Steve

Ursula Vernon has turned her all-seeing eye upon one of my hobbies and granted upon us a hamster suitable for the dark future of Warhammer 40,000.

-- Steve doesn't play the Dark Templars chapter, which of course makes rendering them as hamsters all the more amusing.

As a promotion for the upcoming Dawn of War II release, THQ is taking a surplus British Army FV432 armoured carrier and converting it into an Imperial Space Marine Rhino. The completed Rhino will make its debut at the Birmingham Games Day 2008 show, on the 14th of September, so there's not much time left.

THQ's conversion diary and related flickr gallery are up for inspection, should you desire.

-- Steve now has to fight down the temptation to get a new computer to play DoW2... the series is great, but the current beast'd melt trying to run the upcoming edition.

PS: The high-definition gameplay trailer for Dawn of War II went up a while ago. The CGI cinematic trailer went up yesterday too, if you wanna see.

For those of you who don't know (which is probably most of you) I've been playing the Games Workshop miniatures game Warhammer 40,000 (abbreviated "40K") for fifteen years now off-and-on. That doesn't mean I'm good at it, just that I've been around it for a while and seen it grow.

Back in 2003, Games Workshop ran their Eye of Terror summer mega-campaign (site still viewable, but slow); a series of games played either at home or at selected stores where the results of each game were tallied and applied to a larger meta-game to determine the ebb and flow of a war. It's immensely immersive, as you can imagine, and it became even more so as Games Workshop said that the results would dictate the progress of the storyline in the 40K universe.

This campaign was even more interesting to me as it was the first one to include their newest "race", the rather manga-ish Tau. I'd been collecting them since their first release in 2001 because the models are rilly-rilly cool. I was really eager to get involved and probably chattered on in the forums too much, but as a result I did end up creating the character of pro-Tau Human propagandist Sa'cea Sally (sadly neglected archive in that link). Her broadcasts, very much in the "Tokyo Rose"/"Axis Sally"/"Lord Haw-haw" vein, provided a lot of people on the Tau and Imperial forums a lot of fun and were kinda fun to do.

Well, the campaign rolled up and the forums vanished; I moved on to other obsessions (*cough*Halo*cough*) and kinda lost track of things Tauish for a while. Then the new Codex (a rules book describing the particulars for a specific race) for the Tau came out two weeks ago and I got interested again, poring over the new rules and pondering new army lists, but things were a little hectic at work and I've had a bout of some sort of ear-and-throat plague driving me nuts for a while so I didn't get a chance to really read it.

Until yesterday, when I flip through the story section and find on page 15:

Those [Human] forces that did remain were totally insufficent to hold the Tau at bay, and many, thanks to the actions of a Human traitor operating out of Sa'cea, were convinced by the Water caste to lay down their arms without a struggle.

It's kinda cool, being canonised and all. :)

-- Steve's eyeing this summer's mega-campaign with a little more interest now. What new worlds will be there to conquer?