June 2026 Hobby Update
In 2024 I did an ad hoc hobby update series. It was meant to be quarterly, but planning for the ICI V kind of put a damper on my personal projects and it became beginning, middle, and end of the year updates. When I polled friends about the posts they’d like to see on the blog, I was actually surprised that hobby updates ranked quite high, so…here’s another one!
Real Life taking over
At the time of publication, my wife and I have a one year old child and that, as you may guess, means I have much, much less time for painting and playing little space duders. A lot of the blog posts last summer were actually written and scheduled well in advance to avoid a break in the publishing schedule, though I often can write these on my commute, so the blogging part of the hobby is one part I’ve been able to continue. This of course raises the question if I should really be writing about something I barely have time to do, but, hey, you’re still reading this. Not to mention, I’ve been playing for over twenty years, so I might have something to contribute.
The late night painting
There were two projects I completed in the latter half of 2025: the first was a Five Parsecs From Home crew with a handful of adversaries, which I wrote about in detail here. The second was for the annual Christmas Carnage.
Myself and some friends started playing a four way game over the holidays as part of our get together and gift exchange. I hosted the 2025 one, and designed the game: mainly the standard Carnage scenario (4 players deploy in corners, one objective in the centre, whoever controls this at the end wins) but with a prequel Carnage game…in space!
I secretly painted up a small Battlefleet Gothic fleet for my Black Legion, Jacen’s T’au Sept, Greg’s Salamanders, and Elton’s Hive Fleet, each consisting of one cruiser and three escorts. I had each painting recipe from previous projects and managed to get them all painted just in time for the game (though I painted my own fleet the night before, which was my first time using paint markers on a project).
Of these, painting the Salamanders ships was my favourite: they took a drybrush very well. The Tau took the longest, requiring multiple layers to get decent coverage, plus lots of edge highlights. I have a much greater respect for the work Jacen puts into his Tau now: it’s not an easy scheme. The Nids were also fun (especially the maws on the escorts) and were very similar to painting any other Tyranid beastie. I’m still getting the hang of paint markers, as they bled when working on the filigree of the chaos cruiser.
For the space game, we used One Page Rules Grimdark Future Warfleets rules, which are much, much simpler than Battlefleet Gothic. We used the base fleet building rules because the fleet builder app isn’t, to my knowledge, linked anywhere on Warfleets’ rules webpage. Frustrating to find a dozen flavourful rosters after the fact…but maybe for the best since it was meant to be a quick game before the main show.
Warfleets played fast, with everyone picking up the rules pretty quick. I haven’t played full blooded BFG, so can’t really compare, but after this game I’m very curious about it.
Innocence proves nothing
Over the last few months, there’s another project I started, one that, like this blog, I can work on from my phone: writing a full conversion and modernization of Inquisitor.
Inquisitor, to me, is one of those intensely interesting and oft idealized games. It is such a strange blend of RPG, skirmish game, and 40k encyclopedia that takes forever to play: I don’t know if I’ve ever come close to finishing a game.
But it is so, so freaking cool. So much artwork and an entire subgenre of Warhammer fiction are the result of this one, weird game. I looked at a few other rulesets for playing Inquisitor, and considered hacking one, but they just never fit. I don’t just want good rules: I want three different lasguns and four different types of bolter magazines. That wasn’t going to be in another scifi skirmish game, and if I was going to spend time hacking a game, why not just bring Inquisitor up to snuff?
And lo, the Ordos Pilgrim was born, an update to Inquisitor. The game is currently very far from beta, requiring players to flip back and forth from the OP ruleset and original Inquisitor game, but the goal is for it to be a standalone system. I have so far only played one (1) game of OP, with Jacen, and we didn’t even finish it. But damn…it felt like a good game.
I’m sure I’ll be writing about this project more in the future: it’s just early days at the moment and there’s no real incentive (yet) to rush it. What I will share though are some models I’ve worked on. First off is Inquisitor-Knight Samantha Zoar, Monodominant, former arbites Tallock, his cyber mastiff, and the zealot Sabbatha (originally painted for Five Parsecs).
Equipped with power armour and a daemon hammer, Zoar might be too powerful: hence why the warband is on the lower end, with only three characters (technically the mastiff is equipment, but we’ll see if that gets changed). This is a remake of a 54mm warband I had started to make about…twenty years ago?! Oh boy.
