers) against a horde of bad guys controlled either by another player or the AI included in the book. You build your breachers from scratch, picking equipment and bonuses from a big pile of customisation, thus letting you build the operator you want before the mission. There are a few example groups to help theme them and get their inspiration flowing, as well as providing some special abilities unique to the groups. As part of the initial release, each of these groups had a selection of figures available for them, including the pair I have painted up – Sarie and Wolf Pack.

Those of you with a careful eye might think that these guys look a little familiar, and yep – Stephen May sculpted the Breachers for the initial launch, giving us some Spectre-adjacent figures in both styles and gear. There are a few changes I’m less keen on – these guys are missing the small puddle bases that more modern Spectre figures have, leading to a few of them having some questionable ability to stand up straight without some additional support, thanks to the smallest contact points known to man. However, these two are more traditionally posed and were great fun to paint.

The Sarie organisation is based mostly within the MENA region and are pitched as one of the more careful of the Breacher groups, caring more about maintaining local infrastructure than smashing everything up. The operator comes in a mix of civilian clothes with low-profile tactical gear, not much more than a belt and chest rig combo under the jacket. She’s also carrying a M110 variant rifle (actually in the same setup as the Spectre Insurgent PMC Marksman) and sidearm. I think this is an excellent model for a SOF specialist assisting local forces, looking like one of them but with unique details or specialised equipment. Painting helped with this, the red of the head scarf providing a touch of colour to the model. I did apply some shading to the rifle for visual effect, making it look like it’s a prepared piece of kit rather than fresh from the box.

Wolf Pack are described in a way that makes them sound more like classic Western Operators – beards, operating in pairs, non-uniform but well-maintained equipment and being more than happy to smash anything needed. The figure shows that off, with a version of the SIG MCX SPEAR configured for a close quarters role (including an EoTech), combined with a plate carrier and belt combination packed full of magazines, grenades and more. The hair and beard are a nice piece of character for him, and help to make him stand out on the field. With the final paint job, next time I’d probably do more with the rifle to make the mag/rifle/vest stand out from each other, something I might go back and do later. For now, I’m happy to put him on the table.

Overall, these figures were great fun to paint up and didn’t take a huge amount of time. Painting solo figures (rather than batch painting) can be a nice change, especially when you’re painting camo elsewhere. I’d actually love to see more figures like these two, either from Black Site or the market in general – these figures are ideal for lots of different styles of games, from modern military to spy action to fighting zombies or the slow collapse style of post-apocalyptic. They will probably see plenty of action alongside the Spectre Agents range (as you can see above) or in small numbers to appear as advisors to irregular forces.

I’ll probably paint some more of the Breacher figures as well. I have a partially completed CORE figure (because legally I can’t NOT paint heavily armoured figures). The others I have printed, but I’ll be going back to try and add some wider connection points around the feet, just make sure they stick down properly. I guess time to load up Blender and add some shapes.

It has been far too long since the last time I put fantasy figures on the board with the correct-sized base and in more reasonable numbers. As fun as the rank and flank of the Old World has been, my heart is much more skirmish-focused. Having received my copy of Famous By Our Swords at Salute (directly from the author himself), I suddenly realised I was eager to get back into the swing of things. More importantly, I was excited to get my Sister and the Regular opponents into the latest version – we enjoyed the last time we played and with a few tweaks (and the whole new monster generator section) it’s time for us to buy far too many random figures and get them on the table.

The First Regular opponent to hit the table was the Creative one. Driving down from the Frozen North, it turned out that he had been assembling a set of figures from Victirx and Wargames Atlantic for some Medieval fellows and (as is the habit with his army collecting) had built enough fellows for a full-size company. For our intro games, we decided to minimise the group to only five figures, a mixture of heavily armoured nobles, spearmen and a crossbowman.

On my side, I had originally planned for the party to go up against a trio of Last Sword’s Werewolves but alas, my painting was not done (I will blame Tarkov and a morning working in the garden). Instead, I delved into my pile of minis and prepared several scenarios.

