Here be Dragons!

[Dave]

3rd place, that's not even runner up, you losers! 

[noahtonkin]

Hey, it's my 1st trophy! Let me be proud for a bit!

[noahtonkin]

So Chaps and chapesses.
A quick update about my highly successful weekend away in plymouth...

So, friday. Unfortunately for me I had been working thursday night, so got to sleep at something stupid like 9 am friday morning.
After a fitful mornings sleep I set off after lunch time, picking up Mr Loyn and one of my team members, James, on the way.
It turns out Plymouth is actually really quite far away, but a sprint down the motorway (nd a stop off at burger king/costa) meant we got there at a fairly reasonable time.

Friday night was nice and tame. 3 ofmy team did a little bit of prep looking at a few of the lists, but to be honest not really taking it too seriously.

Saturday morning.
Got to the venue nice and early.
round 1 draw saw us against the Giant's Mercinaries.
We'd looked at the lists for these guys the night before. Nothing too bad, so we were hoping for some good match ups.
I ended up playing their beastmen player who had a shard and 4 lv 1s, 2 on shadow, 2 on beasts. big block of gor, big block of bestigor. ton of chaff as is usualy in a beastman list.
Now it was open lists, and havng looked through a few the night before everyone seemed to have the ram horn 1+ rerollable on the general.
he set up the 2 blocks in the middle, shard behind, then chariots on 1 flank.
I put 1 unit of princes against his chariots, and basically everything in the middle to face off, right on the back line so that i could control the combats a bit.

As it played out everything came forwad.
1 unit of princes charged the flanking chariots, went through 1 in a round but then stuck on the second. had they got through quicker then I could have got into the mages standing around the heardstone a lot quicker.
i then charged the dragon lord, bsb, other unit of knights and seaguard into his bestigor.
the way it lined up the seaguard could clip so only 1 guy was attacking them, but they provided the ranks to break steadfast.
had to charge the DPs in, otherwise the seaguard would have had to maximise and so get more men in.
so I then challanged with the BSB, thinking if he accepts with his ram horn helm guy I should get 3 hits, 2 wounds and then he's saving on 4s, with a reroll. However he declined, sending his general to the back, racked up a ton of kills, but then he said his general had the stubborn crown... doh!
in the end ground out the bestigor and picked up all the rest of the chaff. but had to gove up a unit of dps and the seaguard and archers. mage cascaded and fell down a hole, making the dragon rather redundant. result was a 10-10. would have liked to have got more, but my fault for not prepairing.

my team however got a 20-0 and 2 19-1s. so we got the cap of 50 points. score!


Game 2 was vs Fists and Squids (aka team wales..and annie)

where round 1 had gone our way with match ups, this really didnt.
I would have been happy to play annie or loyn, but ended up going against matt yeo's ogres.

not ideal. ironblaster did it's thing and it ended up with no models left on the table for very little gain. 20-0 loss.
the rest of my team didn't fair too well either. Ed Hamon cascaded his slaan despite cupped balls, nick got run over by demigryphs, and james managed to get 14 off annie with his dwarfs.

so in round 2 we ended up having to take the sympathy points and getting 30.


Game 3 was against They Might Be Giants. Played a guy called tony with TK.
Now if i could ask to play 1 army all weekend it would be TK. they can be nasty against me but they're also nice and squishy and the flying means i can really use the movement. plus I dont have to worry about artillery as its all flaming.
And basically that was what I did. He had 2 units of 6 knights, 1 didn't fight a single combat. a warsphinx which did the same and a necro which died to mass archer fire.
charged the bsb over a unit into the casket and killed it in a turn, survived the explosion and started mopping up.
ended up with a 14-6 to me (basically because I failed a bucket load of 2+ wards vs his flaming chariots...idiot boy).
However unfortunately while the match ups went our way the luck didn't.
James, our dwarf player had a shocker vs skaven on the table next to me and ended up with a 15-5 loss. ed got 1 and nick got 5. so we needed sympathy points again, taking 30.


One thing I've forgotten to mention is the food. It was fantastic. booze was cheap too. So saturday night ended up with a lot of drinking.
Some may have heard the story but I dont really want to relive it, but i basically got acosted by a very drunk and very naked Jon Warmington.
Myself James and Nick were sharing a room and when we got kicked out of the Giant's Lair ended up taking a bottle of Jager back to the hotel and playing drinking settlers.... needless to say the sunday morning hangover was painful.


Sunday. Game 1.
so despite a rousing start we were now well and truely at the lower end of the table.
There was a lot of talk about the uncapped last round maybe shaking things up, but to be honest we ( and by this i mean me) were more concerned with the amount of shaking i was doing before the 1st game...

so the round was against Plymouth association wargamers. playing Kev Shilito.
Matchups went ok, but I had to play the O&G, as basically noone really wanted to play them exept James, and he said he wasn't likley to get 20, so would rather something else.
So my brief was not to loose 20-0. difficult when there's 2 doom divers, 2 bolt throwers and a stone thrower...
however he deployed all his war machines right out on the flanks and gave me the chance to run for the with knights and eagles.
Would have worked had I not completely fluffed. ended up putting the dragon into a block of trolls. thought being i should go through them eventually, and the vomit is a breath attack. turns out it isn't (there were quite a few rules things in this game. and i wasn't particularly happy that he had his book on a chair under the table and when ever I said 'can I check that' he said, well I've just read it and it says what ever. so I got shirty when he tried to flap back with a doom diver, would have missed with the flying base anyway, then I pointed out that in the book it says to use a goblin base and the base he was using for his doom diver wasn't. he was also being a complete cock towards ed on the next table with a rules discussion about a doomwheel flank charging a unit of skinks, but that's a story for another time.)

