Punk Wargaming

 

The world of wargaming has always been a little bit punk. Bear with me as I give my argument.

“The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action, and not "selling out".”   - Wikipedia.

All right, maybe not all these things, but I would definitely say the non-conformity and do-it-yourself ethic have always been there. When addressing this topic it is difficult to not address the great big Oliphaunt in the room, Games Workshop, so we may start with them. Early days of GW were what I would call punk. The adopting of sci-fi and fantasy themselves in a wargaming setting were definitely not the accepted norm in the hobby at the time. 

Up until that point wargaming was mostly re-enactment of real historical settings. The industry itself was still very small and a lot of hobbyists were casting their own soldiers in lead in sheds and kitchens across the country (something I think of as a little bit punk too.)

These actual punks appear in the first edition of 40k, Rogue Trader

Going forward through the eighties with the actual birth of punk, we have the release of GW’s sci fi game Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader. Is it a coincidence that another British home grown success, the comic 2000AD had a similarly named title. Another company that had a punky anti-establishment feel to it.

Another image from Rogue Trader, real punk vibes

Early GW games had their own limitations due to the range of products not covering everything required, so there has always historically been an encouragement of colouring outside the lines by the hobby including scratch building or “converting” as the slang was at the time. This was also partly due to the inclusion of randomness in some of the rule sets. I am guessing this is something that bled over from early roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons where players liked the dice to decide what their characters attributes were.

Random ability table from Rogue Trader

Still a popular game today, Mordheim encouraged scratch building your gangs as well as buying the provided kits.

The possessed gang could even gain mutations, definitely something that needed a bit of hobby converting!

As GW became a shareholder led business, they themselves have become the corporate, consumerist entity that punk is “anti” so it obviously leads to these attitudes being less encouraged. I’m not completely against this, when a company grows and has to start ensuring that it has a guaranteed business certain decisions have to be made. The company still has a place in the hobby, it definitely is the gateway drug into a large community that definitely would suffer without it.

The Freebooterz expansion rulebook had a whole army list of Ork/Genestealer hybrids that could only be played with conversions. There were no models!

So, what is Punk Wargaming now? Well, I think I have come up with a definition.

Punk Wargaming – Wargaming with the rule of cool. Not always using models for their intended purpose. Scratch building and converting models. Finding a way to play a game in your own budget. Playing to tell a story rather than win a game.

Not all of the above is required to be a Punk Wargamer. But having the attitude to accept these things in your opponent as well as yourself is probably enough to cover it. So, how do I join the gang I hear you ask? Well, luckily in this current world of the World Wide Web, PDF's, self publishing, 3D printing, it is easier than ever to be a Punk.

Firstly there are a lot of rule sets out there now for whatever your budget. There are free rules from the likes of the 28 community who I would definitely say are Punk Wargamers. There are various self published rules out there that expect you to find your own models.

Self published skirmish cyber-punk rules from Wargamer Punk Patrick Todoroff

If you are still a bit of a traditionalist but want to be a bit punk, well Opsrey do a whole range of miniature agnostic rules. Some which cover historical periods as well as sci-fi and fantasy. The best way to be a Wargaming Punk however when it comes to rules is to write your own. if you aren't confident enough yet maybe use an existing set of rules and write a set of house rules or a campaign. Be inspired. (As long as you don't start publishing and making money from this, being a Punk does not mean being a stealing douchebag, Respect copyright laws)

If you want inspiration for being a Hobby Punk, you are advised to go and watch all the videos from Trent at Miscast. I can heartily recommend his channel, it's great fun. If the written word is more your preference, then go read 28 magazine for inspiration from a whole host of hobbyists. Or if you don't think you can cope with making a mess with hot glue guns and resin, then maybe try some 3D sculpting, you may surprise yourself.

Or, if you just want to buy some different models for your games, then start looking around on the internet for alternatives. Maybe visit Ramshackle games or The Still Tower, two companies who I would say are Punk Wargamers. Or buy something from one of the hundreds of smaller companies out there. Why would you want to have exactly the same models as everyone else in your army at club night, you're a Wargaming Punk now, be individual. (Although I don't recommend putting a safety pin through your nose, Sepsis is still a thing.) Next time you are at a show and you see a model on display, when you say to your friend "That's cool, but I have no use for it in my games". Buy it anyway, you will find a good use and it will look cool on the table.

