Between the Bolter and Me: 2016, a year in review

2016 comes to a close!

With 2016 coming to a close, Between the Bolter and Me is now four years old! We began the year updating the look of the blog, changing our logo (maintaining the frog theme, however!) and color scheme, trying to reflect a continuing commitment to pushing ourselves forward in the hobby. We also started a podcast, called Dragged into Turbolasers, hoping to use it as an avenue to connect with a wider audience and meet new people in the hobby. Now that 2016 is over and we reflect on it, we are happy to say that we think it was our most productive and enjoyable year yet! Between two major collaborative projects, The Pilgrym and the Curse of the Alabaster, we met so many wonderful people, and spurred ourselves to create what I believe is our best work yet, painting an unprecedented 20 models (a major feat for us!). We even started to create our own background material and try our hands at writing some short stories. But enough of boring prose, join us below to see a picture recap of 2016!

The Pilgrym: An Exchange of Hands - the final moments of the Daylight Wall Anomaly

Immediately after finishing the Pilgrym Game,  I knew that I want to write a short story describing the final events of game from the perspective from one of our main characters, Roland Arnesen.  He is one of our more interesting characters. a headless mercenary from the Ordo Machinum, who infiltrated the Church of the Red Athenaeum to help locate the Pilgrym.  What's more, he even has a cyber-owl companion named Bronwen!  Roland and his feathered friend played a small, but important part in the Pilgrym game, and I felt writing about it might help provide some additional context to event, and highlight one of the many plot lines threading through the game.

The story was posted earlier on Iron Sleet, but I wanted to post it here, as well. As an addition, the ever talented Aletheia Atzinger wrote some parts in Bronwen's perspective which have been added! I hope you like it! 

The Pilgrym: Told in pictures

Secrets and Lies.

The dust has finally settled from the massive undertaking that was the Pilgrym event.  It is difficult to convey how awesome it all was, from playing the game to meeting all of the talented individuals that took part in it.  My brothers and I took a whole host of pictures during the event, and have endeavored to show a selection of them with descriptive captions to help convey the story of the event, and reveal the fate of the elusive Pilgrym!

The Pilgrym: Rules for the Church of the Red Athenæum

The Hunt begins.

After 7 furious months of work, the Pilgrym game has finally been played and we are back in the United States.  The event was a fantastic success, truly culminating everyone’s hard work and passion.  Over the next few weeks we are going to be creating a few posts detailing the event.  To start things off, we wanted to share the rules that we devised for our warband, the Church of the Red Athenæum.  The game was played using a modified version of the Necromunda ruleset, with a focus on narrative elements rather than strict adherence to any particular book.  For the Church, we wanted to take special effort to convey that most of its members are not fighters; they are civilians that are missing limbs and other body parts, further separating them from any sort of fighting elite.  They are, however, extremely devoted to their cause and due to their lives of suffering, able to withstand a lot of pain.  The only exception to this are the members of their military arm, the Order of the Crimson Hour, which are trained for combat and therefore have firearms, and Roland Arnesen, a sleeper agent of the Ordo Machinum.

The Pilgrym: Roland Arnesen Missionary of Church of the Red Athenaeum

Roland Arnesen and his vox-owl companion Bronwen.

Although I find it difficult to believe, after 6 months of tireless work, our warband for the Pilgrym Project is finished!  The very last model is finally painted, Roland Arnesen, missionary of the Church and sleeper agent of the Ordo Machinum.  He was the first model I built way back in January, and I am thrilled to finally have paint on him!  I hope you like him; he did quite well in the actual event, something we will detail in a future post, so check back soon!

The Pilgrym: Bronwen vox-owl

Burn the Witch.

While I am still hard at work creating more members for the Church of the Red Athenæum, I realized that I never posted any finished pictures of Roland's owl companion, Bronwen.  I painted Bronwen to look like a Great Horned Owl due to his pronounced ears/horns.  What do you think?

The Pilgrym: Roland Arnesen, headless mercenary

"With their fingers on their triggers, knee-deep in gore."

Over the last few days I have been working on creating my headless mercenary, Roland (who is posing as a missionary for the Church of the Red Athenaeum, but is a agent for Inquisitor Molnar, Ordo Mechanicus). He is still work-in-progress, but I wanted to show some pictures to get everyone’s thoughts and suggestions. Since he is posing as a warrior priest/missionary, we thought that he would be armoured much like Church’s armed force, the Order of the Crimson Hour. Although the Order is modeled after the Adepta Sororitas, they will not have power armor (the Church would not have those kind of resources), but more practical tactical gear.

The Pilgrym: The Church of the Red Athenæum

Not willing to rest on their laurels from last years Invitational, the hobbyist/artists from Iron Sleet have embarked on what is likely the most ambitious hobby project ever concieved: building a section of the Shrine-world of Holy Terra, to be the setting of a massive Inquisimunda game played this summer. The Pilgrym. Iron Sleet is not attempting this project alone, and instead has gathered a small group of dedicated individuals, including luminaries like PDH, JRN, Jeff Vader, and none other than Thistle himself! And we are excited to announce that we are going to be taking part in the project as well!