Oh hey, I didn’t see you there. This? Oh, this is just a little something, a small annual novella documenting my year in miniatures in miniature. How did it stack up to previous years, you ask? Well, I don’t think anyone in my immediate social or familial circles died, so that’s a plus! Anyway, let’s break down this year of complex emotions, highs and lows, joy and pain in some cold hard numbers:
- Acquired 426 models, mostly due to weekly overlap in Stormbringer and Imperium magazine
- Built 152 models
- Painted 153 models
- Played 52 miniatures wargames over 5 game systems, winning 35 of them
- Completed reading 5 Black Library publications and dropping another
- Attended 4 tournaments/events
- Recorded 18 episodes of my podcast, The 40k Badcast, plus:
- 18 bonus episodes for our Patreon subscribers
- 6 episodes of the granddaddy of 40k podcasts, The Independent Characters
- Wrote or contributed to 75 articles right here on Go On Hammer Dot Com
- Created 42 videos and 77 shortform videos for the Goonhammer YouTube channel
If, for whatever reason, you choose to follow the narrative arc of this particular weirdo, you can follow along with similarly formatted novellas from 2021, 2022, and 2023.
January
This year kicked off with this MF named Regis. In Warhammer Quest: Lost Relics, a Barnes & Noble exclusive I have been meaning to review for well over a year, his name is Regis Fulbright. I believe this Knight-Incantor (now gone to Legends, RIP) was an exclusive miniature in an Age of Sigmar starter magazine, but freed from exclusivity, now resides in this bookstore bookshelf boardgame. I believe this was one of the first Stormcast I painted in my updated scheme, which trades washes in the cloaks for darker layers and smoother transitions. It’s a smidge slower but looks more consistent, and I ramble more about it later in this retrospective. I don’t love this mini, but it’s good to start the year off easy.
At the same time as Regis, I painted up Xandire’s Truthseekers, the Warhammer Underworlds warband. I’ll just quote myself here because I was (slightly) younger and (decidedly) less tired when I wrote about them in Stormbringer issue 10:
So adamant are Games Workshop that you seek truth with Xandire, that they have seen fit to include them in the Warhammer Underworlds: Harrowdeep set, the Rivals of Harrowdeep set, the Warcry: Crypt of Blood set, Warhammer Quest: Lost Relics, their own standalone kit, and now this, the 10th issue of Stormbringer.
Painting them was fine; they’ve got some overlapping detail that’s hard to deal with and the hammer guy literally has no ass – not in a Hank Hill way, but in a “There was an ass here. It’s gone now” sort of way. Terminal case of noassatall aside, they look the part of intrepid adventurers.
For the rest of January I went on my own little adventures, with my wife and I heading to Arizona to hike Saguaro National Park and Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. Bouncing between Tucson and Phoenix was alright, until I remembered that these hot summer days were actually in January. I tried not to think about that too hard as I looked out from Camelback Mountain, high enough to see the fullness of that city-sized strip mall. Strenuous as that climb is, looking down on not just the horizon-stretching urban sprawl, but the birds in the sky below you is really something. Saguaro is a punishing hike as well, its forests of cacti providing minimal shade and maximum pain, with potential dangerous critters around every corner and under every rock. Still, I’d recommend both to anyone prepared and able to do so. Just bring more water than usual.
Lastly, I did write my first Mugwatch column, in which I reviewed the color changing mug from Stormbringer. Please read it, it’s very stupid.
February
I hadn’t revisited this kit in several years, as while the Primaris Black Templars range feels like it was released yesterday, that was 2021. Roaring from that anxious era came one of my personal favorite ranges in Games Workshop history, bringing the art of John Blanche and Mark Gibbons to life. Working on this squad was a welcome return, and I got to use a bunch of the Templar upgrade bits I didn’t get around to using the first time. My painting style had also changed – much like with the Stormcast just before, I’d transitioned from a technique of basecoating a fabric, washing it, and layering it up, to just starting with a darker color and mixing more colors for smoother volumetric highlights. I didn’t like the tidemarks left by washes, or the occasional odd reaction they’d get with pooling, cracking, or going off-color. If you want more words about that and how I painted these lads in particular, I contributed to a How to Paint Everything article about em. All that being said, this squad has seen every single game since, as even in games where I only take a single Crusader squad, I prioritize these slightly nicer looking ones.
At last year’s NOVA live show, listener and entirely too generous ginger Ken gifted me one of these then-impossible to find tanks. A mere half year later, I got around to building and painting the damn thing, laboring over every edge highlight, transfer, and scratch of weathering. It’s one of my favorite looking models, and my local competitive crew were so thrilled I’d leaned into one of the best Space Marine units out there… on paper. In practice, this tank has earned the moniker “Sadiator Shit-Your-Pantser” from Kriegsie, the local Ken to my Ryu (or vice versa, I forget which one’s cooler in the new games). This tank is all swings and roundabouts, and is either the MVP, a sad idiot box that does actions on objectives, or an even sadder idiot box that misses all its shots and dies ignobly on turn 2.
I went on a tear of terrain painting here, if you couldn’t tell. My friend Zac has been patiently teaching me how to use an airbrush for some time, and these Sigmarite ruins are the fruits of those teachings. Even still, I didn’t like how smooth they looked, so I drybrushed them and did some weathering to give them some texture, then used Contrast paint on all the wood. It feels good turning that much surface area of bare plastic into painted, usable game pieces, none of which have yet been used. I got some of these later in Stormbringer, but I preempted that need and painted them early. I admit that, on occasion, I look at what will be coming down the line in an effort to better plot out my painting. It’s a coward’s move, but time would become increasingly precious this year.
