Warhammer 40,000: Watch Company Andromache

And, while I mind me, there were even then, and always, men named Monstruwacans, whose duty it was to take heed of the great Forces, and to watch the Monsters and the Beasts that beset the great Pyramid, and measure and record, and have so full a knowledge of these same that, did one but sway an head in the darkness, the same matter was set down with particularness in the Records.

 - William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

Earlier, I made some Deathwatch marines. The project stalled at the time because Brexit had just happened, and GW's shipping was a complete disaster well into the spring. The first bunch of models here I couldn't finish because none of the Deathwatch upgrade kits I'd ordered showed up. However, I got lucky: I got one of these.

The Start Collecting Deathwatch box was an incredible bargain and I was kicking myself for not getting one before they were discontinued. At 2021 retail prices, the box has two Deathwatch Kill Teams at 32,50€ each and a 11€ Deathwatch upgrade sprue. So that's 76€ of stuff I was going to get anyway, plus the 22.50€ Watch Captain and a 45€ Venerable Dreadnought. Amazing value for money, especially since the Kill Team kit is absolutely first-class.

**

The first model I finished was Venerable Dreadnought Lysistrata Tacita of the Prophets of Mercury.

The entire chapter was lost in the Abyssal Crusade in M37 - except for those members seconded to the Deathwatch at the time. One of them was Lysistrata, who still serves the Deathwatch as a Venerable Dreadnought, and is almost certainly the last survivor of the chapter.

**

On to the actual marines: I'm a little bit proud of this Rainbow Warrior with a storm bolter and storm shield.

I since heard that storm bolters don't get special ammo any more in 9th edition, but who cares, maybe I'll try these guys out in 12th or whatever. I imagine frag cannons will still be good though.

The Marine carrying one is from the Black Guard. The next order to arrive was a box of Vanguard Veterans, where I got a thunder hammer for my Blackshield.

I also made a Vanguard Veteran from the Lamenters:

And with that, Malleus Kill Team Gydrael is done!

**

Then, finally, I got my jump packs, which meant I could finish my Chaplain.

As well as converting the special character in the Start Collecting box into the far more interesting Watch Captain Andromache, originally of the Dark Brotherhood and with a Statuesque head and a bolter from the Deathwatch box.

**

I built my marines to an 8th-edition roster, so I have no idea if my equipment choices or indeed anything makes any sense in the current edition, nor do I really care.

My close combat Kill Team will be led by this Sergeant. He's from the Emperor's Shadows; I'm kinda happy with how the chapter symbol worked out.

Because I had Dark Angels bits, here's a veteran from the Angels of Redemption.

And another from my Punishers. I used the skull pad that came with the Deathwatch box, and put a hazard stripe on the storm shield because why not.

This guy is from the Executioners, and I'm absolutely delighted with that chapter symbol! One of my more successful freehands.

Finally, I made an appropriately dramatic Blackshield.

If we add the Jade Paladins Terminator I painted earlier, we have another squad - I think this may need a fifth veteran, but I'll look into that later.

**

I also made a whole bunch of guys with storm bolters, because I like storm bolters. The squad will be led by Watch Sergeant Dargaard Soth from the Death Knights.

Here's a Grail Knight: they're a homebrew Blood Angels successor chapter I invented, and I built the model out of Blood Angels tactical squad bits and a Deathwatch shoulder pad.

From the slightly disappointing video game Inquisitor: Martyr, a Stormwatcher.

Finally, there's this Black Dragons Vanguard Veteran.

When we add the Imperial Fist and the Smurf from the Overkill box and the Dark Angel Terminator I built earlier, here's a Furor Kill Team.

**

The rest of the veterans will join the two jump pack dudes from the Overkill box to make a Vanguard Veterans squad. Here's an Exorcist:

And a veteran from the Mentor Legion:

And finally the sergeant, from the Crimson Guard, with an inferno pistol from a Blood Angels box and a Statuesque Miniatures head.

