Jumping Ship (Tim Drake, Steph Brown and Harper Row)

First, let me say this so there's no ambiguity: I'm grateful that Steph is back. I like the way she's being brought back: origin polished up a bit, still in keeping with the character we remember and with earnest promises that there are plans for her after Batman Eternal wraps. This is good, I'm glad to see it and very enthused for where its all going next, but...

My God, am I seeing great chemistry between Tim Drake and Harper Row!

It certainly helps that Eternal has taken the New 52 Tim and reverted him to type just a little. Tim is one of those characters to me, we all have them, who is so bound up in how I got into comics that I'm a bit precious about him. Chuck Dixon's Robin wasn't the first series I read but it was the first series I went looking for back issues and collections of, the first time I learned to look for a creator's name. I watched this character grow through Dixon's run, through Young Justice, through Bill Willingham's run (look, we all make mistakes) and then to become a truly spectacular solo act in the Red Robin ongoing.

Then it all got swept away. I'll say this straight: I am not a fan of the new origin Scott Lobdell set down in Teen Titans #0 or the whole attitude of trying to place Tim totally outside the Bat-family. What I like about Eternal's Tim is that he's back in Gotham yet retains the lone wolf vibe he developed coming out of Batman Reborn plus the one aspect of the New 52 version I liked: his focus on looking out for the young people who suffer when the adults fight.

Add to this mix young Harper Row, future Robin-esque Bat-sidekick (according to that Eternal teaser that interrupted Zero Year) who has enforced her help on Tim the way Tim did to Batman back in the day. Okay, that's not such a good description of Tim's new origin but the New 52 is more about cultural memory than a literal chain of events laid down by continuity. That's my theory and it helps to make the New 52 a bit more palatable and comprehensible. She's also as dedicated to her own area of social justice as he is, except her focus is the poor of Gotham rather than the young of the world.

Of course, their mutual arrogance has placed the two of them in conflict almost since the moment they met but Tim has something of a history with stubborn women. Almost exclusively with stubborn women, now I think about it, between Steph, Lynx, Wonder Girl and Tam Fox.

You know, listing it out like that it occurs to me just how celibate Tim's been since Flashpoint. I think the only time he's managed to get any in the last three years was when he got possessed by Trigon and fooled around with Solstice which... ugh, no.

What I'm basically saying is this: we have two alpha-type personalities who are techy, stubborn and arrogant and I really want to see the sparks fly. 

Space Hulk: The Self-Justification Phase

I'll say this for being a wargamer: its honed my sense of buyer's guilt to the point that I feel it BEFORE I've made the unwise purchase. On the one hand this is good and has prevented me from starting literally dozens of armies I didn't actually have the requisite time, cash or inspiration for. So yes, having geeked out for a bit over the possibility of Space Hulk being re-released and the re-release having been confirmed by leaked images I'm now having this running debate in my head:

“Yay! Space Hulk is coming out again and I've just been paid at my fairly steady, safe job so I can afford it now like I couldn't in 2009!!”

“Yes, but aren't you concentrating on your Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts at the moment?”

“True, but its a limited release so if I want it I have to buy it now or never (or wait five years, possibly).”

“You never play 40k anymore.”

“Dan's getting back into it so I might do soon.”

“What, with Tyranids? With Blood Angels?”

“I might.”

“You can't get a grip on Tyranids because you like writing characters and you hate the Blood Angels with their stupid colour-coded helmets.”

“There are successor chapters.”

“Yeah, there are three you like but a) there are bareheaded Terminators so they can't be Angels Sanguine; b) they're too blinged out to match your vision of Flesh Tearers; and c) you've never found a way to paint Lamenters you liked since they stopped making Tau Sept Ochre.”

“Yeah, that does still rankle.”

“You could always paint them purple and call them Soul Drinkers.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Yes.”

“Look, bottom line: I've spent five years wishing I'd been able to scrape the doubloons together to buy this every time I see a picture of Sergeant bloody Lorenzo and his awesome cape. Quite besides, this might all be moot: I'm getting out of work at 7 tomorrow and it'll take me twenty minutes to get down to GW. It might even be sold out by the time I get there. Let's say I'll buy it if the ineffable machinations of fate allow me to and be done with the debate.”

“You realise you're going to have to spend an extra tenner on round bases, right?”

“So be it.”

“Angels Encarmine?”

“No way, I'd have to paint the Death Company white.” 

16 Weeks, 80 Models, the Reign of 1,000,000 Years

This was actually inspired by the Warhammer World trip I'll now not be able to make but I'm determined to salvage something from it all. You see, I had this notion of giving my Tomb Kings their inaugural game at Warhammer World. On what would have been my first visit to Warhammer World, actually. Not going to happen now but before I found that out I came up with a pretty workable army list for getting ready in time and it goes a little something like this:

Lords

Tomb King (170) armed with great weapon (6) and wearing light armour and riding a chariot (55). 231 points

Heroes

Liche Priest (70), Level 2 Wizard (35) using the Lore of Nehekhara. Hierophant. 105 points

Liche Priest (70), Level 2 Wizard (35) using the Lore of Nehekhara. 105 points

Necrotect (60) armed with two hand weapons including whip wearing light armour. 60 points

Core

3 Skeleton Chariots (165) pulled by Skeletal Steeds each crewed by 2 Skeleton Charioteers armed with spears and bows, full command (30). 195 points

5 Skeleton Horse Archers (70) armed with bows, full command (30). 100 points

20 Skeleton Warriors (80) armed with spears (20), shields and light armour (20), full command (30). 150 points

20 Skeleton Warriors (80) armed with hand weapons, shields and light armour (20), full command (30). 130 points

Special

3 Sepulchral Stalkers (165). 165 points

20 Tomb Guard (220) armed with halberds (40) and shields, full command (30). 290 points

Tomb Scorpion (85). 85 points

3 Ushabti (150) with great weapons, champion (10). 160 points

Rare

Necrosphinx (225). 225 points

Total: 2001 points

There are sixteen weeks until New Year and this army, which is pretty elite by my standards, has eighty models so that works out at five models a week. Fair declaration: I do actually have fifteen Skeleton Spearmen finished already from my last stab at this army so that's even less work to do (though I'm not too happy with them and might re-paint them if I have time at the end of the project).

