From Barks: Tommy Atkins's weird WW1 day (Limbo)(64 points)

I've been a little slow getting off the starting blocks for this Challenge, but I'm happy to be back.

My initial Limbo entry is this Martian scout tripod from Alien Dungeon, which I picked up from the good people at the War Library. I sprayed the whole thing silver and washed it black, and then hit a creative wall. Should I make it rusty and decrepit? What colour should the eye be? Should I make the details more defined? So it languished, until the Challenge inserted new life.

I decided to leave it un-rusty, and go for a red gem effect on the eye. I blended a deep red to black and orange, and then gave it a gloss coat. I'm not entirely happy, but it is done. The photos are with a previously painted PSC 15mm plastic soldier for scale. What else will poor Tommy Atkins encounter today?

I painted the tripod because I had been inspired by The Last War, a Forbidden Psalm/ Weird WW1 ruleset. My 15mm WW1 project had also been in a bit of limbo as well, and Last War has helped it approach completion. The tripod will be my 'Thing from the fog'. To add to my meagre Squirrel score, I've painted a few more gribblies.

First, I had a bag of transparent zombies from a board game. These made great ghosts, and also mud ghouls when liberally coated in mud effect.

Ghosts

Mud ghouls

I 3D printed some other figures at 50% size.

Trench maggots (Goonmaster)

Hounds of Annwn (Knucklebones)

Gas bugs (Goonmaster)

Trench rats (Duncan Shadow)

Some of these were barely painted (mud ghouls and ghosts) and others are small (15mm giant rats). So how about:

• 1 x 25mm vehicle: 20 points
• 24 x assorted 15mm gribblies: 24 points
• Limbo bonus: 20 points
• Squirrel (Last War) +1
• Can opener duel +8

From Millsy:

Great to have you join us again this year Barks! This is a great way to kick of your Challenge and I think you did the right thing sticking with the shiny finish on the walker. I've always thought part of the otherworldliness of tripods is they were made of unknown materials and wouldn't rust. I've scored it as a 28mm vehicle given the scale.

Nice work mate, a healthy 64 points to kick of your Challenge.

Cheers,

Millsy

From Paul O'G: Last War Barbed Wire Beasts (15 points)

My opening entry for Season XIII is also my first salvo for a small side project. Last War is a small indy produced skirmish level game with a Weird/Horror WW1 theme, with the premise that the War goes on, never ending, with only death awaiting all...

On that cheery note - Merry Christmas!

What really got me was some wonderful digital sculpts by another small indy company called Knucklebones Miniatures (whom you can find on Facebook, Patreon, and MyMiniFactory).  I just couldn't unsee them, and so (with Reilly's technomage assistance at our 3d printer), here we are. 

Pics thematically taken in front of the Rulebook Cover

While my first Section of Trenchers is under construction, here are the first of their battlefield antagonists - barbed wire beasts. The "Spandau ballet" undead kept in agonising pain by the cursed barbed wire that is now enmeshed in their bodies as they hunt the living across No Man's Land...  

I sculpted the bases to represent the eternally muddy and moist Western Front 

Great to be back and always good to get onto the scoreboard before Christmas - hope you all have a great one!

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Haha! This is hilarious, as I have the same three minis on ramp to get done for the exact same set of rules. Burned! Well done, Paul. These ghouls look absolutely fabulous, especially with the wire wrapped around them. Chilling. 

- Curt

From JohnE - 28mm Mixed Bag - (50 Points)

Well, here it is. My last-ditch attempt to meet my points goal. This is just a mixed bag of 28mm figures that I've finished over the last two weeks. Details in the photo captions.

It's been an absolute pleasure to participate this year. A huge shout out to Curt for putting this together and to the Minions for all their hard work. Also I very much appreciate all the positive comments on my submissions, and if I'm found worthy to participate next year I will work harder on commenting on the fine work of others. Cheers!

Reaper Xiufang, Femme Fatale

Reaper Xiufang, Femme Fatale

Foundry Squire

Foundry Squire

Westwind German Zombie Controller

Westwind German Zombie Controller

Crooked Dice Pulp Investigator

Crooked Dice Pulp Investigator

North Star Sapper

North Star Sapper

North Star Heavy Cavalryman

North Star Heavy Cavalryman

North Star Supernatural Investigator

North Star Supernatural Investigator

North Star Officer

North Star Officer

Brigade Games French Chasseurs Alpins

Brigade Games French Chasseurs Alpins

Points Summary: 

10 x 28mm foot @ 5 points = 50 points

Total = 50 points

From Millsy:

What an absolutely smashing collection of character miniatures John! Each and every one of them is worthy of commendation in their own way but if I was forced to make a choice for favourite it would be Reaper Xiufang, Femme Fatale. The saturated jade green you've chosen for her dress and gloves is wonderful and the pick flowers are a lovely counterpoint. Kudos mate, these are awesome!

