Where's Julian?
Where's Julian?
Well the good news is I haven't disappeared in a cloud of white smoke and been transported to the pages of an entertaining series of books in my stripey jumper! I'm still right here where you left me, you just needed to look harder!
Lots of things have happened in the past few months, although not as much has happened in my gaming life as I would like. Work and family commitments have again consumed my time, leaving me very little time for gaming, although I have been able to squeeze one or two hours in over a weekend for the past few months to keep up with my gaming and hobbies.
In December 2018 I took part in a Warhammer 40k narrative mega battle, Vigilus Laid Waste, at OTT. I really enjoyed this, even though I lost my game. It was a great event, and on socialising and speaking with other members there, they were able to point out a few aspects of my army which could be improved.
I considered the suggestions given to me for my 40k Space Marine army, and two things I decided to improve were my fast attack and assault options. So with this in mind, I spent my Christmas money gifts on trawling through eBay to find some second hand models I could put to use in either a fast attack unit, or an assault unit.
I have spent a bit of my time over the past few months sorting out my new 40k mini acquisitions.
I picked up quite a few Space Marine bikes, although most of them are missing parts in some way or other. Most of the bikes don't need the paint stripped off them (which is a relief) and so with a bit of repair and rebuild work I will get these assembled into a couple of units. Now I have most of the bikes stripped down and cleaned up, the next job is to either buy or cast the missing parts for the bikes.
I also picked up a couple of squads of Space Marine assault troops, although the paint job on most of these was quite heavy handed, so they are currently sitting in a jar of cleaning fluid (I am using methylated spirits with reasonable results). Once I get these out and cleaned up, I will get them reassembled and added to the paint queue.
It is difficult to not buy more than you need when shopping online, so when I was shopping I decided to pick up a few more Space Marine character models I needed to flesh out my army. As most of these were metal minis these were quite easy to strip the paint off, so I tackled these first. I have just completed the rebuild of these and have added them to the paint queue with a couple of the other character minis I had had lying in a box for the past 10 years. I am hoping to get these all painted before the end of this year! lol
The rest of my gaming and hobby time over the past few months has been spent on one of those crazy projects which sounds good at the start, but a few months in you think to yourself “what am I doing?” I decided I needed a library, and not just any library. This was no simple wizards study, or large reading room in a manor; this was to be the grand library for the Frostgrave Library scenario.
I needed to be able to fill about a 2ft square section with bookshelves and tables. The tables I will consider later as I have some tables from the Heroquest boardgame that would suffice, so what I really needed was bookshelves; and books, loads of books!
The building of the bookshelves and books is not difficult, but is quite laborious considering how much I have to actually produce. I have some books, potion bottles and scrolls already made so I have a head start on these, but what I really needed was bookshelves. The task started out quite easily, but when I began to lay out the space, I quickly discovered I needed a lot more bookshelves than I had originally believed. With this in mind I have been steadily building the bookshelves over the past few months. I am on the final dozen or so bookshelf carcases so hopefully in the next few weeks I will be painting and filling these with books.
So, on the whole, even though I haven't achieved much over the past few months, everything has been moving along slowly and steadily, albeit there has been only two main projects on the table so far.
J