2024 has been a good year. I write this, bundled in a nest of blankets, in my new house, between festivities. It feels like a good time to look back at the year and make plans for the new year to come.

First, a few highlights:

  • I painted 205 miniatures this year (a 188% increase on 2023, although this is somewhat misleading as “one miniature” can be anything from a tiny tank to an entire display board)
  • I purchased one house
  • I published one commercial wargame
  • I made two really nice props
  • I exhibited at four conventions
  • I went to five wargaming events
  • I added 11 new pikachus to the collection
  • I read at least 55 books

And now a brief recap of the year:

January

January had two main focuses: I had to build my ultramarine army for the Goonhammer Open Heresy event later in the year, and I had to prepare for the “To Boldly Game” convention being held at the National Space Centre where I was planning on exhibiting Able Artemis, my “cold war gone hot on the moon” wargame.

One notable part of the ultramarine project was my use of recasting: this is a controversial topic but I am a firm believer that done on a personal, non-commercial basis, recasting individual parts and figures is a core hobby skill (and one that is sadly lacking in the modern hobbyist repertoire). In this case, since GW didn’t produce a good breacher upgrade kit, I bought one set of the Praetorian Breachers upgrade (at ~£20 for 5 shields, plus swords and arms I didn’t need) and produced a mould which lasted for about 8 castings, of which I got about 29 good shields, which when combined with the original five, gave me the 30 I needed for the project.

I also built the first Operation Manager’s Suzerains, combining the new “truescale” plastic MK IIIs with the old resin Invictus Suzerain kit from Forgeworld (which are still beautiful models, but tiny compared to modern plastics). The bodies, surplus to requirements, were sold to a friend in the states, and the new plastics were upgraded with braided brass wire, custom laser cut laurel wreaths and all the spare pouches and grenades I could muster. Part of me thought here I could have saved about £80 by recasting the parts I needed, but the effort of moulding that many parts for what amounted to a single casting make it not worth the effort, and whilst I don’t have a problem with recasting single parts, an entire kit feels like the other side of the line for me.

The other big project meant producing a display/demo board for Able Artemis. I’d started it in 2023, and then left it in a half completed state for several months but then blitzed it in a week. This involved painting the board itself, designing some jet-wash deflectors and converting the existing lunar rover design into an earthmover, printing both and painting those. I snuck a few extra details in, like the flag and obligatory distance signpost but everything was ready for its debut at the end of January.

To Boldly Game was a great experience, and people loved the game. The goal of the convention for me was to prove to myself that the game could properly engage and enthuse “the motivated gaming public”, i.e. people who had paid to enter a tabletop gaming themed event but had no other prior association with me or the project, and in that regard it was an overwhelming success. Of the two day event, the first day was by and far the better day (having a greater proportion of event attendees to families attending the space centre) but even the second day saw several good demos.

February

February too contained only one self-contained project and the major start to two longer running projects. At the end of February I attended a Badab War kill team event run by the Rollmodels discord server, and whilst I’d painted two kill teams (Lamenters and Carcharodons) I decided that I really wanted to paint some quartered marines and so I rapidly put together a Howling Griffons kill team with things from my stash and managed to build four breachers (a combo of old firstborn and the really old FW breacher kit, purchased for ultramarine research), a techmarine (purchased in the made to order window the previous year for Reasons™️) and five scouts (three normal scouts from a custom chapter project just after 8th edition came out, and two sniper scouts from my 1st edition heresy blood angels army).

Cue some rapid painting (including a tiny amount of final painting in the hotel room the night before) but the army was very well received at the event. The event was incredible, with a massively high bar for the quality of the hobby on display, even if the Badab War kill team rules are inconsistent at best and required frequent adjudication.

The other two projects were relating to Hypersteel Nightmare: February marked the beginning of the typesetting as the rules were starting to properly coalesce and we were starting to get the art back, and I started the bulk of the work on building the full-size demo board. This involved laser cutting a new 3ft folding board, which involved exciting engineering decisions and not a small amount of percussive persuasion. This also included building the buildings, which I had started to design in December but now had to actually build.

