Let's Build Modiphius Terrain

Earlier, I had ordered a couple of Fallout figures from Mōdiphiüs for my Renegades and Heretics, and I found them to be good quality, but the range as a whole was kind of uninspiring. However, I did order some Nuka-Cola machines for my Imperial Knight's base:

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I thought it made for a fun addition to the model, and the resin terrain pieces were all fairly good quality. This made me take the plunge and order their Skyrim Word Wall.

The whole thing came in one piece, and the cast quality is really excellent. It's even got all the little Nord runes on it and everything, and I'm delighted to report it's the Unrelenting Force wall: the best shout in Skyrim because it has by far the greatest comedy potential.

I covered the whole thing in Basalt Grey, and gave the words and the darker bits a Black Ink wash.

The non-dark stone then got light drybrushes in Neutral Grey and Medium Sea Grey, and I did the FUS runes in Deep Sky Blue and Fluorescent Blue.

I was lazy and did the same greys on the back.

Here it is! Armiger and Arch-Militant for scale.

It's a simple paintjob, but I'm very happy with it.

**

Soon after I finished my word wall, Modiphius dropped the price of their Red Rocket station, and I felt like I had to get it. I'd looked at it earlier, but frankly it was way too expensive.

It's a very hefty box! Most of the weight is the 3'×3' neoprene mat, which is all right, I guess. Not really something I was interested in. It doesn't look bad, and although it's quite creased from being folded in the box, I'm pretty sure it'll even out.

What we're really here for is the Red Rocket building. It's made out of fairly strong, good quality card, with plastic connectors holding it together. There are also two resin coolant pumps and a resin Red Rocket.

You start by building the ground floor of the station. Two things struck me. First, there's no assembly instructions in the box: you have to get them off the Modiphius website. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying scrolling around a PDF on your phone. The instructions are also shoddy. You have to squint quite a bit to make out what goes where, and ludicrously, all the card pieces are named on the sheet you punch them out of - but the instructions don't use the names. This is just silly.

Secondly, there doesn't seem to be any way to attach the building to its base. With the card as light as it is, it'll never stay put, and I could see this becoming very annoying.

The card is quite nice, though, and I'm almost surprised how good it looks despite the plastic connectors. I actually googled to check if there really was no way to mount the building, and finding none, I grabbed my trusty Finnish equivalent of PVA glue and stuck the walls on the base.

This worked quite nicely, and I decided to reinforce my building by supergluing in a couple of scenery items, like this GW barrel:

And an appropriate Fallout container.

With that done, I moved on to the next phase: the canopy. 

After I moved from the canopy to the roof, I realized that the assembly instructions were even worse than I thought. You use the same piece for both the roof and the floor of the building - or so I thought. In fact, the two pieces are mirrored, and if you pick the wrong one for the floor, you can't mount the Red Rocket signs on the roof. The instructions don't tell you this, of course. Guess which piece I already glued.

So that's annoying, but I can work with it: I just need to glue the signs onto the roof edge the old-fashioned way. That's not the end of it, though. The roof isn't really attached to anything either, but I get that, because then you can lift it off and use the building interior. However, this does mean that the roof will shift around a lot, which isn't great. What's worse is that the whole canopy is only attached to the building with a single plastic connector. It's just hopelessly flimsy: even assuming the resin rocket, the whole thing shudders and shifts if you so much as look at it.

If this was for a diorama or something, it wouldn't be ideal; for a piece of miniature wargaming terrain, it's inexcusable. People are going to be placing models and templates around it, poking about with tape measures, bumping the table and so on. Terrain can't be this flimsy. In my opinion, this whole thing is going to need a proper base, and it should have come with one. Since it doesn't, I'll build one.

Before I do, I really have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with this kit. The instructions are garbage and the end result is flimsy. If I'd paid the frankly outrageous original price for this thing, I'd be pissed.

**

Sadly, adding the resin rocket doesn't help much. The four pylons are meant to fit into slots in the rocket's base. They don't.

