The Phoenix Rises

The seal of the 993rd Regiment of the Imperialis Auxilia - the Firebirds

I've been waffling back and forth about starting a Solar Auxilia army, and I have finally decided to jump on in. This is going to be strictly a side project - and, more often than not, allies for my Salamanders or Salamanders + Iron Hands Shattered Legion themed force - but you can expect to see some work in progress posts sooner than you might think. I've got a trio of leman russ tanks to start converting up, and I'll probably paint them as test models for my color scheme.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to post some of my regiment's background material... check it out!

• • •

The 993rd Regiment of the Solar Auxilia - Cognomen: Firebirds - were founded under unusual circumstances. The core of the regiment came from the Garuda Compact, a caravan of void-nomads brought into compliance seventy years before Istvaan. In exchange for technological assistance, trade contracts, and a planet to settle, the Compact agreed to contribute both manpower and void ships to the founding of an auxilia regiment. Although technically not hailing from a world of the Segmentum Solar, the technological aptitude and discipline of the Garuda Compact meant that the scant equipment and training usually afforded to a regiment of the Auxilia Imperialis would be inappropriate. Instead, the Firebirds, as the regiment became known, was granted access to the same equipment as the elite solar regiments, making them an honorary part of the Solar Auxilia (for other examples of regiments granted similar honors, see the Astera Strix, the Green Dragons, and the REDACTED).

The Firebirds served with distinction in the decades before the Great Crusade came crashing to an end. They fought alongside many other regiments, including the 9th Saturnyne Rams, the 905th Ash Scorpions, and the 147th Head-Hunters. They also had the honor of serving alongside the Legiones Astartes on several occasions, including the Ultramarines, the Sons of Horus, the Word Bearers, the Raven Guard, and the Salamanders.

When the Heresy began and the ruinstorm descended upon the Empire, the 993rd Firebirds were divided. A significant portion of the regiment had been seconded to the support a detachment of Salamanders, and were stranded alongside them in the Nomos Rift. Other portions of the regiment were spit out of the Empyrean in the region of Baal. Small detachments were scattered throughout the galaxy.

Before the war ended, most of the Firebirds were able to unite and drive a dagger into the side of the Arch-Traitor's approaching fleet... but at great cost.

The Casters of the Pod

As promised, it's time for me to introduce you to a few of my favorite Horus Heresy podcasts. Without any further ado, I enthusiastically recommend...

• The Adeptus Terra
• The Age of Darkness Podcast
• The Eye of Horus
• The Imperial Truth
• The Independent Characters
• Masters of the Forge
• The Overlords
• Seize the Initiative

And in case you don't want to just take my word for it, let's take them one at a time and I'll tell you what's cool about them.

The Adeptus Terra

These two guys are great to listen to, and play off each other in really entertaining ways. Although like some of the others, this is technically a Warhammer 40k podcast, they have been spending more and more of their time lately on Horus Heresy content, which isn't really surprising, the way this branch of the hobby seems to take over peoples' lives. In any case, like the other Warhammer 40k podcasts I link to, these guys have got the right attitude about the game and are dedicated to enjoying it for what it's good at rather than griping about the ways it's bad. Their production values are also top notch, making this a very easy podcast to be immersed in.

The Age of Darkness Podcast

Full disclosure - as of the writing of this post, I haven't finished their back catalogue, so it's possible that at some point in my future and their past, they begin to suck. Assuming that isn't the case, the Age of Darkness Podcast is definitely a fun listen for anyone who's into Horus Heresy. These dudes are so Canadian it hurts. Them being mean about Roboute Guilliman sounds like the New Yorkers I grew up with being nice about anyone. They're also a pair of clever and dedicated gamers with a positive attitude.

The only thing to watch out for is that almost every episode ends with a "book club" segment. If you're far behind in the series - like I am - you'll have to skip that part to avoid spoilers. However, I recommend sticking around for the brief audio fiction! Every book club segment begins with the hosts reading a part of the text out loud, and they're really quite good at it!

The Eye of Horus

Fully painted is for who? CLOSERS!

These guys have rapidly become one of my favorite podcasts, period, and I listen to a lot of podcasts. Their cheerful, positive, and profane commentary on Horus Heresy is endlessly entertaining.

The Imperial Truth

Possibly the most serious podcast of the bunch, the main host has been rising through the ranks of the hobby to the point that he's actually throwing his own events. Nevertheless, the podcast has a good balance of taking the game seriously and understanding it for what it is.

The Independent Characters

The podcast that started it all. Well, for me. I didn't listen to any of these losers until after Carl quit and I was suddenly down to zero 40k podcasts. I'm almost glad for the interregnum, because it gave me a chance to broaden my horizons. Carl is unfailingly enthusiastic, positive, and fun to listen to, and I'm overjoyed that he chose to return to us.

