I got my Clanrat Slave unit painted up to about 70% complete, but I didn't have the stamina to finish them off. Hopefully sometime during the week I'll be able to finish them up. I just have to paint their weapons, do some detailing, and paint and flock their bases. Once I get that done, I'll have my 2250-point army finished and be just 22 figures away from my 3000-point army.

I've become addicted to watching PBS shows while painting. I suspect that my painting speed and quality suffers, but I've learned all sorts of things about technology, nature, and weird fitness shows with Willie Nelson soundtracks.

The Reaper website has many of the Warlord grunt sculpts available in the Boneyard section of the online store now, but there are several figures still only available in the army packs. Unfortunately, the figures that are unavailable as individual sculpts are figures that I only need two or three of for my army lists. I think I will scrap my Warlord plans for the moment and work on other armies until Reaper sorts out their Warlord miniature line.

More Griping About Reaper Warlord

I am growing increasingly frustrated with the changes to Reaper's Warlord game. In the forums it was mentioned that people who don't want to buy army packs (9 figures, generally 3 each of 3 sculpts) or blister-pack singles (all the same sculpt of one grunt figure) could buy a variety of the sculpts from the army packs from the online store. After re-doing my army lists to represent the point-cost changes I went to the website to see what the prices on the singles are. There is no listing for them anywhere on the site as far as I can tell.

I have 7 units of figures that I need for my armies that all come in at the 4-5 figure mark. I'm unwilling to buy seven packs of nine figures when I'll only end up using half of the miniatures in each pack. If I went that route I'd end up paying almost $9 a figure. It just doesn't make sense financially.

And if I buy the blister-packed singles, I'll have units composed entirely of one sculpt. That is undesirable from an aesthetic perspective.

I've posted again on the forums asking if there is indeed a place to buy the individual sculpts, and hopefully there will be something that I missed in my visit to the site. Otherwise I will scrap my plans to build up some Warlord armies and divert that time and money to a different project, perhaps a Space Marine army or some sort of historical force.

Finished Pics of Warlord Crusaders Battle Nuns

They're not the best, but they're finished. The pictures are a bit blurry as well.

The Fantasy Basketball Season is Over...

The NBA season ended yesterday, and so did the Fantasy Basketball playoffs. I did extremely well this year, with all four of my teams receiving little digital trophies. In my head-to-head leagues I got a 1st-place finish and a 2nd-place finish. The 2nd-place finish would have been a championship if I had played Rajon Rondo on the last day of the season instead of playing Nene Hilario. Oh well, second is still okay. In my Rotisserie leagues I had a 1st-place finish and a 3rd-place finish, and I was the only person in both of those leagues to use up my full allotment of games at every position.

The Fantasy Baseball season is well under way, and my teams need to pick up the pace. I think I'll be okay, though. I drafted well and the season is a long one.

I also am almost done with the Battle Nuns. I just need to finish up the bases and add some dullcoat to the places that shouldn't be shiny.

The Fantasy Basketball season is almost over. I have managed to reach the final round in both of my head-to-head leagues, and I like my chances of winning both of those leagues, or at least splitting them with one first-place trophy and one second-place finish. One of my rotisserie-league teams is in a bitter back-and-forth fight with another team for 2nd place. My other rotisserie-league team just took the first-place spot from the team that's held the top spot all season. I'm hoping I can hold on to it, and end up with four 2nd-place or better trophies this season.

The first week of the Fantasy Baseball season started out well for me, but ended in disaster. A lot of my best players got shut-out by the weather this week, and my place in the standings took a free-fall. I've got plenty of time to make it up, though, as the baseball season lasts forever. This daily roster-management is getting me down. Next year I might go for the leagues that have a weekly roster, so I only have to switch my players around one time every week.

It's occured to me that I sounded quite angry in my last post's remarks about the Reaper Warlord army packs. I suppose it's because I am heavily invested in three partial armies for the game, and the changes to the distribution system stand to cost me a lot more money than I really want to spend. That leaves me in the lurch, as I either lose by having three partial armies that I was excited about painting or by spending a bunch of extra money to finish them out. I think I'll just paint my Warhammer and Supersystem stuff until the situation sorts itself out or I break down and buy the rest of the models I need.

