Now With 50% More Camo! (40K)

One of the things I've learned in this project is the tight integration of craft supplies with the GW hobby, as well as unique consumption patterns. For example, almost nobody ever buys two bottles of Vallejo paint. Why would you possibly want to do that? With 40K, it takes half a bottle to paint a tank, so if you've got a few vehicles, it's totally reasonable to buy a couple bottles at a time, which is what I've been doing this week. This is why we let Vallejo and P3 paints get down to 2 bottles (lately down to 1) before re-ordering, but Citadel paints get a restock when they hit three, and even then we get outages. Foundation paints curiously sell slower, but I think it's because customers haven't been educated in their use (yet). Add airbrushes, like we'll be seeing from GW this Summer, and paint consumption will accelerate even faster. GW is counting on it.

Second, there is a brand loyalty that is logical, and not just kneejerk like I once thought. I've got a paint set already, fairly complete and comprised primarily of Vallejo and Reaper Master Series paints. I've probably spend a couple hundred dollars on this stuff. Nevertheless, I bought $70 worth of GW paints this week because I wanted to use their painting guides. It doesn't hurt that I've actually come to like the GW paints. I'm a hack painter. I don't thin my paints, mix new colors, blend, layer, stipple, fold, spindle or mutilate my paints. I paint straight from the source and GW paints are the easiest for this. All this talk of dropper bottles and advanced technique is like me talking about performance characteristics of super cars: useless knowledge that will never see practical application. Just give me a bottle and a brush.

Now what I've been up to:

The six, 10-man Tallarn squad boxes came in today. I was beginning to wonder if this would be one of those embarrassing projects where I had a completed army, except for those 60 or so men I needed.

The box sets are metal and are disappointing. This is because I can only use 7 of the 10 figures, as I'm not using rocket launchers or melta guns. Still, they're cheaper and much easier than buying little two or three man packs, which I may have to do once I finish my inventory. Plastic sprues with modular weapons are a giant leap forward, in case anyone had any doubts.




My camo ratio is all about packs of blue-tack. This is 50% more blue-tack than the previous chimera, meaning more camo. I think I like the first one better, but I wanted more red and less gray. I'm hoping that when I reverse the paint scheme with the basilisks, it won't be too noticeable or jarring.




Camo adds two hours to the project. Accessories add about an hour and a half, including installation.

D&D 4: A Rocky Start

Our order didn't ship from Wizards of the Coast until yesterday, making the release of Keep on the Shadowfell a precarious one for us. We snagged just enough copies from distribution and hopefully we didn't lose any sales. We ran out last night, but nobody asked for a copy after that. Our regular order arrived a couple hours ago. This problem came about because I ordered very early. Keep on the Shadowfell got lumped in with Star Wars releases originally scheduled the same day. When the Star Wars stuff got bumped, so did my KotS order.

My 4th editon order is big enough for WOTC to ship it via freight, rather than UPS. A big tactor trailer will pull up and offload a pallet of D&D 4 books. The positive side of that is that freight orders are a bit more unpredictable, so they're delivered earlier than a UPS order. This is especially good, because the book stores are already breaking street date on Keep on the Shadowfell, so every extra day is more sales. Of course, the down side is the unpredictability of freight. The freight company may promise a lift gate, to get that pallet off the truck, but when they arrive without one, are you going to tell them to come back in a few days and not delivery your thousands of dollars in product or are you going to roll up your sleeves and start with the heavy lifting?

My backup plan is still my book distributor, but with pre-orders in the many dozens, the book distributor order would likely last only a few hours before being depleted, and that's not even covering all the pre-orders. It's sad that I need a backup plan, and there is definitely a cost associated with the plan, but street dates are the real problem here.

Mass market cannot handle street dates. They are just not capable of that level of granular planning. Mass market gets many pallets of stuff in their stores every day and this stuff need to go out on the floor immediately. There's limited space and it's all about staging product for flooring, not storing it because some podunk publisher says you can't sell it until Tuesday. In the game industry, everyone is podunk to the likes of Target or Barnes and Noble, and although D&D 4 might be an exceptionally big release, most stores probably barely notice a Yu-Gi-Oh or role-playing release, let alone care about their street dates. The solution is to eliminate street. There is no middle ground, no "soft" dates or soft releases, just get rid of the street dates and all these problems disappear. Of course, I say that with the luxury of no local competition to scoop me on new releases.

Camo (40K)

This didn't turn out exactly as I had planned, but I planned wrong. I was going for a red vehicle with gray bits, but I got the reverse because I used red as the base coat. I don't think it looks bad, just not what I planned. The big question is whether to keep going like this, possibly using a lot more blue-tack to mask more red, or to call this an experiment. I'm reluctant to call 8 hours of work (total) an experiment, however.