Masters of the Forge

Another 40k podcast that's got some Heresy content, this one definitely epitomizes the virtue of making the game your own. These guys, frankly, love to make shit up, and they're really good at it. I hope they fall deeper into the orbit of the Heresy and continue to invent characters, missions, and campaign for 30k.

The Overlords

Although this one was originally a 40k podcast, it's been overtaken by Heresy content to the point that it seems nearly 50/50, at least. These guys are also a lot of fun to listen to, complete with addled banter and ridiculous jingles. Their positivity and insight are unmatched.

Seize the Initiative

These guys are often a little more game focused and a little less narrative focused than I would like, personally... but hey, who doesn't like to win games? And it's not like they're WAAC assholes - it's just that they spend more time talking about how to win games and a little less on the story or hobby aspects. That said, I still enjoy them. They're a bit irregular at present, but they're also a young podcast, so we'll have to see what happens.

• • •

That's all I got for now. I hope you check out some of the podcasts I've recommended, and if there are any good ones I've missed drop me a line in the comments and let me know!

Forgeworld Friday the First

It's just another Forgeworld Friday... (oh oh oh)
Yeah, this is my day (oh oh)
To spend more mon-ey (oh oh oh)

All of us who are involved in this absurd hobby have some experience with Forgeworld. I thought it might be fun to start a series of posts about my personal experiences with Forgeworld. Unlike Workbench Wednesdays, I don't think I've got enough material to make Forgeworld Friday a weekly thing... though you never know. Between my stories, posts where I shamefully admit to having made yet another order and tell my faithful reader(s) what I'm getting, pics of arriving packages, and the occasional product review or post about a new release or tease or leak, maybe I'll have enough material to do a Forgeworld Friday every week, or most weeks?

We'll all find out together.

For now, I want to write about the very first box I ever got from Forgeworld...

It was back in 2014. I had just survived a terrible year at an awful school, and I'd run so far away that I'd actually ended up getting ready to work in a different district. I decided that it was time to treat myself, so I dipped a little bit into some investments my grandfather had left me and made my first Forgeworld order.

Well, actually, it was my second. But my first - a couple of tetras, back when I still played Tau - was so long ago that I can barely remember the circumstances, and I was so spooked by the shipping that I actually had them shipped to a friend of mine who was living in the UK and then waited until the holidays so she could deliver them to me by hand... ah, I am both entertained and ashamed by my own innocence.

Anyway, my first Forgeworld order that I can actually remember, for an army I actually still play, of models that I actually still own, consisted of a contemptor dreadnought and two close combat arms, a legion glaive, and some Inquisitorial brass etch. The contemptor dreadnought is still one of the models I'm most proud of. The glaive got as far as having the turret painted and the main body... mostly painted before I decided that I actually wanted to play 30k, stripped it all down, and started it up again in green instead of red. The brass etch... well, it's been useful, but I think that only a single model with any of that brass etch attached to it has ever been finished.

Ah... that's life in the hobby for you!

From those early experiences, I learned that Forgeworld's shipping was actually quite reasonable and not nearly as slow as I'd feared. I also got bit by the resin bug - my Knights of Blood contemptor is still the pride and joy of that army. Most importantly, having lost my Forgeworld virginity, I realized that placing an order with the big FW wasn't really anything to be afraid of.

And then, a little more than a year later... I started playing Horus Heresy. It's been down (up?) hill from there!

Introducing... Workbench Wednesday

This is something I did for a while back on Tumblr. I'm going to post a picture of my painting table, as messy as it is, and say a little bit about the visible works in progress. If you'd like to play along, start doing the same thing on Wednesdays and drop me a link in the comments. On Thursday I'll make a post of all the Workbench Wednesday posts I'm made aware of, and we can all oogle each others' progress.

Without further ado: my first Workbench Wednesday!

My actual workbench

Let's see... what's visible here. Center right are my almost-finished melta support squad and center left are my built-but-not-primed breachers. To the left, you can also just barely make out the beginnings of my Iron Hands survivors. There's the kitbashed quad mortar, its crew, and some terminators, including a forgelord with conversion beamer. Just in front of the breachers, you can probably also make out my other forgelord, this one Salamanders, with  grav gun.

And of course, in the background, underneath the little lid of watch parts (for the Iron Hands) is my eternal, uncompleted glaive... I've got to get that thing finished one of these days. Once I'm no longer focusing on getting infantry done for my upcoming zone mortalis campaign, I'll start getting some tanks done.

And, as a bonus, here's my to-strip bin:

Wooo! Take it ALL OFF!

