Climbing Sprue Mountain #1 - Dark Eldar

Climbing Sprue Mountain could probably have been the name for this blog. It's a silly phrase, of course, but it rather neatly captures the endless work that a hobby with small plastic toy soldiers involves. To celebrate a year of writing this blog I'm doing a short series this week that details exactly where I am with all the armies that I collect. I recently climbed my own sprue mountain in the more literal sense as - under orders from my wife - I completely (re)organised the hobby shelves on the landing outside our bedroom (it really needed doing!).   

Not very much going on here...yet...

I'm starting this series with my Dark Eldar because this lot are 99% still on the sprues. It's fun to have an army in this state, where it only exists as a fighting force in a prospective list form, including a whole bunch of things I've not bought yet. This is the first time that I've collected miniatures with such a planned method and I'm hoping that it'll stop me taking too many pricey wrong turns! My strategy is to build this army around Haemonculi HQ with plenty of Wracks and Grotesques - here's hoping that a plastic set of Grots makes it into the release schedule for next year. At the moment I'm thinking of a paint scheme that's mostly white, with purple details - that would be a cool challenge.

Shapeshifting And The Changing of The Ways

I believe it's widely held among stage magicians that the most shocking magic tricks involve turning one body into another, where a person undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming somebody else in full view of the audience. I'm thinking about this a lot today for no particular reason - so I started to collect some inspirational pictures of miniatures that are shapeshifting, either temporarily or permanently, through magic, possession, or grotesque genetic modification. Who knows what projects will spawn from this? All hail the Great Conspirator and the Architect of Fate... 

Hordes Incubi

Forge World Skin Wolf

An alternative Greater Daemon (Image from here)

The future of genetic modification

I would've made the feet smaller, personally

Snuff Said

Detritus the Troll - an excellent miniature
based on a design by Paul Kidby
Available here.

A few days ago Terry Pratchett was interviewed on BBC Breakfast about his new Discworld novel, Snuff, which I've just started reading. As fans will be well aware, Pratchett suffers from a form of Alzheimer's and is progressively less able to use a standard keyboard when writing his books. He now uses a mixture of dictation software and a human assistant to get his words onto the page.     

Alongside Snuff I'm reading the Dark Eldar codex, which was written by the rather verbose Phil Kelly - I don't mean that pejoratively, only that he has, in some senses at least, an extremely good grasp of the English language, and writes and talks with an extensive vocabulary. Pratchett, of course, is a master craftsman of language, so it is interesting to see how the change in the production method for his prose has influenced his storytelling. A handful of pages in, I would say it has actually strengthened it.  

Although a codex is not a novel, it does have some narrative elements - 'the fluff' - so it has been impossible for me to escape from a comparison of the two writing styles. This has re-enforced a longstanding issue that I have with the in-house writing at GW. While their writers are obviously intelligent and highly skilled in many respects, for me they fall down on a very basic issue of language use; that is, they tend to use flourishes with abandon, which leads to stylistic-overkill.

Let me outline one example: "Commorragh is no mere metropolis, for it is to the largest of Imperial hives as a soaring mountain is to a mound of termites" (Dark Eldar codex, p.8).

Now, nothing technically wrong with that sentence, but try reading it aloud. Do employees of GW really speak like this? Of course, the written word is somewhat different to the spoken, but as the Pratchett example shows, the difference shouldn't be so great. Perhaps there is something in the house-style at GW that favours anachronisms: there's a phrase in the 8th edition rulebook for Warhammer that reads something like "...a goodly amount of the evening".     

I just wish that the GW writers would sit down (like all good undergraduate students should) and read their work out loud. Then they might realise how ridiculous some of it sounds, and calm it down a little. 

Returning to the 41st Millennium

So, what did I do with those GW vouchers? I decided to take the plunge and return to the 41st Millennium. Since I got my gaming boots back on last year I'd more-or-less ignored 40k. The main problem for me - on the surface at least - was the dominance of vehicles in the majority of the current armies. When I used to play (back in the mists of times), vehicles were very limited and were little more than what are now referred to as 'dedicated transports'.

The way that 40k worked for those of us playing the wonderful mess that was Rogue Trader, and the rather more organised 2nd edition, was as a predominantly skirmish-based game. We could set up a number of buildings and terrain pieces on a small board - say, our parents coffee tables - and spend an hour or so pitting a couple of squads against each other. 

But that was the olden days. Reading through gaming blogs and seeing battle reports from tournaments it soon became clear that, in those environs at least, a large number of heavily armoured and armed vehicles was an essential spine to a competitive force. The idea of buying, painting and fielding maybe eight very similar tanks just does not appeal to me on any level.

(Perhaps if I was to play epic scale, but really, that's not something that ever got my juices flowing). If that was the way that 40k played, I just wasn't interested.

Of course, although we might buy GW products, we don't have to buy into everything they put out, and neither do we have to follow the tourney crowd and take army lists and math-hammer them to the stripped down logical conclusion where a force is simply designed to win at all costs. Dr Bargle is very good of reminding me of this, although he's perhaps more interested than I in the retro-style-mashing of gaming systems. I myself wanted to be convinced that current 40k was a viable gaming proposition, given my preferences.

It was in this spirit that I went into my local GW store yesterday and put down a challenge to the staff: "sell me something" I said. And what a very good job they did. After talking through my current fantasy armies and spending a few minutes weighing up an Ogre Kingdoms battalion box we arrived at the tricky subject of 40k. I outlined my concerns, which they talked though with me, and then suggested that I try the game first-hand, which I'd guess is their No. 1 sales tactic!

More the 20 years had passed since I'd last moved a Space Marine on the tabletop. But I was pleasantly surprised with how the rules had developed and it didn't take long for me to realise that current 40k was a system that I could feel comfortable playing - the mechanics are smooth, shooting doesn't have to dominate gameplay, and vehicles don't have to overtake squad-based tactics. But which army to choose?

In the past - and I mean when mullet hairstyles were in fashion - I had Space Marines and Orks. I didn't really want either of these because the modelling and painting possibilities are either limited, as with Marines, or something I've recently tackled, as with fantasy battle greenskins. For a while I toyed with the idea of Chaos Space Marines - lots to work with there, good fluff, tactical diversity - but I settled on Dark Eldar.

For some time now I've been looking over the recently up-dated Dark Eldar range and envying the opportunities they presented. Some of the miniatures are simple breathtaking. I'm also sold on the way that they play - you can't hang around with these guys - you need to get them into the melee action quickly because they won't last long in an open firefight.

Another area where style and tactics is in perfect harmony is with the vehicles. No rust-bucket tanks for the Dark Eldar - oh no! Their transports are all open, angular, full of fantastic aesthetic detail - in sum, they're a model-junkie's dream!

With a battleforce box sitting on my desk I've got a long, long way to go with this army, even before I get to try them out on the tabletop. But I'm making my way through the codex and really getting into the narrative of the Dark Eldar - something that I've discovered has been fully and extensively revamped to go with the up-date of the miniature range.

And I'm really looking forward to getting started on the Raider model - what a great centre piece for one of the shelves in my display cabinet! (Oh yes... haven't mentioned that DIY project to the wife yet...)