The one where I do a 180 and go back to Gepids and Sea Peoples.

This is a WIP post, reader beware.

It's been a long week at the Factorium, hence no updates. Sometimes life comes at you fast and you have to cut away stuff here and there to keep up with the daily grind as it were. The blogging took the hit instead of cutting into the actual hobby-time.
Not to dive into it to deep but here is a small part of everything; We had our kitchen torn out to the studs due to an old waterleak so we are pretty much living an unorganised chaos here at the homestead and there is kitchen-stuff everywhere. Wifey dearest went on a fish auction (as in aquariums, not eats) and we had to set up a couple tanks and empty a tank of tanganiyka cichlids down to bare bottom to pop some young koi in. The practice-sessions with the band is slowly gaining monementum. I got involved with the local county history club and started up a couple of projects there. I have had a chestcold for the past 2 weeks that's come and gone. 

....and I got invited to a gamingday at my buddy Johans place. The other Johan, with the boardgames. Not Johan with the WW2 stuff.
There will be loads more coming regarding that, but suffice to say I kinda it lit a torch under me and I got to preparing my stuff to host a HOTT-table.

A small portion of the stuff I have been working on the past week. But let's start from the beginning of this maelstrom I have been in lately.
My resin-printer broke down a couple days after my last post. Apart from giving me a slight headache it also meant that I had to put a break on the project I was gearing up to print and paint; 6mm ACW for Altar of Freedom.
When stuff breaks down it kinda puts a damper on everything so I decided to work on my backlog a bit while I wait for my true passionproject at this point, the Irregular Miniatures 2mm nappies that are in the mail. 

Said and done, I broke out the bag of 15mm Gepid Medium Cavalry and got to prepping and painting them. They are made by Old Glory 15S and are part of a Field of Glory-armypack for... Gepids.
I bought them cheaply on Ebay 7-8 years ago and just got to painting them this year to be used for DBMM. The army is chugging along nicely at this point and I have about 300 points or so painted up i think. One of the issues with the armypack is that the Gepid Kingdom never really differentiated between heavy and light cavalry, whereas the makers of both the rules and the miniatures thought it would be a good idea..
This means that instead of getting 25-odd elements of knights, I have about half each of heavily armored cavarly and unarmored ones.
Oh well, whatcha gonna do.
While I could order the heavy cav-version from Old Glory, the shippingcost, VAT and time to get them to Sweden just rubs me the wrong way. The models aren't really that nice either to be honest.
So, I am painting them up as generic goth/germanic cavalry!
This lets me use them in a variety of armies without really comitting to any particular shieldmarkings or other distinguishing features.

Somewhere here in the timeline I got invited to the gamingday and I started to think about what I could host for everyone. DBA came to mind, but since I have one army each from book 1 and 2 it would just look and feel weird as a historical game. So HOTT it is!

I realised I really need some cool fantasy-elements in my armies so I decided to put in the time and do a rescue attempt on my printer. Without making it longwinded, I did a deepcleaning of the mechanics and ran a few tests. Lo an´ behold; she runs again!
Above is my setup that resides in a room we keep above freezing out in the barn. The printer itself is in a temp-controlled fridge (my old fermentation-chamber for homebrewing) together with all the fluids and gloves while the tools and the curingstation is in a wardrobe. Works like a charm and over the course of about a hundred printsruns I haven't had any issue due to the enviroment affecting resin-printing; Humidity, temp changes and so on.

So, what did I print?
For the Gepids I decided to morph them into a germanic dark-forest cult. Worgs are a must, as is a druid. As a behemoth I chose a wendigo model I thought looked especially feral. This should round out the choises for the OOB nicely with hero, cleric/mage, behemoth, beasts, warbands, knights, riders, shooters, sneakers and spears. As with the coming stuff, I will do a proper army presentation once everything is painted and ready to go.

To make the Sea People a bit more fantasy-esque I took some ideas from the DBA & HOTT Wargaming facebook-group and especially wanted to build on the idea that was suggested to me by Russel Strachan; The Minoan Genius.
They are essentially benign demons with lion or hippo-heads in minoan legend. 
I debated with myself what I wanted them to represent, but in the end decided to print a "lion-man fighter" from Cults3d in 20mm scale and use it interchangeably as a behemoth or a god.

You can see two priests and an airboat in the picture aswell and that should be enough to make the army feel, and play, cool. The Sea People are a bit lackluster against the warbands in the army above, but I'm gonna let the player decide if they want to use the warrior-elements as blades or warbands. 

The plan is to bring both armies with all elements I have available, put the armylist on the table and ask players to build their own 24 AP force and have at it.

Apart from finishing the paintjobs and basing on all of this, I need to slap together some extra terrain that's suitable for the tablesize. I have printed a germanic-looking stronghold for the forest cult so there is that. I think a couple of simple hills, a forest-base for my trees, a marsh and a couple road-sections would be enough for what I want to bring. That should be manageble in an evening during the week.

That's it for now.
Cheers.
/Fred
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