I'm not quite ready to add the toxic chemicals, because I'm waiting for two more russes (and potentially two manticores to convert into basilisks/medusas) for my burgeoning Solar Auxilia army (you'll hear more about them in a post to come). But as you can see, my motor pool is growing! I can't wait to get this sicaran on the table - it's going to look great in green!

Selling Shit

You know what I regret?

Warmachine.

Don't get me wrong, at the very beginning, the game looked awesome. I mean, what's not to love? It's got a great steampunk/dungeonpunk aesthetic, huge stompy robots, and the game is dripping with awesome wizard characters. Warmachine (and its sister game, Hordes) has the distinction of being pretty much the only game where the better I got at it, the less I liked it.

Why? Honestly, it was that far too much of the game was seated in list-building. It's not a matter of how you play - it's a matter of whether or not you get off the combo in your list. Assuming that nobody makes an error, the "best" (or rock-to-scissors) combo will win.

And that's about it.

So, I've been getting out of Warmachine, gradually, and (this is why this is apropos of this hobby) hopefully turning it into more Horus Heresy resin. When I want to get rid of an army, where do I go?

Bartertown is a great resource for trading and selling, with an integrated reputation system to make sure that a potential trading partner is on the up-and-up. I have bought, sold, and traded quite a lot on Bartertown, and I love it. The only problem with Bartertown is that the system that prevents spam is wildly out of step with the rate at which shit actually happens there. If your thread doesn't get any attention within 24 to 48 hours, it's not going to happen. However, the website makes you wait a full week before you can post again with, say, a reduced price. This can sometimes really, really suck when you are (like I am) impatient.

My second favorite place to go to get rid of shit is The Barter Bucket. It's a Facebook group, so you'll have to join, but the real name and face (ish) nature of Facebook makes it a pretty comfortable place to buy and sell. I don't know anyone who's gotten screwed on the Barter Bucket. For some reason, I've encountered more flakes on the Barter Bucket than anywhere else, but that's just a little bit frustrating rather than being a dealbreaker. Nobody has ever flaked on paying me, so it's all good in the end.

Finally, the elephant in the room is eBay. Goddamnit, but I fucking hate eBay. I have only once sold anything on eBay, and not for a satisfactory price. More often, the shit I'm trying to sell just fucking sits there, mocking me. If you've had more luck with eBay, I'm extremely eager to hear your thoughts.

All of this is particularly relevant for me because I'm trying to sell my fucking Khador army so I can get more resin. So if Warmachine is - for some reason - your jam, drop me a line and let's see if we can make a deal.

Apologies

I'd like to apologize for the text issues in the previous post. I've been noodling with it for almost twenty minutes, and I cannot for the fucking life of me figure out how to unfuck it, so I'm going to leave it the way it is. At least the fucking thing is readable now.

If any of my elder brothers of blogging have any advice on preventing this bullshit, I'd appreciate it. I know I'm not a professional, but I'd like my posts not to look like utter shit.

Fucking fuck...

Why Heresy?

About a month ago, my elder brother blogger Mordian 7th hit 1 million pageviews, a truly impressive number. The man, Mordian 7th himself, ran a giveaway contest over on Heresy 30k. All you needed to do was post what drew you to the Horus Heresy, and Mordian 7th would enter you into a random drawing. The winner has already been chosen - so no luck for you! - but I thought it might be fun to look at and reflect upon the reasons why the H30k community - or at least that subset who posted on the thread - decided to pursue this iteration of the Warhammer hobby.

This is going to be the point of view of a slice of a subset, so I don't expect it to represent the community at large... but that doesn't mean it won't be interesting.

You can check out the thread yourself if you're curious, but I'll provide a summary of the themes I saw in the responses, in rough descending order:

1. The plot, setting, and characters are interesting and compelling
2. The community is great
3. The game is "bigger" (more explodier, more dramatic characters, bigger battles, higher stakes) than 40k. 
4. The models and setting have nostalgia appeal.

Let's break these down a little further.

The plot, setting, and characters of Warhammer 30k are well known to many, thanks to the Horus Heresy series published by Black Library. This series, which began with Horus Rising in 2006, tells the story of the civil war that wrecked everything, starting with the closing days of the Great Crusade and the conspiracy to corrupt Horus and going... on. On and on. Right now, the series encompasses more than eighty novels and short stories. And no, they aren't at Terra yet.

I've got to admit that, for me, the Horus Heresy series definitely falls into the same category as Conan the Barbarian and other pulp literature. I'm not going to shit on it - it's fine. It's fun, things explode, people die, the villains are villainous and the heroes are, well... some of them are heroic. Some of them are also villainous. It's the slightly less grim, slightly less dark, slightly less future of Mankind, after all. But it's certainly not fine literature. Of all the speculative fiction I've read, this series probably wouldn't inspire me to buy into a wargame. I'm reading it for the opposite reason: I like the wargame, so I want to read the novels.

