PACTS: low level goons

Here is a horde of goons for my Firefly Stargrave campaign:

These will be ruffians for the PACTS faction, the Pan Asiatic Crime Tong Syndicate (the name might not stick, I think I was just desperate for an acronym). The plan is to have a couple of different factions of enemies, from scavengers to gangsters to Alliance law enforcement, which should between them cover most results that I can roll on the table of humanoid enemies.

I’d originally planned to have an alternating red and yellow colour scheme, or maybe blue to make them look like they are sponsored by Blue Sun, but settled on charcoal and red (which I like, it makes them look a little bit like they’re trying to cosplay as Harley Quinn). To try to disguise the duplication of sculpts, I mixed up the colour schemes a bit between models, so if one of a sculpt had charcoal trousers and red accessories, the other would have that flipped, or one leg of each colour. 

I like these Rezolution sculpts, but I kind of fell out of love with them a bit during the painting process - it felt like things kept going a little bit wrong, and I was spending more time correcting mistakes than making actual progress on the paintjobs, until it got to the point where it felt like done was as good as I was going to get. My original idea of adding some messages down the sides of their cloth bits got abandoned, although I did apply some shonky freehand to the head of the rocket:

I was going for a shark like look, but ended up with something that looks more like Deadpool as a cartoon dog, but I’ll take what I can get.

The Tally has also taken a hit between me starting the draft of this post and actually publishing it, as I nipped into GW on my way home to grab a pot of grey paint and also came away with this month’s freebie mini:

It’s a repeat of an older one that I missed the first time round - while I’m not overly fussed by space dwarfs, it does come with a cool female head wearing an aviatrix cap and flying goggles.

All in, the Tally now stands at:

30 vs 181 = -151

While there are several things that I should paint next (like the rest of my Stargrave crew, the orcs I need for D&D, or monsters for Warriors of Athena), over the last couple of weekends I’ve shown my kids the first two Lord of the Rings movies, and so am tempted by a family build and painting project to play some Battle Companies. And I’ve even picked up some elves for my daughter already, which don’t touch the Tally as she’s hopefully going to paint them:

If anyone has any oddments of LOTR minis knocking around in their bits boxes that need a new home, let me know before I buy Uruk Hai scouts on eBay. My wife has even said she’ll play with us if she can have hobbits, so I need to see if I have any unofficial minis that could stand in for those…

May the Fourth be with quick wit and nimble fingers

As is tradition, May the Fourth brings a Star Wars themed post:

An Alliance Smuggler from Imperial Assault. Last year I’d originally planned to paint a pair of trusty droids, as that was what was missing from my classic trilogy rebels, but with Stargrave on my mind and a vague plan to run a Star Wars campaign using those rules I fancied painting something that could be used for that.

I was going to treat myself to a nice Diehard mini, but unfortunately they didn’t bring any of the things I wanted to Salute, so I had a dig in my backlog and pulled out this chap instead.

He’ll make a nice rebel operative when the time comes to pull jobs against the Empire I’m sure. He’s come out a little duller than I’d originally intended, but the good thing about painting to a deadline is that there comes a point where you just have to call a paint job done.

The Tally has also taken hits in the opposite direction, as the ongoing Age of Sigmar partwork magazine has had Skaven on it a few times, and the new Clanrats are pretty nice. Do I need more clanrats? No. Did I buy 20 because they’re much more animatedly posed than the old ones, even though that means that they might be tricky getting onto 20mm square bases? Yes.

(I actually bought two issues to get both halves of the sprue, but didn’t take a second picture)

All in, the Tally now stands at:

21 vs 180 = -159

What’s next? I have some enemies for my Firefly Stargrave campaign half finished on my painting tile, which I could probably polish off if I gave them about an evening’s worth of focus. Then again, the family game of D&D hasn’t run since the start of the year, and I have some minis for that half finished too that I need for a future session. Although, apparently I started watching the Third Doctor’s adventures exactly a year ago while doing the washing up, and this morning, while doing the washing up I was also watching the Third Doctor (odd, with it being Star Wars day I guess), and I have a half painted mini of him in the queue…

Salute 53: the shoppening

As you may know, yesterday was Salute, and we made our annual pilgrimage (although in a reduced party of 2 this year).

