Apologies dear readers, as you may have noticed I’ve been a little quiet of late but that does not mean I have not been busy! It finally got announced that I am doing a novel for Winged Hussar Publishing called ‘Rage and Grace’ (Excitement all round! Woo woo!) So I’ve been busy on that. As you can probably agree, adding to the general stories and joy of Kings or War is far more important than merely writing about it! I’ll cover lots about the writing process and the story in a future blog but that will be a while yet. There are lot of books in the release schedule and mine is far down the list, and the stupidbumsmell pandemic has pushed everything even further down.
I did write a blog though, and I decided in the end not to publish it. A Facebook post posed a query about wether people paint their armies in different skin colours and that got me thinking so I wrote a piece of both gender and racism in Kings of War. They’re subjects that are quite heavy in the media and every aspect of life seems to be under analysis so I thought I’d analyse ours, not from any personal views but out of sheer curiosity. Obviously its a volatile subject but I’ve never been afraid to open my mouth. I checked it over and got several learned people to read it over before I posted it just to make sure it was balanced, insightful and reasonable. I re-wrote parts and left it a while to look at it with fresh eyes. It was then I saw a poll in the Pannithor wiki Facebook page asking what people wanted to see in the novels.
‘More stories involving the named characters from KoW army lists’ was the top choice with 16 votes. There were 15 different poll options and right there down at the bottom with no votes at all was….
‘Stories where thematic commentary on real world issues is the central focus’.
No votes. Not one. And this mirrored my own view. We come to fantasy to explore new worlds and while real world themes exist in Pannithor, war, betrayal, greed, faith etc, bringing a loaded modern media frenzy is simply not needed or wanted.
Real world bullshit can stay in the real world.
It’s the same reason I haven’t blogged at all about the pandemic and the effect it has had. We know full well what effect it has had on all of us and our lives and gaming so there’s no need for another blog from me to drag further misery into our happy place.
But it seems we have a bright future ahead. Watching the Mantic-fest releases shows that we already have a huge amount of cool new miniatures coming out and the tournament scene is getting pretty well booked.
Already I have a rescheduled tournament at the brilliant Tabletop Republic in July and another in November. I’m making the long trip up to Stockport in September to Element games for the FFS/Troll thing tournament and then there’s Clash of Kings at the new Firestorm Games in October. There’s also the possibility of the London Grand tournament too but that’s a lot of events in a short time and once hotels and travel hit my pocket that might be one too far. Plus I’m no fan of big multi-game events like that and the LGT has had some hideous reviews in the past so I won’t cry if I miss it.
One of the fun aspects of this line up is that every one has a different army list points value. With plenty of time in advance for once I’ve actually been looking at army lists, getting one I’m happy with and working towards building and painting it. Usually I tend to paint models I have and work towards making them work for me. It has the effect that many of my armies don’t synergise well until I’ve played a couple of tournaments with them and get new stuff to add in. After 3 Clash of Kings with my Trident Realms I finally reached an army list I was more or less happy with.
So for 1495 points at Tabletop republic I’m hitting with Forces of Nature. Two naiad hordes and a hydra will provide my base line with huge amount of ensnare, regen and nerve to get through at that points level. Backed up by an inspiring, healing Avatar of the Green lady they aren’t going anywhere. My counter punch will consist of a regiment of Centaur Bray striders and a beast of nature and a troop of bray-hunters and a pegasus for chaff/flank charge support and finally a unicorn with a boomstick to inspire, heal and zap anything annoying. Anything wanting to get through the naiads will have to overcommit a lot if they want to break them which means they won’t have the necessary forces left to deal with my fast stuff.
FFS/Trollthing is at 2000pts and for this I just decided to go stupid. I don’t often plan armies in advance, sometimes buying models and units I like with the idea of putting them into an army in the future. Sometimes I manage to get hold of stuff cheaply in sales or trades that might look fun or I’ll start armies and run out of steam really quickly. As a result I had a fair few dwarves hanging around and reading over the free dwarf list an idea slowly formed in my mind. Badgers. My buddy Duncan ‘Shadow’ Louca is great at sculpting animals and I’m a loyal member of his brilliant Patreon so I asked if he could sculpt some for me that I could use as swarms in place of hunting mastiffs. It got stupid quickly and 4 swarms later I have a lot of badgers! So 4 regiments of ironclad with throwing badgers gives me plenty of unit strength and piercing shots, 4 swarms of hunting badgers with throwing badgers is even worse. And a packmaster to make all those shots vicious? It’s so crazy it might just work. But if you’re going crazy then you may as well go really crazy. 2 regiments of Brock riders and a foot regiment of bezerkers gives a bit of punch, Sveri on a BIG badger gives me even more and finishing the list is a bezerker lord on badger and another with wings of honey maze to go hunting irritating things. Its fast, it’s crazy, and it might just work.
I’m doing these two armies for now. Clash of Kings is now up to 2300 points and as I always take a Mantic army for that so I’ll probably continue with the Forces of Nature depending on how my first list does. Maybe some surging/windblasting greater air elementals would be a nice addition. I still have two painted hordes of water elementals that haven’t seen the tabletop yet. Or my Forces of the Abyss are languishing in a box waiting to get finished…. We shall see! I may change my mind completely.
In other news I am now the proud owner of both League of Infamy and Armada. I have no one to play against, no time to paint the models and barely had chance to look at them but I love them anyway. Im also working on a Lord of the Rings style Kingdoms of Men army which is lots of fun.
So between novel writing, all this army preparation for my return to civilisation and being bombarded with awesome new stuff, I hope to write a proper blog again one day. You’ve just read the entire page when you could have read this last paragraph. Sucker.
Get older. Don't grow up. 