While I had the rocket on there, the pylons did stay more or less still, but I'm still really uneasy about the whole canopy resting on just one plastic connector. Especially since the rocket won't actually stay on, as the slots are just too small for the card pylons.

So, it was basing time. I optimistically started with some thick card.

Then I cut down the tabs on the pylons to a size that actually fits the rocket, and after a lot of frustrating wrangling, managed to superglue the rocket on.

If you ask me, there's no way that thing stays up there without glue. But with superglue for the rocket and to make the pylons stick to the base, it sticks together and makes the whole canopy much less wobbly. I then painted the resin coolant pumps, cut a little base for them out of some of the leftover card, and stuck them on.

Next up, a Nuka-Cola machine.

At this point, I decided the walls looked a little bare, and got my flatmate to print me a selection of tiny weathered posters.

I mean is it really a garage without an explicit calendar in the office area?

I also added a poster to the garage area, and I have to say, I think it looks great.

In the public-facing area: Torquemada is watching! Behave!

Finally, I added a poster for a lecture course I taught last fall:

And my favorite touch: wanted posters from my Rogue Trader tabletop campaign.

I have to say, these little posters made me very happy indeed. All that was left to do after this was glue sand to the base.

And paint it Neutral Grey to go with the rest of my scenery.

**

So, this was a mixed experience. The word wall is lovely, and the Red Rocket station was a disappointment. To sum up: if you buy the Red Rocket kit thinking you're getting an easy to assemble, ready to go piece of wargaming terrain, well, you're not. If you buy it as a starting point for a terrain piece you're going to spend a bit of time and effort building, then I think it's not a bad purchase. But that is to say that it doesn't exactly do what it's sold as.

Having said that, I might well be persuaded to buy more card terrain, as long as the price is right. The resin word wall, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic, and I'm delighted I bought it. In general, Modiphius's resin terrain pieces have been really good, from the small bits to the big stuff.

Anyway, now I have some terrain, for better photo backdrops if nothing else!

Warhammer 40,000: Let's Build Munitorum Containers

I've been on a terrain-building kick lately, and now it's time to continue it with some containers.

**

A while ago, I found some money on the street. Literally, there was a wad of banknotes. I turned it in to the proper authorities, but when no-one showed up to claim it, the amount was deposited into my account. It wasn't a huge sum, but since it was almost literally a windfall, I decided to spend it on something stupid that I couldn't possibly justify buying otherwise. Because I'd been looking at Kill Team terrain at the time, that stupid thing ended up being this Munitorum Munitions Hub box.

This is just a wonderful, huge box of terrain, with ten armored containers, piles of crates and barrels, and even cranes and vehicles. My second full-time job ever was at the Helsinki harbor, specifically at the now-vanished container terminal in the Western Harbor, and I suppose as a legacy of that, I kind of have a thing for containers? So I sort of really wanted this terrain box, but I could never have justified spending this much money. But it came down to either this box or the Armada Super Star Destroyer, and I'm pretty sure this will spark more joy.

Then, of course, the pandemic happened, and we never did get to play any Kill Team, or, indeed, anything else that couldn't be done over email, so terrain dropped pretty far down my list of priorities, and the munitions hub gathered dust on a high shelf.

Now that we're playing 40k again, though, it's time to get started. Here's my first new piece of terrain: a container.

Bearing the livery of an obscure trading house, this container was an absolutely lovely model to assemble. Each sprue in the box has one container as well as several crates and barrels, and it's been a joy to tinker with them. On that note, here's another container.

**

For my first slightly bigger project, I'm going to stick some containers together. But first, I want to build an interior for one of them. Any Imperial settlement is going to have innumerable places for people to hide away, either for a little nap during their work shift, or as a whole illicit residence of their own. So I made this little bedroll out of green stuff:

Here's the whole thing painted, with a Fallout crate and some boxes from the container sprue added.

I then seem to have entirely neglected to take any pictures of the rest of the build! Anyway, now it's done:

I know grimdark is very much the thing, but I've found I have a certain nostalgia for the bright corporate colors of the 1980's, and wanted to bring some of that into my 40k as well. The top container follows my Epic terrain theme. Next, I gave my containers a cardboard base.