Here's the whole gang:

**

I think that's all of my Deathwatch marines on foot dealt with. However, I did buy the new Horus Heresy box this summer, and when we split the contents with some friends, I ended up with all ten of the Cataphractii Terminators. So why not make a Deathwatch relic terminator squad?

Since I've already got all these thunder hammers and whatnot, I decided to go with the classic Cataphractii loadout of combi-bolters and lightning claws, but give the sergeant a chainfist. I also decorated them with purity seals and various other doodads from my box of space marine bits.

Because the armor is so old, I wanted the suits to be worn by Second Founding or otherwise well-endowed chapters. So here's my Sergeant, from the Inceptors.

A Blood Drinker, because the Blood Angels were being really subtle about the whole vampire thing. I had a little Blood Angel shield thingy left over, and also that blood-drop-themed thing, so I put them on this dude.

A Storm Lord. I gave him one of those spiky things from the Chaos Terminator Lord kit, as it had a Tyranid head on it and I thought this would be something a White Scars successor chapter would do.

A Reviler:

And finally, a Minotaur. Who knows who they stole that suit from. Possibly the Inceptors! I made the bronze color by mixing two parts Copper and one part Natural Steel.

I wasn't that enthusiastic about these models at first, I have to admit, but they were fun and easy to build.

**

Of all the modeling projects I've done so far, I may have enjoyed this one the most. The classic marine kits are some of the best ones anyone's ever made, and the Deathwatch veteran kit is one of the best of them.

On top of that, a Deathwatch army really lets you make every single model unique: they can pretty much all have different equipment and be from different chapters, which makes for a really fun modeling, painting and even research exercise, where you can create individuals but tie them all together into an army. I've had fun just browsing Lexicanum looking for entertaining chapter colors and logos, let alone executing them and thinking about how to make each Marine a little bit different.

Now that I have a bunch of infantry, the next thing to do is to get them some support. I'm quite looking forward to building more Deathwatch!

Let's Read Tolkien 92: The King and the Steward 25-30

Ithilien, Blackbird Hamlet 

May 14, 3019 

“So you just announced it to the entire Emyn Arnen: ‘merry men of the Blackbird Hamlet?’”

Together with the men of Blackbird Hamlet, our heroes are planning to rescue Faramir.

**

Faramir and Éowyn are being held in Emyn Arnen, and they're plotting to escape with the help of Beregond. The Blackbird Hamlet gang are plotting to free them, and now Tangorn and Tzerlag participate. Various spying shenanigans ensue, leading up to Tzerlag sneaking into Emyn Arnen to free Faramir. The attempt fails, and it looks like they're going to be killed, but Aragorn's spies let them escape.

Two constants remain. The names are all over the place: the man Beregond clandestinely meets is called Runcorn, and they're caught by the Gondorian "counterspy" called, ludicrously, Cheetah. Anachronisms abound: the espionage and counter-espionage are fully 20th-century, as is the martial art Tzerlag is trained in. Someone actually shouts "Freeze! Drop your weapons!". And so on. Yeskov's Middle-earth is a total mess. The only redeeming feature here is that it's Blackbird Hamlet.

What's worse is how Yeskov ruins his story by turning everything into a sterile intellectual exercise. Whether it's intelligence and counterintelligence, or a fight in a hallway, one side always know exactly what the others expect them to do, and then do something different. Everything works out just so, and this is explained to us by nearly omniscient characters as if everything was always completely obvious. Faramir and Éowyn are the only ones who are allowed to escape this, and therefore the only characters in these chapters who even remotely resemble people. With everyone else, there's no human element present at all.

Again, the overriding impression is that Yeskov very badly wants us to think he's incredibly clever. This could have been a decent spy/heist story, but it's just soulless. By the way, our Nazgúl main character Haladdin is barely even mentioned in these chapters.

Where this all ends up, then, is that Faramir and Éowyn are free, Haladdin and Tzerlag have access to Faramir's palantír, and Tangorn sets off for Umbar.