For game 1, we played a familiar mission – the party out in the wilderness finds itself set upon by the undead, the taint of necromancy guiding their unholy movement. To compound the issue, the Necromancer is protected by a Hedge Knight, stomping across the field to be a real threat to our heroes.

As the horde descended, the fighters formed up. Taking point were the two heroes in the group, sword and board and with heavy armour. On the flanks, the two spearmen would provide some standoff (spears form a bubble 1″ around the wielder, which requires a test to pass) while the crossbowman would be able to ping things at range. Attempts to get the charge on the enemy were thwarted by the second hero being unable to pass the resolve test needed to charge something terrifying.

Soon, battle would be joined as the zombies made contact and the hedge knight waded in. The zombies have a nasty habit of only dying after the necromancer is killed, so there is very definitely a bit of spinning plates to keep them down so you can concentrate on the rest. On the other hand, the Hedge Knight was a very real threat (with a similar statline to the main characters) and able to wade in. There were a few close calls, but a one-two punch from the spearman and then the hero managed to wipe him out before he could do much damage.

With the bulk of the group keeping the zombies at bay, the second in command managed to push through the line of the undead and sprinted towards the necromancer. You may have expected the necromancer to go down immediately, but he did manage to hold off a few combat rounds before getting his head stomped in by a knight. Once the necromancer was down, the rest of the zombies got cut to pieces, letting the heroes manage to lead away.

After having reached the rest of the company, the Knights received a new contract from the local Baron. A visiting noble needs an escort to the next town. Fortunately, our Knights are available with a small group taking him across country while the main group took the longer roads. However, while trekking through farmlands, the group suddenly hear the sound of a clanking automaton before a Golem leapt out of the crops and into an ambush.

Yep, the poor poor Siccarian Ambassador is back – and potentially about to be in serious trouble.

This was a relatively simple game – the Golem started with three activations and gained more as he took wounds. He was also using the Cave Troll statline, meaning he could send opposing characters to the ground, ignore armour, and completely ignore any attempts to parry or block due to the fact that he was hench. There was plenty of back and forth in the fight, the Knights able to swarm the Golem, while my awful dice rolling meant the Golem was much less effective than he could have been. Next time I’d be tempted to give him an attack that would let him attack multiple enemies in a single attack, to represent a big swing.

However, as the battle continued, the wounds started rolling in. The Knights saw two people go out of action (one of the spearmen and the Necromancer slaying hero), but the Golem’s programming meant he was quickly forced to make a run for it. However, while making a break for the board edge, one of the crossbow bolts ripped through the monster’s head, breaking it into pieces as it removed the final wound.

Having finished the pair of games, it’s safe to say that the Creative Regular Opponent is very happy to play some more FBOS. The rest of the company will soon be gaining names and statlines and then from there we may launch into a campaign. We also got to talking about how the fun the possibilities are with FBOS for just getting together all the figures you might want to use, while the ruleset allows for some fun tactical plays thanks to its activation system and flow of combat. It’s also a great starting point for setting up your own little rules, in a similar way to many RPG systems, with plenty of options and entry points for minor rules tweaks – we already start looking at how you might add the rules for weapons or abilities using the built in keywords and adjusting them; maybe aswordmaster or two who can switch between Riposte and At Bay special rules on a turn by turn basis for just a starting point.

The next step for me is to finish off painting a few things. But I am a terrible person for all things new, and small-scale fights are just asking for the arrival of some sneaky fellows. The latest month of the Last Sword’s wargamers tier adds to their Dark Elf range and brings with it my favourite Dark Elf unit, the Shades. Once I get these cleaned off and assembled, I’ll have a little warband of murder elves all ready to go up against the Regular Opponents.