I recently got a gift certificate from Wyrd Miniatures and ordered their Misaki, Warmaiden figure, which came in the mail a couple of days ago. It's a cool sculpt and I've seen a few painted up that look really nice. My issue is that it will take some doing to get it assembled and looking right before I paint it. The figure comes in four pieces: body, rock base, head, and weapon with hand attached. The feet don't seem to rest correctly on the rock, so I'll have to do something about that. I can't seem to get the head matched up to the neck, so I'll have to work up a way to attach that. And the weapon was bent all the way around in a loop and looks to be extremely fragile and impossible to straighten entirely. There are also several metal tabs poking off of the figure, at least one on every piece. They will have to be clipped off and then I'll have to work the areas where they attachedto the point where I can paint them. To me it seems like a lot of effort just to prep a mini for painting.

I did a little more work on my contest miniature this week. I finished his crossbow and his gloves. I also started on the cloth portions of his clothing. At some point I'll finish him up, hopefully in the next day or two.

I've been wondering if I still want to build my Warlord armies up. Reaper just announced that they are cancelling the 3-packs for grunt-type soldiers and moving to singly packed figures or "army packs" of 9-11 figures. The problem with the single-packed figures is that Reaper took the best-selling sculpt of each grunt type and only sell that sculpt in the single packs. The problem with the army packs is that they cost approximately $40 each. The price point on the 3-packs was perfect for a standard visit to the hobby shop ($12-14) and the 3-packs usually contained 3 different sculpts, so you could build up a unit of soldiers that didn't all look exactly alike.

On the Reaper forums this move has been met with a lot of resistance from casual gamers (like myself) and people who like the 3-packs for games and painting outside of the Warlord hobby, but there are a few hardcore Warlord players who are quite adament that Reaper is doing the best thing for the customers.

The price point issue has been a major issue of debate, with the hardcore players saying that they'll just save for an extra week to buy the army packs and the impulse buyers saying that they'll just buy something besides Warlord figures. I fall into the latter camp. $40 falls into the "planned purchase" category for me, and so I'll probably be buying from other companies with the $10 or $15 purchases that make up the bulk of my hobby spending. Also, how many hobby shops will take a risk on a $40 pack of miniatures that they can't be sure they'll sell?

The problem with getting only one sculpt in the single blisters has also been discussed. The fanboys say that if you really want variety, you can just order single minis directly from Reaper's online store. I have two issues with this. First, one of the selling points of the army packs was that they cost less per model than the smaller packs. That's true, but a lot of people don't need or want 9 or 11 figures of the same type. And ordering the singles through the online catalog is a lot more expensive per model than the army packs or the 3-packs. My second issue with the "order from Reaper" solution is that it bypasses the local hobby shop. This may be good for Reaper in the short-term, but taking business and foot-traffic from the already hard-pressed hobby shops will probably be bad for them in the long term.

I like the minis and the army concepts, but the price point and extra models I'd have to buy for the army packs are putting me off in a big way. For me, Warlord is a cool game that I can pick up a couple figures for every once in a while when I don't have any paints or other figures I need. I just can't justify planning my purchases around these new packs when I have other projects with higher priority. So Reaper is going to lose my business on the Warlord end for a while until they get this sorted out.

In other news, we had a nice visit to my parents' house tonight for Easter dinner. There's always good food to be had on the farm.

Battle Nuns WIP

Here are three of the Battle Nuns I've been working on. Not much to really see or talk about, at the moment.

I just upgraded my blog to the new Blogger. I'm not sure what it means, but one neat feature is that I can add labels to my posts so readers who don't want to hear about my real life can just read wargaming stuff or look at pictures of my minis.

Speaking of photos, I meant to take some WIP pics of the Battle Nuns today, but as usual my camera battery was dead and I did not take any photos. I really haven't done much on them. Last night the paint on their faces dried and smoothed out quite a bit. They don't look nearly as bad as they looked before. They're not great, but the faces are certainly wargaming standard. Today I painted their sleeves and got a pretty good basecoat on their habits/tabards. Once I get a few more layers done on those, I'll just have various metallics and straps to paint. I hope it goes quickly because I have a project with a deadline coming up.

I went to the hobby store in Nampa today (Team Dewey Toys and Hobbies) to check out the details on their Reaper Mini of the Month painting competition. This month the subject is Wizards. To enter, you have to buy a Reaper wizard miniature and paint it before the 25th. Then they judge the contest and whoever wins gets a free mini for the next month's competition. I looked at the entries from last month's contest and I feel pretty good about my chances. I do need to learn to paint better eyes. There wasn't much selection at the store, so I narrowed it down to a couple of minis. My first choice had already been painted by someone and I didn't really want to do a repeat, so I got this mini instead. I think her hair and the unicorn head on her staff should be a fair challenge, but I should be able to do a fine job of painting her and hopefully place well in the contest. I need to get the Battle Nuns done and off my desk so I can get started on her. I only have twelve days, and I imagine the time will go a lot faster than I want it to.

