Out with the old, in with the new (Part 1)

 Well, it's getting perilously near the end of the year, and through all the chaos of the preparation of Christmas a wee glance back over my shoulder at the gaming year past and a gaze forward are always welcome distractions.

I'll start with the year past. On a different board somewhere at the start of 2009 I drummed out my marching orders for the year. I had decided to follow the example of a blogger on his quest of A Year of Frugal Gaming and try and concentrate on the piles of stuff I already had in my hobby shed.
The list went as follows:

This year I want to concentrate on a few long boiling projects without adopting any new ones (well I can dream)
Projects for 2009:

1. Paint the THREE main characters for my RPG group - they've been sitting base coated and fleshed since last July for crying out loud!!
2. Paint the 5 werewolves & create a farm house to play the Two Hour Wargames "Dog Soldiers" minigame.
3. Start playing TwoHourWargames 5150 ruleset
4. Create open ground terrain for play (Trees, bushes, etc)
5. Create a modular dungeon terrain set.
6. Create Necromunda style terrain with the bits of polystyrene & platformer build sets I already have.
7. Paint all the Heroquest style orcs, zombies, skeletons, etc for Heroquest and Dungeon crawls in 5. above.
8. Build & paint the robot/terminator/necron force for battle
9. Build tanks, etc to bulk up my Catachan force (not necessarily for 40k)
10. Paint up an extra Necromunda gang or 2 (I already have one to touch up the battle scars so not too much effort here).

Funny how looking back at these reminds me of some of the bold visions of the future in Tomorrows World. Also how quickly plans and priorities change. Plans #3, 5, 7, 8, 9 & 10 just never happened. So much for sticking to my guns!

A lot of my time/enthusiasm was captured by my RPG group. I am currently Hosting/GMing the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying (1st Edition) classic "The Enemy Within" campaign. So I managed to get the PC group finished and painted a couple of other figures for a D&D game (tick pledge #1).

Scenery took up most of my time, as it turned out. Some outdoor trees (tick pledge #4) and some indoors fantasy decor to go with the "flexible" RPG room spaces constructed from box files. I also managed to cobble together so Sci-Fi terrain (tick pledge #6). The thing about generic terrain/scenics is that you never seem to have enough, so to have actually done some constitutes a victory in my books. No doubt more will be slowly forthcoming in the next year.  But I'm leaving that for part 2. Just to finish off my generic fantasy terrain list is a small town of cardstock buildings I'm constructing. They will feature in future posts without any doubt.

That just leaves my Dog Soldiers Project. I'm just going to miss the year end deadline here I fear. A box file based cottage has been made, and 5 werewolves have been painted. The barn/garage is in the process of construction (see next post) and the squaddies are undercoated. Do-able but most probably a January finish. The whole sheebang will be up here.

Next years pie-in-the-sky plans will be in part 2...