From StuartL - A Miscellany at Graveyard Beach - 251 Points

Hello all,

Recently work has been irregular, unpredictable and generally taking up far too much time that could be spent on more valuable things like painting minis. Between working online, meetings and other such time consuming things, actually being able to sit down and paint for any length of time has become a bit of a novelty. Similarly, since I have been spending too much time in front of my PC for work, I haven't really felt like sitting down and typing out comments for every post on the challenge recently. My apologies to everyone. I do try to look at everyone's work, there have been some great entries in the past few weeks. So if I didn't comment on your submission, I apologise. 

Which brings me to this post. Rather than submit several entries over a couple of days, I have put them all together into one submission to save some time and effort.

First of all, here are some Weird World War II US Rocket Infantry.

The models are from the Dust Tactics game. I bought into the game heavily when Fantasy Flight was running it, as it was available from Amazon here in Japan at a reasonable price. Sadly, FF decided to drop the game, and then there were a series of debacles with Battlefront and the designer of the game running a kickstarter. The models are that soft kind of plastic that a lot of board game makers favour, but they look pretty good when given a lick of paint.

For five 28mm minis, these should add 25 Points to my total. And, as WWW2 is a new genre from me for this challenge, they add a Squirrel point to my tally too.

Earlier in the challenge, I painted up 5 old GW Lizardmen Skinks. Since then I dug out a bunch more of them from the hobby stash and painted them up too.

Here we have 42 of the old minis, still on their square bases. On the minis posted earlier, I had used a green wash on the skin, but on this batch I went with brown. After comparing the two, I find that the brown gives a much nicer shading to the figures and makes them look more natural. (As far as fictional sentient lizard folk go). I'll probably revisit the first batch at some point with a brown wash.

For 42x 28mm minis, these add 210 Points to my total and to my GW side duel as well.

When visiting my local dollar (100 yen actually, but it's roughly the same) store a week or so ago, I found some bags of plastic palm trees that looked like they were a reasonable size. I picked up five bags and brought them home to see how they would look as terrain.

They are a still a little on the small side perhaps and a bit rough around the edges, but good enough for the gaming table. The pirate figure in the picture is just there to give a sense of scale. I have since gone back to the shop and bought up the rest of their stock, so I should have enough of these to make a reasonable amount of scatter terrain.

The trees fill a roughly 3" by 3" by 4" area of the table, or roughly 1/6th of a terrain cube, so should score me 3 Points.

Finally, the part of my entry related to the Graveyard Beach section of the Chambers of Challenge. Some Pirate Ghosts.

These five spooky scoundrels are from Reaper's Bones line of minis and are cast in a translucent green plastic. I quite liked the look of it as it was, so I painted up the scenic bases and weaponry on the figures, but left the bodies and clothing more or less untouched.

To try to give them a bit more definition, I added a thin coat of Vallejo Transparent Green to the 'skin' areas of the figure. It doesn't show up in the pictures very well, but I think it helps.

Each of these undead pirates has a skull on their base (their own perhaps?) as well as a mix of flotsam and wreckage. 

As for points, I am not sure how to score these. As 28mm minis, they should come in at 25 points, but large parts of them are deliberately unpainted. So perhaps scoring them at half the usual rate? That should get me 13 Points, rounded up. If one of the minions disagrees, they can alter my score as necessary. I believe there was some mention of bonus points for the chamber if the undead had a nautical theme? There are also 5 Skullz for my side duel.

So, in total this submission should get me 251 Points, which I believe puts me over my target for the challenge with three weeks remaining.

My running Duels totals:

GW Points - 1016

Skullz - 456

Squirrels - 18

From StuartL - WWW.WeirdWorldWar2.Com (45 points)

As you can probably guess from the title, this entry is for the Weird sub genre of World War 2 games.

These models all come from the Dust Tactics 1:48 scale line of miniatures, which was later rebranded Dust Warfare and is now just Dust. I first got these minis when Fantasy Flight Games were producing the game. Once it seemed like they had milked it for all it was worth, they dropped the license and it went over to Battlefront. One disastrous kickstarter later (I'm glad I missed it to be honest) and the game is now being produced by the creator of the game universe and seems to cost twice the price it once did, so I probably won't be getting anything else for it.