The second warband is Inquisitor Lucifer Trade, Recongregator, ex-tech priest Boris Falco, hive ganger Jane Scald, and arco flagellant Krull 1001. Again, this is a remake of my original 54mm Inquisitor warband. Converting these was much more intensive than Zoar’s warband, especially the arco flagellant. The arms looked very spindly with the ork power klaws, but I bulked out the silhouette with tubes and wires to try to hide that.
Finally, I’ve been building some Inquisitor NPCs. This has been an interesting project, as I’ve been aiming for unarmed citizens and specialists and finding hands without weapons is surprisingly tricky in Warhammer. So far, I’ve built these four: a pilot, a tech adept, a cardinal, and a preacher.
Jacen and I have talked about a game where the two warbands start off hidden in a crowd before the shooting starts…which means we’ll need lots of civilians.
The big game
The final bit of this hobby update is the Inquisitorial Conclave Invitational VI. This was a direct sequel to the ICI V (which, again, you can read about in exhaustive detail here) and was intended to be a narrative capstone for the previous event. But, as mentioned above, I’m a dad now and planning a big ol’ narrative shindig is a lot of work. We scaled back the size, both in the time (just one day), number of participants, and scale (only one apocalypse mission instead of eleven normal sized).
Even after scaling back, this was a huge amount of work and, to be frank, a mistake given my real life commitments. It consumed all of my extremely scant free time for about three months, and though I think Jacen and I did a great job and am proud of the event we put on, I’m not in a hurry to do this again.
I’ll cover this event in a future article, but suffice to say it was an Apocalypse battle where the forces of Chaos assaulted a Necron stronghold defended by the metal men and their thralls. Jacen and Greg constructed some spectacular terrain, while Jeff and I created new boards for a huge 20’ by 6’ table. Eleven players battled for the mysterious Apocrypha Engine and control of the ruined planet Exitus over the course of about ten hours. When the dust had settled, the balance of power had shifted and the Pilgrim Sector will never be the same.
On the horizon
So what’s on my painting desk right now? Back in December, I did a test Dwarf Ironbreaker and have been working my way through the rest of the unit.
Though it’s supposed to be a speed painting project, there’s another nineteen of the short soldiers and it’s been a while (especially with planning the aforementioned Apocalypse game). I’ve promised myself to play at least one game of Old World before starting another Dwarf unit, which I’m now the proud owner of many: Jeff gifted me a whole hold-full of Dwarves and I now have a playable 1,500 point army, with units to spare.
The colour scheme for the Ironbreakers is simple: prime black, drybrush Leadbelcher, paint the gold details Skeleton Horde, base, shade, and highlight the beards various shades of brown, black, grey, or orange, plus extra details on the command models. As Ironbreakers are 90% armour, this works pretty well, but basically every other unit in the army will need extra steps for cloth and skin. So…yeah, this unit is taking a while to paint, but the other units will take longer.
Also on the desk is a Contemptor Dreadnought for my 30k Salamanders. This will round out a nice little Zone Mortalis force. Though I haven’t really had any great urge to play Heresy lately, it’ll be nice to have a painted force ready to go.
The last is a few test panels for my Titanicus Psi-Titan. Long time readers will know this has been waiting in the wings (slumbering in the coffin ship?) for a while now and, to be honest, it’s an intimidating project. But it’s the last unpainted Titanicus model I have and will jump my collection up to a respectable 2,500 points.
What about 11th edition?
At the time of writing, the core rules for the new edition have dropped. Though I’m cautiously optimistic 11th will be an improvement over 10th, that’s such a low bar to me it’s not really something to be excited for.
There’s definitely aspects of 10th edition I liked, but so much flavour and theme has been stripped out of 40k in the name of balance, playability, or accessibility for new players that it feels like a shadow of its former self. I’ve been playing 40k since 3rd edition, have played every edition of the game since then except 4th, and 10th edition was the first time I felt the game had gotten worse instead of better. And what I’ve seen of 11th edition hasn’t filled me with confidence that it’ll bring back any of the things I miss about the previous editions.
All that being said, I don’t know if I actually had a game of 10th edition I didn’t enjoy. Playing it is still rolling dice with a friend, and you can’t complain if that’s what you’re doing. Maybe I’d be singing a different tune if I played more randoms or went to lots of public events, but these days I’m only playing good friends.
Next time
That’s it for now! I can’t guarantee what next month’s blog post will be, but here’s hoping the next hobby update isn’t an excuse for not painting the Psi-Titan.