Also on the partworks terrain train were these sets of Manufactorum Ruins which I’d gotten at some point in the Imperium series. I had some competitive gaming coming up and wanted to get some tournament-ready terrain, and if these are good enough for official GW events, they’re certainly good enough for me. This was also a contrast to my newfangled airbrush terrain painting, as these are just rattlecans, drybrushing, sponging and other tried-and-tested techniques. The same part of me that didn’t care for fingerpainting doesn’t care for terrain painting, as it’s just so damn messy and there’s nowhere to hold to keep your hands clean. Maybe that says more about me than I expected a paragraph about a fake plastic building to.
As has been alluded to in previous retrospectives, an urge occasionally possesses me to convert a little dude and paint him, and that wriggling feeling won’t leave my brain until said little dude is in my hand. This Lieutenant was one of those. Oodles of Assault Intercessors arrived via Imperium during my review of that series, and it got to the point where I could just start using leftover bodies to make cool characters. What genuinely excited me most about this dude was his heraldry, which repeats covering his left pauldron. You can kinda see it here, but there’s a turnaround on my Instagram.
Similar to January, this month was also spent largely away from my humble home in Bend. We traveled down to Grass Valley, California, so we could convert our work van into a camper. It’s not garish land fortress like a Sprinter, but something humbler, smaller, and better suited to two little gremlins who want to go camping without bringing an entire studio apartment along. Her name’s Tasha. We would go on to take her out occasionally, but not as often as we’d like, as much of the following 6 months were scaffolded around my education. I went back to school for a UI/UX bootcamp, as nearly every design job I had applied for in the previous three years wanted at least something from this skill set. To make this career change happen, I’d be giving up my previously sacred Wednesday Warhammer night, as well as about 40 hours a week where I’d be either in class or grinding away on homework. Sometimes this would mean taking a class from a hotel where I’d rather be enjoying a vacation with my wife, or missing game days and tournaments because I had another Figma prototype to build. I knew it would be hard, and it was, but it was only 6 months; classes were over in August, and a week before NOVA at that. With that carrot so tantalizingly dangling at the end of the stick, I got to work.
March
God damn do I love spooky shit. On that January trip to Arizona, my wife and I watched through all of Castlevania, and I found myself playing Symphony of the Night for the first time afterwards. They’re both very good! I’d also purchased one of those big holiday splash boxes of Soulblight duders at my FLGS, which still resides unopened in my emotional support backlog. I started cracking into some good old fashioned spooky boils and ghouls, largely in a single batch. It was a welcome return to the scheme utilized in the Cursed City set I painted a distressing number of years ago, slightly modernized with my developing paint style. The Carstein Crew are delights one and all, with sharp details, a healthy variety of textures, and poses that ooze menace without looking static. They, like the aforementioned Cursed City set, would only find use in games of Dungeons & Dragons.
Around this time I also started reading a few Warhammer vampire novels. John French’s The Hollow King (it’s good!), Gary Kloster’s The Last Volari (not bad!) and Joshua Reynolds’ The Return of Nagash (I don’t like it!) accompanied me for some time throughout this year. While each had their own unique merits and narratives, all three followed a vampire with a ghost in their head, usually of a parent, guardian, or other elder. While I am no stranger to being haunted by the at times unrealistic expectations of my forebears, I was tiring of that particular story beat. I pulled the ripcord halfway through my third book in a row where a ghost in a vampire’s head calls them an asshole.
I also painted this Necromancer, who I’d been holding onto since I was working on my old Empire army. He was going to be an amethyst wizard in that force, but he’d sat primed in a box for several years. I busted him out and painted him in my Cursed City baddie scheme, and even though he’s an older model, he absolutely holds up. The face sculpt is especially great, and it was a comfort to dot an i that had been let undotted for so long.
Only a month into the aforementioned UI/UX bootcamp, I was given an offer from Goonhammer to be brought on full time. This was a “when it rains, it pours” situation, where I went from having precious few obligations to now figuring what a job with Big Goon would look like between my schooling, podcast, and daily life. The first thing I did was design the Goonhammer Open T-shirts you may have seen or received at any of our events this year (I saw some in person at NOVA, they’re nice!) but my main job was going to be video production. The fruits of those particular seeds wouldn’t come til May, but as a certified Edging Enthusiast, I can only attempt to share my delight in delayed gratification with you.
April
I spent half of March and all of April painting these models. They are the most beautiful collective pains in my ass I have ever worked on. As much as I enjoyed coming up with individual heraldry for each of them, they are each, on their own, Too Much. Together, they are Much Too Much. This immoderate crew of cavaliers is not one I wish to paint again, as gallant and distinct as they are. While classes occupied several of the hours I would have spent painting, there is an altogether excessive amount of stuff on each of these models that I blame for the overlong completion time on what is, at the end of the day, just five dudes and dudettes on horseback. I love this army, but painting this quintet largely put me off painting more Cities of Sigmar models for the rest of the year. When time is increasingly compressed, it’s difficult to maintain momentum or motivation when forward progress is so hard to measure.
With that, the Cities of Sigmar launch box from the previous August was finally complete.
May
I sadly had to miss Adepticon and the yet-forthcoming Tacoma Open this year due to my academic obligations, but was able to escape for a weekend to Pendleton for the Squig City Casino Royale. This event was held by my friend Ethan Melville at, as you may have guessed, a casino out in Eastern Oregon. I do not care for casinos, nor do I by and large care for Eastern Oregon, but the natural desolation of the desert is preferable to the manufactured desolation of a casino. That is the extent of my grousing, as this was a genuinely lovely time with some equally genuine and equally lovely people. I wrote several thousand words about it. This event marked my first time contributing to Competitive Innovations, as I had accidentally backed up into being West Coast Good. Himboing my way to top table (and choking) caused a mental shift: tournaments were no longer just a means of getting a bunch of games in, but with the scent of blood in the water I realized I wanted more. I realized this was a thing I was actually getting kind of good at, and a competitive part of myself previously hidden came to the fore. I immediately snatched up a ticket to go to Storm of Silence in May.