Then I glued on some sand, painted and varnished it, and it was time for the next components.

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of Necromunda terrain got released, including the lovely Underhive Market set. The large market stall was simply perfect for what I had in mind, so I built one and painted it orange.

I also have some Fallout workbenches from Mōdiphiüs, and I thought the armorer's workbench would look cute here.

I glued in the workbench and one of the Munitorum crates, and added sand.

And then it's time for the market stall.

Obviously I couldn't resist adding a Nuka-Cola machine and a crate or two, and then it was just a question of more PVA glue and sand until the whole thing was done!

**

This was a fun little project. I'm very happy I got the Munitorum box, and I've barely gotten started: there's still all kinds of stuff in there...

Warhammer 40,000: Armigers

"Very good. Now for the next riddle:

Poets know the hearts of Men and Mer

But beasts can't know my heart, you see

This book was written by a bear..."

 - Salyn Sarethi

Back in the summer of 2019, I built my first ever Knights: two Chaos War Dogs for a battle against the Imperium, where they were promptly shot to bits. I was happy enough with them, however, that I wanted to make more.

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They were my first attempt at freehand Daedric, which I later also used on my Renegades and Heretics and Titans.

The Helverins that shot up my army were so terrifying that I decided to start by making one for myself. I had an AT-ST from some discontinued German Imperial Assault boxes I bought, so I glued together some Imperial Guard autocannons to give it slightly more Helverin-like weapons, and slapped on a Chaos emblem from the vehicle upgrade sprue.

Meet Renegade Armiger Dearola.

**

I was also inspired by Goatboy's enthusiasm to get a Knight Moirax with lightning locks. Interestingly, the kit was basically a plastic Armiger with some resin bits. I still cordially dislike working with resin, but Forge World really has come a long way.

I repeated the metallic, black and red base colors from my earlier Armigers.

The obvious Daedra to name a lightning-themed Knight after would have been Meridia, but I already have a Renegade Armiger Meridia. The only other Daedric Prince with a connection to lightning is Sheogorath; therefore, this is Renegade Armiger Sheogorath.

And here are all my Renegade Armigers.

**

As I was building Sheogorath, it occurred to me that I also had two Armiger Helverins I'd bought on a whim years ago, to deploy alongside my Mechanicum Knight. Here they are in the appropriate Machine Cult livery.

Now, I may or may not have bought the new Horus Heresy box when it came out. Liber Mechanicum tells me that what I have here is, in fact, an entirely viable Questoris Household detachment, just a little shy of 800 points.

So it turns out that not only have I built and painted all my Armigers, but I also now have a Horus Heresy army.

**

I have to say, I like Knights. Every now and then, I think I should just not do anything 40k smaller than a Lord of War. Then I usually get my next infantry unit conversion idea.

Let's Play Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is ridiculously good

I've talked about Warhammer video games before on here, mostly in the context of Gladius, a 40k 4X that I still maintain is one of the best Warhammer games out there. Now, however, it's got competition: since last Yule, the game I've been spending most of my spare time on has been Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

**

Some years ago, Swedish developers Fatshark released Vermintide, which was like Left 4 Dead, but with Skaven. They later did a sequel, also with Skaven, and in 2022 they came out with Darktide, which is like Vermintide, but with Nurgle.

In other words, Darktide is an online co-op first-person shooter, where you play as an agent of the Inquisition, doing missions that give you various justifications for fighting huge hordes of Chaos cultists. And it's ridiculously fun.

There are four character classes in the base game: you can be an Ogryn, a psyker, a sharpshooter or a zealot. Since I have a theology degree, my choice was easy. Here's my zealot preacher early in her career, still slumming it in her prison getup:

The zealot is a wonderful character class. It's geared almost entirely for close combat, which mostly means butchering massive numbers of Poxwalkers and cultists. It's unbelievably fun. The zealot special ability is a dash at an enemy, which produces both an automatic mêlée critical and an inspirational Imperial warcry. There's nothing like charging into a blob of cultists screaming "CONFESS YOUR SINS".

