Trench Crusade

Currently I’ve been big-time Trench-pilled. I bounced off the vibe of the game initially, and my take has been that some of its loudest supporters have had a not great vibe, but now that I’ve got Carcass Front in-hand I really, really like the system and scale of the game.

So I’m trying to get a starting force painted. It’s taking me forever because I bit off too large of a chunk and circumstances are conspiring against me having bandwidth to work on them.

It’s my hope that I’m able to wrap up at least my starting models by 11/15, when we’re going to have a little single-day campaign. We’ll see if I can achieve that.

This is the current state of the Heretic Naval Raiders (given that they’re literally Satanic Marines… is anyone else going to get the pun when I call them “‘Devil’ Dogs?”

This is the state of the table I’m printing out. Won’t be painted any time soon but if I can get everything printed by 11/15 I’m doing great.

It’s mostly Saucerman Studios, which is a designer that I like. Ive printed other kits of theirs and this is in line: a lot to like: maybe 90% as polished as it should be, and reasonably priced. This will be supplemented with kits from Dicehead Studios.

Marvel Champions

The worst thing about this year has been an RTO order (which I won’t expand upon because it sucks and I can’t do anything about it), which has crippled my ability to hobby in the afternoon. Now, I get home with maybe an hour and a half with which to putter before dinner and family time.

This has left me with a need to find something I can use that time for, and I’ve finally made my way to LCGs I can play solo: I’ve picked up Arkham Horror (starting, conveniently, with this year’s Chapter Two reset) and Marvel Champions.

Arkham I’ve only just started to noodle with but I’ve really been activated by Champions. I’ve gone in pretty deep in this and even still I’m short two scenario boxes and maybe a dozen character packs… all of which I’ve proxied because fuck it.

I’ve been playing it several times a week and just went to MCDC, one of two(?) conventions for it up the road at Huzzah two weeks ago.

I spent a good chunk of the year painting Sylvaneth: I painted up the (now a) spearhead for them out of the contents of some issues of Stormbringer and, despite my loud complaints about how spindly and breakable the models are, I just loved how they came out so much. The bark being drybrush/wash made them low effort for the high impact of the bright yellows, oranges, and reds.

I ended up running them at Richmond Open, which is a separate post I might never get around to.

These were painted in two stretches: one where I simply expanded on my painted Sylvaneth and a second in which I worked that into a list I wanted to run at Richmond (only to have the new battletome come out and throw that plan into disarray.)

Looks like I never got the 40 Dryads or two sets of Awakened Wyldwoods into the lightbox, but this is what I ran:

I impulsively signed up for the 1490 Doom tournament at NOVA Open 2025 and powered through painting these sculpts from Skullforge Studios to use in it. I had an excellent time – it’s a very fun game and the Buer Games gang are very cool people. I strongly recommend checking it out.

A few months later I got a bug up my butt to paint up a little display board for them because I’m so pleased with how they came out.

I took the week off for NOVA Open this year, like I normally do. I didn’t go, of course, but I did spent a bit of it grinding out some terrain for it.

This is the scaffolding that comes from their tidy little Meerbridge starter:

And I printed off their keep over the weeks immediately following NOVA last year. Finally got it painted.

If anyone’s curious: this was fall off a log easy to do. Moss green rattlecan primer, grey craft paints drybrushed on, GW Celestra Grey drybrushed, metal bits picked out and lightly drybrushed, then oil washes.

Wow, it looks like I haven’t posted to this sucker in over a year: yikes! (Looks like the last thing I worked on here is a half-written “NOVA Open 2025 Plans” post. Yikes!)

I’d like to blame increased activity on BlueSky (there’s nothing more dangerous too healthy blogging than social media; it’s a disease on humanity), and that’s definitely true, but also I got clever with the configuration of the site and managed to lock myself out of it every time I had just a few minutes to try to post something. I think I’m past that.

I don’t know that I’ll be typing much here but I did just upload almost every single lightbox photo I’ve taken since the Raveners I posted about back in Aug ’25, so we’ll have to see if can find my way to vomiting out some photodump posts.