Homebrew Gamer

Chimera! mostly...

2012-01-23T07:02:00.000-06:00

So here's the work I've done on my chimera in 15mm. I'll post pics first, then talk about the construction of the model.

All the finished pieces

Another shot - there's another track in the works, just got the bolts started on it today.

Vaguely what it looks like assembled.

So this model went quicker than expected, though due to the demands of the army I wasn't able to finish it in a more timely fashion. The hardest part is the bolts. I basically clip little bits of styrene tube, just large enough to grab with tweezers, then glue them on one at a time. It takes a while lol. I like the texture it leaves, though in all honestly I didn't put as much effort into keeping them lined up as I should have. This is one of those things I may decide to redo down the road when I'm not deployed and so on.
Next I have to decide what hull to do to go with this one. I'm going to do a couple of chimera chassis variants then start on the Leman Russ.

Deep thoughts on my 40k in 15mm project

2012-01-06T06:14:00.002-06:00

So after some good discussion on a TMP (The Miniatures Page), I decided to sort of outline my short term as well as long term goals for this big 15mm project. I’ve already gone over a couple of times my basic motivations, money, creative fun and so on. Now I’ll discuss my ongoing goals in terms of games, rules and so on.

First and foremost, I intend to write my own rules for 40K in 15mm (abbreviated here on out as 40K15). The rules in most ways will at least resemble GW’s game system so that it feels familiar as your playing it. The trick is going to be to add the kind of detail I’d like to add but still make the game playable on a large scale in a reasonable amount of time.

For detail, I’m aiming to put it somewhere around 2nd edition 40K in terms of having wargear, heroes, and just about every knick knack and doohickey that’s ever existed on top of whatever I can think of in the game. I know it will include: jump troops, drop pods/troops, teleporting to the table as well as onto the table, artillery, aircraft, Titans, super heavies, characters and a whole host of other things included. One thing I can tell you there won’t be is a point system. Why you might ask? Well, in some ways I’m using my experience playing a friends WWII 15mm rules. I’ve had tons of fun playing his games and he’s never used a points system. Once you become familiar with a rules system you understand how the units in it operate and can define scenarios and objectives based around those. Some heavy play testing will go on for anything I do for upcoming conventions.

For time I’m using the aforementioned WWII rules and our games as a rule of thumb. We can play a game with 6-12 people, about 25-35 tanks, and a couple of hundred figures in about 2-4 hours depending on objectives. Key to this is that the game will be designed to be played by groups of people., not just 2. This means movement which tends to be one of the longest phases in large games, will go quicker with a handful of people moving units in an army. For conventions games, a 4 hour time slot is what I’ll be shooting for. 4 hours goes by quickly if you’re enjoying yourself and my aim above all else is to make 40k15 enjoyable and fun to play.

As for model development, it’s a mixed bag really. My first big 40k15 project is the Badab War. I enjoyed the campaign setting and the books a lot. More importantly, the armies themselves will be easy to get ready to play games with as they are primarily space marines on both sides, with a smattering of IG or IG like armies. I’ll do contingents of all the players in the campaign and write up some scenarios based around some key battles outlined in the Badab books. The interesting thing about the Badab war will be the Tyrants mixed armies of Space Marines and IG. I think this will make for natural splits of commands for multiple players and keep it more than just a space marine versus space marine game.

In the longer term, while I’m developing that campaign setting for my rules, I’ll be slowly developing my first big 15mm WAAAGH! There’s a pattern here that’s easy to see. First, Space Marines are in my opinion the most iconic and original armies in the setting. It also just so happens that all those angular vehicles and vehicle variants that share common chassis, makes it easy to develop a space marine army fast. Imperial Guard are similar in that their vehicles are easy to build and many of them use the same chassis. IG troops will be easy to basically proxy using WWII lines and other 15mm lines of minis. Finally, Orks are probably nearly as easy as Space Marines. Their vehicles are individualistic and ramshackle. This means I can get creative and no two vehicles have to be alike. What will most likely happen is I will build basic, simple chassis for a couple of different types of vehicles, then add detail after the casting is done to make each vehicle fairly unique. Finally Orks can easily be done by using existing fantasy based 15mm orks and converting them to have a more scifi feel. Of course snakebites on squiggoths will be fairly simple!

Chaos Space Marines and IG renegades of course will come later and are easily adapted from my existing SM and IG lines.

Other armies will be tough to do. Eldar and Tau have some fairly difficult designs to replicate using my techniques in 15mm. I’m hoping to start tinkering with other techniques so by the time I get the first big three armies done, I might be able to move on to doing something like the Eldar. The thing about an army like the eldar is it’s going to be difficult to produce troops on my own unless I want to pay someone to sculpt them. This can get expensive for a project that doesn’t earn me any money.

Ultimately, along with all the basic types of vehicles and units, I plan on developing my own ideas for the game and doing things such as Titans and super heavies. The end result being that my games will resemble huge 40k Apocalypse games in miniature (pun intended). This, in my opinion is how the game should be played anyway as the scale is more appropriate. One or two Titans standing 12-24 inches per side should make for a visually exciting game, and will hopefully be fun to play!

I have no solid timeline. This is all a personal project, will most likely be nothing but a money and time drain lol, a labor of love if you will. It means I will have to squeeze it in when I can here and there as life will demand time. My hope is to have an appreciable Space Marine and IG army or two put together before the end of 2012 in order to start running big games. Ideally I’d like to have about 30-50 vehicles a side, 400-500 figures per side and possibly a nice super heavy or Titan per side as a centerpiece. I feel confident I can get pretty close to this.

There are some things I could use some help on. First, if there are any of you out there doing 40K armies in 15mm and would be interested in possibly doing some trading then I’d encourage you to contact me at robofan5 (AT) gmail.com.

Also, if anyone has any good ideas for nice gothic scifi terrain in 15mm I would appreciate hearing them. I have some ideas I’m developing for modular terrain similar to the stuff GW already put’s out but it’s not priority. My first big terrain project will most likely be something simple, like bastions and defensive walls and emplacements, easy to build and look great on the right table.

I’m constantly asked if my models will be available for sale. To put it simply, it’s tricky! I’d love to but I also want to respect GW’s IP and of course don’t want to end up getting in any trouble! This means the chances are slim to none that I’ll be selling any of this unless I can get an idea of the legal issues involved. As mentioned above, I’d do some trading with those doing other 15mm 40K armies to save myself some work but as for selling them, I wouldn’t hold my breath!

Storm Raven in 15mm

2012-01-05T06:58:00.000-06:00

Here's the latest model I've been working on for my space marines in 15mm line:

The pieces so far. engine nacelles aren't complete.

Not much to look at at the moment. Like most of the other models, it won't be 100% when I make molds and start casting. I'll be doing the wings and possibly some weapon options once the castings are complete for ease of build and for cost saving.

Also, In this model it's fairly obvious I'm not doing exact replicas. There's a couple of reasons for this. First, under my current conditions it's hard to carry reference material on me so I have to make some of it up from memory as I go along. Second, I like giving these models my own spin. In some cases it's easier to skip some detail or add some. For example, at the moment I'm mostly not engraving or etching since I have some tool sleft at home to do that sort of work more precisely with. Once I do get home, I can take the time to go through before making molds to detail out these models with tools and techniques I can't use here in afghanistan.

Big 40K in 15mm update!

2012-01-05T05:50:00.000-06:00

I've been able to get some work in here and there while on deployment and I feel like I'm making some progress. I've stil got a ways to go to get where I want to be by the time I get back home but I'd say I'm about 60-70% there right now. At this point it's really about finishing the variants for the marine vehicles, which requires that I do some bits ordering - the weapons for full scale 40K work well as vehicle scale weapons, in general, for 15mm.

Let's start with the rhino:

Basic Rhino Hull

With Predator turret - still trying to decide how I want to attach weapons to it...

Whirlwind, the round turret still needs to be drill out so that the stand fits inside it.

Whirlwind turret - these missile pods will also work for my tornado landspeeder!

Razorback turret. This is one of those parts waiting until I can get a hold of some 40K weapons to make variants.

Landspeeder! I chose to do the close cockpit first since it's easiest. Later I may do an open cockpit. The wings and top of the tail piece will be done by hand in styrene since they're too thin to cast.

Chimera! My first IG vehicle. The piece on the back is an addition I made to extend the hull slightly. I want the IG vehicles to be smaller than the Marine vehicles but I made this one a little short. It'll get shaved down and blended in with the rest of the hull.

That's it so far! For the chimera I'm doing the hull and tracks seperately. The reason is the chimera variants hulls are so drastically different it's going to be easier for me to do them all as seperate pieces.

A return to 40K in 15mm!

2011-12-28T12:50:00.003-06:00

I say return but it’s more a return to my blog as it is my project. Since I’ve been deployed to Afghanistan I’ve been able to put some work in here and there and I’ve come quite a ways towards my goal for the end of my deployment. The goal is to have enough of the Space marine line knocked out to be able to start casting and play testing rules and I’m getting close.

Some have asked why bother, there’s already an epic scale 40K, and then the regular scale 40K can be played in apocalypse. There are several reasons why I’ve chosen to embark on this project.

1 – I like the 40K universe but don’t like the marketing and edition rotations, the lack of codex upkeep and so on and so forth. Doing it in 15mm allows me to develop my own models, as well as my own rules, and play them in a scale that is somewhere between Apocalypse and Epic. In fact, it’ll play a little like both games.

2 – The challenge! Mostly I like scratch building, but I’m not an artist so I often have to work off either something already completed in concept, or I work from some poor sketches I work up myself, or pay someone to sketch for me. This way I know exactly what I’m building, can put my own creative spin on it, and more importantly develop my techniques and hone my skills.

3 – I’ve always liked the 15mm scale for anything modern and beyond. Aesthetically it makes more sense, and if done right can make for some awe inspiring games. A local gaming group I often game with puts on these huge spectacle games and those done in 15mm are always my favorite. In general the scale is more “practical” in that it’s easy to store and transport as well as build terrain and boards for.

4 – Cost. For about 300$, enough to get a solid playable army in general, in 40K, I’ll be able to put together an army about 5 times as large. I’m estimating around a dozen vehicles and about 200-300 figures.

5 – Finally, I can develop my own models for the game. There are a lot of things that would be fun to do that are hinted at in the fluff of 40K. There are also some ideas floating around in my head that would be fun to set forth on the table and see what happens.

With Space marines and IG being the two easiest armies in my opinion to build in 15mm scale, I’ve settled on doing the Badab war for a start. It’s all SM and IG, I’ll get to do several chapters which will make the painting side of things a little more interesting, plus the Tyrants Legions will be an interesting army to field on the tabletop with its mix of Space Marines, IG and some experimental chaos type things going on. I think it will look fantastic on the table as well.

So the list of complete models goes as follows:

1 – Land Raider – still need some weapon options completed but the hull is finito!

2 – Rhino – done!

3 – Whirlwind – Done! Just had to do the missile launchers and turret to attach to the rhino, easy and done!

4 – Predator – Like the Land Raider, still need to do some weapon options but I’ve got base turret and hull done, and I’ve even got the baal assault cannon attachment done. Still need to do sponsons but otherwise this ones close to done.

5 – Drednaught – Just need to complete some weapon options. I’ve got multi melta and CC arms done. The rest will be easy and simple to do.

6 – StormRaven – this model is about 80% complete. The basic hull is done, along with turret and I’ve started on the engine pods.

7 – Landspeeder – this things about 75-80% complete. With the whirlwind done, I can use those launchers for a Tornado. All I really need to do is some small detail work, and a couple of weapon options.

Most of these models won’t be 100% when it comes time to cast them. There are certain parts it’s going to be easier for me to produce assembly line style then to cast. For example the actual wings and tail on the Storm Raven. They’re thin enough to cause problems casting so I’ll be building those of styrene for each model I cast. I can knock out about 4-5 models worth of wings and tails in a day so no issues. On other models it’ll be things like weapon options (for example, anything having to do with heavy bolters I’ll be using cut up regular 40K bolters. I can build those as I need them.).

I have some other models I’d like to get done in the next 3 months. I’ll finish the Storm Raven in the next week or so. At that point I’ll look at doing some other models. I want to finish as many of the predator options as I can then I may move on to doing Guard vehicles for a while. Pics are coming in the next few days!

Planters for Infinity!

2011-11-01T13:44:00.000-05:00

So I managed to get a little the last day or two and started on some planters for infinity:

Large and small Planters

Another angle

Just a little something you can do with these to change things up, small planter in the large one, might work as a fountain too.

Here's the biggest problem with being in Afghanistan right now...er, other than getting shot at and blown up that is. Typically, at this point I would cast these simple planters up and then make a couple of variants of them. I have ideas for adding some texture, or adding some other details to mix things up. It's easiest if I can cast some copies then make the variants to give more options.

So for right now these will stay like they are until I get back home. These should on average come up to about the average 28mm standing miniatures, chest. I plan to make something a little shorter in a couple of different sizes as well as something a little taller (I've seen some pretty tall planters in some of the cities I've been.

Also, for my own terrain, I plan on making little plants on inserts from aquarium plants. The idea is I can put say 3-4 inserts in the large planter and then I can remove one to stick a miniature in there to represent a mini moving into the planter for cover. Again, something I could demonstrate better if I were not in a third world country lol.

Inifinity terrain

2011-10-21T09:49:00.000-05:00

Hey all! First I'm reviving this blog! Originally I'd sort of stopped updating as I was going to be deployed to Afghanistan, didn't know what conditions were going to be like. I've been here 6 months now and things have settled down enough I can finally get some stuff going again. I've been focused on my scratch building and started with some 40K stuff in 15mm. I finished a better version of the Rhino with some weapon options, started a landspeeder and am about 90% done, and also started a Stormraven, which I'm about 60% done with. I decided to take a break from the 40K in 15mm for a bit to do some Infinity terrain as I hope to get back into that game once I return to the states. I'm also hoping to produce some things people will want so I can sell a few bits here and there.

You'll have to excuse the crappy pictures, I don't have the best place to take them and for some reason my camera isn't co-operating at the moment. I thought I'd snap some WIP's anyway and here they are:

Above is a pic of 2 of 3 pieces I'm working on. On the left you have a recharging station for vehicles, about 20mm in height. On the right, a smallish dumpster with two bins.

Up close shot of the dumpster. I still need to do wheels for it but for the most part it's complete. I tried to give it some texture but it's sort of 'dumpy' looking :D

A shot showing the lid comes off. I plan on sculpting a piece that fits in the top to make it look like it's full of trash, more pics of that in a day or two.

Finally, a close up of the recharging station. I need to file down the connections on the sides and put lenses in the holes in the top you can barely see in this picture. I plan on making a different sort of recharging station as well, a little larger, and mroe square.

So that's it for now. Obviously this stuff would look better finished and painted but I wanted to just post up some WIP's to let people know what I was doing. I have a third piece I started, a larger more standard type dumpster, but it will have a small incinerator unit on it for self sufficiency. My overall goal is to produce a line of interesting tech terrain for games like infinity. I have plans for vending machines that will allow you to slide a plastic window on the front to give in some depth, a couple of different sized air conditioner/generators, a robotic hotdog cart, and a couple of street side vending carts.

More WHFB!

2010-06-06T18:48:00.002-05:00

WHFB stuff

2010-06-03T06:50:00.003-05:00

Finally, an Update!

2010-05-05T08:45:00.000-05:00

Ok, while I haven't been updating my blog regularly like I want to, I have been getting some work done. Recently I told myself I wanted to get a single project done before I shipped off to the Army. That project was going to be Nids for 40K. However after getting some guants painted and starting in on a Carnifex, the paint scheme just wasn't working out the way I wanted. It's not bad, but it's not inspiring enough for me to want to force it on something like 150 models in a hurry.

I played around with a couple of other ideas. I converted a couple of Ork Meganobz that turned out pretty good. Eventually I want to do an Ork army but no way I'm going to get it done before I leave so that's a project for the future.

Eventually I had to find something to focus on for a few days so I grabbed some Space Marines, a Tac Squad to be exact and decided to work on my Crimson Fists project. Originally, this project was supposed to be a quick one. Space Marines are easy to paint, base coat in appropriate color (In this case I found the perfect blue spray paint at the local hobby store), shade, highlight, detail done. In theory I can get a full squad of Tactical Marines done in about 4-5 hours.

Now,originally for this army I'd already completed a Landraider using methods described above. Here are some pics:

It turned out alright, and only took me a couple of hours. Not a lot of detail on it but that was originally the plan. One thing I did not like about this model was the decals. At first it was going to be a time saver for me, but ultimately the affect just isn't right and as you can see by the grayish coloring of them, they're coming off. They're ways to fix this but I set it aside to ponder if I wanted to try hand painting symbols on these models. This would significantly increase the time needed to complete the army so I spent a couple of weeks not doing anything with it.

Finally, I grabbed the Tac Marines Squad and began painting. The blue I use is a dark blue, appropriate for Crimson Fists. I wash with a mix of black and a blue to match the base coat. The wash is thin and sinks naturally to the recesses. Once that's dry I highlight up with 2, possibly three gradually lighter highlight colors. Paint fists red, wash with a charred brown color, highlight again with red. Paint bolters, aquila/skulls and so on and I'm done thus far. This process for about 10 marines takes 3-4 hours, including drying time for wash. It's not hard and goes quickly.

