Infinity models are very, very pretty.

However, they are also very, very brittle, both because they’re sculpted to be a bit thinner than the “heroic” scale minis most other companies produce, and because a couple of the factions are saddled further by a veritable forest of these f@#$ing things:

Ugh.

I haven’t written a rant in a couple months, so let’s see if I remember how to do that.

I figured that if I’m going to start talking about Infinity, I should probably start with what made me decide to get involved with the game. And it’s probably not what you’d guess.

• It isn’t the game’s setting, even though I find the setting fascinating and a really creative break from the GrimDark and GreyVsGrey universes in so many other games.
• It isn’t the sculpting opportunities, though I do really look forward to trying some full sci-fi sculpts.
• It isn’t the ruleset, even though they could scarcely have come up with rules better-suited to poke my brain’s reward center.
• It isn’t even the minis line, despite the fact that as far as I’m concerned, Corvus Belli is putting out the best gaming minis on the market– the sheer dynamism and detail in their current line is just mind-blowing to Sculptor Spud.

No, those are all awesome things, and they’re all contributing to my current enjoyment of the game. But the first thing that drew me in, and the thing that has consumed by far the largest chunk of my time since my induction over the last two months, comes down to two words:

Space Buildings.

I haven’t posted in a while, but it isn’t because I haven’t been working– I’ve done some cool conversions, made an assload of drawings and designs, and also started a massive terrain project.

And while I sometimes get in a funk where I work but don’t feel like posting, that also isn’t the case here: I have three half-written articles in my queue that I’m really excited to finish up and share with the half-dozen vagrants who still wander by here to shoot up in the comments section.

The reason I haven’t posted anything is that the stuff I’ve been working on isn’t Warmachine- or even Privateer-related. And speaking just for myself, I always get really annoyed when I start following a blog or podcast because it talks about something I like, and then the staff pulls a bait-and-switch and starts talking about things I don’t care about. It happened when my favourite D&D live-play podcast switched from D&D 4E (which I played) to something called Saga (which I’ve never heard of); and it’s happened on WM/H blogs when people started padding their posting schedule with video games or SDE or whatever else. I hate it when this switch happens to me as a reader, so I’ve felt really crappy at the prospect of doing it to whatever can be considered the “audience” of this blog.

In my head, I figured that the best way to make the transition would be to confront it head-on with a “really big post” to mark my (likely temporary) change of focus– eg, a long essay about all the awesome things I like about the game I’ve been playing lately, or a really awesome scratch-sculpt for my army, or… something.

But it’s now been almost two months, and I’m still waiting for that “big post” to hit me, and I’m ready to conclude that it probably won’t happen. The “awesome sculpting project” keeps getting pushed back by a lot of smaller and individually less impressive projects; and I wrote a comprehensive “why I’m doing X now instead of Y” essay, but it was really long, really self-indulgent, really boring and basically just a waste of your time and mine. Especially when the entire thing can be summed up in one paragraph:

“I still like Warmachine, but I’m bored with my armies. I have lots of ideas for cool armies that really excite me, but they all require 6+ months of extensive modeling and painting work, and I just don’t have that in me right now. So I’m taking 6-12 months off as a WM/H vacation to recharge my batteries, and playing something else I’ve had my eye on for a change of pace.”

So, you know what? Nuts to my “big post” idea. This post is about all the column inches I want to waste on apologizing for my infidelity (and to reiterate: I DO feel the apology is necessary, as I’ve been on the other end of this situation before and it was annoying as hell). And now I’ve said it, and I can get back to posting cool stuff. And, hell… this doesn’t even mean I won’t do any Warmachine stuff at all during my vacation. I’ve just finished making an awesome Warmachine terrain board that I need to write up, and I’m still doing some paint exchanges and gift models in the next 6ish months for my various gaming associates that I’m really excited to start working on.

But it’ll be mixed in with some other things that aren’t Warmachine, sometimes for a couple months straight, and I’m apologizing now if that isn’t something you find interesting. I’ll come back and rejoin the legions of Magic Robots in time, but for now, I need to shovel my free time into a different furnace.

And so, for better or for worse, this stands as my official declaration:

Spud plays Infinity now. It’s cool, and has pretty models, and the rules are stupidly complicated, and Spud loves things that are stupidly complicated, and Spud is basically just excited to play games again in a way he hasn’t been for the last year.

Alright, drama post over. I’ll post some proper content this weekend.

-Spud