Bill.IVC

So… First, sorry for any who may check this, I am a slacker.  I would like to say that I have been busy, well I have, but that would be a cop out.  The truth is, I haven’t felt any inspiration to write here in a while.  That being said, on to business…

For those of you who listen to us, and really if you are reading this, I am sure you do, you may have heard my experience at the last tournament.  So that experience has brought up a couple things for me.  First off, I knew my army wasn’t the most competitive.  It lacks the ability to deal with some of the more powerful items in the meta (primarily a mass mech army).  This is something I am working on addressing.  I am not 100% sure my scouts will ever be the super competitive force that I would like it to be, but I am looking at options to improve my list.

The second issue is what I am looking to address first.  Loosing a painting prize to someone who doesn’t have a fully painted army has got me thinking about my technique.  First off, the guy who won the painting contest has great skill and technique.  My issue is first with the standard of a painting prize.  Anyone who shows to a tournament without at least 3 colors on their models (in this case, not even primed), should never expect and indeed should never win a painting prize.  If this is the case, let me have a few super well painted, perhaps commission pieces, and the rest of my army primed.  By the previous logic I should win because those models I have painted are top quality.  If you are not forcing your participants to have a fully painted army, then don’t offer a painting prize, or offer that prize to those who have strove to bring a fully painted force.

Alright, that rant out of the way… What does this mean to me?  Well, it has inspired me to work on my raven guard painting.  To this end, I have searched out a few tips to painting black marines.  I am giving up on the badab black overkill paint process.  I started going to more tradition painting.  Painting it black and working on highlights.  Bit by bit I am working on this, it is a lot of work, but I think in the long run it will pay off.   I suppose this is a declaration of my intent to work on my painting skills.  Stay tuned for some pictures.  Anyone with any suggestions or tips, I would love to hear them.

Feel free to email me contact@imperialvoxcast.com or post in our forums any comments or suggestions.  I say this  because the comment area of the site tends to be more spam than anything.

Thanks for reading and more importantly listening.

Hey guys, it has been a while since I posted.  I took a short video with my new flip and I thought I would try and post it up here.  I want to say thank you to all who hung out with us and made Adepticon an enjoyable experience for Tor and I.  I know it took me a month to put this up, but I am new to some of this.  I am looking forward to going again, hopefully that will be next year.  Hope you guys enjoy the vids from Adepticon.

HTN/IVC Adepticon

So… Southern California, land of beaches and sun.  I really can’t complain about living here.  From my condo I am at the beach in 15 minutes, the mountains and snow in a few hours and the desert in a couple of hours.  It is an outdoor person’s dream come true.  How does this translate to a gamer?

Well, it has its perks, but then I do think that all this beauty and outdoor activity affects the gaming atmosphere.  Starting with the cons: there are far too many amazing and rather active options for one to do, consequently many people develop rather non-gamer related hobbies.  It is probably due to this fact that the gaming store option is a bit limited.  I hear stories of some places that have multiple amazing options to game at and are able to travel around depending on the day and the game they wish to get in.  Here there is one local store and another that is in fairly easy drive distance.  No GW presence short of a couple hour drive also puts a damper on some aspects of the hobby.

As I wrote about earlier, the outdoor, active life style can put a damper on the gaming scene.  There aren’t many days when we can’t run outside and do something, so people don’t necessarily develop inside hobbies like gaming.  This creates a limited group, thought I doubt there are tons in many places either.  Due to all this beauty and activity people pay a premium to live.  With rent high, gaming funds are a bit more limited than I would like (who has enough gaming funds though right?).   Our earthquake building codes also prevent us from having one of the greatest stereotypical man-caves, a basement.

Okay, enough complaining… Southern California is beautiful and the temperature is rarely cold enough to prevent spraying or other outdoor hobby work.  I have never had to sacrifice on gaming time in order to shovel the driveway and there has never been weather so severe that I couldn’t make it to the game store.  On days when we are gaming the windows and doors can pretty much always be open to help air out some of that gamer funk that develops when multiple big guys stand around and play games.  Hell, more often than not we need to have the AC or fan on when we are playing games.

Sure, there are locations where gaming is easier, more popular, etc., but would I trade that for where I live?  No.  This is Paradise and as far as a gamer’s paradise, well I suppose that is what you make of it.  Through the podcast I am meeting new people and developing relationships with others both locally and across the world.  I suppose that the gaming scene is really what you make of it.  Sure I am not about to open a game store any time soon (though I wouldn’t necessarily object to that either), but I can work with my group to improve it bit by bit and to develop my own options for playing both in our places and at other locations.  I suppose it is a revelation I have had or a resolution maybe.  I need to develop relationships with more people that play the hobby.  This has started through meeting some of the other podcasters like Carl and Josh (from Life After the Cover Save) and I seek to expand upon this in the near future with other relationships and expanding upon those I have already made.   All in all, I have to save I do so enjoy living and gaming in Paradise.

Looking over the comment of my last post, I noticed that Physhdude commented that I should make a mold and then cast my bases in Resin.   Well, that was my plan all along and was reaffirmed after cutting out the original ravens out of plasticard.  So, over the last two weeks, since the last post and the last Broadcast, I have been working feverishly on getting my bases ready.  If you follow our Twitter feed then you have probably seen the pics I have been putting up periodically as I take another step in my basing projects.