Problem was they looked sort of plain. On top of that I knew using decals was going to be a huge pain on those shoulder pads. I decided to give hand painting the symbols a shot. I decided to start on a bigger model. I had 3 rhinos sitting around, base coated and washed. I highlighted those along with my Tac Squad the began adding details:

I think they turned out pretty good! I used the Ultramarines in the Codex Space Marines as a guide since Crimson Fists are pretty Codex strict anyway. Overall the effect was good and the symbols, even the fist symbol, weren't too hard to paint. I tried to figure out a way to make them more uniform, templates weren't working for me though so I eye-balled it and it came out fine. finally I drop yellow dots on the front fender and added a squad number. I'll have Tac Squads with numbers to match.

After I finished the Rhinos they inspired me to go ahead and try hand painting symbols on my Tac Marines. It was some work, probably an extra 2-3 hours worth, but again, surprisingly easy and it paid off:

I apologize for the quality of the pics, I was in a hurry and may try to get better pics this weekend.

I painted tactical arrows on some shoulder pads, and mixed it up with the squad number on others with a small tac arrow on the pauldron. I added a few tac arrows in knee pads and painted the banner on the Sgt and I was done! The Multi Melta didn't get any Tac symbols. I'm going to mark him with a Devastator symbol and operate on the concept that Hvy Weapons are detached to Tac Squads on a needs basis. That means I'll be doing 10 regular bolter Marines plus Flamer, plus Melta for a total of 12 Marines per Squad to have the most basic options. Eventually I may add more options down the road, like Sgt's with different loadouts and whatnot.

Finally, I'd had some Termies sitting around about 80% done for a while. I just need to finish the Sgt and do some symbols. Once I did the Tac Squad I went through and completed the Termies:

These are just the Assault on Blackreach Termies so nothing fancy. This week I think I'll pick up a box of assault Termies and paint them up soon. I have some Tac Squad marines coming in a trade but they won't be here for at least two weeks.

I still have:

2 Drop Pods - Primed and ready to be painted
10 man ac Squad with a few options - primed and ready to be painted
Pedro Kantor - Primed, ready to be painted
4 Devastators (2 Lascannon, 1 Heavy Bolter and 1 Plasma Cannon) - Primed ready to be painted
1 Iron Clad Dreadnought - Primed and ready to be painted (including all weapon arms)
1 Vindicator - Primed, ready to be painted
Lazorback - Primed, Ready to be painted.

I'll most likely do the 2 Drop Pods and the 2 Vehicles together. Otherwise I'll slog away at these guys until I can get it all painted up. Prob won't finish before I ship unless something delays my entry. I'll know more on that end of this week.

Battle Report!

2010-04-20T08:03:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I last posted and I apologize. Getting into the army has been a lot of work lol.

This past weekend my buddy nick and I got together for a game. We settled on a 1500pt game, my Chaos Space Marines against his Imperial Guard. I had some concerns going into the battle. My CSM is a plague marine themed army as mentioned in some of my other posts. At 1500 points I had:

Typhus
5 Terminators w/heavy flamer, combi melta and powerfists
2 x 7 man Plague Marines w/melta, power fist and rhino
10 CSM with heavy flamer, powerfist and rhino
Predator - twin linked las, hvy bolter sponsons and posessed
Defiler

It's not built to be uber competitive. I wanted a core of Plague Marines to represent original Death Guard marines. These guys are designed to sit on objectives for as long as possible. Eventually I'll also have 2 squads of CSM used more aggressively then the plague marines. Right now I have one squad, but that gives me 3 troop choices so I'm comfortable with it at 1500pts. I have the Predator because I really like my conversion and paint job on it lol. It's not the most effective use of points but it's done me well so far. I just recently added the defiler to the list as I like the model and look forward to painting it.

My concerns were that I just wasn't going to be able to handle the mass of guard plus the inevitable mass of heavy armor. It didn't help that we rolled Annihilation so we were playing for kill points and not objectives.

Nick's army was roughly:

Lord with Astropath and Master of the ordnance
3 x autocannon hvy weapons squad
3 x Missile launcher hvy weapons squad
3 x Lascannon hvy weapons squad
3 x Hvy Bolter squads
Hellhound
Veterans with shotguns, plasma and chimera
a platoon or two of guardsmen
2 Leman Russ

Don't quote me on that build I'm sure I'm missing some things but that's what I recall.

We rolled Dawn of War and he set up first. He spread guardsmen out across his end of the table and deployed his command squad in the center of the table, all forward about 1/4 of the width of the table. I then placed both squads of Plague Marines in rhino and held my HQ back for a deep strike later.

Table:

The buildings are some nice pieces Nick built for warmachine and we often use for other games.

We didn't take a whole lot of pics but I'll post what I have after a quick run down of the game.

I knew I wanted to be as aggressive as possible so as to not get wiped out by templates. I decided to charge the rhinos with PM and CSM at his lines as quickly as possible. I focused most of my troops on my right flank, while posting my defiler and predator on my left. My hope here was that he might float his tanks over to challenge my vehicles, both being reasonably easy kills for IG armor. This would take the heat off my troops, which I knew were going to be able to do the most damage. My biggest concern right away wasn't the tanks but the weapons teams. Thanks to a lot of horrible rolling the first round or two on Nick's part, his weapon teams had barely an affect on anything. This allowed my PM and CSM to punch into his lines, primarily one squad of PM on the right flank who managed to sweep through a couple of squads of IG in quick order.
He chose to spread his tanks out across the table, putting his chimera and Hellhound on my right and a Leman Russ in the center/right, and a second LR to the far right. My second turn I managed to deep strike Typhus and the terminators into a nice spot behind his lines. I knew I was going to take a lot of fire but figured that's what they were there for. I managed to wipe out a squad of IG with the flamer/bolter attack that round and withered tons of inevitable fire from the guard on first rank. second rank fire orders, plus several tanks. nick rolled a ton of dice and I think at the end of the round I'd lost one termie. I did opt to take a ton of hits with Typhus. I figured his 2 save, 4 wounds plus FnP would help keep more termies alive so whenever I could I took the hits on Typhus. It sucked letting Nick roll against Tough 4 instead of Typhus tough 5 but sacrifices had to be made.
Each round found Nick whittle a termie out of the squad as I would charge a unit, wipe them out and then hang out in the open until next assault round. Eventually he managed to wipe out all the termies but Typhus was still going strong. His nasty assault combined with Nurgle's Rot (Typhus always passes psychic tests and this forces all models within 6" to take a Str 3 hit, great against Tough 3 guard massed IG!) made him most definitely the MVP of the game.
Finally, the game ended with me having killed or ran every IG trooper off the table, and immobilizing the chimera. I never touched his tanks but at the end of the 4th round I had a squad and a half of PM, almost a full squad of CSM, 3 rhinos (one immobilized) Defiler, Predator and Typhus and we decided to call it to try to get in another game. I think ultimately we're both noobs at the game and I had a more forgiving army. That combined with Nick's ability to roll hundreds of dice to little or no real affect helped me to win the game!

Pics:

Later in the game you can see the IG lines have thinned out. the guys on the top of the building closest to the camera are in the dead pile so aren't a part of the game. his tanks didn't move a whole lot (and really they never needed to except occasionally to get a better LoS).

About the same time as above, you can see Typhus in the middle facing off with missile launchers and the command squad behind them. Left of that my Plague Marines are in the ruins preparing to assault another squad of IG. The rhino in front of his lascannon belonged to them and I figure it was better off sitting in front of his cannon blocking fire and it paid off!

The Plague Marines assault from the ruins! I lost 4 from this squad over 2-3 turns of fire from a Leman Russ and some IG, plus two assaults. I believe I ended the game with these three still alive and kicking.

An Awesome shot of Typhus preparing to assault the IG command Squad from the command cupola of a Leman Russ! nick tried his best to concentrate fire on Typhus and his termie squad, and eventually it paid off in the death of all my termies but he couldn't pull it together fast enough to make the difference. Typhus was definitely worth the 225pts I paid for him.

Finally a shot over my Predator of my left flank. The Vets chimera was immobilized my first round of shooting and later they come under some heavy fire from my Pred and Defiler. I believe that's them behind the chimera running away!

Squad Moribus

2010-03-29T09:44:00.006-05:00

When Beniamus followed self titled Lord Angrus to the deathworld of Creyton IV, the slaughter and destruction they expected to sow was not the only ‘prize’ they received. Unknown to the warband at the time was the fact that the population had been nearly wiped out by plague of unknown origin. This plague proved to be extremely virulent with a 98% mortality rate. As Beniamus and his squadmates watched others in their warband turn quickly to diseased goo and their own bodies became wracked with the pain of their insides liquefying, Beniamus cried out to Father Nurgle. As they lay dying one of their warbands dead and partially liquefied brothers exploded as a beast of chaos burst forth from the warp, spraying them with putrescent rotting flesh.
The daemons single diseased eye stared down at Beniamus and he received a vision of a hulk passing through the warp, and of a Chaos Lord, Typhus. He knew that for his squad to survive he would be bound to serve the Plague Lord Typhus and the Great Father Nurgle. His vision began to blur as his eyes filled with pus and his last thought before the darkness took him was ‘Yes my lord Nurgle, we serve and obey.’.

Brother Sgt Beniamus

Brother Troth

Brother Xpianus

Brother Aloysius

Brother Egidius

More Plague Bringers!

2010-03-29T09:00:00.003-05:00

I managed to get quite a bit done this week. Finished my squad of terminators and saturday got around to painting my Possessed Predator. I've decided to work more creatively I'm going to come up with stories to flesh out the background of my Chaos Warband.

"The machine was thousands of years old. It exuded an aura of age that was only overshadowed by the evil stench of rot and decay. The low moans of what was left of its crews souls emanated from its hull and occasionally one of the many bilious boils that erupted on its surface revealed briefly one of their tortured aspects before it sank back into the depths of its eternally eroding metal skin. Occasionally excrescence spilled from openings and burst into writhing, puss covered tentacles before withdrawing back into its shell.
Heavy bolters held by purulent appendages burst from the sides of the machine and a mouth where the commanders’ hatch used to be constantly emits gurgling, choked howls of pain. Those who hear it burst out in wracking pox that leaves their decayed husks lifeless and liquefying into a putrescent puddle. Only the sons of Father Nurgle, the Death Guard plague marines could come close or enter the ‘Delacerator’…"

Pics and WiP of my current 40K project

2010-03-22T09:58:00.008-05:00

Here are some pics of my army as it currently stands!

First up, my Demon Prince:

This model is fantastic! Heavy since it's all metal but not to bad to assemble and a hell of a lot of fun to paint. I went with a paint scheme that matches my Death Guard, I figure he's a Champion elevated to Daemon Prince status, still got elements of space marine armor and so on. As you can see he has my deck plate base scheme. His is a little more weathered and worked over. I figure the presence of a Daemon Prince of Nurgle probably has a serious effect on the surroundings!

Next up, Plague Marines:

Shots of the whole team, plus some close ups. I had to do a little converting on a couple of figs. I needed a powerfist champion so built up a green stuff power fist. It looks a little weird, too big really, but in the right frame of mind I guess you could consider it "bloated with disease" :P

Also wanted to make sure I had enough plasma guns to go around. I like plasma guns but they only come with 1 plasma gunner and you can have two per squad so I grabbed some normal Space Marine plasma guns and converted the models so now I have two per squad! Other than that, deck plate basing, and a lot of drybrushing to give these guys a creepy sickly look! I used a more deliberate, 'wetter' form of drybrushing to make sure they looked right, then followed up with some rusty, dirty looking wash strategically placed. I think it worked out well.

Also, in my last post I think I mentioned wanting 2 squads of 10, but for fluff's sake, I'm going with squads of 7 Plague Marines as that's Nurgel's sacred number and whatnot.

Converted, Possessed Predator!:

I'm really proud of this thing! One of my first big conversion projects and it turned out really, just like I had imagined it. It's primed black at the moment so might be hard to pick up on details. Had to have tentacles so I have a few around the barrel, a few bursting from the rear hatch, and a bunch bursting out of the sides that hold the sponsons. On one sponson I have bloated, puss filled daemon flesh spilling out in the form of 3 pustules similar to nurgles symbol.

I included an open maw in place of a commanders hatch and turned the sensor pod on the side of the turret into an eye. Finally I added chains to 'hold the beast in check' as well as some pustules and scabbing on the hull in spots. It's really going to be a lot of fun to paint and I think it's going to look great when complete. Has me excited to do another possessed vehicle or two!

Typhus:

Nothing too exciting here yet. He's based on deck plating and ready to be primed but I haven't decided how I want him to look. I'm leaning towards a sickly green base to make him stand out from the rest of the army but we'll see.

Terminator WiP:

This is a shot of a single model but get's across the basic color these guys are going to end up being. It's sort of a rotting flesh green with a little bit of brownish green shading and some highlighting. I have to go back and redo the brass on the model then I'll follow up with details and he'll be done. 4 more after that!

Finally some shots of my CSM WiP:

Nothing too exciting on these guys yet. I've focused on removing spikey bits where I didn't like them. I figure nurgles' less spikey, more decrepit and decaying. I'm trying to decide if I put a little bit of wear and tear on the armor yet but probably. Finally I need to base them. Building the bases takes some time, a squad of 10 will probably take me about 2 hours or so.

This week I'll be working on finishing my termies and once they're done I'll work on this first squad of CSM.

Full sized 40K!

2010-03-22T08:03:00.002-05:00

So this past week I got a hold of the new Nid codex and as with all the latest nid codexes to come out, I was intrigued. It looks like a fun army to play, tons of modeling potential and not in my opinion, too overpowered.

However, while I don't know when I'm going to basic training yet (still waiting on some documents to arrive) I do know my time is limited. Because of this I've given a lot of thought to what I want to do in the next few weeks to months before I ship out. I finally settled on a 40K project, for a couple of reasons. The biggest is that I will most likely be able to get some games of 40K no matter where I go. These days that's probably true of Warmachine as well but 40K is still the most reliably played game out there. The second is that I have some mostly painted Warmachine armies and it would be nice to have a fully painted 40K army ready to go. I examined the models and armies I do have and decided my Chaos Space Marines would be the easiest to finish in the shortest amount of time. I sat down Saturday morning and took inventory and then decided where to start. Currently I have:

- 15 Plague Marines fully painted and ready to play
- 1 Converted posessed predator, still needs paint job to complete
- 5 Chaos Terminators, based and base coated, though I knew the base color was changing
- 10 Chaos Space Marines, assembled but still needed bases built.
- 5 Chaos Havocs, unassembled still in the box.
- Demon Prince, fully painted and ready to play
- Typhus, based, still needs to be painted.

I think all together I can eek out about 1700pts, but it's a fully loaded, not competitive enough type army. I sat down with the codex and laid out a plan for what I needed. I still want to add:

- 2 more Squads of Space marines for a total of 3 Squads
- 3 Rhinos, 1 for each squad of Space Marines.
- 5 more plague marines to complete a total of at least 2 squads of 10.
- Defiler
- Dreadnought

All of this I think would round out the army I'm looking to build. It's all based on a theme of course. I'm going with Plague Marines/Death Guard. Nurgle Marines were one of my first 40K armies and I've always wanted to return to them and hence this army was started.

I don't want a full army of just Plague Marines, I need more flexibility than that, so I laid down what I thought you might find in a Nurgle themed army. Right now I don't see a place for anything with jump packs, obliterators and a few other fast attack options. Of course later I may do some 'counts as' type conversions but with a limited amount of time I wanted to stick to the simple theme of slow and purposeful.

I decided a core mob of actual Plague marines as my "elites" is the best place to start. These guys are the real deal, blessed by nurgle in all his stinky, pestilent glory. They've done their time and now their card carrying members of the Plague Marines. In general I'll use these guys to hold objectives. Their tough, and hard to move once they get dug in.

My 'standard' chaos space marines are aspirees. These guys wannna be Plague Marines bad, but haven't put in the time yet. A little bit more flexible and customizable, and also cheaper, they'll be my core 'assault force'. I'll be using them to help hold objectives, but also to play more aggressively in order to capture objectives. For a paint scheme I'm going with a Death Guard like appearance, using a really light green - almost white really, with lots of brass for that chaos feel.

The possessed Predator was just a modeling project that went really right. Sure it's probably not the most efficient use of points but it looks really awesome and might help get my CSM to their objectives a little faster by clearing potential hard targets that may get in the way.

Terminators are in the same scheme as my CSM and I'll be using them in a primarily assault role. I'll most likely be deep striking these guys in for added shock value. They'll provide the hammer to slam my enemies up against the anvil of my CSM and Plague Marines.

The Havocs I picked up on a whim, and will probably only be using them on occasion to fill some points for their obvious uses.

Defiler I want because like the Predator, I think it is already sort of a cool model, will provide some awesome conversion potential, and with the battlecannon, might help against horde like armies.

Typhus is a must have for a plague army. Not sure how much I'll use him but he looks like he is worth the points. The demon prince is a cool model, looks great painted up and I'm sure I'll use him on occasion.

Finally, the entire army is based around a concept I had based on Plague Marine fluff. These guys travel the warp in rusty, plague filled space hulks bringing painful blistery death to the galaxy. for each model I use a little plastic card, some plastic mesh screen and some other bits to make it appear as if they might be standing on deck plating or in an imperial hive if you wish. I chew it up and pock mark it appropriately using a dremel and some other tools, and finally add some decay and rust to it and voilah, I'm done!

Pictures and WiP to come soon!

Working, working, working

2010-03-19T09:13:00.002-05:00

Whole lot of stuff going on, not a whole lot of it worth posting on my gaming blog lol. Still working to get into the Army, as a lot of military people will tell you, hurry up and wait is the name of the game. A day or two of furious activity is followed by a couple of weeks of nothing. Hoping next week for some big news but we'll see....