Having not played the army myself and, in fact, never having played against Tomb Kings in my life I'm forced to go back to first principles: include what I seem to need and then just pick up what looks pretty. I've got the basic sort of general; the necessary wizards; a buffing character I like the sculpt of; plenty of core plastics; and finally lots and lots of pretty centrepiece kits.

The reward tree needs a little tweaking since there are things I actually need to finish now and it reads like this:

500 points: Ushabti.

1000 points: Necrosphinx

… then we'll see where we are when we get to 1500. Probably I'll start rewarding myself with minis from outside the Tomb Kings to offset boredom. The Warsphinx will be painted one day (sorry, Matt, it was a lovely present) but, to be honest, I'm kind of going off the idea of buying Nagash. It's a lovely model but not of much use to me. The Undead Legion is cool but I've never been one for special characters. I might get a Mortarch kit to make a Vampire Lord on Abyssal Steed (which is what it is for, I don't care what anyone else says). Okay, let's say that for 1500, provisionally.

Project Tracker

15 of 80 models completed.

Reward Tracker

15 Skeletons Warriors with spears, shields and light armour = 90 points (410 points to next reward). 

Sometimes the universe just gives you stuff

So two days before a house inspection is a great time for your shower drain and bathroom sink to both clog. Add in a few work issues and having to cancel a trip I was really looking forward to but then the internet just out of nowhere delivered me two really, really great announcements:

ANNOUNCEMENT ONE: Gail Simone's super secret post-Batgirl project is a Secret Six relaunch! Not entirely the old team, it seems, but the Comicbook Resources article name checks Catman and Black Alice and since Simone is apparently incapable of writing a series without Ragdoll turning up I can but hope.

It could go wrong, anything can go wrong. Maybe DC will have put some creative fetters on Simone when the last incarnation of the series thrived on editorial distance. Maybe the law of diminishing returns will strike as it often does when an author returns to one of their great works a few years down the line. It must be said, thought, that DC has been making real improvements ion the not-fucking-up stakes this past year so I feel positive about this announcement. If this had been announced in 2012 I'd have very little faith in it. We shall see.

ANNOUNCEMENT (-sh) TWO: a teaser video on Games Workshop's blog that (please please please) points to a Space Hulk set coming to pre-order next weekend. It shows a Space Marine being strapped into Terminator armour with flashes of Genestealers spliced in.

I can't begin to think of another interpretation of putting those two images together. If it is Space Hulk then I'm in. I was completely broke when the last set came out in 2009 and it sold out on me in about a day. Those Blood Angels Terminators were gorgeous and even after five years have never been bettered: not by Wolf Guard Terminators, not by Deathwing Knights, not even by the Forge World sculpts.

Whether its a new set (I am kind of hoping for the “other” Space Hulk Terminators: Dark Angels Deathwing) or just a re-release of the 2009 set I am absolutely, definitely putting money down for this. 

The Companion Chronicles to return as box sets. Yay!

There was an article in Big Finish's Vortex magazine about their new series The Early Adventures that slipped in, off-handedly, that The Companion Chronicles would be returning next year as box sets.

Now, to set out some biases off the bat: The Companion Chronicles is my favourite Doctor Who series ever. Not the modern series, not the classic series, the McGann audios or even the hallowed New Adventures but The Companion Chronicles. I'm not trying to be contrarian but the series was consistently inventive both in offering new perspectives on classic characters and by experimenting with different narrative approaches to work with the limits of a small cast, usually of no more than two actors. By necessity they were very character based and given how underwritten many of these characters were on television it gave the actors a real chance to shine.

I loved them but I did respected that Big Finish chose to end them when they were riding high. After eight seasons and a few specials the series clocked up over eighty releases and if ideas were getting thin on the ground I'd rather have eight seasons of enjoyable and inventive than having two or three more seasons of flogging a dying horse.

Am I looking forward to the box sets? Hell yes.

One thing The Companion Chronicles were great at was working with their limitations, they were designed around them. The whole idea was to give Big Finish a way to tell stories for eras where principal actors have passed away. The series expanded a little from that initial brief in its middle years but that was always the core of the project: First, Second, Third and (when Tom Baker wasn't yet on contract) Fourth Doctor stories when full cast stories weren't possible. The general format was a companion actor (again, this occasionally went off-topic) and one other actor. Most were basically talking books with dialogue sections whilst some were fully dramatised two-handers.

I think the box set format might be a nice new limitation for them to play with. Box sets have generally been good for Big Finish series. In fact, with the mini-season format the Main Range adopted in 2009, The Companion Chronicles were the last man standing in the anthology format. I did like the anthology format, I did like getting a different TARDIS team every month but I think a tighter focus is almost always a good thing.

As supporting evidence I give you another BFP series to go from singles to boxes: Bernice Summerfield, which ran for eleven series as singles before going to box sets for its last six. The singles had an overarching plot that was sprawling and very hard to get into whilst the switch to box sets provided a tighter focus. Each box has had a theme or a setting of its own and then spends however many discs exploring the high points of the concept before the next one offers up its own idea.