This is my "command" chimera, the junior officer chimera in my infantry company. That's why it lacks any gear on the outside. The lieutenant is very picky about such things, going strictly by the book. What a brown nose.




They gray is Adeptus Battlegray, a Foundation color. The gray highlights are codex gray. The treads are textbook tin bitz with a dry brushing of boltgun metal. Shiny metal is done with chainmail. It could still use an ink wash and I'll likely wait until all the vehicles are finished before applying transfers (decals).

I've decided I kind of lack the muted Foundation colors for armor. It looks more appropriate to the battlefield.

The Return of D&D

Yes, 3.5 D&D is still around, but sales this year have been dramatically off with D&D 4 around the corner. D&D is role-playing games, if you happen to own a store, with about 60-70% of sales being D&D or D&D related accessories, including things like dice, which also ebb and flow with RPG sales. This week we arrive at that corner we've been waiting for. Not only do we have Keep on the Shadowfell released this week, a very good D&D 4 adventure with enough rules to not need the core books due out in 3 weeks, but I've had my first solicitation for third party products.

I suppose these aren't truly 4E third party products. The GSL license debate has dragged on for so long that we're probably 6 months away from GSL third party releases. I don't know if WOTC planned it that way, but what appears to be big conspiracies are often just incompetence with an unintented twist. Goodman Games is releasing "system neutral" source materials with 4E code words like "points of light," which happens to be the name of a new release for August:

GMG4380 Points of Light (System Neutral Gazeteer) $10.99 Aug 2008

This SYSTEMS-NEUTRAL mini-gazetteer describes four lands suitable for insertion into any role playing game. These isolated bastions of civilization can be used as home bases for an ongoing campaign, or places visited by heroes over the course of a game. The Wildland is set shortly after the fall of a large empire where civilization is on the brink. The Southland is on the frontier of a large kingdom. The Borderland is the frontier between two empires, and the Swamps of Acheron is a tumultuous realm in need of heroes.

Role-playing games takes up a quarter of our store and it's been in a kind of holding pattern for quite some time. Yes, there are great new releases on the shelf now: Pathfinder adventures continue to sell well to D&D 3.5 players, Traveler has picked up, Dark Heresy is supposed to be re-released when the oracles throw the bones in the right combination at Fantasy Flight Games, and even White Wolf, returning from the land of the undead, has been having good success with Exalted (they're now a top 10 company for us, if you're a list maker like me). With the exception of Dark Heresy, all the hot releases combined wouldn't sell as many copies as a new D&D release about how your bard could inspire the party with good cooking. Last time I checked, however, the Dark Heresy core rulebook was our best selling item of the year, and it was only out for five weeks. Time will tell if the 40K RPG, botched horribly in its release, will make a comeback.

Role-playing is cyclical in many ways, but as a store owner I can't help looking at that quarter of my store, with shelves bare in some places due to sheer lack of new material, and wonder if there was an easy way to expand the blockbuster miniature game section into its real estate. There's a concept of sales per square foot, and role playing games has been a near charity case for a while. It deserves about half the space it currently takes up. The toy section also gets that squinted glance, as if I'm wondering how Flames of War would look next to Thomas the Tank Engine. No, best to be patient. While RPGs are cyclical, the toys are slowly beginning to grow. Sales per square foot of that quarter of the store would have me condensing it into two shelving units. Patience grasshopper.

We have kind of a toy dilemma. We do seem to be selling them at a better pace, but there is a subtle shift occurring. Things that do well, like puzzles (yes puzzles), crafts, novelty items like slingshots that shoot nuns (no kidding) and Schleich stuff are being concentrated, while we're trying hard to divest ourselves of the stuff that doesn't really fit the store. It's a painful strategy, but we're claiming it as the toy department of our game store, rather than the mini toy store that some people would like it to be. Toy customers are coming in and trying to push us into directions and product lines that we really don't want. Unfortunately, this means some of our emerging toy customer base may be disappointed, but I think our game customers will find it more appealing in the long run. It came down to a realization: Our toy store kind of sucks, but parts of it comprise a pretty good toy section of a game store, if that makes any sense.

Base Coat (40K)

I started painting today. The base coat is a Citadel Foundation Paint called Mechrite Red. It took half a bottle for each chimera and went on very easily in a single coat. I considered making it the only coat of red paint on the models. However, after painting one chimera with standard Citadel Scab Red (on the left), I could tell the difference. Scab Red seems to have a more vibrant finish, plus it's a bit more "red" than the Mechrite, which has more orange in it. I actually like that orange shade of red better, but the finish seems too dull.

