Blue Man Group

So the Crimson Fists squad is finally done. They took a long time, but it isn't because I didn't enjoy painting them. The colors were a nice change of pace. The dark blue and red were really a nice contrast that made the marines very colorful and therefore fun to paint as well as visually appealing.

Vote for Pedro!

This is just an update on my Crimson Fists squad. I put a lot of work into them this weekend and they are almost done. Pretty much all I have left are the backpacks, and I should be able to knock them out (barring Pedro's bakcpack which has quite a bit of detail) pretty quickly. The sad news is I am going on holiday for a week starting tomorrow, and I don't think the wife will be too keen with me packing up the paints as we head down to South Padre for a week. So they will have to wait until I get back.

With that said, here are the WiP shots.

Men in Blue

So I'm continuing my "chapter of the month project" with the Crimson Fists. I actually painted up my test model a looooooooooooooooon time ago. The rest have waiting while I went through my "blah" phase. 

Well its over and as you may have noticed with my Iron Hands and Flesh Tearers, I have been kinda busy (for me at least). With that in mind, and keeping in mind a special announcement I want to make in the coming weeks, I have decided to paint Pedro the same time I paint the regular dudes. With that done, here is the 50% point of my Crimson Fists.

Review: Rynn's World

So I finished Rynn's World last night. Wow, what a book. Steve Parker did a really good job with this book. From reading a lot of the fluff from the 40k book and other sources, I knew that the Crimson Fists were gunna get jacked up in this book, but Parker did an excellent job of fleshing it out.

I have really been impressed lately with the action "scenes" in a lot of BL books (40k and Fantasy), and this book is just as good. The battles were pretty epic, even when it was just a skirmish. The only thing I was disappointed with was the fact that the space battle was glossed over, but this was a pretty beefy book, so a chapter or two of space battle missing isn't too bad.


My major pet peeve of having too many plots and characters going on at one time was thankfully absent in this book. There were quite a few characters, but they mostly revolved around different parts of two major plots. For me this was good because I got a bit of the "oh my god this is good, I can't wait to get back to it in the next chapter," but I didn't get the, "OK, now I have to remember what this character was doing 200 pages, and 15 sub-plots ago."


Another thing that was thankfully missing was the "uber-evil imperial guy" that is just there to make the lives of the major characters more of a PITA. There was one dude in the story that I thought was going to shape up into one of those characters, but it didn't turn out that way. Thank you Mr. Parker!

With prior knowledge of that fact that the Crimson Fists were going to get mauled in this book, it made me hesitant to cheer for characters, but I knew that many of them were gunna be blowed up, and this was the case. I actually think this was a good thing in the book because every time a new and interesting character was introduce, I was like, "Oh no! I hope he doesn't die!" Another thing I liked was that Mr. Parker did in fact kill off some of those likeable characters you were just getting to know. It made it feel real. It made it feel as if the Crimson Fists were well and truly boned.

A couple of the things I didn't like about the book were the distain that many of the Space Marines felt towards the humans that they were fighting for. There are some circumstances that do come up in the book that explain it, but it was the differences between that different Astartes that really made me stop and blink before continuing.

The last thing that sorta stuck in my craw was the fact that we saw Space Marines in this book had a stat line that was roughly, in my opinion, BS 7 WS 7 S8 T8 W10 I6 A8 Ld 11 Sv 1+. Regular tactical marines were ambushed by Orks and killed every ork without taking a casualty, there were fights were you would think SOMEONE is gunna bite it, but no one does. Now I understand why this is written this way. It's a Space Marines novel, so we want them to be heroic. We want them to stand against the Green Tide and never give up, but there were a couple of occasions where it was a bit unbelievable, even for Space Marines.

Overall this was an excellent book. I would encourage anyone to read it. I give it 4 out of 5 stars!

Damn You Black Library!

So I've been reading a lot of Black Library books. Recently I've started in on Fantasy. The first one I picked up was a Dorf book (of course) called Honourkeeper by Nick Kyme. I then went into the Gotrek and Felix First and Second Omnibuses (Omnibusi?). There were some really good books in there. I especially liked Daemonslayer and Beastslayer, and I loved the use of the Skaven in the books.





Well after I finished the second omnibus, I didn't think the third was out yet, so I bought some other books. I picked up the 40k book Inquisition War which seems very interesting and it also happens to be one of the first Black Library publications, I believe. I also picked up Matthias Thulman: Witch Hunter which is a three book omnibus as well as The Blackhearts yet another omnibus. I heard on one of the podcasts about the Times of Legends series, which looks to be WHFB version of the Horus Heresy, so I picked up and read Heldenhammer with is the story of the rise of Sigmar and the fledgling Empire. Good book. After I finished reading that I went back and read the first short stories and the first book in the Witch Hunter book. I then saw the Third Gotrek and Felix book so I had to pick that one up.

Then Tamara comes home with Rynn's World which seems to be the first in a new series of books for 40k which go over some of the significant battles that the Space Marines have fought. And F me if it doesn't start out good. So not-so-long story, long. I've got an ass-ton (perhaps even a metric ass-ton) of really good books waiting to be read.

Anywho, I'm off to read some more Rynn's World.