More barrels than Donkey Kong

 So, having two weeks off of work as usual this time of year (as my wedding anniversary and birthday fall in the same fortnight period) to take a break from looking at checklists about Operational preparedness for Christmas I… pulled out my checklist of things I need to finish before I can play the first scenario of Rangers of Shadow Deep. Then, presumably subconsciously rebelling against the tyranny of checklists, I of course finished something that wasn’t on it:

Barrels! The four at the back are two thirds of a pack from Fenris Games (excellent product, excellent service), the other two being saved for any future barricade scenery building needs, and the front one came with the same lot of bits from Sippin’ on Paint Water as the previously posted crates and whatnot.

So what’s next? You’ll be delighted to hear that my checklist rebellion was short lived and I knuckled down to knock something else off…

I ruin everything

 

Well I guess rubble is more appropriate but I already had my heart set on the pun for the post title...

While I was on track to blast through the last few bits on my Rangers of Shadow Deep checklist, I somewhat hit a motivational wall painting all the barrels and bags and whatnot on my scatter terrain, which led to me going back to finish Final Fantasy 7 Remake (which was originally postponed so that I could paint my entries for last year’s Zomtober). And then the Episode Ardyn DLC for Final Fantasy 15 that I hadn’t got round to. And then Abzu, because it was pretty. 

Then I got the call with my return to work date, and I thought I’d best get back to painting!

It was still a lot on my painting tile, so as well as dabbing at the bits on my list, I finished off these rubble bits (because finishing things is a great motivator I find!) - they’re from Fenris, and whilst originally designed to decorate bases of the their Rubble City kits, I bought some to make terrain for Dungeons and Dragons (hence the square bases)

I diverged from my usual recipe for painting stone to avoid the rubble and the ground looking the same, highlighting the rubble up to a pale grey rather than my usual bone.

I mulled over several options for what sizes to make, but in the end settled on several 2x1 bases and four single tiles, to allow me to make a variety of shapes rather than being limited to ‘big square’ ‘little square’ and ‘rectangle’

While primarily planned for RPG useage, I’m sure they will also get used for Frostgrave and Rangers of Shadow Deep:

While the square bases are a little odd looking, nothing so terrible that I can’t live with!

Next: more painting tiny crates and barrels...

Which witch is which?

It’s taken a while to get done, but here’s my first painted miniature of the year:

A repainted Mage Knight figure of Scholar Magus Bessa that I have apparently been entirely unable to photograph well today. Being bendy plastic, despite my attempts to fix her bendy staff using the hot water trick it seems to have curled back down, but I’m not mad enough about it to try and fix it again...

I like the little details all over the figure, like the potion bottles and assorted feathers. I tried to go for a swirling smoke effect on the orb in her hand, but I’m not sure if it quite reads as that (my daughter asked if she was holding the earth, which I’m not sure is a compliment or not). It got a coat of gloss varnish to finish it off, so it looks glassy at least!

The colour scheme was inspired by another witch:

Except for the yellow ribbon on her hat, which was the result of asking my wife to choose. 

Although I’ve described her as a witch, she was actually painted to fill the role of Sorcerer in the Classes Project, with the running total currently looking like this:

Classes (as of 5e Player’s Handbook):

• Barbarian
• Bard
• Cleric
• Druid
• Fighter
• Monk
• Paladin
• Ranger
• Rogue (and also here)
• Sorcerer

• Warlock
• Wizard

Which leaves me just a Druid to go to complete the challenge! 

As an aside, picking what to paint for my Sorcerer was an interesting exercise: when it comes to the magical classes, what are the tropes and visual cues that set them each apart? Admittedly, I could have chosen any old magic user and called them what I liked, but I wanted something more archetypical than that! 

In my mind, the Wizard is the easiest to define - robes, beard, staff, big nerd. Not all wizards are like this I know, but that’s the wizardiest wizard, the one that pops to mind when someone says wizard. Warlock and Sorcerer are a bit trickier though - a Warlock forged a pact, which doesn’t really affect their look, but ritual knives, maybe some spooky tattoos sell the theme (and the mini I chose for my Challenge Warlock was pretty much the only Warlock mini I had). Sorcerers though, what defines them? The Charisma magician, so sexy wizards?

(Pathfinder has taken this theory to heart)

The other way to go is raw power, so a magic user with their hair whipping around, robes flapping in the arcane typhoon... but I didn’t have a miniature like that, so went with a cute witch instead!

