Esprit de corps(e)

As you will have seen from my last post, needing some Corpse Tokens for the first scenario of the Hunt the Golem mini-campaign, I set about making some! I know I could have just used the laser cut exclamation mark tokens that I use for Rangers of Shadow Deep, but I figured these would be a nice little project (and I’m sure this isn’t the last scenario that I play that will have a need for corpses).

I grabbed some 25mm flat Renedra bases, as that is what I’ve used for the rest of my tokens, glued sand to them, and then set about rooting through my bits box for bits that looked like they could be used to represent the aftermath of terrible violence wrought on the human body by a massive monster with stone fists. A couple of half-empty Frostgrave sprues furnished me with some arms, one of which got a paper clip bone stump, but these were looking a little bare so I looked for some torsos. After a brief pass for thought where I considered what the worst miniatures I had that I didn’t mind sacrificing to the cause, I soon realised it was probably the sprues of Wargames Factory figures. Technically the redcoats are worse, but zulus would be a good generic body when suitably distressed - and yes, I guess the golem hit them so hard that their shirts flew off? Either way, it keeps them nicely generic, so I can use these in Frostgrave, D&D, anywhere where I need to gore things up basically. Once I’d hacked at them with a pair of clippers, I went in with green stuff to make any cut edges look more ragged (as well as making a generic glob of gore on one base that still looked a little bare), and ended up with a selection of tokens that looked like this:

The one at the bottom even got a pelvic bone added, which I used green stuff to meld with the torso:

Is it realistic? Probably not. Do I mind? Also probably not.

They then got a quick and dirty paint job, all pale skin and copious globs of TCR, and they were ready for their first outing in the frozen city:

Doeskins of which, I also painted up these tents from Renedra:

A quick grubby paint job, with plenty of sponging and drybrushing to try and make them look nice and textured and worn, but isn’t really worth a separate blog post of their own. I’m torn on whether I should go back and black line some of the creases - I still have the campfire piece to paint, so it may still happen. Good enough to use in a game already at this point though!

What else is happening? I entered a competition hosted by Wargames Illustrated, and won a copy of the book Assassins and Templars:

Handy, as I’m currently very tempted by some Third Crusade gaming (more on that in a future post, I hope).

Finally, the family D&D game has restarted after five months away, with a short after school session:

The party are rushing back to Phandalin in response to a message received by sending stone (the ringing sound for which is the sound of an old school Nokia vibrating on a table, thanks YouTube for fulfilling my weirdest sound effect needs) when they come across something unusual - someone seems to have set up checkpoints across the road, but there is no one to be seen… alive, that is (although I had to remove the corpse tokens from the board, as they were grossing my daughter out). ‘We should be careful, it’s probably an ambush’ my wife’s character warns, as the Dragonborn Paladin played by our son sprints headlong at the nearest pile of crates…

Salute 2023!

So, after a long time away (having not been since 2018, as in 2019 my son’s due date was the same time as Salute, so I skipped it, and then a global pandemic made it tricky to attend large gatherings) this year we were back to our annual pilgrimage to Salute, this time with an additional party member, my oft-alluded to friend that derails all my projects by showing me cool stuff (see Rangers of Shadow Deep, Inquisitor…)

Said friend drove us up to Canary Wharf, so this year was a much less bleary eyed trip than our usual break of dawn coach! 

After spending almost no time at all queueing, we paired off and started our preliminary tour of the stands. I wanted to run straight to Mantic to make sure I was able to secure the show exclusive Hellboy release, and then signed up to play a game of Silver Bayonet, as it’s on the project list:

I ended up taking the Russian unit, by dint of them being closest to me when it was time for our slot to begin at 10:30:

(This is before I’d annotated the sheet with brief descriptions of each model so I knew who was who, and also what colour we were using for the skill and power dice)

After we’d had the rules and scenario (troll bridge, with a hint of zombie villagers) explained to us (as three of us had never played before), it was time to begin! Everyone else made cautious advances on the objectives, hugging cover, but I figured it was the time for guts and glory and threw everyone bar my rifleman forward (who hung back and managed to land a fairly telling hit on my friend’s officer - I felt kind of bad about that, but he was the only figure he could see!)

