Bane crew

Progress on the Secret Six and/or Suicide Squad continues.  In the meantime I am also trying to circle back and paint some of the henchmen I have that have been half done or untouched.

When I first tried the Batman game I painted Bane and got 2 of his 3 mercs started (3 colours and based) so I could try the game out.  Yesterday I finished all 3 mercs that came in the Bane starter.

What generally seems to make playing villains with henchmen (as opposed to all named DC villains) more flexible is that a lot of henchmen are available who don't use extra resources.  The biggest challenge I've had figuring out crews so far is what I can "afford" in terms of funding rather than reputation.  If anyone has any suggestions for good crew builds I'd love to hear them in the comments below.

I'd also like to point out that if you ignore the meta-humans this game's henchmen figures would work for a variety of modern/near-future games.

A little bit of hobby A.D.D. is looming on the horizon with figures for 5 different games sitting on my desk waiting to be painted right now.

-Jay

A few days ago I asked if Rad-Pigs were a thing, today I can confirm that they are!

Like most hobbyists there are tons of hobby projects I would like to do, but that doesn't mean I'm really all that motivated or energised.  The opposite end of the hobby spectrum is when I or a friend make an off-hand comment that we could do something and then it becomes an itch that I HAVE to scratch.

Lately I've been playing a bunch of games of This Is Not A Test by World's End Publishing and my mutant warband has a semi-Gamma World, semi-Animal Farm theme.  My buddy Ash and I were discussing how fun it would be to play one of the scenarios that's themed around a horde of zombies running wild in the apocalypse only with radioactive-mutant pigs instead of zombies.  It was one of those weird "what if" things that became a must do.  What was especially crazy about it (to me anyway) was that I'm sure over the years I've seen tiny plastic farm animal replicas literally everywhere but as soon as I had cash in my pocket and set out to find some they were nowhere to be found.  I'd completely given up finding the pig toys that I needed and then during a drive home from work I stopped into a hobby shop I hadn't been to in years to buy some spray paint and low and behold they had 18 or the 27 pigs I needed!

So now I'm officially back in the radioactive pig business!  The plan is to paint 20 basic rad-pigs and then 7 super-mutated-rad-pigs.  My first 10 basic rad-pigs are officially done!

I still need to find a few more pigs but I'm on the road for work this week so I'll fall into my usual pattern of trying to find toy/hobby shops near where I have to go and hope that have stuff I haven't been able to find locally.

Wish me luck!

-Jay

I.....AM......GROOT!!!

I'm all over the road at this point.  My plan was to paint the Mad Hatter and then do Groot but I decided to skip ahead to Groot while I reconsider my painting priorities for the Secret Six and the Suicide Squad.  The irony being that once I was done and I started reviewing stats I'm actually fairly certain I can't play the Secret Six with the existing models unless I include Mad Hatter...irony.

Anyway Groot (if anyone reading this hasn't seen Guardians Of The Galaxy) is the Guardian resident 'brick'.  Which in superhero terms means he's the big strong guy who punches things.  Groot is basically a giant treeman so this is also I good reminder to get back to my Sylvaneth.

My one regret about collecting the Guardians Of The Galaxy is that in hindsight I wished I'd started with a bad-guy force for Marvel as well as that always has more RPG crossover potential.  Having said that if you're old (like me) you might remember that three of the Guardians five core members (Groot, Drax & Gamora) started off in comics as villains.  So depending on what era I set a game in Groot could still show up as a baddie.

-Jay

The Fresh Prince Of Belle Reve

(I will literally NEVER get tired of referencing Suicide Squad to Fresh Prince Of Bel Air)

Tonight I got my third Secret Six member and first Suicide Squad member done; Deadshot.

Deadshot is a core member of the Secret Six who has been on every (pre-52) version of the team and is also one of the longest serving, most re-occurring members of the Suicide Squad.  In fact to my recollection his longest absence from the Suicide Squad since the mid 80s was the pre-52 period that he  spent with the Secret Six.

Deadshot has frequently been depicted as more of an amoral anti-hero than a true hero or villain throughout his career.  Typically if Deadshot is coming after you with intent to kill you probably deserve it.

There are currently two version of Deadshot available for the Batman game.  This one I believe is based on  the look of the character in one of the Arkham video games.  I'm not familiar with the series but his costume looks pretty radically different than this in every comic I've ever seen the character in.