Generic Hobby Update Number 83

 I haven't posted since December on this blog, but I have been regularly posting on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge! It has been hard to motivate myself to contribute to both blogs for this period as well as paint with fervour to have something completed once a week to blog about. I am therefore giving myself a week off the Analogue Blog and putting the brushes down. (Well carefully sliding them into the multi-slotted plastic brush holder from The Works. For non UK folk, The Works is a remainders book chain that also does a great range of cheap art products.)

  So, I am sure you are all following my progress on the blog. I don't need to tell you that right now as I type I am 24th in the table with a points total of 865. My original target being 500 points. I knew this year I would paint a lot less (I can't remember my total last year but I think it was around 1200) so I set myself the same conservative target as my first year. I still have plenty to paint, but I won't feel pressure to get it all done for the rest of the challenge.

So, for those few of you who have not followed the blog, here are some highlights of the photo dump from entries:

Squigs, need I say more.

This is the way. (Today is two days away from series three, eek!)

Dum Dum Duggan. (I would watch his spin off series on Disney Plus)

Generic Space Dude in Fancy Pants armour from some toy shop I popped in to for the youngest. (Honestly I cannot remember what they call Space Marines these days, I feel so old)

A second attempt at the bust I blogged about here. I assure you it is a separate piece, not an over paint.

Frostgrave Barbarians

Zeus, chucking his thunderbolts. The entire time I was painting this I was hearing Russell Crowe's crazy accent in Thor - Love and Thunder in my head.

A new snazzy version of Gaunt and his Ghosts.

They are nice sculpts I admit of some of the key characters.

There was a missed opportunity here though as the Ghosts are a mixed Gender regiment, I would have loved to see a model of Tona Criid maybe?

Home Guard from Bad Squiddo

Shaka Zulu

Batman Animated Series Green Arrow

Coming up in the wargaming world we have Salute in April. As I am sure you know it is one of the highlights of my hobby year. I am sure Illustrious Opponent and others will be joining me for the day out where we see if we can shave off a chunk of journey time using the new Elizabeth Line. Yes it is over a month away, but it will soon be here. As I have said on many an occasion, half the fun is the prep beforehand for the day. This year I have a new train route to plan.

Middle Earth painting at Christmas

 So, I have been painting like a (Golden) demon already post Christmas with the Analogue Painting Challenge. under the alias PeterB. For those of you who have not popped over there to find my posts among all the vastly superior work on offer, (There are on average about 10 posts a day from people showing some great painted miniatures over there every single day.) I can give you a brief update on some work I have done so far.

Firstly I have finished the Balrog I picked up at Salute. It actually took a bit more work than I originally thought it would when I bought it. I had to restore two claws at the front of the wings and the point of the rear of one wing entirely with green stuff where they had been snipped off for some reason. 

I then also had to build up the surface below his left foot as his leg was so twisted, that it was clear above the ground.

Next up, a couple of members of the Fellowship, painted as close as I could to their movie counterparts.

Finally, a couple of Bad Squiddo models. the Wolf I picked up to use for Silver Bayonet, the Knight was a model I liked the look of that was part of the recent Kickstarter. I'm not sure I'm happy with the sword and the shield, time will tell if I repaint them.

Another Space Marine, Dagnammit.

As I stated in my last post, I used to be a lazy painter. My days of playing warhammer was all about the game rather than the painting, so my armies didn't look that amazing on the table. I had a Skaven Army that included a massive slave unit of sixty models. All I had done to paint them was spray them brown, paint each nose black and the end of their spears silver. Oh and flock the bases, jobs a good'un. My first 40k army was actually Blood Angels. They were so badly painted I have actually overpainted or sold most of them, so apart from a terrible Mephiston Librarian on a Bike conversion I still have I technically don't have any Blood Angels.

I recently ventured into the town centre for a visit for the first time in a long while for my first Covid Vaccination (Yay!!) Whilst there I decided to get some hobby supplies. I still haven't touched my Stargrave plastics as I don't want to waste them, I am saving them as a treat. We have a small independent store in town that mostly sells airfix type kits so I picked up some Tamiya plastic cement from there. I have good memories of that brush on poly that GW had back in the nineties that just bonded the two surfaces together without getting any gloopiness everywhere. Apparently this stuff is just like that, so my Stargrave plastics will get the same VIP treatment. I really want to get these plastics right, almost to the point where I am scared to actually build them. Not having definitely decided on what any particular rule system I am using them for (I didn't actually buy the Stargrave book) I'm not sure what I'm going to arm each model with. Do I go for lots of variety for a skirmish type games or do I make whole units of models armed with similar weaponry? I also grabbed a few new texture paints to try out.

