Rumors: Space Marine Photo Dump

Here is a collection of all the new Space Marine photos I could scrounge up. Many of them came from Dakka and others from Pins of War, where you can find these photos of Tac Marines and Sternguard that I can't seem to steal shamelessly.

For my part, I'm none to impressed. I heard new Vanguard Vets and almost lost it because they have such potential. I do think they're the best of the bunch here, but from the GKs, Dark Vengeance chosen, DW Knights, and Death Company, I expected better. Especially from the Vanguard models. The poses are really disappointing to me. Especially when compared to that awesome PAGK kit where you get to have a guy stabbing through the skull of a Plaguebearer. It's a model so good it looks like a conversion, but isn't. The key to making amazing Vanguard Vets would have been in the momentum expressed by the poses, in my opinion. I do, however, like the Sternguard, tanks and the Libby a lot. Hope to see some good figures in the Sternguard kit as those photos surface.

Enjoy folks. I'll be around, but I'm on vacation and I'm trying to knock out that kids' book before I go back to work.

Changes to my Blogs and What's to Come

I have a lot coming up in the near future and in preparation of it all, I have decided to finally link my Blogger account with my Google+. So, nice to meet you, I'm Dan. Were I still only going to be writing 2d6D, I don't think I would link them, but it's all or nothing on Blogger.

I've just started a new blog that I will be using as my professional page as I release my self-published titles over the course of the next few months and it's for that blog that I linked my accounts. The first release, a children's picture book, ought to be done and available at all major eBook retailers around the end of August or beginning of September. The one to follow that will be an interactive picture book and educational tool for learning English and Japanese.

News articles and cool links that regard writing, 2D art and other topics that relate are going to be posted over here, on a blog that I have not yet configured at all. I'll also be blogging about works as they progress.

What does this mean for you, the reader? The first is that there will be more content, more articles and links. But more importantly in my opinion, they will be more sharply focused because non-40k material that relates more to writing, art and translation will be siphoned off to my other blog. So if you're only interested in one or the other, this should help filter out content that isn't pertinent to you.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but I'm really looking forward to it all because I think it will lead somewhere fun and interesting. Keep an eye out as there will be developments and updates all along the way. Cheers!

Space Marine Rumors: (Week of July 29th)

I'm not sure how much I buy into a whole new family of weapons for Space Marines, especially when the fluff behind it makes them extremely rare. Also the wounding method is wildly inconsistent with the established rules which makes me even more skeptical. Still, rumors will be rumors and they're fun to look at while we wait to see what becomes of half of the armies in the entire game.

Best_Pone wrote:
Up for release in September is the new Codex: Space Marines.  

 - There will be 7 Ltd Ed varients. 6 of these will be covers for First Founding chapters, whilst the 7th will have Black Templars on the cover.  

 - New weapon family: Grav weapons. I believe these wound against the armour save (so terminators would be wounded as if they had a toughness of 2).  

 - First Founding chapters will be getting a substantial section each to themselves, so hopefully this can be looked as as Codex: Space Marines instead of Codex:Ultramarines. This will also show in a rule called Chapter Tactics, for which the effects depend on the chapter being played. 

- There is a new armour type that at first glance looks to be somewhere between a terminator and a dreadnought - looking more closely, it appears to go over the marine's power armour however.
- This new armour can be armed in 2 ways, depending on the user. The devastator version has either a bolter array or missile launchers mounted on the chest armour, whilst the gauntlets can be armed with heavy bolters, lascannons or grav cannons. The assault version has a bolter array or frag launchers mounted on the chest armour, with assault drills mounted on the gauntlets.  

 - There are 2 new AA tanks. One tank veterans will already be familiar with as the Hunter, armed an AA missile launcher. The other tank mounts 2 tri-barreled turrets instead.  

 - There is a new tactical squad. Lots of options as you'd expect, but of particular interest will probably be the grav pistol and grav rifle.  

 - A new plastic Sternguard veteran squad.  

 - A new plastic Vanguard veteran squad.  

 - New plastic characters: a captain, a librarian and a chaplain.

What do you think? Look plausible? Got any wishlisting you want to do?

Vassal Engine Update

Just in case you haven't seen it already, the Vassal Engine was updated not long ago. Far too many bugs have been corrected and there are too many updates for me to cover them all here, so I recommend reading the update news on their site. You can download the new version here.

Wargamers in Japan and Details on our First Event

Here is the official logo for Wargamers in Japan. It's hard to call it a group as that would defeat the purpose of the thing. Really it's more like a confederation lol. It's a group of all the 40k groups in Japan that we can get involved. So far we have groups in Zama, Atsugi, Yokosuka, Yokohama, Chima, Saitama, and Tokyo. I'm trying to get the Nagoya guys involved as well and hope to get them in on the meetings soon.

It's an open group and our basic philosophy is the more people, the more gaming, the more fun we'll all have. We have lots of people already involved who are all into a lot of different kinds of gaming.

The first event is scheduled for September 27th, 2013. We're definitely going to have tables for 40k, Fantasy, Bolt Action, Space Hulk, Necromunda and some historical war games that I know nothing about personally. There are details and Facebook contacts in the group. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you are in Japan and want to game or if you even know anyone who is moving out here and could use some community support for gaming or even getting adjusted to the country and lifestyle.