Brief diversion into the semiology of magicians aside, what else have I been up to in the month since my last post? Plenty, just nothing was finished until now to post! A lot of my much reduced by homeschool hobby time has been spent prepping miniatures:

Just a few odds and ends to paint as it takes my fancy! Also an entire Frostgrave warband, as apparently I can’t just use already painted miniatures to play solo...

I’ve also got a few odds and ends half finished to check off some things from the various lists in my previous post, but I’ll save them for future posts when they’re finished!

The Tally also took a swing in the opposite direction with the arrival of this:

Out of Print 12th Doctor mini made by Crooked Dice before the range got pulled, sent by the guy that runs Tangent Miniatures because he was feeling like he was in a surplus of awesomeness! 

So between painting one and receiving one, the Tally stands at:

1 vs 1 = 0

For now... I placed a little Northstar order when they had a subscriber order earlier this month which has now been despatched...

I also finished these walls made by Fenris Games:

They’re gorgeous, and painted mostly with drybrushes of Wilko tester pots, with a dirty wash and a spotty green glaze thrown into the mix too! They were intended for use in Rangers of Shadow Deep, but will also see service in Frostgrave, Mordheim, and potentially more modern games too, as walls are walls regardless of era!

Finishing this scatter terrain gets me a third of the way towards crossing an entry off on the Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (1/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

I could probably claim painting the Sorcerer as ‘something old’, as she’s been undercoated in the painting queue for an indeterminate amount of time, but I’m sure I’ll have older stuff in the coming months too!

So, what next? Probably not Blackstone Fortress, as my back ordered copy of Escalation (that I need to use the copy of Ascension that my wife got me for my birthday last year) was cancelled, as it has apparently now gone Out of Print and copies are selling for silly money on eBay, which has soured me towards GW somewhat (although if someone has a spare copy of Escalation, with for without minis, that they want to send my way, let me know!). As previously mentioned, I’ve started a couple of bits from the checklist of things I need to finish to play Rangers of Shadow Deep, so that and painting a Frostgrave warband are my current priorities, including something using these supplies:

(Mysterious mysteries - I might not end up using the tape in the end though...)

So, singular focus on getting to the point where I can play a solo game. Well, singular except for the fact that my wife and I started watching Wandavision...

The year of the plague (doctor)

Whilst it may have been a while since my last confession, do not think that I have been idle! Although admittedly the things that have taken up most of my time aren’t finished yet, so you won’t see the fruits of that this post...

My Salute order from Fenris arrived, and had a free miniature in, taking another point off of the Tally:

(I’ve also placed and received another order since that I apparently forgot to take any pictures of, but it was some walls and rubble, so no effect on the Tally)

The chum who waved Rangers of Shadow Deep under my nose was considering ordering a couple of Frostgrave sprues to try them out, so I offered to trade him one of my Soldier 1 sprues if he ordered a couple of Soldier 2, so I find myself in possession of this bunch of lovely ladies:

He also threw in Mad Donna, because my friends are generous to a fault. 

The box I delivered the week before:

I threw in a couple of interesting bits from the Barbarian sprues as well in case he fancied taking a barbarian companion for his own solo ROSD games...


At ten to midnight on the day that Partizan would have been, I found myself idly scrolling the Crooked Dice web store, and ordered myself a Captain Scarlet lookalike as it was on sale (which has led to me spending the last week or so of lockdown watching the original series while I do the washing up, and considering ordering a load more to do an entire Spectrum force, but I’ve managed to hold off thus far as I’ve only undercoated this first one so far!)

My order came with another freebie as well, tugging the Tally even further into the red (or should that be scarlet)...

Finally, I ordered a pack of Copplestone Giant Spiders that I’d need for the first couple of ROSD scenarios, seen here with Captain Scarlet for scale: 

They’re horrible, in a good way. I thoroughly enjoyed bending their little legs and mandibles around to get a variety of poses!


It hasn’t all just been me gingerly receiving packages at arms length from the postman though; having vowed to any gods that would listen that I would dedicate myself solely to finishing miniatures and terrain needed so that I could play the first couple of Rangers of a Shadow Deep of course the first thing that I’ve finished isn’t actually for that:

A plague doctor from CP Models, that I have no real need for but it caught my fancy, given the state of current affairs. Maybe I’ll claim it’s the first model in an Assassin’s Creed miniatures project that I haven’t started yet...