At the tail end of Age of Sigmar’s 3rd edition, we got a smattering of Darkoath releases, including an army supplement that was legal for a record breakingly short amount of time. More positively, it came with a bushel of barbarians, some of which I had the pleasure of reviewing, and a few even showed up on Warcom. It pains me that I spend longer painting 10 point jobbers than I do painting the actual heavy hitters of the army, but the legacy of the Heroquest and Gauntlet barbarians loom heavy in my mind. I love the idea of running a horde of these musclebound jerks, but much like my experience attempting to play Norsca in the Total Warhammer games, you need the mailed fist of Archaon’s finest if you want to get anywhere with the forces of Chaos. I also started building the cavalry for these dudes, but with limited windows to work on them, they’ve sat half-built in my closet ever since.
I got a Loonboss in an issue of Stormbringer and since we didn’t have one in the media library, I painted him up for my review. I don’t specifically paint things up for my magazine reviews all too often, as they tend to be fairly common miniatures, but it helps when they inspire such joy as this little fella. The notion of a Gloomspite army is one that will continue to pop up time and again, like the very mushrooms they love so much. Said mushrooms also took about as long to paint as the rest of this model, simple as it is.
On every trip to Portland, I try and stop at either Guardian Games or Mox Boarding House, as they have excellent selections and often discounted product. While this was not from my own trip, my wife got me a Squigboss with Gnasha-Squig, as she knows I like goblins and didn’t think I had this one yet. She was correct on all counts, and I delighted in painting up MF Gloom here and his little Squig.
I picked up this crew in Grass Valley earlier this year, and I don’t believe I need to explain why. These are, gob for gob, some of the best gitz Games Workshop has ever produced, all whimsy and joy. The sword and shield one had been earmarked as my player character for our current Dungeons & Dragons campaign, wherein the goblin paladin Skub Gubbins accompanies his friends into Avernus to save Baldur’s Gate. He’s actually quite nice, you’d like him. I was later scolded for him being out of scale with the smaller Wizkids-produced models the rest of the party was running with, so he has resided in the display case for much of the year. These would partially scratch the goblin itch for a time, but they’d be lurking at the edges of my mind and backlog for the rest of the year.
After a series of delightfully silly yet rather detailed greenskins, I wanted something quick and simple. I grabbed a pack of mechs from my backlog and rapidly knocked them out in my Lyran Commonwealth scheme. This particular group represents three of my favorite Battletech mechs of all time, and also the Annihilator is there. The Blackjack was my dependable little guy early in the Battletech PC game from Harebrained Schemes. The Rifleman, cool as its Robotech-derived design is, has a firm place in my heart after arm flipping and headshotting one of Josh’s mechs at Adepticon 2023, marking the conclusion of one of the best games I had all convention. And the Madcat, well, it’s Battletech’s Pikachu, of course it’s near and dear to me. The minute I saw it on the cover of Mechwarrior 3 in a curious bundle with Worms Armageddon, I fell in love.
The Annihilator looks like a fat kid with a hat.
As one of Goonhammer’s Resident Chaos Guys, I got to write a review of Abraxia during our coverage of the Dawnbringers books. This model is one of my favorites, and I delighted in working in some burgundies and pinks into my army with her mount. Despite being a big army centerpiece, Abraxia is actually a pretty simple model to paint. This was a test of sorts too for painting Krondys, who has sat primed since February, and will remain as such for the rest of the year. Big monsters are not my favorite things to work on, and I always feel the need to reinvent the wheel with them as I don’t have the same established rhythms and practiced techniques that make infantry painting so automatic. Also the Dawnbringers books were pretty good. I know not everyone here loved them, but I enjoyed reading the lore and getting more of a boots on the ground view of the Mortal Realms. It’s hard to contextualize giant floating discs of mythic unreality when every point of view character is a demigod-esque immortal of some sort, but they do a decent job. Hell, any book where dudes are just marching from one place to another and their route is shown on a map is liable to make me fall out of my chair.
That aforementioned conversion bug bit me some time ago, and this particular dude had been sitting primed in my closet for over a year when I finally got paint on him. Was he going to be a Lieutenant? Bladeguard Sergeant? Judiciar? Why not all of the above? I’ve only used him as a Judiciar since he’s got a Warhammer looking doodad in one hand and a big executioner’s blade in the other. I researched some French heraldry from the 14th century and found something I liked, swapping out Fleur de Lys for Templar crosses on his repeated heraldry. It’s also on his hip plate which, of course, you can’t see here. Go look at him on Instagram if you want. He’s been helpful in games where I wanted to run a pair of five-man Sword Brethren squads with Judiciars, which can make for some rude combos. Cranking up the damage on his sword by 1 and giving a squad of Sword Bros Fights First kinda rules, not gonna lie.
There’s a good chance if you’ve seen any B-roll of 40k games in our videos, they were shot at Storm of Silence. I intended to write a lengthy travelogue in line with Squig City, NOVA, and all the rest, but despite documenting the beers, hangs, and games in an exhaustive note on my phone, I never completed a formal writeup. I again went 4-1, losing a game slightly earlier to Kasra Houshidar in one of the best games of Warhammer I’ve ever played. You can hear me go over the games on the Badcast, but further specifics will be lost to time, like beers in drain.