Up first is a squad of very heavily armed and armoured British Airborne. I don't know how they jump out of a plane with that much kit on, but they are all set to avenge the disaster at Arnhem. Armed with some kind of phaser cannons and rocket powered fists, they are an unstoppable force on the battlefield. Unless you shoot them in their completely unarmoured heads, which seems a terrible design flaw.

This guy is some sort of special character (you can tell because he is wearing shades and chomping on a cigar, only special characters do that). Because he is so bad a$$ he has TWO phaser cannons. I made an attempt at painting the correct unit insignia on the models' shoulders, though really it came out as burgundy and blue splotches. But if you squint your eyes and look at it from a distance, it just might look like a poor attempt at the British Airborne's divisional badge.

And a close up of the other three guys for completion's sake. Interestingly, all three guys have a knife on their belt, just in case that rocket powered fist isn't enough.

To give them some long range support on the battlefield I also painted up a walking tank. One of the points I liked about Dust was that the allied tanks looked kind of Sherman-esque. This one bears a resemblance to a Firefly, though the turret is kind of small. I may dig out my Tamiya Firefly and play about with swapping the turret to see how it looks.

Continuing my theme of being a nerd for insignia, this model borrowed some spare decals from a 1:48 Cromwell kit. These mark it out as being from the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, 22nd Armoured Brigade, 7th Armoured Division 'The Desert Rats'.

The model actually comes apart, which made painting it a bit easier. The turret is removable and there are some other weapon options available for it including a flame thrower and some tulip rockets which I may paint at some point in the future.

By my reckoning, I have 1x 28mm scale vehicle and 4x 28mm scale infantry for a total of 40 points and another notch on the Squirrel tally.

___________________________________________________________________

Weird War 2 is becoming quite the topic du jour - excellent work on these chaps, but if the infantry are 1/48 scale, surely that means they're substantially bigger than 28mm? I'd better sling a few bonus points your way just to be sure. Five should do it!

Ev

From PaulO'G: Even more Indians and British Assault Walker (85 points)

In addition to my Bonus round submission, this week saw me complete another dozen Woodland Indians for our FIW campaign.  Alan routinely fields two dozen of these bloodthirsty braves in our Sharp Practice games and seeing them bear down on my loyal Colonials gives them the heebie jeebies - hopefully my having a reciprocal amount will give his French equal pause!

These are really lovely sculpts by Bob Murch from the Flint and Feather range, aimed at early contact/pre-contact period, thus the myriad of traditional weapons.  Again I spent a bit of time on authentic warpaint as I think it really makes them look savage!

To command my 2 units of Native Allies I have added a Sachem leader and I really like his commanding pose.  This is another figure from the Flint and Feather range. 

Next up, this beast is the M8 Grizzly Assault Walker from Warlord's Konflikt 47 range.  As this Allied walker is fielded by both US and British forces, I have pained it in the colours and insignia of a British Armoured Division and added a British tank crewman; so now it can support my British paratroopers when I want to weird them up a bit!  I really like this sculpt and had a lot of fun painting it, but putting it together was rather a pain and it required a lot of cleaning up and some parts needed work to bend them back into shape.  Regardless, I'm happy with the overall outcome.

The Grizzly is quite a sizeable beast and dominates the tabletop. Accordingly, I wanted something imposing for the base and agonised over that for awhile.  I've tried to convey it smashing through a small forest and crushing everything in its path, both natural and man-made obstacles with the barbed wire.

A panzergrenadier's view - rather imposing!

Added to my Russian Spider Mechs from the Armour Bonus Round, this makes three Weird War walkers I’ve completed during this challenge – time to order some more!

And so I present a 28mm vehicle, its crewman, and 13 Indians with some lovely warpaint (! :-) to the judge for adjudication.  I also hereby officially increase my AHPC VII target to 1000 points, which will be a new personal best for me.
 

Jeez Paul, I sub for one day and I have to figure out how to rejig Miles spreadsheet to fit your new points goal!  

Anyway enough wining - I'm sure that I can lay some delayed action fuses to mess with the Mathemagician.  Great work on the Indian tribesmen, the warpaint looks great to me.  I'm not into the whole Weird WW2 thingy, but that Grizzly is a thing of wonder.  Is it just me but is that gun in front in a rather umm suggestive position?  Well done with the weathering and basing.  I wouldn't want to be in that panzer grenadier's boots.  I'll concur on your points tally, I figure the walker counts  as a vehicle but what do I know?