Dino’s annual preview 2023
Aha, so it's 2023, anything special coming up this year? Well, I'm turning 42 and as everyone knows, 42 is the answer to all questions! To all questions? At least to one question I have the answer: do I need more minis? No, not 42...
The Great Moderation is a concept that I have been following for several years now, where I limit my budget to 20,- € per month, with the goal to increase my painting output of existing miniatures and to limit the new purchases in my hobby. As it turned out, 240,- € per year is quite a lot if you already have a bunch of miniatures at home and the pile just grows and grows. For this reason, I plan to cut my budget again - ironically, my strategy has also found approval in the forum of the Tabletopwelt and a group project has emerged from it, so to speak, the not so anonymous round of addicted hobbyists, in which if possible no new purchases should be made. However, everyone receives 150, - € annual budget - for slip ups. This seems feasible to me, since I have everything here, within the projects I pursue
But before I move on to tackle one of the leftover projects, I want to paint the new acquisitions from last year first, because there is also a part remaining. In addition, I will set myself a fairly small annual goal in 2023, since my hobby time continues to melt due to my professional commitments.
Dino’s annual review 2022
It's that time again, a whole year has gone by and I have quite mixed feelings when I look back. From a hobby point of view, all in all, it actually went quite well. I have not reached my goal for the year, but I was and am close.
At the beginning of the year, I managed to paint the two remaining archers from the Corinthian part of my Mortal Gods army quite quickly. In fact, it went so smoothly that I would have loved to paint another troop right away, and I've assembled another group in the meantime.
Corinthian archers
Trouble in Tollonia – Oathmark Campaign Part 1
Holey kamoley, what have I done!? After I played a game of Rangers of Shadow Deep at the beginning of the year with Nico and Andreas, two buddies from the forum of the Tabletopwelt, and watched a lot of Oathmark videos on YouTube, I had the idea to raise a small Oathmark force from the resulting background.
While I was talking about it with Nico via Discord, the idea kept mutating until the thought came up to maybe play an Oathmark campaign for a weekend. The basic idea was good: paint the existing pool of minis and make an army out of it, while they would also work in several other systems. Target date for completion? Fall 2023, possibly in October when there's less going on.
In the near future I'll talk about this topic more often, but for today I'll introduce you to my Goblin Champion. My force consists of a necromancer and her undead henchmen, as well as the lowly goblins pressed into service. In my eyes, they excellently fulfill the classic role of henchmen and cannon fodder that kick the bucket in droves in every movie scene. On the other hand, their numbers are usually so large and their sly deviousness so pronounced that they don't seem insignificant.
In Oathmark, Goblin Champions are not quite so frail. They are characterized as evil-eyed bullies who like to emphasize their words with a whip. That's the kind of bully I wanted to portray with this champion.
Frostgrave: A Sword and Sorcery Adventure – Part 7
Somewhat surprisingly, I painted the thief for my Frostgrave warband last month. I can't say myself what drove me there, because usually it takes me quite a while to paint a mini in my style, especially since I'm not the fastest painter anyway.
But somehow I felt like it and the thief, I think I'll call him Garrett, just whizzed across my painting table. Probably the limited color palette has also contributed a lot to that, something that. I probably remember this for an upcoming Oathmark project.
Stargrave – Mercenaries
The third plastic kit from the initial Stargrave release are the SG003 Mercenaries. Probably the most colourful from the trio, and certainly worth a look. So, let's upon up this box.
Where the Troopers are the uniform wearing military force of a corporation or government, these mercenaries are coming along still as veterans of their trade, but a lot more specialised and unique. You get troops in once again heavy armour, but with more humanoid (and less humanoid) variation in terms of face and a wilder mix of their gear / weaponry.
Stargrave – Trooper
The next two plastic kits for Stargrave after the crew are far more combat orientated, and we cover the SG002. To be honest, if you wouldn't know about Stargrave being a skirmish with role-play elements, you'd assume this is a generic Sci-Fi soldier kit.
The Troopers for Stargrave are an 28mm scaled multi-part plastic kit and has a RRP of 20 GBP for 20 miniatures. This kit is compatible with the other Stargrave kits of the Crew and Mercenaries. And its content is spread across four sprues of five miniatures each, along with two additional sprues covering the 25mm round bases.
Stargrave – Crew
As Stargrave was supported right away with three different plastic kits, there is no real "first" one - but we have to start somewhere, so we grab the Crew kit as it has the product number 001.
We have a 28mm scaled science-fiction kit, covering a total of 20 multi-part hard plastic miniatures for a RRP of 20 GBP. That goes for all of the three initial kits, the crew, the mercenaries and the troopers. The crew is the "core" of most warbands, not just armed up troops, but actually people who make up the crew of spaceship - thus the name.
The Crew box covers 4 sprues of 5 miniatures each, along with two stripes of 20 flat 25mm diameter round bases. Casting is properly done and on the same high level that you get from the Renedra, Plastic Soldier Miniatures or Warlord Games kits. Proper use of the available space, so you have a lot of options for the five bodies to add to, lots of heads, different arms and gear.
Stargrave – sci-fi wargames in the ravaged galaxy
From the gifted mind of Joseph A. McCullough comes another skirmish ruleset at Osprey Games - Stargrave. The sci-fi variant of the very successful Frostgrave was launched mid-2021 and gathered more than 115.000 GBP with its initial campaign.
The very broad pledges of the crowdfunding campaign supplied the new game right away with a hardcover rulebook of 176 pages (25 GBP RRP) with a lovely layout and a whooping three different plastic kits (which we will cover in the coming days) supported by a variety of metal miniatures (we'll cover parts of these as well) to build your own crew of space-faring adventurers.
Oathmark – Skeleton Infantry
I managed to get my hands on two sprues of the Skeleton Infantry for Oathmark in trade, and as I like the design of them, I thought I'd cover them in a review. So this is not going to cover a whole box, but only the sprue.
These add to an already extended range of Oathmark plastic kits, covering Elves, Dwarfs, Greenskins and Humans. And are out there on the market, along with a few other undeads made from plastic in 28mm:
- Wargames Factory / Warlord Games Skeletons
- Wargames Atlantic Skeleton Warriors
- Mantic Games Skeleton Regiment
- Deathrattle Skeletons (who recently took over from the pretty decent Skeleton Warriors from 7th edition)
Dino’s Annual Summary 2020
As regular visitors of the Chaosbunker will have noticed, there have been rather few articles from my hand lately, which is why it's time to approach the year 2021 with a little more consistency and regularity. For many it is certainly no surprise when I say that 2020 was rather mediocre, but let's take a look at it together...
This was 2020
Basically, the year didn't start out bad at all. I went into my ongoing projects with a lot of motivation, wanting to both start a new gang for Frostgrave and finish the one I'd already started.
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