If you want to give Famous By Our Swords a go for yourself, you can find it over on Ko-Fi in paperback (with a PDF version hopefully returning soon). Eoin’s store also has their fantastic range of hero figures (one of which I still have to assemble) as well as Clash of Banners, the slightly larger scale game that everyone with an Old World force is eyeing as a possible add-on. If you’re wanting a fantasy RPG-lite skirmish game and want to support a small creator, definitely take a look!

For now, I return to plotting how I shall deal with someone’s Dwarves…

Phew, okay—I’ve mostly recovered from Salute. This year was definitely one of the more exciting ones, and I actually was there for the vast majority of the show, which is unusual for me. Again, I want to thank Brad Sanders for inviting me down, introducing me to folks as an expert hype man, and giving me a chance to chat about all things Ultramodern. I also managed to chat to a good few people, which is always a plus as someone who has struggled to make time for the weekly club – sometimes wargamers just need a good natter.

Like every show, I get a good hobby motivation hit once I return to The North. I’ve already pulled a few figures off the “to-be-painted” pile and got them on the desk, as well as getting the filament printer refilled with material and back to work printing out a MENA battlespace courtesy of Urban Scatter Gaming.

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However, this year’s trip (and the two separate car journeys enjoying the delights of the A1) also had me thinking a lot about ChargeBlog. The blog has now been running for 10+ years, and like anything that’s lasted that long, it’s survived by changing and adapting as the years go on. From the Ultramodern Comparison Guide that is probably why most of the readers are here, to multiple posts a week back in the day (God’s I was strong), to Wargaming Weekly to the quiet times of 2020/2021 and then the return with The News Stand, the site has kept going by shifting to what is the best way to show my interests.

With us now having lasted over 10 years, it’s time to think about what it is I really enjoy in the hobby. From some introspection, I’ve worked out the three pillars of ChargeBlog, the three elements that make up what this blog provides:

Personal Hobby

The reason the blog has lasted so long is that it changes based on what I’m interested in. Projects like The Old World or BattleTech or Fantasy Skirmish are the sort of stuff I do because it’s what is currently interesting me, or because it’s what myself and the Regular Opponents are currently getting up to. This is (and should be) the most common category of post on the blog, forming the bulk of my writing – ChargeBlog’s tagline is literally “My Adventures in Wargaming” after all.

This concept isn’t going to change – forcing myself to just do stuff that I think will be popular but I don’t want to do is the fastest way to find myself wishing for death and the blog coming to an end. What is going to change is how much I manage to do – the aim is to push for more hobby time each week to keep a steady drip of SITREP and PAINT-REP posts.

Development Projects

This is a bit of a catch-all for anything longer-term, be that lore writing for ChargeReal, development of my own game Project Elements, or my attempts to learn 3D sculpting to bring the figures I’ve been scribbling about from idea documents to printable objects. Development projects are the long-term goals of the blog, letting me flex my creative muscles and open up potential new avenues for myself.

The problem with this is that every one of them takes a chunk of time. Even writing, something I’m reasonably skilled at, takes time to make it right, with each piece requiring iteration after iteration. The other side is that there is a lot of skill growth in this section – it’s taking time to learn graphics design for the writing, games need hours of testing, and it takes even more time for sculpting. I can’t promise that Development Projects are an ever-giving font of content – some weeks I can dedicate multiple evenings to it, sometimes I’ll be lucky if I get more than a couple of hours. Stuff moves slowly, especially as I’m working across several projects at once.

Ultramodern News and Thoughts

At the moment, “The News Stand” is a unique piece on the blog. It doesn’t fit into either of the other pillars I’ve mentioned previously – it’s neither my own personal hobby nor is it me building something for myself. And yet, it is the most successful post series on the blog, both in terms of views and comments I’ve had in person and when talking to people at events like Salute. It is also something I very much enjoy doing, capturing the state of the current industry as it grows and changes, as we see new tech and concepts enter this niche of a niche.

