Cronos

We had a few Talos conversions roll off the line.

Lessee, what's the news. I really haven't kept up on the blog and I apologize for that. Right now at this moment I am at home with family, at the kitchen table, keeping an eye on the kids. Tamie is in the other room wrapping presents. Our kids are still young enough to be impressed by relatively inexpensive presents. After all, that's what Christmas is about. Seriously though, we do a traditional Christmas thing complete with nativity, reading Luke 2 and all that. I just don't like to talk about it. I guess I just did.

We don't really overly stress about Christmas. We keep it simple. We realize that for the kids the presents are a big thing. It's fun. My wife and I try not to overthink it.

There's a thing where people say Happy Holidays and I'm fine with that. I really don't care either way. It's Christmas, though, after all. I'm all for freedom of religion, which I should say also protects people who want to believe in nothing. Just make sure your corpse isn't blocking my driveway.

That was harsh. How did I get from Merry Christmas to that?

We're working on the Mountain Fortress project, absolutely an enormous amount of time and expense going into that. More details are coming up. I'm working up the tournament format. Renn and other experts are going to be involved heavily. I don't think I should really even say tournament. It's more like a "scored wargaming adventure". The rough draft looks like the following:

During the three day event you play four games, each worth 10 points each. You can play the four games at your leisure, though there will be primary times for this. Two games will be against other players and two will be Mission type scenario games against studio armies on themed boards. You can take your army up against the studio force, or you can play a studio force. We are also trying to work in there the possibility where you don't even need to bring an army. Storyline and scenarios play big into this. If you want to play a fifth game and drop your lowest score, you have the option of doing that as well. Players will get a personal score and a team score (you'll be part of a faction for the story eg xenos, invaders, imperials).

One possibility is that you can show up, no army, and play the Orks all around in the various scenarios, for example. Same for Blood Ravens.

Normally at a tournament you have a small percentage of really competitive players who club their way through a herd of baby seals to the top table (yes, I really heard this analogy on a prominent forum). Prizes are given to the elite few. To the rest: obscurity. I don't like that. That's why I don't go to tournaments. I want an event where there are competitive challenges (some of the scenario games will have high scoring potential but be almost impossible to win) but where a low-intensity player will be able to have a great time and be part of a memorable story.

A big part of that is to make world-class tables and terrain. Well, at least really, really cool ones. No sucky terrain!

We are basing the first two events roughly on the Kastorel Novem storyline, a book from Forge World. We are making a huge Ork army for this. One of the scenarios will feature (for example) a horde of 150+ ork infantry. This is underway. Which reminds me, I am still running a really good special for massed infantry. We can currently do: Gaunts, Guardsmen, Orks, Skaven, Tac Marines. In fact, I'm open to almost anything in a run of 50+, though I would prefer 100+.

I am making one storyline change, Blood Ravens are going to be the SM chapter.

In summary: a TON of stuff is going on behind the scenes. I expect the whole story will break in 5-10 days.

Many fans have suggested we improve our picture-taking ability. I agree and we're working on it. I almost invariably hear that the figures are better in person than on the website.

In my personal life all is well. I have a great marriage and four lovely children, all in good health. Well, that's not quite right, we had to cancel some Christmas plans from two kids with infections. K had strep and W had some kind of sub-dermal face infection that sealed one of her eyes shut. It was quite pathetic. She's all better now after a run of antibiotics.