Things with wings

You wouldn’t know it from everything else I’ve been posting about, but over the summer I decided that my next project was going to be Warriors of Athena, an obscure Frostgrave adjacent Greek Fantasy game originally released as a series of magazine articles - and then it got announced that it was getting a proper release from Osprey! The plan is to rope in some compatriots to watch Clash of the Titans while building warbands, but in the interim I’ve been painting some suitable enemies, some Foundry harpies:

You can tell at a glance how happy I was with each individual face based on how much Blood for the Blood God got splashed around. 

It’s been a while since I painted any miniature nipples, so I turned to my big book of painting for inspiration and advice:

Looking at their backs, I tried to make the upper feathers look different to the lower feathers - I think I could perhaps have gone a bit further, but I’m not mad at how they turned out:

I think I need to start varnishing my miniatures if I’m going to play games with them though, these ladies have done nothing but fall over since I got them.

Fun fact about the bases - they are decorated with bones from a Wargames Factory skeletons set that I bought years ago from a gamer that had given up on trying to get them to go together as they were so fiddly, which was fine for me as I wanted to use them for scenery. Having rejoined the Lead Adventure Forum again this year, I was looking through some of my old PMs, and realised that the gamer that I had bought them from was actually Joseph McCullough, who went on to write Frostgrave, and Warriors of Athena, the game that these miniatures have been painted for.

Speaking of wings, I’ve also painted this little chap, an excellent sculpt as ever from Crooked Dice:

I bought him at Salute just because he’s such a lovely little sculpt, it’s mostly serendipity that I actually have a use for him now.

Speaking of little sculpt, he’s tiny, that’s a 20mm base he’s on. I suspect it may be time to dig out the magnifier that I have somewhere, that got packed away back when I was young and vital and didn’t need such things.

It’s been a while since the last Tally post though, so I’ve also received some miniatures:

Last month’s GW free mini of the month was a Chaos Dwarf, which I quite fancied, but unfortunately came out the same week that I found out that if you work hard enough, you unlock extra time off on doctor’s orders (hence all of the solo games and blog posts recently), and it was a week and a half before I could bring myself to go into town, where I discovered that they had apparently run out that morning. So instead I treated myself to this pack of D&D miniatures from the games shop on the other side of town:

My daughter has made it very clear that she wants to play a Tabaxi Rogue at some point in the future because of the Dungeon Club graphic novels, so I figure I’ll probably end up letting her have one of these when the time comes.

The next month, I nipped in on day of release to grab the Deathwatch marine, because I figured there’s definite inq28 potential there:

I also took advantage of em4’s Black Friday deals - I ordered a kilo of random dice, planning to make my children dice advent calendars, although they took too long to come to be ready for Advent, so the backup plan is to do some sort of twelve days of Christmas deal instead. I had a voucher from when em4 used some pictures of minis I’d painted on their website, so bought a slightly discounted bridge (because slowly but surely, I’m working my way towards playing that next Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario), and then figured I may as well add on a mystery bag of five random minis for a fiver to qualify for free postage (although to be fair, out any mini in front of me for a pound and I’m likely to bite) and was furnished with these:

I’d admittedly assumed it was going to be some of the weirder ranges that em4 stock, but other than one prepainted dwarf that will likely get stripped so that I have a random minis for ready the next time my son wants to paint something I got 4 Grenadier sculpts, only one of which I already own (the chap on the far left). I was especially happy with the chap on the far right, as having recently finished Cyberpunk 2077 I was tempt3d to paint up a Rockerboy, and ummed and ahhed for a while over ordering the singer from the same range at the same time, but showed remarkable restraint and resisted the urge.

All things included, that brings the Tally to:

36 vs 255 = -219 

I’d need to paint ten minis a day, every day, for the rest of the year to get the Tally back into the black at this point! I’ll settle for trying to get my finished minis up to an average of one a week though.

What’s next? More Frostgrave, and more painted minis hopefully! I will admit, I did dig out some minis that can be painted with very simple paint schemes to try and game things in my favour, but on the other hand, inspiration may have struck for another new project for next year:

And then again, I rearranged my nerd bookcase earlier to try and get all my Really Useful Boxes of minis onto shelves rather than having some piled up on the floor next to it, and found myself unearthing things I hadn’t seen in a while and going ‘ooh I should probably dig out my Strange Aeons minis right?’

