I produced all of what follows last summer, and it only occurred to me recently when I went looking for it that I’d never collected all of it online anywhere.

The first half is long-form Infinity fiction, but for what I presume is the majority of you who don’t care about that, you can skip past the blue blocks straight to Week 2 for the start of the comics. 🙂

Last summer, I played in an Infinity league at my store. As a major feature of this league, each player created a Spec Ops special character to fight alongside their army, gather experience, and grow as the league progressed. Each player was told to write up a backstory for their character in the month leading up to the league, and then after each week’s mission, we were encouraged to post an in-universe writeup of the mission’s results, whether as a narrative or as a debriefing report.

On this page I’ve compiled all of the material I created to tell the tale of my spec-ops, a Crusader Brethren Hacker named Chinenye Ojokwu; I previously covered the process of converting her game model here. For anyone not familiar with the game’s fluff, my army are Knights of Santiago, an order of Violent Space Catholics who travel aboard trading ships on long journeys to escort religious pilgrims from planet to planet. I had only been playing for a few months when I wrote all of this, so it’s possible that some of it isn’t quite canonical, though I did try to research everything as much as possible. 🙂

The interesting thing to watch as the weeks roll on is the steady degradation of my hope for the character’s future. At the start, I thought I was writing a story about redemption and new beginnings… and then I started losing.

And losing.

And losing.

And… well, you’ll see.

*sigh*

Corvus Belli released the new ITS 2015 mission pack last week, and it mandates the use of a “Classified Objective Deck” to randomly assign secret mission objectives to each player.

Which is awesome, except they haven’t actually released the deck. >_<

But, whatever. We know pretty much what it will look like and exactly what will be in it, so in anticipation of my store’s ITS2015 event this weekend, I spent a few hours knocking one together.

BEHOLD!

I have always opted to buy love. Really, it was the only option available to me– given my staggering menu of crippling personal flaws and blatantly antisocial attitudes, the only way I’ve been able to maintain any sort of social circle throughout my adult life has been through the balancing contribution of my works. My goal has always been to inspire in those around me, both in my physical and virtual spaces, a difficult moment of indecision.

“Okay, sure,” they say to themselves. “Spud may be kind of an asshole, and he does leave his crap lying around on four different tables wherever he goes, and the relentless bragging does get pretty f***ing irritating sometimes… but on the other hand… man, that blowfish was pretty awesome. Maybe if I put up with him for a while he’ll make me something pretty like that.”

And in that moment, they’ve unwittingly entangled themselves in my calculated cycle of grudging tolerance. Putting up with Spud does not, in the end, pay off for most people, but after years of practice I’ve perfected a manner of making it look like it might. I guess I’m sort of the lottery of human beings– a horrific investment obscured by really good marketing.

I made a thingie!

It’s for Infinity. It makes hacking less complicated by eliminating the irrelevant options in any situation. This way, even a dummy like me can figure out my options!

It’s also pretty.

That’s very important.

Each year at my local store, we run a Christmas tournament. Each participant shows up with a painted model, securely wrapped, and attaches to it a label with a handful of hints to its identity. We play Warmachine all day (the last two years, the format was Thunderdome), and as people score points, they can unlock the clues to each present’s identity and creator. Then at the end of the day, people use the hints to choose which model they think they’d like to swap their current present for, with higher-scoring players getting later swaps to better ensure that they keep what they choose.

The entire exercise, from model creation to playing to opening presents, is the most fun I have gaming all year. 🙂

Two years ago, my entry models were a pair of festively-themed Basilisks named Herb and Lindy, while last year I brought the fury of Santa Reznik, High Naughtymonger of Menoth.

This year I’ve been trying to focus more on scratch-sculpting than on conversions, so I decided that whatever I ended up making, it would be entirely sculpted out of Fimo, which would give me more leeway in creating an interesting model. I originally tossed around some ideas for a custom warbeast, but had just finished scratch-sculpting a few rather large models, and was in the mood to work on something smaller and faster. In the end, I had a fantastic idea; a counts-as Withershadow Combine in the guise of different collection of immortal magical cobblers:

Boo-yeah. 🙂

Updates have been a bit sparse lately due to my holiday giftmaking– most of my projects are super secret until delivery to their various recipients, and work on the remaining presents robs me of the time I’d need to blog about them anyway.

But fear not, seven remaining readers! For while Spud cannot show you something worth looking at, he CAN waste your time with an incomplete practice mini and a goofy piece of recently-acquired photographic equipment!