**

In other news, I'm happy to say that I finally got to give my lecture on Tolkien at the Helsinki Adult Education Center, as part of our lecture course on the history of heresy. I talked about evil, Manicheanism and Pelagianism, and did my exegesis of Frodo's experience on Amon Hen. I thought it went all right, and I'm very pleased I got to put together some of the stuff I've been writing about here into a proper lecture.

**

Next time: Aragorn.

Epic: Let's Paint Aeronautica Imperialis

Let's face facts: I love painting little planes. What got me back into this whole hobby in the first place was Star Wars: Rebellion, and I liked painting all the little TIE Fighters and Y-wings and so on so much that I bought Star Wars: Armada and all of its squadron expansions just to paint more of them. And Warlord's Blood Red Skies. So yeah I think I like planes.

Also, 6mm Epic was my first love, and I thoroughly enjoyed painting and playing Adeptus Titanicus. However, I've finished painting all my Titanicus stuff for the moment. Is it, therefore, high time to get my hands on Aeronautica Imperialis, if only for the sheer pleasure of painting all the little planes? Especially since they just announced a beautiful golden flyer, and I love gold? Yes. Yes it is.

**

My friendly local game store still had all three starter sets in stock, and I dithered for a while over which one to buy. Eventually my Gladius experience tipped me over into Wings of Vengeance: the Imperial Navy flyers are represented in Gladius, and my brother likes playing orks in our multiplayer games, where he makes devastatingly effective use of Dakkajets.

I'm going to start with the Thunderbolts. Somehow, I did not learn my lesson about fiddling with tiny-as-hell magnets when I built my Epic Knights, so I'll be magnetizing their underwing hardpoints. I've still got a whole pile of those Primal Horizon 1/16"×1/32" magnets, and at least I can console myself with the thought that if I use them on these models, I won't have to use them on anything else. The Thunderbolt's wing is just barely thick enough to take the magnets:

I decided to start with the Skystrike AAMs, and what I ended up doing was simply chopping off part of the pylon to accomodate the magnet. It's not pretty, but it works, and they're under the wing anyway, it'll be fine.

This wasn't as fiddly as I'd feared, but I'm still not doing any of the other munitions unless I need them! So far, this is the most glaring difference between Aeronautica Imperialis and Adeptus Titanicus: with the latter, they've thought about magnetizing in the design of the miniatures, but with Aeronautica, it doesn't even seem to have crossed anyone's mind.

Other than that, the models were a delight to assemble. The quality is similar to Titanicus, which is to say very good, and since there weren't many choices to make here, it was just an easy and satisfying build.

One thing did bother me, though: the bases. Even in that preview of the Custodes flyer I linked earlier, GW always shows the bases completely unpainted. I think that's a tremendous shame, they're big and chonky and practically crying out for paint. There is simply no way I'm not painting that Custodes base gold. Luckily, there's a lovely guide on Goonhammer that shows how to pop the bases open so they can be painted and still stay functional. I tried it and it works.

The planes themselves are going to be painted dark green to match my Imperial Guard vehicles, and if I'm going to do that, I think it would be fun to give them a similar camouflage scheme as I did for my Soviet Blood Red Skies planes. So it's Deep Sky Blue for the undersides.

The blue isn't actually that brilliant, but the light was hitting my desk funny and I like it. I was teaching Swedish history at the time and decided to use the Kalmar union colors for the insignia. Here are the bases:

They were quite easy to reassemble, so I'm definitely going to be painting the rest of the bases as well. For the top side of the Thunderbolts, I painted them Luftwaffe Camo Green with some German Camo Dark Green and Black Green splotches to make a sort of camouflage pattern.

I also went full Soviet on the markings, with the exception that the numbers are significant: these are Blackbird 1 and 2 from whatever I'm going to call my Imperial Navy unit.