Raider from the stripping pot

Here's another one from the painting queue:

An em4/Grenadier Future Wars savage from the depths of my stripping pot, for use in the Fallout project as a savage Raider, which lets me strike off the first item from this years challenge list:

2018 Challenge:

• Finish something years old
• Finish something pre-blog old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Paint something from the stripping pot
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Build a wargames board
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Open Star Wars Imperial Assault and paint all the miniatures from it
• Paint all the miniatures needed to replace the tokens in the Imperial Assault Core Game
•  Paint a complete box of miniatures (either a full regiment or starter)
•  Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted)
• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics
• Finish a member of the Nextwave team
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

Oddly, I found myself becoming less and less enthusiastic with this sculpt as I was painting it. Especially when working with oddities like sculpted bulging eyeballs:

Nuts, the splotch of spilled wash on his hand is super obvious. Ah, Raiders in Fallout are generally filthy dirty, I'm fine with leaving it there.

Tally

2 vs 0 = +2

There are two more miniatures currently half painted on my desk (as I cleared away a lot of the accumulated bits and bobs that had accrued over the year), so I think I'll see about finishing and posting them before clearing away my paints and making space for other projects. Or potentially getting around to painting the scenery that I built back in... June?

What is best in life?

Yeah, it's everyone's favourite brooding Cimmerian, Conan:

Mood music:

I love Conan, and have had vague plans to game in Hyperborea for several years now. Small scale, run using the Song of Blades and Heroes ruleset, borrowing models liberally from the other fantasy projects, it's yet another one of those ideas I had where I thought 'this is small enough that I'll be able to finish it and actually get a game in' that then ended up getting mothballed until my attention swung back round again...

Admittedly part of the reason for the delay was finding a miniature that I was happy with for the main man, but in the end I went with this lovely lad from Hasslefree. 

You might notice a slight bit of shininess and or discolouration around his axe arm, which is a result of repairs and some minor cosmetic surgery after an escape attempt:

I have vague plans for a 'tree' style campaign (the kind where if Player A wins a game, you play one scenario next, but if player B, you take a different branch, potentially unlocking additional reinforcements or other boons in a final climatic battle along the way), which I'm sure I started sketching out on a scrap of paper that I should probably try and track down...

But wait, there's more!

Conan doesn't want to take on the cult of various snake gods on his lonesome, though, so I've also finished one of the chums I have for him in the painting queue:

Nice, classic Grenadier/em4 barbarian. Chosen almost entirely because I love the idea of a near-nude berserker taking the precaution of wearing a full helm (I assume his mother made him promise to never go out without wearing his helmet, and so he always has). He was also painted to a lighter skintone than Conan, to make the big guy seem all the more bronzed by comparison.

I feel like I might have missed a trick by not giving him a comedic beauty mark or heart tattoo on his backside though...

And here's the pair of them together:

The Grenadier barbarian looks a little bigger and chunkier than Conan, but that's fine, he's in a more dynamic pose, and was always described as being athletic as well as beefy, so I'm still happy with my choice!

Tally

41 vs 40 = +1

Back in the black!

Necromunda pre-orders went up today though. I've been good so far.

The aforementioned scum and villainy...

As was the plan, now I've finished the pieces of terrain that I had on the go I've painted some miniatures!

The generic Star Wars thugs that I converted a while back. Once I got into the swing of it, finishing them off was a breeze! I think there's something about painting a batch of non-uniformed figures that I enjoy, making colour choices on the fly, daubing paint wily-nilly as the fancy takes me...

I painted them in a spread of colours and materials - the second guy from the left is painted like he is wrapped in a scavenged tarpaulin, for example, and the armour on the second and fifth chap is painted to look like it's scavenged from Stormtroopers.

In hindsight, it seems like I've subconsciously painted the leader like Kal Jerico. Because he is awesome.

As ever, fun was had with weathering, in this case on the two guys wearing long coats. I think it came out better on the leader, it didn't seem to show up as well on the lighter coat...


