Still Alive!

I feel like I've settled into the North East nicely, and it's lovely to be near more of my family.

I'm lucky enough to have a car so I can explore clubs that are further away from me than MAD Gamers was down South.

So far I've explored five, and experienced an exceptionally warm welcome in all of them!

Newcastle Warlords

Whitley Bay 3D Gamers

Contempible Little Wargames Club

The Rusted Revolver Gaming

Heaton Games Society

A useful website which collated a list of such clubs was the Edge of Empire podcast blog, which has a general North-East club list in the link, there.

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People play all kinds of different games.  Often the age range of the players determines what is fashionable at any one time.  Clubs with younger folks definitely stick more to newer games and the systems that Games Workshop have currently available.

With that in mind I tried to get a hold of some Age of Sigmar figures and that's why I dug out my Space Wolves to paint some test figures for them.

Of course, being the self-sabotaging make-everything-difficult-for-myself kind of person I am, I decided that the paint scheme for my Stormcast Eternals should be one of the harder ones to do.

Instead of the "chapters" which Space Marines are organised into in Warhammer 40,000, the Stormcast Eternals are instead themed around "Chambers" with different colours and icongraphy.  One which appealed to me is called the Knights Excelsior, with a mostly white, blue and gold scheme.  The iconography of this faction is meant to be an eclipse, not the hammer of the starter set models.

  However, there is a similarly coloured chamber mentioned in the Stormcast rulebook called the Maelstrom of Light.  I thought that that was a good enough excuse to be able to mix iconography in my force.  I haven't quite finished this test model, it's not been varnished and I haven't added any grass to the base, but felt it was good enough to show off a picture.

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  I also began my second 40k squad, this time of Space Wolf Scouts.  Again, going back to models I glued haphazardly half a decade a go then mothballed reminds me of all the mistakes I made and learned from.  There are so many fiddly, hard to paint nooks and crannies in these models due to how I glued them!  I have to remind myself: these are not Golden Demon models, they just have to be good enough to push around a tabletop.

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And here is evidence of me actually playing a game!  At the Contemptible Little Wargames Club I demonstrated a game of Warmaster; Chaos versus High Elves.  It was a lot of fun as Warmaster is the only game I can lay on entirely by myself, terrain and armies, fully painted.  Even two full armies and terrain don't fill up too many boxes as it's only 10mm in scale.  This photo is from me tidying up a lot of casualties at the game end, most of them mine!

A couple of other wargamers have mentioned that they might have some models for Warmaster lying around.  It was never as popular as Epic but it does create some fascination in being an official Warhammer universe game in a smaller scale.  I hope that if I convince others to join in for a game or two I might get some regular opponents - even if I have to provide the models!