No gaming this week and no real hobby time. The only thing I’ve had chance to build has been some new desk top storage curtesy of Hobby Zone. I’ve already got a few drawers and a display / storage case so when I was having a bit of reshuffle and clearing out some old paints I decided to pick up a few more pieces. If anyone out there is looking for a modular storage solution I can highly recommend them as the ones I’ve had to date have served me well hence me going out to buy some more.
I’ll get a few pictures of them once there in place and loaded up with paints, projects, odds and sods so you can get a feel for how I use them. But I’ll have to clean up my desk first as got cluttered at the moment so I’ll need to make it look all clean and tidy.
Now than because I’ve not got any hobby in and I’m spending this week and next week in collection of different hotels with not a lot to do I thought I’d continue my musings over the new eighth edition of 40K. I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to pick up on with one being fluff based and the other about the game itself. Now this first one may divide opinions but here goes. I was watching the Beasts of War weekender last Saturday and they were talking about putting a new army together based on the idea of resurrecting a lost chapter. That way they whole chapter can come back into the 40K universe full of Primas marines. So this got me thinking about what chapter I might like to resurrect or could you even bring back one the original missing Legions. Then I had one of those eureka moments. What if you did a Dark Angel successor chapter but unlike the rest of the Dark Angels these guys are still and always have been loyal to the Emperor. Yes you heard that right. We all know that the Lion was hedging his bets during the heresy, waiting to see who would win before declaring his allegiance one way or the other. But those loyal marines left behind on Calabn weren’t for playing this game so he had them all killed and the chapter have spent the last ten thousand years trying to erase the evidence of their betrayal.
The idea I have to make a successor chapter that is made up entirely of Primas marines, just because they are really nice models. This give me a chance to use all of the really cool fluff from the Dark Angels background like the inner circle, the Death Wing and the Raven Wing. They would also be trying to track down the fallen, but not to interrogate them but to welcome back into the fold. That also means that Cypher could also make an appearance fighting alongside them. I even like the idea of the chapter having a position of Lord Cypher which plays a key part in some of the Horus Heresy books about the Dark Angels. You could even push this one to a real extreme and actually have the Cypher as the lord Cypher. Off on his own mission but returning to the chapter periodically to steer them in the right direction. A side benefit of this would be that Al can’t then call them traitors like he did with my original Dark Angels. Even though his Black Templers were technically founded with a heretic at their head. After all Sigismund couldn’t even follow the orders from his own Primarch. It also fits in well with the idea of a slow burn project as I’ve only seen the one squad of marines so far along with some images of new dreadnaught and the flying rhino. That means it shouldn’t be too over facing and I’d be able to get games of kill team in with only a few models painted so that could be a good way to get me back into playing. But I would have to take my Orky head off for a while and I don’t know if I can do that.
Or I could be branded a heretic and hunted to ends of the known universe by agents of the of the Inquisition. Which in fairness would simply add more options to expand the fluff of persecuted and misunderstood chapter.
The other 40K linked activity for this week has been whiling away a few hours avoiding the hotel bar by watching what other people think about the new eighth edition. Now I have to right up front that the haters make far and away the most entertaining videos, and I’ve spent some time tracking down some real corkers. The other thing I also want to say up front is that I want to like the new rules, I never had a hissy fit falling out with the older rules, I just sort of drifted away. Then things appeared to have changed so much I didn’t know where to start when I thought about getting back into it. So I just didn’t bother. Now after spending time listening to all these people who think the end of the world is upon us and they will never have anything to do with GW again I hadn’t heard them say anything that was putting me off.
So next up it was time to start listening to the more measured reviews where people are happy to talk about the bits that they don’t like, and give a nice reasoned explanation of why. These are the people who also balance one view out by explaining all the bits they like and why they like them. It’s been listening to these that has me now poised on the edge of picking up a copy of the rules. Which when you consider the last edition I actually purchased was fourth. I carried on playing for a couple more editions but mainly played doubles with Pets where my role was build whatever crazy ork idea Pete came up. And he looked after the rules. So it’s quite a big deal for me to be thinking about actually picking up a new GW rule book.
It seems to me that the overriding opinion seems to be that the change is certainly going in the right direction. You will never please all of the people all of the time but it does look like GW have spent time listening to what people actually want and then trying to deliver as much of that as they can. Whilst at the same remembering that they are a company who have shareholders to keep happy and at the moment it seems to me that they are managing the balance quite well so hat’s off to them for that.
Any way I’m going to call it day there, I hope you have good weekend and I’ll be back again next week, and because I know I won’t be able to get any hobby time in I’ve got a bit of an Orky retrospective in store for you all. But if you want to know more you’ll have to pop back next week.