Yes, there have been boxes where I wish the big idea had lasted longer. I genuinely think Epoch was a couple of discs too short but is that even a criticism? The fact that I was left wanting to hear more of Bernice's life in Atlantis and the idea of a world where all history more than 57 years old is banned just means the writers cut themselves off before the idea had a chance to go stale, which is exactly what I praised The Companion Chronicles for doing at the top of this post. 

The End Times army I'd like to see

Okay, this is not so much a wishlist as working out a grudge with Games Workshop. In fairness, though, it is my only grudge. If you're expecting one of those bitter anti-GW rants that inevitably involve the phrase “Games Workshop has ruined my hobby” followed by unnecessary numbers of exclamation marks this is not that. This is a bit of nostalgia that just might come to pass if things are going the way they seem to be.

You see, if there's one thing we can confidently predict about The End Time its that one of the supplements will be about Chaos. GW's basically doing an all-singing all-dancing remake of Storm Of Chaos and you can't really do that without a Chaos supplement of some sort.

And if that's what they're going to do they couldn't do better than resurrecting the Horde Of Chaos method of army building.

The way this worked, for the benefit of the young, is that in the hallowed 6^th edition we had two Chaos army books: Hordes of Chaos and Beasts of Chaos with Chaos Warriors and Daemons lumped together in the former. You chose your general (a Chaos Lord, a Daemon or a Beastlord) and then Core units like him stayed Core and other Core units became Special. So if you had, say, a Great Unclean One as your general then Plaguebearers and other Daemons were Core whilst Chaos Warriors, Marauders and the like became Special.

Specials and Rares stayed as they were, incidentally.

Having read the Empire vs. Nurgle Chaos Horde sections of Nagash it really tickled my sense of nostalgia but also my sense of annoyance. You see, in the Hordes Of Chaos days I loved the idea but all the Daemon models back then were metal and super expensive. These days they're all plastic but they've also been hived off into their own army and because I like to personalise my generals and get inside their head when I write them a pure Daemon army just doesn't grab me. So the army I loved was first too expensive and then not game legal.

I say this might happen because a) a Chaos supplement seems inevitable and b) the Undead Legion was a nostalgia trip to the old Undead Army Book of 5^th edition.

If nothing else, I'm a Bretonnia player and hope comes naturally to me. 

That's Quite Shiny: Morghasts and Spirit Hosts

Its that time of week again and the GW pre-orders are up! After two weeks of single model releases (albeit a very versatile single model last week) this week they're pushing the boat out with two models!

I'm being facetious because both kits are absolutely gorgeousy. To start there are the Morghast Archai/Harbingers, two models for £36 and they're huge by the look of them. They more than fill their chariot bases and those bone wings are fantastic. There are already people online calling this kit the “two for one Nurgle Daemon Prince box” and I won't disagree, seems like a great use for them.

I can't really say more about what I think of them because I haven't actually reached their background in the Nagash books. As such I don't know how well what they look like matches up with what they're meant to represents. That's really the big test of a model as far as I'm concerned.

Perversely it isn't the big winged bone things of awesomeness that are catching my attention this week but the rather more modest Spirit Hosts (3 bases for £16). I've wanted Spirit Hosts for my Vampire Counts for years but the standing miniatures were... well, look at them...

Good in their time, I am sure, but outdated now. If we could just get some decent Fell Bats that would pretty much complete the range. 

Jane Foster is a creepy Silver Age girlfriend

She's a bit of a chameleon is The Mighty Thor's Jane Foster: she's been a nurse, a doctor, an astrophysicist and a hippie groupie type in various incarnations but of course, since she started off in the Silver Age, she was also intensely creepy and stalker-ish:

I don't know what issue this is from but it does illustrate the deep, terrifying levels of insanity Silver Age writers used to think was part and parcel of being a love interest. Still, I suppose that's one way of introducing agency and “strength” to a female character: the genuine belief that you can dominate a warrior god into submission.

It's insane, it's creepy and far from a healthy portrayal of female sexuality but sometimes with old comics you have to take whatever agency you can get. 

Bretonnian ponderings

There was going to be an End Times post today but then I ran out of steam. We'll get back to it, I'm sure, but for now I'm pondering my much delayed Bretonnia army. Now, my focus up to the end of the year will be the Tomb Kings but since I'm going to need to do a lot of conversion on the Bretons to make a full army it'll have to be a slow build even before we take into account painting all that heraldry.

So, yeah, the things the Bretonnia range is currently missing: generic knightly characters, Questing Knights, Mounted Yeomen, the Grail Reliquae, Mounted Yeomen, Grail Knights and the Field Trebuchet. We're good for core plastics and Pegasus Knights but that's are a lot of things I'll either have to convert or do without.

I've been at this long enough that I remember when this sort of thing was business as usual. I remember the days when character classes and even whole units had no models for them. I had a Lost And The Damned army! I converted ninety mutants! This is nothing!

So, a few initial ideas:

Questing Knights

The name Graeme Friend Of Dwarves has always been an inspiring one to me. I was just going to paint an old Questing Lord in his colours but now I have all these spare champion weapons from my Dwarf Longbeards that don't seem too badly scaled to the knights. If I can chop the ball join flat I think I can wed the Dwarf great weapons to the knights with little difficulty.

More challenging are the piles of junk Questing Knights generally carry around, having no home to go back to and all. I'll have to raid my bits box and anyone else's I can get my hands on for random objects.

Mounted Yeomen

I once saw (and stupidly failed to save) a tutorial on merging Bretonnian Men-At-Arms and Empire Pistoliers to make Yeomen. Shouldn't be too hard to do if I can find the right spot to chop the Men-At-Arms in half at.