On top of laser cutting the buildings, I added cork granules and designed and 3D printed a bunch of gubbins such as window AC units, roof ductwork and lights, and scratch built some billboards. All in all I build twelve new buildings and constructed and detailed most of the base board itself.

March

March brought was mostly focused on Hypersteel Nightmare and it’s auxiliary projects. I painted six of the twelve buildings and had a lot of fun varying the brickwork to try and introduce enough variety given that there were only a limited number of actual buildings.

I also designed and printed the first prototype for the M36 Superheavy mech model. Working from the illustrations we’d received from Juan Ochoa was fascinating and a real diversion from a lot of the sculpting I’d done in the past. Whilst I didn’t get to paint the prototype during March thanks to resin 3D printers being bad, I did paint a Vanguard Miniatures renegade Novian tank platoon in a lovely tan scheme, and a Pendraken Futurewar Commander platoon in a 90s scifi purple scheme.

In terms of personal projects, after watching Witch From Mercury, I tripped and fell and bought three gunpla kits. I mean at £16 each, I felt like I couldn’t say no. They were assembled over two evenings, nominally justified as research material. From a primarily wargaming/scale modelling background, they’re fascinating. I’d love to get more, but it’s fitting them in to my busy modelmaking schedule, and my unfamiliarity with the core gundam timeline that puts me off more.

April

April was another busy month of Hypersteel hobby. I started the month by painting the M36 mech from March, in a bright “international rescue” orange. There’s nothing quite like holding a miniature you designed in your own hands, knowing that not long ago, none or it existed. I also printed and painted test casts of the bubble tanks, inspired by Hideki Anno’s first major anime (which no-one should watch, because it’s awful). These I painted in my favourite stupid colour scheme: the ahistoric caunter camo based on the fact the British Army changed the names of some colours and one of the colours used is now a bright baby blue.

I also painted another three sets of tanks for demo/playtesting/photography purposes: another set of Pendraken Futurewar Commander tanks, this time in a bright green “traditional” paint job, a Vanguard Miniatures “Eloi” grav tanks, in the same Yme Loc scheme as my 28mm eldar, and a Vanguard Miniatures Cybershadow Technocracy platoon, painted in the traditional Mars red.

In terms of personal hobby, I did a quick paintjob on a spare set of the resin objective markers I did for Goonhammer the previous year as the last bit I needed for “Greetings from the Warp”, a two day “narrative” Heresy event I attended with my friend Zach. In the spirit of keeping the retrospective positive, all I will say is that the standard of hobby on display was very high, and we left on the morning of the second day feeling slightly ill and not enthused about playing a second day’s worth of games.

Back in Nottingham, April was the month that I did the photography for the interstitial spreads for the Hypersteel Nightmare rulebook. This meant doing a rapid paint job on the folding city board, including two evenings spent painstakingly painting traffic markings, one evening painting up a bunch of ruined car barricades, and about a week painting four extra buildings. I spent three days taking the photos, using a mix of my terrain and tanks, and terrain and tanks provided by Evie from their collection.

May

May was a solid return to personal hobby. I kicked the month off with a RMRO (get together organised by the rollmodels group) at Warhammer World which was doubly great as I got to see a bunch of my friends AND I could roll out of my own bed and down the road to the event rather than having to stay in a hotel.

Back from that, I painted a test Stormcast for a possible Age of Sigmar army, which I really enjoyed but as a single exercise and didn’t find myself enthused by the range to do an entire army. I painted it with enamelled armour, heavily chipped to reveal a rough cast metal surface beneath. I’m thrilled with the results, but again it didn’t spark joy as an army project.

Otherwise, it was back to ultramarines! Goonhammer Open was rapidly approaching and I needed to build and paint, uh, most of an army. I built the remaining seven Suzerains based on the prototype from January in three days, including converting a banner using the primaris command squad banner and a librarian from the then very shortly OOP firstborn librarian with force staff (which I had to re-carve to turn into a single handed weapon). I spent two days building icons from layers of laser cut card for drop pods (and built two of the five I’d need). I spent two days building a pair of dreadclaws (which are equal parts genius and hateful in their construction). One day building a heavily converted leviathan, and two evenings building a combination of a deredeo (with resin weapons), converting a herald from the ultramarines named herald model, and a unit of nine resin MK V support marines with a mix of plastic plasma guns (which was hateful because of the mix of guns with integral plastic hands, which needed aligning with arms with integral resin hands that I had to cut off).