June
So there was a pretty good Fallout show, and the very real Goonhammer offices were abuzz with excitement. I got these to review some time ago, and only got around to it fairly recently, but my review glowed like the series’ cartoon understanding of radiation. The characters in this set run the gamut from name-brand fan favorites and recurring characters to Glup Shitto-tier characters I only vaguely remember when browsing the Fallout wiki, but the sculpts are up to Modiphius’ typically high standard. It felt good to buy into the zeitgeist and do something different, even if I still haven’t finished the show at time of writing. I also revisited Fallout 3 for a minute around this time, which gave me an uncanny sense of deja vu when walking around DC just a few months later.
I was part of the team that reviewed Skaventide, and while I would have loved to take on a bigger portion of the box set, my studies were ramping up in a major way. My lighter model lift represented another revision of my Stormcast scheme, now involving some Pro Acryl Light Bronze instead of Sycorax Bronze (we’re getting in the Ghyran weeds here) and further attempts to paint flames, one of my least favorite textures to paint.
And yet, paint flames I did. I think it took as long to paint the fire here as it did to paint the goth birb dog. There’s something Dark Soulsian about this character, and I appreciated the update of a previously chubby 1st generation Stormcast model who I had avoided until this rework. Her overlapping fabric folds and armor plates make for a challenging model to maneuver a brush around, but the end result was one I was pleased with.
“When it rains, it pours” had escalated from Spring showers to monsoon season. The rapid-fire release of Pariah Nexus missions for 40k and 4th edition Age of Sigmar rules required some timely video content, which involved complete immersion into two sets of rules that I would not get to enjoy for several weeks. This involved rewriting lengthy articles into legible scripts, tracking down B-roll, and a whole lot of reading. Academic obligations were also consuming my time, meaning that the chief way I was engaging with wargaming was through work. I’m genuinely happy with the majority of that work, but it becomes harder to get excited about the Next Big Thing when it only represents a deadline.
July
Much of this month was spent in what we refer to as “darkness protocol” in my household, wherein the blinds remain drawn to keep out the light of the Hateful Orb and keep the blistering outdoor temperatures out there, and not in here. Unfortunately, this also replicates the feeling of living in a submarine. The air outside was toxic, as the wildfires that periodically rip through Oregon were running rampant, cranking the AQI to the triple digits. Political turmoil also certainly wasn’t helping. I’m not going to delve too deeply at this time, but the world’s worst person was the target of a botched assassination and his frothing base was galvanized by the attempt. At this point in my studies I was also deep in the tank, unable to get games in as the final month was fast approaching. Between Goonhammer and classes, projects were piling up. If you watch any of our videos from this period, understand I was crunching hard to get them out in time. For a couple weeks my average day involved working from 9am-6pm, attending classes from 6:30pm-10:00pm, and then returning to work until I went to bed sometime around midnight. I likely could have asked for some more time or space on my work here, but I’m too proud and too invested in those projects hitting their deadlines to do so. Feeling alone, trapped in my home, surrounded by fear, and overloaded by the mounting pile of tasks and deliverables on my plate, it was an echo of the midsummer of 2020. I experienced panic attacks for the first time in my adult life. I had three in a two week period this month, and I do not recommend them to anyone.
I broke up my Stormcast painting and anxiety attacking with this unit of Scouts, procured from my buddy Nik after learning just how useful Scouts are at the Storm of Silence GT. They all got Templar Neophyte arms because I believe the gunshow should be a year-round event, and that way they could have a smidge more Templar flavor. Even though these guys weren’t going to be doing a whole ton of fighting in games to come, with how ubiquitous Scouts are as objective grabbers and Action-doers in competitive 40k games, I figured I should lavish at least a smidge of extra attention on them. Personalized heraldry, patterns on guns, this is all firmly My Shit. They’ve since appeared in every 40k game I’ve played, and I’m glad I gave them a bit of extra love when I did.
I was working on these for our Skaventide coverage, but hit an absolute brick wall with the flames. They were looking too artificial, too cartoony, or otherwise not convincing enough. As a result, I put them down for long enough to paint the Scouts you likely just scrolled past. Returning to them was more fruitful, and while I still think the flames could look much, much smoother, they certainly draw the eye. I’ve since used them in a few games of Age of Sigmar, and it feels good to actually have a Stormcast unit that’s cheap, fast, and able to work so well in mission play. They take up like half of a KR case.
One of the very few games I was able to play over the summer was a Battletech Alpha Strike draft day run by my good friend Forest over at our FLGS, Modern Games. After a modest buy-in, players got to draft mechs from a stack of boxes, passing them around so everyone got at least one first pick. The event would be a massive free-for-all, with a “keep what you kill” system and a bunch of Mario Kart-esque powerups scattered around the map. These pickups could be anything from airstrikes or repairs to additional mechs, and it made for a chaotic and crucial break from the monotonous slog of the past few months. I left this event with a smile on my face and a grip of eight mechs, some of which you can see here. I painted these alongside my Clanbuster Black Knight in my Northwind Highlanders scheme, tartan and all. It had been so long since I’d painted this mercenary company that I got the color placement wrong, and gave them brown bottoms and green tops instead of the other way around. It’s a variant scheme now, who cares. The Black Knight here is the only premium figure I’ve gotten from Catalyst, and were I to give it a micro-review, I would say it does live up to the “premium” moniker, with sharper details and multiple pose and weapon options. If I ever luck into another Black Knight, I’ve got a spare sword arm so I can convert up another one of these idiot robots with an anime sword.
The obligatory second Scout squad came up next. I gave them more Neophyte weapons for the Sun’s Out Guns Out aesthetic, and shotguns this time to better differentiate them from the first squad. Hotrod flames on the heavy bolter were an obvious choice, as were the transfers adorning the flat expanses of those chunky Astartes shotguns. These models are pleasantly simple to paint, and turning down the pressure of “Oh god this pile of models needs to be painted by NOVA” was necessary. A front of new anxiety was building, with the end of my classes in sight I could actually think about that event at the end of August. Would I get my models painted in time? Would I get enough games in beforehand to know what I was doing? Would I beef it at the live show? Time would tell, and the tumult in my brain would not cease until September.
