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…

Grotty goblins

Or ghouls, more specifically:

Frostgrave and Rangers of Shadow Deep use Gnolls extensively as their proprietary monster type, but in my games I’m using goblins (I blame the manga/anime Goblin Slayer, primarily), using the LoTR Moria goblins I painted ages ago. Needing some ghouls, I figured that the Hobbit Goblin town minis would fit in my world, as goblins that have become diseased cannibals and look a bit gnarly and gribbly. 

I converted a couple to have shoulder armour to make them stand out of the crowd for RoSD scenarios requiring a ghoul champion:

Or is it chieftain? I can’t remember off the top of my head, and my book is in the other room, but you know what I mean.

I also fished this lovely Heresy Miniatures sculpt out of the painting queue where it had languished undercoated for many (many!) years, swapped it into a non-lipped base, and painted him up with the rest to use as a ghoul king (there’s a Frostgrave scenario somewhere with one of those right?)

Such a beautifully detailed sculpt, although I did paint his sculpted testicles as though they were part of his loincloth (which I’m not entirely sure how it stays affixed, it looks like it’s pierced onto his waist…)

And here’s the rest:

Lots of fun painting such a sickly unhealthy skin tone, and then going over with crimson and green washes to make their books and sores look really unpleasant.

I probably didn’t need to paint so many, as I’m likely to encounter somewhere between two and four in my games, but this was the number that came in the lot I bought on eBay so I figured I’d do them all at the same time just in case, and all else failing that’s a ready to go warband for another game.

As ever, here’s a terribly out of focus posed shot of my Frostgrave Knight having a very bad day:

And some behind the scenes shots showing that I’ve largely sub-contracted set dressing and posing for these things:

Painting these beings the Tally to:

65 vs 47 = +18

Or at least it would have, if not for the postman…

I forget how I found myself thinking about Warmachine, but several weeks before they announced MKIV, I decided to go back and continue my read through of all the books and issues of No Quarter that I had stalled on somewhere around 2019, as I think the fluff and lore of that game is simply outstanding. 

Idly browsing the internet, I realised that I was only one rule book short of a complete collection (not counting the campaign pack that is apparently silly money), so I had a nose on eBay. ‘I’ll put on a lowball bid which won’t win, get it out of my system’ I thought to myself. And then I won it, of course:

As is often the case, I found myself thinking ‘ah, I could just do a small scale project, paint up the equivalent of a battle box, that’s what four minis at most? I’ll squeeze that in between Skaven units, just like they were a somewhat chunkier than usual palette cleanser’.

And while I do have two battle groups sat in various stages of painting in the painting queue, I had a hankering for the original Sorscha sculpt, as when the game was first launched I played a demo game where I had Sorscha, which is what first got me interested in the game (brief aside - this was either in Westgate Games in Canterbury or… Fantasy Workshop in Ashford?)

And since she’d have been lonely on her own, I grabbed her a couple of jacks too. 

And some Cryx bits, because they’re cool, and I’ve got Asphyxious and Cankerworm sat undercoated too.

Which leaves the Tally at:

65 vs 55 = +10

There are more bits on the way, of course - the Withershadow Combine I bought had unfortunately had the little skeleton puppet filed off which I couldn’t see in the listing’s pictures, but the seller kindly offered to swap the set I had for another, but to make the postage worth it I bought some more things, including a model for a faction that I have no other miniatures for, but he was cheap and looked cool so…

You shall not pass

Go! You shall not collect £200!

I painted everyone’s favourite archetypical wizard, using paint recipes cribbed together from a couple of different sources. Normally I’d wing it, but as I was trying to recreate the look from the film I wanted to be a bit more structured in my painting! 

These old Lord of the Rings sculpts are lovely little miniatures - I know I’ve got the rest of the fellowship and a Moria display base stashed away somewhere, and I’m tempted to paint the rest up now!