As well as continuing the News Stand (we’re at issue 81, that series is AT LEAST getting to 150 before I reconsider its existence), my other plan is to expand posts that take a deeper look. I’m probably not going back to doing tons of reviews (my days of aiming to buy everything coming out don’t quite make sense as someone trying to slim down how much stuff I have lying around) but there is definitely a space to look at what’s coming out with a more critical but constructive eye. If you can capture what something does well, then you can illustrate the useful elements within it to someone, while being productive around what it does poorly or could be improved.

In my drafts, I’ve got the start of several series that will cover some topics around figures, range constructions and ruleset requirements. This is, much like the article from earlier this year about hobby time, capturing the thoughts that bounce around my head regarding the stuff I’ve been keeping an eye on. These articles are usually just an excuse to get people thinking about what they actually want from their hobby as well as providing tools to better articulate those wants when discussing. It would be better if we could, as a hobby, be better at how we discuss rulesets and figures, mostly to try and avoid suggesting stuff to newcomers that doesn’t match to what they have requested. If this sounds familiar, then yes, I’d like to fill the gap that The Great Big Modern Wargaming Rules Comparison once filled but on a larger scale and across multiple elements of the hobby.

I’d also like to offer the knowledge I’ve gained from staring at these tiny men and rules for over 10 years out to other people. I don’t want to start trying to wear the analyst hat but having spent a chunk of time on this niche of a niche, you start to see what works, what doesn’t and what can be done to improve. I’m not going to hunt down people and randomly offer them my opinions (there is too much I haven’t had experience of to be kicking in the doors and shouting at people) but if people want to chat about the Ultramodern market, it’s something I love to do. You can either message me on Facebook or drop me an email via the link in the top bar.

Something else that needs to be mentioned is the Patreon. It’s going reasonably well! At the moment, I’m happy to say that it covers my monthly website hosting costs and my more regular Patreon outgoings. It would be great to get a little growth (and add a bit more to the hobby funds) and so for that reason, I need to work out better perks for the patrons at various levels, to make it a more attractive proposition. I’d love to get over 50 patrons and get the cash incoming to a stage where it’s slowly building up rather than disappearing off to keep Combat Octopus’s files appearing on my hard drive ready for projects. I think many of my analysis posts will start off available only to the higher-tier patrons, before unlocking a little bit later. My eternal problem is wanting to make sure people actually read my writing versus the need to charge an amount for it.

With all this in mind, here is what’s going on in the near terms:

1. Rebranding – the blog is looking old and creaky, with a theme that looks aggressively “okay” on mobile – luckily I’ve already got a theme planned out, I just need to assemble the pages using the WordPress Block Editor. The same goes for the various header images for the blog, patreon and socials – they need an update overall
2. Back-end fixes: there are a few bits of optimisations to the blog I need to do on the tech side. Some of you may have seen issues with the featured image in the last few posts, and I think this is due to the type of database guff that builds up when you run them for 10 years. There will be some more tweaks, all with the aim of keeping the site up to date.
3. Clear up my desk: I have several sets of figures on my desk that are either painted and waiting for a PAINT-REP or are a few coats away from being done

However, from now on, you’re going to be seeing more posts. I picked up several rulesets at Salute, as well as several pieces that have been lying around. I’ve got a pile of stuff in progress and quite frankly, I need to get back to playing games and writing up those battle reports. My intention is that by the time we get to Salute next year, I’ll be able to write up another planning post for the next year and talk about what actually went well. But for now, I’m looking forward to what I do with ChargeBlog next.

The weekend saw Europe’s biggest wargaming event, Salute. Run by the South London Warlords, this was the 52nd show (and yes, it runs as well as you’d expect for something that has been going on for over half a century at this point), this show is THE event of the wargaming calendar, a wargames show unlike literally anything else in the UK. The size and location means you get things you wouldn’t see anywhere else – wargamers flood in from all over the world to partake in giant participation games, see some of the finest custom built games, play the first previews of a whole host of rules and get to see a whole load of traders happy to give you a new piece for your collection in exchange for the contents of your wallet.