Here I am, further along my career, in the Skyranger I mean Valkyrie, departing on a mission with my brother's Ogryn and our friend's sharpshooter. We all love Hadron, our friendly and helpful tech-priest.

There are seven different missions and five different difficulty levels, with all kinds of additional qualifiers thrown in. They're really all quite similar: you and up to three friends or online strangers, supplemented by decently competent bots as necessary, fight your way into a location in the hive city, do something like kill a cultist leader, purge a demonic infestation or whatever, and fight your way out. Some of the locations are quite pretty, and the different level sections are combined and reused intelligently. The 40k vibe in all of them is immaculate.

The most important thing, though, is how viscerally fun the game is. Once the mission gets underway, I get totally absorbed in negotiating whatever tactical challenge we're up against, and I thoroughly enjoy myself. The controls just work, the different character classed complement each other excellently, and the blow-by-blow fighting is unbelievably satisfying. The sound effects are excellent, the voice acting is good, and some of the music is excellent. For a long time now, what I've valued most in a video game is the simple experience of playing it: I'm not really interested in dramatic plots, incredible visuals or groundbreaking design, I just want to have fun playing. Darktide delivers exactly that.

**

Of course, everything about Darktide isn't perfect. As I write this, it has a Mixed score on Steam, which, as I understand it, is largely down to some unfortunate miscommunications between the developers and the fans. Clearly some people feel they were promised things that they didn't get. This was all before my time, so there's not a lot more I can say about it.

One particular bone of contention seems to be the paid content. There are several kinds of in-game currency which you can use to buy and upgrade weapons and curios (which give you gameplay bonuses), and buy cosmetics for your weapons and character. The only thing you can spend actual real-life money on are cosmetics. For example, I bought my zealot's respirator for a very small sum of real money.

As someone who spent real money on portrait packs in Crusader Kings, I'm entirely happy with paying for cosmetics in general, and for my respirator specifically. I get that people are unhappy if they feel they've been promised otherwise, but hell, I like the cosmetics shop. You can also get cosmetics by completing in-game achievements called penances. As it happens, my zealot's current getup combines the respirator I bought for real money, a lower body cosmetic bought with in-game money, and an upper-body one earned through a penance.

While I'm okay with the cosmetics system, I have to say I entirely agree with the criticisms of the way weapons and curios are handled.

There are several different kinds of mêlée and shooting weapons, and I recognize basically all of them from 40k, so I have some notion of what they do. What I don't really understand at all is how they relate to each other. Each weapon has several percentage values, and I don't really understand what any of them mean. They also have overall damage values (apparently a very late addition!), but it's not entirely clear to me how much damage each weapon actually does as you use it. They also have various perks and blessings, but it's not necessarily at all obvious what they mean. It's just really difficult to understand if a weapon is good or not, or which of your weapons is better than another.

In practice, you have to try them. I'd ordinarily be okay with this, but it's made impossible by the fact that your main source of new weapons is random drops after missions. I have something like six or more different autoguns, I have no idea which of them is best, and frankly there's no way I'm doing comparison testing.

So frustratingly, you very soon end up with an absolute mess of weapons in your inventory, with more of them to buy in two different in-game shops, and it's very difficult to understand if they're any good. It reminds me of the total chaos that was your inventory in the first Mass Effect, with the key difference that there, it was possible to tell if one component was better than another. Don't even get me started on the item blessings and perks and so on.

None of this is a huge problem, at least for me, but it's annoying, especially when you're getting started. It's not just the weapons, either: there's a general lack of any kind of documentation. For instance, there's a penance that says "kill 10 elite Terrors". My progress bar on it reads 2/3, and I have no idea what an elite Terror is. Would it really have been impossible to explain these things?

Exposition is not a strength of the game in general. Like I said, I actually like the incidental dialogue a lot: I'm especially fond of my posh zealot, who I presume is trying to sprinkle in some High Gothic into her speeches, and it's brilliantly rendered as mock medieval. And how could you not love Hadron calling you a varlet? Unfortunately, none of this has carried over into the plot.