Quick dopamine hits were the order of the day, and Battletech mechs are fit to provide. I enjoyed painting this lance of “Just a Dude” mechs in my preferred blue and white scheme. As much as I like my Highlanders colors, I always come back to basically painting Ultramarines. The Centurion, Banshee, and Grasshopper are all classic mechs, and at least one is likely dear to any given Battletech or Mechwarrior player. The Hatchetman is dumb, shares a name with the Insane Clown Posse mascot, and also sucks. I love it.
NOVA wasn’t far away and I didn’t have a ton to paint for it, but I still wanted to get stuff done. I ordered some black primer early in the month and it took three weeks to show up from California, a state bordering my own. My FLGS would not restock black primer for another three months. To keep my hands and head busy I knocked out these ruins I’d had primed for some months. They’re okay. Shaky hands make for easy drybrushing, I guess.
I had all of one real-deal, true-blue tabletop game in July on a rare Wednesday night where I did not have class. It was the only time I saw anyone outside my home for the month. I was too overwhelmed by the emergence from my house-bunker to enjoy it as much as I would have liked to. Most of my engagement with Warhammer as a game instead came in the form of the mobile application Tacticus, a shallow collection of lights and colors resembling the tabletop wargame I love so much. I did not feel enthused to play but rather compelled to play this gachapon collection of inscrutable orbs and indecipherable currencies all wrapped in the façade of a strategy game. On a morning after spending 40 minutes on my couch idly tapping away, I felt like the gambler I saw in Pendleton, pitifully pawing at the non-touch screen of a Buffalo Rush video slot machine. This grown human adult of legal voting age was trying to affect the outcome of a predetermined spin through an interface that this machine did not possess. It was like watching a baby bat at the rotating stars and plastic spaceships on the mobile rotating above their crib. In disgust more with myself than anything else, I uninstalled the app. If you work on this game or personally enjoy it, please understand I mean you no ill will – there’s some lovely art in there. It is just not a game I care for.
August
I was finally freed of my academic obligations this month, finishing strong with a 95/100 score for the class. NOVA was the prize after this six month educational sprint, and a chance to make up for all the time spent studying by playing Warhammer with a bunch of my pals. To do that to the best of my ability, however, I would need to paint more dudes.
I had the lofty goal of 10 Sword Brethren floating around in my head, and painted up a second group of 5 to flesh out the unit I’d started back when the kit came out. I took this opportunity to use some of the alternate weapon options in the kit, as the various power swords, axes, and mauls had been mercifully flattened down to one generic statline. The best part of these models is always coming up with individual heraldry for each model, which I saved for the end as a treat. In the long run, a full squad of Super Sword Bros is too much, and any transport they embark in becomes the proverbial basket in which ride far, far too many eggs. Maybe I’ll run multiple 5-man squads in the future with Judiciars in Impulsors or something. This was still an enjoyable hobby project, and these were a great place to flex how I’d developed my painting techniques since the first squad.
I believe no bit should be uncommitted to. My Templars had been running two Land Raiders for most of 10th edition, but earlier this year I had the bold thought that ruins so many relationships: What if we introduced a third? I fully magnetized this tank, utilizing bits amassed since 2008 to make it fully interchangeable. At time of writing I have not yet painted the Redeemer or Crusader parts, and if history repeats the pattern established by my first magnetized Land Raider, those will not be painted until 2031. I also liked slamming a big Knight tilting plate on there for the heraldry, which I naturally repeated on as many of the little shields adoring the tank as I could. This was my last model to paint for NOVA, and even if I wasn’t taking 3 Land Raiders this go around, I wanted to bring my big stupid new toy. I would caution you, dear reader, that Land Raiders do kind of suck to build and paint. The details aren’t as sharp as modern kits, as most of the model dates back to 1999 and represents a hand-sculpted, pre-digital design. Gaps are large, mold lines are thick, and rubber bands or clamps may be needed to aid in construction. It’s a timeless design, but one that could use a sharper, revamped model. When that inevitably happens, I will likely buy two.
NOVA ruled. NOVA always rules. You can read my similarly loquacious and similarly annual recap of it here should you care to. I broke into the 4-1 bracket and then went 1-3 in said bracket, proving I’m Pretty Good But Not That Good At 40k. There were some kerfuffles with my list leading up to this (with some taking place as close as my flight over!) and I had no shortage of anxiety about doing another live show, but my worries were largely unfounded on the former, and certainly unfounded on the latter. Seeing my ham family (hamily? Whatever.) here is always a highlight of my year, and I intend to keep going as long as possible. The competitive thirst in my heart was sated, and there was a palpable sense of relief that I had just one more competitive event left to attend this year.
September
Better late than never, I painted up a squad of Liberators from the Skaventide box we’d reviewed earlier this Summer. It felt like a glaring oversight to not paint the veritable backbone of the Stormcast force when we did that review, but time was limited. These were a simple process to paint, with poses open enough that I could leave their shields attached. I’d started the squad before heading to NOVA, and it was a pleasure to come home to a half completed squad and just hammer them out, pun as intended as you’d like. The basing is a mix of Epic Basing 3D printed bits given to me by my friend Peter, Gamers Grass, Vallejo, and Army Painter tufts, corks cut into rocks, Woodland Scenics clump foliage, plus some juniper bark and twigs from forest floors and trails around Oregon. This army’s basing was inspired by the temperate rainforests in the Cascades, and what better way to honor that than by using pieces of it?
This was the only thing I was looking to purchase at NOVA, and within the week of returning he was already complete. Painting this model was a joyful little sprint, all simple textures and techniques paying off in a model I don’t know if I’ll ever find a proper use for. It was a model purchased painted solely for the joy of the hobby, something I was starting to rub up against.
