It’s finally happened, Bart – You’ve lost your mind!

For those not in the know, this weekend was Perth Open House 2012, which is part of an international movement that lets people in to buildings and facilities that are usually off limits to the general public. Ryan and I headed out on Saturday and took in the Perth Concert Hall, Council House, the heritage buildings on the Terrace and the Church of Jesus Christ Scientist.

Of the four, the Concert Hall had the best tour – with access to just about every nook and cranny including backstage and the roof space above the auditorium! – Council House had the best views, the Church had the best architecture, and the heritage buildings…. well that tour was pretty short and didn’t actually let us inside many of them – but as they’re now occupied by a dozen different businesses that’s probably understandable. And it was all free, so no complaints!

Pictures are slowly going up on my photostream.

But that’s not what I came to tell you about – I came to talk about the draft.

No! Wait! I came to talk about how I’ve gone completely mad.

Those who keep up with such things will know that I nominally run a Valhallan army in the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniatures game. I say “nominally” because I haven’t played a game in ages – my only semi-regular opponent was Fabes and he’s now got a partner and another kid on the way, both things that make playing with toy soldiers seem rather insignificant 😉 One of these days I’ll get myself together enough to pack my force up, take it down to Games Workshop and play a game there – in the meantime I fool around with converting models and building terrain whenever the mood takes me.

And oh boy, has the mood taken me.

One of the elements of the 40k universe I’ve always liked are the Adeptus Mechanicus – the Machine Cult of Mars. There’s a lot of background for them, but no official tabletop army, which is a shame because if there was I’d probably be collecting that rather than the Imperial Guard (which is not to say there’s anything wrong with the Valhallans). One of the coolest things about the AdMech of course are the Titans – ridiculously oversized and impractical battle robots that constitute the Imperium’s ne plus ultra in regularly available battlefield forces – ranging in size from the merely impressive Warhound Scout Titan to the mind-bogglingly insane Emperor Titan, which could quite happily knock down the Statue of Liberty just for the hell of it.

Fielding a Warhound – or even the next size up Reaver – is quite possible with an Imperial Guard force, thanks to the amazing models available through Forgeworld. However, their sheer power (and points cost) limits them to oversized Apocalypse games, and their investment in terms of cash is not be sneezed at – particularly for a more-or-less casual player such as myself. So adding a Titan to my army is not something that’s really possible. That is unless…

…we consider the Knight.

Knight Titans are somewhat obscure nowdays – you hardly ever hear them mentioned in official sources. However they are part of the 40k universe and provide a much more reasonable option for Titanic tabletop goodness. There are no official models for them, so if you want to field one, you need to hack it together yourself out of existing models and whatever else you can find around the house – it’s quite a project to get on with.

Now what did I say earlier about fooling around with converting models? 😀

Yesterday I dropped a frankly stupid amount of money on eBay to purchase a Nemesis Dreadknight and assorted bits from the Storm Raven and Defiler models, all with the intent of knocking together my very own, homebrew Knight. Unlike most of my conversion projects I have a very clear idea on what I’m going to do with it, which should make matters rather more efficient – but it’s still no excuse for wasting so much money on toy soldiers. But hey, what can you do? 🙂

(At least I can recoup some costs by selling the various bits I won’t use…)

I intend to field the model as an armoured Sentinel. It won’t be anywhere near as powerful as a Knight should be, but I’m more interested in just having a Titan model on the table than I am actually winning with it – which given my general performance with then models I already have is probably a good thing 🙂

So that’s my insane plan. Stay tuned for progress updates when the parts actually arrive…