Commission piece almost finished. Still can't post pics but it's been a fun project and the guy who commissioned it has given me a lot of leeway to play with this piece! This will be a piece that hopefully goes into some production so I'm kind of excited!

40K in 15mm is moving along at a snails pace. Dreadnoughts basically complete, though I'm still trying to decide if I want to cast it with legs attached or not. I think the best way to go is to attach the legs to a base and cast them that way.

Finally, after all this scratchbuilding I'm itching to get some painting done. I'm tossing around the idea of doing some 40K Eldar or Tyranid. Both would be a lot of fun but in different ways. The eldar have a lot of pretty, troops and things like Harlequinn would be a real treat to paint. Nid's on the other hand would provide a lot of conversion and scratchbuilding potential and would be a fun army to play. I have to decide in the next 24 hours as I plan to finish my commission work tonight and would like to get started painting tomorrow.

Working on commissions

2010-03-09T07:13:00.002-06:00

Hey all, still alive and still here! I'm currently working on commissions so don't have much to post at this time. If I can get permission I'll post pics of the commissions I'm working on.

40K in 15mm is moving ahead! I've met some like minded individuals who want to help me out so it might be possible to meet my goal this year and have two armies ready to play by years end!

Quick update on 40K in 15mm

2010-03-02T09:09:00.000-06:00

Sorry no sweet pictures this time! I'm in the process of trying to join the army. I have some challenges to overcome in that arena so it's been a lot of hard work and probably will be for the next few weeks. I'm still hoping to get time to finish my SM army before shipping off, or atleast be well into finishing it!

I sat down this weekend and worked on the first weapon arm, the multimelta arm. Weapon arms are going to be complex because of the way I've set them up to plug into the generic dread body. Not to mention that working with small pieces that have lots of details always proves to be challenging! Hoping to finish it and the assault cannon arm this week. Lascannon and missile arm will be easier so I"m saving those for last.

Finally I have some potential commission work coming up. Not sure if I'll be able to post WiP or not but if I can, I will!

No Updates yet!

2010-02-22T07:09:00.003-06:00

No updates on my dreadnaught yet. My plan is to start work tonight on weapon arms. I was hoping to start them this weekend actually but life's not co-operating. fortunately my week is pretty open and I'm hoping to get at least a couple of weapon arms done and quite possibly start making molds!

Dreadnaught in 15mm WiP

2010-02-17T08:56:00.005-06:00

Over the last few days I've managed to make some serious headway on my 40k in 15mm project. I'm about 80-85% done with my dread! I've essentially completed the torso and legs as well as the right close combat arm. The next step is creating a series of modular weapon attachments including melta, assault cannon, heavy flamer, rocket launcher, las cannon etc.. anything that can be mounted on a dread currently, and possibily more!

I apologize for the bad photography. I wanted to try to get in and get some of the detail but it didn't work like I wanted it too.

Up first, some detail shots of the torso.

I really think this is some of my best work. There's tons of detail, I'd say about 75-80% of the original model. I haven't decided whether I want to do rivets on it or not but I most likely will so it matches the rhino and LR.

Shots of limbs:

The close combat arm turned out better than I had hope, unfortunately the pictures don't do it justice. It's not exact. The storm bolter is a little rough but will work fine at this scale. I also repositioned the fingers because I always though it odd that on a normal dread, when the fingers are spread, one of them blocks the storm bolter.

The legs turned out ok. There's a little less space between the bottom of the greeve and the ground, but thet's because I wanted to keep this thing short and it was already getting taller then it should be. That's the pitfall of eyeballing scale, the torso is proportionally good but I reliazed it was a little taller and so had to subtract a little from the legs. Shouldn't be too noticeable though:

Final shot of me holding the torso over the legs:

All in all this thing was more challenging than the vehicles but a lot more rewarding. I decided to glue the upper arms to the body as I saw no real reason for poseability and it would make casting better. I will have to get a vacuum chamber to cast this thing though, with all the details it's got on it!

Some lessons learned:

1 - When working with tiny bits, put the glue on the bit itself and not the surface of the model you're applying it to! The glue I use softens the plastic. When ti dries it welds the stuff together and works fantastically. However too much glue in one spot and the little bits soften too much and can get warped or messed up.

2 - let the little bits dry! Along with #1, let tiny pieces dry a little longer, it takes a while for them to harden back up.

3 - Sand and file everything smooth BEFORE attaching to other parts! This is a general rule but sometimes I get into the rhythm of things and forget this. I did a couple of times and it made for some sticky situations.

4 - always cut a little extra length or space. On most bits, atleast the ones that aren't too tiny, I cut a little extra to use to grip with my fingers, or to allow for some breathing room when cutting to shape.

How I scratch build

2010-02-15T13:46:00.003-06:00

I've had some questions on some of the scratch build stuff I do so I thought I'd take the time to explain. It's all pretty easy to be honest, the big thing is it just takes some practice to get what you want out of it.

First, I have a huge bin of styrene at home from Plastruct and Woodlands Scenics. about 95% of it's generic tubes and sheets of various shapes. Once you build up a nice collection of stuff you have more to work with at hand and you'll find things get built a lot easier then if you just buy for a specific piece. I tend to buy a couple of packs of random bits when I go to the hobby store to purchase something specific.

Second, I have a ton of little helpful tools. Nothing fancy, a couple of different hobby knifes with various blades, files in all shapes and sizes, sandpaper in various grits, cutters, plyers, tweezers etc. There are tons of tools designed to make your life a lot easier, for example, my next purchase is a styrene cutter! The best tool I have however is my Dremel.

There are two basic ways to build a shape. First, you can build a "box". This is an 'additive' method, where you cut the walls of the shape out and glue them together to form the shape. The best example is a box! If you look at the hull of my Rhino, that center box was created essentially in this way, but I cheated. I used a core of balsa cut in the shape I wanted. Then I lined that block with styrene. This method is easier and balsa lets you cut away pretty easily anything you may need to as you work. Otherwise you literally cut out all the sides of a shape you need and glue them together to make that shape. This in my opinion is time consuming and makes the piece more fragile.

The second method works in my opinion much better. For smaller pieces I take thick pieces of styrene or balsa and cut away from that until I get the shape I want. Often I have to glue several pieces together before cutting. For example, the Land Raider hull I did was something like 6 pieces of the thickets square styrene rod I could find. I cut them to the length I though I needed, then glue them together. Once dry (I use plasti-weld I believe by Plastruct so it dries fairly quickly) I use the dremel to shave it down to the shape I need. Once that's done I file and sand until it's smooth and clean.

Once you get the "main" part of the model done, from there it's just adding details to taste. This is where a lot of different types of styrene tubing comes in. I use hollow and solid, round, half round, square and even some rectangular and hexagonal pieces. I have them in tons of different sizes as well. I basically sift though what I have until I find something as close to the shape of what I need, and then I cut or shave down to the exact shape I need it! Some more complex shapes are just several simple shapes added together. For example if you look at my current Dreadnaught torso piece, you can't see it but it's made up of 11 pieces of 2 different size of square solid tube, 2 thin strips of styrene sheet and two pieces of round hollow tubing. I'll use really small square tubing or sheet to add details where appropriate.

For the most part, with some practice and a nice collection of tools and styrene I think anybody could be doing this sort of thing. It obviously takes time but it saves me some money and in the long run allows me to play games I want with the models I want, in the scales I want!

Some people have asked how I do my rivets. It's fairly easy but takes some patience. I use a really thin tub and cut little bits off the end. Then I glue them in place and let them dry. At this stage the bits are way longer than they should be. Once they are completely dry, I use the dremel to shave them down. You'll use a few and have to redo them but in general it works pretty well.

Tips:

1) I can't say this enough, get plenty of various styrene bits!

2) Dremel! I use this thing to cut large bits of styrene or balsa. To shave down bits where I need them shaved. I use it to occasionally cut lines in a piece or I use some of the smaller tips to carve out holes and other shapes. You could use non powered tools to do this but it would take a lot more time.

3)Compromise on detail if you're looking to make playable models quickly. I look at a model or make a sketch to determine what details I definitely want, then I add to taste as I'm building until I feel like it's done.

4)Don't add random bits! I think this looks horrible for one thing and is usually pretty obviously just a random bit. If you're building something and not sure what sort of details it should have, look at real life examples where possible. Try to find artist renditions of scifi vehicles and so on. If you're building your own designs, sketch it out! No mater how badly you draw it will help, I promise!

5)Learn to identify basic shapes in a model. Once you can identify basic shapes, and break a model down to those basic shapes you'll find that most of the heavy work will go quickly. The rhino I did was basically a box with the track sponsons' effectively rectangles with some odd sides.

6)Layer bits. approach you model in layers. My Rhino and LR were done by creating the basic boxes, then adding sheets of styrene to armor it up, then adding doors and hatches and other similar bits, then finally adding details.

7)It's easier to add to something then to take away, so wherever possible plan to add to a piece instead of subtracting. I recommend you build the basic shape like i do, shave down to it but beyond that, it's easier to correct mistakes where you add then when you take away.

40K in the right scale

2010-02-15T07:52:00.007-06:00

Several years ago I was introduced to the world of 15mm miniatures. I like the scale since you get enough detail to keep things interesting, but the price point is right and for some genres the scale is much better than larger scales. I think anything really where the gun begins to make a large impact in warfare really needs to be done at 15mm or smaller. 25+ scales do indeed look nice but it doesn't feel right when the model is only shoting 12" or so.

Of course 40K in 25-32mm has always felt completely off to me. Especially when they began releasing huge artillery pieces for the Imperial Guard. The cannon on the basilisk is larger than any other gun in the game but at one time I'm pretty sure you could still find targets out of range on the tabletop lol. Even infantry shooting at 12-24" just seemed to short for my taste.

A year or two ago I decided to see what I could in 15mm by scratch building. I built a landraider that turned out pretty good (and I believe may be in one of the first posts on this blog.). Proprotions were a little off but overall I liked the look and decided since I was just doing it for my personal collection, it didn't matter if details weren't exact.

Last week I decided to put up all of my GW stuff for sale. Not to go into a long tirade but I just realized I wasn't interested in keeping up with edition changes every 4-5 years for both games. I'm still a fan of the background of 40K and so decided before I got rid of my SM army I'd use some of it as reference and sculpt a couple of more things in 15mm.

I started with a rhino. As with the landraider, some proportions were off. Admittedly I'm sort of lazy when it comes to buidling these things, and I don't tend to use exact measurements. The landraider was a little long but no big deal. The Rhino turned out to be a little "tall" in the body, but I didn't notice until I got the track pieces glued on and couldn't go back and fix it. Other than that, it looks like a mix of the old Rhino and the new:

I'm about 99% complete. The green stuff needs to be cleaned up but I had to wait for it to dry. Right now it looks soft and gummy, a little filing and sanding will fix that. Also, for casting reasons, the tracks are left off and I'll have to do those individually. My plan for that is to buy a styrene chopper which will make that go quickly.

Some scale comparisons:

Yesterday afternoon I started on a dreadnaught. The regular Dreads body is fairly complex. I'm keeping mine slightly more simple for ease of building and casting. I'm only about 20% done on this thing, still a ton of detailing on the body to do and then I have arms and legs!

For scale:

Finally, a family shot:

These could probably work for 20mm as well. I'll take some shots next to 15mm minis next time I think about it.

Overall I'm pleased with the results. The rhino will give me the base to make the other SM vehicles and I also plan to do a landspeeder and Drop Pod.

Yes I will be casting these, no they will not be for sale!

Battletech, my interpretation

2010-02-10T00:53:00.002-06:00

Battletech was the "gateway" drug for my wargaming habit. Some friends and I discovered it at around the age of 12 (roughly 1985/86). We played for several years, effectively turning one off games into mercenary campaigns and so on. We built some interesting characters, at least to us at the time and over several years we put together what I thought were some interesting stories.

I was thinking today about how I want to approach getting back into CBT using the quickstrike rules. I know I basically want to try to "rewrite history" now that I can look back and get a more cohesive concept built for some key characters and my mercenary group. Along with thoughts in that direction I started thinking about what made battletech, well, battletech for me. I was so young I can't honestly recall how much of my perception was literally driven from the game itself and how much was from my own daydreaming but here's a list of things that make classic battletech to me:

1) Low tech - for the setting that is. Battlemechs were extremely rare, mostly passed down from generation to generation and in some cases provided by other institutions’ such as the great Houses or Mercenary companies. To lose a Mech and become disposessed was worse than death, since the chances of getting back in the pilots’ seat was rare. The technology that came with those battlemechs, fought against them or were used by the average IS citizen was for the most part understood, but often times unreplicatable. Not quite treasures, all the really big shiny tech was something you held onto tightly!

2) Feudalism - or a modern version of Feudalism. The houses controlled all within their borders to some extent but like kings and queens of old dealing with widespread kingdoms, it is difficult to monitor or police all of the hundreds of planets spread across hundreds of light years. So you had Barons, Dukes and Princes who ruled their small slice of the kingdoms as they saw fit, and were allowed to do so until someone noticed they might not be toeing the party line.

3) Mechwarriors - They are the warrior class. Almost literally a caste to themselves. While the vast majority were just blessed to own mechs, some were given land rights and titles making them lords of the battlefield in their own right. Like knights in full armor, they were feared on the battlefield and respected off.

3) Grit and texture - While you can find the pristine suburbs and university grounds, or the neon lit, glossy urban sprawls, most of the places mechwarriors saw were dirty back world places where the damage they wrought was minimal to the overall picture, whether the locals agreed or not. Most worlds were harsh, and due to centuries of warfare, the bones of war machines littered these stomping grounds.

4) Water - or lack thereof. I always had the impression that water was a rare substance, relatively speaking in the universe. That as the IS expanded, water was found to be not as common as humanity had hoped and so watering hole planets were precious. On top of this, water provided extra cooling power to overheating prone battlemechs and so it wasn't uncommon for the centerpiece of a battle to be a lake or river.

5) Aged, old - Everything seemed "aged" to me. Probably because I was pretty young at the time but battletech wasn't the shiny, fresh new kid in town sort of action that Japanese anime was (I was a huge fan of robotech long before I discovered battletech). Mechwarriors were old, grizzled veterans of countless wars and battles. Mechs were banged up, scarred, and probably didn't have more than 60% of their original parts left. Cities, and even the governments of the great houses spanned hundreds, even thousands of years and had the weight that nations always get as they age.

I think that about does it. These concepts were what forged my vision of CBT when I was a kid. The Clans came along and blew all of that away of course. I wasn't a huge fan of what the clans did to the game, though I understand the business reasons for rebooting the game. I'd like to find a way to make the clans a part of my future battletech experience without going up against the concepts I describe above. I think giving them less of an impact then they really had, sort of an all teeth and no body, sort of monster.

Selling some stuff over at bartertown

2010-02-07T14:42:00.008-06:00

I'm selling a bunch of GW minis over at bartertown and posting pictures here.

I discovered Quickstrike rules for CBT!

2010-02-04T07:02:00.000-06:00

I've been working away on my Pulp figures. I'm almost done with a second squad of rocketeers and hoping my zeppelin troopen from Pulp Figures comes in soon. Once those are in I can start playtesting my rules!

Just as exciting, I came across the announcement that Catalyst was releasing quickstrike cards for mechs for CBT at tabletopgamingnews.com - http://www.classicbattletech.com/index.php?action=products&mode=full&id=283

I'd never heard of quick strike but looking at the cards my heart skipped a beat. Could it be a stripped down, more easily playable and streamlined version of CBT?! You have to understand, BattleTech got me into wargaming. I was 11 and some freinds and I were playing Palladiums TMNT, some DnD and Gamma World when we walked into a Shinders one day and discovered battletech. I fell in love with that tan warhammer stomping around on the box cover firing its PPC's. We bought the box, and soon after that a neighbor handed over his copy of citytech and battletech as well since he wasn't playing them. That led to us playing what evolved into an ongoing campaign of sorts for about 8 years.

Eventually, time became a more precious commodity and I discovered other games that only required a couple of hours to play and basically tucked BT away. Since that time, every couple of years I pull out my models, do some painting and play a couple of games to remind myself why I don't play much anymore. The systems clunky (but still holds a quiet place in my heart), and anything over a couple of mechs takes more time than I really ahve these days to dedicate to gaming.

I've tinkered with alternative rules sets but nostalgia has always made it hard to use other rules and I've never found anything as satisfying. I love CBT's background and fluff, especially the third and fourth succession war eras. Clans blow but the new comstar jihad seems interesting. I've bought Total War and the latest box set to come out and I have about 2 or 3 dozen mechs in various stages of painting and assembly but just couldn't bring myself to dedicate my time to playing the game. I've hoped beyond hope that someone would find an alternative way of playing the game that's faster, leaner but has strong ties to its background and I think Quickstrike might be those!

As I understand it, Quickstrike is based on the Battleforce rules (a quickstart set of those rules can be found here:http://www.classicbattletech.com/downloads/QSR_BattleForce.pdf). The full set of rules can be found in Strategic Operations: http://battlecorps.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=2164

I've done some investigating on the CBT forums and I'm reading the BF quickstart rules now, just to make sure it sounds like something I want to invest some hope in. I'll probably be downloading Strategic Operations today and digging into the Quickstrike rules but I'm very excited and hope this proves to be a rekindling of my love affair with CBT.

Pulp Action miniatures

2010-01-27T09:09:00.004-06:00

I've been wanting to do some Pulp Gaming for a while. A guy in a local gaming group has a great set of skirmish rules that would work, and I also own .45 Adventure that might be fun to play.

