Conversion Corner: CSM Sorcerer on Bike - Construction Complete!!

Got a couple of hours to finish up construction of my Bike Sorcerer. I love how it came out, and am looking forward to painting it up for Kublacon! I started painting the sorcerer a week ago, and will be painting him alongside the Helbrutes, as they'll be the same scheme. Still on the to-do list for Kublacon are a Heldrake and Kazak the Befouled on Rot Beast, who will serve as my chaos lord on bike. On to the pictures!!!

More pictures after the jump.

Conversion Corner: CSM Sorcerer on Bike WIP #2

I got some work done on my corpse cart tonight, and it's coming along nicely!  I've assembled the main body of the cart completely stock as it comes from GW. I like the kit a lot, and it fits together pretty well!

Trying to fit the Forgeworld Nurgle Sorcerer where the corpse cart charioteer stands was impossible, as it was too small a space and obscured the sorcerer. Turns out the sorcerer fits well standing on top of the pile of corpses, which suits the feel of the model perfectly. I assembled the rider with a long stake carrying an impaled corpse, whose task it is to feed corpses to the engine of the cart.

Conversion Corner: CSM Sorcerer on Bike WIP

With the release of the Crimson slaughter codex, I've added a Chaos Space Marine sorcerer on a bike to my Kublacon list. Divination is the bee's knees. As my CSM army is Nurgle themed, I didn't want to just convert a Chaos Bike to have a sorcerer on it. That bring us to the Corpse Cart. Really cool model, obviously oozing Nurgle (quite literally), and perfect for a Sorcerer to ride into battle. Here's the problem though:

Workbench Wednesday - 3/26/14

It's been a pretty busy week! Built and magnetized 3 of the new Helbrute kits, and I have to say they were a pleasure to build! Looking forward to getting them painted and ready for Kublacon. On the workbench today are 40 cultists getting ready to be primed. I also have 6 spawn whose greenstuff is drying and who will be primed this week as well.

I've been toying with a few lists for Kublacon, and have narrowed it down to 3 possibles that will need some okay testing. Not knowing which I will bring does, unfortunately, necessitate me modeling and painting for all 3 possibilities. 

What Does the Pagecount Say?

When I'm thinking of buying an RPG, the first thing I do is look at the table of contents.  The table of contents tells you a lot about a game.  It tells you what the game is about:  A game with a magic system is about magic, a game without one, isn't.  A book where half the book is about game mechanics, with the other half sharing GMing tips, setting stuff, and character creation is going to give a very different feel than a game where one tenth of the book is about mechanics and character creation and the rest is an overview of the setting.

Look at the player's handbook for Dungeons and Dragons sometime:  There's less than twenty-pages of setting material, and extensive rules for spells, equipment, character creation, skills, feats, and combat.  From that I know what the game is really about:  It's about characters who use spells, equipment, skills, and feats to fight things.  Where they do it isn't that important.  On the other hand, Talislanta's five hundred page tome with all the rules crammed into fifty pages or so, is a game about a strange alien world where the differences between magic schools are shaped as much by social opinion as by what the magic does.

Workbench Wednesday 3/19

First things first. I know it's Tuesday, but I'm going to be taking a picture of my workbench each Wednesday to show current projects, plans for the next week, etc. I can assure you it will look exactly the same tomorrow!

With the release of the new Helbrute kits and the impending dataslate, as well as the new Crimson Slaughter codex, I unearthed my second Dark Vengeance set and am in the process of assembling them. On the right you can see three new helbrute kits (boss!), which I will be doing a review on and painting posts. The bits boxes on the top are full of empire Flagellants and state troop bodies, eagerly awaiting their transformation into cultists!  The pile of assembled minis in the top left are already converted Flagellants and Beastmen Gors which will also serve the Dark Gods as cultists. 

The Quandary of the Computer Hacker: What Modern RPG's Have to Learn from the Classics

The Role-Playing Game is a distinctly modern genre.  The roots of Role-Playing Games go back over a century.  The first miniatures wargame was published in the 1800's, but it took almost a century between that game and the revolution of small unit tactics games in the 60's, which would become Chainmail, which would become Dungeons and Dragons.

If you're a gamer of my generation, your first RPG was D&D.  It had its weaknesses:  There were really only a couple ways to interact with the world.  You could talk to things or attack them.  There were charts for both.  Certain classes had other ways to interact with things:  Elves could spot secret doors; Dwarves could understand architecture and tunnels; Spell-casters could do a lot of things; and Thieves (they wouldn't be renamed rogues until second edition) had a list of things they could do that were denied all other classes.  Some book added secondary-skills, giving each character a useful occupation such as "armorer" or "cooper" but there weren't systems for these skills.  The (wilderness and dungeoneers) Survival Guides added a system of non-weapon proficiencies which gave you some new ways of interacting, but, essentially, all characters had a set of buttons, one was fight, one was talk, and then there were a few more that varied by class.