Gandalf was also just what was needed to take the Tally to:

18 vs 18 = +0

Finishing Gandalf also meant that I had everything I needed painted to play the Wizard Duel mini game that was rereleased in White Dwarf a couple of months back:

You’ll notice I scribbled up some cards for declaring what magical attack and defence you were choosing rather than messing around with having to constantly reference the chart in the magazine. My handwriting is worse than my 6 year old daughter’s, I know.

We even had thematically coloured spin down life counters for maximum immersion!

I lost, of course, as my wife knows me well enough to know that I’d obviously favour pushing rather than the more direct damage, and then was able to second guess me on almost every turn. We also managed to use the palantir once each during the game, making it well worth the expense to purchase and effort to paint.

Also, despite only featuring three painted things, technically this is a game played using fully painted miniatures, so pow goes another thing off this year’s Challenge:

Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (2/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

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

Well, I’m already doing better than last year! Who knows, maybe this is the year that I tick most of the Challenge off?

 

The White Wizard

 

I painted up this Saruman mini in the hopes of cajoling my wife into playing a game of the wizard battle mini game that was in White Dwarf a couple of months back at some point. 

He was painted almost entirely following an old Duncan Rhodes YouTube tutorial, which was pretty straightforward and came up with a fairly nice result! 

Trivia for this mini - due to the finely sculpted eyebrows, this is the first mini in the long time that I painted the pupils of using a paintbrush rather than a micron pen!

For the wizard duel game I also need a palantir, so I got this lovely little piece from Zealot miniatures:

I painted the plinth to match his staff rather than just being grey (as I thought it might blend in with the board too much otherwise), and the same goes for the red cloth (as well as the ongoing truth that Mephiston red is a lovely shade of red). It will also do double duty as a treasure token for Frostgrave. 

Tally:

3 vs 18 = -15

(I’m not counting the treasure token as a mini for the purposes of the Tally)

In other news, I’ve had a sudden urge to revisit Dark Age, the old miniature game inspired by the art of Brom, but it seems like it’s died and everything got sold off on clearance a year ago... if anyone has any Forsaken bits and bobs in their trade pile let me know!

...although it’s entirely possible that my attention span will have wandered already, truth be told

Patrón

(The joke in the title only really works if you read this blog post immediately after my previous one...)

Despite working longer than usual hours at work (lockdown plus Christmas makes for busy times) I’ve managed to finish another miniature, snatching twenty minutes of an evening whenever I could:

She’s a repaint of an old Dungeons & Dragons prepaint, an Elf Warlock from an old starter set I believe. The detail is a little soft, but she still came out looking quite nice!

The boob armour was a bit much, but I think with a bit of careful colour selection it looks more like a set of clothes rather than a couple of bowls strapped to her chest now! She got purple hair because... I let my wife choose. While yes it is the same as the miniature in my previous post, no I did not paint them simultaneously, despite the fact that that would have been a much more efficient use of time...

Finishing her brings me one step closer to completing the admittedly fairly sidelined Classes project:

Classes (as of 5e Player’s Handbook):

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

• Warlock
• Wizard

(I would have updated the links, but blogger just won’t let me on any device currently, so you’ll have to try and imagine the others I’ve finished!)

I may even expand the project out to encompass miniatures to cover all of the races featured in the Player’s Handbook too, but that might be a project for next year...

The Tally took an equal hit in the other direction too this week:

I grabbed myself a Saruman from eBay after grabbing the latest issue of White Dwarf, in order to be able to play the Wizards Duel game in it (I already have a bare metal Gandalf somewhere in the Lead Mountain). So he hops straight into the stripping pot, and takes the Tally to:

46 vs 134 = -88

"All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs"

A solid two years after doing the conversion, I've painted my Tyrion Lannister!

As you may remember, the conversion is based on a LOTR hobbit with green stuff boots, a GW axe and the head of a ... well, I'm not sure entirely, as it was donated for the project, but I'm fairly certain it's from a Wargames Factory sprue. 