After NOVA and the local Hammerfall AoS GT, I was starting to feel really goddamn tired. For a good week the sky was the color of a bruise and every time I opened my car door a layer of ash would fall from the vehicle. I ground away at a series of important but samey mission briefing videos for 40k, worked through some NOVA con crud, and moderated our livestreams of Space Marine 2. It was alright, but watching my friends have fun with a game while I watched the chat to make sure nobody said any slurs wasn’t quite the experience I was looking for. Here’s also when the Tempestus Aquilons for our Kill Team: Hivestorm review showed up, and realized I wasn’t having a very good time with them. The “hobby” part of this hobby had fallen by the wayside, and when your relaxation and work activities are fundamentally inseparable, it starts to become difficult to do either. More Stormcast were coming and I was fairly excited for those after going 3-2 in the Hammerfall GT, so I decided to bide my time with something just for me.
I did not need to spend anywhere near as long on this guy as I did, but sitting down and just painting a duder who I don’t have a clear use case for continued to feel like a massive relief. No due date, no list he’s gotta go into, no meta that needs to be chased, just a model from my stash of Cool Little Guys that I could lavish some love and detail onto. This little fella and the Steel Rook were the kind of buoys I needed. Aside from the somewhat aspirational self portraiture he represents, I got to paint some of my favorite textures – skin, cloth, and gemstones. Understand that every single gemstone you see on my models is directly trying to emulate the user interface from Warcraft II. The shiny, pixelated gemstones on the attack icon and the like have lived in my brain as long as any zug-zug or ready to work barks. I got to paint a few more of them in short order:
I don’t usually post more than one picture of something in these recaps but good gravy was this model a big lift. I wrote a review about the model itself if you’d like to read another plenitude of words about Warhammer today. Maybe work is slow. Maybe this particular session in the restroom is really taking its time. Anyway, this model owns.
Despite Stormcast being kind of my “easy” army, I still wanted to flex with this big monster since they were such a centerpiece. I’d go further if they were in my Templars, but I had a Warcom deadline to hit, and as someone who generally avoids painting huge monsters (I just like painting lots of little dudes, so sue me) I didn’t want to spend a whole month on a single model. Instead I just ground away at this big birb and their nonbinary rider (that’s canon!) for like two weeks, meticulously highlighting each feather and working on my flame techniques.
Speaking of Warcom, Iridan was up there with a bunch of their pals in a Community round-up post. It rules getting to be up there with so many other great painters (including Goonhammer’s own Keewa!) and as someone who yearned to be in the pages of White Dwarf as a teenager, it feels like a youthful dream realized in bite-sized fashion. Understand that, through the grousing I have been espousing, painting stuff early and reviewing models is often a load of fun. Sometimes it can just overshadow the self-guided nature of this hobby and overcommitment to any task can sap the joy from it. Iridan instead represented that miring of work and play at its best – a model I was excited about, with time enough to paint it to a standard I enjoy.
After something so momentously large and challenging, I wanted something easy. Over the course of an afternoon, I took this Warhammer Hill from black primer to finished paintjob. It’s too big to fit in my lightbox, so you get to see how grody our garage work bench is. There’s something comfortably messy about terrain like this. Unlike a lot of the typical buildings and industrial spaces that make up so many Warhammer tables, this is just natural textures and you can really be loose. This is just washes and drybrushes, then a load of watered down PVA glue and the same mix of basing materials my Stormcast, Cities of Sigmar, and Gitz share. Honestly, this single piece model is the closest I’ve felt my hobby came to arts and crafts class in a long, long time, and knocking it out in a single afternoon was refreshing.
October
As we entered spooky season, I would be remiss not to celebrate in some small way. My wife and I had been amassing a collection of Nighthaunt over the years, all with the intent of building out an army for her. Regrettably, finding the time from my own hobby projects and obligations to really get the ball rolling proved a challenge. Enter Grey Seer primer, a big drybrush loaded with white paint, and Contrast. With a specific recipe and technique nailed down it would be an easy sell to get more Nighthaunt ready to roll, and make a ghost host with the most for us to play with. Spending multiple weeks obsessively detailing the edge highlights and heraldry of a squad of Marines can feel good, but there’s something intrinsically satisfying about turning something from primer to table-ready in an evening.
Splitting the difference between those easy-peasy ghosties and more laborious Space Marines, I started working through a few more Stormcast units. First was the Lord-Celestant, a welcome upgrade from the extremely tubby first iteration of this unit from 2015. I tried to echo some of the White Lions of Chrace from Warhammer Fantasy with her lion skin, largely for contrast’s sake. She was a neat little model, and pretty subtle for an Age of Sigmar hero. I’m surprised she didn’t look more like the Realms of Ruin version (or vice versa, since they had the first usage of the new slimmer Liberators) but I do like this take a lot. Fun fact: she has a spare hand sticking a fist outward. One could easily build two and have them fistbumping. For these and other pro hobby tricks, keep your browser tuned to go on hammer dot com.
Being subtle is one thing nobody could accuse our friend the Lord-Relictor of. As my buddy Nik asked: “Why do Stormcast Chaplains go so much harder than Space Marine Chaplains?” to which I could only guess “because the Age of Sigmar sculptors have more fun.” I decided to go with my weathered bronze for the skull mask instead of white, largely because I thought it would look more sinister and I think I was right to do so. Honestly the biggest challenge with this dude was just avoiding the spikes sticking out of his backpack and the skeleton-on-a-stick, as those are prime candidates for bends and breaks. These were both a smidge late for Warcom, but I was happy to get them out of my closet and towards the table. I never had either unit’s previous iteration, so I was happy to fill those little gaps in my collection with these 2024 glow-ups.