My poor Light Cavalryman (who had so far mostly been tasked with standing in front of my Officer as a human shield, as he was the only one of my pistol armed troops that didn’t also have oil and torches, which I suspected might be handy against a troll) was then tasked with grabbing the clue marker, which of course brought the troll into play:

From this point on my only objective was to take down that troll. My rifleman popped out to snipe it, and everyone else cocked their pistols menacingly. My Officer had originally planned to shoot it before charging in heroically to slay it in hand to hand, but then I remembered that the icy river was difficult terrain so he’d have to forego his shot to have any chance of reaching it, so instead rather sheepishly moved behind the Light Cavalryman to prepare for a slightly less courageous but slightly more tactically sound counterattack next turn. Which was probably for the best, as the troll hurled a rock at the Light Cavalryman which (thanks to my opponents on the other side of the board spending Monster Dice) absolutely exploded him (cue ‘Team Rocket blasting off againnnnn’ quote as I remove him from the board).

While all this was going on, the players on the other side of the board controlling the French and Austrian units were cautiously closing on each other, with an Occultist doing their spooky thing whilst a Dhampir charged in to fight the opposing officer only to bounce off. My friend (controlling the Prussian unit), was much more tactical than I was, using cover and tactics to try and swoop in and steal my kill:

As the guy running the game explained, it’s not who does the most damage to the troll that gets the XP…

At this point, with my counterattack poised and ready to take down the troll, our slot came to and end, and I found out I’d have only needed to do 4 more damage to have finished it off! 

I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and so Silver Bayonet might see a little bump up in priority up the Project list… one brief highlight was looking up during the game to see the designer Joseph McCullough watching us play, so I gave him an excited thumbs up! Also, that troll was quite a nice looking miniature… 

They also had a copy of the first expansion on hand, despite it not being out until next month, but I only managed to have the briefest of flicks through it after chatting with one of the other players before we had to head off to make space for the next batch of players.

Once we’d finished our game, it was time to do the rounds! The original plan was to do a lap first of all to scope things out, before swinging back to select stalls, but in the end we’d only seen about half of them by the time we stopped for lunch, and then rest took us pretty much to the end of the day! I was apparently also bad at taking pictures throughout the day, having a chum to chat to as I went round rather than my usual lone wolf approach, so what follows is only a tiny fraction of the goodies on offer at Salute.

There was a glorious Mordheim table, complete with glowing comet crater, and a ton of cool looking warbands:

Not bad for a game that’s been out of print for two decades!

Brief aside: every year, the tradition is that we have a picnic lunch sat on the grassy area just outside the Excel centre. Alas, this year we discovered that it was now a building site:

Bad Squiddo released a giant squid that is frankly impressive that it all fits in the blister:

I took a picture of this Batman game, as we were reminiscing about a previous Salute where I and another friend got overly excited and made a number of elaborate plans (and purchases!) for the Batman Miniatures Game. There have been multiple editions of that game since, and we’ve still not managed to play a game of it…

Giant barrel of dice:

The guy at the stand cut me a great deal on the fistful of dice I had at the end of the show!

Other things of note were thinking that I’d somehow missed the Hasslefree stand, only upon hunting it down after lunch to discover that they weren’t at the show (which outs a dampener on my plans for May the Fourth!) , and having a nice chat with Karl at Crooked Dice about plans for filling in gaps in their range, and the Doctor Who Miniatures Game (must remember to email him about that Preachers pdf!)

And so, to the meat of any Salute post, the loot: 

I took out a chunk of cash in the morning, to avoid having to deal with the terrible signal at the show and also for budgeting, which I only went slightly over.