Grail Reliquae and Battle Pilgrims

Battle Pilgrims, easy: Empire Flagellants with the twin-tailed comets filed off and as much Bretonnian props glued to them as I can find. Grail Reliquae, far harder. I did own a Grail Reliquae so hopefully I can dig that up, strip the awful teenage paint job and just set it up in the middle of the Flagellants.

Trebuchet

There's only one other Trebuchet in GW's range and its terrible. Again, hopefully my old one has survived somewhere.

Grail Knights

Unbelievably this is the trickiest proposition. It seems easy: they're armed and armoured exactly the same as Knights Of The Realm and therein lies the problem: making the buggers look distinct. My first idea is to strap lots of those little heraldic shields to their shoulders and I think there are some big fleur de lys I could use somewhere on the model (chest, maybe) but aside from that I'm kind of out of ideas.

Still, if I make the Questing Knights first it'll be a while before I have to worry about the Grails. 

The End Times: Character death and product

(Page 190 now, I'm not usually this slow a reader but this is a book I really want to take in rather than rush through and forget. This post, as the title suggests, is about character death so beware THE MOST SERIOUS SPOILERS THIS WEEK though certainly don't expect an exhaustive list because that isn't what this is.)

Even if you set aside the wholesale annihilation of the Border Princes, Estalia, most of Kislev and everything Tilean north of Sartosa, The End Times: Nagash still has an absolutely epic amount of significant deaths in it. I've already held forth on the rubbing out of Heinrich Kemmler but by this point I have to concede that Warhammer's most vintage villain dying is small potatoes.

In a moment of mild cynicism my friend Matt and I wondered how many of these deaths would match up to old or out-of-production models but I'm... not exactly “happy” but shall we say “reassured” that this hasn't been the case. Yes, Kemmler's sculpt is ancient and all the Bretonnian special characters are either dead, missing or so transformed you'd expect a new model when the time comes around. Now I like the Fay Enchantress, King Leoun Leonceour and the Green Knight but they all have chunky, blunt swords and suffer various scaling issues, not least of which is Leoncoeur's Hyppogryph which is minute by the standards of modern monstrous mounts.

Yes, I can see why GW would perhaps want to shift them off the board or relaunch them with new concepts. Yet there are characters who've died that I can't account for with that: Volkmar received a new model two years ago and whilst Thorek and his Anvil Of Doom are old you'd think they'd want to keep the thing around to make a fantastic new centrepiece model someday.

So what I'm saying is that these are not totally cynical deaths motivated by cutting outdated product from the webstore. Some may serve that purpose, might even have been written in for that very reason, but there are others which appear to exist for purely creative reasons. It's a good sign, I feel.

Which all brings us the upcoming Gotrek & Felix novel Kinslayer, which promises to be “Book One of the Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson” and I only have this to say on the subject:

Please, Black Library, please kill him! I like the Gotrek & Felix novels as much as the next fan but this series needs to end. I remember the scene in Shamanslayer where Nathan Long was clearly angling to kill Gotrek and it would have been a fantastic scene, it was so well set up to serve all the characters perfectly. Frankly, the odds that any other death would match up is slim but the time has come to bite the damn bullet and put this franchise to sleep especially as by this point the series timeline is so screwed up in relation to the rest of the Warhammer world.

Gotrek's death is, actually, something to look forward to and since he is a fictional character with a twenty year time jump in his story he can prance forever through the Elysian fields of short stories and nostalgia novels if you so wish.

I am not one to cry “cash grab” at Games Workshop because I'm an adult with some understanding of economics but I do have a problem with marketing through false hope and if I'm promised doom I expect some bloody doom. 

The End Times: Equal opportunity inspiration

(Spoilers here up to the Battle of Skull Chasm section of Nagash Book I)

One thing I greatly appreciate about the way Nagash Book I is written is how none of the armies involved look like chumps. I've just passed the halfway mark and so far Nagash and his various minions have gone into battle against Bretonnia, Skaven, High Elves, Dwarfs, Night Goblins and more I've probably forgotten. All of this is to built up the Undead Legion and the various Mortarch's leading it but at no point does the opposition end up looking like idiots.

It's an easy temptation to fall into. You're marketing a particular faction, there's a natural desire to make them look great and this can spill over into making everyone else look like pushovers before their awesome might. The last Tau Empire book was quite bad for that, bigging up the Tau at the expense of making the Imperium look weak. It's not just unsatisfying if you happen to be an Imperial player, its dramatically unsatisfying. If the army can just sweep their enemies aside then what's the point of the fight?

We're back to Superman again, really. Peril is a generator of drama, invincibility is not.

This book is Nagash's day in the sun (sorry) but at no point does it make the forces the Undead Legion are fighting look like anything other than genuine threats. The undead will win because this is not only their book but the opening phase of The End Times so naturally the bad guys have to sweep the board.

To take an example: there's a section where Neferata and her Lahmian army fight Night Goblins. Neferata has a huge undead horde including her closest vampire handmaidens, ghouls, Tomb Guard and Neferata herself: the oldest vampire in existence. Her opposition are a mismatched collection of Goblin tribes displaced by her advancing army as she passes through the World's Edge Mountains.

This could easily have been a joke. The first vampire and her handmaidens versus a bunch of short, green, mushroom addicted cowards. Instead the chapter is a pacey little number that sets up the Goblin Warboss as a genuine threat who sets an ambush Neferata walks into through pure arrogance. It was a nice read and from a business point of view it might make people think about doing a Goblin army which is no bad thing because Goblin armies are ridiculously fun.