Like the entire project, he takes inspiration from a mid-mash of sources - armour and axe from his brief stints in battle at the Battle of the Green Fork and Blackeater, his lack of a nose from... well, mostly from it getting squashed whilst in cautiously cleaning up the plastic head, but we can always claim that it's inspired by his look post the Battle of the Blackwater!

Painting this takes the tally t-

Oh, that.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a skirmish narrative wargame and this one looks shiny (and I'm already considering the options for swapping out the enemies, or running it as a more free-form game on Space Hulk tiles...)

Painted Tyrion and impulse purchase (although spending a week mulling over whether I was going to get it makes it less of an impulse purchase I suppose) takes the tally to:

19 vs 104 = -85

Alas, my assassins won't be getting painted tonight, as having dug out the Foundry black triad that I bought at Salute last week it turns out that rather than shade, mid-tone and highlight, the pack contains three pots of shade, which is... well, just black really. Maybe I could paint the cape and cowl on the Batman mini I've got on the go an- no wait, that's black too.

There are no men like me. There's only me

Jaime Lannister... How do I begin to explain Jaime Lannister?

Jaime Lannister is flawless. 

I hear his hair's insured for 10,000 Gold Dragons.

I hear he does cart commercials... in Asshai.

His favorite bard is The Blue Bard.

One time he met Loras Tyrell on a tourney field... 

 - And he told him he was pretty. 

One time he punched me in the face... it was awesome.

(If you've never seen the film Mean Girls, that heavily referential joke probably fell flat)

So, as you may have guessed, I managed to finish painting the Jaime Lannister conversion that I'd been meaning to finish for so long in order to face off against the tiny Ned Stark I had previously completed (in order to refight the confrontation in the streets of King's Landing when Jaime discovers that Catelyn Stark has taken his brother prisoner, hence him being in a long coat rather than full plate). The two generic lads flanking him are both minor conversions that I'd built a while ago that I largely painted whilst waiting for washes to dry on other miniatures...

I hate my painting most days, but I eventually got his coat to a stage I was happy to stop and walk away from...

Tally -

18 vs 22 = -4

Having finished these three miniatures brings my total of painted Lannisters to neneteen men, although if I finish the next figure in my painting queue it will be nineteen and a half, if you catch my drift...

A long time coming...

Unbelievably, I finished painting the converted Lannister House Guard that I started way back in June 2013:

They're plastic Minas Tirith bodies with all insignia removed, with cast converted heads and roman oval shields with a cast on lion insignia from an Advanced Heroquest figure, led by a Finecast Minas Tirith hornblower with a Perry head (mostly for the pursed lips) and the sword that was broken by the lot he came in being sent in a bag with zero packaging material by an unthinking seller cunningly replaced with one from the Perry mounted men at arms set:

I filed away the front of the hand to allow the graft of the whole piece from the Perry set, rather than trying to pin a teeny thin blade onto his fist...

Completing these 8 miniatures doubles the current size of my Lannister forces, so I suppose I should get round to painting a hero type or two to lead them... 

(Ignore Dengar for now...)

Tally - 14 vs 15 = -1

I'm still here, honest...

So, things have been all quiet on the blogging front of late, as I now have somewhat reduced modelling space:

Yes, that's right, I am now the proud owner of one tiny ewok. She spends a lot of time sleeping currently, so I've been grabbing some modelling and painting time during my Paternity leave where I can...

Well, if by grabbing modelling and painting time you mean wildly procrastinating, watching blocks of Community on Netflix, or spending half an hour searching for your superglue because you can't remember where you put it when tidying away dangerous things ready for having a baby only to find that you did in fact put it somewhere sensible you just didn't look at the back of the modelling supplies cubbyhole... 

When I finally tracked down the necessary materials, I thought I'd crack on with the Jaime Lannister conversion that's been rattling around the Song of Ice and Fire project box for a ridiculous amount of time waiting for the right head transplant...

One Westwind Pictish head later and voila, we have a Jaime ready for painting. So, based on how long it took me to finish my Ned miniature, expect to see a post in two to three years...