Last year at Little Wars in Chicago I purchased some Pulp Figures from a vendor and decided I want to do a series of themed games. The first would start with an air assault by american rocketeer and British Gyro Copter troops, on a German Dirigible being defended by Zeppelin Troops! I bought 2 packs of rocketeers and a pack of gyrocopter troops in anticipation and finally got them all painted up:

Rocketeers led by Command Cody Wallace:

I'm trying to give these miniatures a lot of character. I painted US flags on the shoulders and a "blood stripe" on their pants. I may go with a different color stripe for the second unit that I need to paint up.

Gyrocopter troops Led by Commander Laurence Blackbottom:

Commander Blackbottom isn't complete and so isn't picture but his 'bumblebees' are. I decided to give this unit some character by giving them the symbol of the bumblebee and painting it on the back of their jackets and jumpsuits.

I'm slowly working on the design for a scratchbuilt gyrocopter for these guys as well but haven't come up with a complete picture that's satisfying yet.

Next up, more Rocketeers and Gyro troops! I placed an order today for Zeppelin troopen. Once those guys are done, I can focus a bit on terrain for the top of the zeppelin.

Retribution of Scyrah army coming along

2010-01-27T08:55:00.008-06:00

I've been working slowly on building a Retribution of Scyrah army for Warmachine. I promised myself I'd buy/build/paint - buy one model/unit, build it, paint it, then buy the next one. I've mostly held to this and at the moment I only have a unit and 2 solos that still need painting. I've put a lot of effort into making them look good and I think they've turned out alright.

Garyth:

I spent a lot of time on Garyth, relatively speaking. He still only took about 3 hours to paint but I spent some effort on detail, especially the face and like the way he turned out.

Kaelyssa (my first warcaster):

Warjacks:

I paint runes on my warjack bases (and arc markers on all bases). The runes don't mean anything, they're just random shapes I think work with the army theme.

Arcanist:

Dawn Guard:

I'm not satisfied with how these guys came out. They look 'ok' but my shading really didn't work out on them. Recently I've become really impatient with doing large units of troops and I think these guys suffered for it.

Finally, the whole painted shebang! Nayl is in there as well but I hate his paint job so didn't take any pics up close:

All in all I'm happy with the way they've turned out so far. I've taken my time on getting them done, trying to stay away from the idea of buying tons of models just so I can play the army and instead focusing on getting things assembled and painted. Each solo has taken me about 3 hours to paint, with Jacks being about the same. The DG unit took me probably something like 5 or 6 hours. I've been focusing on different techniques I know need to get better, blending, layering and so on. I also tried a suggestion I saw in a PP product somewhere and dry brush my static grass for some extra effect and it looks pretty good.

Warmachine Resurgence this past weekend

2010-01-27T08:32:00.009-06:00

I ran the Warmachine MkII Resurgence Event this past weekend and had a lot of fun. Things went mostly well and I managed to snap a few pictures. I'm not a photographer lol and about 1/3 of the pictures I took turned out ok.

First, a couple of shots of the tables and players bent on their opponents destruction:

Some pics of the first round of games:

Second Round:

Final round. There were some interesting fights going on this round. Benesh and Brian of Focus and Fury were playing for Overall. Benesh spent a couple of rounds focusing on taking out the avatar with some of his nastier jacks (The deathjack looks like it's running away but it was turned around so the models could be placed base to base):

Nigel, also of Focus and Fury found his Old Witch the target of a successful assassination run:

Finally some shots of some nice looking minis, Nigels' Khador:

Nick's Khador:

Brian's Wrack:

There were some good looking armies there, Benesh' cryx were mostly, if not completely painted, some of the other armies were just newer and in various stages. Mostly, the pics I took of other models just didn't turn out, sorry guys!

Perry WotR plastics arrive!

2010-01-20T07:12:00.008-06:00

I got home today and sitting on my doorstep was a delivery from Age of Glory, 2 boxes of Perry War of the Roses plastics! Once I got settled in at home I tore open the box and started examining the content. I snapped some quick pictures but it was apparently darker in my hobby room than I anticipated so some of them aren't real clear and I apologize.

Each individual box was heavy compared to other manufacturers boxes of plastic miniatures. Extremely colorful and made from a thicker then normal cardboard as well.

As you can see, the back had some examples of livery coats and text explaining content.

I popped open the box and pulled out the sprues. The leaflet inside popped out and onto my lap so I examined that first. It contains some tips on assembling these miniatures, another shot of livery coat examples and more importantly some examples of flags from some of the important players during the war!

The box also includes a sprue of green bases which I believe are standard for perry plastic box sets. I'm not sure if they were designed for a specific game system or not but the sprue includes some that would be suitable for DBx games. Since I'm basing mine for Medieval Warfare, on 40x40's I won't be using these bases. I don't get enough of the 40x40's to base every fig and I prefer my stands all match so I'll be ordering from Litko. Nice bases though.

Finally, the sprues! The box comes with a total of 5 sprues. 2 small and 3 larger. The 2 small sprues hold the 4 Men of War, full harnessed figs that come in each box. It also comes with arms for banners, a trumpet and a couple of other things. They also contain several well armored heads, swords for attaching to belts and waists, two different kinds of arrow bits (arrows stuck in the ground and arrows in a bundle). My favorite bit in the box is probably the sword and buckler bit.

Finally the 3 large sprues are all identical. They contain 12 torsos each, arms for about 10 bowmen and 6 halberdiers plus 12 heads. One pleasant surprise was that the halberdier arms were mostly a single piece. All you had to so was trim from the sprue, add glue and slide into place.

I decided to spend the evening assembling what I could. It took me about 3 hours to get one full box of miniatures assembled. Archers are all two seperate arms, torso and head. Halberdiers are as mentioned above, mostly 1 arm/halberdier piece, toros and head, though a couple of the arm sets are seperate and slightly finicky since you're matching wrist to hand. Men at Arms were torso, two arms and a head.

Flash was non existant. I think there was one head I had to scrape a bit of flash from. Mold lines were also minimal and I didn't bother with most of the pieces. A few of the heads and arms needed some scraping but for the most part the torsos were clean enough to leave alone.

Detail is fantastic and one of the things I really like about these miniatures is that with the variation in parts provided and the ability to do some customization, you can get a lot of variability out of the look of these miniatures. Standing all my guys together on my hobby table, they had a real organic "living mass" look to them, and weren't too uniform. There are enough bits to keep it interesting but I used probably close to 85% of the pieces on all the sprues.

I also tried to get some shots of them next to my complete old glory figs but the camera ran out of juice! For size they are a nice match. I think there will be a noticeable difference, but not so much that you couldn't use them side by side.

Still chugging along

2010-01-19T06:58:00.002-06:00

I'm going to try to update as regularly as possible. I've approached my blog as requiring pictures in order to make worthy posts but I don't think it requires it. I am however shooting to get a solid camera in the next couple of months since half the reason I haven't been providing as many pictures is the girl keeps moving it to places I can't find it! (That's right, when in doubt, blame those you love!)

Last night I had some time but have a few issues with some of the projects I'm working on. My Quar assembly came to a screeching halt when my pin vice bit broke! The next size up that I have is too big for some of the pieces so I'm in a holding pattern until I can pick up another bit - probably tomorrow.

This coming weekend I have to run a Resurgence event for Warmachine and my LGS and that should be pretty awesome. Between adjudicating and observing and organizing games I'll probably try to get some more Retribution painted. Currently the only model I have unpainted for that army is small and shouldn't take more than about 3 hours.

Sunday is a big football game (Vikings-Saints!) so I'll probably get soemthing done but I haven't decided what. Most likely assembling more Quar since I'm almost done. However if WoTR comes in I may have to start in on those guys since I have a goal of spring for running A Coat of Steel.

Last night I pulled out some casting I made of some 15mm MaschinenKrieger stuff years ago. If you're not familiar with MaK 3K chck this site out: http://www.maschinenkrueger.com/joomla/

I recommend his old gallery site as it has pictures of tons of models. I've always liked Kow Yokoyamas' creations and thought they'd make great 15mm gaming fodder. A few years ago I sculpted up an SAFS and Gustav suits in 15mm. They turned out pretty good and I still have the molds. I also sculpted a Kangaroo, a larger heavier one man walker I liked the look of, and it turned out pretty good so I made a mold of that as well. Last time I worked on them I was in the middle of scratch building some legs for a couple of Kangaroo castings.

Since I'm pushing for 15mm this year I decided to return to that project and see what I could get done in fits and spurts. Most of it's pretty easy to sculpt up for gaming at that scale so hopefully by end of the year I havea nice selection of models sculpted, cast and ready to play!

I'll post some pics later this week of the models I do have from that line. Last night I assembled and based about 10 of them and I think they're going to make an awesome addition to my 15mm collection.

Balancing Act

2010-01-18T07:56:00.002-06:00

Haven't had many pictures to post recently though I've made some progress in the hobby area. Classes started back up and I find myself busier then normal. It's a balancing act between trying to learn and put forth an effort in class to make some progress, and trying to get everything else done.

This month has seen the release of Warmachine MkII from Privateer Press! I've spent my saturday evenings at a local game store running demos and playing games with people mostly new to the game itself. It's been a lot of fun. As part of this I've been pushing to get some Warmachine models painted. When the Retribution of Scyrah came out I knew I wanted to collect an army. what I didn't want to do is get bogged down with unpainted miniatures like I have with most other games lol. I made a promise to myself that I'd buy a model/unit, and then paint it before I bought my next model/unit. For the most part I've managed to stick to this and it's working fairly well. I have about a 30pt army ready to play and fully painted. It's not completely conmpetetive. I'd originally wanted to go with a mage hunter theme, using the tiered army format for the warcaster Kaelyssa. Unfortunately the releases haven't supported that and I ended up purchasing dawnguard sentinels and attachment and a couple of warjacks.

After playing a few games I realized that Kaelyssa really is an assasination caster that absolutely has to work with supporting units in order to get things done. She doesn't hit hard enough to go it on her own but with the support of the right solos and units to corner enemy warcasters, she could be nasty. Unfortunately I didn't have any of those for my first few games! While fun to play - and having played Khador almost exclusively since the game came out - I really like that they play different from anything I've used before. Troops with solid armor (ARm 17 in b2b contact) decent shooting and melee combat, arc nodes on both light and heavy jacks, and some nice spell lists makes them a lot of fun.

Yesterday I painted my second warcaster, Garryth. I spent the entirety of the Vikings game (A solid stomping over the Cowboys) painting this fig and the attention to detail really paid off. I think he's probably one of my best painted miniatures ever and I applied myself specifically to his face and it turned out surprisingly well. No pics unfortunately but I may try to get some tonight.

I'm also in the process of waiting for some Perry plastic War of the Roses figures. 2010 has become the "prefect storm" as far as WOTR is concerned. With Perry finally releasing their plastics recently and my discovery of the Perfect Captains free rules set A Coat of Steel/Crown of Paper, I finally have the complete motivation to attempt to finish a couple of armies in the hopes of getting some WOTR gaming in this year.

Quar Scout Car

2010-01-07T08:04:00.004-06:00

When I came across the Quar I was in a frenzy of scratch building. I'd done a few private commissions and really liked what Zombiesmith had going for potential Quar vehicles so offered to build something for him. He passed om images of his Scout Car and I went to work:

A couple of shots of the scout car next to a mechanic

Top 3/4 view. There's a gap in the bottom of the track I still can't figure out how it got there lol. It would be easy to fix I just haven't gone back to do it yet.

Top rear. I made the engine cover using some screen door mesh. I got the stuff for like 5$ a roll and I've used it for engine grills, floor decking and tons of other things.

Front shot, mean squat looking thing.

In Zombiesmiths original sketches, it also had large curved armored plates. The bottom of these plates covered the top half of the track, and they curved out over the car a little, giving it a neat look. I haven't got around to making those yet. At the time I had so much going on my plate I wasn't able to stay as consistant on this thing as I did with other projects, and am doing these days. Eventually Josh said they'd decided no to go with the design anyway (I think he was just being nice lol after my flaking out a few times on this thing.). It's too bad really, I think this thing works well with the Quar and I plan to make a few copies for my own collection.

Quar! - finally

2010-01-07T07:41:00.004-06:00

So a couple of years ago Josh Q (Zombiesmith: http://www.zombiesmith.com/ ) was showing off his Quar figures on TMP, and I instantly fell in love. They were in my opinion, truly unique. A whimsical creation that had a touch of reality. They reminded me a lot of something Ralph Bakshi would have done for Wizard's or some other creation of his. They instantly set off an explosion of ideas and concepts in my head and I knew I had to have some.

Once they came up for sell I order a pack or two, and when they arrived I assembled and painted them almost immediately. They were fantastic, and Josh was completel responsive and freindly to inquiries, and gave me a lot of insight into his creations.

Here are some shots of the original Quar minis I recieved a few years ago:

While they were fiddley to assemble - skinny arms and necks made for a lot of drilling and contact points that are extremely limited, they were a joy to paint. The detail on them is fantastic, Aaron Brown is the sculptor and he's done a fantastic job bringing these guys to life. I settled for a simple paint scheme, base coated them in olive drab, painted flesh, weapons and other details, then washed them in a dark brown, and went back to pick out some details. Didn't take too long to paint and turned out fantastic.

I then tucked them away for a while, I'd started classes again, and had all sorts of other crazy things going on in my life, Zombiesmith hadn't yet released they're rules, and while I had my own ideas for a rules set, I couldn't come up with anything satisfying.

A few days ago I was lining up planned projects for this year. With my 15mm moving along nicely, and my 20mm in a place where I can start finally playing with them on the table top, I decided it was time to dive head first into the Quar!

Last night I got home from work and spent several hours assembling the Crusader army box I'd ordered. I'd ordered these just on the cusp of going from multipart models to well, less pieced out models lol. Josh included a bag of the figures with arms already attached and they are fantastic. Slap on heads and details and you're ready to go:

That's most of the army box, with some close ups of the mortar team and and is-Caerten (officer). I'd also ordered a PykPyk squirrel handler (and squirrels) and 2 units of 5 Cav. I woke up early this morning and had soem time so started digging into the cavalry (which along with the infantry are fantastically unique and amazingly detailed) and managed to get two complete models done before I had to go shower for work.

One thing I have to add about these models is that there are a ton of extra details! Atleast last time I ordered you got 4-5 bodies plus arms in a baggie, and then equipment in a seperate baggie. the equipment I got was more than enough to add all the detail needed and still have a ton left over - which I plan to use for objective markers and scenery detailing.

If you haven't checked out the Quar yet, I highly recommend you head on over to Zombiesmiths site and check them out. In the last year or so he's come out with Royalist, and their army box plus extras is next on my list to order, once my Crusaders ar complete!

Star Wars 1:20,000

2010-01-04T08:33:00.003-06:00

About two years ago I started this tiny little Republic Cruiser. I got about 70% done and then as usual got distracted and sort of forgot about it.
Recently I came across the model and had it sitting on my desk. I also watched the first season of Clone Wars and got some inspiration, so sat down this weekend to finish the model and start on another concept.

There's some etching in the hull that isn't apparent in these pics but not a lot. At this scale alot of the hull lines and so on would not only be a huge pain to do properly, but I don't believe would really show up and appear in scale. I decided adding the major details, and bits to give it some texture would be just fine. I like the end result.

The rear is a little rough and I'm trying to figure out the best way to fix if. I had to use thin sheet for the hull on this thing and so ended up 'stuffing' it with green stuff to give it some strength and to fill out the trenches along the sides.

I have yet to do the engine tubes. I'm debating whether to just cast it as is, and do the tubes for each ship myself with styrene tubing, or try to premake some and cast them. Since I'm probably only going to do a run of these things for myself, I'll prob just do the engine tubes and command/control towers individually.

Finally, I started on the next ship. It is inspired by a ship out of the Clone Wars series. It's only in one episode and I couldn't find any pictures of it on the web. Effectively it appeared to be the front wedge of a Republic Star Destroyer wit the triple engine setup from the Republic Diplomatic ship (As seen in Episode 1). I thought it was an interesting look and figured it would make a good fast attack corvette or something.

New Year, Old Projects!

2010-01-04T08:20:00.003-06:00

Well the last half of December got crazy! I didn't get much modelling or gaming in and didn't have many updates for the ol' blog.

I managed to finally finish the 20mm farm house buildings I've ben working on. I think they turned out alright.

The big thing was working to get a "realistic" feel to them. I se a lot of middle eastern terrain done in that traditional smooth sand type structure and it always looks off to me. In fact, up until literally last week, I had yet to see one of those small squat structures with a dome on top that seems to be popular for terrain builders, in real life. I came across a picture of some americans patrolling in Iraq and they happen to be passing by one.

I guess ultimately I just prefer more "texture", and atleast in Iraq brick and mortar seems to be fairly popular.

I also wanted to focus on the beatup, dusty and run down appearance of a lot of these structures. Most look pretty rustic, especially out in the country side, but some are surprisingly rough even in the middle of some major urban centers and suburban sprawls. Lots of dust, rust and wear. The buildings I did are fairly simple so there wasn't much detail I could bring out of them.

I based them in gray primer, then used a small sponge to dab on the Iraqi Sand color until I got enough coverage to make it look like the brick was the same color as most of the dirt and dust that would cling to the walls. I painted the tin roof and siding in a subdued metal, added some rust streaks and then when that dry, finally sponged a little of the Iraqi Sand over top. I like the way they turned out!