The Tally has however moved in both directions this week - as well as finishing these 5 chaps, my DM was getting rid of a box of assorted Orks, so I had a pick through and grabbed some Gretchen and a couple of chunky bodies for the bitz box should I get round to converting some Scavvies for Necromunda/inq28:

Tally:

6 vs -10 = +16

2017 Challenges:

• Finish 5 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/5)
• Finish 10 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/10)
• Finish 15 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/15)
• Finish something years old
• Finish something SUPER old (as in, pre-blog old)
• Finish a piece of terrain x3 
• Empty out my stripping pot
• Paint something from the stripping pot
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Build a wargames board
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Open Star Wars Imperial Assault and paint all the miniatures from it
• Paint all the miniatures needed to replace the tokens in the Imperial Assault Core Game
•  Paint a complete box of miniatures (either a full regiment or starter)
•  Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted)

So, plans for the immediate future include trying to smash through some more miniatures from the queue to knock off the second and third items on the challenge list before getting distracted and starting something new allowing myself to start something new (mmm box of Star Wars miniatures I'm looking at you). Timing might be an issue with that though, as if I don't make some headway rapidly we'll be at May 4th before I know it. I mean, I have a couple of Star Wars miniatures in the queue that I could paint for May the Fourth, but none that I want to. I mean, plus the fact that Salute is only a month away already..

Star Wars thugs WIP

So, this is what the blurry out of focus project alluded to in a previous post is:

Having vague intentions to at some point run a Star Wars RPG, a few months back I read through every back issue of Star Wars Gamer magazine, and it would seem that something approaching 93% of every Star Wars D20 adventure features an encounter with around four human thugs - equipped with this knowledge, I picked up a handful of Mark Copplestone sculpted scavenger types from em4 at Salute with the intention of 'Star Warsifying' them - some were fine straight off, whereas with others, all it took was a minor alteration like removing the gun magazine to make it look more blaster like:

(Sadly in my enthusiasm I didn't take a before picture!)

The mini that I bought to use as a leader type came slightly miscast, with a stubby little blob for a left hand, so it was conversion time! 

His gun was also too clearly modern, so that had to go too (after all, there's a fine tradition of hands getting lopped off left right and centre in the Star Wars universe!) and a suitable donor was located after having a shuffle through a selection of the prepaints (fun fact - most of my original choices for donors were then discounted due to having alien anatomy, like only having three fingers, when I wanted the whole hand for ease of pinning and hopefully not looking too differently scaled to whatever hand I ended up using to replace his left...)

[insert your own 'totally armless' joke here]

And lo, one donated fun and a clenched fist from a Perry sprue later we have a rejuvenated leader type, ready to spring an ill-fated and ultimately doomed ambush on a party of PCs before being recycled to the next encounter:

And here's the complete group ready for undercoat:

Well, it turns out that my can of flat black was pretty much dead, so here they are less than half undercoated waiting for an application of brush primer!

Salute 2016

So, yesterday was Salute, the annual nerdy pilgrimage to the Excel Centre to gawp at lots of lovely miniatures, and stock up on supplies and inspiration for the coming year!

After a longer than usual seeming coach journey up (pro tip for next year - don't bring experimental fiction to read on the way up that you end up finishing in 25 minutes. Also, don't forget that coaches have plug sockets, so you can bring iPads and phone chargers), we arrived at the excel centre with plenty of time to spare. It was unusual not being herded along with runners of the London Marathon, as is usually the case (with the excel centre staff giving us directions based on where they assume we're going - who's to say that the bearded men with backpacks aren't here for running rather than little men?)

Once doors opened and we were inside, as usual, I had a thorough scout around (perimeter first, and then up and down every row) before hitting up particular places - this year seemed like there was a lot  more than usual going on, as my initial cursorily walk around took a full hour and a half! I didn't have a particularly long list of things I was after this year, mostly keeping an eye out for anything interesting and quirky, as well as my usual attempts to buy at least one thing from some of my favourite companies.

I went to see Anvil Industries, as last year I'd enquired about the availability of their Pulse Mech heads and their potential suitability for use on Mantic Enforcer bodies only for them to not be available yet, and when I asked this year I was told that they were available, but looking at their racks of blisters it was revealed that they had forgotten to bring them. Oh well, I'll try again next year, maybe third time is the charm!

As ever, I took less photos than I thought I had, but here they are:

Some beautiful Adeptus Sororitas painted by Siege Studios

Their display cases also included this Tor Cyan bust - does anyone know where it is from? I'd be tempted to get one, as as the youngest of my 2000AD liking friends I'm the only one that likes the character!

A Vietnam table - not my chosen period, but I can appreciate the modelling skill!

