A Blog of Two Gamers; Your questions answered
You'll remember from Friday's post that I got more than a little excited about The Island of Blood set. Mainly because of the great High Elf miniatures that come with it (have you seen the Griffon!?). That's not to say I don't like the Skaven, they're very cool, but I'd much rather have more Elves, which made me realise that you'd have quite a sizeable High Elf army if you combined the contents of two sets. All you'd need to do is swap your Skaven for the High Elves from a friend's set and you'd each have around about 1500 points of the respective armies. Keen to explore this idea further I got my hands on a second set and with the assistance of Adam Hall (he's the good looking chap with hair as opposed to the devilishly handsome one without any), a Blog of Two Gamers was born. Over the next couple of months you'll be able to follow me and Adam as we assemble, paint and game with the forces from the Island of Blood. Once we've got the armies to 1500 points we'll be adding in extra units to make our armies up to 2000 and then to 3000 points. And so that we can update you on our progress as often as we like, the 'What's New Today' section will be changing slightly - from tomorrow there will be the main post in the usual place, and there will also be 'A Tale of Two Gamers Blog' that sits underneath it on the main page. Anyway, here's a look at what Adam and I managed today.
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Two boxes' worth of frames is a lot of frames indeed! Each frame has some Skaven and some High Elf components on it, so it's a good idea to get together with your swap-partner and clip out all of the miniatures together.
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This picture was taken about five minutes after Adam first clapped eyes on The Island of Blood. While I got to work clipping out the High Elves as fast as I could, Adam spent the first twenty minutes gawping at the Skaven and repeatedly telling me how cool they were.
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By the end of my lunch hour I'd assembled this mighty High Elf warhost. All of the models are really easy to assemble - they snap together and don't need glue, although I glued mine for extra stability.
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Two sets of Skaven is a lot of Skaven! You'll notice that the second Skaven Warlord and Engineer are missing (and the second Griffon and Mage are missing from the High Elf force) - we plan on doing something a little different with them.
After we finished assembling our forces, we popped over to the Studio to get some painting tips from the 'Eavy Metal team. While we were there, I asked Studio web photographer, Jim Sowter to take some pictures of 'Eavy Metal's painted version of The Island of Blood box contents to share with you. There are two pictures below and I'll show you another four each day this week.
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The Lothern Sea Guard are fantastically detailed. There's a full command group included in The Island of Blood including the musician shown.
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This is the first time there has ever been a model for a Skaven Poisoned Wind Mortar Team.
On Friday I said that if you had any questions about The Island of Blood, I'd try my best to answer them. Well, here goes:
Q. Will the rulebook from The Island of Blood be available separately?
A. No, as with the miniatures, it's exclusive to The Island of Blood set.
Q. What is the page count of the mini-rulebook?
A. There are 184 pages in the mini-rulebook.
Q. Are the scenarios, alliances and magic lores included in the mini-rulebook?
A. Yes, anything that could be regarded as a 'rule' is included in the mini-rulebook.
Q. What miniatures do you get in The Island of Blood box?
A. The set contains 74 models in total: a High Elf Prince on Griffon, a High Elf Mage, 10 High Elf Lothern Sea Guard, 10 High Elf Sword Masters of Hoeth and five Ellyrian Reavers; a Skaven Warlord, a Skaven Warlock Engineer, 40 Skaven Clanrats, a Skaven Master Moulder, two Skaven Rat Ogres, a Skaven Warpfire Thrower and a Skaven Poisoned Wind Mortar.