I went to the doctor's office for my first therapy appointment today. I didn't really feel like going as my back feels fine now, but there are outside forces that must be obeyed occasionally, and She Who Must Be Obeyed wouldn't let me just slide on this one. Before doing any stretching or whatnot, the therapist hooked me up to some sort of electrical stimulator that supposedly relaxes your injured muscles.

He said, "I'm going to turn it up and you let me know when you get a comfortable tingling in your back." I let him go a bit too far and my back seized up and I made a gurgling sound, so he dialed it down a bit and handed the controls to me, along with some instructions on how to run the device. Then he set a timer for about 15 minutes and left to take care of some other patients.

I looked at the screen on the controls and saw that the device was set at 48, about half-power. I got to wondering how high I could go with it, so I turned it up to 60. My back tightened up and my arm twitched a bit, so I took it back down to 50. Then I decided to try 70 out. My back came off the table a little and I snorted a little before I took it back down to 50. Then I got to thinking that I couldn't just do my time without finding out what 100 was like, so I pushed it all the way to full power. It was pretty exciting, so I decided to see how long I could hold it there. My back arched all the way up, my arm was really shaking, and I was making funny noises and sweating from my forehead. Then I heard the therapist say he was going to come check on me, so I dialed it back down and returned to normal.

My brother and I went to the Monster Truck show Saturday night. It was a pretty good show, very loud and filled with monster trucks, smaller trucks, and dirtbike stunts. True to form, several of the monster trucks lost axles, wheels, and two of them even caught on fire. To add to the excitement, my brother and I each picked trucks to cheer for in the elimination races, and his truck went all the way to the finals, where it lost to Grave Digger. When the smaller trucks raced, I saw that one of the trucks was sponsored by the new hobby shop in Nampa. It would appear that the guys who own the shop have their hands in a few other hobbies as well.

We also made a trip to Hobbytown to find miniatures to use as superheroes in Supersystem games. I figure it might be better to get him started on a cheaper game like Supersystem, which only requires 3 or four figures per team, rather than a Warhammer or even a Warlord army that could end up costing $100 to $1000 or more, depending on what you want to put into it. He picked Warl Hellbore, who we wrote up as a sort of shadow ninja who creates shadows and has the ability to essentially teleport through those shadows to anywhere on the map.

I picked up a Clay Golem, who I wrote up as a standard heavy-hitting brick. I've already chosen the other two characters for my team, Mr. Cranium with his robot sidekick and Killshot. I'm thinking I'll paint them up and play them as villains. There are quite a few other miniatures I want to get, but they can wait.

My brother wants a modern-looking mage (maybe something anime-inspired, as he's really into Yu-Gi-Oh) and some sort of brick. We looked at quite a few miniatures online, but he didn't see anything he really liked.

I started working on my unit of Battle Nuns. I've finished their skin, but I'm not very happy with how it turned out. They look as though they were burned badly, mauled by a back-alley plastic surgeon, and then went through a failed Lasik surgery. I can't decide if they really look that bad compared to my previous work or if I've been looking at so many nicely painted minis online lately that my confidence has waned. I think this is one of those units that I'll just have to push through and be glad I'm done with them.

Today was a rather interesting day for me. Last night my back went out on me again, causing a fair bit of pain. I was able to finish my eight hours at work and get home, but when I woke up today I could hardly move around my house. So I called in sick and went to the immediate care place. The nurse seemed had a really hard time understanding what was wrong with me, although I think I explained it (with help from my wife) in very simple terms.

I explained it something like this: "My back hurts. It's been flaring up off and on for a year, and I've been to the VA Hospital about it twice." She was unable to grasp the concept, so we had to tell her several times.

She finally understood that my back was hurting and said, "Well, what do you want us to do about it? You're just here to get pain medication, aren't you?" I told her that I would prefer to find out what is wrong with my back and work on fixing it rather than just popping pills to mask the pain. She didn't seem convinced, and went off to get the doctor.

