Month: Jul 2023

Supervisors Rule!

/ Carrion Crow / 8 Comments

After many hours of collating, typing and, in some cases, making stuff up, the Golden Heroes Supervisors Book is complete.

Combine this with the Players Book that I attached to this post, and you now have a complete roleplaying game to recreate the kind of four-colour action from your favourite comic books.

Now, I do appreciate that these rules date back to the early eighties, but I still feel that they are a solid set of rules and therefore haven’t really tinkered with them too much. My contribution was to tidy them up, add additional options for some of the existing powers or rewrite them where I felt they were a bit lacking and, in the case of the Heroes & Villains section of the Supervisors Book, add those characters that appeared in various articles and scenarios that were published after the original boxed set came out.

In respect of some of these characters, some were only mentioned as an aside, so I have expanded on what was written to beef them up a little and, where possible, found suitable illustrations for the majority of the characters.

Both the Players and Supervisors Books lack cover art, as I wanted to create new covers for these, but have yet to have the time.

The final book, which is referenced in the rewritten rules, will be the Adventure Book, which will contain all of the previously published Golden Heroes scenarios I have managed to locate, along with a Champions scenario that I have converted to fit in with the GH background. This is about a third complete, so keep an eye out for this in the coming (hopefully) weeks.

Obviously, there is nothing to stop you using these rules as they stand and creating your own adventures and, should you do this, I would appreciate any feedback on what you think of the rules.

ghsbDownload

The Perfect Storm?

/ Carrion Crow / 12 Comments

So, here we are, 11 days into July and even with the week’s extension that I kindly gave myself (because I’m nice like that), I still managed to fail to complete my Forgotten Heroes entry until last night. So, four days over. A pretty poor showing on my part.

Note to self: Must try harder next year.

Anyway, this is the figure I started with, a DC Heroclix Signalman, complete with weedy arms, which I removed and replaced:

And this is what the end result should look like, the Tornado, in all his pink and red glory;

So, having done the majority of the shading last time, the first thing I needed to do was reattach his painted cape with hot glue, which I was somewhat nervous about, as I wasn’t sure if the hot glue would react with the paint and result in me having to repaint various parts of the figure. I needn’t have worried, as this went extremely well and set in no time, allowing me to complete the details.

I started by painting a capital ‘T’ on his chest in Docrafts Noir (black to those of us who don’t speak French), then when this was dry, painted a smaller ‘T’ in Docrafts Blanc (i.e. white) inside the black, so as to create a black border. This needed several touches up to neaten the borders, but all was good at the end.

Next, the black was used to paint a tiny ‘T’ on his belt buckle, as everyone needs to know that it’s HIS belt. I also used some watered down black to add shading to the cavity in the top of his holster, to suggest shadowing.

I then moved on to his eyes. Now, I’m always nervous about painting eyes, as if you cock it up, you end up with a cross-eyed hero, which no-one will take seriously. Two blobs of white were adding to suggest his eye-sockets in his mask, then I carefully painted one eye, then the other, making sure that they were even. Then I tidied up the edges of his ‘mask-holes’ with some Cherry Red. A few parts of his cape, where the wash from the previous stage hadn’t taken, were over-painted with GW Tentacle Pink (at least I think that’s what it’s called) and a black circle added to the end of his gun barrel, to suggest a hole.

Finally, I mixed some black with burnt ochre to get a dirty wash, then liberally applied this to the base, which had previously been given a cost of dark grey. This was to suggest dirty concrete.

And he was done.

Even with the pink cape, he doesn’t look like someone you want to mess with.

So, done for another year and another unique figure for my collection. I’m pretty pleased with how he came out, even if he did take slightly longer than anticipated to finish.

So, what’s next?

Well, it occurred to me that I’ve not recently turned random crap into something cool and I’d squirrelled away the below;

A couple of months ago, I replaced the windscreen wipers on my wife’s car. As I’d bought Halfords own brand, they have a generic blade for the model of her car, but it comes with multiple fittings so it can be used on different makes. I used the correct fittings, but ended up with two of the above extra fittings. Not being one to throw away interestingly shaped bits of plastic, especially when they can be re-used elsewhere (single use plastic? I think not!), I kept hold of these, as I had a cunning plan…

So, what am I going to use them for, you may ask?

I’m not saying yet, but the image below may give you a clue;

Join me next time, when we will be voyaging to a galaxy far, far away, for some high-speed pursuit amongst over-sized trees, avoiding feral teddy-bears…

The Gathering Storm

/ Carrion Crow / 6 Comments

My wife stated that she wasn’t happy with the state of our garden, so realising that this presented an opportunity to earn valuable Brownie Points, I girded my loins and attacked both front and back gardens with lawnmower, edging tool, etc. After several hours of hard work, the gardens were neat and tidy and I had banked a lot of Brownie Points, which meant I could break out my hobby stuff with no fear of reprisal.

When we last saw the Tornado, he looked like this:

So the first order of the day was to complete the base, so I broke out the Milliput and filled in around the integral base from the original Heroclix figure, then textured it using sandpaper. As I always mix up too much Milliput, I also completed the bases on a couple of other figures as well. This was then left overnight to cure.

Now the figure was ready for painting, so the whole miniature got an undercoat of Docrafts Blanc, a cheap acrylic paint, similar to (I think) Apple Barrel paint in the US. It’s not quite as good as proper miniature paint, but it’s a damn sight cheaper.

Once this was dry, I painted his torso and legs with Docrafts Cherry Red. Prior to painting his head, I was struck by how much he now looked like DC’s Deadman;

I guess it’s the huge collar…

Whilst I was waiting for the paint to dry, I mixed some Docrafts Cherry Red with some GW Mithril Silver, to create a metallic red, as my intention was to use this for his pistol. Due to the era that this character hails from, I thought that his ‘ray-gun’ of whatever it is should be similar to the metallic toy guns from this period.

This was then painted onto the pistol, and gave a nice metallic sheen to the weapon, which contrasted nicely with the bright red of the character’s costume, as being predominantly red, we needed to differentiate the various shades of red.

Now, came the decision regarding the colouring of his cape and gloves (and boots, as I’d decided they needed to be the same colour). This is the original illustation:

Due to the printing process at the time, some comics only had limited palettes, which meant that the Tornado’s cape and gloves are pink. I wavered back and forth regarding this – should I retain the pink colouring to match the illustration or change it to white, to match the ‘T’ on his chest? As I find white to be a colour that I have difficulty successfully shading so that to doesn’t look ‘dirty,’ as I already had the Docrafts Flesh paint out to do the only part of his skin that was exposed (i.e. the lower part of his face), I decided to try this and see what it looked like…

And the results were pretty good, so this was applied to his boots, gloves and the collar of his cape, as shown below:

I’m not certain if the white marks on his left shoulder are reflected light or where I’ve missed a couple of spots, so will need to revisit this.

And a close-up to show the pistol, which looks more ‘metallic’ in real life.

So, progress made. I need to paint his belt and holster, which seems to be black leather in the illustration, but that may change to a dark brown, add the ‘T’ to his chest and, once the cape is painted (currently only undercoated white) reattach this – probably using hot glue, then add the relevant shading.

But I’m pretty happy with how he’s looking so far, so fairly certain that he will get completed by my new self-imposed deadline of Friday.

Now, as everyone else has already finished, I won’t list the links again, but if you want to see what can be achieved when your time-management skills are better than mine, check out my previous post.