Back to the 1,200 Point Challenge

Yet again Mantic have dangled the possibility of a big global participation campaign in front of me, so I decided to count up my Normans to see if I had enough. After 30 minutes ranking everyone up in the movement trays (I probably should have provided a picture...) I discovered I was 4 crossbowmen and a few licks of paint shy of 1,500 points!

Impulse buys from my local gaming shop/cafe. Lovely figures though.

Immediately I ordered the crossbows from Curtey's Miniatures, along with some slingers to 'round out the order' and drive me deeper into bankruptcy. Thankfully this marked the high water mark of my recent hobby splurge, although I'm still itching to add an extra 500 points to get to the mythical "2000" which represents the ideal fantasy army in my mind.  

More marauders. I have a few more, but not enough for a regiment of 20, which offends my need for completeness

In other news, I will have to give up my previous ambiguity over my location. I am living in Liverpool, which is home to Scythe and Teacup cafe and stockist of Ral Partha Europe, who import BattleTech models from the states. Thankfully they didn't have any 'Mechs in stock, otherwise my charitable splurge would have cost me a whole month's beer money.

Two Federated Suns 'Mechs (Dervish L and Jagermech R) with another Free Worlds League 'Mech (Orion) in the purple. The insignia on the Federated Suns is taken from the Federation (of course) in the anime 'Fang of the Sun Dagouram', which wa a big influence on BattleTech.

As you can see, I'm making steady progress on the BattleTech box set models. Currently on the go are my House Steiner forces, so expect to see them in the next update.

Ral Partha fantasy sorts undercoated

The Ral Partha models I picked up are jolly good, cleanly sculpted but not de trop and all that. The only problem was that in my attempts to get a symmetrical appearance on the mounted paladin's sword, I just kept making it shorter and shorter. In the end I gave up: otherwise I would only have kept trimming the alternate sides until there was no sword at all.

I finally caved and bought some properly sculpted slingers...

I've been contemplating getting the mantic elves starter box, which contains more than enough figures for a 500 point allied contingent, but it does cost more than I'm willing to spend in one go, plus it would mean painting 50 figures from scratch, and I'm having enough trouble catching up as it is.

It's easy to motivate yourself to paint just a few chaps...

I could use my existing chaos warriors, painted when I was a mere boy to fill in the gaps, but I'm not sure who I'd play them as in Kings of War. It would probably mean buying the supplement book of army lists for Kings of War. At least that would include stats for Beastmen too. Who knows. Maybe Christmas.

Two female knights and the bearskin on my Bear Mystic coming along nicely.