I got:

The Limited Edition Lobster Johnson for the Hellboy game

A variety of scenery bits from Renedra, including an old barn and some fencing that I thought would work nicely as Mordheim walkways without their fence posts,

A sprue of Napoleonic Brits to round out my Silver Bayonet unit

A Frostgrave ruler, offered in consolation when I asked if there were Wizard Sheets for Second Edition and there weren’t

Some new clippers from TTCombat, as my GW ones have vanished and replacing them is insanely priced, as well as a pot of reasonably priced superglue

Plenty of Crooked Dice minis to fill gaps in my Who collection

A blister of Penangalan miniatures, as they’ll do nicely for my Ronin of Shadow Deep project

A 3d printed greenhouse to go with the set of gardening supplies that I’d picked up from Bad Squiddo

The same troll miniature that had been used in the Silver Bayonet game that I played in,

Some dice, including one with a rubber duck in,

Some bases, because I seem to have run down my stash of those,

A selection of minis from Tritex Games for my son to paint,

A not-who set from Tangent Miniatures that came with a song,

A selection of Burrows and Badgers miniatures to see if my daughter is ready to take the step up to metal miniatures and maybe play some games,

Amongst a number of other odds and ends!

Adding it all up, the Tally now stands at:

11 vs 41 = -30

Also noteworthy was grabbing Pat from the YouTube channel The Painting Phase as he was minding his own business doing some shopping to tell him how great I think the channel is, me being offered a peg:

Which got me a querying look from my wife when I posted on Instagram that I’d been pegged…

So, what does the future hold? Fortunately, due to the excitement of having miniatures that are explicitly his my son demanded that we do some painting today, so I was able to prep a couple of miniatures for painting at the same time…

Fences and Gravestones...

This week has seen a couple of mini-projects finished! As well as the Chaos Wastes terrain in my previous post, I finished up a couple of other terrain pieces I'd been working on at the same time, and rather than spreading them out to two posts I'm going to pack it all into one!

Cast your mind back several months - picture the scene, it's just after Salute, and our intrepid narrator is all fired up to start playing the Batman Miniatures Game (having gotten very excited with a friend of a friend and made all sorts of elaborate plans). 

I've built up quite the stash of coffee stirrers over the last few months (the ones from Eat are the best, I think, as they're chunkier and more 'plank-like' than the skinny ones you find in Starbucks), and so set about making lengths of wooden fencing!

I made various lengths, aligning them with various plastic Renedra bases (of which I seem to have a ton, from the various boxes of plastic minis I've bought for the ASOIAF project over the last couple of years) so that I could use them singly or in groups; making yards or just blocking terrain between two buildings if need be.

I also make a couple of corner pieces, using matchsticks for the corner post, so that I could make enclosed yards if need be.

A couple of months pass.

Deciding to crack on and finish this project off, I finished off the last couple of lengths of fence and set about trimming the plastic bases down so that the fences could be lined up snug without any gaps. Due to the wonky artisanal nature of these fences (I wanted them to look quite rundown, so that they can e used for post-apocalyptic games as well as modern-day), this meant that I ended up with various lengths of base, which I'm more than fine with!

I originally planned to hot glue the fences to their bases, reasoning that a good glob of glue once covered in texture would hold it nice and firmly, but alas my hot glue gun is terrible and old and the glue was drying on the wood before I could get it into contact with the base! Instead, the old faithful cheapy superglue from Poundland stepped up and did the job instead.

A couple of pieces would later start to come away during painting, but this was easily fixed with a second application of superglue.

Cork chunks were added to the bases, to break up the flat expanse and also make the point of contact between the fence and it's base less narrow, to hopefully reduce the chance of breakage in the future.

Doesn't everyone have several baggies of differently graded cork chunks? I think these mostly came from my generic set of rocky terrain and skull rock builds...

I think at this point I decided that I should make some urban rubble barricades, as I already had the cork out and a variety of resin pieces, and I'd be able to paint them at the same time as the fences, maximising my efficiency. I found a couple of sprues of Renedra gravestones, as well as some old Horrorclix base parts and a limited edition Uncle Mike's Strange Aeons gravestone, so I of course built and based them instead.

