Blogomorph no.1

In which we discover what a blogomorph is, discuss Star Wars Zero Company, and the latest in Warhammer small scale battles: Battle March!

Blogo-what?

You may be wondering what this blogomorph business is about, and quite rightly too! It’s a) my none-too clever portemanteau of blog and lagomorph, and b) my attempt at changing things up a little bit around here. I’ve been wanting to have a space to discuss gaming/modelling topics in a manner lighter than writing full posts about them for a little while now, and tacking these pieces to my normal posts about painting a unit etc hasn’t felt quite right. A good example of this was my attempt a little while back to put in some book reviews at the end of posts (the short lived From the Shelves series). While I enjoyed doing that it felt a bit weird having these posts with two quite distinct themes.

The other side of things I wanted to address was the limitation I’d placed on myself to only post finished things to the blog. While this has driven a lot of progress through my backlog of models, it’s rate limited posts to how fast I can paint. In busy periods this has meant posts dropping to once a month or couple of months in some cases.

Finally, while I quite enjoy writing and would like to do more of it, my post per finished unit format was a bit limiting in itself. There’s only so much you can write about the third unit of goblins you’ve painted in a row.

All of the above has lead me to want to try having two types of posts on the blog: 1. These blogomorph posts, which will be more regular shoot from the hip looks into things that interest me, WIP shots, and such; and 2. In-depth posts where I go deeper into one topic, such as reviewing a full army I’ve just finished, battle reports, full on discussions about games etc. These in-depth/deep dive (undecided on the name as yet), will happen when they happen (i.e. when I have something to talk about!).

The blog is turning 6 tomorrow, which is wild to think about as I did not imagine I would go on for this long. I’ve been enjoying it greatly however and this feels like a good way to welcome 6 more years! I hope you enjoy this experiment, time will tell if it sticks!

Star Wars Zero Company

Zero Company is a new strategy video game that is basically XCOM but Star Wars, and I’ve been enjoying it greatly. I get along well with this genre of turn-based tactical game (it’s effectively the video game version of tabletop skirmish games so perhaps not that surprising). That being said I’ve not played much of the XCOM games themselves which is probably an omission on my part. My favourite entries in this style so far have been the Shadowrun games that were released 10 or so years ago (I recommend them if you like this genre and/or Shadowrun as a setting).

Anyway back to Zero Company. I’ve been enjoying the story so far and the gameplay has been great fun. The battles are tough if you’re not paying attention but not crazy hard which is a nice mix to keep you not too frustrated and interested. A weird (for this genre of game) upside has been the level of the graphics and the character customisation options. The game looks good and you can change a lot of stuff about the characters which has on a few occasions lead me down a rabbit hole of tweaking characters rather than actually playing the game…

For me, a usual side effect of getting into something Star Wars-related is the rising need to paint some Star Wars Legion models. As you start the game, you get to create the leader of Zero Company (called Hawks but that’s pretty much the only fixed thing), and I ended up with a look I quite liked so decided it would be fun to paint a model in that scheme.

The new Rebel Commandos set for Legion has models that are bang on for reproducing my version of Hawks (Fatigues, Twi’lek heads, sniper blaster), so I just assembled this out of the box, no conversion needed.

A quick one-sitting paintjob later and I had successfully expunged my need to paint some Star Wars models (although for how long, we will see…). If you’ve followed the blog for a while you might recognise the basing as matching that of my Imperial army. One of my many project ideas is to make a rebel force that matches those imperials for cool Endor-themed games. That project is now one model strong!

I’ve started taking note of my recipes in a notebook as that lets me keep proper paint swatches alongside the paint names, which makes keeping track of mixes and finding matches for paints going out of production much easier. That’s the theory at least, let’s see how it works out in practice.

On the Painting Table

Besides the Hawks model above, I’ve been busy painting some Dwarfs for Warhammer. Recently Games Workshop released an updated edition of the Warhammer Old World rules as well as a book called Battle March which has rules for playing small games of Warhammer (500-700 points). It has modified army selection rules to make games of that size interesting as well as a cool set of narrative scenarios which is right up my alley. Battle March armies are very roughly 3-4 small units and a character which makes for a nice self-contained painting project.

This seemed like a great excuse to paint up some small armies so I trawled through my collection of unpainted models and decided it was time to get paint on some of my old Dwarfs. I’m lucky enough to have quite a few of the middlehammer-era (think 2000s) Dwarfs and it’s a shame they’re still just bare metal, so this seemed like a great excuse to rectify that without being overwhelmed by needing to paint a full army.

I’ve pretty much finished the Hammerer unit, but have hit a hurdle: I don’t have era-appropriate shields in my bitz box (the horror!). I’ve since found some on ebay so that problem will be solved once they arrive but it’s been a bit of a hit to motivation (which is ridiculous, as you can see I have two units of longbeards and a character I could paint while I wait).

I’ve had some good luck 3D printing bases for my Midgard models so I thought I’d try to make some for these models. I have buckets of 20mm square bases in my stash, but severely lack the 25mm the current rules ask of these models. They came out pretty good and I’m relatively confident the layer lines will be hard to see once the base rim is painted.

I’m hoping these Dwarfs will make for a nice first “Deep Dive” post when I have the whole army painted up.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for joining me in this blogsperiment, I hope you enjoy the format, it’s been fun to write and I think it hits what I’m after for these which is a nice bonus.