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.

Farewell to my so-called academic career

You could never consult Archival Records in a straightforward manner. Much of the interpretation which emerged from that source had to be accepted on the word of the ones who brought it or (hateful!) you had to rely on the mechanical search by the holosystem. This, in turn, required a dependency on those who maintained the system. It gave functionaries more power than Taraza cared to delegate.

 - Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

It's now been four years since I quit my PhD, and this September, I returned the pile of infantry regulations I had on loan from the National Defence College library, which I guess marks the ultimate end of my "academic career". I wrote a little bit about this back when it happened, but now that it's been some time, I want to take a broader view of what's happened.

**

The subject of my PhD was the development of Finnish military doctrine as a process of nation-building. Very briefly, in the first two decades of independence, a lot of the things the Finnish military did had a lot more to do with building a very particularly racialized and gendered kind of Finnishness than with national defense. I started understanding this when I did my master's thesis on Finnish armor, and took a preliminary stab at this with a peer-reviewed article I wrote on the jäger way of war.

I worked as a freelancer in defence journalism for a decade or so, so I knew a thing or two about the national defence scene in this country. Our history, and especially our military history, are still captive to a very nationalist, triumphalist Story of the Nation, where heroic Finland overcomes huge odds and difficulties to become the greatest country in the world. The military history of the early years of the republic is invariably written from the viewpoint of the 1939-40 Winter War, which is still framed as a literally miraculous victory over the dastardly Stalin's Asiatic hordes.

So I knew going in that anything that challenges these views is going to have a hard time. That difficulty is compounded by the fact that military history in this country is largely monopolized by the military, in the form of the "cadet school", i.e. the National Defence College. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, it's classed as a university, even though the master's degree theses they produce in history would barely make the grade as bachelor's theses in most actual universities. The academic publications the cadet school produces aren't much better; they almost exclusively refer to research produced inside their own institution, with a smattering of random international non-fiction works thrown in.

The military took exception to my research efforts surprisingly early. Way back in 2014, a seminar paper of mine was published in a collection of undergraduate gender studies papers. I wrote about how recent military publications on conscription talk about gender. This led to a faculty member at the defence college looking me up on Twitter, belittling me and berating me for writing "unscientifically". This was absolutely not true, but also a remarkable intervention for an undergrad student to experience. I still don't think I wrote anything particularly incendiary, but I was still sought out by a senior serving officer and abused for it.

That was the most direct military intervention into my academic career, if you will, but certainly not the last one. While I was working on my PhD, I also qualified as a history teacher, specializing in adult education. That led to me teaching some lecture courses at several adult education centers.

One of the first courses I taught was a history of the Jäger movement. Military history is pretty popular around here, and it was packed. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive - except for a couple of people, one of whom called me a communist. At least one of them started reporting on my lectures to a military heritage foundation, whose head (a retired general officer) then got in touch with my superiors at the institute.

It was a very silly game of broken telephone, where whoever was reporting on me was exaggerating what I said, and in some instances straight up lying, and the aforementioned retired general then put his own gloss on things. It would almost have been funny, if the foundation hadn't directly demanded that I no longer be allowed to teach. I'm happy to say they were not successful.

Like I said, I've worked in defence journalism in this country, and I know what these people are like. It was very unpleasant to have to defend myself against malicious lies, but on the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that these extremely hostile reactions meant that I was doing something worthwhile. I was also quite cheered by the fact that so many ordinary, non-academic people responded so positively to my teaching. What I didn't expect was that I would also encounter this sanctimonious military patriotism in civilian academia.

**

During the editing process of one of my publications, I was directly told that I shouldn't criticize deficiencies in published research by military officers, because it would be very bad for my career. I was also heavily pressured to remove references to published university-level research that was uncomfortable for the army. I had made what I thought were fairly uncontroversial references to research published in the previous century, and I was treated like I was trying to sneak Erich von Däniken into my footnotes.

Eventually I complained about this, and this person - a fairly influential academic in my field - exploded at me. They angrily denied saying any of the things that they said in the emails they sent me, and were very insulted that I had the nerve to make these kinds of accusations when they were only trying to help me. The editing process was eventually completed, but there were times during it when I thought I was losing my mind. I had physical stress symptoms like I'd never experienced before.

I feel it's fair to say that by this point, I was feeling fairly heavy pressure to conform to the military-patriotic line in my research. The trouble was that I had almost no resources to fight back with. Quite frankly, no-one at my university cared about anything I did. These things were happening in some of my first ever teaching experiences, and my first encounters with academic publishing, and I didn't really have anyone who could help me with them. Apart from some advice from my academic friends, I had to figure everything out myself, and it really multiplied the stress.

Like I think most PhD students in Finland, officially I had two supervisors. I never even met one of them. I've also heard people tall about a "university community" or a community of researchers. If there is such a thing, I certainly never encountered it. I haf great trouble figuring out even the most elementary parts of things like funding applications, because there were times when I couldn't get any answers to my questions.

During my time as a postgraduate at the University of Helsinki, I did not once feel that anyone there even remotely cared about anything I did, or indeed whether I was even doing anything or not.

**

An article in the Finnish journal of adult education divided PhD researchers into four groups. Studying PhD researchers' accounts of their academic careers, they saw these defined by personal and systemic conditions. Personal conditions were things like age and gender, but also research subject, skills and abilities, and so on. Systemic conditions include funding, supervision and "networking".