I had originally planned to base them all singly, so that each base would have a headstone and a slight raised mound, but whilst having a quick google for other people's finished sets I found this post on warbard.ca and decided to base mine in a similar fashion. Most got multi-based, but I left half a dozen or so single based (as I'm fairly certain there's a Strange Aeons scenario that needs something like 6 or d6 grave markers...)

Then comes basing. I'd originally considered a non-traditional method of applying sand to a gluey base (to whit, a salad spinner...)

But that seemed awfully wasteful, so I went with the old faithful method of globbing the glue on with a shaved down matchstick and dunking each piece individually in a lunchbox of meticulously hand-blended grades of sand.

Having sent some of the bendy Doctor Who Weeping Angels to Gunbird from 20mmandthensome, I fancied using one in my graveyard too. a couple of GW bases later and we had a mini-plinth for it to stand on...

And lo, one batch of freshly textured scenery.

But, I wasn't quite happy with my Weeping Angel statue - it just wasn't tall enough...

After a couple of days peering at various small plastic pots every time we went shopping (the wife is used to this sort of oddity by now), I decided to take matters into my own hands, and set about cutting a chunk of cork.

The first attempt, I carefully measured the base, and when I test fitted it against the plastic base it just didn't look right (the plastic base seemed to hang just a tiny fraction over the edge).

So, for the second attempt, I intentionally cut the slices of cork slightly too large, and then trimmed them down with the angel in situ. One plasticard plaque later, and I was much happier with it!

As these pieces were individually quite small and light, to prevent them from just blowing away when I spray undercoated them I covered a chopping board in newspaper, which I then covered in lines of parcel tape sticky side out so that I could just stick everything to it. This worked a treat, except for when I put the tray down on my lap and it stuck to my trousers (as in order to make sure the tape was firmly in place, I wrapped it completely around the board...)

And so, everything got the usual spray of poundland grey.

This was, of course, on the wettest day ever, after I'd spent an entire week of sunny evenings not being able to do it.

The fences got a hefty drybrush of brown...

...before I gave everything a hefty wash of watered down Vallejo Smoke.

It's a filthy business, but you gotta do what you gotta do...

After that, everything was painted up with various drybrushes. I went over various fence panels and gravestones with a couple of washes and light tones, to give a bit of variety, and carefully picked out the sculpted foliage on some of the gravestones (word to the wise - it's not easy to do detail paintwork with your five-month old daughter sat on your lap trying to steal your paintbrush). I also used the texture paint Stirland Earth to make a layer of dirt in the larger grave, and painted the plaque on the angel statue with the new Retributor and Liberator Gold paints.

Then it was just a case of adding flock and grass, both in places that looked like grass would grow (generally out from under chunks of rubble, as they'd be protected from the elements) but also anywhere that over-zealous drybrushing had revealed bare cork!

Et voila, cork gap fixed!

And so, we have one competed graveyard and a set of fences. The fences are straightforward enough that I should be able to easily make more if needed, and the gravestones was only half of the Renedra set (as you get two identical sprues in a pack).

Everything here also fits quite neatly in a small cardboard box too, for ease of storage, which is nice.

What next though? I've not really been in the mood for figure painting recently, so the nice broad strokes of drybrushing (or brusherating, as terrain for hippos would have it - this is why my fences are highlighted up to tan, rather than Bleached Bone as I would otherwise normally have done) has been a way for me to still get some hobbying done. I still plan to make some urban barricades (piles of rubble and urban detritus that are based so that they can either be used as random rubble markers or lined up and used as barricades), but then again with the Deadpool movie out next year maybe I should try and crack on and finish the Deadpool miniature that's sat half-finished on my painting tile... Or some of the Batman miniatures I bought at Salute... Or the Fallout miniature that I did some green stuff work on this morning when I got woken up at half 7 by my upstairs neighbours banging and crashing around (sneaky peek of this over on Instagram)...