A New Year, and a return to 6th edition

Happy new year, everyone! As usual, it's been a long time since my last post. I actually started this post a couple of months ago, and it never went anywhere. But here I am now!

I have not achieved much painting over the last few months, partly because my priorities started to get confused. I still have several partly painted Gyrocopters on my table, and it's possible I'll get them finished before shuffling them off to the cabinet (removing them whilst partly-painted would feel like an admission of defeat). I did paint a few "Hammerers", who are random models I tried to convert to help me pad out my actual Marauder-era Hammerers a bit. It was really just a bit of an experiment.

A second command group, and a few sneaky extra Hammerers to pad my total out to 2 units of 18.

A 5th edition multi-part Warrior, a Fantasy Fighters Dwarf, and a Skull Pass standard bearer walk into a bar...

Bit of a view from behind.

The conversons were a pretty rough chop job using bits from Empire Knights and whatever hammers I could find lying around (the one on the right is from Mantic).

First time in a while that I pulled out the green stuff, as you can probably tell. Rough, but did the job OK.

Anyway, the slow grow has effectively ended some months ago. I did pretty well out of it, and the benefits can easily be seen by how badly my painting ground to a halt as soon as it ended. I'll try to get together a group photo of everything I got done during the challenge, and might also do an updated whole army shoot whilst I'm at it.

After a break for a couple of years due to COVID, we're planning to return to Cancon in a couple of weeks. I didn't really know what I was going to play at the event, but eventually a Warhammer Fantasy tournament was announced, so I signed up. There is just one catch, however - the tournament is for 6th edition.

I find it a little shocking to contemplate that 6th edition was "current" from 2000-2006. So... I last played in a 6th edition tournament 16 years ago. Man, this sort of thing makes me feel really old.

6th edition seems to have developed a strong following on the internet in recent years, and a large number of people are convinced that it was the peak of Warhammer - the most characterful and balanced edition GW ever released. I find this perspective interesting, having played every edition from 4th-8th. 

I know a lot of players didn't like 8th edition. It was a dramatic departure from all the previous rule sets, with the removal of the estimation of ranges, addition of random charge distances, and vastly increased damage in terms of blows struck in combat and stronger spells. The changes were not to everyone's liking. But I find that I have trouble going back. There are many things about the older editions that bug me - things that I feel that 8th edition did better. 8th was/is certainly not perfect, but I frequently encounter things in 6th edition that annoy me.

Anyway, the decision of what army to use at Cancon has been a prolonged process. I didn't have Empire or Dwarfs back when 6th edition was current. I used Orcs and Goblins quite a lot back in the day, and the odd bit of High Elves. Then the Wood Elves came out and I got excited to use an all-tree army (something I'd always wanted to do), accidentally won a couple of events because they were crazy good, and had to retire that list... Oh, then the Ogres came out, and they were pretty bad. So I don't want to go back to that...

Decisions, decisions. My poor old rulebook! I still have the spine somewhere...

I strongly considered going back to Wood Elves and using it as a motivator to paint up some Eternal Guard and update some of my old 5th edition Archers. They do need the love, but in the end I decided it wasn't going to happen. Instead I'm going to use the Dwarfs (using the book that came out late in 6th - I don't actually have the earlier one). I've been convinced that it's a chance to use the Anvil that I painted during the slow grow, without it being absolutely awful like it is in 8th edition.

We will ride eternal, shiny and chrome! Except it's 6th edition and we're not actually allowed to move.

I need to submit my list soon, so I'll post it up here too. Suffice to say that it doesn't have enough artillery for me to be a proper Dwarf player - and probably not enough to win many games, either. We shall see!