Holiday Blues

2009-12-14T09:21:00.002-06:00

The households all in an tussle due to the holidays and whatnot so I'm not getting a lot done. On top of that I started my first week of the winter quarter last week and so haven't settled into a rhythm with that as well.

I did manage to sit down this past sunday and do some painting. I started on the 20mm buildings I've been working on, no pictures yet. I also started work on a unit of Warmachine Retribution minis and will be posting pics of that as well as the buildings, hopefully complete by the end of the week.

Sagittarius strider from DP9

2009-12-11T07:51:00.010-06:00

Hey all, 20mm Modern buildings are on the spray booth, base coated! It's cold here and my booth is in the basement where it's colder than the rest of the house. Takes longer for the spray to dry so I sprayed them after dinner and decided to get some work done on something else. Having not got any material for 15mm yet (I know slacker right?) I decided to put together a model I recently purchased, Dream Pod 9's Sagittarius Strider for the Southern Armies!

Pictures of the model complete. This thing is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of the Heavy Gear setting and appearance. This is probably one of my favorite models, and while I love the gears, I think the Striders tend to be more unique in appearance.
One thing to note: The base it comes with is too small in my opinion. The "toes" totally hang off the edge of the base. I decided to use an extra GW Dreadnought base for mine and that worked out well.

Below are shots of the pieces as they come in the package:

A shot of all the pieces straight out of the box. Flash was to be expected on all pieces and I found for the most part that the sprues were well done.

Torso and feet. The torso had a line of flash along the center running the length of it. The top wasn't too bad but the bottom needed some cleanup, filing and scraping with a sharp knife. It cleaned up alright. I may have to do some minor gap filling.
The feet only really had flash on the bottom. There's a semi-sphere in the middle of the bottom of each foot that requires some shaving and filing and you have to be careful doing this so you don't ruin the toes.

Another shot of the feet. A little care needed to be taken cutting the tabs off the bottom of the feat. The feet are thin and while the resin is somewhat flexible, it's also brittle. I had no problem removing it, but I've worked a lot with resin before and knew what to expect.

These are the legs. They attach to the feet in a nice socket that is tight enough to prefit for different poses. They also attach to the hips and can be rotated there as well. Unfortunately the knees are not flexible so you would need to do some work to get them to pose at the knees. I found the positioning was dynamic enough that I didn't want to bother.

Weapon Sprues. I haven't played Blitz locked and loaded, and I've never played with the Sagittarius so I wasn't sure what "normal" loadout was. The picture on the packaging has it with just the center missile pod, however the art on the datacard has all three missile pods and I liked that look so went with that. The mini also comes with a double cannon/grenade launcher looking thing but I didn't like the balance of the mini with it mounted so skipped it.

I messed up a little on the rocket pods but my excuse would be that I was running on about 5 hours of sleep! Anyway, I assumed that the rocket pod faces that come on the one sprue, attach to the back of the rocket pods to give them a through and through look. The funny thing was, when I did the first pod, the little tab on the back of the rocket pod face didn't match up at all, so I ended up shaving it off, then shaving off the little tabs on the back of the pod before gluing it on. Having done that, I went to do the next pod and noticed I didn't have enough faces to attach to pods and realized to my embarrassment that two of the pods just need one face each! Unfortunately, I couldn't do anything to get the face off of the back of the pod I already glued on (the nice thing about glueing resin is that it sticks real nice!). So now I have one pod with "two fronts" but I have a fluff concept for saving face lol.

All in all, I really liked assembling this model! The resin was eays to work with and the flash wasn't too bad for a resin cast. The missile pods were a little rough but nothing a solid coat of paint won't fix. I thin once it's assembled it's an impressive looking model that stands close to twice as tall as some gears!
This was my first DP9 resin model, everthing else I own is in metal but I'm looking forward to working with more resin pieces!

Life, work, school, etc...

2009-12-10T06:38:00.003-06:00

Hey all, sorry, no updates this week. It's the first week of our winter quarter and on top of that we've had a huge snow storm which has put a kink in being able to get anything done. I'm exhausted but may try to do a little more work on the 20mm stuff, maybe even try to get it painted tonight!

20mm Iraqi Farm terrain.

2009-12-07T07:00:00.006-06:00

The good news for those of you waiting to see more 15mm terrain is thst I should be picking some material up tomorrow to start on the next building!

I had some time yesterday and decided to see what I could get done for my modern terrain. I've decided as a playtesting scenario for my 20mm rules, I'll be focusing on a rural farm. The scenario is based around the idea that US forces have recieved intel on the location of an important "personality" designtaed 'Objective Gold'. It means US forces, while having the edge in firepower will need tobe careful in order to catch their objective alive. The Scenario is designed to allow a mix of smal forces for playtesting and an introduction to the game.

There are three main buildings to the farm.

Two of these buildings I finished a week ago and posted pics of. The third building which I finished yesterday is the main farm house:

It's not as rough as some Iraqi farm houses I've seen, similar to suburban houses, though smaller. I tried to give it a more rustic feel by making the doors a little rough, and covering some of the windows with cloth (using green stuff).

I also created two brick walls. Brick walls seem to be a common theme in Iraq. Their cities have them all over the place. In urban environments they created a serious obstacle for allied troops during the war. I needed more 'hard' cover so decided to go with one large wall and one small wall.

This should provide plenty of cover. I'll be adding some small bits of clutter, horse drawn cart, rubbish piles, maybe a small outhouse, but otherwise the main buildings are done. I want to do some fencing too, classic wood fences for aesthetic reasons. After that it's just a matter of buying some palm trees to add atmosphere.

I haven't decided whether I need to build a table for this. I don't honestly have a lot of room for storage and the group I'd play this game the most with has some really nice tables for 15mm WWII that would work just as well for this. We'll see I guess!

Current Project Progress

2009-12-04T08:15:00.004-06:00

It's been a busy week. The girl and I have a dinner party to prepare for, plus other holiday complications have set in to make it hard for me to get down to the hobby room as much as I wanted too.Next week I start winter classes but should be able to settle into a steady pace.

Last night I took about an hour to sift through what materials I have and what I need. I don't have thick enough sheet styrene to start my next 15mm building yet, and probably won't be able to pick some up until next week sometime.

After taking a brief inventory, I did pull together some scrap and begin work on my next 20mm modern Iraqi house. typically I'd probably want to use thicker stock then I have, but in this case I can use thinner stock and just reinforce it with a layer of brick textured styrene.

I'm working on something like this:

http://www.michaeltotten.com/images/Trash%20and%20Houses%20Sadr%20City.jpg

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_c9QK9GVZnB4/SEv_ybYRWtI/AAAAAAAABCo/ldZsfRHGYXA/100_1624.JPG

I'm shooting for a more squared off, modern look. I know some manufacturers do the mud daub, dome topped houses, but I haven't honestly seen a whole lot of those in pictures I've studied of Iraq except in rural areas. Since I'm trying to shoot for more urban regions I'm aiming for more modern looking structures.

The overriding details on these types of structures are:

- a larger lower floor with a secon, and sometimes 3rd floor that is smaller in area. The bottom floor roof appears to often provide a sort of deck area and from what I understand, on hot nights Iraqi families often sleep on these 'decks'

- Small, square offshoots that tend to stick out of the sides of these buildings.

- Looking at pictures of places like Fallujah, windows are often covered in blankets. I assume this is probably due to damage to windows but I'm told from a combat perspective these acted as 'hides' for snipers and ambushes.

- Urban houses had courtyards that were surrounded by concrete or block walls. I've determined that I'll probably build each structure with these walls attached for ease of portability.

Originally I was planning on engineering these structures for casting. Doing that takes extra time and atleast currently I'd like to focus that energy on completing my line of 15mm structures.

I'll post pictures early next week of work I'm currently working on. Christmass stuff has delayed getting my first structure cast up but I promise work will move forward on that soon

Playing fun games, crunching the numbers and differing play styles.

2009-12-03T09:45:00.001-06:00

I was discussing my rules with a friend the other night and he had a good question for me. He’s not quite the hobbyist I am. I don’t mean that as a boast, I just mean I’ve dedicated a large portion of my time to my “gaming hobby”, he has not. He started gaming by playing Magic, and moved to 40K. Recently he’s picked up AT-43. He’s used to “fair and balanced” games and I think his question was a good one.
He asked, “If your game has no points system, how do you stop an opponent from ‘traiting-up’?”. His concern was, what’s to stop someone from applying tons of traits to make uber units. This lead into a discussion on types of games, number crunching and what I do and don’t like about certain types of games.
My answer to his question, was “There’s nothing to stop someone from creating uber units.” However, I pointed out that someone who seriously showed up to the table to play a game like that probably wouldn’t get a game out of me. Doing that indicates to me that a person like that doesn’t really understand the goal of the game.
First, I have to declare, I’m not a huge fan of tournament based gaming systems. I play them on occasion, and even enjoy them, but I find that they tend to encourage bad gamer behavior in some. Ultimately, they tend to turn historical games into a joke. I’ve seen more Flames of War games where lines of Tigers and King Tigers, hub to hub in lines across the length of the battlefield face off against lines of hub to hub t-34’s and K-1’s. The war wasn’t fought this way but the game tends to promote some pretty ridiculous scenarios on the table.
I don’t attend any tourney based gaming events, but I hear a lot of complaining about the bizarre behavior that goes on at these events. I know a few local players who take some pride in “creatively” interpreting the rules during these types of events just to see what they can slip past the judges and other players. I have attended several gaming conventions that involve games based around scenario play, and while there’s always the bad egg when human beings gather in groups, my impression is that these types of events tend to draw more “fun”. I’m not saying people don’t enjoy or have fun at more competitive events, but from my point of view, I hear less complaining about non-competitive events and the behavior surrounding those.
The rules I’ve been working on for various settings are geared towards fun, scenario based play. My best experiences have been with games like this around a table of friends, and so those are the types of games I gravitate towards. Do they have their own set of complications? Absolutely. I’ve seen the occasional heated argument over the sudden appearance of units that weren’t originally included in specific scenarios, and of course you get players occasionally creatively interpreting rules or situations to their advantage. More so I’ve found these types of games tend to set a relaxed precedent. That gamers who can wrap their heads comfortably around the idea that you don’t need points or “balanced” armies to have fun games, tend to relax more when playing these games and can roll with the peculiarities they present.
Ultimately I’m really just writing these rules for me. I know how I enjoy playing games and the next logical step just seems to be writing rules sets I’m mostly happy with and hoping I find a few people who might also be happy with them. Or at least allow me to inflict my rules on them on occasion!

15mm Rules Electronic Warfare and Reserves

2009-12-03T07:53:00.003-06:00

One of the things I definitely wanted to include in a 15mm scifi game was electronic warfare. It's been a part of real warfare for decades now but it's rarely seen in science fiction gaming.
In this case I wanted to reflect localized effects. I may decide to include more far ranging effects as time goes on but for now I'm keep it localized.

Electronic Warfare

A unit with the EW trait may choose to take an EW action during it's activation. There are two different kinds of EW actions, offensive actions and defensive actions.

All Offensive EW attacks start with a to hit score of 5+. The activating units EW trait will have a Strength rating that that they apply as a modifier to the base to hit number. For example, a unit with an EW rating of 2 would need a 3+ in order to hit with any of its EW attacks. Attacks are rolled on a D6

Offensive EW attacks are used for a couple of different things.
- Negating Electronic fields or weapons.
- Choosing a freindly unit in LoS that all attacking units must apply a +1 to hit with (positive modifers are bad since they increase the to hit number)
- Choosing an Enemy unit in LoS that all attacking units apply a -1 on their to hit rolls.
- Negating Defensive EW

An EW unit may choose to go with a DEfensive EW action instead of an offensive one. In this case a straight up roll for success is made with a target numkber of 4+. If the rol is successful, then all freindly units withn 10x EW Strength in cm are +1 to hit for the rest of that round.

Reserves

I really liked the direction Rackham goes with their reserves rules in AT43 so decided to go with something similar.

Since the game is scenario based, each scenario will determine if, and what percentage of a players forces should be put in reserve. Some scenarios may even lay out a rough indication of how many and of what type a players units are, and which of those units should be in reserve.

Ove the course of a game a player may accrue Reserve Points. Types of units will be assigned RP costs by the scenario. As the player acrues RP, he may purchase Reserves to deploy in the following round. Players accrue RP several different ways:

- Objectives marked int eh scenario can be captured for a certain number of RP. to capture an objective the player must have the most number of figures/units within 6cm for the objective.

- Hold the Objective. A player may hold a captured objective by mainting a numerical advantage in figures or units within 6cm of an objective, in the rounds following the capturing of an objective. Note that once an objective is captured by a side, it cannot be "re-captured" by that side, even if it loses the objective. Any round after capturing the objective the player is considered to be holding it. Each side may capture an objective once.

- Players automatically accrue a minimum number of RP each round.

- A player is awarded a number of RP equal to the RP cost of any enemy unit they destroy.

Once a player has accrued enough points to purchase units, he may choose to spend those points when and as he sees fit, as long as he purchase whole units. Once a unit has been purchased the unit must be put into the activation rotation. A player can choose however to hold onto RP points until a later round, and is not required to spend them the round they are recieved.

At this point, thast's about it! I'm hoping to begin some serious playtesting this month. I'm sure things will change some, and I'm also sure we will be adding new rules. My goal is to have a few months of solid playtesting then move on to creating scenarios. Of course each scenario will have to be playtested as well but I hope to have the rules set "complete" by mid summer.

If you see any glaring holes, or have any ideas you think you'd like to see added I'd love to hear them!

15mm Rules - Morale and Motivation

2009-12-01T10:29:00.000-06:00

I consider morale and motivation to be key to any solid wargame. There's a balance to be held between the suicidal tendencies of gamers to throw troops and equipment at a problem that flies in the face of real world doctrine or rationale, and effectively letting the game run itself.

In my favorite WWII rules the effect ios that troops under certain conditions have to be motivated to act. I've followed these concepts with my own rules.

Troops make Quality Checks to motivate under certain conditions:

- When losing a close assault
- When they have taken fire in the round before they activate
- When "assaulted" by vehicles
- When being issued Special orders
- When the unit is down to 25% of it's members
- When a unit wishes to Close Assault

If a unit fails a Quality Check for any ofthese reasons the only actions it can take are to hold and shoot, or evade and move without getting closer to the enemy than they already are.

Quality is a rating between 1 and 6 with lower scores being better Quality. Quality checks are made on a single D6 with a successful roll being equal to or higher than the units QR (Quality Rating). I'm shooting for all dice rolls being "good" when rolling high.

Leaders are given a Quality modifier typically between -2 and +2 that the player adds to the roll if the leader is assigned to the unit or has the Command Presence Trait.

20mm infantry

2009-11-30T18:55:00.002-06:00

So I managed to sit down and snap a few pictures of my infantry. Some of the pictures are dark, I really need to setup a light box for this, or atleast move some lamps lol. These are all Liberation minis and they're fantastic.

Just couple of individual soldiers. Top guy is carrying an M16 with grenade launcher. Bottom guy is an officer. You'll notice it's early Iraqi war, a mix of forest green camo and desert camo. I thought it would break up the sand color a little.

All of my US Infantry were really easy to paint. I basically sprayed them in a sand color, added detail, like green bits, camo, and black on weapons - flesh on face and hands. Then I dipped these guys in a walnut shade. Probably paint about 20 of these guys in an hour!

Couple of shots of a squad. You can see Lineration does a good job of putting these guys in various dynamic positions. I'd guess I have a couple of more poses too, some of them lying down or whatnot.

Iraqi soldier carrying an RPG. Sorry it's a little dark.

Again, a little dark. These guys were easier to paint then the US Infantry! Olive drab, some flesh, black on weapons and a little brown for AK's and dip!

Some Feyadeen Saddam. I remember seeing a video of these guys marching at the start of the war. They were all in brand new white sneakers and so most of my Feyadeen are as well! Again, easy to paint, base coat black, color sand, add some flesh, shoes and guns, no dipping necessary!

More Feyadeen...

Some generic Insurgent types. These guys could be used for just about any African country. I bought them to use for Iraq as well as say Somalia. I used colors on these guys to make them stick up.

Mor Militia/Insurgents.

I have more. Tons more Iraqi troops, some more Americans. I know I have a squad or two of Dboys, and more feyadeen carrying heavier weapons. All in all I"m happy with Liberation minis. I plan to do some eastern european troops down the road for a Russians/Chechen warfare.

20mm modern

2009-11-29T19:38:00.012-06:00

So I spent some time trying to engineer my next 15mm structure. It wasn't working for me and I need to rethink my approach. I think I have a solid idea but didn't havethe materials so decided to work on something else.
For a few years now I've been collecting things for some 20mm modern warfare. I have a couple of companies of Americans of various sorts, plus nearly twice as many Iraqi soldiers and insurgents.
I've taken pictures of some of the stuff I've collected, but more importantly I decided to start on some terrain. It's the one thing I've really been missing and decided to see if I can't get together enough to put on a small scenario game. Pictures below:

All the roofs come off for what should be obvious reasons. I'm aiming for a real urban combat feel and want units to be able to move through buildings and houses whenever possible.

I think the ket to giving everything a realistic feel is to make it look beat up, weathered and on occasion, battle damaged. It's hard to see (I'm learning to use my camera still lol) but I have some patching on the roof I think will help add texture. I'll add some more details this week to help out on the appearance.

A quick shot of one of my american soldiers in front of the shack for scale. I believe he is a Liberation mini, most of my 20mm minis are. They're fantastic miniatures and Liberation has a great line.

you can see I "shuttered" one of the windows with some steel siding. Having gone over tons of pictures of urban combat zones, mostly in Iraq and eastern europe, the thing that stuck out was that everything is so beat up and worn. It's not just battledamagem so much as a sign of the poverty of these areas. I think it definitely adds texture, and solid weathering will reallt bring the stuff home.

