75th Leads the Way

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Should I be concerned when Higher tells me they've got plans for me? Eh, whatever.
If you have not gone to Gamer's Lounge (http://gamerslounge.coda.net/), run by a couple of fellow Sugarland GW gamers, do so. I bring this up not just to publicize a great podcast, but also because of this:
Way back (actually not that far, only since last August or so) when I first got into this hobby seriously (ie I was doing more than ten Tactical Marines per year), I decided to go Imperial Guard to replace my wrecked Space Marines. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing. I believe I won twice with it over several months of playing it (it wasn't just poor composition, I had no idea how to use the army and was making stupid mistakes left and right). It originally had a theme of urban warfare light infantry, but somewhere along the line, that got lost in the interest of getting more of those tanks that make the Guard so very popular (thus losing the notion of light infantry).
Listening to all that talk of theme and composition in the podcast caused me to revisit the idea of an army made for theme, would be fun to play, and would, hopefully, do tolerably well in games.
I am currently working out a 2000 point Guard list that features no tanks. Instead, there are well over 100 Guardsmen, loaded with enough heavy weapons to make up for the lack of tanks, supported by a bunch of ogryns and psykers. Rummaging in the bitz box, I found enough bits to make a spare Guardsman and painted him up as a proof-of-concept model for this new army, the 75th Strathmoran.

So I went from urban to desert. This is a crazy-easy paint scheme; I figure I can do a full squad in two days, tops (which, when you consider the number of Guardsmen involved, is a very good thing). Unfortunately, considering the amount of stuff I have to do, just in regards to the hobby (painting Space Wolves, building up and painting Empire, restarting my Codex Chapter Space Marines, and now this), it's going to be awhile before that list sees the light of day. But when it does . . . well, it's going to take forever to finish my turn in games, that's for sure. But heck if it won't be fun as hell.

The Brewheim Longswords march to war

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I find myself unable to conjure up any pithy and completely unrelated remarks for this post, so we'll just jump ahead to the point of this.
I've completed my first block of State Troops. These Swordsmen call themselves the Brewheim Longswords, and they have proven themselves to be quite effective fighters.

For anyone who's wondering, the bases for each individual models are made to represent flagstones, as though the army is marching through a city or some sort of ruins (some of my other models' bases lean more toward the latter due to the inclusion of things like vines and rocks). This is accomplished by cutting the stones' shapes into the bases before any gluing happens, then painting appropriately. It's very simple and looks pretty nice (no, I didn't come up with it; GW mentioned one of their employees who did it that way on their website a while back). And those are Reikland colours. 'Cause everyone keeps thinking I made their colour scheme up.

The Keepers chapter is back

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What does Square Enix have against Cid? In FF12, he was, from what I saw, the #2 villain, and arguably the reason all the badness was going on. In FF13, he's a Fal'Cie goon/spy-type (or something like that; I don't speak Japanese well enough to know for sure).
But this isn't Booj's Adventures in Final Fantasy, so returning to the correct topic . . .
As promised, I have finished the first of my Space Marines army rebuild. The scheme is an update of my original paint scheme, being both simpler and much better looking. As a bonus, it's now harder to mistake them for Dark Angels. Of course, originally the "Risen Angels" were a Dark Angels successor chapter, but with the new paint scheme comes with a new background. They're an Imperial Fists successor chapter now called the Keepers.

Compare to the original:

On another note, I mentioned an expansion to 1850 for my Space Wolves. To commemorate, I painted my Rune Priest:

I've also thought up a truly evil scheme: 15 Blood Claws with a power weapon, 2 flamers, and one with the Mark of the Wulfen, a Wolf Guard with power weapon attached, all mounted in a Land Raider Crusader. Smash!
Speaking of Blood Claws . . .

It may not be WYSIWYG, but is anyone seriously going to complain?

Pwent's Boys--er--Dwarves

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I know they said we were getting a lot of snow, but dear God this is ridiculous.
On a somewhat more interesting topic, I finished painting my Lord of the Rings Dwarven Battle Company. There was something appealing about playing as the tanks of the LotR universe, thus my selection of the Dwarves. The painting for these guys was something of a rush job, an experiment to see how long it would take me to paint seven dwarves (you think GW picked that number on purpose?). In all it took about seven hours, including a dinner break and wash-drying time.

It's far from my best work--I am reserving that kind of effort for my Space Wolves--but for doing it that quick I am rather pleased with the results. Pwent (a name I shamelessly filched from RA Salvatore's books--good stuff, read 'em) is the company's Hero; he's the Dwarf Captain model, second from the right in the front row, having taken the place of one of the two-handed weapon wielding dwarves.
I've only gone through an instructional LotR game once at GW Sugarland, in which I was more than a little surprised at the survivability of hobbits; yeah, all but Frodo went down but the other three survived long enough for Aragorn to come in and wreck face on the remaining Ringwraiths. And I think Pippin took one of the Nazgul out himself, not bad for an annoying little snot. It was abominably fun, and I look forward to seeing these fellas go make a mess of things.
One a side note, I'm thinking it's time to rebuild my old Space Marines army. Those few of you who know me may recall they met a rather grizzly fate at the hands of Route 7 traffic. I've been wanting to rebuild them, not so much to play as them (freakin' everyone plays Space Marines), but because it was a shame to lose them. I've been putting it off for months, but that's not a good way to get things done, so mayhaps there will be more Marine nonsense popping up here at some point in the near future.

More pictures

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You ever get a song stuck in your head that you wish you had never heard before? 'Cause I bet if I went to a Random-Song-No-One-Has-Ever-Heard-Of-Stuck-In-Your-Head competition, I'd get at least the bronze medal.
But you didn't want to read about that.
I think I've worked out fairly nasty lists for 40k at 1850 pts, both for my Wolves and my Guard (not it's not completely mechanized). I've also figured out a 2250 pt Empire list, but it's going to be a helluva long time before that's ready. On the other hand, my Warriors of Chaos only require a few things here and there to bring up to that point level, so they may be seen on the field again (now under the thrall of all four Dark Gods as opposed to just the one).
I also grabbed some Lord of the Rings Dwarves, so perhaps Gimli will be seen on the field at some point in the near future.
I also come with pictures.

These are the last two of my Wolf Guard. Note the Chaos Marauder sword the one on the right is wielding. Kinda ironic how the Chaos bits work so nicely with the Space Puppies.

My first Grey Hunter. Those shoulder pads are a bitch.

This is a better view of the shoulder pad.

Switching tracks here, this is the command group for my Empire Swordsmen. I have just over half of the block painted and hope to finish off the rest of the unit in the near future. These guys were done before I started working on a solution for the contrast in skin tones, so at least everyone else should start looking better.
All for now.