40K Breaking News

The Warhammer 40K rulebook is no longer available on the GW site.

What can it all mean, Myrtle?

Well, Well, Said Pooh

Another offensive opens by GW in their campaign to bankrupt me. :)

Things that Go Bump in Nottingham

Pic Source

"Nottinghamshire police received 97 calls about aliens, monsters, werewolves, zombies and witches over the last three years." according to the Telegraph.

Why Nottingham, one wonders?

Jessica Gladwin, owner of Nottingham-based Dusk Till Dawn ghost-hunting company, said "I personally saw a ghost in 2010 on one of our tours at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. It was a man, with a horrible grimace on his face, just staring at me. Usually for a spirit there can be a horrible smell, like sewers, and that happened before he appeared.”

Nobody tell Ms Gladwin but that wasn't a ghost; it was a wargamer.

It's the smell wot gives 'em away.

Model Zone Sale

If you live in the UK and wargame with modern 1:72 models, Model Zone have a sale on for buildings including Hornby and Airfix.

Life's a Bitch

Life's a Bitch

And then you marry a wargamer and come home to find your spaghetti saucepan being used for boiling plastic camels.

FLGS: No Man's Land, Maidstone

I like to highlight FLGS so this week it's the turn of No Man's Land, inside the Royal Star Arcade off Maidstone High Street.

This is a large modern shop inside a central arcade.

There is a great display in the side window of a Space Marine Strike on an urban zone. It's nice to see a bit of effort going in to marketing.

 This is the downstairs retail area. I get so used to musty wargame shops with damp problems that are in run down zones so It is so pleasant to find one that is light, airy and spacious. There are a couple of tables downstairs along with displays and goodies on sale.

Some of the toy soldiers and accessories on sale. I noticed Mantic, Spartan, Flames of War,Warlord and, of course, GW amongst others.

The main playing is upstairs and is stupendous. I have been to clubs that have less room than this.

Displays and pictures decorate the walls.

The upstairs painting area.

The player zone. There is rack after rack of terrain available for players, some of it massive.

And have a look at the rulebooks available for the use of customers.

 I bumped into three old friends that I hadn't seen in ages when I turned up to take these pics. I highly recommend this place for its friendly atmosphere.

Achtung, Ve Haf Vays of Pursuading You

 Pic from here

The GW legal team are at it again.

The Faeit 212 and Bell of Lost Souls websites were taken down in a DMCA strike. BOLS seems to have been electronic collateral damage as it is back up but Faeit has been cleansed from the universe. Faeit got about 20 million hits and was a keen 40K fansite so you might imagine that most company management would love their actions but this is the Imperium, paranoiac, hate-filled, trigger-happy.

The blogger behind Faeit has put up a message on YouTube.

The sheer randomness of the GW strikes is worrying other bloggers but what can you do short of never mentioning them or their products again. I am seriously wondering whether that is where we are going.

At least one major wargaming news blog has pulled all GW material and will not be mentioning them again for the foreseeable future.

I struggle to see how this helps GW's commercial operations. Being at war with your best customers has not been entirely successful in other industries, such as the music business.

Yes a company has to defend IP but how it chooses to do this and where it draws lines is quite flexible. This is starting to look like cack-handed corporate management in thrall to their lawyers.

GW always says that they don't 'do' PR: they do you know, just very, very, badly.

Astonishing Generosity

A little while ago I got an email from my friend Devos IV to the effect that he noticed I was building a Dark Elder Army and that he had a few spare models he would send me.

I expected a couple of infantry units so I was astonished when two huge boxes came through the post enclosing half a dozen vehicles, a dozen jetbikes and innumerable infantry and infantry sprues.

There are hundreds of pounds of models here.

It is a salutory lesson in these days of corporate greed and corruption, and slimey lying politicians, that not everyone is on the make. There are still decent people out there.

Thank you, Stewart, and I hope I have not embarrassed you to much.

John

So Long

Miniwargaming is too close.

Games Workshop scores another hit.

Reasons for closure given here.

And who's next, I wnder?

Ve Haff Vays

Apparently one can get into real trouble for posting this.

April Fool Early?

There is a rumour doing the rounds that GW have informed independent traders that they will not permit them to continue online sales of GW products from June.

Hopefully this is an early April Fool

I've Got To Stop Doing This

Found on the web but I've lost the source.

Cease & Desist

Who? Me Guv.?

(source)

One Thousand

The last post was the one thousandth to be put up on this blog so to celebrate I thought I would show a photo of a Suzuki GSXR 1000 for no better reason than I once owned a Suzuki.

In those thousand posts, 130,856 people, well computers really, have looked in. Around half of them are repeat customers. 61% come from the USA, 16% from the UK, and about 4% from France.


The most popular single day was looked at by 615 people, on  the 8th April 2022, but I normally average around 250.

Nothing was actually posted on the 8th but a few days earlier I put up a taster for my new novel, Wolf in Shadow: out in July (shameless advert).

Clearly I will have to do that more often.

