PACTS: low level goons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All in, the Tally now stands at:

30 vs 181 = -151

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

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

May the Fourth be with quick wit and nimble fingers

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

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

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

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

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

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

All in, the Tally now stands at:

21 vs 180 = -159

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

‘Stick’ it to the man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19 vs 29 = -10

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

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?’

Fountains (of Wayne?)

Although the next scenario in the ongoing adventures of Tim the Necromancer doesn’t actually require a specific piece of terrain (unusually, most of my gaming delays are from having to build and paint something in particular), as it was described as being set in a ruined garden clogged with statuary and fountains, I figured I could dig out a GW Azyrite Fountain that I’ve had sat on it’s sprue for a while and get that painted relatively quickly:

It’s a GW piece, so there are a number of skulls and the word Sigmar on it, but not so many that it’s stands out when used in a non-GW-approved fashion. Building it without the weird orrery on top that it originally comes with helps it blend in more, I suspect. I was originally planning to paint some varnish in the bottom of it to make it look wet, but chickened out at the last minute and decided to leave it as a dry pool.

And her it is, being set up for the next scenario: 

What’s next? Watch this space…

I aten’t dead 2: electric boogaloo

So, it’s been three months since my last post. Not long after Salute, we got an eviction notice through the door letting us know that we needed to find somewhere new to live on a deadline. To cut a long and unfun story short, we did in fact find somewhere new to live, but it did mean putting a pause on hobby activity while we packed everything up.

The new house has a garage, which is a handy amount of storage considering the last two houses we’ve lived in have had basements. Unfortunately, despite moving day being needlessly hot, the weekend after had heavy rain, and the garage turned out to be less waterproof than we had been led to believe:

Honestly, we got very lucky, with minimal actual damage to our stuff. One box of terrain at the bottom of a pile unluckily turned out to have a crack in it though, and so I ended up with this:

An amount of time with a hairdryer and sitting on a cookie rack in the bedroom has managed to salvage everything though, so it could have been much worse! Which reminds me, the roof for the clock tower has fallen behind my chest of drawers, must remember to dig that back out…

So, despite hobby activities being on hold, the lead mountain has in fact grown. First of all, it was Father’s Day since my last post, and as I’ve been watching some old school Doctor Who my presents included a Crooked Dice Temporal Traveller that looks uncannily like Jon Pertwee:

I also grabbed a mini of the month from GW, as I figured he’d make a nice unit champion or Wight if I slapped him on a square base:

I got a message from one of the buyers at work asking if I wanted her spare advanced copy of the upcoming 40K Character encyclopaedia, and who am I to turn down a free limited edition mini:

Which has also tempted me to maybe paint up a little Kill Team or something - GW released a mini game based on the video game where Titus and 3 other marines battle a handful of Tyranids, that’s a small and doable project right? For the other three marines, I figured I would probably want to have them be quite distinctive looking, and so grabbed another mini of the month, this time a Space wolf:

I’m not sure if I’ll leave him as is or try to convert him into a Deathwatch marine, only time will tell…

I also grabbed a magazine that had this sprue as a free gift on the front, because who doesn’t need more hero minis for D&D?

It was also my birthday at the end of August, and among my presents were this baggie of Foundry harpies, because I’m quite excited for the next Joseph McCullough game Warriors of Athena (it was previously released in Spellcaster magazine, and so was going to be my next project, but googling around to see if anyone else online had made war bands I stumbled on a product page saying that it was getting a full book release next year, but more on this in another post):

It also came with a free archer, hooray!

Which brings the Tally to… no, wait, in the time since I started writing this post I’ve ordered more minis. So, to continue:

Sprues! Some skeletons, for Warriors of Athena purposes, some Greek chaps, for Warriors of Athena purposes, and some Wargames Atlantic zombies, for… well, because that is a goodly amount of zombie heads, and between this and the release of the newest Silver Bayonet book inspired me to convert up some historical zombies for Zomtober:

Speaking of Silver Bayonet, I also grabbed a bunch of limited edition minis and… a sprue for Warriors of Athena, because that’s what I’m all about at the moment:

So, all in, the Tally now stands at:

15 vs 247 = -232

Hopefully I can get some minis painted in the next few months and try and chip away at that deficit a little!

