Time is my Enemy

Time is my Enemy

Rob Lane

Well it's been a start to the new year and a half, so much so that writing my nonsense down has been a very low priority, but I have a little bit of time today, so here goes... and as this is the first post of 2025, let's talk about what you can expect in this lovely new year!

Darklands Lite

First and foremost, Darklands Lite, which is on my mind this January. I haven't really been working on it much since the last time I've spoken about it - mainly because I've had other fish to fry - but now the monthly subscription pressures have gone I have way more time to get on and sort it.

Expect some movement on this very soon, hopefully late January, but more likely to be February, as I may well tie it in with the below...

A Hundred Warlords

Kickstarter have done something interesting over the last couple of years - the Make/100 promotion, which basically gets creators making a hundred of something, be it 100 different tiers, 100 things on one tier, or whatever combination around the number 100 you can think of. Kickstarter themselves promote the projects that fulfil the make/100 criteria, so I'm thinking - why don't we do something? So we're going to!

Now before I launch into what we're doing, I'm very much aware we still have a lot of miniatures to make for previous projects, Brutal Beasts and so on, at least in Grey Wulf resin; but what I have in mind for this project won't really impinge on that because we're only going to do a limited run of (mostly) human-sized miniatures, which take very little time.

If you've been reading this blog, you'll note I've had Quinn Colvin drawing some lovely stylised versions of our emperors, kings and queens - so what I'm going to do is create a strictly limited edition "set" of these warlords, only one hundred of which will ever be made. The set will probably be £100 to buy and will include a limited edition version of each warlord Quinn has been drawing; there will probably be ten of them, and we'll chuck in a poster and probably a copy of Darklands Lite too.

The project should include:

  • Albainn - Taloc macUuid
  • Anglecynn - Penda the Bloody-Handed
  • Atalantes - Alexandra the Saviour
  • Brythoniaid - Cadwaladr the Blessed
  • Byzantii - Constantine the Great
  • Érainn - Conall Cóel
  • Fomoraic - Kraan of Baalor
  • Jutes - Eorcenbehrt
  • Khthones - Ophios
  • Norse - Ingjald Ill-Ruler
  • Ysians - Euryalia (in human form)

All the artwork for the above has been done except for two - Eorcenbehrt and Kraan - but I'm getting those done in the next week or so. I'll probably also give you some nice limited edition artwork prints of these guys. Vras and Infernii will probably miss out, but we'll see on that...!

I'll be getting Cleyton Amorim and Rafael Callegari to make these miniatures, so you're assured of excellent quality figures too!

...and of course I'll ensure each of the above have profiles in the game, if they don't already.

More news on that next week.

Old/New

So most of you will be aware that this website is now at mierce-miniatures.com, and the old one is at oldstore.mierce-miniatures.com; you still have access to all your old orders, but the payment system doesn't work on the old store these days, so don't try. Use this one for all future orders and this year I will be making sure the information on the old store is ported over to this one - meaning, things like sculptors, heights, contents and what not.

Atalantes

Let's have a look at some pretty miniatures!

The last ‘monthly battle host’ (for December 2024) was of course for the Atalantes, and Rafael Callegari has just about completed the khalkotes, which look bloody amazing if I do say so myself. There's still a few details to correct (the spears are thin, and the heads are a bit too big) but they're just about ready.

Armed with kopis or sarissa, bareheaded or helmed, the khalkotes are veteran Atalantes warriors that have been injured in battle and ‘repaired’ by the tekhnomaneís (plural of tekhnomántis, dontcha know; the word means ‘technomancer’ in Greek), and if you look closely you'll see limbs and hands and feet of bronze in the image above. How? What? Why? Well...

Wizards Did It

A favourite pithy recourse of mine to most questions regarding the arcane or fantastical nature of some of the nonsense I come up with is ‘wizards did it’. I usually say that if I can't be bothered to explain something or if I want to annoy the kind of people that question how undead skeleton warriors can blow horns, or why the Fomoraic have bare flesh and live on ice, or why some of our female warriors have very large breasts. (The very same people seem to have no issue with walking trees, the concept of being undead, nor wizards themselves, somehow).

Notwithstanding the inherently fantastic nature of the lands of darkness, such questions usually have a more mundane answer - in the case of the above three, skeleton warriors can't blow horns, they just act it out like they used to (although there is a magical aside to that); Fomoraic paste their bodies in animal fats to stave off the cold; and very large breasts are there to show people at a glance that it's a female warrior (and not just because I like very large breasts) - but in the khalkotes case it really is because wizards did it. The tekhnomaneís graft scalding hot bronze to bare flesh and bone using ancient magical craftsmanship, and there's certainly a debate in there about how modern technology (the Atalantes being star-farers) would look to people from the dark ages - they might be technomancers to themselves, but to everybody else they're wizards.

I saw a cerebral joke by a comedian the other day: if you went back in time, and wanted to prove you were from the future, how would you do it? None of us normal people could explain to our ancestors how our mobile phone works, how its camera can take pictures, what binary is, why our clothes are made of plastic, what plastic is, how cars work, or why Epstein didn't kill himself.

Ahem. So how would we prove we were from the future? To our ancestors the things we can do would be considered magic - so, heck: it might be technology that grafted bronze arms and legs onto bare flesh and bone, but it looks like magic. And if it looks like it, quacks like it, and walks like it, it definitely is it.

I'll leave you with that. Oh, and Euryalia in human form:

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