Barrowgate Town Watch

Reaper Miniatures once again lured me in for a holiday sale.  While I got a number of things that you will see in due course (or not, my record on finishing or showing you projects is poor), I wanted to highlight the "Barrowgate Town watch" set I got. 

First off, these are extremely well packed, with a blister pack that has a vacuum molded inner section to hold each figure in the correct orientation. The backing is printed with their name and information, and on the back there are clear pictures of the figures. 

Above are the figures stood between Franz and Jean our regular measuring figures, so you can see they are a bit on the tall side, and probably are in more of the 30mm range.  However, they should fit nicely stylistically with TOW/AOS figures and the new Guards of Traitor's Toll figures. 

Pretty great value for $3.25 a figure. 

Baby's first kickstarter

A few weeks ago now I got delivery of my very first Kickstarter reward.  I had pledged the minimum pledge of $10 for Bones 6, and after dithering a long time how to use that credit, I decided on getting a proper dragon.

I selected "Chaarondar the Cruel", the sturdy looking guy below. 

That's Chaarondar the Cruel, with two As

I eventually got a heavy box in the mail, which contained the following:

Since that does not look like much, here is a scale shot of the base. 

Hard plastic base, with an Eldar crew person on a 30mm base

So you can see that the dragon will be massive!  I did a quick assembly test, and everything seems to slot together nicely, although I would need five hands to hold it all for a picture to prove it.  I may need a bit of putty for the wing to body joints, but that is to be expected for a huge guy like this. 

Anyway, so far, I am pretty pleased with the whole thing.  Now it gets put away into a box for a while...

Happy Christmas/New Year

So, you may have noticed that 2020 was a wee bit different than previous years, and I for one, am glad to see the back of it.

In any case, I hope you had an enjoyable Holiday season.  I was working for most of it, but I did get the specific holidays off, which this year at least added up to a couple of long weekends. 

I made out pretty well in terms of gifts this year too:

Not pictured are a few more Reaper figures (including the paint your own Krampus kit), and a couple of other things that will get their own posts later.

My oldest got a large box of Space Marines from Santa, so he was pretty excited about that, and got most of them assembled already. 

As for 2021, all signs look as if at least the first half of the year will be the same as 2020, which is to say, no face to face time, busy at work, and very little gaming.  

Happy Christmas/New Year

Happy Christmas and Happy New year to you all.

I hope Santa/Krampus/Your Paypal account brought you what you wanted this year.

I have been rather busy for the last month, with a conference in Chicago, being sick for a week, and then taking nearly two weeks off from work to be with the kids.

For Christmas this year, I, er Santa, got everyone in the household miniatures from Reaper for their stocking.  Reaper, as is usual for the season, was running a few promotions, so I got a few extra things too:

Reaper Christmas 2019

Specifically, in addition to free shipping, I got a free miniature of the month (Genie coming out of a lamp), a free pack of holiday figures (I selected the Christmas familiars because my wife loves polar bears), and a Christmas Sampler pack.

Candy and miniatures (plus paint and an ornament)

The sampler pack I, er, we got had a Santa miniature, an ornament, two paints, three bones figures, and some candy!

For Christmas, I did unexpectedly well, and got the D&D Essentials set from my sister, and some X-wing stuff from my Wife.  She also got me a subscription to White Dwarf, although that will not show up for a while.  Santa also got a number of Reaper figures to stuff into my stocking.

Somewhat unexpectedly, my son got First Strike, the miniature starter for 8th edition Warhammer 40k from his grandmother, so there has been a lot of talk about Warhammer in the house lately!  He has already read the books, and Christmas morning clipped the figures out and put them together.  Finishing the miniature assembly and playing through the starter missions are in our near future.

Pleased as punch

Boxing day I had a hour or so to work on the terrain mat with my daughter, and we got the roads done, the river bottom painted with its first couple coats, and some rocks added to the ford.

It is really coming along nicely now, and I anticipating it being done with a couple more sessions.  Mainly, I want to glaze some green on the river, and then layer in some clear caulk. Unfortunately the flock is not sticking to the canvas/caulk quite as much as I anticipated, so I am going to have to paint it with a coat of watered down PVA.  In the picture above the regular flock clumps you can see in the lower left are where I was adding another layer of caulk/flock to try and fill in some empty areas where the flock had rubbed off. 

We got away to my Wife's cousins' house for New Years, and in addition to playing a ton of Code Names and In the Bag, we managed another game of Risk Legacy. Unusually, I nearly won, and was back stabbed by those that encouraged me to make some board spanning moves.  Such is Risk!