And this time I was there! After last year off (and a punishing single day visit the year before), I returned to London for roughly 24 hours. Driving down from Leeds and staying at the finest accommodation London can provide (the Travelodge at London City Airport), I got to meet up with a whole collection of designers, writers and Warlord club members for some social drinks at the Fox close to the Excel centre. I had A lot of fun and finished the evening with a pizza in my hotel room (a plan which, based on the number of drivers coming to the hotel, I shared with the pile of people there for an international event for the TCG Flesh and Blood). Said pizza would also be the fuel for the following day, meaning I got to happily munch a slice while walking across to the convention centre.

This year, I was lucky enough to be invited down by Brad Sanders of BobMack3d and Battleground HD. A keen fan of the blog since the early days. Brad reached out earlier this year, and I took up his offer. The bonus of this was that I got a fancy red visitor band, letting me get into the show early before the usual kick-off time. It was great to run around before the show filled up with wargamers, letting me chat to some of the usual suspects before the show kicked off and all their time was taken doing glorious trade.

Speaking of BobMack3d, let’s kick off with a tour of the Cold War Corner. With Battleground HD, BobMack3d, Flank March Miniatures and Full Metal Miniatures all working together, there was an impressive display of Cold War wargaming, with figures, vehicles and a wonderful-looking Berlin Wall board, complete with apartment block, period cars, a chunk of the wall and even an exclusive figure. One thing I really like about going to wargaming shows is being able to see figures in the flesh – in this case, it was getting a chance to see the Flank March sculpts in non-render form and the metal/resin hybrid figures released by Full Metal Miniatures. Now, when I first saw the renders, I will admit the proportions looked a little dumpy and round. However, having seen them in person, that effect massively diminishes when at figure size – they may not quite have the same style as companies such as Spectre, but I think the chunkier look means that in person, you really see the exciting details.

Across the aisle, there was an area dedicated to Battleground HD, with another Player vs Player BAOR game nestled next to a step in the light green. I was lucky enough to, right at the end of the day, get to have a game of Hunters on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a PvE module for the game that pits players as MACV SOG against an AI-controlled set of NVA. The PvE system was exciting (including a clever use of a QR code to throw a wrench in your plans) but I’m even more excited to talk about Battleground HD in the next few weeks – it’s one of those systems that at first glance is a little overwhelming but as you play it, you start to see just how well it models certain elements of modern wargaming. I’m also interested in seeing how it scales up – the demo game I played was only two small teams, but it can potentially go up to platoon level, complete with vehicle support. More details coming soon – I think B is a good place to start some kind of comparison series.

Famous By Our Swords is one of my personal favourite small-scale skirmish games, and after their successful Kickstarter, I was super excited to see them at Salute. Of course, it helps that I was also picking up my printed copy of both Famous By Our Swords and the larger regimental game Clash of Banners and so hunted them down pretty quickly! They had a good pairing of a table featuring both games and the retail table showing off books, the range of hero figures for the setting.

A return I was glad to see was Spectre Miniatures! Fresh off their successes over in the States, they had a pile of new items and an exclusive figure available, while across the aisle from them, they had a demo game that was run during the day. Of course, being a filthy STL user, I’m going to have to wait for them to appear on the website before I can get my hands on the new goodies. However, one thing I was very glad to see was just how busy they were all day – a healthy Spectre is a positive thing for this little niche of ours that is Ultramodern Wargaming.

Now, COMPLETELY out of left field was 1918 – A First World War Wargame. Remember those Friday night drinks I mentioned? I ended up chatting to one of the guys behind WarFulcrum Games, a team running a patreon and making a historical wargame around the final stages of World War 1, where the static trench warfare changed into the first version of modern combined arms combat. Well, we got to talking and it turned out the mad lads were launching a Kickstarter the following morning at the show, aiming to bring a hardback rulebook and a collection of STLs to life.

