Tymell

Folks can call me a grumbling Longbeard all they want, but anything over half that price would have me raising an eyebrow.

Again I'm baffled at how the Votann released in side-games (Kill Team and Necromunda) continue to be so much cooler than the main 40k army itself.

This one almost made me spit my drink. In an edition marketed around simplifying and cutting down on bloat, one of the coolest things is how every single unit now has to have a special rule crowbarred in, just for the sake of it. Sure it is, GW.

Tangent, but the fact that Volume II came 3rd in the "Book of the Year" votes tells me either the voting thing is faked, or the audience's tastes are very different to my own.

Well, that's it I guess. My feelings on Volume III, like all of them (and honestly, like the Siege and even the Heresy as a whole) are mixed. On the one hand, I feel Volume III is the best of the three. It's by far the most focused, with a good deal of its time spent, understandably, on the big Emperor vs. Horus fight. Where the narrative does cut away, it feels natural for the most part, to keep the flow going and continue on with some of the other threads established. Sorry this post's a big rambling, but I guess this whole set of books was too, so maybe that fits. In summary for Volume III, I really liked the title fight itself, but most everything else around it dragged the book down, either falling flat or outright annoying me, with one or two exceptions. And I still stand by this absolutely not needing to be three volumes, sorry Dan. If it was Nick Kyme as editor who allowed that, then they needed a better editor for this, because any editor worth their time could've cut so much of this out. If they'd cut all the fat away from this, had a single beefy volume with the better parts of Vol. I, the Sanguinius fight from Vol. II and the Emperor fight from Vol. III, plus some of the better side-stories hammered more into shape, this could've been one of the best books of the series.

I saw the thread title and immediately thought of a Night Lord wearing skulls and flayed skins waving cheerily and saying hello. Welcome!

No. I'm sorry, but just...no. This is an entirely unnacceptable amount of awesome. How dare you show the rest of us up like this?! Seriously, incredible work that simultaneously inspires me and makes me question even attempting any modelling when I know it'll never reach this level. And yes, you should absolutely show this to GW.

It's adorable and I want it.

I'm late as usual, but I finished up Volume II today (ready to press on into III), and my thoughts are: BLOAT FOR THE BLOAT GOD! FILLER FOR THE FILLER NOVEL! Okay, this (and the above snark) is probably going to come across harsher than it should, but I can't resist this very succinct summary of my feelings about most of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb4a_CLHtBs So, yeah, wasn't a fan of this. It always feels kind of odd when a product suffers from something so entirely predictable. Not that the contents were predictable (they kind of are, but we've always known how this was going to end, that's not my criticism), but when you hear about some new project or decision and you immediately think of some way it sounds like a bad decision. And it's so obvious that part of you is sure it won't be a problem. Because it's so obvious. They must've handled it already, right? It's like when someone in a story is so obviously being set up for something, you feel sure that won't actually happen, precisely because it seems so apparent. The obvious reaction when the final book of the Siege was split into two, then THREE novels, was "Huh, why? Surely there isn't enough story to warrant that? That sounds like it'll just feel really bloated and unnecessary." And…yeah. It's really bloated and unnecessary. For much of this book's time, it's a painful, gruelling slog through page after page after page of nothing happening. The Siege is continuing, time and space are going crazy, the Warp's taking over, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, we get it. Vulkan's still in the throne room. Malcador's still on the throne. Dorn's still stuck in the desert. Valdor's still cutting through daemons. Sindermann's still in the library. Keeler's still leading people in a pilgrimage. Loyalists and traitors are still fighting. Fo is still making his own bid to steal the "Most Pointless Waste of Time in the Siege" trophy from Keeler and Sindermann. This is the overwhelming impression for most of the book: padding, filler and bloat. Cutting back to scenes that don't go anywhere or serve much of a purpose beyond setting the scene, which we've already had plenty of. And it's not even as if the scene-setting is outright bad, it's decent prose, it's just…unnecessary. I've seen a counter to this a few times along the lines of, "Well of course there's a lot of it, the HH series has so many plotlines to tie up!" And while it's true that the series as a whole has a ton of plot threads, most of them aren't really covered here. Which is fine, I didn't expect them to be, but it doesn't work as an excuse for the three book length when there aren't actually that many threads going on here, and many of those that are taking place don't need the page count they get. One of the common questions you see for people new to the series is, "What can be safely skipped?", and it's always a question I struggle with. I'm a completionist when it comes to this, I want it all, and for me it feels like the entire point of the HH series is to expand on things and flesh them out. So I get the idea of just focusing on the more important bits, but I never feel comfortable advising people to skip things, at least not based on how "necessary" they are to the plot. I'll defend The Damnation of Pythos to this day, but The End and the Death Vol. II might be the first full HH novel where I'd advise people to skip it (at least most of it). That's not something I should be feeling about the conclusion of the entire series! The reason I keep saying "most" is because I do think there are some really good bits buried in here, mostly within the last quarter or so. These highlights save the book from a truly abysmal score, but for me it's still the weakest of the Siege novels (setting aside the novellas). I was willing to give this the benefit of the doubt regarding the book split, but now I can confidently say this absolutely did NOT need to be 3 volumes. I'm still not convinced it needed to be two, but we'll see what the third is like. 5/10 (and was heading for more like a 3/10 until the last third/quarter)

Also feels like the reason the Votann army list is so pathetically tiny and dull for a brand new army. Ancestor cores forbid we create a properly fleshed-out and expansive list for the new army, we can only release so many kits at once, so everyone will just have to wait another two or three editions to actually get a decently varied list (if at all).

Results are out, and congratulations to Lion for becoming the 2nd best Miniature of the Year!

I refuse to vote on the grounds that daemon Fulgrim, the objectively correct choice, isn't listed

The more time I spend on this new webstore, the more it seems to be everything I despise in modern website design rolled into one abominable Chaos Spawn of a site. Also, random little query: did they do away with wish/gift lists? If not, where on Terra have they hidden them?

Could maybe be a very dark green armour too, not that this suggests any other specifically to me. The only ones I can see with dark armour and blue trim, though it's not a perfect fit, are the Astral Hawks.

Absolutely exquisite model, and such an immense glow up from his previous weak HH sculpt. The serpentine coils, the posture lithe but full of power, the twisted weapons and armour, those immense wings, that stunningly sculpted face. I'm just as in awe as I feel someone should be in-universe for Daemon Fulgrim.