It's all your fault, you encouraged them ...

Another day, another post. This time, it's my latest addiction - Firestorm: Armada. It's like Battlefleet Gothic but with no flying castles. I have chosen the Sorylian Collective as my fleet of choice to help the sales push at Wargames Inc. All next week I am running intro games for the peons who blight my life. I'm also proxying enemy fleets with BFG models, so you needn't feel like a lemon if you don't have the toys the cool kids have. You'll just look like that kid in the corner - you know, the outsider who no-one really likes. Which is why hugely muscular male barbarian miniatures are not homoerotic in any way whatsoever. Pictured below is 17cm of resin warship that actually fits together. That's right, it's nothing to do with Forge World at all.

A similar metal BFG ship (Cairn Class Tombship or Marine Battle Barge) will set you back £20, plus you won't actually be able to play a Games Workshop Specialist game in a Games Workshop store as the guys at GW Loughborough found out when the area manager bollocked the GW staff member who had foolishly allowed the regulars to play a GW game in a GW store. Apparently, as it's not a core game it's not welcome as it doesn't encourage massive sales of Space Machines. This was after the aforesaid regulars had done about £500 on BFG product. Really fucking professional to dress down a staff member in front of the customers and on the shop floor.

The above Sorylian battleship is in stark contrast to the latest bolus of plastic shit to be listlessly dripped from the sphincter of the GW design studio's derelict, rotting tract by some form of decrepit peristalsis. These atrocities are actually real models that are expected to sell. Looking like a skinned Damian Hurst exhibit, these things have been on the kind of steroid/antibiotic shit that are force-fed to beef cattle to the nth degree. Un-fucking-believable. Abdominal muscles all the way up to their necks and arms like Nelson's fucking column. All this screams 'I want to be a Rat-Ogre' in a loud voice. Not as skinned-rat looking like the 'Dire Wolves' in the Vampire Counts range, but rat looking all the same. Whoever put this shit together also understands nothing about anatomy, it seems, beyond the basic requirements of a biped - one head, two arms, two legs and a body.

I don't think that creativity should be stifled, but (paraphrasing from an interview with a GW sculptor I read a while back) you need to learn the rules before you can break them effectively. All this seems to have flown over the head of the deaf, blind, dumb and dead moron who okayed the go-ahead of this addition to the range of ungilded turds, who seems to not understand that you shouldn't have biceps over the shin bone. However, the number one crime that has been committed is the fact that they don't have cloven hooves.

Now call me a bitter classisist if you will (and I'll call you a twat) but having standard, clawed legs means these are just large Beastmen. That's all. I imagine that they will be really heavy hitters, but that won't change the fact that these models are just shit. And the fur - my God, the fur - looks like it has just got some doormats stapled to it's skin. Workshop has a shitload of cash invested in haptic sculpting tools and 3d software and spend a fortune on tooling these molds to pump out rotting smeg. They wouldn't do it if idiots (i.e. you) wouldn't buy the shit. That's the only way to make GW change their mind - hit them in the accounts department. However, don't take my rant for it here are the offending miniatures:

Now compare those to this green from Felix Paniagua (fired from the GW studio), a more traditional minotaur from his Avatars of War range:

Note how it looks like a minotaur, even though it is heavily muscled, and the hair looks like hair and not like a rug randomly glued to any extremity available. And it has the traditional cloven legs, not rippling fields of undulating meat contracting like an ocean of giant spasmodic penises. I fucking hate how they have completely ruined the flavour of the Beastmen army, leaving it bland and tasteless. Genericised for mass consumption it's like Big Mac special sauce but with the main ingredient being blood-flecked ejaculate. And it will be you fuckers that perpetuate this artistic blight. Twenty seven pounds sterling for three models. Like Tyranid Ravenors but shit. A massive let-down after the Trygon kit.

Right, it's midnight and I have had enough of the lack of taste that GW preys upon to shift most of it's fucking product. You may deserve this shit, but I don't.

Rob
Angry at the river of cash avoiding him

The after-con report in full lacklustre-o-rama

Well, last con of the year and it was Dragonmeet. Run by Angus Abranson, the director of Cubicle 7 Entertainment (publishers of SLA Industries and Cthulhu Britannica among others), Dragonmeet has been going for a little while to say the least. So, time to pack up the shop and head down to drizzly London for what is essentially an indoor market place for the hobby industry. Turned out it was a 16 hour day. Fucking 16 hours to get to and from and trade at what, essentially, is a roleplayers convention. This fact was hammered home later on in the day when a couple of Anne Rice twinkly vampire woe is me Twilight types pointed at the stall and opined 'We don't need any of that here'.