I also thought I would pop into my local GW store to get some paints and another painting handle. When I first saw these painting handles I thought they were a waste of money, but then I got one for my youngest as he was struggling when painting to hold the models. Then I'd actually started borrowing it myself and found it really useful so now we have one each. (Never too long in the beard to pick up new techniques.)

Whilst in there I showed the store manager a picture of my latest Space Marine paint job and he was impressed (I know, I know, it's his job to be nice.) and he asked what I was going to paint next. Well the store is having it's anniversary soon and they are having a couple of competitions including a conversion competition. GW only bits or green stuff allowed. So, I decided to go right back to the beginning and have a play with some green stuff. Could I make a new style Primaris Marine look like an old school Blood Angel. Well, I don't think it's gonna win the competition, but I had fun making him.

Oh and of course it had to have an old school green trim on the base, nothing else would do.

Paints used:

Coat D'arms. Blood Red, Bone, White, Grass Green, Ink Wash Armour

Citadel. Abaddon Black, Caliban Green, Eshin Grey, Retributor Armour, Grey Knights Steel, Steel Legion Drab, Flash Fitz Yellow, Baal Red Wash, Brown Ink

Painting Space Marines

So regular readers will know I'm no longer a GW fan, I am definitely not up to speed on the current rules, or background of their systems. I'm not anti-GW at all. I buy their paints and I will peruse their shelves to see if anything jumps out at me, although I'll be honest, a lot of the new style models with their insistence of using lots of negative space and delicately balanced "stringy" bits isn't to my taste. (just me, I know I have no reason not to like it, I just have no idea how anyone transports any of it safely!) 

There are a large number of people who look back on the nineties as the "Golden Age" of Warhammer, whole groups of people look back with tinted glasses on what was once my teenage years and the "best of times" rather than the "end of times". (Okay seriously, that is enough with the quotations.) There is an excellent fanzine out there here dedicated to those days of goblin green edged bases and cardboard standees for that larger model in your army you just can't afford. 

There is an argument to be said that us Longbeards need to let go, like the middle aged man with his car on his drive he had when he was a teenager, tinkering with it every weekend to keep it running because it is a classic. When in reality, it's just a piece of metal from the eighties. Things improve, technologies change. When I was a kid embracing the latest 40K rules coming out there were probably Longbeards at the time tutting and stroking their facial hair, lamenting the lost days of Rogue Trader. So, maybe things have improved?

The last time I played Warhammer 40K the rules were in the midst of a trend that bigger is better. Apocalypse was the trend so all games had to be bring everything you have to the table. I had a Space Marine army and so had increased it to the size of an entire company and then some. I had a lot of Space Marines, mostly painted as quickly as possible to get them on the table. The game took all day for us to play, turns would last for up to two hours, the rules were basically skewed towards whatever the latest new models were, so my Space Marine army suffered horribly. I packed my lads away carefully in their foam trays and I was done with them.

More recently GW did one of those magazine runs where part one is £1.99 to entice you in and the first issue came with three new style Space Marines, a brush and three pots of paint. As one of those colours was black and paint costs more than that per pot in store, I proceeded to buy three copies just for the paint. The Marines were packed away for a rainy day.

This week I decided it's been long enough and to see if I could paint Space Marines any better, also to see if it the models are any better. My painting style has changed over the years so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I also read somewhere recently where someone suggested that we should try not to compare our painted models to others across the internet but rather our own earlier attempts. That way you can see your own improvement. So, here they are.

I've gone for an Ultramarines colour scheme for a mass appeal so I can use them to show my painting ability. It's amazing how many paints you actually use though for what initially seems a simple colour scheme. As an exercise I took note for once in the actual paints I used:

Undercoat: Coat D'arms white

Main armour blue: Citadel Macragge Blue, Citadel Blue wash (if you don't happen to have a twenty year old pot of this Coat D'arms do a similar ink blue wash), highlight with Citadel Russ Grey.

Helmets: Coat D'arms white with a wash of Coat D'arms light brown super shader, Citadel Eshin grey for the eyes.

Sergeant head: Coat D'arms horse tone brown, then drybrushed with Citadel Cadian Fleshtone. Hair is Citadel Sunburst yellow with a glaze of Coat D'arms Golden Yellow.

Boltguns: Coat D'arms gun metal and horse tone brown with respective washes of Coat D'arms ink armour wash and Citadel Brown ink. Citadel Abaddon Black for the middle body.

Brass trimmings: Citadel Retributor Armour with Citadel Gryphonne Sepia.