My wife asked me why I painted these like bald eagles and not a cooler bird, like the golden eagle. I replied, simply and honestly, that golden eagles would be harder to paint. On seeing the mix of feathers and curiously beefy lats on these critters, she understood. My buddy Zac (who judged a very cool painting event with me last year!) gave me these and they sat in the door of my van for most the summer, miraculously not melting in the hundred degree heat. I painted them in the same colors as Iridan’s Morrgryph because I finally decided to record how I painted an animal skin/feather color. While highlighting those feathers is a smidge repetitive, these models were pleasantly simple, and going forward will likely be the last of the early Stormcast models to remain in the range.
Between ol’ Skeleton-on-a-Stick and those oddly buff birbdogs, I turned 34. I spent my birthday much in the way I likely spent my 13th – playing Super Smash Bros and Mario Party with a couple of my pals, with Wild Ride Brewing’s Cold Chillin’ Vanilla Cream Ale taking the place of Vanilla Coke. I’m still in the process of gazing so deep into the abyssal self that I intend to see my reflection looking back, but all I see are the wrinkles around my eyes.
The critical mass of my backlog closet was getting to me, and the menagerie of Mercenaries mechs delivered via Kickstarter was staring me in the face. I wanted to see how effectively I could batch paint these – I mean really batch paint them – and knock out a Tactical Squad’s worth of models all at once. I grabbed two boxes and got cracking. First was this Inner Sphere Security Lance, a fun collection of Silly Mechs Only that immediately drew my attention during the Kickstarter campaign. This collection of ugly ducklings and submarines on legs is lifted by the Scorpion, the first quadrupedal mech that Catalyst has produced for the game. It’s stupid, will collide with any other models or 3-dimensional terrain on the board, and I adore it.
In hindsight, I’m not entirely sure why I grabbed this lance. None of these mechs speak all too deeply to me, as the Charger sucks, the Ostroc is just a round Orion, the Merlin is the Night Gyr we have at home, and the Assassin isn’t anything too special either. That’s not to say I dislike any of the models, as I think their designs (especially the Assassin) are overall pretty good and Catalyst has been knocking it out of the park as of late. I just usually only grab packs of mechs that speak to me, as I try vainly attempt to avoid the Pokémon-esque urge to catch ’em all.
The supposed cherry on top of this mechanized sundae was to be a Mercenaries Salvage box containing a single random mech. With trepidatious fingers I broke the seal and pulled out the plastic casing therein, averting my gaze until this blindbuy buddy was fully free of their cardboard and plastic prison. Imagine my disappointment at finding a dinky little Javelin. I don’t dislike it or anything and I think a pair of SRM-6s shotgunning someone in the back is pretty funny, but it’s very much a jobber battlemech. I got a holographic Blastoise on my first grip of Pokémon TCG packs back in the day, and I have been chasing that high ever since.
November
For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a heart, the beginning of November wasn’t exactly great to live through. As I was largely away from home for swathes of October through November, my hobby also slowed down, hampering a crucial self care tool from my day to day. It took, on and off, two months to paint the collection of entirely too detailed jerks you see above. For everything I’m stoked about (The Servitor skintone! That banner!) there’s something else that bugs me (Those silver highlights, that photography) but I’m glad they’re done. Chaplain Grimaldus and his running crew represent the final models from the initial 2021 launch of Primaris Black Templars that I had not yet painted. I never used their smol predecessors in a single game, and I’m certainly late to the Grimey hype train, but I hope to use them in a few games before the year is out.
I’ve done interviews for Goonhammer before, but this Trench Crusade interview was our first video one for the YouTube channel. It was inspiring talking to Mike and Tuomas; two absolute fonts of passion and talent. It was clear during our call that this game’s biggest fans were on the other side of the screen from me. I’d already backed the Kickstarter at this point so they were preaching to the converted, but it made me all the more excited for this game to have its proper launch and, for the second time this year, torpedo my backlog.
With temperatures dipping below freezing, I thought it time to return to my winter Guard project. This army has been slowly growing, getting a squad here and there over the last two years. While Space Marine 2 inspired me to get to my Guard models and my local Guard player absolutely owning me solidified that impulse, what really did it was the aforementioned chill in the air. For two consecutive years in my youth, big expansions for PC war games in snowy theatres dominated my Christmas break gaming: Call of Duty: United Offensive in 2004, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault in 2005. I nearly beat the former in one sitting, only failing to run out the timer on the final mission because dinner was ready, and spent the following years playing Winter Assault, replaying its own little campaign every so often. These two games in annual succession cement that end of year period as “army guy time” in a way nothing else quite does. I had a few stray thoughts about how I’m just painting regular lasgun guys again and these models aren’t that much better than the old Cadians, but a quick side by side of my test model made from 2000s leftover bits and these minis put that notion to bed and tucked it in with a warm glass of milk. “Just regular dudes” is a happy place for me to be as a hobbyist, and I enjoyed my time with this particular group an awful lot.
My 150th model of the year was Commissar’s Duty, who I’d picked up at the Tacoma Open last year. 150 models was the goal I set for myself in Badcast 140, and I figured he’d be a fun way to commemorate that. My wife was working Thanksgiving Day, and without much in the way of obligations until later that night, I knuckled down and painted him over the course of four hours. It kills me how much more characterful this model’s pose and details are than the standard Commissar, but I’ll just keep in mind what day it was when I painted this fella and be thankful that this model is as cool as it is. He’s also supplied with a base 4mm larger than a standard Commissar, now on record so any games I play with this army in the future can be discounted as I flagrantly modeled for advantage.