I was ready to perform one of the following actions: berate them with the history of roleplay games - essentially they are derivative of a game called 'Chainmail', which featured a fantasy supplement called 'Dungeons and Dragons' - or perform an anal lobotomy. Unfortunately I then remembered I can't pick on the disabled and left them to their rousing discussion of GNS theory and how cool it would be to suckle at Ron Edward's cock or whatever shit they were burbling on about.(Don't you just know that when the cover of an RPG has shit Poser models rendered in wank-o-vision it's going to be great. Or a portentous piece of storytelling twaddle).

Anyway, back to the con. The wonderful Smog:1889 miniatures I was sure that any self respecting miniature lover would give his functioning testicle for (or at least pay the price on the fucking box for) turned out to be a bit of a bust - only one person bought any. I did get complaints about the pricing, though. Apparently a direct conversion via xe.com isn't good enough for people who, surprisingly, are prepared to pay a premium for models cast in cheap-shit resin that don't fit together from Forge World. Oh no. Because it's not fucking space machines, because they are well cast with minimal (if any) mold lines and fit together almost perfectly people expect them for fuck all. People forget that these are 54mm minis, and the price point is competitive with Forge World on comparable models and the product is far more imaginative to boot. Bastards.

However, there were some great things about the con, too. Chief of which were Pagan Angel, where I got some awesome t-shirts (and the lovely lady who runs the shop wears skimpy fetish gear ALL DAY), and Leisure Games, who have a real cute girl working for them. Real cute. Shallow of me, I know. But it made the day worthwhile. Also cool were the guys who actually bought from me, especially Rob, an American who likes his Flames of War and Fred, who is into his 40K and Fantasy. I ended up talking to Fred and his friends quite a lot, and getting free cooking theory lessons from a Frenchman is all good.

Now I imagine some of you are thinking I'm one of those people who dislike roleplay games, and I do. On the computer, they generally suck (WoW is just a fancy chat program if you ask me). However, I got into the hobby through real roleplaying games (well, eventually, anyway) and I have a stash of goodies, including a pile of books from the greatest roleplay game ever, Cyberpunk. I'm just getting back into roleplaying, so I'm getting into it with a system I know and love - Dead Reign, from Palladium Games. Why the Palladium system? Because I like their stuff. I don't care if Kevin Siembieda is a dick who fucks people over, I like his product. So the trials and tribulations of my foray into the RPG world will feature here too. You lucky, lucky bastards.

The final highlight (aside from sneaking glances over at Leisure Games Girl and Pagan Angel Lady) was meeting Nigel and Ash Pyne, creators of War for Edaðh (Edath), a two player card game. I played Nigel and got crushed pretty handily, and I knew I had to have the game, so I borrowed the money off my helper and bought it. I also got my rulebooks signed by the pair of them. Just like a comics convention. Wargames Inc will be stocking it very soon, I'm sure.

I really enjoyed talking to people just to see the hunted look on their faces - you know, the 'Oh shit, I have to interact with someone and I bet the bastard is trying to sell me something' look that was on a fair few faces, I can tell you. It seems the average RPG geek is no better at social relationships than their digital counterparts, just more looked down upon. And I have to say, trim, good-looking French and American men aside, that I was a veritable sporting 'jock' type compared to some - even smoking 20 a day I could finish the 100 metres an hour before some of the people I saw. However, Dragonmeet is well worth going to, it's a great day out, just watch out for the expensive parking and the fact that it's £1.20 for a single can of Coke. I dread to think how much a pack of fags is.

Today, the plan is to get some prep done on my Skorne inbetween serving the multitude of customers (dodging the tumbleweed) so I can get some more batch-painting done for my Skorne. I want to get a unit done, so it might be the Praetorian Karax, or it might be the Tyrant Commander (which is a shitty cast - 90% of the model is covered in extensive pitting, so it's going to look like it's pebbledashed). I can't be arsed to change it though, so it stays. I'll be putting pictures of the progress up soon, along with some pics of my latest flight of idiocy which will provide many a chuckle, I'm sure.

As I sit here on my fattening arse at shitty o'clock in the morning typing this diatribe, all I can honestly think about is how much I would like a latte with an extra shot of espresso. What a cock, eh?

Rob
Angry at his insomnia