Some sort of post-apocalyptic Wacky Races game - and who doesn't love that?

A lovely Frostgrave table - I alas didn't get any games in this year, but more on that later...

Crooked Dice's 7TV Star Wars table, which was small but perfectly formed! It's a shame I didn't take any pictures of their other tables, as each was a masterclass in how to pack a ton of character and awesomeness into a relatively tiny amount of space...

Something steampunky, and awfully framed.

Mad Max! I read an article in one of the wargaming publications about this game at some point in the last year, so it was cool to see it in the flesh!

Various props were on hand to add to the effect!

This very large castle was on display at the Renedra stand, and very lovely it was too.

The painted versions of this year's freebie miniature in the flesh in the display cases. There was also a conversion that combined a nude body with a faceless robot madam head from Crooked Dice that I thought was both inspired and singularly odd...

A cool display table that I saw last year but didn't note down who it was...

So I made sure to take a picture of their banner this year!

This was an insanely large fantasy table, with every faction you could imagine squaring off. At first I thought that it was strictly Games Workshop, but spending some more time peering around the board revealed that it was all sorts...

Attractive miniatures from Otherworld on an attractive board.

Despite my claims that 28mm is God's True Scale, the Halo Ground Command stuff is somewhat tempting... I mean, look at those Hunters! Those Warthogs! Those Grunts! 

New stuff for Frostgrave in the Osprey games cases, including some female wizards if I recall correctly?

A beautiful Frostgrave diorama that there are much better pictures of available elsewhere on the Internet.

They're making an Eisenhorn video game! It may end up terrible, but hopefully it's at least cool...

I remember very little about this except that I am drawn to nicely painted medieval miniatures like a moth to a flame (I blame Game of Thrones)

Modern conflict table, which if I recall correctly had zombies off on the side - put on by Akula, I'm assuming?

It was pretty cool seeing this in the flesh at the Heresy stand after seeing it so much on Instagram over the last few weeks!

Raiders of Arcana is a new fantasy skirmish game, which I took a photo of mostly to tend myself to look up later to see if they produced any miniatures that I might want for other projects 

Here's a screen grab of my Instagram post from the event with the caption 'it's hard to see from this picture taken from the back of the crowd, but @angel_giraldez is depressingly as handsome as he is a talented painter' when the only person that had liked the post was Angel Giraldez himself!

An In Her Majesty's Name table, if I recall correctly, which I think I saw last year but the sheer variety of available factions is just as impressive now as then!

One of the things on my list of things to do this year was to track down the guy from Westfalia miniatures to grab a promo halfling miniature (like the one I got last year that I recently painted). As ever, finding a chap in a black shirt at Salute is akin to the proverbial needle in a haystack, when I noticed that he mentioned on his Facebook group that he'd aim to be at the Empress stand at 2, and potentially again at 3. Checking the time, I saw that it was almost 2, and beat feet to the right corner of the hall.

And so I lurked.

As well as a man over six feet tall in an orange hat can.

Overhearing someone say the word halfling, I got chatting to a bunch of strangers who were also lurking with the same intention: 

The mob of us hit double figures, but still no sight of Westfalia guy.

Look, there's Duncan Rhodes, he of genteel painting instruction video fame (from the GW YouTube channel - fun fact, the new girl on the channel used to work in my local branch, apparently) waiting nearby. Not for a free halfling though. He probably gets free halfling a everywhere he goes. Apparently he was with someone from Beasts of War, but I couldn't confirm or deny that.

More time passed, and the mob began to shrink as people lost faith.

My companions came and found me, to hand me this sweet new shirt (as I'd agreed to use my body as advertising space for this app - have a nose if you have a smartphone or tablet and play tabletop games where you might need an army list - it makes it super easy to make speculative lists, rather than scribbling bits on a scrap of paper).

More time passed (it was now half past 2) and then there were only two of us. At this point, we realised that we were closer to 3 o'clock than 2, the other listed time that the chap would aim to appear, and so we continued to wait. Twenty minutes passed, and Mark (the other chap in the front of the earlier picture) got a phone call and had to leave. At this point, it was nearly 3, the time when I'd have to start making a move in order to get back to Victoria in time, and so I hung on a little longer, but to no avail. I did a couple of laps of the nearby area hoping to spot the chap from Westfalia miniatures, but alas it was not to be. With time getting away from me, I had to give in (and sadly didn't have time to hit the Warlord stand, that I'd somehow earlier missed on my laps of the hall, or Crooked Dice, where I'd planned to nip back and buy something before leaving, as I had to dash to the DLR to start making my way back to the long coach journey home...)

