Welcome!

Welcome to "Crucible of Fate", my attempt to chart my trials and tribulations in the wide and varied world of table-top wargaming.

Now for a little background. I'm primarily a 40k player, starting off with a brief foray into 2nd edition followed by a long hiatus until just before 5th edition dropped in 2008. I'm sure most of you have dipped in and out of the hobby over time and the way I got hooked back into it probably mirrors many others. A chance conversation with a friend in Uni resulted in the discovery of a shared past interest in the hobby which then lead to me popping into my local GW. I ended up buying one of the fairly new plastic Eldar war walkers and some paints and glue etc and then got busy with the building. After completing this little project, I ended up getting some more bits and bobs then before I knew it, I had about 750pts worth of stuff! At the same time, my buddy managed to dig out all of his old stuff and by the time July rolled around we were ready to start re-learning how to play with the new edition. 

Fast forward to 2013 and you'll find me wielding about 4000pts of Yme-Loc Eldar and about 2000pts of Salamanders Space Marines for 40k. On top of that I've got Imperial Navy and Salamanders fleets for Battlefleet Gothic and a small Skaven army for Fantasy.

Moving away from GW systems, I also play Malifaux. For those who've never heard of it, Malifaux is an awesome skirmish game produced by Wyrd Miniatures whose setting is a mash-up of the Wild West and Victorian Steampunk. I know, it sounds crazy but I urge everyone to give it a go just to try out the playing card based game mechanics. I found it to be a really refreshing change to chucking buckets of dice around and the start-up costs are pretty reasonable. 

I post regularly on Heresy under the forum handle "Jams" and some of you may have seen some of my painting work in the modelling and painting forums. If you haven't, don't worry. Part of the reason I've set up this blog is to try and motivate myself into posting my stuff more regularly to get more critiques and comments so I can improve and learn new and exciting techniques. I also aim to post up some tutorials for some of my paint schemes as I've received numerous requests over the years from people wondering how I achieved a particular look but I've never gotten around to getting them written down. Eventually I want to attempt to go for a Golden Daemon but I've got a way to go before then.

I'm also going to share my experiences as a gamer, not just the victories, but also the defeats, with the aim of analyzing my games and seeing what I could have done better, regardless of the outcome. The reason for this is my local meta has become increasingly more competitive since 6th edition was released and I've been trying to hone that killer edge so that I can start attending GT's in the near future. I'll detail the lists I've used and how they worked out and then see where we go from there.

Hopefully, those of you that read my blog will find it interesting and hopefully helpful, but I also want you guys to chip in with stuff you think might be useful in helping both myself and others in our journey through the hobby.

So, without further ado, lets crack on!