I took a short break near the end of the month from Ultramarine madness for two reasons. First, I spent a week building the first of the props I built for Soulmuppet: the gun-in-the-stone. It’s foam, laser cut MDF and acrylic, and a ton of plaster and paint. It was delivered just in time for UKGE and went down a storm. And second, the first print run of Hypersteel Nightmare arrived and Evie and I spent a day packing and shipping our pre-orders.

June

June contained two events: the GHO and Gaming for Good, but in terms of hobby, it was a monomaniacal focus on painting Ultramarines ultramarine. And going mad masking drop pods.

The first weekend of June was spent finishing building the drop pods, and then spending way too long masking off panels to paint them blue and white, and very quickly abandoning the original plan to reduce the number of white panels on the four non-HQ drop pods. The army was rapidly painted in the first three weeks of June, and finished on the literal day before the event. It’s not to the standard I’d have liked, but it was done and honestly on the table it looks fine. I hope in 2025 to be able to go back and tidy them up a bit, as I’m taking them to another GHO but honestly I might focus on expanding them.

Painting was briefly interrupted to exhibit Hypersteel Nightmare at the Nottingham Central Library for Gaming for Good, a small local show run for the first time this year. It was good, we ran plenty of good demos and sold a reasonable number of books.

The month ended with the Goonhammer Open however, which is honestly a highlight of the year. Four games over two days, I won two and lost two, and came away grinning from ear to ear.

July

After the marathon sprint of getting ready for GHO, July was comparatively quiet. The main project was painting the Vanguard Miniatures “Hellian League” Battlefleet Gothic-alike ships, in preparation for another RMRO later in the year. These were a real blast to paint, being cast beautifully in resin rather than the often metal options from other companies.

Otherwise, I built and converted a Seraphon old blood on carnosaur to be climbing over an exploded steam tank, with an attempt to convey the exploded piping from a steam engine coming out of the dead steam tank. That in particular took a few attempts to get right, but it was a fun little self contained project.

August

August was even quieter, hobby wise, but again had two events. The first weekend kicked off with RMRO, in which I played Battlefleet Gothic (a fun but terrible and confusing game), Age of Sigmar Spearhead (a great game I should play more of) and ran a whole load of games of Hypersteel Nightmare for my friends. It was held at the Leeds Wargames Club, a magical situation of a wargames club who own their own building.

The second weekend was Britcon, the last wargames show in Nottingham proper run as a combination wargames show and tournament over two days. Evie sadly couldn’t attend the first day, so I had help from my friend Fox, and it was alright as a show. Slow, and a large portion of the audience was primarily historicals focused, but still managed to do some sales. The second day was dead, however, and none of this was helped by the fact that the tournaments (a big selling point for us traders, as every tournament attendee had a £5 voucher) started before the show opened and finished after the show closed. I don’t know if we’ll rebook for 2025, especially as it’s moved to Leicester and increased in price.

In terms of hobby, August was a conversion month. I built a Sherman Firefly for a diorama, attempting to incorporate as many armour modelling techniques as possible. There’s a few details on it that are likely ahistorical, but hey ho it’s not a museum piece and who knows, maybe a British Firefly crew got talking to an American crew from the Pacific theatre and were willing to risk their CO’s ire in loading their tank with crap.

Seeing that Inquisitor Karamazov had been discontinued, I ran to Warhammer World and thankfully picked up one of the last copies off the shelf, and saw this as a sign that I should actually do the magos conversion I’d been threatening to do for years. Using Karamazov’s throne, the legs of a castellax (courtesy of the new plastics), a manipulous from 40k, a servoautomata from the FW heresy tech priest, the cognitor from the inquisitorial agents box and a pile of other bits, I built my very own Ordo Cybernetica archmagos on abeyant.

And then I realised, abeyants give you the hover rule. Uh, it jumps.

Finally, I built a tank I’d been talking about for months now, taking a 28mm tank and converting it to be a massive land dreadnought for 8/10mm. Alas there are no good 28mm T-35s that don’t involve buying from Russian companies, so I got a Rubicon T-26 and built it with too many turrets, and a bunch of extra details from the brass etch pile.

