After
weeks on end of packing, moving, unpacking, building furniture,
arranging bill payments and entertaining violent revenge fantasies
about certain employees of the local council, my housemates and I are
now all moved in to our new place.
Both
my new housemates are old friends and fellow hobbyists so we've set
up a dedicated gaming space. Originally I planned to start a new
project to celebrate a successful (if typically stressful) move but
after a quick game against Dave with my Orks... well, I had a better
idea.
You
see, I got nostalgic from living with my friends again and so I
decided to return to some old projects: one an army that I started
but which never got off the ground, the other a revival of what was
once my signature army.
A
couple years ago I had a chance to snap up a bunch of Tomb Kings kits
at a dirt cheap price so I did. Trouble was that whilst I was looking
to move on to a new army, the army I was moving on from was Vampire
Counts and so I just wasn't feeling it. I'd painted enough skeletons
and so the kits have sat in a box ever since. Still, a year or so of
Lizardmen later I can look at the Tomb Kings and see what I loved
about them originally.
|
"Forward, my minions!" |
I
like that they're these Universal Studios-style Egyptian undead who
are, in their own way, good guys. They even use exorcism magic. I
like that just about everything in the army is either a skeleton or
an animated statue and not just because it means I can dash off the
block infantry and cavalry pretty quickly and concentrate my time on
the centrepiece models. That's certainly a benefit but it also means
the army has a very unified, focussed look to it. Plus, I have this
odd affection for the Tomb Scorpion, which was one of the first
“centrepiece” models I ever saw and one I'm really looking
forward to painting one of my own.
The
other army on the docket are The Lost And The Damned or, rather,
Renegades & Heretics since I'll be using the list from Imperial
Armour 13. The Lost And The Damned used to be my signature army back
in the old Codex: Eye Of Terror days.
Whilst
the Tomb Kings are an army with a very unified aesthetic that I can
make straight out of the box, the Lost And The Damned are anything
but. The Lost And The Damned are an army all about converting models,
be it with the Forge World upgrade sets or by digging through your
bits box. It is, in essence, the ultimate show-off's army. You can
customise the characters and units as much or as little as you want.
I have a bunch of the Forge World conversion sets I picked up at the
final Games Day and oodles of ideas on top of that for cool
conversions. Anyone who converts their models, I am convinced, loves
that moment when someone asks to take a closer look at their work.
Its a lovely feeling.
Also,
the Imperial Armour list is, to my mind, the best version of the army
so far. It has some very odd moments of copy editing and some rules
my friends and I have flat out decided to ignore because they are
flat out stupid. There's a lot of that Hordes of Chaos business where
your choice of general opens up one or two options and closes off
about a dozen others. That's just ripe for ignoring, frankly, which
is why we don't usually see so much of it these days. Plus, there's a
silly restriction on who can use Daemonology which, again, is a rule
the group has roundly voted for me to completely forget.
I
have some building to do, it seems.