Luckily, the doctor seemed fairly competent. He told me some stuff that I can do to help prevent further pain, prescribed a few drugs, and maybe I'll end up doing some rehab-type therapy sessions. So I should be able to return to work tomorrow.

I was able to get some stuff done on my miniatures today. While my wife was watching American Idol I cleaned mold lines off of a bunch of Warlord figures. And after she went to bed I took them out to put primer on them and touch up the primer on my previous batch of figures. Priming is always an adventure, as I have to place the minis on some sort of stable platform, put on some latex gloves, grab my spray can, and somehow get it all out the front door, over the gate into the yard, across the yard, and into the shed. In the dark. I managed to drop one part of my Duke Gerrard figure on the porch while I climbed over the gate and I also dropped the freshly primed Duke himself on the dirt and dog-hair covered floor of the shed. Luckily, he did not absorb any dirt particles and I was able to respray the parts that got dinged up. Now I've got plenty of stuff ready to paint, and I just need to get on it. If that wasn't enough, I also got paint on my last good pair of pants.

I've been looking at pictures online trying to come up with a good paint scheme for my Battle Nuns. So far I've determined that the only color combinations out there are blue/white, black/white, red/black, and red/black/white. I think I'm going to go out on a limb and try a green/brown combo for my Crusaders army. We'll see if it works out.

I also printed out the Supersystem 2nd Edition rules. I figure I can rebase and repaint Heroclix figures until I start adding some other superhero figures to my collection.

Last night I cleaned up and assembled a bunch of figures. Today I primed them, and at some point I will actually start in on painting them. I had to do some conversion work on a Rat Ogre with some green stuff. It doesn't look that good, but hopefully I'll be able to work with it and get it looking better. I was going to do some cleaning up work on the rest of my Warlord figures and assemble my next unit of Clanrat Slaves tonight, but I got caught up in other stuff and didn't get around to it.

I did make up a list of all the figures I need to buy for my Warlord armies, so I can check the little boxes as I add to my collection. I was going to make some sort of list that involved several check-boxes for each unit so I could track a few categories like Purchased, Primed, Painted, and Based, but if I let myself go too far on lists, I end up spending more time on lists than on miniatures. It's a slippery slope, and once I'm on it I can produce an entire notebook based on 25 miniatures. I am planning on making a painting notebook, though. I will be painting the Warlord units in stages as I buy more figures, so I'll have to remember my color choices.

It always amazes me how much priming my figures cuts down the intimidation factor of painting them. I was looking at my Warlord figures last night and wondering how I would paint all those little indistinct details. But once the primer hits the figures they become so much more defined and I am able to see what and where everything is supposed to be. I'm hopeless when it comes to bare metal, but on primed figures I can see what I need to do. It's similar in concept to what they say about writing projects. The blank page can be intimidating, but once you get some ink down ideas will start flowing.

I dragged my wife to Hobbytown today and picked up a couple of Reaper blisters. We have worked out a little arrangement. There's a Jo-Ann Fabric store across the street from Hobbytown, so I drop her off there and then go on to Hobbytown. She buys yarn and beads and craft stuff, and then she walks over to Hobbytown. It's good for me because she gets excited about the craft store and spends some money, so I get to make more trips and not get a guilt trip about buying a couple of figures or some paints. I also picked up some foam at the fabric store so I can make a transport case for my Skaven army. If this foam works out, I will have a fairly cheap way to keep my armies safe when I move them.

I am taking my little brother to the Monster Truck show this Saturday. I think he will like it. I remember going to see the Monster Trucks with my dad when I was a kid, and it was a pretty good time.

At drill this weekend I was somewhat surprised to hear them call out my name as one of the people to be promoted to Sergeant. I'd expected that it would be at least one more year before I got up on the promotions list, but apparently enough people above me failed their PT tests and I got bumped above the promotion line. Depending on how well my unit can wheel and deal, I may have to transfer to another Troop to keep the rank, but I'm hoping that I can work something out to get the promotion and stay in my current Troop. Either way, it's a little more money coming in every month, and that means more fun for me.

I've started a bad habit. I've been letting my Basset Hound get up on the couch with me at night. He's getting a little older, so he spends more time sleeping and isn't as much of a nuisance when he's in the house. We have to help him get up on the couch because his stubby little back legs can't quite make the step. Earlier today he solved the problem by hopping up at an angle and then rolling onto the couch, but he's already forgotten that method. Our Lab is jealous, but she's too huge and energetic to sit on the couch.