But hey, I'm not here to yuck your yum. If you think that the Horus Heresy novels are the best thing since sliced heretic and that's why you got into the wargame... good for you!

However, I enthusiastically agree that the Warhammer 30k community is great. I will probably always be struck by the responses to my first ever post, declaring that I was planning on starting Salamanders. No "oh they suck in this edition," or "these are the only models you need." Instead, the responses were "are you doing pre or post Istvaan?" and "GW bright green or FW drab green?" This is a community that has its heart (as well as its brain, genitals, and other organs) in the right place. They know that this isn't the best rules set by any stretch of the imagination, but that's okay. This isn't a tough, hard-minded strategy game - it's a game of blowing shit up and reenacting imaginary future space battles!

It's also pretty clear that the bigness of the Horus Heresy is reflected in the rules and the models. Super-heavies are common, squads are big, and the average game will be deadly for a third to a quarter of your army - and that's even if you win! Horus Heresy is very well designed to reproduce the feel of its setting, an apocalyptic war in which entire planets will be sacrificed as a side-effect of the enormous battles taking place on and above them.

Finally, I've got to admit that I can't really speak to the nostalgia appeal of the models, as I'm a relative newcomer to the hobby. So I'll simply leave that point alone. If anyone wants to step in and write a guest post about the nostalgia value of Heresy models, drop me a line and we'll set something up.

However you come to Horus Heresy, it's a great game, with a great community, set in a great world. There's definitely more than enough greatness to go around! In the comments, why don't you let me know what drew you to the wars of the Age of Darkness?

Prophesied Photos

I just wanted to give you all a little update about the army and WIP photos I promised. Amazon has informed me that the photo cube I ordered will be arriving later today! So I will probably be able to start experimenting with taking non-shitty photos this weekend, which means that you can expect some less-shitty-than-usual photos of what I've been working on sometime... soon. This weekend? Start of next week? Who knows?

If you've got any tips for taking photos of minis, feel free to drop them in the comments!

Welcome to Legion XVIII

Blogs, man.

Blogs.

I used to blog religiously. That was before I got a day career, back when I was working on building up my "platform" as a professional writer, because I couldn't get anyone to pay me for anything else. I'm still a writer, but now I do something else all day. Specifically, I teach middle school science. It's my "day career" because unlike a day job, I care about it. Actually, I love it. It's my calling. Those demons of ignorance and superstition aren't going to banish themselves!

I still write, but sometimes I need a pastime that's a little less emotionally demanding and gets me out of the house and interacting with my fellow (adult) humans. To that end, some time in my second year of teaching, I picked up wargaming.

Like any good hobby, wargaming has gradually expanded to fill every moment and resource I am willing to allocate to it. Part of that expansion has been my branching out into Warhammer 30k with a Salamanders force.

Why Salamanders?

1. They're green.
2. I like lizards.
3. Although their heroism and self-sacrifice certainly doesn't give them exclusive access to a moral high ground in the morass that is the Age of Darkness, their concern for human casualties sets them apart and casts the rest of the setting into deeper shadow. I like that.
4. Vulkan is a boss.
5. It's an excuse to paint black guys in warhammer, which pisses off the people that I like to piss off.

For the time being, this blog will be exclusively about the Salamanders and Warhammer 30k, but in the future... who knows? Maybe I'll post about other wargames? Maybe I'll start another Heresy faction (the Solar Auxilia are calling out to me... "play with us, play with us" they sing...). Maybe I'll drift away from Heresy and decide to put some other games up here, too. Maybe I'll start a podcast!

But in the meantime, it'll be all Heresy, all the time.

I post on Bolter & Chainsword and Heresy 30k as ElectricPaladin. Actually, ElectricPaladin is my handle pretty much everywhere on the Internet, so if you encounter an ElectricPaladin somewhere, it's almost certainly me.

Expect pictures. Quality pictures. My brother-in-law-to-be got my wife and I a new camera for the holidays and I just ordered one of those little photo taking tent things. It's going to be an adventure!

Expect a total lack of tolerance for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and any of that bullshit whenever it should rear its head in a hobby and community I love. Fuck that shit - we can be better than that.

Oh yeah, expect lots of cursing. I have to keep a clean mouth all day in front of my students so I curse like an angry sailor as often as I can.

Expect links to threads I find interesting on B&C and H30k.

Expect links to other blogs and podcasts.

And most of all, remember...

Choom choom, motherfuckers!