Actually, there's an earlier chapter where Mannfred Von Carstein takes an army into the Under-Empire and fights some Skaven, a chapter that made me want to dust off my old Skaven army before I remembered I'd actually sold it a few years ago.

(And of course there are the Bretonnia chapters which make me more determined than ever to work on that project, as much as the heraldry makes me want to tear my hair out in frustration every time I notice a difference between the two devices on one side of a knight. I do try to temper my perfectionism but with Bretonnia I find it hard.)

One of the main reasons this book exists, I feel, is to provide inspiration. There are a lot of pages given over to short potted backgrounds of individual characters and units involved in the battles. Any little bit of background can provide inspiration: my Tomb Kings army is based around a character who got a comedy box-out in their Army Book and a single line describing a “Legion of Legend” called the Zandri Blackshields. My first Bretonnia army was based on a name and a heraldry design from the Army Book's colour section.

My only problem, and it is far from unique, is keeping the same inspiration for any decent length of time. I've worked out about three different army lists since starting this book (Bretonnia, Skaven and a Lahmian themed Undead Legion, as it happens). I just have to remember that right now my Tomb Kings take priority.

The End Times: I feel like you've just killed an old friend

(Okay, so I've totted up everything I want to discuss about the Nagash set and having got as far as page 125 it looks like this is going to be a theme week. Today: SPOILERS for the Twelfth Battle of La Maisontaal Abbey, so page 65-ish, and tomorrow we'll move on to other, less Bretonnian and consequently less interesting topics. Just kidding, this whole thing is fascinating).

How important was this character? He looks like THAT and
they still remade him in Finecast resin.

Let's talk about narrative collapse and Heinrich Kemmler.

I was fond of Heinrich Kemmler. Okay, the model had a very old school pose which lead me to know him as The Dodgy Watchseller Of Darkness but I rather liked him. I first encountered him in White Dwarf's Return Of The Lichemaster campaign where he was the villain for a fun little series of scenarios pitting him and his undead cohort against Bretonnians and Wood Elves as he plundered barrows near Athel Loren. My own Master Necromancer, Berenice Von Gallenberg, was very consciously designed with Kemmler as a template.

I especially loved that he was a villain with a sidekick: Krell, a Wight King who had been a Chaos Champion in life, bestowed on Kemmler by the Chaos Gods in exchange for his soul. Yes, being a Master Necromancer wasn't evil enough for Kemmler: he also sold his soul to Chaos. They were a fun little team and I was very pleased to see them back together when the Nagash book described the army Arkhan The Black was taking into Bretonnia.

Then, on page 65, Arkhan killed Kemmler.

Kemmler, by the way, is one of the oldest characters in Warhammer and he was introduced in the original Battle of La Maisontaal scenario, the very first narrative scenario written for the game. That's where he was killed, too, in the explosion that destroys the Abbey. Got to love a little circularity.

This is probably the point at which a lot of gamers start throwing their toys out of the pram that a character they love has been removed from the board. Not me. I loved it. I'll miss the greasy old bastard, as the title of the post over-dramatically suggests I have considerable affection for him, but I take it as a good sign.

If one of the oldest characters, created in the oldest scenario, meets his end here in The End Times that's a massive symbolic sacrifice. What we could be dealing with here is nothing less than a complete narrative collapse scenario for the Warhammer World: a threat not to the fictional world but the world of the fiction.

Time to declare a bias: I love narrative collapse stories! Part of this love is that the collapse has to be preventable but the cost of restoring order has to immense, traumatic and permanent in order for it to matter. Joss Whedon is probably the modern master of narrative collapse, just look at any Buffy season finale but my go to is Graduation Day. Buffy can save Angel's life, defeat Faith and survive the Mayor's Ascension but that's only possible if she pays the price for each of those victories: she saves Angel only for him to leave her; without Faith she returns to the loneliness of being the sole Chosen One; and she has to sacrifice the basic premise of the show, its high school setting, in order to take out the Mayor.

To bring this back to The End Times: in the opening stages of this collapse alone we've lost one of the game's oldest villains; countries have been destroyed; kings have fallen in battle; and there are more significant character deaths after the point I'm talking about.

And that's the collapse, we aren't anywhere close to seeing what the restoration of order is going to cost us.

This is a very exciting time to be playing Warhammer.  

The End Times: Bretonnia ain't goin' nowhere

(Those seeking spoilers are not getting them from this post. Okay, maybe one, a little one. I'll be doing a full review of the Nagash books when I've finished them, this is just based on reading the first 80-odd pages of Book One and how I think what's been written affects my most favourite army ever, ever, ever: Bretonnia.)

I'm not one to give credence to the doom and gloom rumours of armies getting “Squatted”. Frankly, the Squats were a long time ago and they were, sorry if this offends, a crap idea. Space Dwarfs on motorbikes were never going to age well, it was very Eighties and one of those mistakes companies make when they think they'll be out of business this time next year. They got dropped more than twenty years ago and its time to get over it. Whilst we're on the subject: Black Templars players (and I am a Black Templars player!) gained more than they lost from being folded into Codex: Space Marines.

Still, the continuing false rumours of a Bretonnia release and the dropping of kit after kit from the webstore have made it hard to keep the faith. May the Lady forgive me, I did start to waver.

Then I opened the Nagash book.

Oh, its grim for Bretonnia just like any other Forces Of Order race right now but I've watched enough wrestling, seen enough faces pounded into the canvas to know where this is going. In this book and probably the next the good guys will get hammered relentlessly but come Wrestlemania (or, y'know, Middenheim or wherever this ends up) the good guys will strike back with faith, steel and gunpowder (less of the last one with Bretonnia but you get my point).

