The IRL stuff of The Gaming Yeti

So my Grand Master Librarian Thecarius has been sitting dormant for some time now due to other circumstances interfering. Namely that of the surgery of my child.

It was only a simple procedure, tonsils and adenoids out and grommets put in, but the pent up stress about the matter has been weighing on me even stronger than I realised.

It wasn't until she was done and was showing a superb recovery that I began to relax and understand how much I had worked myself up over it.

Here's a picture of her on the hospital bed stealing some of my garlic bread. She was keen to get eating and drinking straight away, I had to slow her down in case she got sick from it heh.

So after a week or so, once the kids are all settled down again and I have my uni work under control, expect some return posts of the Reclusiarchy Dark Angels force. As I may have mentioned, I do so love the idea of the Chaplains and will always have my forces being led by them.

And here's the little me snuggled up watching some cartoons after she got out of hospital. She made me retake the photo twice to ensure all of her toys had their faces shown properly.

So for a few weeks I shall be incommunicado but then expect to see some paint jobs and hopefully the beginnings of my conversion work of an Interrogator Chaplain on a Ravenwing Bike, wielding the mighty Mace of Redemption.

The Rise of the WAAAGH!

So this is the story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down. I found myself suddenly living on the Sunshine Coast with a lot more spare time on my hands and a strong desire to return to the hobby I had forsaken for many years, so I did what any stereotypical nerd would do, I went searching on the internet.

I recalled a gaming site of old called Warseer and put up a few posts on there and was eventually directed to an Australian based gaming site called WargamerAU. It was there that I found a collection of forums dedicated to local gaming clubs and much to my satisfaction i located one not all that far from me. So I loaded my gear into my trusty steed (a run down ford falcon) and off I went.

Much to my dismay I was not greeted with warm welcome by all. Sure, there were people there and they were indeed playing the tabletop games that I wanted to play, but there was a definitive feeling of being an outsider. And to top it off, it was raining. What I found instead was basically a closed group, although they most probably did not even realise it. Nobody was rude, nobody was rejecting, but neither was anyone welcoming, and this I fear led to that club's eventual demise. The positive side of that day was that I did eventually meet a few people and had a game and had some fun.

The entire experience however, left me feeling like this was not the place for me. It was a group of people who've known each other for a long time and who most likely fit in that introvertive personality trait that many other gamers and geeks and nerds belong to. It's not to say they were bad people, far from it, many in fact are quite nice and awesome people, and since that day I've had many a game with them. It was, though, a negative environment to newcomers.

So in order to remedy my situation of a lack of gaming partners, I went and started my own club, only not with the blackjack and hookers. I put up some tentative posts and had a few responses.

What surprised me though was the turnout, whilst initially it was just a trickle, it turned into a flood. And after 3 months, the fortnightly meets turned into weekly, and after 6 months the stress of running it all led me to realise I wasn't having fun anymore so I essentially 'went public' and got a group together to decide on a leadership team to keep the club running so I could go back to having fun and playing games.

Fast forward a year and we've since moved to a larger hall to accommodate the more people we were receiving as our initial hall was quite tiny. Now we have the room to handle many more people and I hope we can continue to grow.

You can find our club forum here, BeerWaaagh!. If you're in the area, even if just temporarily, we're welcoming to all new comers and there's always someone fresh for a game.

Thecarius progress and my painting ADD

Unfortunately the weather on the sunshine coast has been non stop rain for quite a while now and my only airbrushing site is located outside and due to the share house nature and small children, is a set up and pack up in one go deal. Which makes it difficult to get in practice or time at all.

My plan was to mostly use the airbrush to get going on Thecarius but I got bored and began anyway. Also, as I've recently started using a thinner to my paints I find they take longer to dry between coats or colours, so in order to alleviate the boredom of waiting I began on other models as well.

So, here is the progress of Thecarius so far, I have basically undercoated him with a German Yellow Primer, my plan is to make him a much lighter blue than my previous power armour Librarian, not sure why yet fluffwise, I just want a lighter blue. I'll reason it out later, in the meantime here he is:

So while I waited for that coat to dry, and got bored and wandered off into my other projects I also started working on these guy guys, my Deathwing Knights Knight Master, and a chaos Chosen warrior that I'm converting into using as a possessed unit champ and as a kill team member with the daemonic USR.

The Knight also doesn't have much to show just yet, I was definitely far more interested today in Chaos.

The Chaos Chosen: The Warrior Balguun, has begun his daemonic transition with some warping of the flesh onto his lightning claws as well as his leg and shoulderpads. The painting is as yet unfinished, i opted for the bright blue as the beginning colour of the warped flesh as I felt it contrasted much better with the world eaters colour theme I'm aiming for. So, here's two pics of Balguun, front and side.

These pics were brought to you today by my crappy phone as my SLR camera is in a few pieces at the moment whilst I attempt to clean the fingermarks from my children off the lense. I promise to have some better quality pics next time, also I'll have the primary blue done on Thecarius.

I look forward to reading some comments, especially on the beginnings of the work on Balguun, the Chosen.

Painting Thecarius

I shall be documenting my painting of this guy as time goes by, I am waiting on the backorder of paints yet to come, when those guys arrive (as they include some of the new undercoats I want to test out) I shall begin painting Thecarius, he'll be a shining beacon of blueness as is fitting of a Librarian of the Imperium of Man, with some dark angels adornment of course.

Thecarius the Termiator Librarian

Ok, so here's a picture of the librarian in terminator armour i recently created. I unfortunately didn't document the process, but i'll give a brief rundown.

I was working with parts from the deathwing knights set and the dark angels bits sprue, i had some spare terminator legs from the DA sprue, and the front, head and gun arm from the knights sprue. But i had no proper terminator chest.

So i used the back end of a normal power armour pack, added the backpack to it and glued it to the front part of a terminator piece. This of course left large gaps and holes and looked all around quite silly.

To remedy this situation I added the cloak from the knights sprue, and built a greenstuff rear armour for the only visible parts. This was nice and easy to do as i knew that most would be hidden by the presence of the backpack and of course the arms.

I recently obtained some power swords and other items from Hoard 'O Bits and used one of those swords, some items from the DA bits sprue to flesh it out and added a nice book bit to his shoulderpad.

His base as you can see is in the process of being terraformed into an ice wasteland to suit that of the rest of the army (of which very little is painted still, but hey, that's life). I used some cork board that i picked up from spotlight, can also be obtained from bunnings apparently, and some sand that i've had stocked around for a long time.

I'll hope to put up a post of some of his painting in progress as i go. I'm still awaiting the rest of my paint order which is required.

Here he is in his current glory:

And so our story begins...

I wish I could say that it starts with a bang, but it's more like a flumph, the noise of me sitting on my chair.

I tend to enjoy telling stories and I thought it was time that I found myself an outlet to tell them. Now the focus of these stories will be around gaming, predominately tabletop, such as Warhammer, and various RPGs, but also occasionally computer games.

Sometimes they will be battle reports, other times I might wish to tell of how I came to create a model or a unit, or perhaps just an anecdote from the evening of my local gaming club.

Whatever the form, I will do my best to make it entertaining, or at least useful.

I imagine it will look rather plain to begin with, but as time goes by and I learn the tips and tricks I will fancy it up somewhat and we shall have a show on our hands then.

For now, fare thee well.