Space Marine Characters released this month…

The Epic Armageddon metal Space Marine characters are released this month.

This is a picture I took at UK GamesDay 2004.

Here are the Space Marine Characters.

It’s a pity that they are based so much on the plastic characters, new designs would have been nice, as they have done with the bikes.

A pity you can’t get the bikes separately, and I am unsure how many bikes you get in the “random” blister.

The Ork characters look interesting, but again most are re-casts of the plastic characters!

Fanatic Evolving or is this just cutbacks…

Message from Jervis Johnson on the official epic forums:

Fanatic support for the Specialist Game Range will be moving primarily online in the New Year. Work has already started on an exciting new Fanatic web and community site, and we will be announcing the precise launch date for the new site in the coming weeks. This is an exciting time for Fanatic, and will enable us to concentrate our resources on supporting the existing Specialist Games community via the web.

As part of this process Fanatic and the main Games Workshop Studio are being reorganised into a single integrated team. Over the last five years the Fanatic studio has taken the Specialist Games Range a long way, and I think we’ve done an excellent job of working with the online communities that have grown up around the Specialist Games Range. However, by bringing support for the Specialist Range into the main Studio and taking Fanatic online we will be able to greatly improve the quality of the support that we provide.

I’ll be staying on as Head Fanatic along with some of the members of the existing Fanatic team. Other members of the team will be going off to join other departments and do new jobs. I hope that you will join with me in wishing them well in the future. I know that they will do Fanatic proud!

What won’t be changing is Games Workshop’s commitment to provide ongoing support for all seven Specialist Game systems. All of the games and miniatures will remain available through Games Workshops Direct Sales operations and Online Stores, and we will also continue to bring out new releases, though we do plan to reduce the sheer quantity of new models that we make so that we concentrate on improving the online support that we provide. Even so we have some great new releases coming up over the next few months, highlights of which include the Swordwind supplement and Eldar army for Epic, and the fabulous new Battle of Five Armies game by Rick ‘Warmaster’ Priestley.

If you have any thoughts, comments or feedback about this evolution in the way that Fanatic is going to be providing support for the Specialist Games Range, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. I can be reached by email at jervis@games-workshop.co.uk. Although I can’t promise to reply to all the emails I receive, I do read all of the correspondence I receive and I would love to hear from you.

Best regards,

Jervis Johnson
Head Fanatic

In my opinion, this is not evolving, this is cutting back…

Maybe it is the cynic in me, but my business background tells me this all about cost cutting.

Reduce staff

Reduce production

Move support from paper to online and let people develop and plan the games for free.

This should save money…

If Fanatic were doing well and making money then they would be expanded and staff increased.

Grot Cutta

I have drybrushed by Grtot Cutta, first with a heavy drubrush of Tin Bitz, followed by a lighter drybrush of Boltgun Metal.

I will then be painting the mast and boom a dark brown.

As you will notice this model is “different” to the standard Grot Cutta in that the rear wheels are the Heavy Gunz style wheels rather than the tyres which came with the model.

I have noted that this model sells quite well on eBay, as do the other models from the Gorkamorka range. I would still like to try and get a Grot Lugga as I quite like that model.

Concept Sketches Ork Landa

Concept Sketches Ork Landa from the Fanatic Stand at UK GamesDay 2004.

This is the original concept sketch of the new Epic Ork Landa.

if you look closely you will see that even with the sketch are the words…

“size about the same as the Thunderhawk”.

I wish they had thought differently and done a much bigger model, in my minds the finished metal casting is on the small side.

I do wonder if Forgeworld will do something…

The Plot Against America

I was in Waterstones (a local bookstore) when I noticed in their main area this new novel, which was an alternative history novel.

Usually Waterstones lumps all the alternative history novels with the Sci-Fi and Fantasy books, but this was at the front of the store alongside all the Dan Browns and Jamie Olivers…

“What if” scenarios are often suspect. They are sometimes thinly veiled tales of the gospel according to the author, taking on the claustrophobic air of a personal fantasia that can’t be shared. Such is not the case with Philip Roth’s tour de force, The Plot Against America. It is a credible, fully-realized picture of what could happen anywhere, at any time, if the right people and circumstances come together.

The Plot Against America explores a wholly imagined thesis and sees it through to the end: Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR for the Presidency in 1940. Lindbergh, the “Lone Eagle,” captured the country’s imagination by his solo Atlantic crossing in 1927 in the monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, then had the country’s sympathy upon the kidnapping and murder of his young son. He was a true American hero: brave, modest, handsome, a patriot. According to some reliable sources, he was also a rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and a crypto-fascist. It is these latter attributes of Lindbergh that inform the novel.

The story is framed in Roth’s own family history: the family flat in Weequahic, the neighbors, his parents, Bess and Herman, his brother, Sandy and seven-year-old Philip. Jewishness is always the scrim through which Roth examines American contemporary culture. His detractors say that he sees persecution everywhere, that he is vigilant in “Keeping faith with the certainty of Jewish travail”; his less severe critics might cavil about his portrayal of Jewish mothers and his sexual obsession, but generally give him good marks, and his fans read every word he writes and heap honors upon him. This novel will engage and satisfy every camp.

“Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course, no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.” This is the opening paragraph of the book, which sets the stage and tone for all that follows. Fear is palpable throughout; fear of things both real and imagined. A central event of the novel is the relocation effort made through the Office of American Absorption, a government program whereby Jews would be placed, family by family, across the nation, thereby breaking up their neighborhoods–ghettos–and removing them from each other and from any kind of ethnic solidarity. The impact this edict has on Philip and all around him is horrific and life-changing. Throughout the novel, Roth interweaves historical names such as Walter Winchell, who tries to run against Lindbergh. The twist at the end is more than surprising–it is positively ingenious.

You can get the book from Amazon.co.uk.

It sounds and looks really interesting, it has been added to my Christmas list.

Imperial Flyer aka Aquila Lander

The new boxed set of Warhammer 40000 has some plastic scenery of a crashed Imperial Flyer.

Forgeworld have realised a resin version of the “complete” un-crashed flyer.

This is a picture of a completed model taken at UK GamesDay 2004.

quila Lander

It looks okay from this angle, but personally I am not a fan of it.