So, yeah, its grim: a major character has been taken off the board; four duchies are in ruins and another one seems to have been eaten by daemons; and La Maisontaal Abbey was destroyed but, frankly, that's just what happens to La Masiontaal Abbey. By this stage La Maisontaal being burnt to the ground is almost a running joke, what you put in an army book's timeline when you want them to have done something in Bretonnia.

But then...

Okay, NO SPECIFIC SPOILERS but the counter-attack is already underway. The book opens with a forty page prologue describing where all the races and nations of Warhammer are at the beginning of the End Times (or is the end of the beginning?). Most of the good guys get a ray of hope, something that they (and their fans) can cling to in the hard times ahead and Bretonnia's is a whopper!

My point is: this is not how GW addresses a concept they're going to junk. They have two strategies they've used in the past. Either they ignore the idea until it fades away (Squats and a lot of Rogue Trader-era background) or they completely, utterly nuke it in a brief piece of background. 80 pages in and this book has the highest mortality rate of any Warhammer supplement I've ever read: background characters and playable special characters with models have been done in, whole cities and small nations have been wiped out including one or two places that did once constituted the basis of an army.

Really, not everyone is going to be happy with who bites the dust including some much-missed old armies but as for Bretonnia (yes, I'm selfish!) they get such a build-up, such a huge revelation-ish (not entirely a surprise but still nice), such advancement from where they were left in Warhammer Armies: Wood Elves and such a huge part in the opening chapter with the whole La Maisontaal affair (and a couple of accompanying scenarios in the rules book) that I cannot believe GW has any plans to drop them.

In fact, I lead myself to hope this means something is coming in the not too distant future. After all: why write whole scenarios requiring a Bretonnia army and not have a Bretonnia army available? Right now the whole metal and finecast range are out of production and there are no knightly character models. 

Like I said, every good guy gets a ray of hope to see them through. 

The Bretonnia Royal Marine Air Corps

Okay, the revival of my Bretonnia army keeps getting delays due to lack of models but this idea won't leave me alone. You see, for a while my friend Matt and I have wondered how exactly Bretonnian naval warfare works when they don't have cannons. Logic dictates that they depend on boarding actions and ramming manoeuvres but a few nights ago something occurred to me:

What if Bretonnia has invented the aircraft carrier?

I just have this image of Bretonnian frigates acting as mobile bases for Pegasus Knights. The Bretonnian ships close with the enemy and whilst their peasant crews prepare for ramming speed and boarding the Pegasus Knights sally forth to draw fire and harry the enemy crews. Meanwhile Damsels using the Lore Of Life whip the sea up so as to batter the enemy ships and speed their own fleet to attack positions. Their Lore Of Beasts sisters use their own magic to augment the Pegasus Knights' attack run.

(Yes, I know Bretonnia is probably the most sexist and most superstitious human nation in Warhammer so you could argue that women wouldn't be allowed aboard. However, Damsels have long been established as beyond all social rules enforced on the general female population and quite a few enforced on the male population, too).

So now my Pegasus Knights have a theme: lots of trident and merlion heraldry to represent the coastal duchies. I wonder if I can pinch a trident head from Matt's Lothern Skycutter for the champion?

The Grand Redemption of Peter Davison

There was a time when this was considered high drama.
That time was in the producer's office, not on transmission.

(SPOILER WARNING for Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Box Set: Psychodrome and, I suppose, Earthshock).

Last night I listened to Psychodrome, the first story in Big Finish's The Fifth Doctor Box Set, and it really drove home how much Big Finish and others have done to actively rehabilitate the Fifth Doctor era.

In a way this has happened with every Doctor Big Finish has worked with. Their Sixth Doctor is less abrasive to his companions than he was on TV whilst still retaining his hard edge; with the Seventh Doctor stories push the boat out on his scheming and questionable morals; their Eighth Doctor has darkened to flatter Paul McGann's talents; and their Fourth Doctor series benefits greatly from a less arrogant Tom Baker who doesn't feel the need to steal every scene.

A lot of that is character, though, whereas with Peter Davison I feel what's being rehabilitated is the whole era.

Take Psychodrome: the elevator pitch on this one was to create a new second story for Peter Davison. The story is set right after Castrovalva and a lot of it is about the four regulars and their impressions of each other after having been together a very short time. As Tegan points the two stories she features in before this point take place over less than two days and she hasn't had a moment to stop and mourn the death of her Aunt Vanessa. Nyssa's whole world was destroyed and the Master is walking around in her father's corpse. Adric has seen “his” Doctor die shortly after Romana left them and the TARDIS is no longer the same environment he “signed up” to travel in.

None of this was dealt with on-screen. These four characters skipped from Castrovalva Part Four to Four To Doomsday Part One with little continuity. Nyssa does have another encounter with the Master in Time-Flight with no mention is made of the whole “Dad's corpse” business and Tegan meets several members of her family over the years with no mention of poor Aunt Vanessa's fate.

This is the era, lest we forget, that sold itself on its “soap opera” elements and continuity yet never really invested in a sense of character. The season this story is set in ostensibly has one “focus” story for each companion but they aren't focus stories as we understand them: Tegan's story sees her possessed by the villain; Nyssa's has Sarah Sutton playing another character more than she plays Nyssa; and Adric's story gives him little to do beyond die dumbly.