After six months of being good, I had a little splurge though, and ordered a few bits for some Mass Effect inspired fun:

A limited edition Mantic figure that is 'heavily inspired' by the Geth. All I need to do now is work out whether I should spend infinity money on buying more of these, or should I see about casting up the head to use on donor bodies...

A Strider mech from Dreadball, because I got it for such a good price that I figured I could convert some weapons onto it rather than just coughing up the cash to pay full price for the Deadzone one that comes with weapon arms...

And also an Enforcer starter to convert into Cerberus Assault Troopers and the kickstarter exclusive figure to convert into a Quarian scavenger type. 

Alas, I still find myself searching for the right helmets for headswaps before work can begin in earnest - the general look I'm after is this:

The closest I've found is a Pig Iron head (top centre), but I'm still hoping there's something better that I have as yet to discover (anyone that can think of any I've not seen, drop me a comment and I'll love you forever)

Well, heads and the new Enforcer support booster and an Infinity ninja (to convert a Guardian and Phantom respectively), but then I'll be right on the productivity train (well, that or go back to looking for heads to Frankenstein onto Sedition Wars bodies...)

Tally - 6 vs 15 = -9

Delves in my stripping pot...

Having finally overcome my deeply ingrained (and generally unfounded) nerdrage, my wife and I have been catching up with Marvel's cinematic output (I'd previously only seen The Avengers , having decried all comic book films as a comic book fan). We've been watching them in chronological order, and we're now currently halfway through Agents of SHIELD, waiting for Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 to pop up on Netflix! As tends to happen in these scenarios, I found myself with a hankering to recreate what I'd seen in (roughly) 28mm, and so duly procured a Marvel Heroclix Avengers Movie Mini Gamefor the four sculpts within, with the intention to strip and repaint them:

Which reminded me, some of the miniatures in my stripping pot had been there for over a year, so it was probably about time to clear it out before adding anything else to it!

So, so time last February (I thought March, but the Valentines cards in the background of the next picture would suggest otherwise!) I picked up a whole bevy of Batman Heroclix from Blue Rat Games with the intention of painting up a posse or two for the Batman Miniatures Game:

Including picking up one particular Two-Face figure purely for the fact that it came with a 1:1 scale replica of Two-Face's coin, which I (should I ever manage to get a crew painted) will use to make every decision whilst playing as Two-Face!

There are some nice little sculpts in the Heroclix range (although admittedly generally not as nice as the entire range of miniatures that Knight Models has brought out in the time that these have been sat in my stripping pot), although they are sometimes hidden under thick (and goofy!) layers of paint:

Chilling. Master of fear indeed.

So, I attempted to strip them. Nail polish remover would absolutely destroy the plastic that they're made from, so I gave it a go in some Fairy Power Spray, which I'd read positive reviews of:

But nothing. Months of dunking, scrubbing, and repeating, and nothing. Frustrated, I dumped the lot into my usual stripping pot (of Surgical Spirit), where once more, they were dunked, scrubbed, rinse and repeat. Almost no change to the paint. What are they painting these things with?! As you can see, they've been in long enough that the glue holding them together has dissolved, but not the paint:

As well as the various Batman Heroclix, there were also a couple of Mage Knight sculpts that I fancied repurposing for the Dungeons and Dragons project (which I should really make a greater effort to get off the ground, what with the release date for the next edition having been announced and everythig); some Games Workshop Dwarf Slayers that you've seen in previous posts before their fragrant bath; the old Spirit Host ghost I picked up at Salute; Manfred, an old Fighter; and a mounted Eomer that I picked up as a potential base for a mounted Robb Stark conversion for the ASOIAF project.

Although I wasn't able to remove the paint from the Heroclix (which after another rinse off I'm probably just going to paint over the top of. Or throw into a fire.), they are now however exceptionally clean, and somewhat soapy smelling, leaving my stripping pot looking like this:

Into which have gone the Avengers from the start of the post, just in the off chance that their paint is somehow different from the previous releases...