Thursday, July 30, 2015

Oi! LOOK WOT DA BOYZ GOT!!!

Demz got da ORKY FORT!!!!



I got these beauties fully assembled, based, in pristine condition and at a bargain price from War Frog last night! Now we can get down to playin' GorkaMorka all good'n propa! That said, this week I'm playing Bolt Action vs. Bob, but I'll ask the rest of the gang if they want me to bring the fort for them to use (and I'm already assuming the answer will be 'yes') lol.

On a different note; Clayton, builder of the mighty battlewagon Cassandra from my last post just started a blog of his own called: Pug of WAAARGH!, and when I say 'just started' I mean, like...today (well, yesterday as this will post tomorrow), but uh...whatever, just go and check it out!!

Monday, July 27, 2015

Cassandra joins us for GorkaMorka Game 2.

o/

Okay, not to burst anyone's bubble here, but Cassandra isn't a female gamer. Yes I know that in the gaming world at large, gaming women are rare, but locally they're just part of the norm. That said, Cassandra (or is it: K'sandruh?) is named after a woman.

Ya see Clayton bought a $12 firetruck model at the FLGS, and over the course of the week converted it into an awesome battlewagon to use in GorkaMorka (yes there are roolz for those here). Why did he name it Cassnadra? Well (quote): 'Its named after my brother's girlfriend, because she's a big bitch!'

lol, wow, with an intro like that you deserve to see some photos to see 'her' for yourself:

You can still recognize the vague outline of a fire truck...
The funky turret still lacks a gun, but it was a rokkit launcha with a yoof gunner (because that was effective).
The cab's roof is removable so he'll be able to paint the driver and interior.
Plenty of room for Clayton's boyz!

Here are just a few random pics of game 2. Game 1 wasn't confusing enough with 3 players, so this time we had 4! This was another learning game, with no campaign rules or bottling out rolls, more a fight to the death or (as it turned out) till okay we're tired and most everything is dead/immobilized.

The following are a few random pics (possibly in the correct order), most were unfortunately blurry/bad and coherent picture of the game was lost with their deletion...


Two of my Trakks lining up to run down 2 grots that had disembarked from Cassandra.



The (typically) failed thrusterbuster move. I did run them down eventually, a few times actually. Oddly though, getting hit by a speeding vehicle is only a S:3 hit, and grots were more resilient in the olden days...
Scott's beautifully painted minis. He didn't paint them however, a detail he ought to have left out considering how impressed we all were with them.
The thrusterbuster chart strikes again! Meaning Cassandra was just short of pancaking my Nob on his bike!
Clayton's nob boards my trakk (and eventually cleared the vehicle of my crew!).
...by this point virtually all of the vehicles were immobilixed, and the enraged drivers were cleaning house in close combat!
Da boys: Clayton (front Left), Scott (back Left), Me (Front right) and Nick (back right)


Again much fun was had, and there are yet more people looking to join in for a campaign!

Thursday, July 23, 2015

My Grymn's Stug Walker is complete!

o/

My apologies in advance for the super short post this go round. I just finished mowing/brush hogging the yard and I'm wiped out. Thus, without further ado here it is:


This particular Stug has rousted up a feral Lesser Mawe from it's burrow. No doubt the little beastie is hoping the heavy foot falls of the approaching walker will scare up an easy meal...

Monday, July 20, 2015

1st game of GorkaMorka!

o/

Clayton and his buddy Andy were on hand Saturday to muddle thru our first game of GorkaMorka. We figured that being my first game of it in a decade or so, the their first game ever, why not make it easy and have 3 mobs running around, right? No scenario was used beyond to just kill each other, and we weren't bothering with the campaign stuff either. 100 Teef and Ork hilarity were all that we needed!

Okay, I'm going to be honest here, Cards Against Humanity aside, I haven't laughed this much in a game of anything in years (indeed, I had a bit of a sore throat by the game's end)! The game was a blast, and we can't wait to play it again!

Playing chicken, ramming, stealing bikes and trakks (one bike on the table was in possession of all 3 mobs at one point or another during the game...dunno if that's legal or not, but we thought it was fun!). The following is a photo dump of the insanity and hilarity, and fair warning, the captions may not present a coherent picture of what happened during the course of the game, but such is the nature of Orky gang warfare!