As always seems to be the case, I took far fewer pics than I thought I had, mostly due to spending the time walking and talking as we encouraged each other to support a variety of small businesses, as all good citizens must.

As is now tradition, as soon as we got into the hall we rushed over to the Osprey stand to sign up for a demo game, this year being Warriors of Athena. While we waited to see if anyone else was going to sign up, we got to have a look in the cabinet at a preview of the upcoming sprues:

Here’s the board of the demo game, which is basically the second scenario from the first Quest:

I selected Penelope as my Hero, who unlike the other Heroes had no companions, but did have a bow, which I figured might be tactically optimal to reduce the chance of getting my face smashed in by a Cyclops:

The game was fun, and our luck with dice seemed to be very thematic. We were there to reclaim some honey that was due to the gods, and so bundled in to wreak mighty violence on the naughty Cyclopes that were withholding it. Things started well, with us generally avoiding getting blatted with flung rocks and even taking out one of the Cyclops brothers with a combination of bonfire and carefully applied axe, but then things took a turn. My hero, finding herself with nothing unengaged to shoot at, explored a hut, discovering it to be a slaughterhouse full of meat (some of it human). My usual terrible dice rolling skills returned in this moment when I rolled a 3 and failed to hold my nerve, and threw up at this sight. The next turn, I dashed forwards to grab the honey… which again required a roll to resist eating it (which the Gods were very clear about the importance of not doing). And I again rolled a 3(hey, she was probably hungry after losing her lunch earlier). The next turn, everything that could go wrong did, as 3 of the 4 companions were killed, and a harpy appeared just as we came to the end of our time slot, so we all surmised that I had managed to curse us:

Once we’d finished the game, we then ambled around peering at lots of lovely minis. A small selection of things I took pictures of:

Scratched paintwork, a music themed mech game that caught our fancy. No minis for it, but probably worth an investigate…

A Robin Hood game - not something on my immediate projects list, but it’s probably only a matter of time…

Butt Fish!

Dreadfjord had a cool diorama that caught our eye

Barsoom! I’m surprised I haven’t had a Barsoom project at any point, as I enjoyed the novels I’d read, and have a stack of the comics too. I even liked the movie!

Which leads us to the crux of every Salute post, the loot:

• A few packs from Foundry - assorted Satyrs and ancient townsfolk for Warriors of Athena, and some Mexican Irregulars to use as Tejanos in the Alamo project 
• A box of Perry Spanish Guerrillas, because they work for Silver Bayonet Bandits, and between these and last years purchases I could probably do a reasonable Spanish Napoleonic army… 
• A freebie of a little lizard from Twilight 
• A mixed pack of tufts, as I build up my basing options
• The event freebie of Saladin. Fun fact: I read the entire Osprey about the third crusade on planes trains and automobiles coaches the day before Salute in preparation 
• The Barons War Outremer expansion - I asked whether the rumours of this book being updated in the near future were true, which they couldn’t tell me, but I bought it as I figured it was still going to be full of cool Crusade stuff, and also they said they’d give me a free sprue of Ancient civilians (that they were giving away if you bought Gangs of Rome) if I bought it, which I was eyeing for potential Warriors of Athena use 
• Crooked Dice - some Greek themed treasure tokens, the 13th Doctor, a companion for the 3rd Doctor, and the Terminator to go with my batch of them from last year 
• Super Tiny Giant Battles and two gacha from the Mammoth Minis gumball machine 
• Some GSW basing bits - crabs, that I’m hoping look good enough based up to be enemies in Warriors of Athena, and Pigeons, because my daughter is currently pigeon obsessed and next time we play D&D will probably want her Druid to turn into a pigeon
•  Silver Bayonet Spanish Unit, because… it was in front of me and I really like the sculpts! Plus, with the various Perry Plastics I have I could definitely make a unit. He says, still needing to finish his first unit… 
• Bad Squiddo vampire hunters, in case this is the purchase that gets me to actuslly finish my original Silver Bayonet Unit 
• Warlord gave me a couple of Konflikt 47 preview sprues when I bought a pot of Strong Tone at their stand 
• A sprue of Mantic Abyssal Dwarf infantry was another goodie bag freebie 
• Sci-fi barricades (for Firefly) and Amphora (for Warriors of Athena) from Debris of War
• 2 pots of Troll Trader superglue, as a pot of that lasts a year as opposed to going through a hundred tubes of terrible Poundland glue
• A Vae Victus buttfish, and a Dwarf Slayer from a company selling orange brushes 
• 3 shapeshifting aliens from Tangent, because I try to support Wayne every year 
• The Wargames Illustrated Templar and Assassin heroes, that I had previously resisted, but were in fact right in front of me which is much harder to resist 
• A Bushido giant crab for use in Warriors of Athena - expensive, but the nicest crab sculpt I’d seen all day and a good size too 
• Warriors of Athena Mythic Bees and Athena herself - after months of telling myself that I was going to find some alternative miniatures to use as giant bees, after playing the demo game I decided that maybe the official minis were actually the way to go! 
• My Gringo 40s preorder, which had a spread of minis for Silver Bayonet and the Alamo, and even included a freebie mini of an 1860 Egyptian chap 
• The final goodie bag freebies was the annual Salute die, a sample of Warmag base magnets, and then a smorgasbord of stickers, fliers and catalogues.

Before we add all of that to the Tally, a confession:

With the best of intentions, I’d hoped to wrestle the Tally down to zero before Salute, but that didn’t quite pan out. I even took minis 250 miles to Germany to try and hit that target:

Only to discover that rather than Foundry 34B, a nice dark charcoal paint that I was planning to use next, I’d packed 34A, black. 

I was able to get some other base colours done though, although I only managed to actually sit down and paint once the whole week between one thing and another.

And in full transparency, I had also picked up another issue of the new Warhammer partwork magazine since my last post, which had added 3 more minis to the Tally:

So, running all the numbers, the Tally now stands at:

20 vs 160 = -140

Not the biggest haul I’ve ever brought home, but still unlikely that I’ll get it back into the black by the end of the year!

Forklift certified mid-boss

This week (well, technically last week, but I’ve been so wiped I was only able to snap a pic a full week later) we have another offering for the Firefly Stargrave project, à test model for one of the enemy factions:

He was originally a Rezolution APAC Enforcer Lieutenant (as you can probably tell from the micro crop top and tie combination), but for my purposes he’s going to be a fixer and potential bounty target that is a mid level boss for a vaguely future Asian themed crime family - I haven’t yet decided what they’re going to be called, but I vaguely recall planning (back when this project was originally planned, fifteen or so years ago) to call them something like the Pan Asiatic Crime Syndicate or Pan Asiatic Syndicate Tong (because, y’know, acronyms).

He’s a beautifully sculpted little mini, from his abs to his tiny cigarillo, and the back of his jacket also has some sculpted detail. I think it was supposed to be a dragon, but with some careful brushwork I was able to turn it into a tiny rendition of a tiger:

In order to reference the most famous jacket worn by a forklift certified individual, Ryu Hazuki from Shenmue. It’s not an exact copy, but I think is close enough in vibes:

Which brings the Tally to:

20 vs 29 = -9

What’s next? Probably painting the other dozen or so APAC mooks I have undercoated for him to boss around! Or some other low level enemies, or the rest of the crew. I finished my for research rewatch of Firefly a couple of weeks ago (very handy, as there are some law enforcement types that appear that I can paint some Grenadier cops to represent), and now this week they’ve announced that they’re going to being back Firefly as an animated series - it’s nice to be ahead of the zeitgeist curve for once, even if only accidentally!