Finally, at the cousins' house I finally got the chance to use the D&D miniatures that I gave the kids in 2017, and then had to contend with them begging me to play more D&D for the rest of the trip. (and they even were trying to figure out how to play together over facetime!)  First session they asked if they could fight each other, and then split the party after the first encounter...  The kids seemed to have a great time, and it was one of the only things that could drag them away from the Switch they got.

D&D 5th Edition Starter Set Miniatures

For Christmas this year, I somehow convinced my wife that we should give her cousin and his kids the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition starter set... and further that I should buy and paint up a set of miniatures to use with it.

Now, this new D&D set is a "theater of the mind" sort of thing (also known as cheap), so no fold out maps, no tokens or stands.  It barely has dice. So I really wanted to juice it up for them and make it seem more exciting.  Thus the miniatures, and I also made a whole map pack of the Sword Coast for the cousin, who will be the DM of the group. (and that is why I made the Faerûn travel distances matrix).  I went a bit deep with the maps and such, and got about 20 pages of material, including a DM screen that I found somewhere online when looking for travel distances, and I also bought a set of dice for each of the kids.

Anyway, as the kids range from 3 to 8 years old, I knew that I wanted to use Bones miniatures, and began by reading the pre-generated character sheets, which happily are gender neutral. After a few lunch times worth of trawling through the Reaper online catalog, I ordered some miniatures from a seller on Ebay, and set to work.  I made a few conversions, mostly to remove the more egregiously bendy weapons, but also to shift them more in the direction of the starting equipment.

Here is the starting group.

Two humans, elf, dwarf, and halfling

Converted staff

Converted warhammer

Sculpted on detail removed, painted on heraldry

Replaced sword with great axe, removed dragon head, replaced with sculpted tree stump

No changes! 

Replaced bendy sword with plastic

Now, I figured that my own kids might want to play too, and so they needed their own figures (and character sheets, which I wrote up).  So I added a barbarian and a Gnome fighter to the group.

Thankfully no changes

And I also painted up a henchman/torch bearer and a donkey, because every D&D group needs someone to do the dangerous work for them, and I hope that having miniatures for them will help the group to remember this important fact.

I had a pretty good time painting these, although as always it was a bit of a rush at the end to get them done in time.  The wilderness type bases were a lot of fun to do, and if you look closely, you can see there is quite a bit going on there.

Anyway, so there is most of my hobby work for the month.  What about you, did you make any miniatures to gift?

Reaper Bones Comparison

Yesterday, in my post about buying some Reaper miniatures, Merijn asked about the quality of the Bones figures, and it got me to thinking about how I happen to have a duplicate figure (as a result of a mispack) 

Here are a couple of quick comparison shots I took this morning.  The pictures are not great, and the metal figure is partly converted, but you can see that the figure is at least in the same range of quality, with some softening around edges, possibly most prominent on the hair.  Some of this is also an artifact of the photography, as white figures just do not photograph well! You can also see the level of flash on the bones figure (look at the right boot), which must be cut away, rather than sanded or scraped. 

Anyway, I like the Reaper Bones figures, particularly for half the cost!  Hope it is helpful to someone. 

Halloween Post

I have been a bit off my hobby game lately for a variety of reasons, but I did manage to take advantage of the annual Reaper Halloween offer to get some miniatures that I had my eye on, as shown in the first picture.  Reaper is doing a 25th anniversary miniature for each month, which I got, and the Halloween offer this year was three paints, candy, and a chance for a miniature... or a rock.  Fortunately I got a miniature this year, which appears to be a ghostly figure of some sort. Reaper is a great company, and I got these on Halloween as the kids were suiting up, so it worked out nicely.

I also managed to get some priming done, which will be helpful as the weather inevitably turns to cold and dark and I manage to get some time to paint (hopefully on that second bit!)

Federation fleet additions

Skitarri (and a metal Harlequin Death jester in the back)

September White Dwarf

This Saturday I managed to make it to the FLGS to pick up the September issue of White Dwarf.  This issue is centered on the 30th Anniversary of Warhammer 40k, and rather unusually came in an over-sized card envelope. This allowed for two posters to be included, one of which is the cover art, and the other an advertisement for Total War: Warhammer II, and also allowed for the actual magazine cover to be fairly spare, with just the White Dwarf and Warhammer 40k/30 logos.

Oversized 

Magazine and contents

Quite large poster of the cover image

You may also notice that I bought a Bones figure.  With the Reaper Bones IV kickstarter closing on Saturday, I was in a Bones sort of mood, and picked this guy up to add to my stockpile... not exactly sensible, but he should turn out nicely.  As for the kickstarter, it ended up breaking $3 million.  I have only put in $1 so far, but expect to add quite a bit before the pledge manager closes (in July!).

