Finuval Plain: Bolstering the ranks

So a date has been set for the big battle, with the Elves scheduled to slaughter each other on January 2. This is pretty soon (less than a week away), so I'm scrambling a bit to try to get things as ready as possible. Over the last few painting sessions I've been working on adding to my existing unit of Swordmasters of Hoeth, and I'm now ready to call them "close enough" (my usual painting standard, really)...

23 new Swordmasters, ready to rumble. A random mix of metal models and the plastics from Island of Blood.

Coming soon: The Battle of Finuval Plain

It was around this time last year that a number of us gathered together and created the colossal battle report of Hel Fenn. Recently it has become clear that people around here expect this sort of thing to become an annual event – there have been lots of questions like “so what will the big game be this time?” To be honest, I hadn't intended for it to become a regular thing... But with so many people clearly itching to have another go, I kind of figured: why not?

I decided it would be preferable to avoid the armies that featured in Hel Fenn, rather than just featuring the same things over and over again. So that ruled out battles involving Empire and Vampire Counts. It left plenty of other armies to choose from, but it's not always the easiest thing to scratch together 20,000 points or so of painted models for a single race. In the end we settled for another classic match-up: High Elves vs Dark Elves.

The Battle of Finuval Plain is another famous battle in Warhammer lore. It was the climax of an invasion of Ulthuan by Dark Elves and their Chaos allies. It was basically a final stand for the High Elves after a disastrous campaign in which they had been repeatedly beaten and driven back on their own soil. However just as their fate seemed sealed, Tyrion and Teclis rose to prominence and led their people to victory. There are more details than that, but we'll save those for later.

I'm still trying to sort out exactly how large the game will be and who will be playing, but I think the game will be at least as large as Hel Fenn, and it will happen in the next couple of weeks. So watch this space...

Onward Kislev!

Some time ago I managed to get my hands on some of the increasingly rare Kislev models that used to be part of the Empire army range back in 4th and 5th edition. I wanted them as part of my preparation for my ridiculously ambitious plans to recreate the Battle at the Gates of Kislev. I made a lot of noise about these plans a while back, however I've been focusing on other things since then. This doesn't mean I have not made progress. My painted Empire army has come along steadily since then, and the Chaos forces at our disposal are better prepared too (thanks largely to Owen, who is exceedingly mad and very fast at knocking out painted stuff). 

Anyway, the Kislev game has started to become a bit of a joke around here, as one of those things that is talked about, but will never happen. I've kind of treated it as an eventual goal rather than something with a specific time-frame attached to it, but it might be time to address that. I haven't done the maths yet, but we must be pretty close to having the painted army sizes I had imagined, and with Warhammer 8th edition coming to a close sometime in the second half of next year (so the rumours suggest), I feel I need to make use of the existing edition's rules, which work so well for large games (who knows what next edition will bring). 

One thing that has not advanced over the last year or more (actually it's more like 2 years. Sheesh!), which is the state of my actual Kislevite models. I have Horse Archers, Winged Lancers and Kossars, and they are all as unprepared as they were when I got my hands on them. This is unacceptable, as they are basically the only essential element in the game - the thing that will add the appropriate flavour. So I am finally starting work on them.

I decided to start with some Horse Archers, as I thought they might be fastest to paint. First I had to do some repairs, including adding tails - because the previous owner had not attached (nor included) a single tail to the whole batch of 12 of them (nor the 10 Winged Lancers that came with them). Maybe he doesn't like tails. Anyway, whatever the reason, I was well short in the tail tally. 

12 Kislev Horse Archers, looking for paint.

Lores of Magic: Lore of Athel Loren

There are no two ways about it; the Wood Elf book is old and in serious need of an update. Rumours currently suggest that this might happen around May 2014, but that's still 6 months away. So in the interest of completing my reviews of the Lores of Magic (there's only a few left now), I figured I might as well give the Wood Elves the treatment.

Interestingly, the extreme ancientness of the Wood Elf book has both its perks and its downsides in terms of the spells here. An echo of a bygone era...