New hobby season 2024/25

Welcome back! Summer is nearly over. We had each our more or less relaxing summer breaks.

The importance of breaks

To prevent tze dreaded hobby burnout, regular breaks are as important as streaks of high productivity. This may seem like some random cringe self development/ business advice. But putting aside your hobby activities for a while enables you to come back later with new ideas, inspiration, and even fresh motivation to finish that long-term project.

Plus, let’s not forget all that wonderful inspiration you’ll discover by traveling.

Eric’s inspiration from Oberstaufen (Allgäu, DE). Fantasy houses anyone?

Outlook on a new hobby season

Before diving into speculations and grand ideas for future projects, let’s have a look at what’s already planned during the coming weeks.

Post wise, we’ve got some more BATTLETECH content for you. There will be the next terrain tutorial, as well as a retro book review.

We try to maintain our #motivation-sessions as regular as we can and continue crafting and painting together via discord. In that context, we wanted to revive an old tradition and issue hobby challenges (craft this, paint that…) in order to try out new methods, build more unusual (scatter) terrain, all while inspiring and motivating each other in the process.

Gaming

Whilst we enjoy painting minis and building terrain, the gaming aspect of our hobby is what matters most to us. That’s why we focus on gaming first. From there, the need to build new terrain and paint more miniatures will, of course, develop naturally.

Below are some of the games we might play, paint minis, and craft terrain for during the coming months.

One Page Rules

On the gaming side of things, each of us is working on his 250 points One Page Rules Age of Fantasy Skirmish warband(s). So, that may be the first game we’ll play together. Olivier is painting his Vampiric Undead, and I’ve started working on my Chivalrous Kingdoms troop. Eric, on the other hand, decided to use his already painted Age of Sigmar and Gorechosen Khorne miniatures as War Disciples. Of course, we won’t forget Grimdark Future Firefight for our Sci-Fi skirmish games.

Warhammer Fantasy Battles 4th. Ed. and the Battle for Maugthrond Pass

This hobby season, we intend to finally conclude our Maugthrond Pass Passion Project and to play the scenario. Initially planned to be launched in 2023/24, we were unable to muster all the troops and collect all the material needed. Eric’s Goblin horde needs some last models painted, but my elf army is almost finished (thanks to the cunning use of stand-in models). We managed to craft the house and the watchtower (we even made two of the latter). Of course, we’ll have to dive into the rules of Warhammer Fantasy 4E again. Speaking of which, there’s this free rules tutorial that you would get in your FLGS, like the long extinct Fantasy Bazaar. We might use it to get started.

Classic BATTLETECH

There are still some more terrain tutorials in the making for Classic BATTLETECH. And, hopefully, we’ll get more games going featuring all those shiny new terrain pieces.

More small-scale Sci-Fi games

Still on the Sci-Fi-front, we also decided to test the new edition of Horizon Wars, called Midnight Dark. Maybe we’ll even test play BATTLETECH Alpha Strike. Anyway, we’ll dust off our 6mm armies.

The idea of building a modular 6mm space colony is very tempting.

Naval Wargaming

Naval wargaming keeps popping up now and then during our discussions. And, maybe we’ll take the plunge, or we’ll stay ashore and keep talking about it (no pun intended). In the past, we already played the fun little game Fire at Sea, but we wanted to expand our games to other periods. Games like Galleys & Galleons and/or Naval Command are currently undergoing rules study by Eric and may be play-tested in the future. Of course, we’ll need to 3D-print and paint some ships. Also, let’s not forget a proper ocean playing surface and some terrain (islands, reefs, wrecks, etc.). Hence, some thematic tutorials might be expected.

Frostgrave

Let’s not forget one of our all-time favorites: Frostgrave! The fantasy skirmish game by Joseph McCoullough will turn 10 in 2025. Reason enough to dedicate some content to this awesome game and continue our ongoing campaign. We are also tempted to write a special anniversary scenario or mini-campaign. There’s also a big draw to build some more special terrain pieces for the game.

The other classics

Of course, we’ll continue playing our other classics: Kings of War (fantasy and historical), Lion Rampant, Gaslands, Space and Sword Weirdos, Full Thrust and all of our other evergreens like Brawl Arcane 28. For the latter game, Eric intends to build further and less generic, terrain pieces. Maybe as a hobby challenge.

Future of the blog

With adulthood being quite tedious and overwhelming at the moment, please forgive us for not posting every week. We’ll continue, of course, to document and post everything hobby-related we do.

At the same time, we’ll try to update and add quality content to our Resources page, where you can find inspirational sources on the internet, as well as downloadable gaming material we produce. So, have a look there as well.

Other ideas

We’ve got some more vague ideas in mind, which we’ll need to further develop.

Each of us has his personal passion project(s) in the back of his mind. Eric, for instance, is very tempted to start building the Warhammer 40k army he always wanted to collect as a young gamer. You’ll have to read his jungle terrain tutorial for a hint. He’s also tempted with dice casting and physical miniature sculpting. He’s already done it in the past, albeit with varying degrees of success. Also, finishing that Blitz Bowl pitch is on his never-ending to-do list.

And, let’s not forget social events, like going to a convention, a cultural event or simply to our local Italian restaurant.

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