Fantasy Figures

As seen in my last post (was it really two weeks ago?), some miniatures I have painted recently.

Usual excuses about photography with a cell phone, and lighting.  I may eventually get around to taking better pictures, but given my track record on that regard, I would not hold your breath.

The two enigmatic large bases need a bit more work before I show them off with their proper occupants.  I have enough figures to show off that I will break them up into a few posts.

First off fantasy.

Leading the charge is this Night goblin on a wolf, which I converted back in August after being inspired by Sebastian's work over at Eastern Empire. (Inspired should here read "nearly directly ripped off")

Next up are these Reaper peasants, although really only the one could be a peasant, while the others are clearly city dwellers.

These may need another application of matte spray

And finally we have a chaos standing stone made from the one grasped by the plastic giant. I carved away the excess material (a giant hand) and ended up with this stone.  Seems like it needs something else though... spent candles, and some blood maybe?

Tomorrow I have some various Inq28 figures to put up, and then we will have another wait until I actually get something painted. (I did assemble and prime a troupe of Harlequins, so there is material forthcoming eventually!)

Reaper Halloween

Vinyl appears to be in my future

During October Reaper Miniatures has had two Halloween related promotions going on, one that has their usual "Ghoulie Bag" with a trick or treat figure (you can see how that worked out for me last time), and a second where they are selling cutsie large headed monsters (Boneslyvanians, although in metal).

When they were first announced, I sent the picture of the Boneslyvanians to my wife, and she mentioned that they were "cute", particularly "Gil" the little guy reminiscent of the creature from the Black Lagoon.

And so an order was put together...  the hard part was keeping the costs contained, since my rough list of things I liked and might want to get was well over $100 (and with the bones figures running ~$2.50, you can imagine how large the list was!).  In the end, I got a few figures for INQ28, a few D&D figures, a few Halloween related figures, and some bits.  In my Ghoulie bag, I got a few pieces of candy, some paint, and Elise the Witch... not the most kid friendly model.

I had hoped to get the order before Halloween to get some painting done, but it did not work out, so maybe I will be painting late tonight.

Red Box Games Kickstarter

Red Box Games, Tré Manor's line of miniatures, is having a kickstarter to transition the HelsVakt Gynnade Krigare figures from metal to Trollforged plastic-resin. Backing at $25 (Plus shipping?) means that you get five figures, when normally they go for $40 in metal.  So a good deal if you are looking for properly scaled chaos warrior types.

Tré is a great sculptor, and used to (still does?) produced the odd figure for Reaper as well. His figures have a great musculature, and always seem to be loaded down with gear the way real people would be in battle, or better, when exploring a dungeon.

The current Red Box line has some great figures, so I am watching this one eagerly, and hope that it allows Tré to re-release a number of his lines into cheaper plastic-resin.  So please give eagerly!

Reaper Miniatures

This weekend I got my Reaper Miniatures order in the mail.  I ordered the PC figures and a few monster/NPC types from Reaper, and was able to take advantage of both their free shipping, and their special October "Trick-Or-Treat" offer.  Here is what I got in my Trick-or-Treat bag:

We have a bag of candy, the Pink color paint for Breast Cancer awareness, four bottles of paint as samples, a pack of CAV branded playing cards, and my Trick-or-Treat figure.

The real Trick vs. Treat aspect of the bag was the chance to get a "treat", a figure, or a "trick".  I got the trick, which was a packaged rock.  Maybe it will be a future collectible? It is after all a one of a kind figure...

As I have mentioned before I really like Reaper figures, and I like how useful their website's figure finder feature is. (although it would be nice if there were more keywords for each figure). Unfortunately, at least in terms of this project, most Reaper figures are more in the 32mm range than in a 28mm range. Some are even pushing that, since the Dark Heaven range is fairly free form, and different sculptors have different ideas of how large a figure ought to be.

Pictured between "Franz" and "Jean" our comparison figures, we have Red Box Games, Perry Miniatures, Ebob, Reaper elf, and Reaper Gnome.  Sort of a motley crew, but I think basing and paint will draw them together a bit more.

Why only one player wants to be a male character I do not know, but it sure made figure finding more difficult.  More on that later, when I introduce the PC figures.

Now I am just waiting for bases from EM4, and we can start seeing some real progress here, and not just shots of bare metal.

Also, a warm welcome to new follower Bogus Gasman, who has a D&D blog titled "My pants are Haunted".