Now, I am happy to say that I have 32 28mm rounds, 11 40mm round, 4 60mm round and 10 bike bases made up and in various states of readiness. More are on the way as you read this post. Personally, I am loving it. It wasn’t the easiest thing to start with, but once I got the system down, it wasn’t too bad. If you have any desire to work with resin and silicone, I think it is worth the work for the customized look it gives your army. Now, it isn’t the cheapest endeavor, but I doubt it is too much more expensive, if at all from buying bases from an online store. Depending on your hobby skills, these bases may be complex or simple. I kept my bases more along the simple side since I was not convinced that I would be able to handle the more difficult designs and how they would then come out in Resin. Perhaps for one of my other Armies (since I am not thinking of going back someday and making Bases for them) I will design more varied and complex designs for the bases.

I apologize for the grainy images, they were from my phone.  I will try to upload replacements from my main camera.  Here are some in various stages.

So, I have been working feverishly on the Raven Guard, but there is one aspect that I have been stalling on.  Okay, more than one, but the one I was thinking of on this occasion is the bases for the army.  Having little armor, the basing will be prevalent and numerous.   So the plan was and still is to do the basing featuring a raven in the middle of the base.  I was originally thinking to have them featured on a tiled base, but I am not sure I am going to be able to pull that off.  I am going to attempt this sand and Raven base.  Well, here is the first attempt:

A pretty simple set up.  Using plasticard, I cut a raven our after tracing the Raven on from a Transfer Sheet.  Cutting the Raven out wasn’t overly easy.  It didn’t turn out perfect, but I plan on doing a few more so if I do cast these they will be in sets of five or so.   I then took some modeling sand and sprinkled it onto super glue.  Unfortunately when cutting out the Raven, the plasticard broke and I had to go back and re-craft a new talon.

On to more basing.  I think I will go to the Terminator then Dread sizes before coming back to the infantry.

So I have played 40k for quite some time.  When I initially got into the game, Tor showed me a bunch of those pamphlets that GW used to hand out to get people amped on different armies.  I looked through them and had Tor tell me about the different options.  At that point the Xenos really didn’t click with me, and at that point the idea of playing something evil didn’t sit well with me.  So what did that leave me?  IG or Space Marines.  Well something else about me- I don’t like to follow the same path as everyone else.  Once I discovered that the Space Marines were the most popular army in the game, I moved on and dove in to the Imperial Guard.  Truthfully, I wasn’t very disappointed.  These were the everyday guy that served as best they could despite the considerable risk that he was in.  These guys had the coolest tanks and could field a withering array of heavy weapons.  At that point there wasn’t a hugely in depth look at game play or rules, just a desire to play and picking an army.  So… there is the background, I chose NOT to play Space Marines.  So, here I am now, fourteen years later and what am I working on building up?  Oh yeah… Space marines.

So, why change my mind after so long?  Well, after building a mean as hell IG list, then a mean as hell Chaos list, or perhaps vice versa, I noticed that people were not quite as enthusiastic about playing against me as I would have liked.  It also seemed that against most local players my armies did a decent number on them.  I am not tooting my own horn, but a do consider myself a slightly above average General.  I do not play in a lot of Tourneys due to work conflicts, and having played in a GT last year, I learned that I was better than half, but definitely not as good as some.

Back to the point (see I veer off course even in writing)… I wanted a challenge and I wanted some more versatility in my army.  My IG I play pretty much one way, my Chaos I definitely play one way, I wanted something that I could diversify.  At this point, Dawson had been using his Space Marines to go across a few different codices and though I didn’t set out to be able to do this, the option or opportunity to grow a Force that could be whatever I Wanted, whenever I wanted, really appealed to me.  Also, Tor had discovered a love for his Bike list and having seen it in action and looked over the unit in the book, I must say I liked the idea myself.  So, Space Marines were no longer repulsive to me at this point, but I had not necessarily made that my choice.  So… back to it… why Space Marines?

I did mention that I like to do things that are off the beaten path right?  Well I had said for a long time that something I wanted to do is build an all scout army.   Why that?  Well, scouts used to be better, but in the current rendition, they are still no slouches.  Besides, when was the last time you saw scouts on the table?  For me it had been a long time and if I did, it was to see a small sniper squad.  So, here I was, looking for a new Army and realizing that I had wanted to build a scout army for probably ten years now.  There it was,  I could achieve a long time goal and start that new army that would be a bit more fun and a bit more friendly.

Army= Chosen… Theme=Chosen… Chapter=?  So here I was, I wanted scouts that is all I truly knew.  What chapter to use then?  I started looking around, searching on the internet, looking through the Space Marine Codex, and thinking back to books I read and listened to.  Finally somethings all clicked into place.  Raven Guard.  I had bought the Kavordyae and Raven Guard upgrade pack at Forge World when I was in England only a month or two before and the Raven Guard makes extensive use of Scouts.  It was a perfect match.  I started reading everything I could about the Raven Guard.  Soon I was hooked.  A chapter that emphasized that which I was looking for, was one of the original Legions, Primarch wasn’t necessarily dead, had a color scheme I wouldn’t hate painting, and with all that, I was in!

Now I find myself expanding my Raven Guard.  Before my scouts are fully painted and ready, I look to the next option.  The next thing the Raven Guard will be.  But that will be a future post…

New Years has come and with a desire to be a bit more open and active I have decided to work on an ongoing blog.  Here I will be working on posting some of my model conversions, paintings and perhaps even some of the my random fictional musings.  We will see what it all comes to end the end.  I am looking forward to exploring this venue with you, originally my listeners, and now, my readers.