December
December began a mad dash where some crazed Goblin at Games Workshop decided there should be a new detachment every day for the month of December. As that is Good Content, Baby, we decided to make videos of all of them. Here is that playlist. That process involved taking scripts from disparate voices in our Goonhammer Brain Trust, hammering them into a more consistent voice and format, and recording and editing video for 24 straight days from November 27th until December 22nd. Any afternoons spent gaming or with my friends were preceded and followed by double duty shifts cranking out video. Any time not spent creating these videos was spent hounding people for B-roll so there would be something, anything, on screen. The only day I attempted to take off during this time was still spend editing scripts for several hours. Having purpose and clear instructions was good. Having a daily unavoidable grind was not. For much of December, without exaggeration, I spent more time in Adobe Premiere than I did in my own bed. One might think that absorbing nearly 30 detachments for armies I don’t play would mean some greater familiarity or understanding of these disparate factions and the game we play, but it more closely resembled cramming for a test then immediately offloading that knowledge once you finished. By Grotmas’ end I was reading scripts without internalizing them at all, akin to reading phonetic spellings out loud in a language I didn’t understand. At last, I occupied the experiential mind space of Golden Earing performing Twilight Zone. Weeks had missing days, and even stone cold sober, I would have no memory of where they had gone. I’d go to bed and still be writing in my head or fretting about the next deadline for an hour. Carving out time for weekly D&D and Warhammer nights was necessary, as even in this digital malaise, the reminder that a world existed outside the editing bay kept me going. What made the summer so challenging was that isolation, and even if I’d arrive at my weekly game night weary and not remembering how I got there, seeing the people I cared about supplied the pep I needed to carry on for another week.
Around the halfway point in the month, I’d established a rhythm and process that made these videos go quicker, a muscle memory that turned these successive 13 hour work days into something more manageable and less taxing, and eventually even something reasonable. Any imposter syndrome carried with me into this marathon was dispelled, self doubt being a luxury the clock could not afford. Fittingly, around this same time, I finished this model – “Unbroken” – a Kasrkin sergeant based on Karl Kopinski’s excellent artwork. I normally paint pretty quickly, but my work schedule had compressed my painting time to maybe an hour or two every three days. Though I had a Sentinel built I could work on as well, I needed something small where progress was clearly visible. This particular mini’s pose and details are so characterful, and I realize now that my sponging got a smidge of paint on his nose. Oh well.
At the same time as the Kasrkin, I was painting this Cadian Castellan, another in a long line of officer models I won’t use very often. I didn’t realize until I was painting him how many details were carried over from Brian Nelson’s classic Cadian Commander, even if he can’t quite be built in the same haughty pose. Models like these two are my comfort food, simple characters I can lavish attention on should I choose to.
With my video work for the year complete, I finally got to luxuriate in some lengthy hobby sessions and knock out this Sentinel. I’d had some anxiety about painting vehicles in this scheme – eschewed in favor of painting More Dudes – and thought I’d start small before hitting the Rogal Dorn. It took altogether more time and effort than a little 65 point walker should, but I’ll chalk some of that up to the magnetization process, and also painting the cockpit and pilot (not pictured) underneath that removable armored canopy. I added up all the points of Astra Militarum I’d painted since that first Kasrkin squad at the start of 2023, and the grand total is a whopping 475 points. I suppose I’ll have to paint some tanks then.
Final Thoughts, The Year Ahead, and What Have You
Looking back at the calendar, I realized that I spent half of this year crunching. Whether that was the Grotmas Grind or whole days where I would work until class, then go back to work before going to bed and doing it all over again. I’d come up for air only to be thrust into competitive 40k, cramming in practice games with the precious few hours I had in the week, or crunching again to get detailed models done in time for events or Warcom deadlines. With so much of my gaming being competitive and so much of my hobby being for events and work, I was losing track of why I got into this hobby in the first place.
I love tournaments, I love painting stuff for review, and I love making videos, but when I started in this greater miniatures wargaming hobby twentysomething years ago, none of that was on my radar. Hell, that metaphorical radar largely hadn’t been invented yet. All I cared about was painting my little guys and pushing them around with my friends, collecting what I thought looked coolest and hoping it would turn the tides against my buddies in our next game. Clearer heads will tell you those halcyon days had more to do with being a child than they had to do with 10th edition 40k or 4th edition Age of Sigmar. Rules are objectively more cleanly written now and the notion of playing Warhammer of any flavor competitively is far more reasonable today than it was back then. Though reengaging with that part of the hobby – my hobby –Â is something I feel necessary to keep the love alive for this silly thing I do. Only near the end of the year did I realize this was something I’d been quietly, unconsciously nurturing the year long, breaking up review models and tournament list additions to churn through a couple mechs, paint an odd character model, or yes, paint several goblins.
So what did I learn from this year of crunching, grinding, and a series of other uncomfortable verbs? The inspirational nugget is that I, and by extension, you, dear reader, can do damn near anything. That’s not to say I could hop into a nuclear submarine and immediately operate it, but that the things one might see as out of reach are closer than you think. There are reserves of energy previously untapped that I never knew were there, and while I have no desire to return to something like that Grotmas project’s schedule, knowing I’m capable of something so ambitious is heartening. While I didn’t win any of the tournaments I attended, I came damn close, and I feel like that is something that could be in my future. Even more important is remembering that these ambitions aren’t tackled alone. Although I’m the face of the channel, our videos wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of the entire Goonhammer team, as despite my best efforts there’s just too much for any single person to cover. Those tournament results wouldn’t happen without my razor sharp local competitive team, who challenge me in regular games and provide the joyful companionship that makes traveling to these events so special. During the metaphorical and literal darkest months of this year, those same people provided the light needed to go on for another week. These ambitions are small, cute even, but they serve as a reminder that even if we can do it alone, we don’t have to. Even if your ambition this coming year is to simply make it to the next one, you’re not alone.
Take care of yourself.
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