None of these have been painted yet, sadly.

September

September started strong. I bought a bunch of old world dwarves, built 32 of them and painted them in the first two weeks of the month. In madness or hubris, I went with a checkered red and white pattern, and blitzed through the two units of warriors including some lovely freehand on the banners. The kits are showing their age, but it has reignited my love for proper rank-and-flank, at least from a modelling perspective.

I then went to the lake district for a week. No modelling occurred. It was lovely.

When I got back I started on three gyrocopters and a gyrobomber, but I’d lost my momentum. Also batch painting four helicopters was a mad idea. So at the end of the month I let myself get distracted with a new project…

Warhammer Nottingham was doing a “clampack challenge” for their store anniversary, in which you bought and painted a single character model in two weeks. I, uh, bought the Lion. He’s a single character model. And I decided to do him on a 40mm base set into a small diorama. So at the end of September I built and mostly painted the diorama/base ready to paint the Lion in the following week.

October

October was a month primarily of competitions. It started off with Lion El’Johnson, which is probably the single model I was most proud of this year. It was a lovely mix of highlighting, freehand and just trying to push myself as hard and as far as possible and I feel it shows in the final product. Sadly, the competition turned into “here’s a reward for participating” for whatever reason, but I am still chuffed with the outcome.

Next up, I painted a batch of the Bad Squiddo “gunny peegs” rabbits. Since I had some of the new krautkover grimdark basing mix, I had to paint them all as the monty python holy grail rabbit, which was very funny and still is very funny. One of them is clearly riding the Akira bike, so I spent some extra time freehanding on my best interpretation of the various stickers on that. I had a blast playtesting the game Annie is working on too.

October brought the second of the two props for Soulmuppet, this time the first component of an Orbital Blues flight deck, which I mostly built and programmed that month. It was a mix of laser cut MDF, 3D printed details, and off the shelf buttons and switches. One neat detail though is using OHP transparencies to put text in the buttons.

Element Games ran a Halloween painting competition, for which I painted a group of three Horus Heresy Thallax, with heavily damaged armour and broken faceplates with visible skulls. It was a real blast to paint and convert them, even if I didn’t place in the actual competition.

At the end of the month, I exhibited at Fiasco (sadly alone as Evie was ill). Fiasco is the Leeds Wargaming Club show, held at the Royal Armouries (in the hospitality suite) and sadly, for whatever reason, the 2024 show is probably the last. Attendance wasn’t great, but it’s always good to get Hypersteel Nightmare in front of more people. It was also the first outing of the M36 mech miniature in 3D printed form, and we sold a reasonable number of them, which proves people like my miniatures.

Rounding out October, I converted a mordhiem chaos dwarf warband using the new Chaos Dwarf bloodbowl team and some custom 3D printed bits (a mix of old stuff from years past I designed to incorporate some Fenris Games bits into my then Age of Sigmar army, and new stuff designed for this project). I love my chorfs, and despite only having three new plastic sculpts (plus the new old-style bull centaurs) they practically convert themselves.

November

November contained one single new miniature. It was however, a doozy. I painted a single Harlequin for the Rollmodels Golden Gunch painting competition, going for maximum effort in terms of hand painting a quilted diamond pattern on the cloak. It was incredibly fun (I might be doing a full harlequin kill team in 2025, watch this space) and whilst I’m sad I didn’t place, the quality of the entries was phenomenal.

The last hobby I did in my old house was, after the harlequin, building the Death Guard kill team from the new starter set (which I split with a friend). I tried to do armour texture on them, but it didn’t really stand out, so the next time I try it I need to make it more aggressive.

And then I moved house. People are not joking when they say it’s the most stressful thing you can do.

December

This brings us firmly to December. Most of December has been spent getting the new house up to scratch, and I still don’t have my proper hobby desk back up and running, but I still managed to do a little bit of hobby.

I built an AT scale reaver titan for the Rollmodels secret santa, which was fun. For some reason I love having knights and titans stand on shipping containers, and here is no different. The leg mostly works for it, which was a relief.

