Torch Finished, Beasts Arrive, LotR?

Ready to rip and burn for your entertainment.

There wasn't much left to do on Torch, as I mentioned in a previous post, so today I did those few things and called it done.  The 5th Border Legion icon didn't turn out as well as it did on Black Ivan.  I'll put a little of the blame on the scheme since the gold on black really popped, but mostly I'll fault my own brush work.  The spikes on the bottom of the 5 are a bit chunky, the arrows in the corners don't look quite right, and in retrospect a bit of black lining would have helped as well.  All that is academic at this point since Torch has a coat of varnish drying at the moment, and it's just nitpicking really.



My Legion reinforcements arrived a few minutes ago.  This was my first sizeable shipment from Miniature Market and despite EV's chronicle of his experiences I was curious how the packing would be.  It was acceptable, but somewhat below the Warstore's standard.  The packing material they used was a coarse brown paper which I'm familiar with from my days in receiving.  I had expected packing peanuts since that's what EV got, though admittedly my box was far smaller than his, and also because the Warstore has never sent me a box with peanuts in it.  Nothing was damaged (the bag holding the Legion counters broke in the box but there were none missing) and I got all the things I ordered which is the most important thing.  Considering the savings of Miniature Market vs the Warstore I'll probably do my big orders through MM in the future, but if I'm getting anything especially delicate I'll stick with the Warstore.  The beasts I got, especially the Angelius and Typhon, are going to use every ounce of greenstuff I have to fill all the gaps and keep pins wedged into place.  I'd like to have them assembled and primed by Wednesday, which will be my next good painting opportunity, but that's probably too optimistic.  At least the construction time will let me continue pondering what order to paint my various beasts in.

I'm still trying to get caught up on my internettery from the time of horribly slow internets.  Part of that is mowing through the backlog of What's New Today posts at the GW site.  I picked up where I left off previously, in the midst of a lot of Lord of the Rings posts.  The LotR game has never really interested me for a variety of reasons, but last night I was taken by the idea of having a small Gondor/Rohan cavalry-heavy force.  EV likes the system and I think he has enough models to field two sides at once, so I started poking around in the GW online store to see what I was thinking about getting myself into.  The models aren't bad, though well below GW's usual standard, and are (a bit) cheaper as a result, though Finecast is an obvious exception there.  The bit that stopped my momentum was, as usual, the books.  $58 for the main book, $25 for a 48 page army book.  I just don't get their book pricing.  If you're a model company that happens to produce a game for you to use the models in, as GW says it is, then why the hefty price tag on the books?  I get that they want to make money on the books, that time and effort goes in, but wouldn't in encourage more people (like myself) to pick one up out of curiosity if they were more reasonably priced?  The 40k and Fantasy books are $60 and I refuse to get either one, for systems that I already have models for and experience with, because it's a ridiculous price point.  Mini companies already have their hooks in the customers through the models themselves, which are impossible to pirate as PDFs and are guaranteed to at least as many copies as the books (in the case of special characters) and probably a lot more (troops), so why not make your money there?  I'm no business major, but it just doesn't add up.  Thus I'll be sticking to the games I'm already invested in and funneling any funds that would have gone towards some Rohan cavalry into, say, Uhlans or Raptors or even Blood Angels bikers.