To be specific, the plot consists of a short cutscene every few levels or so. All of them feature one of the NPCs more or less telling your character that they suck, combined with a very underwhelming side plot about a traitor on the ship. It could all have been replaced with the Fast Show Guy Ritchie skit. I don't know why it's even there.

So yeah, Darktide has its shortcomings, but they're all outside the missions themselves. Once you're on the Valkyrie, everything from there on is damn near perfect.

**

My miniature hobbying is being driven more and more by my video gaming. As my first Darktide-related purchase, I bought a Beast of Nurgle to join my Chaos Daemons. The Beast is the most memorable of Darktide's monstrosities, and looking at its 9th edition stats, I can only be grateful the Darktide version doesn't regenerate.

I wanted to go for something like halfway between the very dark and menacing Darktide look and the goofiness of the traditional tabletop Beast. I started with a base coat of Flat Brown and drybrushed some Camo Olive Green. As a sort of callback to the yellow-orange weak spot on the Darktide Beast's back, I painted the head-tentacles in Orange Red.

The tentacles were finished with Fluorescent Orange, and the body got another drybrush of Green Sky. I did the pustules and tongue in Light Green and Fluorescent Green.

I used some modeling putty on the base to create the slime trail, which is Bright Orange and Fluorescent Orange.

Here they are in daylight, the chungus.

I enjoyed painting my first Nurgle daemon, and it's giving me all kinds of ideas for more...

**

So, I think Darktide is an amazing game. I hope Fatshark sticks with it and expands it, because there's so much cool stuff that could be added. I'd really like to see a new kind of monstrosity. With all these Nurgle cultists about, it'll be a real shame if we never meet any Plaguebearers, and a Plague Marine would be an awesome boss. I feel like 40k suffers from marines being the "default" army, because it makes them so ordinary. Dropping a single space marine into a game like Darktide would be a really good reminder that they really are not in any way ordinary, and Chaos marines even less so.

On the loyalist side, new character classes could certainly include a machine cultist of some description. One of the classic roles in party-based games that's missing from Darktide is a healer, and a very thematic inquisitorial character would be a Death Cult Assassin. I could also see an opening for a heavy weapon trooper. Also where are the Jokaero?!

So far, though, I've been playing Darktide just about every day in January, and even without any new content, I'm not done yet.

Let's Play Fighting Fantasy

I'd been meaning to blog about Fighting Fantasy ever since I dug my old gamebooks out, but it had somehow completely escaped me that the very first of them all, Warlock of Firetop Mountain, is the same age I am: we both turned 40 last year. So what better time to revisit it?

**

I can't remember where I first came across Fighting Fantasy myself. It was almost certainly when I was very young, and at Rygaards in Copenhagen. At least in my time, the school was run on very British lines, and I remember reading a whole bunch of stuff in the Boy's Own way, probably including some gamebooks. I spoke very little English and was bullied quite badly at school, so spending time alone with English books will have been quite attractive to me. Somehow I ended up owning Crimson Tide as my first Fighting Fantasy book; definitely a memorable one, and I'll get back to it later. We'll start with Firetop Mountain.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Fighting Fantasy, it's a series of gamebooks, so basically a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of thing. These ones are directly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, and have the added attraction of featuring a character sheet. Here's the one from Warlock:

As you can see, the Adventure Sheet has boxes for your stats, equipment and monster encounters, so it's effectively a tiny little role-playing game. You even use two dice to work out combat and other challenges. You have three stats, and I'm afraid to say that I rolled obscenely for my character. There's Skill, which you use to fight, and it's d6+6, which in my case meant 11! Stamina is basically hit points, and the starting value if 12+2d6; I rolled a nine. Luck is also d6+6, and I rolled a six. I wonder if I've ever had such an overpowered character!

Here's my adventure sheet and the beginning of the book.

The whole thing has 400 entries. You start at 1 and are always told where to turn next. I'm actually surprised how much it plays like an old-fashioned computer text adventure: "To go north, turn to 292. To go south, turn to 47." Anyway, we're off.

