Careful there, you might end up with a model that you won't wann tinker with...

I have been having a lot of success lately on the hobby side of the house, I even have a few models where I have based them. I wanted something reminiscent of Isstvan V, So I want with a blackened wasteland with skulls and scrub being the dominant feature, with the occasional larger chink of stone.


Here is my dark vengeance helbrute entropomancer gave me, with a couple of mutations... He will be attended by my cultists. After that is my blight drone, and members of the rancid brotherhood. I have been reworking my plague marines to be the tactical marines from the legion, so all bolters, no specials except on the champions.  I am thinking that the overall savings on points will allow me to field extra daemon engines, evening out the weakness.

The avatar of decay, most blessed of Nurgle's children

Lu'urch the multitudinous, bearer of many plagues/

Here is the champion of the rancid brotherhood, I haven't decided on a name yet, but I have decided that he dual wields plasma pistols because he was a moritat before the fall.

The Rancid brotherhood.

The Skull brothers, twins from Barbarus who gladly followed Mortarion into damnation.

So, that bit of show and tell being done,I figured I would talk about hobby stuff. I have a pretty severe budget of around 20 dollars every month or so, so I need to make every dollar stretch. Part of how I do it is developing a passion for the hobby side of things. I am a relentless modeler, usually planning two or three projects ahead, ranging from adding improvements to the paint jobs on a squad to scratch building ogre sized plague bearers to act as filler models for a future regiment for fantasy.

This brings up my best advice for those playing on a budget: Don't throw out stuff. Many of my projects have been fueled by bits I chose to keep. It has proven so valuable that it has been one of the reasons I can still afford to participate in the hobby at all.  This extends to armies as well, If you prefer to play only the most powerful army, even if it means changing armies every few months, shelve the ones you are not playing, they will become more dominant, or even become a part of a combo that becomes dominant. I say this because of how often people complain about the cost of changing to suit their meta, but they fail to see that, if they kept their models instead of selling them for a loss, they would be better off in the long run, with only a few models being needed to take advantage of new rules. This policy also allows you to act like the adeptus mechanicus force Entropomancer is building and taking the many many bodies and reprocessing them into a form more desireble/useful to the omnissiah....

Then there is the kit bash. Done poorly, it is expensive and can make poorly joined kits look like a bunch of smashed assholes. Done well, you can use economy of scale to increase your savings the more you buy. The best example of this is astra militarum. If you take a cadian heavy weapon team set, and cadian guardsmen, you can build nine teams from the two kits. you have the three teams with a weapon mounted on the tripod, three missile teams, and three mortar teams with the bipod. This, of course assumes you don't want to build scenic emplacements and scratch build a mount for the remaining heavy weapons., if that is the case, you can then build the other weapons as well. The benefit of doing this is that you can buy a few kits and build far more units than they necessarily are intended to build, all with little to no conversion work required.

Orks have lootas/burnas, which are completely compatible with boyz, meaning that two loota/burna kits and a boyz kit will make ten of each, wityh extra boyz. the boyz kits have big shootas and rokkit launchas, meaning that if you take a boy here and there and arm him with a rokkit launcha, and one nob, you can build tankbustas without spending the extra for the finecast kits.


these suggestions are nothing more than kit bashing, if you are willing to sculpt, you can have a lot of fun for twenty to forty  dollars a month, with the high end getting you quite a bit considering the option of buying green stuff for ten dollars, and then a a ten dollar set of models. add occasional paints, and that makes for a month of hand sculpting details on your models, a month of painting, and after a bit, many games with the new unit. by buying a little here, and a little there, you can save the extra from your budget for the big, occasional purchases.

In all, even an extremely small budget can get a lot of hobby fun.