I've got to be honest, I'm not 100% happy with how the mask turned out.  It definitely could have used a bit more work on my part but I was struggling with the overall lack of texture on the mask as compared to the rest of the figure.

I've got one more Secret Six model to paint and then I'm going to detour into the world of Marvel comics for a bit.

-Jay

Catman!

Yes!  CATMAN!

In my area there is suddenly a ton of interest in the Marvel Miniatures game by Knight Models so for some reason that has translated into me wanting to paint DC characters for the Batman Miniatures game.

I finally finished Catman (so see, I did paint something brown) who is still one of my favourite DC comics characters.

With the addition of the Flash/Arrow supplement for Batman there is now a ton of support for the two CW network TV shows and the other chunk of content in the book is bringing some more comic teams into the game.  Catman is the leader of the Secret Six which as I have mentioned before was (pre-52) one of my favourite DC comics.  At this time there are only models for four members of the Secret Six; Bane, Catman, Deadshot & Mad Hatter.  The plan is to get Mad Hatter and Deadshot done over the next week or so and then transition to painting some members of the Suicide Squad which will both give me more figs to paint and be useful if I ever get around to running a DC Adventures RPG.

-Jay

Hobby Grab Bag - What can brown do for you?

I did something this past weekend that I haven't done in a long time.  I sat down and spent some time building models.  That probably sounds silly given that I obviously get a reasonable number of models built but because I've painted to many single figures over the past 3-4 years I usually just put them together while washes or drying or something like that.  This weekend I built 2 ACTUAL "units" (I honestly don't remember the last time I did a whole unit at once) with the plan of painting them this week.

Another oddity cropped up while I was prepping units to paint that I noticed is something that has frequently happened with me in the past.  I'm painting two completely different units for two completely different games but without planning it I'm using extremely similar colour palettes for both projects.   Back in my GW days I would frequently be painting 40K and Warhammer units at the same time, and because I played the Blood Angels for 40K and the Vampire Counts for Fantasy I would often be painting two forces that had nothing in common that were none-the-less; Red, Black & Metal.

This time around I am starting a completely new Age Of Sigmar army instead of going back to the Vampires.  The Vampires have been great and I still really love the background and the models but to be honest every time I play them I feel like I'm really just using an 8th ed Warhammer army in a new game system.  So I decided I wanted something (for me anyway) fresh and new.  Enter the Sylvaneth army.  The argument could be made that the Sylvaneth army is really just an updated to the Wood Elf army but the fact that the new list is comprised entirely of animated tree spirits makes it feel otherworldly and like something that fits into a time of legends for me.
I'll be starting off with a unit of 16 Dryads and assuming that goes well there are more Dryads and Treemen coming!

So having established that my first unit will be heavily Brown and Green I'm also going to be painting some basic infantry for Konflikt 47 which may ultimately do double duty in games of Bolt Action.  I assembled 10 Warlord Games British  Infantry and gave them the gas-mask heads from Westwind Productions Secrets Of The Third Reich to make them look a little more science-fictiony.
I'm still not 100% decided on whether they're be commandos or paras but I'm leaning towards paras if for no other reason than to add some colour to them.

Well there you have it.  Either my first attempt in years to batch paint will be super-productive or it will call out why I switched to single models in the first place.

-Jay

Neuroshima Tactics, you're my latest 'why didn't I love you more when you were here?'

In addition to buying a bunch of  cool new figures for This Is Not A Test I've been digging through my backlog looking for denizens of the post apocalyptic wasteland.  Meanwhile there have been two figures sitting on the corner of my desk for close to 3 years now that never quite got to the top of my painting pile that are perfect for games of This Is Not A Test.

Neuroshima Hex had been a popular euro-style board game for years and a few years ago they decided to venture into the realm of tabletop miniature games.  The miniatures are AMAZING but for some reason they never caught on and were never widely available.  The game quickly (very quickly it seemed) went out of production and died a quiet undeserved death.

I was only able to get two Neuroshima Tactics figures before my retailer's supply chain dried up but they are going to be great for tons of different games.

Both figures are very nice but the one with the drum magazine on his weapon is absolutely covered in pouches, accessories and survival gear.

I feel like finding more of these awesome figures will be my white-whale for the next few years.  I know they're out there (somewhere) and I desperately want more.

As an aside with the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic gaming I'm surprised no one has bought the production rights and molds and put these back into production under a different imprint.

-Jay