GW backs away from Social Media

Games Workshop appear to have backed away completely from their tentative foray into social media. Their Facebook page is deleted and nothing has been posted on their Twitter account @voxcaster for four days.

The company have been very slow to exploit the growing virtual world but they did apparently announce at a recent GM that they intended to develop their reach in this area.

Then came the PR shambles of their attempt to ban the eBook version of Spots and the Space Marines, but astonishingly not the dead tree version, using trademark law.

Their problems were exascerbated by their reaction to the slightest criticism or teasing: to 'ban' those they regarded as their 'enemies'. Given that their critics were SF fans and wargamers, they were clearly targeting their own customer base. Not a very sensible decision. And they were not helped by snootily telling the BBC and Guardian that they don't talk to the press.

It remains to be seen whether this silence reflects a drawing back into their shell, a pause for reflection to develop a more enlightened strategy, or a regroup to renew a futile offensive against their customer base.



Picture

Death Star

Courtesy of Space Marine Fred on Twitter, I draw your attention to the latest Project on Kick Starter: a fully functional Death Star.

Pledge when ready.

Kick Starter: Beyond the Gates of Antares and Others

The last year or two has seen the emergence of a new way of funding wargame projects: Kick Starter.

So what is Kick Starter? I'll quote from their website:

"Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others."

 How it works is like this:
1. The project creator sets out a prospectus and a funding target, and offers rewards to people pledging money.
2. Individuals pledge sum of money that are only taken up if the funding target is reached. Otherwise nothing happens.
3. If the target is reached the creator has the responsibility of fulfilling their promises.

As an example of a wargaming Kick Starter project, look at Beyond the Gates of Antares Kickstarter, which has its own website here.

The Target is £300,000
So far £101,000 has been pledged by 975 backers with 22 days still to go.

The minimum a Backer can pledge is £1, which gets a backer PDFs of the alpha and beta iterations of the rulebook.

The maximim is £4930, which gets you a batch of goodies from professionally painted miniatures to dinner with the game designers.

And there are various levels in between.

So what should you look for before offering to give money to a Kick Starter Project?

And please bear in mind that is what you are doing. You are not buying something or investing money. A couple of my friends have been burnt by pledging money that was taken up for  projects that went nowhere.

I think you should consider these criteria:

1. Do you want the project to go ahead?
You have to be an enthusiast for the project.

2. Can you afford to gift the money?
 You could give money to a project that produces no rewards at all and the money is still gone.

3. Is the financial target realistic to fund the project?
Wargame projects are notoriously under capitalised with the concomitant implosions. For example Antares needs £300K or no money is taken. Be very wary of a project with a too low target for the promised outcome. Your pledged money will be taken but the total sum raised may not be enough to fund the project even if the target is reached.

4. Do the people requesting the money have the appropriate skills to handle the project?
Good intentions maketh not a successful business plan. For Antares, the game designer is Rick Priestley who designed 40K (tick) and I notice John Stallard is one of the proposers: he was a senior manager at GW and is the man who created and runs Warlord games (tick).

OK, you don't fancy Antares so what else is out there at the time of writing? Some examples:

1. Jawaballs

 Jawaballs is a project to produce miniature painting DVDs by Chris Dubuque.




 2. Tabletop Towns

Tabletop Towns, a foldaway carboard terrain project by Julian Hicks.


3. Relics Reinforcements

New models for the Relics system by Tor Gaming.

4. Wild West Exodus

A new wargame by Outlaw Miniatures.

5. Torn World

New miniatures from The World of Torn from Center Stage Miniatures


And many, many more.

Go to Kick Starter and try typing 'wargame' and 'miniatures' into the search engines.

Ultramarines Movie

The Ultramarine movie is available.

I haven't seen it.


However, it has nasty cheap animation. That won't matter too much if the script and story are decent but.....

Clip here

Dark Angel Codex Leaked

Go here for some pics from inside of the new gear.

There's some natty new landspeeders for the Ravenwing.

Space Marines and the Slavers

Oh dear, the creatively challenged suits and corporate lawyers at Games Workshop are making themselves look foolish again.

Apparently, they have forced a book off Amazon for infringing their trademark "Space Marine". The book in question is Spots the Space Marine by MCA Hogarth. Do they own the words space and marine when put together? It depends. They own the right to produce miniatures under that name and other related specific uses.

But it is ridiculous to suggest that no one can use those words for a story title. Observe above. This was published in 1936, and it is a sequel to Captain Brinks and the Space Marines, published in 1932.  There are later uses of the words by other authors.

The term "Space Marine" has also been used in: books by Robert Heinlein, who invented the armoured space soldier: Star Troopers, and John Ringo; Games like Doom, Quake, Timesplitters, Eat Lead, Alien Storm, and Freefall Tournament; and the film Starblazers.

Dr Who had Marine Space Corps back in '73: Death of the Daleks.

Using their economic muscle to bully some poor little web author like this makes GW look not only stupid but also bullying.