I built two Blood Red Bone White warbands, one group of fish anarchists and one group of “Undrowned”. Blood Red Bone White is a project from Evie, about a weird war alt-history for the Russian civil war. The fish anarchists are mostly unmodified Warlord Games naval brigade models (with one model converted to have a rifle where the original is carrying an SMG), and Northstar fish men (converted with hats from spare sailors). The undrowned are various Bad Squiddo models, with the effigy made from bits of door mat.

As I write this, I have also painted the fish anarchists. I also built a HO scale boat for a board for it, which was a truly hateful experience. Do not buy a 30 year old plastic model railway scenery kit, you will not enjoy it.

Moving into 2025

So, what’s in store for 2025?

2024 was originally meant to be the year of the big robot, but alas house hunting made sitting down to commit to a 28mm Reaver Titan a difficult prospect (in fact, the billy bookcase I bought in November 2023 was only actually built when I moved house last month). But now I have moved, ’25 is going to be The Year of the Bigature and to that end I have four BIG models planned:

  • A Horus Heresy Legion Mastodon for GHO Armour Wars, which is currently in prep, to start assembly if not in the next few days, in the first week of January.
  • An Ork Stompa for Orktober, with plenty of scratchbuilding and custom parts
  • A 28mm Reaver Titan
  • And Operation Trojan Cylinder

Operation Trojan Cylinder is the most ambitious of the four, but also in my mind the most important. I really enjoy modelmaking, and for some time I’ve really wanted to build something not wargaming related. Model trains are far, far too expensive to realistically justify (and I can’t see myself having the space for it, even with the new house) and so I felt I had two choices: get really into dollhouses or built a 1:300 scale “Island 2” O’Neill cylinder.

I’ve started various planning sketches and diagrams and exploratory pieces of artwork and I have no idea if it’s feasible to complete in a year with all the other stuff going on, but I would like to commit to having at least finished the initial physical study for the interior, and some significant portion of the final sculpture by the end of the year.

On top of the big models, there are obviously the various smaller projects and unlike last year there’s no major plan for big new armies in 2025. Unless GW release Chaos Dwarves for AoS, in which case all bets are off.

And then there’s the “professional” side.

There are five game related projects I would like to complete in 2025:

  • Hypersteel Meatgrinder: the infantry expansion for Hypersteel Nightmare
  • Epigram Brand Miniatures: at least five significant minaitures releases across the year
  • Hull Down: tank focused WWII wargame for 10-28mm
  • Turing Police: Orbital Blues hack/splat/expansion/supplement/something about being a bad space secret service chasing down evil-question-mark Ais and asking questions about the limits of state power in the corporate-balkinised-future
  • Able Artemis: Cold war gone hot on the moon alt-history wargame

Hypersteel Meatgrinder is simple: it’s in progress, I need to get the draft finished and tested and then laid out and printed, but it’s going to be a small softback publication, mostly with reused illustrations and some new photography.

Epigram Brand Miniatures is also kind of in progress, and the first two releases are mostly waiting on new equipment and me to have a functioning workshop again. As I described in the retrospective, the first release will be a resin cast M36 mech, the second the bubble tanks, and then of the next three there’s ideas like smaller mechs to go with the M36, bubble tank expansions for planes etc., more miniatures based on the illustrations, a modular reave kit? The possibilities are endless.

Hull Down is the biggest “maybe” on this list. Hypersteel Nightmare grew out of it, but we’ve learned from that and there’s a lot we can do to improve on it. It in part depends on the work I’m doing for Hypersteel Meatgrinder, but also being able to wrangle the time between me and Evie to give it the love and care it needs.

Turing Police is a game I started writing in December 2022(!) about being space police chasing after Ais after a terrible AI war, and how state power and violence twists and poisons people’s best intentions. Every so often I think about it again, and I really want to finish it even if it ends up just being a bit of a vanity press situation.

Able Artemis is a game I started working on years and years ago and have an informal arrangement to publish with a well known name in the UK miniatures scene. Maybe 2025 will be the year we can find the time to get it done, but it did get some love in 2024 to add some new mechanics. This is the item on the list most outside of my control.

So that’s 2025 sorted.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *