100th Blog Post!

This post will mark my 100th since starting this blog just a little over one year ago. It's quite a milestone, and I thought I'd mark the occassion with a look back at the kind of things I've written about in my first 99 blog posts, broken down by category.

Coming in at number one is the painting category, with 39 posts out of 100. This is a very broad category, since it includes all of the pictures I post of miniatures I've painted. But it does show how much painting I've gotten done in the last year, if you leave out the first several posts of pictures of things I had painted previously. It does show that almost everything I've painted in the last year has been 10mm scale, which has been an interesting change of pace from the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 stuff I had been more used to painting. The vast majority of the painting posts are of my growing 10mm American Civil War armies.

A close second on the list of categories is historical with 34 posts. Again, this reflects that my main project over the past year has been painting up 10mm Union and Confederate American Civil War armies. About a year ago is also when I began my initial foray into historical wargaming. So my first 99 posts contain a lot of pictures of my painting Civil War figures as well as impressions of rulesets, a couple of historical battle reports, and just general useful information I was able to find along the way that helped me start into the historical gaming.

The next three categories represent my main gaming interests: Warhammer 40,000 with 29 posts, American Civil War with 26 posts, and Warhammer Fantasy with 23 posts. Most of these posts also fall into some other category. Warhammer 40,000 definitely is the game I have been playing the most lately, so there are several good battle reports in there, as well as some older posts showing off painted miniatures, and one large campaign. The American Civil War posts are mostly showing the miniatures I've painted in the past year, but there are also two good battle reports and some step by step painting guides. I haven't played much Warhammer Fantasy lately, but those posts do include some older painted miniatures that were completed before I started the blog, as well as write-ups for a couple of campaigns, one of which is still in progress.

Speaking of campaigns, you can read all of the battle reports and story lines for a Wharmmaer 40,000 map-based cities of death campaign under the Attraignnor IV campaign heading, which contains 11 posts. The campaign was pretty fun, and generated a lot of great backstory for some of our 40k armies. I've also posted all of the write-ups from my gaming group's participation in the global Nemesis Crown Campaign, which included 9 posts in total. I've also just started posting the rules and background stories for a Warhammer Fantasy campaign that we are slowly working our way through right now, which we're calling the Grismeire Valley Campaign. There are only 4 posts in this category so far, but there will be many more to come.

As for battle reports, that category contains only 18 posts. This is really sad, since it is obvious I don't actually play games nearly often enough. Especially when you consider that some of the battle reports for a single game take up 2 posts, and that many of these battle reports posts are from the Attraignnor IV campaign, which was played over a year ago. So in the past year, I really haven't played anywhere near as much as I would like to. I would like to try and correct this, but since the people I game with don't live very close to me, scheduling more games is difficult.

The rules category contains 13 posts. This could be broken down a little further. First, there are my reviews of rule books I read when looking at historical rules, such as my reviews of Warlord Games's Black Powder, Wargames Foundry's Napoleon, and Warhammer Historical's Great War, as well as a Civil War battle report with my impressions of Piquet's Field of Battle. The others are house rules, such as my Warhammer Fantasy Map Campaign Rules, several custom Warhammer 40k Eldar Special Characters, and a list of Inquisitor house rules.

The fiction category contains 8 posts, and includes background stories written for campaigns, those custom Warhammer 40,000 Eldar Special Characters I created (since they include the background stories of the characters), and a story I wrote about a Warrior Priest Inquisitor character.

There are 6 posts in the terrain category, mostly detailing my efforts to create some terrain for my new 10mm miniatures. It does include some really helpful posts about making hills, making/painting rocks, and making split rail fences in 10mm scale. Still, there is not as much as I'd like in this category. Hopefully the coming year will see far more terrain posts, as I hope to create fiels and town sections for 10mm gaming, and also some city ruin pieces and Planestrike terrain for Warhammer 40k.

The smallest categories, with fewer than five posts at the time I write this, are: Great War, Napoleonic, Inquisitor, Roleplaying, Warmaster, Battlefleet Gothic, and modelling. I won't summarize what's in each of these categories. They're small enough that if you're at all interested in the subject, you can read for yourself. For some of these categories, I find it unfortunate that they are so poorly represented. I enjoy Battlefleet Gothic, and only got in a single game of it all this year. Warmaster seems like a really fun game, but I've never gotten to actually play it. I had a lot of fun running an Inquisitor campaign for my gaming group, with each group member playing a character, and I played in another similar campaign, but we haven't done anything with it since then. I've tried to get people together to continue the story using the Rouge Trader rules, or get a group together to play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but there isn't enough interest and it's so hard to get more than 2 or 3 people from the group together at once. So, unfortunately, I don't see most of these smaller categories growing much in the future.

So there you have it. A summary of my first 100 posts, which should give a pretty good idea of what this blog has been all about. When I wrote my first post for this blog, way back in November of 2008, I laid out three purposes for the blog. First, it would contain only content related to miniature gaming, which I seem to have achieved easily enough. Second, that it would have posts that would be useful to other gamers out there, not just of interest to the people I game with. Well, between google followers and other subscribers, it would appear that at least 45 people have shown in interest in viewing my blog, so hopefully I have been succeeding in that respect. Finally, I wished to chronicle my start into historical wargaming, which I was just discovering. With about a third of the posts so far falling into the "historical" category, I hope I've done an admirable job there. So far the blog seems to be a moderate success by those terms, and hopefully will continue to be so for the next 100 posts!

Now that you've seen the breakdown of posts by category, if there's anything you want to see more of (or less of), or any advice on how I can make the blog better, please leave a comment and let me know.