Not a bad total at all considering I only started the site at the beginning of the year. This isn't just a self congratulatory post, though. I thought I'd take a brief look at what I'd done and where I'm going.
In my early months I managed to keep a steady post rate up; mainly covering the building of my Fantasy Chaos army. I also had a good sort out of my gaming paraphernalia and decided to sell much of it to finance the restructuring of my Games Workshop collection. I broadened the content of lone pilgrim to add reviews of gaming products and posted some background material for the Skolarii Sector, my own playground in the 40k galaxy. I wrote up some battle reports of my games and I've been steadily refining the format over the past few months.
One of the main things I did was structure my gaming around Games Workshop's tournament year which runs from 1st August to 31st July. I came up with a masterplan - a list of what I thought I could accomplish in a year. Here's what I came up with:
- I will build and paint 1500 points of Forgeworld Renegade Imperial Guard.
- I will add some models to my Blood Angels Space Marines to bring them up to 1500 points, and they will be my main tournament army for the year.
- I will finish my trench gaming board (which is currently half built).
- I will complete subsector 1 (the Salazar systems) for the Skolarii Sector.
- I will get all my battle reports up on my website (around 150 of them!).
I haven't even looked at the Skolarii Sector yet, but I'm still hoping to do so. Similarly the trench board is still waiting for some attention, but that is in hand too. In fact both of these projects slot into my plans regarding Apocalypse, something I didn't even consider when I was making my plans earlier in the year.
I bought a Baneblade at Games Day and plan to put it together around Christmas time. I also plan to scratch build a Brass Scorpion at the same time, so that both my forces of order and forces of disorder have a super heavy vehicle. I'll want to play an Apocalypse game or two to show them off so I'll need a big board. That's when I need to complete the trench board. I can add it to my other boards to make an 8'x4' table. The background to these conflicts will be the second Chaos invasion of the Skolarii Sector which, yes you've guessed it, takes place in the Salazar systems. So I want to take a good month or two at the start of 2008 to pull all these projects together.
I also bought more models for my planned Renegade Guard at Games Day but that is where my masterplan begins to break down. The problem is my Blood Angels.
I thought I could simply add a handful of models and get the army on the tabletop but that's not going to happen. The main reason is that I really love the Blood Angels and view them as my main army. I want to do justice to them and spend lots of time painting and modelling them, but that doesn't get the models on the board quickly enough. We are already in the tournament season so I want to be playing games with them now. They aren't ready. In fact if I add all the models I want to the force and paint them to a good standard they won't be ready until the next tournament season.
Another reason they're a problem is that I want to take them to a Grand Tournament. I had said that I wanted to build a 1500 point army every year and my intention was to use it for that tournament season. Games Workshop is handing out final tickets to the best painted armies so that is a real incentive to do my best with them. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get to the tournament this year due to work commitments so, in theory, they have missed their shot at tournament glory altogether. I couldn't let this stand.
My third and final problem was with my Chaos Space Marines. I had played my Exigators quite a bit last year and had managed to attend the Grand Tournament with them so I wanted to retire them for a bit. Just as I was doing so, the new codex was was released. There were a ton of new models to add to the army, new and better rules and therefore a chance to use some of those unusual units that tended to get left on the shelf when using the old codex. And there I was, packing the army away, despite having about 4000 points of well painted units all ready and raring to go. It just didn't make any sense.
So I've decided upon a change of plan. I've made my Exigators this season's main 40k army and pushed the Blood Angels back to next year. This makes a whole lot of sense to me as it means I get to use the new Chaos codex with my already painted models and I'll be patiently putting my Blood Angels army together in the background. That means they can hit the ground running next year.
It does mean of course that my Renegades will have to wait until the year after but I think the cycle is better. Rather than painting and playing with the same army during the year, and putting myself under immense pressure to do so, I'll now be playing a complete army while getting the next one ready.
A lot has happened over the last 200 posts. Stick with me over the next 200, I'm sure it will be quite a ride.
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