A shot of both the shacks I did. Technically the larger one is more like a storage, or work space. These are next to my Liberation mini American and a Forces of Valor 1:72nd scale Bradley IFV.

A shot of the roughly 1:72nd scale vehicles I've collected so far. The 2 VW vans are specifically 1:72nd, the others are roughly that scale, slightly larger. I may end up using some of the SUV for blackwater type vehicles, but I definitely plan to weather these as well. Most of them are a series of vehicles I believe are called "Action Packs". Bradley IFV for scale.

Some Opfor vehicles. The T-72 tanks are Forces of Valor. You can get these in the US at Target and Wal Mart on occasion, for about 5-7$. Same with the Bradley IFV in the bove pictures. The T-55/62? and the BMP's are resin models from a line of miniatures that were being sold at Little Wars Chicago a few years back. I cannot recall the name of the company however! Those models need to be finished.

Above are pictures of a 1:72nd Apache. This was a model kit I got for around 15$. Took me an evening to assemble and paint and I think it turned out really well. The top picture is the helo on one of my custom made helo stands, a telescoping rod with a magnet on the end, and a large rubber stopper on the bottom.

Above are some pictures of my American motorpool. green Bradleys, lighter colored BRadley's and the Abrams with the plow, 3 LVTP-7's, and about 8-10 HMMV's of various sorts are all Dragon models, prepainted. I can get them locally for about 11$ a piece. The 'greenish' abrams and Bradleys are Forces of Valor. Dragons are defintiely much better in quality but the forces of valor are solid, and cheaper!

15mm rules question

2009-11-27T07:08:00.002-06:00

I can't respond to Comments at the moment and kobold had a good question I thought I'd respond to.

"With the Primary Unit Activation method - does the player have to pass a CA roll to activate the unit when its card comes up, or does the unit activate automatically unless the player passes a CA roll when he can then delay the activation (effectively putting the unit on 'Overwatch'?"

Units activate automatically however, if they have come under fire this turn AND want to do something but stand and shoot you'll need to make a CA. You effectively need to motivate a unit to do anything but respond to incoming fire if they are indeed coming under fire. If they have not been harrassed this turn they're free to activate as normal.

15mm Rules - Part 2 COMBAT!

2009-11-26T07:10:00.002-06:00

Ranged Combat is fairly simple.

Target is declared, range and Line of Sight are determined.
Attacker adds up total firepower for the unit attacking in D6.
Base to hit is 3+
Modifiers for Model in cover, target evading, infantry at long range, attacker evading and attacker in Overwatch. Modifiers are added to the base 3+ raising the number needed to score hits.
Attacker rolls dice, everything that equals or exceeds the target number, hit.

Area of Affect Weapons and Indirect weapons

For indirect or AoE weapons, the player picks a spot he wishes to target. This spot does not need to be another miniature, just a point on the table. Modifiers are added for longe range if necessary, and for being indirect. Direct, AoE type weapons roll with normal modifiers applied.

If the attacker hits, then the weapon takes effect at the designated location. If the attacker misses, roll 2D6 in cm and a "scatter die" (I recomend a D10 with the top point being the direction the weapon scatters.

AoE type weapons can be combined for greater effect. In this case the player declares he's using multiple weapons on the same target. This is always considered to be an indirect attack. One roll is made with misses scattering as above. Each weapon adds from 1-3cm on the radius of the weapon and each weapon after the first adds half it's firepower to the damage roll.

To determine damage to targets, the attacker rolls total number of FirePower for the weapon(s) and applies hits to soft targets in the AoE. If there are any armored targets then a single penetration roll is made using the weapons Anti-Armor against the target.

Overwatch

During a units activation it may be put on overwatch. A unit cannot move if it goes into overwatch and will not fire during it's activation. Instead, the unit may elect to fire at an enemy unit during THAT units activation instead. The attacker elects to fire at the beginning or end of the target units activation, and applies modifiers as apropriate.

Determine Damage

Applying damage to non-power armored infantry, simply apply each hit from an attack as a kill. Units with power armor and some power fields may be allowed a save against damage. In this case the defender distributes hits to models in the target unit evenly. Assign a hit to each target in the model unit until all hits have been applied evenly to all available targets, then make saves per model.

Against vehicles it works differently. If a player scores multiple hits on an armored target or vehicle (other than infantry), the player adds up the total number of hits for each individual weapon, and applies each hit past the first to the weapons Anti-Armor rating. Add that number to a D6 (maybe 2D6 still needs to be tested) and compare to the Armor Rating fo the vehicle. If the roll exceeds the AR then add the Margin of Success (total number rolled over the targets AR) to a D6 roll and compare it to a vehicle damage roll. Higher on the vehicle damage table is better for the attacker, obviously.

Close Assault

to initiate a close assault, the attacking unit must make base to base contact with the enemy. One or more stands must make contact, all other models in the unit that are within 5cm of the target unit on an assault may contribute to the melee.

Unless otherwise noted, all units hit in an assault on a 5+. Each player rolls simultaneously and adds up their total number of hits, applying those as kills against the enemy unit.

The side that scored the most hits wins the combat and forces a motivation check on their enemy. If the unit fails its motivation it must immediately fall back double its move distance towards it's deployment zone. The next turn that unit will need to make another check or fall back in the same fashion, and each turn after until it successfully makes a test or runs off the table.

15mm Rules Part 1

2009-11-25T07:04:00.003-06:00

Deployment

Once players have assembled an army, they should have an overall commander. This commander will have a Command Authority rating and among other things, is used to determine who siezes the intiative during deployment.
Each Player rolls a D6 and adds their Commanders CA to the roll. Highest roll deploys his first unit onto the table. From there players alternate deploying units of troops until both have no more standard deployment troops to deploy.
Units that have Advanced deployment may then be deployed, starting with the player that won the initial CA roll. Advanced Deployed Units cannot be placed within 20cm of an enemy unit.

In some cases units may be held in reserve for later deployment as dictated by the scenario or the controlling player. To deploy Reserve units, a player must accumulate Reserve Deployment Points, or RDP's. The main ways to do this are through capturing objectives, and destroying enemy units. Objectives are either rolled randomly or determined by the scenario and the destruction of enemy units is worth so many RDP based on a chart in the rules.

Unit Activation

There are two types of activation. The second is for large group games and essentially allows all players on both sides to activate simultaneously by moving all units first, then performing fire. All fire in this case is considered to be simultaneous unless otherwise noted. It sounds tricky at first but I've been playing this way with a group in our WWII games for a few years now and it works fine.

The Primary way, meant more for 2-4 players is to put all of your unit cards into a stack, randomly shuffled, then draw the top card and activate that type of unit on the table. I have yet to decide whether this means to activate all units of the type, or a single unit of the type at once.

Players may use Command Authority checks to alter the way this works. When a player flips a card he may choose to make a Command Authority Test. If he fails this test the unit fails to activate at all and play passes to the next player.
If he passes, he can choose a couple of different options. The first is to simply put the flipped card on the bottom of the deck and flip a new card. The second is to play the unit flipped AND flip the next card and play that as well. Finally, the third is to hold the activated card in reserve. In this case the unit is not activated but the player holds the card in reserve until he decide he wants to activate it, instead of flipping a card on one of his folowing activations.

Movement

Movement is fairly straight forward. I'm using the metric system, specifically centimeters for measurments in the game and all units move according to their movement stat. Different types of units react differently to certain types of terrain, so walkers/infantry may be more flexible than say tracked or wheeled vehicles, while tracked or wheeled vehicles may have options for moving much faster in clear terrain.
Units may also choose to "Evade" during movement. This indicates the unit is juking and dodging across the battlefield, making it harder to hit, but in return making it harder for the unit itself to hit targets.

As I said, it's all still a work in progress. Tomorrow I'll start going over Combat!

15mm Rules, the basics

2009-11-24T07:34:00.002-06:00

As promised, here's a run down of the basic mechanics in a rough and ready format.

Rolling high is good - all rolls are based on a D6. Some rolls may use 2D6
Like most small scale games, weight of fire is measured in multiple D6's. Weapons will have a FirePower like rating that will typically be between 1 and 8 D6. It's a "bucket of dice" type game
A minimum of modifiers, typically long range, cover, targets 'evading' and firing unit in overwatch
Rules for: Drop Pods and Jump Troops, Orbital Bombardments, Aircraft attacks and AA, Electronic warfare, reserves, defense shields/screens, power armor and a few more things I haven't yet come up with!
For one on one play, a card based turn sequence where the active player flips a card and activates that unit. Once they are done the next player flips a card and activates the unit. Multiplayer games will be simultaneous activations.

Here's a breakdown of what stats will be included on unit cards:

1. Quality - This is an indicator of the quality of the troops in the unit. Typically this is a generic rating that combines things such as aggressiveness of troops, to the training of troops. For example, lower qualities may indicate better trained troops, or just more aggressive troops. higher Quality ratings indicate poorly trained or motivated troops.
2. Command - Leaders will be marked with a command stat (Trait?) This would be a bonus and not a score for Quality checks or die rolls.
3. Firepower - Units have two types of firepower ratings indicated by "number/number". The first number would be the units general anti-infantry score, while the second number is the units anti-armor score. A unit may not have both numbers.
4. Assault - This is the number of dice each model in the unit gets for Close Assault attacks.
5. Movement - this is an indicator of how far in centimeters the unit moves during the movement phase.
6. Fire Discipline - A unit with Fire discipline gains and extra die to its Firepower for every 5 dice it already has. This indicates the units ability to apply its training in combat. (Possible Trait instead)
7. Type - Type of unit it is - Infantry, vehicle, etc...
8. Weapons - This is a list of the weapons the unit has, single firepower of that type of weapon, and range the weapon is effective to.
9. Equipment - This is a list of miscellaneous equipment the unit might have and what that equipment's effects are. This would include things like shields or EW equipment.
10. Armor Rating - This will be found primarily on vehicles and some heavily armored troops and is the number an anti-vehicle attack must beat in order to damage the unit.
11. Mass - for vehicles and giant creatures only, this is used to determine collateral or ramming damage. (undecided on this)

Here's a set of preliminary Traits I've come up with with many many more yet to be determined.

1. Fire Discipline - A unit with Fire discipline gains and extra die to its Firepower for every 5 dice it already has. This indicates the units ability to apply its training in combat.
2. Motivational - a unit with a Command stat that is also motivational may sacrifice its activation in order to allow 2 units to make QC rolls.
3. Ablative - a unit that has this trait completely ignores the first hit it takes.
4. Sniper - a unit with Sniper always has a -1 to firing tests and can fire it's weapon at up to 3 times its base range
5. Infiltrator - a unit with this trait deploys after all normal deployment per the infiltration rules.
6. Engineer - a unit with the engineering special trait may demolish a structure or remove a minefield with a special action.
7. Aggressive - a unit with this trait does not have to take QC for assaults, but must always make an assault when available.
8. Hardened Electronics - This unit is never affected by EW
9. Electronic Warfare - a unit with this trait may make EW attacks.
10. Holofield (E) - unit is always considered to be evading and does not take a modifier for this.
11. Defensive Screen - Unit always gets cover. Can be E generated
12. Ejector - a unit with this trait has some sort of ejection weapon system, flamers, plasma flamers, globs of nano-wire, etc. These weapons all make attacks within a certain number of cm, and will remove models starting with those closest to the attacking model.
13. Cold Blooded – Unit cannot make a double move, but is not affected by morale and motivation effects from unit losses.
14. Blood Frenzy – Unit never loses a close combat (loss = a tie). If the unit causes more wounds in a round of close combat than there are enemies, the Blood Frenzied unit will take the excess wounds.
15. Near sighted – Units are +2 for long range attacks

Over the next week I'll be posting on sections of the rules I have written, providing more detail for each aspect of the game. So far I'm fairly happy with what I haver and I believe it's moving in the right direction. I can't claim it's completely original or even really innovative but it's a set of rules that will play the way I want to play or as some of our local clubs tshirts allude to "Let me win the way I want to win" :D

15mm Rules

2009-11-24T07:18:00.002-06:00

So I've mentioned writing my own rules for 15mm and starting today I'm going to post bits and pieces of them to give people an idea of where I'm going with the whole thing,

The reason I'm writing rules at all, with all the great options out there, is that this year I've chosen 15mm gaming to be my major project, complete in 3 parts. The first is armies. My goal by this time next year is to have 4 nice sized armies. What that really means, I don't know but my local gaming group puts on huge 15mm WWII games and I'd like to to do the same for scifi.

The second part is terrain. I have about 6-10 pieces of terrain I want to get built and cast up. It's not a money making endeavour so much as I'm an aesthetic gamer and I really like my battlefields to look good. Right now 15mm terrain is somewhat limited so I thought I'd help expand a little.

Finally, a set of homebrew rules. I've written a few in the past. I have a set for 20mm modern I like but have yet to be playtested with any thoroughness. Right now I want the challenge of writing up a set of rules that's fun to play, and meets all of my expectations for a solid 15mm scifi game.

That said, here are the concepts I am working to translate over to my rules set:

Ease of play - I want to play large games in a few hours. Our 15mm rules allow us to play around 30 tanks to a side +/-, and a couple of hundred infantry for very large games. all in about 3-4 hours.
Simple set of core rules, with interesting detail added through a traits system. To put it simply, the core rules should only be a couple of pages long, tops. They should be easy to teach and people shouldbe comfortable running their own game after the first round or two. The real detail is going to come in with the trait system, These will be "descriptors" that alter the way a unit may play during the game. for example, I've already determined my Karks are going to have "Blood Frenzy" and "Near Sighted", both based of common beliefs or myths around sharks. Blood Frenzy allows them to never fail in a melee attack so the worst result they can get is a tie. However, if they cause more wounds than enemies to take those wounds, then those wounds are transferred to the Kark Unit itself. Near Sighted just means they can't hit crap at longer ranges.
Complete. I want it to include rules for Electronic Warfare, combined arms including artillery and aircraft or orbital bombardments, etc.
I want to steer away from a points based system. I know, why the hell would I do that?! LOL, well the set of WWII rules we use are scenario based, no points anywhere in the set, and I've found it to be an interesting and fun time. For a game with traits, it might seem like a weird choice but this game is going to be played by myself and some freinds, and all of the people I game with are nice enough, and smart enough to not try to compress so many traits into an army they want to build as to make it no fun. Ultimately I'll write a series of scenarios that will be available for people to use along wit the rules but I think most reasonable gaming groups should be able to take my rules and have some fun with them. If you're into "fair" gaming then they prob won't be for you.

I think with the stuff I have written now I'm heading in the right direction. My next post will be an intro to the mechanics and some basic concepts.

PS - For some reason I can't currently comment on my own posts! If you post a comment please know I'm not ignoring you and should have this resolved shortly. I'm alwasy looking for input and look forward to anything people want to comment on.

Karks done!

2009-11-23T08:09:00.006-06:00

I got to sit down yesterday while watching the Vikings kick Seattle in the pants and finish my Karks. It was a fantastic victory for both the Vikes as well as myself!

Karks are done! sort of lol. Technically I need to triple the amount of infantry I have and I'd like to have about 15-20 tanks and troop carriers, plus some of the little recon vehicles recently done by Khurasan.

Kark Tanks:

I wanted to give them sort of a natural "shark" look. There are some sand sharks atthe MN zoo that are a brown with black spots so I went for that look. I also added a little sprinkling of smaller two layer dots, sorta of like US chicolote chip camo patterns. The bottoms of the hulls and turrets are grey.

Kark Infantry:

These guys were basically a disaster lol. They looked great when I base coated and blocked all the colors in. Then I used a stain that was too dark and not thinned down enough! This meant I basically had to go back and touch up a lot of the colors, so more work than I wanted to do but lessons learned. The nice thing about 15mm is it doesn't take much so they'll be fine, next batch will be much better.

My first Kark QRF:

Next Order for Karks in coming! I'm trying to balance them out so that by the time I'm nearly finished with my next 15mm building, I'l get my next batch of minis in the mail and they'll be ready to paint!.

Pr-Fab 100% Complete!

2009-11-23T07:46:00.003-06:00

Last weekend I decided to make just a few more changes on the prefab to give it some more texture.

I added a second mechanical/electrical module in the back of the building to sort of balance out the texture and I think it works well.

I also added seams along the length of the building for texture and I really like how it turned out.

This thing is done! There are still some details to be worked out for casting and I hope to have news after Thanksgiving this week.

I'll also be starting the next building this week!

Thoughts on why GW is so controversial

2009-11-20T06:46:00.002-06:00

Recenty GW has recieved a lot of bashing due to several cease and desist letters going out to websites who are technically breaking their IP rules. There are people on both sides of the fence on this issue. Some GW apologists pointing out they are just doing what any good business would do, while others are pointing out that it's just another punch in the gut to GW's fanbase. I think the truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.

I grew up playing rogue trader. I remember boxes of 20-30 plastics running about 19$ US, vehicles too. Of course the lines were small and extremely limited but hey, it was a fun game and they were, for the time, some nice miniatures.

The problem arises when GW hit upon the fact that they basically had a captive audience. No one else was really producing a solid scif line of miniatures or rules. They existed, but not to the extent that 40K did. Once they figured this out (and I whole heartedly believe decisions following this 'epiphany' were consciously made to make money, period) it kicked off a series of unfortunate and honestly disgusting business practices that has since tarnished their name.

