A winner is me!

The lovely Dai over at lostdamnedstunted.blogspot.com recently held a draw, and I was one of the winners! Being the first name selected by the RNG gods, I even got first pick of the prizes, and so had this little lot turn up this week:

10 tiny but perfectly formed stormtroopers from the old WEG release:

They even came packed in an awesome old school TSR D&D minis box (note daughter's excited arms in this pic, as she thinks it's something for her):

I feel a bit bad winning though, as it seems like as opposed to being from Wales as I had assumed (being called Dai, loving rugby) according to the postmark they've come all the way from Sacramento!

Having heard that I had these coming, John did out some spares to add to my collection (presumably hoping to pervert me from the allure of my usual scale) [ignore the painted trooper for the Tally, he was just to show how they look painted up]

So, with these and the Boba Fett and Darth Vader I have tucked away already somewhere, I should have a tidy little Imperial force! Looks like I need to order some 20mm bases and get cracking! (Although I've got the Star Wars PS4 that comes with the new Battlefront game coming for Christmas, so it might be after that that my hobby mojo turns to Star Wars!)

Tally:

59 vs 155 = -96

Zomtober 2015 - big finish!

As alluded to in my previous post, I had big plans for my final week after Zomtober post: a zombie herd!

Alas, the pictures that I took while there was still natural light were blurry and horrible, and the ones that I took later were dark and grotty, so apologies in advance:

The herd is mostly those horrible plastic multi-part zombies that were the first release from Wargames Factory (before they'd gotten used to CAD) with a few Heroclix and Doctor Who and Stsr Wars miniatures mixed in for a bit of variety, with the occasional metal zombie head from Westwind mixed in to disguise their origins! On the Wargames Factory zombies front, after the first coat of grey on the flesh I thought they might not turn out looking quite as bad as I'd expected, but sadly the second lighter shade of grey robbed me of all illusions that they wouldn't look bad - the detail is just too soft! I thought that I'd probably end up covering the majority of them with blood, but ended up being quite restrained when it came to it...

In terms of rules for the herd, I think I'd planned for them to be something of a roaming hazard rather than an enemy per se - too big to really take on single handedly, winning a combat against one would be more surviving to get away rather than glorious victory...

I'd pictured 'wounds taken' being less damage to the herd, more a loss of cohesion - potentially having some stats equal to the number of wounds that the herd has remaining, so as the herd is taken apart it starts being less of a maelstrom of destruction.

I also condsidered a special rule where whenever a wound is taken by the herd, a fresh (single) zombie is a placed in base contact with the herd, to represent it spreading out until eventually all that is left is a scattered handful of single zombies that can then be singled out and exterminated rather than the unstoppable wave that is the herd at full strength - so it would take some doing, but you could eventually wear away at the herd until all that is left is say 8 or so zombies - but in a game where ammunition is scarce and prolonged gunfire is only going to attract more enemies, is it worth it?

Finishing the herd (which I think I started at some point a couple of years before I got married, and potentially long enough ago that I could still have been described as being in my early twenties) brings the Tally to:

59 vs 131 = -72

So, overall Zomtober productivity this year leaves me with this:

Not a bad result I don't think? Plus, seeing everyone else doing it left me with more ideas for things I want to do, so roll on next time!

Mystery Adventurer?

The other day on a trip up to London to take our daughter to the aquarium, the wife and I popped into Orc's Nest. As well as a handful of board and card game bits (and a pack of bases from Renedra to use for some basing some planned scatter terrain), I picked this chap out of a box of random mins:

Any idea who he is or where he's from? His tab just says 'swordsman', and I quite liked him for a generic adventurer type for D&D or Frostgrave...

Tally:

33 vs 131 = -98

Free Space Marine on this week's White Dwarf!

I was somewhat excited by all the rumours about there being a free Space Marine on the cover of this week's White Dwarf Weekly, and so daughter and I dutifully bundled round to my local branch after walking the wife to work.

Upon arrival though, whilst the rumours are technically true, it's not the model we were expecting on the front of the magazine...

Ah well, still bought it anyway to have a nose at the upcoming game (and hey, a limited edition badge is cool too I guess?).

Apparently there's going to be a Word Bearers badge on the front of Warhammer Visions in December, but I don't think that's enough to entice me to pay for that...

Scarecrow

As great as the Arkham video games' take on Dr Jonathan Crane is, I still have a massive soft spot for this guy:

Such subtlety, such grace:

Heh.

I have a selection of resin bases from Fenris that I'd been planning to use on my Batman miniatures rather than my usual gravel and sand bases, but as this was a plastic Heroclix figure rather than a nice Knight Models sculpt I didn't want to risk wasting one of my limited supply in case he didn't take paint well! 

So, out came an offcut of cork sheet from making one of the zombie spawn points during Zomtober to make a basic broken brickwork base:

In hindsight, I should perhaps have made the cuts that separated bricks a little more pronounced, but hey, everything is a learning experience right?

A dab of glue, some sand, and a couple of pins later Arkham's 'Master of Fear' was based up and ready to go:

He was largely painted on lunch breaks when covering in other stores (as although I'm supposed to work 5 minutes from my house, where I can nip home at lunchtime to see my wife and daughter, it seems like recently I've spent a lot of days working in places like Ashford, despite having taken a substantial pay cut to not work there anymore, but that's a whole other story...)

He ended up using far less varieties of brown paint than I expected, which is a shame in a way, as I think I own at least a dozen different shades! Heh, and I complain about my wife having so many bits of similar looking material...

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

60 vs 155 = -95