The following day I turned up to find this rather impressive table showing Villers-Bretonneux, the clash of a German offensive into British-held territory. This is also the first tank on tank engagement, with both A7Vs and MK IVs hitting the table. It’s a great-looking game and I’m excited to see more once the book releases. It’s already passed its funding goal, but if you’re also interested in wargaming World War 1, you can find the project over on Kickstarter.

Also from the Friday drinks, I managed to chat to the guys at 3D Junkie. Well, more accurately, we said the magic words “3D printing” and one of the guys immediately appeared. These guys sell everything to do with 3D printing, be it machines, filaments and resin or more and were fantastic to chat to even as someone who is very much a hobbyist. I’m genuinely thinking that, when it comes to my next upgrade, I’ll be going straight to these guys.

The more dangerous thing for me was the fact that they had one of the new Elegoo Centauri printers there and some example prints. As someone who has literally moved all his terrain acquisition over to filament, this is very interesting as a possibility for getting even more detail into my terrain. And now I need to go and hide my wallet.

Something I am very excited about for this year is Chain of Command V2, the updated version of probably the Regular Opponent’s favourite WW2 game. To help demo the game, the Lardies brought with them this rather wonderful Oesterbeek game. It’s a lovely scene from the Netherlands, complete with some awesome details (from Sabotage3d). It also features a super impressive feat in tabletop wargaming – the gently sloping railway embankment.

I also missed the demonstrations of the new ruleset, but seeing the reference cards listing off new abilities using the CoC Points and chatting to Mr Skinner has got me very excited. They are aiming for a May release date, and I will 100% be getting my pre-order together when they go up.

There were also a few other super impressive games that caught my eye as I wandered through the show. Joe Bilton‘s What a Tanker game has filled my BlueSky feed with perfect shots of the ruins of Caen but it is fucking incredible seeing it in person. I managed to chat to Joe and, as well as being incredibly pleasant to chat to, he managed to talk about the process of making the board and how important a little touch such as “using the same polyfilla mix on the buildings” to make sure everything fits together. I look forward to seeing what he gets up to next!

Speaking of large WW2 games, the 15mm version of the Battle for Berlin (complete with Reichstag, flak tower and more) was awesome to see walking past. Chatting to the guys, it turns out this wasn’t even the full size that they were aiming for which is quite frankly bonkers.

Finishing the trifecta of WW2 games is this Warsaw Uprising game. I literally had a double take when I walked past it, the different levels of detail from the railway tracks up to the rooftops. The layout literally looked like a museum piece, and yet as I walked around during the day it was very clear that this was an active game. Seeing as it also won game of the show, I wasn’t the only person to be blown away by it.

I’m not getting into Battletech with terrain, you can’t make me. Even if this Alpha Strike board looked like something out of the mental image of Mechwarrior 3 that lives in my brain.

Another game that caused me to pause was Zeppelin. Ironically, the balloon was the least interesting bit for me, as the sheer level of detail on the Scottish castle and island pulled me in and made me take notice of what was going on, as it perfectly captures the feel of the remote Scottish castle. There was a wonderful level of detail to the board, and a fun backstory relating to a 1971 film. Brought a smile to my face!

Butcher and Bolt appeared on my Facebook feed the weekend before Salute (so I’m glad that Facebook’s ads actually work for some people) and it was actually cool to see the board the guys had set up to show it off. With both an industrial yard and then the UBoat pens, this was definitely a cool setup. Chatting to the guys at the stand, it sounds like the rules are well on their way to being ready (aiming for later this year) and if the crowd around the table were a guide, I think this could be one to keep an eye on.

Last but certainly not least – truly the largest game of Floorhammer I have ever seen. It’s actually pretty cool seeing this many titans, especially on a board that is a sensible size for the god machines to fight.