Purity seals: Coat D'arms Blood Red and Bone. Washed with the same Gryphonne Sepia.

Base: Vallejo thick Mud.

There you go, 19 pots of paint for a "simple" paint scheme. I think I've come a long way since I first started painting Space Marines.

What do I think of the models? Well they are a lot less fiddly to put together than they used to be, this might be partly due to the fact they are bigger but that is explained by the fact that apparantly they are a new strain of superior advanced Space Marine. I due wonder if the larger sculpts came first then the backstory was invented as an excuse. They do feel more like the genetically superior beings that I always imagined when reading the novels though. The original guys never seemed to tower over their guardsman counterparts.

I fished out a couple of my old guys to do the comparison. 

Well, they are clearly a lot taller, but these are Primaris Marines, an improvement on the original geneseed. Maybe the larger model came before the story, maybe not, who knows. I actually kinda like them. Has my painting improved? I'd like to think so, mainly not due to any increase in skill but in care and attention. I spent probably ten times as long on each model as I would have back the first time. I certainly couldn't paint another full company of Marines at this rate, not if I didn't want to go crazy. Nevertheless I don't think I'm going to go out and buy the latest 40K rules and get playing again, but to be honest, when I first painted Space Marines I think 90% of my hobby time was about the game, the painting was a means to an ends, these days, this old Grognard likes to take his time painting a model, if I get to roll some dice now and then that's just a bonus.

Talking of bonus content, those of you who did the maths, will know that if I bought three copies of the magazine I would have nine marines, well I first painted up just a five man squad, then I thought I would have a little play with a tiny conversion by fishing out an old power fist from my bits box. (Yep, I never throw any spare bits out.) I think it fits quite well, in fact in the old marine models I felt the power fist looked too big, here it looks pretty good.

How to avoid painting what is on your workbench.

Well, January happened. I watched nine seasons of the American Office and four seasons of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Yep, I got lost in a Netflix well. In fact it was a couple of weeks after Christmas before the paints even got unpacked again but that's okay. Lockdown three here in the UK kinda got to me and I decided I didn't need to do anything that needed any more effort than stare at the TV in my evenings. I think you could probably say I hit a wall. Which isn't like me at all, things don't phase me normally, I'm a glass half full kind of person, but I think I just needed a month to be mentally shut off for a bit. I think I'm back now though.

Anyway, back to the toy soldiers. What's been on the workbench? Well firstly I painted the above Cat Paladin from Bad Squiddo. I ordered it as soon as it hit the website back before Christmas and it's been sat waiting since. I did start some Zulu war plastics, they are all glued together and undercoated, then I got stuck. I think I got daunted by the numbers just sitting there and I needed to step back and paint a single model to get back into the swing of things. So, Cat Paladin it was. 

Also I've been keeping an eye on EBay for a Games Workshop item. (Yep I know right? It's like they have you hooked for life.) As you may know I'm a fan of Dan Abnett and have been reading this doorstop of a book.

Now, a few years back GW produced a limited edition resin of one of these Characters called Eisenhorn to celebrate their publishing arm's anniversary. (tenth I think) I missed it at the time, but I've been keeping an eye on EBay for a reasonably priced one. Well, one finally came up.

As a resin piece it was super delicate but I managed to put it together without any mishaps. They call it Finecast resin and the sculpt is super detailed but I smell trickery with the photo in the accompanying paperwork. Either the model loses detail with repeated casts or the model they painted was larger than 28mm scale because there are details in the photo that aren't on my model. It's still a cool model though and I didn't pay more than retail price for it so I'm not too bothered.

Finally this week was a week of experimentation. I ordered a D&D Wizards of the Coast model from Amazon to see what the quality was like. They do large plastic models for various dungeon type creatures, which in resin or metal would definitely break the bank. So I went for a Tyranosaurus Rex.

They also come pre-primed so no need for undercoating, just get painting. (This makes me so happy.) I did need to attach the tail however which did not quite fit snugly. A bit of plastic putty filled the gap though.

I then couldn't decide what colour scheme to paint so I did some tests on some plastic spiders I had found at a car boot sale a few years back, but more on that in a moment. So, one finished Tyranosaurus Rex.

So, back then to the spiders. So, I had painted the spiders now, so I had to paint the goblins that go on top of them if course. Then, if I'd already painted them, why not paint a few more goblins. Then, why not paint the whole goblin army, it's already undercoated.

So, yeah this week I painted an entire goblin army.

And that is how you procrastinate enough to avoid painting Zulu war british.