Those researchers for whom personal and systemic conditions apply are labelled "golden boys and girls", and are highly likely to succeed. I strongly appreciate the authors' remark that when the "golden boys" talked about their careers, there was often at least one, if not several, key points where an academia gatekeeper had given them an opportunity, and they were very reluctant to talk about how it happened. Gatekeeping in academia is very real and very significant, but people who pass the gates don't want to admit it, and those of us who are shut out are dismissed as embittered.

The article identifies three other groups. Those who get systemic support but experience adverse personal conditions are labelled the imposter syndrome sufferers, and those whose personal and systemic conditions are adverse are called the downbeaten. Excluded from support and funding, with severe doubts as to their abilities and a very reasonable skepticism of their chances of success, the downbeaten tend to quit.

I strongly identified with the fourth group: the phantom researchers. In terms of personal conditions, I was fine: as a white cis dude, I'm undoubtedly privileged, and I was quite confident in my abilities. I also think my skills were not entirely lacking. However, I had next to no systemic support. I couldn't secure funding and doors were very determinedly shut in my face. I saw people who had started after me getting opportunities I never had. There were events directly connected to my specialization, where researchers younger than me were invited to participate, and I heard about them afterwards. Apart from the personal support of some of my peers, for which I remain grateful, I was basically left to figure everything out for myself. It's impossible to "network" when you don't have any opportunities to do it. Even though I managed to produce several peer-reviewed articles in this situation, nothing changed. The gatekeepers kept the gates shut.

According to the article, this kind of thing leads to a feeling of being taken advantage of, and eventually bitterness. I'll say.

This is especially compounded by the fact that, as I've said before, the whole gatekeeping process is totally opaque. I certainly never even got the slightest hint as to why none of my funding or work applications were succesful, and I have no idea why the ones that succeeded did so. Rather unsurprisingly, I've found that people who succeed in this system think it works, and those of us who don't have the opposite view.

I raised this question of the opacity of funding for early-career researchers on social media once. I was directly told by a somewhat famous academic to shut up and stop being so bitter that I didn't get funded.

**

So, to recap. I tried to do a PhD on military history. The Finnish army and some of its associated organizations were openly hostile. No-one at my university cared about anything I did, and I was shut out of any opportunities to demonstrate my abilities.

What I expected from academia was a place where I could do work that was meaningful, and where my career prospects would largely depend on the quality of that work. What I found was a system where, unless you know the right people and they're willing to open the right doors for you, it simply doesn't matter what you do, because no-one gives a shit.

I'm sure that many of the people doing research and teaching at universities in this country are as good or better at it than I would have been. What I know for a fact is that that has never actually been determined in any way.

So yeah, you're damn right I'm bitter. It's a terrible system. My time as a PhD student at the University of Helsinki was some of the worst of my entire life. I would rather go back to prison than start a PhD again.

I am deeply grateful that I've since had opportunities to work for employers, both public and private, who actually care about the quality of my work. Right now, I have the great privilege of being employed on a project that's genuinely exciting and delightfully distant from the absolute bullshit that was academia. Whatever happens with that, wherever I end up, at least I know that one chapter in my life is closed for good.

Let's Read Tolkien 93: The King and the Steward 31-35

Gondor, Minas Tirith

May 17, 3019

“Her Royal Majesty the Queen of Gondor and Arnor!”

We now go to Minas Tirith, where we get to know Aragorn and Arwen a little bit.

**

Aragorn, we learn, is unhappy: despite winning the throne of Gondor, Arwen refuses to actually marry him. They're only pretending to be king and queen, when in reality she's his elven "advisor". It turns out they're also running rival espionage operations, competing for the technical knowledge of Mordor and Isengard by running rival Operation Paperclips. After some repartee with Arwen, Aragorn receives the White Company, Faramir's former guards.

The scene then shifts to a quarry in the White Mountains where Kumai, a Troll engineer, is held captive along with a black Haradrim mûmak, sorry, múmak driver, Mbanga. We're given an infodump about how the Harad Empire fought against slavers from Khand. It's puerile, at best orientalist and cliched, and boring. The significance is that Mbanga gets into a fight with the guards and is killed. There's some very cringey orientalism about how he now gets to go to the heavenly lion hunt or something, and also a frankly uninteresting flashback to Kumai's war experiences. The guards also beat Kumai badly, but this provides an opportunity for him to be smuggled out of the quarry by the anti-Gondor resistance.

However, unbeknownst to Kumai but beknownst to us, it isn't actually the anti-Gondor resistance at all, but a fake resistance movement run by Aragorn's agents. Apparently they all have animal codenames, because Cheetah debriefs Mongoose and sends him to Umbar to capture Tangorn. And with that, chapter 35 and part II come to an end.

**

So, that was part II. I have to say, as a fantasy or adventure novel, this is really not very good. If it was an original IP, so to speak, I would not be reading it any more. So this is kind of a slightly weird exercise where I'm actually interested in Yeskov's alternative Middle-earth, but I'm finding it a chore to trudge through his prose. These chapters highlight the problem: I love the idea of elven and dúnedain spies racing to secure the legacy of Mordor; I dislike the silly stuff about Harad and Khand and so on; and I'm bored by everything else. The combination of the terrible narrative voice and the total incoherence of the fictional world is just really offputting. Also I actually miss Haladdin.

Looking at the table of contents, there's four parts and 69 chapters (nice), so I'm pretty much halfway through. I'm going to keep at this, mostly to see if he comes up with any other cool stuff. But I think I'll be sticking with this sparser narration, largely because I can't really be bothered to engage with the story more closely.

**

Next year: part III

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!