Psychodrome makes liberal use of elements from the stories it takes place between: the unreal environment of Castrovalva gets the added twist of being influenced by everyone's perceptions rather than being under the Master's control. The opening scenes are also reminiscent of the exploration phase of a Hartnell first episode that was used in Four To Doomsday and this is really my point:

With the other Doctors characters get reworked using modern techniques but for the Fifth Doctor stories from his era are actively re-written. One of the most acclaimed Fifth Doctor audios is Spare Parts, in fact it was (very, VERY) loosely adapted for television as Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel. Spare Parts used the same basic idea of Earthshock: a Cybermen story hugely bound into their on-screen history but instead of re-enacting old set pieces its a story about the history of the Cybermen, even going so far as to re-use the singsong Cyber-voice from The Tenth Planet.

Its not only Big Finish, either, one of my favourite Doctor Who novels is David A. McIntee's The Lords Of The Storm. This book is very much Warriors Of The Deep but done with Sontarans and done well. McIntee uses elements from every Sontaran story, including the fan made VHS story Shakedown, but does it with fidelity and also thinking about how the concept could be modernised. Like Warriors, Lords features a future society but McIntee gives it far more depth than the one from Warriors and uses it as more than a background for the monster story to happen against.

(The actual ultimate example of this pattern I would love to recommend but since the villain of the piece and therefore story it “replaces” is a huge revelation I really, really can't because the internet would hate me forever. It really is one of those twists fandom swears you to secrecy over. Its one of the Fifth Doctor Lost Stories, that's all I can say, and don't read the copyright blurb on the back cover).

Now, I love the Davison era but I have to admit it is one of Doctor Who's most flawed runs. It crackles with potential but that potential never truly breaks through. Turlough is a great idea for an untrustworthy companion but aside from Barbara Clegg and his creator Peter Grimwade everyone just writes him as a coward; killing a companion was a good dramatic idea but using it as an excuse to get rid of the unpopular one was cheap; the Black Guardian trilogy was a good idea but needed a middle story that actually said something relevant to the overarching plot; and why the hell does it matter that the robot prop doesn't work properly when the robot is a bloody shapeshifter?

So I'm grateful, is what I'm saying. The wasted potential of those three seasons is a huge bugbear of mine. You can point to just about every regular character and say they were wasted and that we can finally see how Turlough and Tegan and Nyssa and Peri would work if written well and directed patiently can only be a good thing.

And yes, if Psychodrome is anything to do by, there's hope for Adric yet.

5 words that need tighter legal controls

After yesterday's post it occurred to me there are other words writers, directors and producers use that kind of piss me off through repeated misuse and here they are.

“Emotional”

Comedies are emotional because they provoke joy. “Emotional” does not have to mean “depressing”. It usually does, though.

“Innovative”

Or, alternatively, “pretentious”. The Dark Knight Rises is a big example of this as far as I'm concerned. For a start its “innovative” plot is just Knightfall and No Man's Land inelegantly stitched together but the films have a larger audience than the comics it adapts so Chris Nolan and his fans get to pretend he's doing something terribly original with the property. Oh, and as for the villain holding the city to ransom with a nuclear bomb... give me a break! That's practically bloody textbook!

“Iconic”

Less widespread than the others and more in video game territory but here we go: companies have a terrible habit of trying to tell us what is iconic. Though, actually, DC tried to pull something similar with Hush, advertising him as the “first major Batman villain introduced in decades” where “major” isn't entirely theirs to define. As it happens Hush was a good idea, he did become a major returning villain but his popularity could not be relied upon before the audience got a look at him.

That ain't how it works. Something becomes iconic because the audience latches onto it. The baseball cap worn by the lead character in a game you haven't released yet does not get to be iconic just because you say it is.

“New”

New Avengers has been running for a decade and I'm really not sure what's new about the current version when it features some of the oldest characters in the Marvel Universe in their role as pillars of the Marvel Universe. The New Super Mario Bros. franchise is a series of nostalgia games designed to evoke memories of the SNES era. There needs to be a statute of limitations on this.

“Realistic”

This is a particularly abused one and social services really need to step in. Like “emotional” this tends to mean “depressing” but with a side order of “brown and shooty”. Reality can be fun and realistic can mean a lot of different things: a story can be realistic because of its setting (Eastenders): because the emotions of its characters are meant to be related to (Battlestar Galactica); or because it takes a procedural angle on the story its telling (Law & Order). It does not just mean first person shooters with limited colour palates. 

Female characters: Equal opportunity flaws

This post started as a rant against the use of the phrase “strong female character”, that meaningless buzz phrase trotted out when comic companies deign to advertise one of their female properties. It can mean anything: that the character is physically strong, that she's emotionally resilient or that the writing is going to be of consistent quality. You just don't know and some clarity would be nice. That's bad enough but it occurred to me there's a second problem with the phrase:

Strength ain't that interesting.

What's more we know this: the standard template criticism of Superman is that as a physically invulnerable, emotionally perfect individual there's not really anywhere to go with the character. Superior interpretations of the character (at least the ones I've connected with) introduce a flaw of some kind: All-Star Superman confronted him with his own mortality; New Krypton turned him into an unwanted lone peacemaker between humans and Kryptonians; and For Tomorrow presented him with a genuine crisis of faith.

To break this down to pure theory: a character's flaws, whether they get over them or fall prey to them, generate more plots than their strengths. If Hamlet weren't a ditherer his uncle would have been dead by Act 2 and we'd be missing some of the best speeches in the whole Shakespeare canon.

As to female characters probably one of the comic writers most praised for their female characters is Greg Rucka who, you may have guessed, is a man. I'm choosing to highlight him over, say, Gail Simone or Kelly Sue deConnick because when a man writes a woman its put under a huge microscope by female fandom and often (unsurprisingly) found wanting. Rucka, though, has not one but two female characters who are regularly held up as a sort of gold standard for writing women in comics: Renee Montoya and Tara Chase.