**

Then it's on to the Dakkajets! Like I said, I've become quite fond of them during our games of Gladius, and I wanted to try my hand at an epic-scale conversion. I was originally going to do this with a 28mm Dakkajet, but I never managed to pick up one of those three-jet boxes until they went out of production. Anyway I chopped a bit off the top and bottom of the fuselage.

And swapped them. With a little putty and some internal support, it worked out just fine.

I assembled the other two in a more traditional way.

And magnetized the hardpoints, if not any of the ordnance (yet). Then it's on to painting, and since my brother's preferred color in Gladius is orange, that's what we're going with.

The Dakkajets have the name of their mothership blazoned across the bottom of the fuselage, and carry a kunning recognition stripe on the wings in white and Royal Purple. I used the same colors, along with some Copper, on the bases.

Then it was just a matter of finishing up the top fuselage and tail section on each Dakkajet, and they're done.

I'm happy to report my conversion was also quite successful.

**

My actual first purchase, when I'd decided to do this, was some Arvus Lighters from Forge World, but they took their time showing up. Most of the players in my Rogue Trader campaign have spent so much time flying around in their Arvuses that their characters must know them inside and out. I already painted a Land Speeder in House Frunze colors earlier, so I think these lighters will get the same Royal Purple treatment. I got started with the bases.

The actual models were a breeze to assemble. Forge World resin has come a long way since the old days.

The only complaint I have is that one of them is very wobbly on its flying stand. Here they are:

**

I'm not really all that interested in the Fighta-Bommas, so I think I'll leave them in the box for now. Marauder bombers, on the other hand, show up in Gladius and based on my Thunderbolt experience, I think I'd enjoy building them. Even though they have eight hardpoints each.

Eight! Was this really necessary? They're big planes, by the way.

I could paint both Marauders in my Imperial dark green. However, I mentioned that I really liked painting Star Wars fighters. Even though I'm an Empire guy myself, the dirty white rebel scheme was my favorite. I've been meaning to recreate it in Warhammer forever, and now is the time. Therefore, using the Gue'vesa rules in the Aeronautica Companion, here is the first representative of the Shi'ar sept: the Tau bomber What is foolish speech?

I decided to use Light Green as the marking color, and I think it works.

The faction markings proclaim the Shi'ar sept's loyalty to the Group of Seventeen, and the aircraft number is is the green circle. Sadly, the Tau numerals GW has come up with are pretty much identical to ours. Here's the Imperial Navy Marauder:

I did the camouflage colors a little differently, because I figured most opponents will be seeing the bomber from below.

**

So here we are: I really liked painting these lovely little planes, and I may or may not have already bought more...

Let's Read Tolkien 91: The King and the Steward 23-24

Mountains of Shadow, Hotont pass

May 12, 3019

“There’s your Ithilien.”

We're back with Haladdin and the gang, who are making their way across the mountains into Ithilien, with the help of some trollish resistance fighters. We visit the trolls of the Shara-teg valley in a sort of flashback, and then our heroes find some of the Baron's old soldiers.

To use Tolkien's terms, we're now in Yeskov's own particular sub-creation, and a couple of things do stand out.

First, the language. We experience Hotont Pass, Shara-Teg valley and meet Ivar the Drummer. Oh, and they drink vodka. There is no logic to these names, or to the kind of culture and language Yeskov is trying to portray. Everything is eclectic and poorly thought out, and keeps getting worse as the story goes on.

This is underlined by my least favorite feature of the story, which is the relentless anachronism. We again have guerrilla fighters in a preindustrial society behaving like modern professional soldiers. People point bows at others like they're guns and hold modern military ranks. While they're staying with the trolls, Haladdin meets, of all things, a graphologist. The graphologist produces a psychological profile of the elven officer they killed in Mordor, and Haladdin uses this to come up with a key idea for his plan, to which we are not privy.

A lot of stupid things get said about fantasy and "historical accuracy", especially by people who are fine with dragons and zombies, but insist that if there isn't violent misogyny it isn't "historically accurate". As a historian, I consider this very silly. Fantasy isn't history: there's no reason to demand historical accuracy of it in the first place, and when the demand is made, it's almost invariably made in a way that's so selective that it's obvious it's being used as an excuse.