The base coat took about 2 hours per chimera, with the scab red coat taking only half an hour. Still, it's quicker than the recommended paint scheme, which was before Foundation Paints. The painter recommended several coats of Scab Red.

The end result is below. I'm not too hip on the triangles. I'm thinking of making green crescents instead, which goes with the middle eastern Talarn theme.

It's About the Diesels (cars)

My car guy consciousness has been gradually shifting away from performance, which is not only very expensive, but recognized as socially irresponsible. In my city of Richmond, the second hand cars driven by the poor tend to be nice, gas guzzling hand-me-downs from the more well to do. Anyone with a guzzler is either lamenting about gas or lamenting about the fact they can't find buyers for their cars at even a fraction of their worth.

Many of my friends have upgraded to hybrids, the winner being the Toyota Camry hybrid. Some adopted the Prius early on, but realized it was a very expensive economy car with finicky electronics. They moved on to something else as soon as they could. What I'm waiting for are the diesels.

Clean diesel technology has been around in Europe for years now, and will finally make their way to California this fall. The great thing about diesel cars is that you can still have a nice performance or luxury car, but with tremendously good gas mileage. A recent road test in Europe put a diesel 5-series BMW against a Prius on a road test and the BMW got 1 MPG better than the Prius. The diesels still pollute, especially particulate matter, but they're a big step up from gas engines and they already exist in the rest of the world.

On vacation a few years ago, I rented a Alpha Romeo 156. It was a 5-series like Italian car that handled like a dream, had style to die for, and got about 40mpg with a 1.9 liter diesel engine.


Alpha Romeo claims they'll return to the US sometime in the next few years, and I don't mind fantasizing at all about these cars. Reliability is supposedly improved too, as they've brought in German management to take up build quality. Their electronics are as badly put together as Mongoose role playing books. Although I was driving a 156, the car that I ogled in Italy was it's little brother, the 147:


If you don't want to play Russian roulette with your car picks, you could always get more tried and true vehicles. The car I lusted after for quite some time was a previous generation BMW 530D. This was a three-liter diesel engine that outperformed most 6-cylinder gas engines, yet got 35 miles per gallon. These are likely the kind of vehicles that will become commonplace in California in the next few years. You won't notice them, except for the combinations of letters and numbers on their back ends. They do produce a tad more smoke out the tail pipe, regardless of what people tell you, but they're not like the oil burners of the past.


My father had an olds cutlass diesel in the 80's. We called it the "gutless," because of it's pathetic power. However, once you got that sucker on the freeway, it would fly, albeit with a cloud of black smoke trailing behind. The gutless engine pretty much self-destructed shortly after warranty, which didn't exactly inspire confidence in American diesel technology. That was the last time my parents bought an American car and diesels in California have been restricted to trucks since then.

The Inevitable Disillusionment (40K)

The 40K game system itself is fine, but my issue, before even playing seriously, is the Imperial Guard codex. A set of rules should provide options that are useful. They might not always be useful. They might only be useful in clever combinations. The problem with the IG codex is that there are so many very cool doctrines and equipment choices that never make sense, or only approach making sense in ridiculous quantities. The point costs are just too high. Clever one shot combinations are one thing, but there are many options that nobody will ever pick because of the cost. That is disappointing and a sign that the game design is lacking rigor.

It would be the Dungeons & Dragons equivalent of saying that the fighter, cleric and wizards are good choices, but the bard, sorcerer, rogue, druid, ranger, paladin, and barbarian are crap, or at best only good when in extremely specific situations and only once. That's pretty much how Imperial Guard doctrines break down in usefulness. One of the complaints about D&D 3.x that's fixed in D&D 4 is that with a little creativity, it's possible to create entirely incompetent characters because of the toolbox nature of the rules. From what I'm reading about Imperial Guard, the army is incredibly difficult to play unless you follow very narrow parameters in army design. A good army is the exception, not the rule, which means the creativity of army design is lessened dramatically.

If you want flavor, it means you make concessions to effectiveness. If you want to play Tallarn raiders for example, you might end up taking doctrines like Sharpshooters, that most people think are marginal at best. It's like the D&D equivalent of crap feats, like Alertness, chosen in protest to qualify for some cool prestige class, only in 40K there's no payoff. I'm not sure if this is true with other army codices, and I certainly didn't feel these constraints in Warhammer Fantasy. Nevertheless, I'm happy with my choices and I'm enjoying the army building. However, as a power gamer and someone who enjoys roleplay and flavor, those lesser choices, chosen for color, weigh on me and take away some of the enjoyment.