30k - Vlyka Fenryka - Space Wolves Commander and Wolves - Horus Heresy

A veteran Space Wolf Commander accompanied by his two pet wolves, Doppleganger and Lange

As regular readers of this blog will know I am lucky enough to have a very dedicated girlfriend who is exceptionally supportive of my hobby! In fact not only does she support me in my miniature endeavours...she also actively participates in them, regularly taking to the field opposite me and utilising one of my secondary armies on the tabletop! Well she has recently decided to up her game (excuse the pun) a bit and actually build her own force of Space Marines to lead to war, and being a loving boyfriend I have sworn to help her in this sacred mission...consider it my Oath of Moment!

30k - Heresy - Sons of Horus Centurion and Painting Tutorial

Those of you who read my blog frequently may remember that back at the tail-end of last year I started (yet another) project, in this case my goal was to build a force of Pre-Heresy/30k Sons of Horus Legiones Astartes for use in playing Horus Heresy themed battles. I initially churned out a ten man squad of Tactical Marines clad in Mk III battle-plate from Forge World. As these models are comparatively detailed and expensive I made sure that I spent an inoridnate amount of time on painting them and finally I produced what I consider to be my best work yet:

http://classicastartes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/sons-of-horus-30k-legion-project-with.html

Anyway after this first squad was finished I moved onto other more pressing projects and they were pushed to one side and relegated to my niche models shelf. However recently my girlfriend has started collecting pre-heresy Space Wolves and I decided that I would expand my own 30k forces in tandem with her so that we would have roughly equal opponents to face! With this idea fixed firmly in my mind I decided to get to work on creating a commander for my Cthonian warriors...

Sons of Horus Centurion

...the end result was this fine fellow, a company captain/centurion armed with a fairly substantial power axe and a boarding shield for close assault devastation. I have a fair selection of resin models from Forge World that I could have used for the model, however I wanted something fairly unique and so I rustled this guy together. His body, which is clad in heavily-customised Mk III armour is one of the 'Masters of the Chapter' models released by GW back in 2006 and is a nice weighty model made of white metal and possessing sufficient proportions to stand comfortably alongside the slightly larger models that FW produce.

Second Edition 40k: Skirmishes and Tanks

This weekend one of my best mates was on leave from his job in the Navy (Royal not Imperial) and unusually I was also on leave at the same time, this is a rare occurrence and we decided to celebrate it by getting a few games of second edition 40k under our belts! Unfortunately he was unable to get ahold of his assorted armies due to storage issues and so I happily provided both forces for the game, cracking out the venerable (modern) Crimson Fists and (1980's) Salamanders Space Marines. 

The forces for the first battle were drawn from the original Codex Ultramarines and consisted of a Chaplain, a tactical squad, a combat squad, an assault squad and a predator tank each. Instead of drawing mission cards I decided to give us both the Take and Hold task in order to expedite things, this allowed me to place my recently completed rhino wreckage in the centre of the board as the objective. The battlefield itself was kept relatively simple with a few ruins and a lot of craters littering the area, all finished off with a liberal splatter of the ubiquitous 1980s lichen.

With the terrain set up we both set about deploying our small skirmish forces on the 3 x 5 playing area,

A Predator's eye view from the Salamander's battleline

My First Retro Wargames Article

As many of you will know I have been writing this blog for nearly two years now (wow....time flies) and it has been something of a medium of expression for my love of all things retro and Oldhammer related!

I like to consider myself one of the more proactive members of the community and I spend a fair proportion of my time (both online and in the dreaded real world) espousing the virtues of all things retro in the hope of turning more converts to our noble past time.

Well I have recently upped my game a bit (excuse the pun) and have had a full article on retro gaming published in a well-known games magazine. That's right, my article entitled 'Out with the New and in with the Old' can be found in the latest issue of Wargames, Strategy and Soldiers (WSS).