Ended up I took 2 points off him. the rest of the team did ok, pulling a small win of 38-42 (despite their results saying 43...)

Sunday Game 2
round vs Nerds of the round table. game vs matt with Brets.
1 treb, 4 lances and 5 peg knights.
looked at it and thought I can give him my core, and can take maybe 1 lance if i get everything lined up right, that plus any characters in it should be 11-9 one way or the other.
ran the eagles to redirect, jumped out of charge arc of a lance and took out the treb. then combo charged the dragon mage, bsb and lord in on his errant unit with the bsb.
unfortunately the dragon mage died to the silver mirror (he only made it past round 2 in 2 games...) but the dragon was still there. 2 rounds of combat to break the lance, then jumped about out of charge arcs.
around turn 5 his pegs had the chance to charge my seaguard who were right back in a corner. At this point i had to stop and say 'look, I'm really sorry about this, but I might have to be a very very gamey c##t in a minuet, but I first need to speak to my captain.'
went over to nick and asked how much does he need me to push it? he replied well I've just been 20-0ed (turns out he actually got 7)

so. fled form the charge with the seaguard, the ran off the table so the peg knights failed the charge.
my turn. dragon lord declaired a charge on the peg knights, plan was to break them and persue off the table.
as it turns out he failed hi terror test and fled.
I redirected into the lance that was positioned to take me out if I failed/stuck against the pegs. terror test, failed, ran them down too. so it ended up with me terror bombing off 400 odd points in the last turn.
result was a 14-6.
my team all managed to get slightly on top (with the exeption of nick) so ended up winning the round 55-25, which with the cap came back to 50-30.



So, last round. uncapped, so hoping for some good match ups.
we were still a way down the field, but coming back strong.
so we ended up playing team Oggy (nothing to do with OG...)
I got drawn against their ogre player. not the best and his list didn't look ideal for me either. poison sniper maneaters. ironblaster, mournfang, bulls and Ironguts.

As it was my dice were on fire. despite him having +1T off for basically the whole game I managed to plough the dragon through the gutstar, avoid the mournfang with the eagles. his IB shot my bsb turn 1. charmed shield. same turn 2, 1 wound. he eventually had to take the slaughtermaster in a challange so the dragon could hit ironguts, but was a worthy sacrifice.
I ended up loosing the archers, bsb and an eagle, for almost a complete tabling (didn't bother with the mournfangs). for a big 20-0.

the rest of my team did well too, breaking to 50-30 cap, and netting us 56 points. the only team to break the cap in the last round.
that shot us waaaay up the table (althougha 50 would still have got us 4th) to take out 3rd!
1st podium, 1st trophy and an awesome weekend all in.
Proved how match up dependant my list was. managed 60 points out of a possible 120. but with 2 of thise being match ups i really didnt fancy i thought that was quite good.
And If my dice were on fire all the time there'd be no stopping me!
1 thing I learnt was the mage dies sooooo quickly. having the noble with the radient gem would have been great, if nothing else to chuck dice at drain magic.
think it means he cant be the bsb, but will have to look.

As I said, fantastic food, some great stories and a great weekend away with a new bunch of very nice people.
If anyone has the chace to go to a giant's lair tounament I would highly recomend it, if nothing else for the cooking!

[Dave]

nice write up, sounds like a fun event, though disagree with the removal of cap in round 6 in general principles it didn't make much of a difference.

[maelzch]

Good job khaleesi tonkin!

[cunningmatt]

Congratulations!

[Tom Loyn]

I was in a team that came second with Annie too, so OG peeps and those related did well!

[noahtonkin]

Right everyone.
A few quick updates.

Settling in to the delights of yorkshire.
Unfortunately for hobbies, I've been doing this thing called drinking...

Anyway, Warrington warlords was last weekend. I ended up coming off a stupidly long stretch of very late nights and ended up having to bail out early as was completely ruined.
On top of that I was having a massive rage about fantasy and my army. So all of this was leading me to be thinking about packing stuff up and having a bit of a rage quit.
But the up coming Norf/Saaf OG off has spurred some interest again.

Have decided that as much as i'd love to do an entire game of thrones set it might get a bit tricky... So i'm gonna do a warriors army.

Have started by grabbing a few bits and pieces that have been hiding in the bottom of a bits box...





idea is to use these guys as characters. need to sort a bsb out as well at some point.
Have also grabbed a box of warriors and some sarissa bases.

Thought is to do a blue scheme like G's deamons. really like the brightness of the blue scheme.

need to think about bases but was thinking maybe to do a winter theme... using layers to make it look like a frozen lake. gonn ahve a think about this but will see.

[noahtonkin]

So here we go. Have got a box of chaos warriors built up but am also painting up crom (as if he goes wrong I can always get another, archaon is a bit rarer...)

Here's a pic as I'm starting out...



Sprayed black and armour painted blue.
Don't ask which one, think its Caledor something.

Next step is going to be to paint the chainmail and ornament bits whitey/cream. Then need to have a play with a few bits and pieces.

Quick question if anyone is still reading this.
Do people think that the typhus model would work quite well in fantasy?

by my guess a few bits of chain mail to cover the joints and lop off the tubes and should be ok... I think.

[cunningmatt]

Good plan dude, nice to see how the Warriors come out!