May the Fourth be with a really big gun

As is traditional, May the Fourth means I’ve painted something Star Wars themed, and this year it’s ‘Mandalorian with large weapon, Paz Vizla’:

I have a bunch of Star Wars minis in the backlog, but this one got chosen because it looked cool in the cabinet while we were chatting with Tim Prow at the Diehard Miniatures stand at Salute, so he got bought and accelerated up the painting queue. I also tried painting heat stained metal for the first time (inspired by the studio paint job), which came out… fine. Something to work on in the future perhaps (as every tutorial I saw said use an ink and dry brush, but whenever I went to dry off my brush all the pigment leached off completely, so I tried to glaze with washes instead which could have benefitted from slower going, but a deadline is a deadline).

While the miniature isn’t completely identical to his inspiration, I did use stills from the Mandalorian to work out which bits of armour should be which colour, as his colour scheme is pleasingly slightly asymmetrical.

Then it was a case of adding a little weathering to make him look suitably battle worn, and job’s a good’un!

He also is the first recipient of one of the grass tufts that I picked up at Salute, which are a lot bigger on a mini than they look on the paper!

Fun fact - Most of these base coats were applied in a Holiday Inn in Basildon:

Speaking of things looking bigger, this mini is actually surprisingly small - I was prepping him at the same time as some Tangent minis, which I thought were giant, but they actually looked larger next to this chap. Here he is next to a Warlord mini, to give you an idea of scale:

Which is interesting, as I remember the Mando that I got from Diehard being on the larger side. Alas, he’s boxed up, otherwise I’d dig him out and compare the two…

As well as painting this mini, I’ve also received a couple. The sample mini from Gringo 40s arrived:

As did a Made to Order Warhammer Empire Battle Standard bearer that I preordered a while ago:

So all in the Tally now looks like:

9 vs 206 = -197

What’s next? I’ve still got some Superheroes in various states of completion, and I really want to crack on with some Alamo project miniatures, but on the other hand I also watched the entirety of the Third Doctor serial ‘Spearhead from Space’ today while cooking a roast, so who knows…

Number Five, I presume

I know, I know, it’s been a while, I blame Cyberpunk 2077. My desire to paint miniatures hasn’t abated though, I potentially have more ideas for projects on the go than ever before…

That aside, I’ve actually managed to finish a miniature for the first time this year:

It’s Five, another miniature for the Umbrella Academy board game. Honestly, 99% of this paint job was completed last year, but I managed to get it over the finish line and then set about reducing the number of half painted minis I currently have piled on my painting tile…

The back is a lot more straightforward than the front, I’ll give you that.

And here’s how the game looks so far:

As well as finishing this miniature, there have also been a couple of Mini of the Months to drag the Tally in the opposite direction though:

A Striking Scorpion, in case I ever get round to doing an Eldar Inq28 warband

And a couple of Skaven, which can be sprinkled in with my existing rats to give a little more visual variety. 

Which takes the Tally to:

1 vs 3 = -2

So admittedly not the strongest start to the year (if you can call March the start of the year), but there’s still time to claw it back; until Salute that is, where the Tally will likely take a hit or two. Or the postman arrives, whichever comes first…

Zomtober 2024 Week 3

Another week, another zombie (he types for the second time, as apparently Blogger is having a day of it and rather than publishing this post just wiped the whole thing, so I’m starting from scratch):

I decided to quickly convert another zombie beastman this week to get back on the Zombieslayer theme - he’s a fairly simple conversion, being just a reposition of the original miniature rather than adding any specific zombie parts.

The arm hanging off by a thread (that I realise you can barely see in these pictures, annoyingly) was something of a happy accident - where I was cutting the shield arm off to reposition it to look like it is dangling uselessly rather than being brandished, when I went to pin it back into place, I realised that leaving the central pin showing would look like a bone of strand of gore!

If the gore looks wet, that’s because it is - it was applied about three minutes before this picture was taken, and then I had to go out in the rain to photograph it!

I also have this chap to offer, a backup that was painted just in case I wasn’t able to convert and paint his bestial brethren in time for the Sunday deadline:

Another TTCombat zombie halfling, this time looking like a tiny zombie publican.

As well as finishing these two miniatures, the Tally has taken some swings in other directions too:

@tmcllghn_paints sent me some heads for a conversion for the Alamo project (because apparently I’m of an age where I want to convert things based on something I’ve seen in a picture in an Osprey), but there’s a whole mini left there so it counts:

I also discovered that a friend’s partner had expressed an interest in trying out miniature painting, so after picking his brains in the car after coming back from a wildlife park last week I pulled together a gift of a sprue of Vikings and a handful of LOTR minis to have a bash at.

All in, the Tally now stands at: 

53 vs 192 = -139

What’s next? At least one more zombie, hopefully!