Lots of dry brushing to grubby him up as he stalks his way through the plague choked streets made this a relatively quick and satisfying paint job to complete, which brings the Tally to:

3 vs 68 = -65

What’s next? The miniatures needed for ROSD are half completed, so shouldn’t take much longer to get over the finish line. I’m about halfway through painting the buildings that I knocked up for the first scenario, but I find painting terrain much less entertaining than miniatures, so I’m jumping back and forth between the two currently...

In other news, after killing the blogger app, it seems they’ve now updated it so that it’s almost unusable in Chrome on my iPad. This post was brought to you by emailing the post to blogger as suggested by a quick google, that not working at all, and so flip flopping between various applications and drafts copying and pasting chunks, then doing it all again when none of the pictures worked. How is everyone posting? And if you’re also having to jump through these hoops, how do you deal with that frustration?

Post-Salute 2018 post

Only a week after the actual event - did I mention that I'm not a fan of the Blogger app being killed off?

The night before Salute, I made a meme after seeing that Troll Trader were running their usual 'first 50 people spending over a certain amount get a goody bag':

My first stop at the show was their stand, where I bought the Collector's Edition of The Walking Dead game from Mantic, so I guess Dark Side Kermit won there...

Ah, early morning starts, everyone's favourite, but a pilgrimage requires sacrifice:

(I think at this point I'd already been ignoring my alarm for twenty minutes)

The usual Salute outfit of Jayne hat - this year was unseasonably warm though, so it spent most of the day in my bag, leading to complaints from my companions that they then couldn't find me.

My phone is alas on the way out, and doesn't hold charge as well as it used to, so less photos than usual, presented in almost no order:

[Obligatory queueing shot]

Modiphius Fallout miniatures: 

I like them, but at a larger scale than my existing stuff, I'm not sure if I'll get any (he says, setting up for future 'well, although last year I said...' posts. Wait, didn't I say last year that I wasn't going to get The Walking Dead?)

One of the thing's I was most excited to see was Mantic's upcoming Hellboy kickstarter - alas, there was only a handful of preview miniatures, and no game content, but look how pretty they are!

Particularlyexciting is that it looks like there's a mechanic for the frog monsters to evolve from little swarms up to big gribblies...

There was a rather large and nice Star Wars Legion table:

(read again my comments about the Fallout game re: larger scale, me not investing)

Mantic were running a paint and take table, so I tried my hand at knocking out a Star Saga Scientist:

Not bad for half hour with a large brush!

I'm not going to count him as painted for the Tally just yet, as I think I'll repaint his face (as it took a couple of goes with the brush I had to get it to this state of acceptability, but could definitely be improved), as well as potentially changing the colours of some things like his kneepads, maybe adding a Vault number to the back of his suit so that I can use him for Fallout, as well as rebasing him!

I managed to snap some pictures of Fireforge Games' upcoming Fantasy Northern troops, and they're rather lovely:

I wasn't sure how they'd look in the flesh, as pre-production renders seen online can hide a multitude of sins (Wargame Factory zombies being one of the most well-known examples of this) but they look like they take paint pretty well:

I think with some custom shields they'll make ideal House Bolton troops for my Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire project, as well as providing some additional bits for House Stark kitbashes...

I took this photo of a Bad Squiddo table to use as an inspirational image for future scatter terrain building, as I think that those rubble and broken pipe pieces look great!

This is an awful picture of a lovely Crooked Dice Post-Apocalyptic table - I think they were running two games on the same table, one with plant zombies and one with dune buggies?

Got to see Angel Giraldez painting again - insert the now traditional 'so handsome, so talented, it just isn't fair' comment!

Joe, our DM, is a feeder. This is fine with me. Picnic lunch with some old friends that I hadn't seen in a while, including Ciarron, who long-time followers may remember from a Salute post a few years back where we both got super excited about the Batman Miniatures game, bought a bunch of stuff and vowed to play. We still haven't.

Someone had painted up their Westfalia Northern Mercenaries kickstarter and entered it in the painting competition! I really should paint mine...

Now, the real meat of any Salute post - the loot!

