Author: CJ Shearwood
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Year of the Bigature: Part Three – In Strange Moods
October has, for as long as I’ve been back in the hobby, been Orktober, the ceremonial month in which Ork/Orc/Orruck players simultaniously celebrate the wide array of ways in which they enjoy and embody their chosen faction, and also lament their apparent abandonment by Games Workshop. Many other hobbyists, myself included, take October as an…
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2025 Recap
2025 has been a year of conclusions. Professionally, it’s been manic. I’ve taken on new responsibilities, become a proper manager again and taken on a shiny new even more senior job title. Personally, with the big milesone of “buy a house” complete, the year felt a bit like catching up, making the house my own…
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Year of the Bigature: Interlude – What isn’t a Bigature
In the first interlude, I explained that the key to a bigature is that it must be a model of something large relative to a person, and also be physically big. The 1:1 version of a bigature should have a sense of scale to it already, but then the scale model should be large and…
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Year of the Bigature: Part Two – A Vi Machinae Divinae Interfici
The Reaver Titan was, when I was young, the largest of the titans Forgeworld made. And as a young child with limited means, it was forever out of reach. I am now an adult with a good job and for the last couple of years, I have had both the means and desire to purchase…
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Die Spade War, or no-one wants to dig a trench
Step one in my still as-of-yet hypothetical book “How to design a tabletop wargame” is “don’t”. This is a hard won lesson from over a decade of game design theory and practice and the most important thing you can do is ignore it. But it remains step one precisely because making a wargame is a…
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Year of the Bigature: Interlude – What is a Bigature
A bigature is a big miniature. As a term, I first heard it on the making of featurette on the Matrix Reloaded, talking about the miniature set for the Zion docks, and later in various ILM and Weta making-of features for stuff like the Lord of the Rings. I’m not quite in the space to…
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The Sack of Tallarn – A GHO Retrospective
Tl;dr: Goonhammer Opens good, Heresy bad game, Heresy good spectacle, resin brick won awards.
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Year of the Bigature: Part One – Once more into the (resin) gates
At the end of 2024 I came to a realisation: the thing I love most in my minaitures hobbying is building big miniatures. Bigatures, if you will. And I committed myself to building a number of them this year. This post is about the first of these projects, the Forgeworld Legion Mastodon. I am not…
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I would like my car not to kill me please
I bought a new (to me) car recently, and as part of that experience I got to drive two other brand new cars whilst the dealership fixed the car I actually wanted to buy. And whilst they both had their ups and downs, there’s one thing that really stood out to me: I would like…
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2024 Recap!
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: And now a brief recap of the year: January…
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A Sprue, a Runner and a Gate
Plastic is fantastic. High impact polystyrene and ABS are wonderful materials for making miniatures from. They are lightweight, flexible and elastic enough to be resistant to light bending, but hard enough to be easily cut and shaped with hand tools. It’s also cheap. If you buy a box of hard plastic miniatures today, the box…
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The Daemons are in the Details
When the second edition of Horus Herey dropped last in June last year, I was optimistic. The edition looked good, we had a strong release schedule ahead full of interesting things, everything was good! But it didn’t take long for things to slip. Rules broken in the core book, the slow and creeping realisation that…
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Heresy is a Heresy
I have been playing Games Workshop’s Horus Heresy since Autumn 2015, when I purchased three resin weirdos on a whim because some of my friends already played it was primarily Forgeworld resin infantry and I liked the idea of playing Mechanicum. I made a thrall-heavy list using stripped down skitarii and had a ball, and…
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Virtual Conferences, Virtual Rewards
2020 has been a wash for conferences and conventions, and I’m not sure their virtual alternatives actually help.