I was so enraptured in my game of Battleground HD that I suddenly checked my watch and realised I had to run back to my car before I ended up with a fine. However, as I walked back and then jumped in the car to head back north, I realised just how much I enjoyed the day. In previous years, I’d been done with the show in two hours flat, leading me to disappear off into London or head home. This year though I stuck around and had a wonderful time. During my time at the show, I managed to dig through the show. I also managed to say hello to a pile of people both friends (such as fellow writer Bill and the lads from Dougie’s Wargaming Blog) and people I’m a fan of (such as Arbitor Ian, Dave from EXP and most surprisingly, climate YouTuber Simon Clark), something that just wouldn’t happen at most shows. It’s a truly titanic experience and I 100% recommend anyone who is able to come to give it a go. It was also nice to see how varied the crowd was at Salute – everyone from the traditional wargamer inspecting the latest Napoleonics to cosplayers, families and more experiencing everything the hobby has to offer.

My haul from the show actually wasn’t too bad. I picked up the Bello Lundi Kalashnikov rules (another success of Friday night’s chat with Peter and Jurgen) and some items from Deep Cut Studios (some road pieces and off-cut mat pieces for forest areas). The Famous By Our Swords books are my Kickstarter rewards delivered in person (truly impeccable service), while as I left, I was handed a full-on Press Pack for Battleground HD despite halfway through my demo game saying I’d be handing some cash over. So overall, I’d say a very successful set of additions to the collection!

However, the biggest thing I took away from Salute was a return of energy for the hobby, both wargaming in general and ChargeBlog as a whole. There were plenty of nice comments about the site and getting to sit down and chat with my fellow wargamers has definitely focused the mind on the types of things I want to get around to doing. We’ll see how the inspiration goes when I return to Salute next year!

So I was supposed to be writing about a province in the ChargeReal that’s about to see a whole lot of warfare, and finishing off a few Militia fighters from Combat Octopus. Instead, I get to step back from the creative side to talk about the current hot thing – Generative AI.

In the last few days, I’ve received emails from four separate people asking me to take a look at a reasonably popular system listed as a Modern Warfare Skirmish game. You may have seen it, the guys behind it have hammered out a pile of content for it, and lots of people seem very keen to recommend it. Putting aside my own issues with the core rules and their attempt to model modern combat (aka, it doesn’t), the bigger problem is that it is dripping with generative AI art, used throughout the books. A lot of it is very obvious, especially to someone with an interest in the specific details of Ultramodern and whose Spidey sense gets kicked off. Its use is also not disclosed, despite it being very obvious to even the untrained AI.

However, it’s not the only ruleset I’ve looked at that has the same issue. I’m in a strange position where, for some reason, people like to send me stuff to look at, either to give feedback on or as a request to feature on the blog. Up until now, every time one of these has arrived with obvious generative AI inclusions, I’ve quietly said that it’s policy not to cover it and left it at that. You may notice I didn’t cover a certain project from an STL producer last year and it was due to its use of AI-generated assets in its marketing – instead, I delayed and covered the items after they were released to their store. The unsaid policy worked.

However, with the sheer amount I’m receiving, I think it’s time to make it clear my position. If you include assets created using Generative AI in your Wargaming Product, ChargeBlog will not talk about it, be that in The News Stand or in specific features. If it is later discovered that something that WAS covered was using AI, coverage will cease and potentially have the existing article removed.

There are plenty of people who have written in great detail online about the ethics, moral, legal and environmental issues around AI (this post about the sustainability of LLMs was particularly concerning) but from perspective as a wargaming consumer, let me explain to you why I personally don’t like products that utilise Generated AI.

And no, I’m not going to use AI Artwork for this. Instead, have a few good examples of non-AI work to fill in the gaps.