Turn 1, Orks speed off in every direction!
Turn 2, due to misreading the rules on playing chicken, the trukk swerves out of the path of a bike!
A thuster spin results in a ramming of a sorts, with the trukk immobilizing itself!
Piling out of the Trukk, Clayton's boyz charge Andy's wartrakk, and HTH begins (btw, the old HTH rules are really weird by today's standards!).
After my trukk pancaked Clayton's bike, da Boys piled out and gunfight erupted (with very little effect, and the HTH combat wasn't much better). Andy tried to join in, but was too busy crashing into his own wartrakk...
The passing trakk hits the 2 orks in HTH and they both rolled the SAME THING, DIRECTION AND ALL when getting knocked out of the trakk's way! lol, thus they continued to fight!
Andy's speeding bike knocks them apart though, still no wounds inflicted from either hit-and-run!
Diving off of the bike, his nob (represented by a spanner) charges my Nob! (and sexual knob jokes ensued...)
Clayton steals da bike!
With my nob out of action, Andy's Nob tries to steal back his bike! but fails the initiative roll to do so!
Meanwhile on the other side of the table, HTH is still raging, using that distration Clayton's trukk driver tries to steal Andy's wartrakk!
My slaver (with the torch) rolls a 1 to jump on the bike, and in doing so, knocks Clayton's rider off of it. DA BIKE IZ MINE!!! As an aside, the primed green ork basically spent the game crawling around on the ground in a facedown state. That's no way to get into the paint queue...
The wartrakk theft turns uglier...
My slaver rides off with his prize!
Having stolen the trakk, something goes wrong, there's a spin-turned-collision that results in an engine explosion and Orks are thrown everywhere!

lol, we ended after that an epic moment was (we felt) a good'n propa' end to da game! Aside from the brawl on the wartrakk, the preceding turns consisted mostly of driving around and not hitting anything. Unlike current 40k, where vehicles can all turn on the spot, in GorkaMorka vehicles turn in more realistic arcs, which makes running down even a face-down ork far more difficult than you would think it would be. 

Thursday, July 16, 2015

GORKAMORKA!!! GORKAMORKA!!! GORKAMORKA!!! GORKAMORKA!!! GORKAMORKA!!! GORKAMORKA!!!

All I had to do to finish my Grymn Stug was paint a single base, and I wouldn't have gotten away with that if it hadn't been for those meddling Orks...

Da' Trainin' Wheelz Mob (hopefully, they'll get a new name once a campaign starts...).

I'm thinking Mad Max, Fury Road had something to do with it honestly. As recently one of the guys in our FLGS' FB group asked 'who wants to play?' (along with spouting various quotes from the movie...), and...well, seems like a lot of us did!

Printed on both page sides, spiral bound and ready to go!

He posted links and I downloaded Da Roolz, Da uvver book and Digganob, got them spiral bound at Fedexkinkos, and this coming Saturday we'll try our hand at this game that none of us have played in...well, forever it seems! If all goes well, a campaign will ensue once we all have the rules down (again).

Skipping the stupid tiny bases leaves room for only 4 Boyz, though I do wonder if I can build a 'top deck' over the roll bars & tops of the boarding planks.

My Spanner & this paint-less grunt will represent the trukk's crew (with luck they'll not have to disembark during any battles).

I have no chance at finding a gubbinz turn template, but if you'll excuse me, I need to rummage around the game room to see if I can find some sustained fire dice...

Monday, July 13, 2015

Reviving my lost art of painting vehicles.

o/

I have no idea when I last painted a vehicle (no Battlemechs don't count). Not only that, I don't recall what it was, or if I even still have it anymore. So, when my new walker (fans of Rivet Wars will recognize it as a Blight Sturmpanzer) I bought for my Grymn arrived in the mail, I went about trying to remember how to do that.

I used to cover my tanks in mud, crud & grime. However my Grymn are painted in a red desert color scheme, so that wouldn't work. That and their red body armor is toned way down via washes, and I've always had issues in using those on my vehicles. However I tried my 'Grymn method' of painting where after the wash dries I go back and drybrush the original color over the wash, toning it down considerably.

Here is the result:


 I rather like it! Now I just need to do the base (which it just barely fits on). With the fixed forward gun and gray paint job, I've dubbed it the Stug and it will serve as an armored sentinel with a missile launcher.

The red leg armor breaks it up visually from a Grymn's eye view (though I wouldn't call it camouflage per se). The blue is to match the corresponding infantry squad as I want a 1:1 ratio of the two unit types (odds of that happening in the foreseeable future: lololololol!). That and I'm not sure what the unit marking decal translates to, best I can tell it says 'FuckifIknow'.

Piloted by a crew of two, the Stug has served as the Grymn's main battle tank for close to a century now. Its well armed with a general purpose cannon which can fire both anti-armor and anti-personnel rounds. Other armaments can be fitted, but are quite rare. It is also well armored (by Grymn standards), and its walker-type mode of locomotion serves it well in the rocky battlefields of the Gyrmn's homeworlds. Whilst it can't fight in close combat, when attacked by infantry wielding grenades, Stug crews have been known to pilot the tank erratically (read that as: in panic) and sometimes manage to step on an adversary. Such desperate actions rarely save the tanks though. 

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Grymn Militarum command squad is complete!

o/

The July 4th weekend allowed for some painting time, and in doing so I finished off my Company Command squad. Here are the 3 new additions, a grunt speaking into his wrist communicator, a medical bot, and my company commander:


My C.O. is sporting her new colors rather than the original polar scheme, as well as her new friend: a Lesser Mawe (that required the purchase of a new 32mm base which was almost too small for the two of them!). The squad is filled out with its heavy bolter team, the details of which can be seen here.