Yes, an hour is a long time to wait around on the off chance of getting a free miniature, but have you seen it? It's beautiful...

[afterword - the nice man at Westfalia replied to my desperate daytime messages trying to locate him later that evening, offering to send me one, huzzah!]

Also potentially worth mentioning, when it was just me waiting, a man came and asked if he could take some photographs of me. In hindsight, I should probably have asked if it was for anything in particular or just for his personal collection...

So, off on the DLR to get several tubes until we were back at Victoria. Pro tip for next year: if you've only brought an experimental book that you finished on the way up and your phone has died, buy something at the show to read on the journey home! Most years, I've picked up a few old magazines or books, but apparently not this year (except for buying an old Tomb Kings book for my friend Joe who has just started building an army, which I gave to him before we left) so I can tell you that the Salute programme and an Osprey games catalogue I received were both scrutinised intently!

And now the fun bit, the loot:

• This year's Salute freebies - a lovely Steampunk lady from Westwind and a nice bronze effect d6
• 8 Maelstrom's Edge sample figures (as everyone I went with said they'd never use them as they're not fantasy and offloaded theirs on me)
• Set of 10 brushes from Siege (for free! Madness!)
• 5 rough looking near future types from em4 (to convert to use as human thugs, as every Star Wars RPG adventure seems to feature an a counter with some human thugs) and some 25mm round bases
• A Jomsviking Warlord from Gripping Beast (for use as an Ironborn Captain, and also his beard reminded me of my friend Joe) because I wanted to support Gripping Beast as they'd just fed me hope on something I'd been asking for from them for the last six or seven years...
• A handful of heroclix (a Spoiler, because I'm currently reading 90's Batman comics; a Controller, because he has an unusual body type; a Ghost, because I liked him in the Warren Ellis Thunderbolts run; and a Multiple Man, because I liked his trench coat)
• A Brotherhood of Steel looking chap from Brother Vinni (sadly I didn't realise he was going to be at Salute, and missed him on my initial scout around the venue, and by the time I noticed his name in the guide and made my way there most of the other iconic sculpts had already sold out)
• The Sorcerer and Castle Guards from Studio Miniatures Medieval Mayhem range because everyone loves Monty Python, right? I think the castle guards will make a humourous addition to a unit in the Song of Ice and Fire project, blowing raspberries at their foes! They do a whole range of the Knights with their accompanying squires (complete with overloaded baggage) that I was tempted to get too, but managed to show surprising restraint... [side note - I discovered that my wife has never seen the Holy Grail]
• Top-ups of Vallejo smoke and Army Painter Strong Tone, as well as a pot of out of production Games Workshop Tanned Flesh paint
• My Hasslefree preorder of a Conan-looking chap, modern witch and a zombie (alas, the other figure I was after isn't available in metal yet, after having to try and describe her to three members of the White family and try and act out the pose!)
• A female trench coat ganger from Heresy, as I was after her gun, but it isn't yet available separately (and Heresy is one of the companies that I try and buy at least one thing from every year at Salute)
• A free kangaroo from Eureka, for saying G'day
• A Cult Tracker and War Hound from Osprey Games, because they are absolutely beautiful, and will go nicely with my wildlings when I get around to building some (although that might not be until we see if the rumours about the next plastic Frostgrave miniature kit are true)
• A free Frostgrave Wizard Sheet, which is brilliant - it's like a combination roster record and quick reference sheet!
• In amongst the usual mountain of flyers and leaflets, I also got a Steam Key for a copy of Talisman Prologue and a voucher for free shipping from Brother Vinni, which was nice!

Tally:

18 vs 360 = -342

You might notice that it hasn't gone down by as much as you'd expect, but that would be because on the morning of Salute I gifted my friend Joe an old vampire special character that I had knocking around for his burgeoning undead legion... It's probably a good thing that I waited around for the guy from Westfalia miniatures for so long, as that prevented me from giving in to temptation and goof back to the Perry stand to buy a box of plastic French!

So overall, the usual fun day out. I've come back fired up to convert some em4 miniatures, or maybe build some more westerosi chaps...