• Rogue Stars Psions (because one looks like farmboy Luke with a lightsaber, and the other is a froggy looking alien)
• Frostgrave Barbarian Tracker (to fill out the kitbashed Wildlings that have been sat on my hobby desk since last summer)
• Rumbleslam goblin & Kromlech orc pilot from my Troll Trader goody bag
• Assorted dice and badges
• Heresy Ebric the Doomed (as I try to always buy something from Heresy - support the companies you love or they might not still be around next year!)
• 2 Crooked Dice Wasteland Warriors (to add some greater female representation to my Survivors collection)
• '!' tokens from Fenris, to use with the set of zombie rules I'm working on
• Some Hasslefree Survivors
• An assortment of Wargames Illustrated Giants in Miniature models, to get the show-exclusive Druid
• [heavily inspired by] Fallout / Mass Effect / Star Wars miniatures from Brother Vinni 
• This year's show mini

Also, the Mantic Walking Dead game, plus a selection of bits from my goody bag, like a couple of rulebooks, a cardboard building that is the perfect size for 1/144 Gundam models, a stencil, some weathering powder, a bunch of beer mats and a handful of sweets!

Fun fact - after Salute, I went for dinner at my Mother-in-Law's, where I showed my daughter the miniature that I had painted that day, which then vanished without a trace. Several days later, he turned up in grandma's bag...

Adding everything up (and factoring in the things that sold on eBay just before the show) brings the Tally to:

9 vs -36 = +27

I'm thinking that I might have to reconsider my 'board game pieces don't count towards the Tally for acquisition' when some of the games come with what are clearly miniatures, as they Tally would look a lot less robust after buying The Walking Dead game! I'm selling some more bits on eBay in preparation for the aforementioned Hellboy Kickstarter, so expect to see the Tally distort even further...

In other news, the sun briefly came out in the UK, and the sound of rattle cans resounded across the land as we had that perfect combination, a warm day with no wind. Not me though, as by the time everything was sorted and my daughter was settled in bed it was ten at night, but I'm not one to let something like that stop me so I set about getting a bunch more odds and ends into the painting queue:

Top Tip: though you might think you've been very careful with your spraying box, in the cold light of day it usually turns out you've sprayed a black line onto the paving slabs in the garden.

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!

Zomtober week 4 - spawn points a plenty

This week's submission (although by this I of course mean last week) is not one, not two, but three zombie spawn points:

Many, many moons ago, I was writing a set of zombie rules, featuring simple, convention suitable rules, and a deck of zombie cards to decide what type spawned. Alas, the laptop that had the half-finished rules on died, but I still have a bunch of ideas rattling around in my head (there were rules for things like survivors accruing noise tokens for doing things like shooting or using a chainsaw), so maybe one day I'll get around to redoing them... One thing from that is zombie spawn points, hence, I made these!

Originally, I'd made and undercoated one a couple of years back which I thought I'd dig out, but I fancied building another to go with it.

Having a dig through some boxes in the garage, I turned up a zombie bursting out of the ground from an old Frothers set, and a gravestone and spade from a Heresy ghoul pack that I apparently overlooked when I made my graveyard a couple of months back. Some torn up cork built up the base after a quick dry-fit, then it was time to crack out the glue.

Superglue just disappeared into the cork, so I busted out the white glue (although I did splash a bit of superglue around the edges to try and toughen it up somewhat).

Once the glue had dried, I dry-fitted the zombie into the hole I'd cut to make it look more like it was actually bursting out of the ground, but the thickness of the cork if used was a little more than I'd originally estimated, which made the figure look a little silly, so I grabbed a coffee stirrer to make an impromptu riser:

Perfect!

I then added the second piece of cork, and pinned the gravestone to the base for stability (as as previously mentioned, the cork pretty much drank superglue)

I then used some pre-mixed filler (that I'd originally picked up from pound land with the intention of making some generic rubble piles with) and smoothed out the steps so it wouldn't look like the grave was on a rocky crag:

My secret weapon in this (and also now in applying glue to bases, rather than using a cut down matchstick or ruining an old brush as I previously had been) was a pack of glue spreaders from the children's stationery aisle in Wilkinsons!

It was at this point that I thought 'hey, surely I could make and paint another spawn point just as easily as the ones I've already got on the go, right?'

I'd had ideas for a couple of different spawn points floating around my head for a while, and knew I had the bits for at least one of them somewhere, but all I needed was another 60mm round GW base... Next time we went into town, we nipped into the shop, only to discover that 60mm rounds are now a web shop exclusive, and don't come in the mixed packs that I'd previously seen in-store.

Plan kiboshed.

.

.

.

