In the (half a) Company of Angels

Welcome back fellow travellers to The Folly of War. The time has come to take stock of how my Blood Angel 3rd Company is coming along. So far I have added a few units here and there and I am now almost on my way to having a fully painted half a company of marines.
My model list totals thus:

• 3 tactical marine squads
• 2 five man devestators
• 1 assault squad
• 1 company command
• Captain Tycho
• Librarian

It has been great fun painting and researching the deeds of this oh so famous company of marines and finally I got to use them in a game. At the H and L Friday night club I played a 1500 point game against the new chaos codex. My opponant was Mr. Pidwell a fellow enthusiast of the fluff and an avid RPG(er). His army consisted of over 14 spawn, a lord on bike, 2 havoc squads, 2 plague marine squads and the infamous Daemonic Rapper E Didy (epidemeus). Now, I can hear you calling from the rafters "that doesn't sound too hard". Well, my eager readers unfortunately for me every model in the army had the mark of nurgle, including, the Havocs. For those of you who have put 2 and 4 together, you will have realised that for each kill a model does in the army E diddy gets to up the tally making the army better. I'm not saying 14 spawn are any good, but when these spawn have hatred, wound on twos with a re-roll and ignore armour, you do feel slightly (oh so slightly) inadiquate. On the plus side it was a highly entertaining game with a delightfully funny opponant (shame about the army). I left the game feeling better about 40k as looking at the 57 marines in the 1500 which, made me think with pride, what a good job I have done with the army. Even though I was slaughtered (to a man) I loved the imagery that both armies had inspired. The thought of a brave last stand against the diseased, rotting, monstroserties rampaging towards combined bolter, las and plasma fire was fantastic to watch and inspired me to keep plodding away at the rest of the company.

In other news I was trawling the BOLS site and came across an article about home made photoshopped backgrounds for miniatures. The cogs began to turn in my head and I thought I could do that. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to experiment to see what I can produce and I hope to show you something very soon...wish me luck. Finally before I would just like to wish everyone going to PAW this year the very best of luck as unfortunately I cannot make it this year. Until next time travellers farewell.... 

The Death of an Army

The Storm Talon

And so it came to be... Silence in the 40k Universe. The death of my Black Templars. Now is the winter of my discontent (and other Shakespearian melodramatic prose). My hopes for the 40K flyers were simple.

1. Could the Black Templars use the Storm Raven?

2. Surely they could use the brand spanking new Strom Talon... surely?

Tragedy. This months White Dwarf did not deliver either of my dreams and therefore have condemned the Templars to a life of "friendly games" and being stuck in their case for an eternity of penance (or until they get a codex update). Surely all White Dwarf had to do was print a little sentence saying "Can be used by Codex marines, Space Wolves, Dark Angels and Black Templars may use this." Not hard. It did even take me very long to type.

However I am not keen on GW bashing so what I will say is can we give them a round of applause for the Dakka Jet. The sculpting is superb and I feel of all the new flyers it really captures the background of the Ork army. This all points to the release of 6th Edition 40k. Are flyers going to be a new class? Are we going to see more anti aircraft. Are Skimmers going to be harder to hit? Has anyone noticed the fighter ace rules? Why the need to separate skimmers? The way this is written makes me feel that skimmers are going to become 6's to hit across the board unless they have some additional rules in a models codex. Who knows except for the creators, not long now though!

!st Squad of the 3rd Company

So what to do? Well on the up side I have continued to paint more Blood Angels and have now finished my first tactical squad of the army. I have found that all of the free hand work that I did on my Templars has given my marines more of an individual style. After some practice I have started to free hand a modified chapter symbol. This has been fun to paint and I hope to finish my next assault squad soon. Well I'm of to give my figure case a space funeral (like Spock). See ya next week.