‘Stick’ it to the man

A slight diversion from my current project focus, as my family D&D game is currently on hiatus until I get the next few encounters prepped. They’re entering the later stages of Dragon of Icespire Peak, so I needed a decent number of Twig Blights to menace them with:

Previously, I’d described them as vaguely humanoid fetishes made out of lashed together twigs and sticks (which is great fun, messing with your players as they wonder whether they saw it move or whether it’s just a tiny scarecrow left to scare them), which the official minis look a bit like - but they are more pricy than I wanted to spend on monsters that are going to be getting cut down in droves, so these 15mm plant monsters from Checkpoint Miniatures  were an ideal standin.

In order to make them look more like they are made out of sticks and whatnot, I dug out and opened up a baggie of ‘forest scatter’ that I bought more than a decade ago - only to find that rather than seed pods that looked like tiny leaves that I could stick on these monsters, it was mostly a bag of brown dust and the occasional tiny chunk of wood - fine for a base, maybe, but not quite what I had envisioned. 

I finished basing these last night (superglueing a frankly outstanding amount of flock and static grass to my fingers as I did so), but have had the Tally take some hits before I could get this post typed up:

Even though I’m probably never going to play Age of Sigmar, a couple of quid for a Grey Seer and a Warlock Engineer is too good a bargain to pass up. Even though I haven’t actually finished anything for my Skaven since February 2023.

It was also new mini of the month day, so we nipped into GW to grab that:

My children both grabbed one too, interestingly, so hopefully we can get some more family painting in in the near future.

With all the pluses and minuses, the Tally currently stands at:

19 vs 29 = -10

Next - back on track with Firefly Stargrave, hopefully… although I do feel like maybe I should finish the next rank of Skaven Clanrats, as I didn’t realise just how long they’ve been half finished!

Bits and bobs

One problem with prepping so many miniatures for my Firefly Stargrave project is that physical space on my painting tile is at a premium, so in between applying base coats to the test model for an enemy faction I finished off some scatter terrain that had been hanging round my painting tile for far too long. Firstly, some mantic bits:

A barricade and some cardboard boxes, which I think were originally from the Mars Attacks scenery set that I used for making my post-apocalyptic ruins way back when. I need a bunch of scatter terrain for Stargrave, so this is a start!

I also finished this piece from Checkpoint Miniatures, that I originally bought purely because I thought it was cool:

It’s technically a 15mm scale standing stone, but I figured it would work just as well as a 28mm shrine (just with a… very small skull having been left as a sacrifice). Here’s how it looks with an angry looking fey stood inside the ring of stones:

And now…

 …for something completely different - my wife and I have been watching the latest series of Critical Role, in which at one point the party is menaced by à Redcap, which inspired me to get this chap painted up:

I went for basic colours for his clothes, to give him a slightly Noddy-ish feel - Noddy is technically Fey isn’t he? Or not, I guess Big Ears was an elf, but I can’t remember if Noddy was actually a human living in Toyland or something else, but I digress.

His whacking great axe got tinted with some teals and greens to try to make it look like it’s made of some strange fey metal - the jury is still out on whether I was successful or not.

In D&D lore, their caps are red from being painted with blood, so I was briefly tempted to give his hat à coat of blood effect paint, but decided against it. From memory, they also have iron boots, and I didn’t green stuff him any of those either.

He was originally a Dreamblade miniature, so getting him ready for painting involved a certain amount of effort and manual labour:

He’s also tiny, that’s a 20mm base he’s on. To reduce the amount of time he spends tipping over due to the ridiculous size of his weapon, I had to glue some scrap metal underneath his base to try and weigh him down:

Painting him brings the Tally to:

7 vs 24 = -17

He’s not in the Monster Manual, so technically doesn’t add to the Monstrous Alphabet though.

What’s next? It was going to be back to focusing on the Firefly Stargrave project, but I needed to finish a couple of oddments to make space on my painting tile for all the new things that I’ve been adding to it…