In Gotham Central and later as The Question, Rucka put Renee Montoya through the emotional wringer: combating alcoholism; the death of her partner; the ethical dilemma of avenging his death when the law proved insufficient; and, not least, being forced out of the closet and having to confront the reaction of her staunchly traditional Catholic parents. There was also her use in setting up Batwoman's past in which she was both the love of Kate Kane's life but by being closeted also represented an act of deception Kate had made the active moral decision not to engage in despite it robbing her of her lifelong dream. These issues drove the personal evolution of the character for close to a decade between Gotham Central #1 and the character's disappearance following Flashpoint and the New 52 reboot.

With Tara Chase in Queen & Country, Rucka went further, and we have a character who is almost entirely made of flaws. Tara is a genuinely competent, even gifted, MI-6 agent but as the series progresses we learn that not only does she have significant emotional flaws but that she was selected as an elite “Minder” agent because of them: they make her a more effective weapon in her handler's arsenal but cause her enormous pain as a human being.

Both of these characters are praised, not universally of course, and under certain interpretations of the phrase they could certainly be called “strong female characters” but that's not what makes them most interesting. I'd rather have meaningfully “complex” over meaninglessly “strong” any day. 

The Rewards of Necromancy

Okay, this one wasn't my idea, exactly. As is evident from past hobby posts I have searched for years in vain for a motivational method to keep me focused on painting. I've tried targets, I've tried doing A Tale Of One Gamer (Dwarfs were not as inspiring as I'd hoped) and other methods too boring to list and pretty much gave up on the idea.

Then my friend Matt and I read the Humbling Of Settra scenario in White Dwarf #30. The idea is simple: Nagash on his own versus the opposing player's entire Tomb Kings collection.

I've got a lot of Tomb Kings models: few are built, none are painted. I had an opportunity to pick up a whole army's worth on the cheap a few years ago and took it. They've been a “rainy day” project ever since and now the day seems to have come. Matt and I intend to play the scenario some time in January between the end of our current narrative campaign and the beginning of the next. I've got four months to paint as many Tomb Kings miniatures as I can.

As an added spur to work I'm going to set myself some rewards for the first few milestones. Another friend of mine does this and his method is that he likes tanks, he loves tanks so when he finishes a big infantry unit he'll reward himself with a tank. I like centrepiece miniatures, I like doing a real production number on something flashy so here are my rewards, my presents to myself:

500 points completed: I get to paint my Ushabti. I love Ushabti and the original great weapon ones look beautiful in Finecast.

1,000 points: The Necrosphinx, a beautiful centrepiece. I'm thinking a jade effect for the body.

1,500 points: A couple of years ago Matt made me a custom “Scorpion” Warsphinx for my birthday: a mash-up of Necrosphinx and the Arachnarok Spider from the Orcs & Goblins range. Definitely something I should paint up now I have reason and some idea of how I want to colour it.

2,000 points: At this stage I get to buy a Nagash model of my very own.

I'll set further rewards if I exceed these targets but that should be more than enough to be getting on with. 

Is Peter Capaldi working from the Colin Baker playbook?

SPOILERS FOR SATURDAY'S DOCTOR WHO EPISODE “DEEP BREATH”.

There's a lot to be said about Peter Capaldi's début episode, amongst them the fact that I'm finally starting to like Clara and that Vastra and Jenny are finally gaining some layers, both as characters and as a couple. What I want to concentrate on is that Capaldi seems to be playing a Doctor, and Moffat seems to be writing a Doctor, who calls back to the series' least popular period.

So it was the mid-Eighties, Colin Baker was the Doctor and I'm sort of reading tea leaves after that because every first hand account of this period wildly contradicts every other first hand account. As far as anyone can tell there was a plan or an idea or a vague, vague notion of running a story arc where the Sixth Doctor would start out unsympathetic and the audience would warm to him over years. It didn't work: Colin Baker started off his era by trying to strangle his (female and heavily sexualised) companion, an act for which he never apologises and she just sort of passively forgives him for even as he continues to be genuinely unpleasant to her.

Once all the feminists in the audience have stopped vomiting, we'll continue.

Anyway, the plan failed. During Colin Baker's second story, a dreadful act of continuity porn called Attack Of The Cybermen, a quarter of the audience just up and left and Doctor Who pretty much died there and then. It was put on hiatus after that season, brought back for a significantly shorter run after which Baker was fired and then generally lurched about the TV schedules for three more years during which it improved immensely but no one was paying attention anymore. From there its cancellation, the Wilderness Years and then the 2005 revival.

It went wrong then, can it work now?

Well, for one thing Capaldi's moment of betraying Clara is almost instantly redeemed. He might be unpredictable but he isn't acting totally against the Doctor's moral code (like, oh, for instance: strangling a defenceless woman!). There's an ambiguous moment with the bad guy of the week where either he kills himself or is killed by the Doctor but the villain is a genuine threat whose survival would have meant the deaths of Clara and the Paternoster Gang. “Would you kill to save your friends' lives?” is a moral ambiguity people can get behind and debate.

There's also the fact Moffat is working with a greater level of audience trust than John Nathan-Turner had in the 1980s. 1980s Who was past its heyday and trying to hold onto an audience that still sort of missed Tom Baker. Modern Who gets more than ten million viewers an episode opposed to the about seven million JNT had in the era we're discussing.

There's more goodwill these days, is what I'm saying. Most of the last seven seasons have been good quality, quite a bit has been fantastic whilst Colin Baker came in after quite a few years of... shall we say “problematic” production values on the series?

I must admit, love Matt Smith's Doctor as I did I was getting a bit fatigued on the series last year, especially as Clara never clicked with me (she's doing better now) so I'm very much looking forward to seeing where this is going.