Effectively, you can't spend 12-15 years making bad public relations calls like cutting out online stores, and ever increasing price hikes for no good reason (GW never provided reasons that held any water) or edition changes in a cycle that left some armies out of the loop for nearly a decade. all of this is still going on, however at the very least GW has begun to provide a better product in my opinion, in their miniatures kits.

So you spend that 12-15 years really punching your fanbase in the gut, then when you go on to do something that might actually make some business sense, it's seen as the same. I think it's been earned by the company.

Here's the other real kicker that I think underlines the inherent flaw in falling back on legalese to support you as a 'good' person. You can choose to send cease and desist letters to everyone you need to. It's off putting, and somewhat intimidating, and maybe it's meant to be. OR you can get someone with some personal skills to send off a nice email, make a call or whatever else to say 'hey, we really appreciate you supporting our products with your website. Unfortunately to protect our IP we had to provide some rules for how people could use our trademarked names, and the domain name you're using violates this. We'd really appreciate you changing it to something that does not violate our policy. Thanks for your support.'

I'm going to guss that's going to look a lot better and get a better response than something more official. It also gives you the oppurtunity to be the good guy for once, and you can follow up with something more official if someone fails to comply. This basically highlights the problem with business and with the way GW is handling theirs. They'd rather act like a big business then say, human beings.

Dip Method, other updates

2009-11-18T07:05:00.002-06:00

So I decided to use the dip method on my 15mm Karks. The basics are as follows:

Base coat models in overall color. In this case an army green
Paint details. skin color, weapons and equipment and some other small details
Dip in a mix of wood stain and mineral spirits
Touch up and overcoat

Because I am dipping (I've used the technique on my 20mm and some historical 15's) I don't worry too much about how consistant the base coat is. As long as it covers 80-90 percent of the model, the stain will hit the rest.

his time around I used a darker stain than I'm used too, and while they looked fine immediately post dip, I swung down to the basement to check on them last night and the stain itself set too dark. It's annoying, but not a major deal. I'll go back and just touch up a little more thouroughly on this batch, and use a lighter stain for the next. It's just a little bit of extra work.

I also managed to get the first shading coat on my tanks. They look good and I should be able to do some detail work on them this weekend and prob finish them off.

I've also come to a decision about CBT. I think I'm going to hold off on CBT in order to see if I can get some Heavy Gear going at my LGS. I love HG, the setting is pretty cool and in general I like most of the core mechanics. I think there's some level of detail that's probably not necessary in some of the rules but those details come up only every so often and for the most part Blitz plays fairly well. I have a nice collection of Gears and I'll be placing an order this week for more!

Things moving along!

2009-11-17T07:44:00.003-06:00

Hey all! Back from my 4 day weekend. I have to declare a near success on reaching all of my goals. I did not finish my Karks like Iw anted however I'm about 80% there! Infantry are basically done and the two vehicles I own at the moment are base coated and shouldn't require more than about 2-3 more hours of work to complete. I should have pictures up this week on that stuff.

I also managed to talk to a friend about getting some of my terrain cast up and walked away with a bunch of good news. My concern was expense, I want to keep it relatively cheap. It's not a money making effort for me really, I'm just motivated to create some nice terrain for games and decided I'd try to share with anyone who might be interested. It might also help pay a little bit for some more 15mm troops! Anyway, I got some key concerns answered and it sounds like I can keep the cost reasonable.

The big decision now is to decide what material I want to cast in. Solid resin is good but I saw a demonstration of the expanding resin foam and I'm sorely tempted to use that. It would save a little money, and more importantly would be lighter and easier to transport.

The other issue I got worked out was what I want to accomplish this next year. Going to school has severly limited my ability to accomplish everything I want. I've had to come to the conclusion that I need to cut back on gaming projects so I can get more actual gaming in. That said, there are 3.5 projects I'd like to get some work done on in the next year:

15mm Terrain and armies
CBT terrain
Modern 20mm Terrain
28mm War ofthe Roses

I say 3.5 because I'm still torn on how much I want to commit to CBT. The terrain would be fun, and I think much easier in some regards than the 15mm terrain, but it would still be time out of my hobby and I'm not sure I want to commit that much time to it so I'm stil sitting on it.

15mm terrain and armies is top priority. I'd like to expand my Karks to be about 4 times the sizze they are now - about 150 stands of infantry and 10-15 vehicles is my goal. Then I might do Protolenes and use those nice combat walkers and some GZG stuff to arm them with. I've also got about 6-10 pieces of terrain I'd like to get built.

I have a nice collection of 20mm modern americans and Iraqi/insurgents, along with a solid collection of modern vehicles (mostly Dragon prepainted stuff.) and a set of rough rules I have written. I'd really like to do something with these miniatures but what's been holding me back is I have no terrain and really, no one makes solid, nice looking terrain for modern wargaming. I may alternate between this project and the 15mm stuff just to shake things up.

Finally, I'm a huge fan of War of the Roses and I think large games would make a nice spectacle. I'd started with 25mm metal a while back but shortly after, heard Perry's were doing plastics and halted my work. I'm a huge fan of the plastic minis and now that these are finally being released I'm going to purchase some boxes. They'll probably sit on my shelves through the winter but it will make a nice change of pace and by spring/summer I should be ready to start building.

I forgot to add! I added some more detail to my 15mm building. I think it looks a lot better now and will be posting pictures in the next day or two. I finally feel it's complete.

Some Random bits

2009-11-12T11:00:00.002-06:00

GZG is kicking off they're christmas sale today!

http://www.groundzerogames.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=190&Itemid=1

Free goodies for orders over 30 british and a voucher for even more deals in 2010! I love GZG's walkers, drones and some of their newer infantry so I may need to jump on this soon,

Pre-Fab Update

I need to do a little filing and sanding but otherwise it's done! This saturday I'm meeting to speak with a friend on some ideas for molding and casting and hope to have a mold done by next week.
I was going to try to do a couple of more bits but then I realized that I can do more bits with each project and then hopefully make them available seperately from the buildings. Cut's down on some of the work I have to do on the front end and allows for more variability.

I'll provide an update later this weekend on where things are and I may try to post some rough sketches of some project ideas I have for the near future.

I also hope to be posting pictures of some of my Khark WiP's over the weekend as I'll be working to finish them in the next four days!

Perry WOTR plastics!

2009-11-11T08:03:00.001-06:00

I got really excited about this announcement on TMP:

http://theminiaturespage.com/news/842495/

Perry's War of the Roses plastics are finally closed to being released! I'm a huge fan of WoTR and have a growing mostly lead based collection now. When I heard last spring that there were going to be plastics I had to pause and think things through. I'm a huge fan of plastic miniatures. They're more durable, and easier to store and transport. After a week or two of thinking about it I put my WOTR project on hold and decided to wait until the Perry's released their line.

I think they look fantastic! At around 25$ US for 40 infantry the price is definitely right! The plan is to order several boxes when they come out then shelve them until I get sick of building 15mm stuff. I'll take a few months off from that and do some WOTR!

Battletech thoughts, small update on Pre-Fab

2009-11-11T07:44:00.000-06:00

Not much to update on the pre-fab. I did some more work on the attachments last night but haven't created anymore. I'll need to do some research today to see if I can come up with something else. Still on track to be done by friday!

Recently I've begun considering moving to more esoteric gaming systems. Well, atleast more away from GW and Privateer Press gaming systems. For the most part I like games by both companies but I have some issues that have left me less than satisfied with them. Both games are expensive. I'm dissatisfied with GW's constant rules updates and I'm not sure I want to spend my gaming career pursuing each edition ad nauseum. Privateer Press does much better games, but MkII didn't completely solve the complexity of the game, and the local PP community is divided into several cliques making it a pain in the butt to organize games or events.

Obviously I've definitely jumped into 15mm. I'm writing my own rules for 15mm scifi and I'll be focusing on that for most of this year I hope. I'll be building a couple of armies and finishing my terrain projects. I've also sketched up some vehicle concepts I hope to get around to building.

The other game I'd like to pursue this year I think is Battletech. I really started wargaming with it and the scale makes it easy to build terrain for and paint miniatures. I'm a huge mecha fan but unfortunately my mech agame of choice - Heavy Gear - just isn't played in my area and I'm not sure I could get people to play it on a regular basis.

I have some hurdles to get over with BT though. First and foremost is the system. It's clunky and makes for long games with anything over a handful of mechs on each side. I don't mind playing games that take some time so that's not so much the issue as the way the system plays. It's got a space in my heart for nostalgia sake but it's rough. I've never found BT to be overly tactical either. Generally speaking I've found two main tactics to winning a game.

First, make sure you match up mechs that give you an edge - duh. Heavier always helps, but sometimes better weapons on a lighter mech will do.

Second, concentrate firepower. Take two or three mechs and focus on one of theirs. There are some important choices to make - do you focus on his heavies since they have the most firepower and armo, then move to his lighter stuff? Do you take out his lighter stuff since they'll die faster? I tend to go for lighter mechs first just because I feel like the less dice your opponent is rolling across the table the better, and taking out mechs faster reduces his dice quicker.

Beyond those two things and occasional obvious use of terrain I find a lot of BT battles end up being the wagon train of death - two groupsof mechs basically circling around each other trying to score hits until one side wins.

Finally, I'm an aesthetic gamer. I like the way things look on the table (It's common for my buddies to hear "get that crap off the table" from me referring to all the excess tokens, dice, papers, rulers and other assorted detritus that builds up on a gaming table.). There are some really nice mech designs in BT, but there are also a lot of really clunky, ridiculous looking ones as well. Some of the designs I just don't get, like who the hell thought this thing was 'cool'? I guess it comes down to a mech only mother could love right?

Ultimately I think the plan is going to be to ease into it and see how it goes. I have a collection of about 30 mechs or so and I know others who have a handful. Organizing games won't be too hard so I'll get a game going here or there and see if I can fall back in love with the game. I want to, I really do.

Random Gamer Thoughts

2009-11-10T11:56:00.001-06:00

It seems recently a game company that rhymes with 'James Burkshoppe' has sent some cease and desist letters to forums and web pages that might break their IP rules. I'm torn on this subject but not completely.
I started out with two wargames back in the day. My first was Battletech. A freind of mine the BattleDroids box set and we'd played a few times. His neighbor handed over a box of Battletech and Citytech sometime later and this really kicked off several years of mostly BT related Gaming.

Then a game shop opened close to the town we lived in and we discovered Rogue Trader and the world of 40k. Back then you could get the book for something like 25$ and a box of 20-30 plastic figs for about 20$.

2nd edition 40K came out and we dove head on into the hobby. I began painting after my brother did some inspiring work with some Squats, and that really got me hooked into the gaming hobby.

Since then I've seen 40K go through 5 editions in total - two fo which I hated (3rd and 4th). It turned out to be alright because back in the 90's GW went public and became more a business than a game company in my opinion. They had a corner onj the scifi gaming market for sure. You couldn't go anywhere in the US without running into a game shop that carried it, and it was your best chance at getting a game that everyone knew how to play when in parts unknown.
The problem I think started when GW realized this. They knew they had a captive audience and so began a legacy of new game editions every few years, army books languishing without updates for 2, sometimes almost 3 editions, and bizarre and constant price increases they tried to write off with weak excuses on how much equipment was costing them, or the price of lead yadda yadda. they began cutting out the middle man, opening their own shops, and generally in my opinion making gigantic asses of themselves while flagrantly flaunting the fact that since they were THE big game company on the block, they could do what they want. I really feel that this was very strongly the case.

Then in the early 2000's several other companies came out swinging. Click games were growing in popularity. Privateer Press had released their awesome Warmachine and Hordes games, and GW was up to the same Shenanigans theyd been pursuing in the 90's and losing ground.

A few years ago they started turning it around, slightly, their kits were getting better, and I don't think anyone can argue that the product they offer is pretty good from an aesthetic point of view. However, we're on the verge of getting a new edition of WHFB - and there are several armies that haven't even been updated to THIS edition. Prices are still ridiculously high, and recently they've been shutting down fan sites to "protect their IP". While I understand the purposes of this, I think rationalizing it legally just goes to show that GW is still out of touch with the hobby community they're supposed to be catering to. Fan sites, forums and blogs are what help a game community thrive. GW will probably survive without, like they've survived every other bad decision the've made but it makes me a little sad to think that a game company that once developed some pretty neat stuff, is so rotten to the core at this point, that they cannot, and probably would not change things to become a much more freindly company. The disease of greed is just too solidly entrenched in the company.

Unfortunately there's no realistic fix. If people stopped buying their product, stopped playing their games and demanded they change their ways, something might happen. But that's an ideal world, that requires GW apologists and people who don't care enough to get on board and that just ain't gonna happen. More realistically, someone get's to the top of the company knows whats wrong and decides to sacrifice some of their comfy benefits to make a stand and change teh company for the better.

I don't foresee either happening. Ultimately we're fortunate that there are other games and other companies out there who 'get us' and so we have choices. The wargaming communities matured a lot since I started gaming. There are tons of events out there offering alternative support for even small press games and producers. It just takes people not being afraid to look outside the box at alternatives.

For scifi, I for one think 15mm or smaller is the way to go. As much as I enjoy the 40K background, and occasionally enjoy a good game of it or WHFB, my 32mm space marines only shooting 12 or 24 inches has never seemed right to me...

Pre-Fab "bits" work

2009-11-10T07:08:00.001-06:00

I got back to work last night after being on vacation all weekend. I was able to add slightly more detail on the building itself, then I began work on some of the bits!

Here's a picture with just about all the bits I have started on so far:

I've got two different sized storage tanks and an antenna looking thing. This also shows how these bits plug into 'ports' I've added on the building itself.

Little Tanks and Antenna:

Large Tanks:

Last bit I started last night. It's going to end up looking somewhat like a radar dome, with some bits attached:

You can also see some of the putty work I've done to cover some gaps. I've added a pipe in one corner of the back of the building, something to add some texture.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied where it's gone. I'm still trying to figure out how to jazz up the door a little bit and I've come up with a few ideas I'll play around with this week. Otherwise I'm on track for completing this thing before the weekend!

Also a quick note on some recent releases:

15mm.co.uk released a space ship crew that's pretty cool:

http://15mm.co.uk/

These things are going to make great objective markers. I think I'll end up purchasing a pack or two of these plus some other stuff and put together some mini dioramas for markers for scenario play!

Khurasan released thier awesome Bio-weapon Insertion pod:

http://khurasanminiatures.tripod.com/t1209.jpg

A handful of those plus some Parasachnids will definitely be goign on my next order along with this sleek looking warmachine:

http://khurasanminiatures.tripod.com/t1208.jpg

Some 15mm thoughts

2009-11-06T07:41:00.000-06:00

I was reading Marks comments on characters for 15mm over at Dropship Horizon: http://dropshiphorizon.blogspot.com/ and that got me thinking.

First, I think he's right, it would be pretty awesome to see characters for different armies that are being developed. figs that stand out even more so then say a simple officer fig. Of course, like his helmet conversions, I think it's possible to do some simple conversions on 15mm figs without having to put a whole lot of work into it. The addition of a new helmet/head, or a sculpted cowboy hat would be a nice touch, and something most people could do if they took the time.

The other thing to consider is the sheer amount of 15mm figs out there - not just scifi but it's been a hugely popular and successful scale for historicals and fantasy. Replacing some 15mm samurai swords with laser guns, or just popping the samurai heads off and sticking them on other scifi figs could give an army soem flavor. In fact, I just had an interesting idea for a character called Samurai Bill....

The other night as I started work on my terrain, I started thinking of other projects I wouldn't mind laying into this year. One concept was of a mercenary unit, full of members of different races, and utilizing vehicles that were rough and ready. I have some designs I'll have to sketch out later for some wacky looking tanks and walkers that might be fun for this sort of idea.

I also had the idea for a large beast, similar to say a squiggoth in 40K. Something probably quadrapedal, but possibly bipedal that had a howdah carrying a laser cannon and a couple of gun toting 'aboriginals'. You could use plastic dinosaur toys to convert for something like this pretty easily.

Ultimately with scifi you can do just about anything and the skies the limit! With today's accessibility to talented sculptors and other ways to get minis produced, if you ahve the drive and the ideas it would be easy to seem them come to fruition!

**As part of my beer series I wanted to mention Sam Adam's Winter Lager:

I've been on a Sam Adam's kick. They're in my opinion the best large american producer and they come up with some pretty good beers. The winter lager was a solid choice for a cold day. Dark, with a slightly mild bitter to it, it stayed smooth all the way down. I have noticed that Sam Adam's beers tend to have a noticeable yeasty after taste - much like you get from home brewed beer. I've always found that taste pleasant and I enjoy it in Sam Adam's too.

Prefab update!

2009-11-06T07:11:00.001-06:00

So I manage to scare up some time last night to do some more work on the prefab for 15mm.
As you can see I added the support columns around the edges of the building. I think they give it a little more of a functional appearance and texture. I also started work on the door. I'm not totally sure what I want to do there yet so at the moment I'm just fleshing things out a little. I think I'll be putting a door frame of sorts just to give it some more texture.

I also started adding some greeblies to the mechanical "core". In concept this is basically a modular piece that can be plugged into the prefab. It contains mechanical and electronic components that would be apropriate for whatever use you're putting the prefab too. It also provides easy access for repairs and replacement.

The three white circles are where components will plug in. I'll be adding a bit more detail to this section, then I'll start work on some components that you can plug into those rings to customize the prefab. Things like storage tanks, communications dishes and whatever else I can thnk of.