**

The story is that you're an adventurer, basically a murder hobo, as it would much later be put, looking to retrieve the Warlock Zagor's treasure. To do this, you have to get through the dungeon, including a proper maze and everything. Sometimes you end up in combat. My first fight started when a snake hiding in a box attacked me. Here's how it happened:

Combat is fairly simple. You roll 2d6 and add your opponent's Skill, and then 2d6 plus your Skill. Whoever has the higher result wounds the other party, inflicting 2 Stamina points of damage. With my Skill of 11 and Stamina of 21, this particular fight was a foregone conclusion. Most of the combats in the book were actually quite easy, which isn't how I remembered!

Monsters aren't the only obstacles you encounter, either. The underground river and its sinister boatman were one of the things I remembered from this book, not least because of the lovely illustration.

I also came across this delightful vignette of some tools working by themselves. This is one of the things I love the most about Fighting Fantasy: you never quite know what you're going to get!

Anyway, once I was across the river, I made my way through a very spooky crypt, and into Zagor's Maze. Where I almost immediately ran right into the toughest fight I had in the whole book: a Minotaur.

However, beating the Minotaur was easy compared to the maze! I wandered around for a bit, and eventually had to get out the pen and paper, and start a proper map.

After quite a while navigating through the maze, I finally made it past the last guardian, and into the presence of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Zagor.

These last fights were not easy! I managed to remember something I'd read at the very beginning of the story, which gave me the advantage over Zagor, and eventually I defeated him. His treasure was now within reach:

To be entirely honest with you, I remembered this would happen. I actually had two of the keys! This is how we did replayability back in the day. Nonetheless, my adventure is over.

**

I really had a good time playing through this book! If I had to critique it, I'd say that my playthrough shows that the random stat range is too high; with my massive starting Skill, all the combats were much too easy. Bearing in mind that the target audience for these books is kids, the overall difficulty is actually quite high. I remember these books being quite challenging when I was ten or eleven years old, especially with my limited command of English at the time. Even now, I thought this would be a breeze to play through, right until I had to start drawing the map...

All in all, I feel that Warlock of Firetop Mountain has actually stood the test of time quite well. It's kind of charming in its simplicity, and there's a lot of memorable scenes and good storytelling. I might have to play some more of these...

Let's Read Tolkien 94: The Umbarian Gambit 36-

Umbar, the Fish Market

June 2, 3019

The shrimp were excellent.

Nah, you know what, he's lost me. I read several chapters of a thoroughly modern, really hackneyed and badly written spy novel, starring Baron Tangorn as James Bond in exotic Umbar, and was bored to death. I started skimming forward, and it just kept going and going. There's no longer any point in talking about anachronisms or themes: the story has nothing to do with Middle-earth or Tolkien any more, and I'm just not interested.

Sadly, this means I'll never find out what dazzlingly clever plot twists the dude came up with for the end of his story. I can live with that.

**

So, that was the Last Ringbearer, as far as I'm concerned. It's much more interesting as a concept than an actual text. I liked some of Yeskov's ideas, but the execution is so bad that I honestly can't recommend it to anyone.

When I started reading the Last Ringbearer, coincidentally a year ago, one of the great points Yeskov made in an interview I read was that a lot of Tolkien's Middle-earth doesn't really make sense. For all his talk of sub-creation, Tolkien wasn't really interested in creating a consistent, or even coherent, fictional world: he was interested in creating a backdrop for his stories and his languages. One of the reasons I was interested in the Last Ringbearer was that I thought Yeskov would try to make it all make sense. But he does the opposite. One of the central tenets of his reimagining of the War of the Ring fails spectacularly, and in general, his alternative versions of Mordor, Umbar and so on are a completely incoherent mess of orientalism and anachronism. Reading Yeskov makes you admire Tolkien's creative vision and consistency all over again, which, given the tone of Yeskov's work, cannot have been the effect he intended.

So anyway that was that. I can't say I think it's a coincidence that I've heard so many people refer to the fact that the Last Ringbearer exists, and so few references to its actual content. As I'm actually quite busy nowadays, my Tolkien-reading series will continue at some later time, maybe. For now, happy new year.