From the first point, it looks bad. Distractingly bad. I know some people turn their nose up at stock photography for their inconsistencies and inaccuracy, but at least they are using actual real-world items and so are, for the most part, recognisable as a real item. No matter how hard you try, generated art hasn’t yet managed to understand relatively static items such as common gun designs, continually mixing and merging elements from every assault rifle it’s seen into something that makes South Park’s guns look incredibly accurate recreations. When you roll this out to the people, you see it across everything from poses and equipment down to such minor things as consistent hair. The visuals with a ruleset are meant to inspire you, meant to get you in the mood to play and put you in place, not present you with a generic mess that pulls your eyes from the rules to the artwork designed to accompany it. In addition, most AI-generated art is of massively varied art style, meaning each page clashes with the next rather than providing a consistent visual brand or sensation to perform its role. More importantly, most of these rule sets that go heavy on AI lack the most important part of a rulebook – useful diagrams to help identify and illustrate key rules concepts – when you play Skirmish Sangin, multiple pages are dedicated to showing you how things such as line of sight work. Merely showing two poorly detailed characters with lines next to each other is not a suitable replacement.

Building a well-made rulebook is a skill and an effort. It takes time to make all the pieces fit together, combining the written word with everything needed to both illustrate how the game works and prepare the player for the experience. When you read something like BPRE28’s rulebook and expansions, every page is laser-focused, crafted together, merging art, diagrams and words to prepare you for the game you are about to play. And it’s not just about being pretty – every hour of work you do when writing the book to help the player will save tens of hours down the line. It is a vital piece of effort that you, as a wargames creator, need to do.

The second point is more of an implication – if someone has chosen to generate their art using AI, to attempt to save time and money through giving up control to the machine, what else have they potentially also passed off to the box in the cloud? What other corners have been cut to get something that (on the surface) looks fine but on the inside might be rotten to the core? How much of the prose that is written to illustrate the game was written and checked over by a human to make sure it was both accurate and makes sense? We’ve seen plenty of rulesets made by human hand released that need a second or third iteration to make into something that stands the test of time, and that is after it’s gone through plenty of eyes to check. While you can prepare a ruleset in a very small time, it takes much, much longer to go through it all, to rip it apart, find the exploits and hacks players will find to break what, on a basic run through, seems to make sense. This all requires work and time and is unfortunately one of the first things to be dropped by the wayside when you push to get something out. Putting aside all of the mechanical issues with not checking and double-checking your system, there is a moral issue – publishing a ruleset that is untested and charging money for it is incredibly disrespectful to your customer base. It also poisons the well, as wargamers are vastly more likely to complain about a ruleset that has wasted their time and it’s hard to claw back your goodwill from such events.

So what should you, a wargames writer whose hand is hovering over the ChatGPT link, do instead? I’m going to be the first to admit, creation is hard work – it’s blood, sweat and tears, spent now so your players have a glorious time later. But there are plenty of options to help with it – for one, collaboration. Find other writers and artists to fill the gap in your knowledge and help push forward – yes, this does require a little give and take (and fair compensation for their work) but you also gain the benefit of everything have gone through two sets of eyes, two different understandings that will help clear up and refine the vision. If you’re worried that someone else might be using your AI, asking for work in progress element should help deal with that.

For visuals, the most obvious way to gain more imagery is literally sitting in front of you – the figures you use to play the game. It doesn’t require a massive number of figures or terrain to provide a mass of variants to fill your book. If you have a collection of STL files, then combining them with Blender and using the lightning engine and simple textures will give you even more options. Combined with simple Photoshop elements, these provide the perfect setup for assembling easy-to-read gameplay diagrams. For realistic images, there is a collection of stock photography websites that can provide pictures for commercial use for a selection of prices (ranging from 3 to dangerously expensive). Especially for an ultramodern player, many photographs from the last 20 years have entered into stock photography archives, so it is very possible to find a suitable piece to match your ruleset.

If you feel like there is nothing wrong with Generate AI, despite all the news and details that the world is providing to you, and you want to continue using it in your products and life, then go for it – I can’t stop you, and even I can see it’s limited uses for crunching data. But please, please, Please, stop sending it to me to look at.