At this point the buildings about 95% done, the total project is about 80% done. I've put a total of about 4-4.5 hours into it and it's been fun. I need to clean up some of the joints and I'll just be using a filler putty for that.

First 15mm "Prefab"

2009-11-05T09:02:00.000-06:00

I came across a post on TMP yesterday that had some links to John Eaves blog: http://johneaves.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/art-of-john-carpenters-ghosts-of-mars-day-one/

I was instantly inspired. As mention previously, up til recently a lot of smaller scale scifi terrain really resembled some odd shapes with some bits of styrene and some spheres glued together to look vaguely like a structure of some sort. Being a gaming snob of sorts I've been holding out for better terrain, and there's certainly some pieces these days by companies like Old Crow that are worth putting out on the table! I decided to see what I could do about making some pieces of my own. Working with Eaves stuff as inpisration I started on this piece last night:

The premise I'm working off of is that it's a prefab structure. Something prebuilt and basically just dropped, are dropped in chunks on a planet. It can be altered to be utilized for various uses, such as dwellings, research stations or work sheds. I have plans for about 4-5 other structures that work under the same basic concept. I'll be creating little spots to plug various bits I will design in order to make each structure 'customizeable'. Things like little radar dishes, storage tanks, pipes and other functional looking bits that you can plug in as you see fit so that each structure isn't exactly the same...unless of course you want them to be! I'm also hoping to offer atleast limited runs for sale.

For this structure I started with a balsa block I found at the hobby store that was about the right size. I cut it to shape then covered it in styrene sheet. So far I've added bits of solid styrene stock to give it some texture. The box shape on top will have severl ports for plugging bits into and will also be textured in technical looking greeblies to represent basically a mechanical/electrical block, that's plugged into each prefab during it's construction. You can also see in some of pictures little angled bits I'll be adding to the sides to give it a little more texture.

So far it's only taken me about 2 hours of construction time. It's a relatively simple build and most of the work will actually go into doing the bits to be added to it. The bare balsa in the front will also be detail to add a large door, that also has a smaller door set into it. Again, to represent its modularity and pre-fabness, the little door for people access and the larger door when use requires it.

Here are a shot with some of Khurasans miniature for scale:

This weekend I'm out of town but hope to finish this piece around about next weekend. Then I might start shopping around for a caster.

Khurasan miniatures

2009-11-05T08:51:00.000-06:00

So I snapped a few in the package type pictures of my Khurasan minis Pelagic Dominate "Karks". A week ago I order about 60$ worth of minis. There was a slight delay as they had to wait for some of the stuff to come back from the casters. No big deal, I can appreciate the challenges a small company has to overcome and waiting a few extra days was fine.

They arrived last night and when I popped open the box I was pleasantly surprised. The infantry figs look great on the site and they live up to that in real life. They came packed in small plastic bags of 3-5 and other than a few bent barrels (an acceptable problem in my opinion due to the challenges of packing and shipping 15mm minis.) look great out of the bags. I didn't notice really any flash and they should be ready to glue to bases and paint in no time.

The vehicles however were what really surprised me. They look sort of "B" movie on the web page. I ordered one of the MBT and APC just to get a peek at them in my hands. It didn't take me more than a few seconds to decide I really liked them, and plan on ordering severl more! Cast in a grey resin, there's a little bit of mold pattern on it but a little paint will hide that. The cast itself is crisp and there is very little flash. I didn't notice any bubbles or pitting which is also a good sign.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with Khurasan miniatures Karks and plan on expanding that army to a much larger degree sometime real soon. I have to order some stuff from Critical Mass Games this coming week - I really want their walkers - but more importantly I need two small forces to do some playtesting on my new rules!

New Beginnings

2009-11-05T07:31:00.001-06:00

Well, my original plan to stick to a couple of simple projects this year has changed slightly lol. I had 8 months off work, finally got work in May and have been so busy with that and school I've neglected this blog. However I'm ready to breathe new life into it this blog!

Starting this week I'll be posting pictures and details on some 15mm scifi I'm working on. Seems the 15mm world has grown quite a bit in the last year or two. I've always loved 15mm for most genres of "modern" gaming. In the past I've begun 15mm related projects in fits and starts but there have been a few hurdles to overcome.

First up til now 15mm for scifi was limited to a few manufacturers. The quality of the miniatures were rough. Vehicles were often tank like shapes with styrene chips added for "detail" Infantry were roughly human shaped blobs. It seems however that several old 15mm companies like GZG for example, have upped their game and they've been joined by new companies like Khurasan and Critical Mass Games who are putting out minis that rival some 25-38mm lines!

All of this has driven me in the direction of making this year a 15mm scifi year. Last week I wrote a basic rough draft set of rules I really like (And I"ll post more on those later) and yesterday I recieved my first order from Khurasan minis - Pelagic minis - the shark doods and some vehicles. I also began work last night on some terrain which I will also be posting pictures of soon.

Of course I'll be posting random other pictures of other projects I'm working on as well and I'm hoping to keep this thing going consistantly from here on out!

2009-04-02T09:56:00.000-05:00

Here are some pictures of my WIP warmahordes project. this is the main building, the warehouse and so far so good!

Once the wood filler was dry - I let it sit overnight - I stuck on the framing. all of that is going to be metal, I'll be painting some rust effects and so on to highlight it's age and utility. The roof is also going to be metal.

I added some rivets on the corner pieces by slicing off the tip of a small styrene tube, then I go back and use my dremel to shave them down a little. I'll do the same thing on the roof to help give the appearance of sheet metal.

The stone styrene is 1/200 fieldstone from Plastruct. I like the texture it adds. I also purchased some brick to do the outbuildings and some other projects down the road.

Things are moving along quickly, however, I ran out of glue yesterday! I probably won't be able to pick up some more until saturday so I'll probably return to painting some WotR until then. The plan is to finish the roof, do a large sliding wood door with iron framing for the large front door, and metal shutters for each window. I need to green stuff the fieldstone where I cut it, I'll probably take care of that today. Finally I'll add some exhaust tubes on the roof and then pu totgether some sort of steam and gear looking contraption to attach to the back of the building and then it will be ready to paint!

Terrain Project for Warmachine

2009-04-01T08:54:00.000-05:00

Since there is some waiting time in between processes on my WotR I decided to start a second project. This one is a Warmachine terrain project. I wanted to do something simple but fun and I decided on a scenario based piece. Basically as I explained earlier the buidling is some sort of workshop located in a remote location in the borders of Khador. The setup consists of the main structure, then two out buildings. Finally I'll build a labor jack, either from scratch or a conversion. The Jack, called the 'Bucket' (short for rustbucket) is active and can be used during play by the active warcaster by spending a focus and making a command check, if the check succeeds then the controlling player may play the jack that turn.
So here is some pictures of my construction process on the main buidling or warehouse, I'm taking some of these techniques stright out of No quarter Magazine as they have some really nice tutorials. The first picture is of my construction materials, and the structure, just cute from the foam core board:

all pretty typical stuff, foam core, styrene in various shapes and sizes, hot glue gun, etc...

Here are some in progress pictures. I basically draw the shape of the building on the foam core, then cut it out. I then cut the corners and fold into the shape of the building and glue the connection together using hot glue:

On this structure I then glued some square rod to each corner to fill the gap, eventually this will look like metal bracing:

Finally, I coated the exterior walls in wood filler. It will end up looking something like stucco. The next step is to attach some framing and some fieldstone on the bottom to give it some texture!

Finished!

2009-03-31T09:53:00.000-05:00

Well, not completely, I have a few hundred figs to paint still lol, but my first 25 or so stands are done and they look pretty good! I was a little concerned because the flock I have is a bright green, which works well for say fantasy miniatures but I wasn't sure about historical figs. After doing a test base though it turns out it looks pretty good!

Overall I'm pretty happy with the way things turned out, and I'm fairly excited to get going on some more miniatures. I've already glued the next batch of Billmen to their sticks, they'll dry in a few hours and I'll prime and see if I can't get around to paitning them today or tomorrow.

This time around I plan on using a dipping method for shading instead of a wash. It won't really save anymore time but it simplifies things slightly and I can go back and highlight colors I want to pop from the mini.

While I'm waiting, I figure I'll fill in the time working on a Warmahordes related terrain project I got the idea for a while back. It's going to be a 'shop/warehouse' of some sort, something rugged and apropriate for say the wilderlands of Khador. the idea is to build the main structure, a couple of outhouses and then to scratch build a labor jack. The scenario allows Warcasters to make a command check and spend a focus to take control of the labor jack for a turn, though its actions are limited to movement (running, charging, etc..) and either two basic attacks with its fists or a special attack it's capable of (two handed throw, arm lock, head butt, etc...). Should be fun, it's the first terrain project I've worked on in a while.

2009-03-30T08:36:00.000-05:00

just a few more tourney pics

I forgot to mention, because of the spread, my first three games weer against Cygnar lol, at the same table! My last game was at a different table against skorne.

2009-03-30T08:22:00.000-05:00

Here's the promised pictures of this past weekends Wamrahordes tourney. The Khador is mine, the blue and tan Cygnar is Tim Flanders (Tim's army was in No Quarter a couple of issues back - he won best painted at Gencon). tim and I had a pretty good first game, though my dice were cold almost the entire game, even Tim was starting to feel bad for me! Bryan's skorne are in there as well, they look fantastic and I'm lucky to game at a club where painting is taken seriously. In general there's a good chunk of us who work to keep our armies painted. My second army was only about 60% done and I don't have any pictures at the moment. I basically took most of these first round, and a few second round and after that got too involved in keeping up.

Overall all I had a good time. All of my opponents were cool, and solid players. We had a weird faction split but representative of the overall area spread - There were 3-4 Khador players, 3-4 Cygnar players, 3 Skorne players and 1 Menoth player. Khador is probably the most popular in the area, followd by Trollbloods (surprisingly none at the tourney), Skorne and Cygnar. Menoth, Cryx and Legion are rarely played and Circle has a small following as well.

Anyway, I only won my second game, the other three were losses through scenarios. all but my third game were close games. On my third game I hadn't heard that my deployment zone was a null zone and didn't count for taking sections of the table and my opponent managed to take advantage of that! Ah well, next time I guess I'll have to pay attention lol.

I'll post a couple of more pics on my next post.....

Aaaaargh!!!! Plastic WotR just within reach!

2009-03-29T08:52:00.000-05:00

so I ran across this today: http://theminiaturespage.com/news/3926/ and I'm excited like a kid in a toy store, and also a little torn lol. I'm a huge plastics fan. If I can collect an army in all plastics I will, and this announcement from TMP and the Perry's is right up my alley, my favorite period in plastics! The killer is that they say 'don't expect them to be on sale anytime soon', and that kills me. I was hoping to order more WotR figs in the next two week to three weeks, once I finish what I have on hand, now I have to decide if I want to keep going with metals, or wait for the plastics! The quality looks typical for Perry - excellent! I'll have to do some more research and see if maybe there are some period type figs they don't plan on coming out with for a while and maybe I can focus on those till they release these.....

Also, tourney was fun, I did horribly but still had a good time. I took some pictures and I'll be posting those with a better rundown of the event later today or early tomorrow!

Progress, but no pics!

2009-03-26T16:35:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update. I popped all the Men at Arms off their sticks and glued them to bases, then dropped ballast on all the bases I have ready at the moment. I believe that's around 20 bases, I'm a long way off from getting two armies done yet but things are moving along at a nice pace. I hope to get these bases painted, and flocked, and basically done by end of this weekend but I have a Warmachine/Hordes (known coloquially as WarmaHordes) tourney saturday so the next two days I'll be busy touching up some models for that and then actually playing! I'll try to take some pictures.

Men at Arms Finished!

2009-03-25T17:11:00.001-05:00

So it only took about 4 hours to complete 28 of these guys lol. Of course, they're 95% silver so that helps! Technically, I probably could have not primed them, washed them with a black or armor wash (I use Armor Wash from Privateer Press - it's fantastic for metals) then gone through and done the colors but I'd hate to do all that work and then have the paint start chipping off, it would be just my luck!

One thing I should make clear if I haven't, I'm no War of the Roses expert, I love the period and the conflict but I have a hard time keeping up with all the players, much less their heraldry. That said, I'm doing most of these guys in 'generic' colors. I say generic because there seems to be a fairly limited palette of colors: red, blue, green, white, yellow, black, a handful more, and there also seems to be a lot of crossover on who had what colors and how they used them. What I will do is when I get around to doing command stands, do 2-3 stands in a specific color combo so they can be easily identified on the field (nevermind the banners they'll be holding!). Since I'm doing basically two armies so I can talk some friends into playing occasionally, I have a lot of work to do and can't get to stuck on small details.

Anyway, these guys were easy! Primed black, then wet brushed on some silver, added some detail for wood and leather, then washed in Armor Wash. Once that dried I drybrushed pretty liberally more silver, then went back and touched up the original colors and added the brighter colors - white, green, blue, red. I inked those to give them some depth and done! Tomorrow I'll go back and stick them on bases. While they're drying I'll go back and finish the bases on the billmen and archers I already have done as I remembered early this morning how much I hate basing an entire army in one sitting!

War of the Roses 25mm!

2009-03-23T17:57:00.001-05:00

I've been gradually - and really gradually! - working on a 25mm WotR army for the Medieval Warfare rules and I've finally decided to put my head down and see if I couldn't atleast finish everything I currently own. That comes to about 5-6 bags of Old Glory Late Medieval miniatures.

The minis themselves are pretty good. Old Glory does a solid line of WotR miniatures, aboutt he only 25mm line out there. They're for the most part crisply cast, though there is some mold line issues on some of the minis, I suspect it's more about that specific batch then the moulds themselves. The price is right though! About 25-30$ US for something like 30 figs in a bag (infantry). basically around 1$ a fig.

I try to paint a bag at a time, I base them four figs to a 'craft' stick (popsicle sticks) using wood glue, base coat them, paint them going through each stick of figs with each color. After that I wash, or dip (since I have to do so many I won't be spending as much time as I usually do on smaller amounts of figs) and then stick them on their bases. Above are pictures of some finished figs plus some in process pictures of todays work.

My latest experiment in beer has been the Sam Adams Black Lager. I'm not sure how long this beer has been aout but it's fantastic. Not being a beer expert, I can only say that for as dark as it is, it's surprisingly not bitter, but smooth. It's also got a nice 'yeasty' after taste I've always enjoyed in home brewed beers my friend makes. If I had to come up with an instant beer rating system, say from 1-5 beers 5 being the best I've ever tasted, I'd give this one a strong 4 beers!

54mm War of the Roses

2009-02-18T12:47:00.000-06:00

So after sitting down and doing a little work on some of my Orks for Epic, I got distracted - it happens a lot! - and decided to start in on this 54mm stuff. I decided I'd post some pictures of prepainted stuff. I ordered them all from http://www.classictoysoldiers.com/. I ordered two different brands, 2 boxes of Revell medievals that came with about 12 figures per box, I can't remember the cost of each box but I'm guessing around 12$. I also ordered some airfix minis:

http://img19.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cststuffjb8.jpg

the Revell models are the best of the two in my opinion. Crisper in appearance, but mostly because they resemble WotR the most. The airfix models are definitely slightly earlier - actually, every "medieval" figure I've come across so far is more apropriate or meant for 100 years war, but they'll pass. Here's the Revell minis:

http://img19.imageshack.us/my.php?image=revellinsidemv6.jpg

and the airfix example:

http://img19.imageshack.us/my.php?image=recastok8.jpg

They're both soft plastic and I just spray coated 8 of the airfix models with a black primer - something cheap from home depot - and so far so good. Next I'll post pictures of a few examples as I want to knock out a few test figures.

First Blog!

2009-02-17T17:01:00.000-06:00

This is my first adventure in blogging and I've decided to do it about my main hobby, gaming! As gamers know we've always got some project or other going (some of us have dozens going at once!). This year I'm trying a different approach and I'm working on planning my gaming projects for the year. Ideally I'm trying to get to a stable point where I have plenty of miniatures for the gaming I want to do and don't have to get involved too heavily in any larger projects, atleast on a regular basis lol. the projects planned for this year are (and mostly in this order!)

1 - Finish my 2250 pts of skaven! I'am actually most of the way there, I'd say I'm about 60% done. I'm using the classic 'dip' method for getting them done. I generally tend not to dip unless I'm modelling in a smaller scale but in this case I decided it would probably go over well with Skaven - Pics later

2 - Epic Armaggedon - This is an ongoing project, but I'd like to get a good portion of my Orks painted. I jsut recently bought a fully painted IG army and a Space Marine army so Orks and Titans still need to be painted. I'm also planning on building some terrain as I go along. However this was the project that actually convinced me to start a blog.

3 - After attending the Little Wars convention in Chicago this past year and seeing a gentleman running a 54mm Battlelore game that looked absolutely fantastic, I've decided to put together two 54mm armies for War of the Roses for a convention game next year! I own a growing colleciton of medieval 54mm plastics and am looking forward to starting this project but probably won't start digging in for a few weeks yet.

4 - Also at Little Wars I managed to score some Pulp Action miniatures - specifically Rocketeers, Gyro Troopers and the Zeppelin troopers and have a growing project idea planned for this one as well.

that's basically it! It should give me plenty to do this year and I'm going to try to stay on track as best I can and not get sidelined by other projects (I still have some Warmachine and Hordes stuff I want to do but with the anouncement of their new edition coming out in 2010 - previews and playtesting in april! I plan to hold off on that.).

Thanks for stopping by! The plan is to post pictures of projects as I go, though I'm not a photographer so don't expect anything worthy of a Time Magazine cover.