Ironically while civilian bots are an all too common sight on the battlefield, military grade bots are quite rare due to their high costs and maintenance. As such they're only used in specialized roles. This one for example is the squad's Medical-bot and it has the blood on it's manipulator to prove it!

The C.O. has a domesticated Lesser Mawe with her. They're quite affectionate pets, and this one is snuggling up to the point of practically pushing its owner of of her base! (something any owner of a large dog can appreciate/sympathize with) Lesser Mawes are fiercely loyal and will not only protect their 'pack', but can also be trained to attack at their master's command in combat.

The Lesser Mawe will serve as a power maul. Given the sharp claws and teeth, its safe to assume that only the heaviest armor will protect the target of its fury. The 'concussive' effects of a power maul are best summed up by the difficulty in fighting back whilst this little beastie is firmly attached to one's arm or leg!

As an aside, I'm not exactly sure what the official pronunciation of Mawe is. I've been pronouncing it as 'Maw' (ignoring the 'e' altogether), but it occurred to me that it could also be pronounced like Maui. lol, I might have to email Hasslefree minis and ask how they say it.

Monday, July 6, 2015

The Age of Sig-meh

o/

Copyright of GW. I can assure you, I want no claim to this wretched image!

Well everyone else is going on and on about GW's latest debacle, so why not throw in my 2 cents as well. As you have probably already guessed, I'm not impressed. Not in the slightest. I downloaded my 4-page rule PDF, as well as the warscroll PDFs for my Empire and Skaven, even the one for the terrain, and...uh yeah. Nothing I read made me think 'Wow! I want to try this out! Now let me dig out my WHFB minis to see what kind of army I can build!'

Dormant as my WHFB collection is, I think it'll stay right where it is (along with 8th ed rulebook), and wait till someone wants to play a good ol' game of actual Warhammer! Hell, I might even build and paint a few Skaven out of spite for AoS.

I really feel for people like Necron Bob. He's a hardcore WHFB tournament player, and had traveled the country to various tournaments, and has many friends in that community. I asked him what his thoughts on AoS were and he replied with this:

"I've been talking to folks from all over the county. At first there was tempered optimism, followed by nervous skepticism. Now that those sad battle scrolls released there's a lot of bitterness and rage. It's totally not my game. I've made a lot of great friends and have loved travelling about the country. That's all going to fragment now. Very sad. Some are going to Warmachine. Some to Kings of War. There's talk of a community organized 8.5. Fewer are holding out hope that GW is going to come through with point values and/or a mass battle system. I don't think they will. For the life of me, I can't see how they thought this was a good idea..."


Yeah, I think AoS is going to tank. Horribly. I'm sad to say it, but I think GW deserves it too. Not only that, but if this is their long term plan for 40k...well, then they'd best start liquidating their corporate assets now, just saying.

Thus far, the only good thing I've seen come from this release is Inso's Adeptus Custodes conversion built from his free AoS mini (with the purchase of a White Dwarf magazine) which can be seen here.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...

Mos Eisley?

 lol, no. I was referring to the BoLS comment section. Oh sure I've done my fair share of trolling and nerd raging in there over the years and in fairly equal measure I would like to think (though in a bit of full disclosure, I ought to mention that I did recently buy an actual 'nerd rage' t-shirt...).

True, so terribly true...

What prompted this post you ask? Well I saw the above Dilbert comic the other day and could think of nothing other than BoLS's readers.

In my humble opinion, BoLS ranks up pretty high on teh interwebz list of exectionally vitriolic cesspits. Though its not just the commenters at fault. I think their writers actually encourage it with the clickbait 'rumor' posts which copy and paste a single post from Faeit 212 and spread it over 4-5 separate posts in hopes of inspiring in some ad revenue. That or Rob Bear's typically lackluster offerings (I've played the kid btw, was a rather good game but the best part was when he bitched about all of my Tau smart missile system bitz which he had sold to me). Oh and while on the subject of BoLS writers, 'MBG' is the only one of the BoLS writing crew that I'll admit to actually knowing

(Now excuse me while I try to use the Force to break Mike's fingers before he types out an argument to that statement...)

Oh and some more disclosure: I still visit BoLS and partake in the 'festivities' daily, making this one of those 'pot calling the kettle black' kind of posts.

I will say that there are posters over there whom I quite often agree with, or who have unusually well thought out arguments (as opposed to the usual nerd rage and name calling). Such as: Auticus & Knight_of_infinite_resignation. Sometimes when the fur is really flying and I don't feel like slogging thru the endless nerd rage, I'll just skim the comments and stop when I see their names/icons pop up, to see what they're saying as I find that their posts tend to be the highlights. Unless of course I'm in troll mode, in which case what I'll be looking for is the nastier the comment, the better...