Until a day or so later, when I thought to myself 'wait, don't I have an Imperial Guard Heavy Weapon Teams boxed set still complete in box from that time several years ago that I impetuously decided that I was going to build a converted Blood Pact army and went on a spree in GW somewhere' and the answer it turned out was yes, yes I do. Plan back on!

This one was planned to be fairly simple, a zombie climbing out of a sewer. The figure is from Black Cat Bases, bought many, many years ago (before their current troubles, which hopefully seem to be getting better?). A quick application of a file to the tops of the ears to round them turned the ghoul into a perfectly passable zombie.

After cutting out the hole for the miniature to slot into, I originally planned to cut the cork to shape having marked the circumference of the top of the base on it. After cutting out a fraction of it though, I thought it might be better to stick it to the base, and then use that as a guide to trim it like you would the pastry lid of a pie!

Kevin Dallimore's painting guides: excellent reading, and excellent weights for squashing gluey bases while they dry:

Trimmed:

And with sewer miniature in situ:

At this point, my daughter decided that the spawn point in its current state of completion looked rather like the oaty rings that she likes to eat, and tried to do so. We agreed to disagree on this point.

And a little more pre-mixed filler to smooth the transition from cork to miniature:

It was at this point that I realised I was a little unhappy with the miniature - the sculpt around the figure was a little rough and ill-defined, so I had a crack at it with my trusty not-dremel to excise the unwanted material.

Pow, it looks more like he's actually in a hole now!

Admittedly, I actually dremelled right through the metal completely in one spot, but that's nothing that a spot more filler doesn't fix!

With my two bases ready to go, it was on to sanding (thank you trusty glue spreader again!) and the addition of the spade left over from a Heresy ghoul pack (the King I think? He's undercoated somewhere, I should really get round to painting him one of these days...)

I didn't cover the entire base of the sewer  spawn point, as I wanted it to look like Tarmac with some loose debris and rubble, rather than a random manhole in the middle of a gravel field.

You'll also notice in the picture above, I added a couple of extra details - a chunk of cork from one of my baggies of different grades and thicknesses of cork off cut for a larger chunk of rubble, and some metal details - a discarded set of burger and fries cartons, again from Black Cat Bases (expensive for what they are, really, but I quite enjoy them really!)

Then, for the first time in years (as I had a ton of things to undercoat at once), out to the garage with the first episode of the Dungeonpunx podcast to spray! (Ignore the Daily Mail, we bought it back in May for the free Lego and have kept it for spraying or if we were to need to start a fire). It's weird how my undercoating habits seem to move in cycles - spraying for maximum convenience on a number of figures, to getting annoyed at having to touch up the bits that have been missed, to gesso, to getting lazy and applying it too thickly and moving to brush-on primer, and so the wheel continues to spin...

Then I painted them, which I didn't take any step by step pictures of because who wants to see that!

This is the original spawn point I built a few years back - some Biohazard barrels from Fenris spilling their radioactive payload (because in the worlds of imagination, radioactive material gives you cool mutations rather than cancer), as is the case with this poor cat, who has lapped some up only to develop a cthulhuesque head and tiny wings! The cat was a freebie from Black Cat Bases, and the spilled goop is a base of GW Typhus Corrosion, followed by Nurgle's Rot, PVA glue to try and give it some structure, and then even more Nurgle's Rot!

This spawn point got a little moss and grass, and is done. Trivia - the zombie pulling himself got a Sotek Green tongue at my wife's suggestion, after I bought up the colours I'd need to paint Boba Fett's helmet according to a series of Youtube instructional videos should I ever get round to building my Knight Models miniature (but that probably won't be until I've painted the other two bounty hunters, and I am sadly still lacking a WOTC Zuckuss miniature...)

Last but not least, the zombie popping out of a sewer spawn point - dry brushing and washes a go-go! The discarded food items got a colour scheme to indicate that their previous owner might have been loving it, and that was that! I briefly considered adding a splash of gore to this figure, to try and hide the fact that it's face looked a bit ghoulish rather than zombie-like, but decided against it as I liked the way the teeth had come out too much!

Finishing these (yes, I'm counting them each as a finished figure!) brings the tally to:

33 vs 130 = -97

So, with just one week left of Zomtober (not that I've hit any deadlines so far, and everyone else seems to be stopping at week 4), I've got a couple of ideas for a finisher - If I can pull it off in time, I could have a biggie (although I also have a backup plan just in case!)