What I think fantasy or indeed any speculative fiction should be is coherent. If you want to portray a pre-industrial society with Middle Eastern influences, then do that. This seems to be what Yeskov set out to do, but it's constantly undermined by his references being all over the place, his unbearably smug narrative voice, and above all by the fact that all of his characters are clearly 20th-century people who for some reason happen to live in a fantasy world.

Tolkien used anachronisms deliberately, to maintain a distance between the narrator and the story, and sometimes for reasons that are entirely beyond me. I still have no ides why hobbits have potatoes. Yeskov uses them constantly to batter the reader into submission.

I'm still of two minds as to whether or not I actually want to see this whole thing through. Every now and then, I read a chapter and I feel like okay, I want to see where he's going with this. Far too often, though, the "look how clever I am" schtick makes me despair. We'll see what happens.

**

Next time: merry men.

Game of Thrones board game 3: Here I Throne

Elderr Gutlon rose violently, his large frame towering over the seated brethren. "How dare you, Vitus. How dare you, who has yet to earn a single "R" in his name, who has not even completed his study of the ancient works, and can hardly quote from them by memory, judge us?

- Mark Brendle, Something Awful

in 2019, we played our first ever six-player game of the Game of Thrones board game. But since one regular member of our gaming group was away in California at the time, he's missed out on the particular experience that is an entire day dedicated to murdering your friends all across Westeros. Last May, we tried to rectify this - and then the coronavirus happened.

We ended up playing Here I Stand by email instead, which was quite an experience. At the same time, it's downright hilarious that the last season of the Game of Thrones TV series was apparently so bad that the entire franchise simply vanished from the public eye, especially since the dude can't finish a book (the latest novel in the series was published four months before Skyrim). I'm going to start telling people that this boardgame is the original work it was all based on. Anyway, Here I Stand is over, so now it's time for Here I Throne.

**

Our first game was a five-player affair, featuring a Baratheon blitz into the Reach and an ineffective Lannister betrayal; it was won by House Tyrell. Our second game had six players, and featured a Baratheon blitz into the Reach and an ineffective Baratheon betrayal; I won as House Lannister. This time, we've got the Mother of Dragons expansion, and while the Essos board extension barely fits on our table, incorporating House Arryn is easy. We also knew that one player would have to leave early, so we would definitely be using the vassal house rules. So we set up for seven players:

Since I've played as the Greyjoys and the Lannisters, I decided I want to be at the opposite end of the table this time, and picked the Martells. The vassal house ended up being House Arryn, who became vassals to House Baratheon. On the first turn, the Greyjoys came out swinging, grabbing Flint's Finger, Seagard and Moat Cailin for an early lead.

This, of course, concentrated quite a bit of attention onto them in the next few turns. While the war in the north raged, we in the south consolidated our positions, and the Baratheons secured King's Landing. As the Greyjoys were chased back to their islands and the Baratheons stormed the Reach, by turn 4 it was the Starks who looked like the ones to beat.

At this point, the Baratheon player had to leave, so Arryn and Baratheon were vassal houses. I decided this made it high time to grab Storm's End from the Baratheons, and the Greyjoys turned the tables on the Starks with a seaborne invasion of Winterfell.

As turn 5 rolled around, everything happened: we recalculated supply, rebid all the influence tracks and sustained a Wildling attack where they ate all our horses.

Turn 6 saw the Stark player leave the game, so we were down to four players and three vassal houses. The Stark departure made things a little bit easier for both the Greyjoys and Lannisters, and they capitalized on it, with the Lannisters grabbing a lead and threatening to win the game outright.

Therefore, our agenda was clear: a House Arryn offensive, supported by both the Baratheon and Martell navies, cleared out the Lannisters from Crackclaw Point, and a Tyrell attack led by Loras took not only Lannisport but also Riverrun. I used the distraction to grab King's Landing.

Meanwhile, the Tyrells also struck in the south, routing my garrison at Starfall, but Arianne Martell sent them right back home.

Going into turn 7, it was pretty much a dead heat between my Martells, the Tyrells and the Greyjoys.

After the seventh turn, I think fatigue set in for all of us, and it was a slog to get through the last turns. The Tyrell offensive sort of petered out; I got into a fight with them over the Reach, but couldn't make any more headway. The Lannisters never really recovered. Finally, the Greyjoys captured White Harbor at the very beginning of the tenth turn to seal the win.

The game took a little bit over ten hours and we were exhausted.

**

So, I came in second with the Martells after winning the previous game with the Lannisters. I feel like the biggest reason I lost was sheer physical exhaustion: I was out late the previous night, and by the time we got to the endgame, I was so tired I was simply unable to put together a plan to get to victory.

Another thing that tripped me up was supply. In our first game, we took ages to turn up a mustering card, and I suffered for that as the Greyjoys since it stopped me from mustering any units at all. This time, it took several turns until we got a supply card at all, but when we did, I hadn't secured enough supply areas and fell behind. Not being able to put effective armies into the field was crippling, and entirely my fault for overlooking this crucial area of the game.

So yeah, I lost because I played badly. On a positive note, though, we all liked the vassal system. The option for players to drop out is frankly excellent, and while the very limited amount of vassal orders you can give makes sure the vassal houses don't completely unbalance the game, they still make things a lot more unpredictable. I would definitely recommend using the vassal house rules, and I liked the addition of House Arryn.

I'm glad we played, but the last few turns were so grueling that I think we have to consider making the next one a two-day event. And holding it next year. At the earliest.

Let's Read Tolkien 90: The King and the Steward 20-22

Ithilien, Emyn Arnen 

May 3, 3019 

“What time is it?” Éowyn asked sleepily.

In this, the second part of The Last Ringbearer, the point-of-view character is Faramir. We've heard about him before: he was handily indisposed when Gandalf took over in Minas Tirith, and Tangorn mentions his forced retirement to Ithilien. That's where we find him now.

**

There's a little introduction where Faramir and Éowyn are being cute, and then we take a flashback to the battle of the Pelennor. As in the Lord of the Rings, he's shot with a poisoned arrow, but here it's very strongly implied that the shot came from his own side. He's then taken to a hospital in Minas Tirith, paralyzed by the poison, and Aragorn eventually comes to see him and monologues at him like a B-movie villain.

The upshot is that Faramir is sent into exile to Ithilien. Éowyn is in love with Aragorn, but he has her care for Faramir and sends her off to Ithilien with him. There Faramir supposedly rules as the Prince of Ithilien, but is actually held hostage in the fort of Emyn Arnen by Beregond and the soldiers of the White Company.

Eventually it dawns on Éowyn that Aragorn has discarded her, and she hears about his marriage to Arwen. So then when an envoy arrives to summon her to Minas Tirith, she refuses to go. Faramir is already in love with her, and soon she reciprocates.

However, Faramir suspects that Aragorn won't leave them in peace, and starts plotting. It turns out he has the palantír that was in Minas Tirith. In this story, anyone involved in the murder of Denethor who looks into it only sees his burning hands. Thinking the stone useless, Aragorn and his co-conspirators let Faramir take it with him. Faramir now uses it to test Beregond's loyalty, and once he determines Beregond wasn't involved in the murder, they start intriguing.

**

As ever with Yeskov, the prose is clunky at best, but his strength is in writing an adventure story, and once we get past Aragorn's monologue, that's what we get. On the other hand, Yeskov is at his worst when he's trying to write something clever, and Aragorn's monologue is just bad. His portrayals of Faramir and Éowyn are humane, though, and we're definitely rooting for them. Hopefully the story keeps rolling along with a minimum of metaphysics and clever politicking.

**

Next time: trolls.