Julio Jaguar

I've moved past the monstrously large cats and into the 'normal' (doesn't quite seem like the right word) man-sized cats.

Julio Jaguar will be my psychic mutant.  Julio is a figure from an old Pulp City three pack; the Dark Solar pack.  I bought that pack to use Solar as a generic superhero in a superhero RPG I was playing in a few years ago, I guess I lucked out that I had an extra catman laying around.


The nice thing is that Julio has way less (as in no) tech gear or equipment so although I'm painting him for a This Is Not A Test game in a few days he's more perfect than most of the figures I've painted for Mutant Crawl Classics.

Two more cat-people are hanging out on my painting desk and will hopefully be done before the weekend is out.

-Jay

When it rains it pours (in a good way!)

I haven't gotten as much painting as usual done this past week for the weirdest reason ever...I've been gaming...too much?

Normally my life gives me lots of opportunities to paint when I'm home with my family but getting out and devoting hours to playing is a bit beyond my schedule.  A normal rotation for me is that I get to play 1 game a week, frequently less.  In the past 5 days I've managed to play 4 games!

Sunday Ash and I wrapped up our Swineland campaign for This Is Not A Test.  I'm not going to give away the outcome but it was an awesome game where we both had our moments in the sun and every die-roll counted.  It was bittersweet to say good-bye to a campaign that has been so much fun but the best stories end before they jump the shark.  I'm looking forward to more This Is Not A Test in the near future as both the game-play and post game do a great job of telling a compelling story.

Sunday I also got to play my second game of the new/current version of Pulp City.  The Supreme Alliance once again took it to their cold war foes The Red Republik.  Now that I'm getting a bit more  used to the rules I'm really enjoying the game mechanics and looking forward to trying out some more new models.  I think I'm going to revisit my old models and maybe finally paint enough models from the Heavy Metal faction to make it a playable force.

Monday I DM'd the latest session in my Curse Of Strahd game.  The tone has changed a lot over the last two sessions. early on the game was heavy on exploration, discovery and an overwhelming fear of what was happening.  The party has now recovered some of the relics scattered about the domain and are seeing more combat.  Last session they got a bit lucky as they found their way into a conflict between two opposing faction and came within one decision of a TPK.  Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat!

Last night I finally played my first game of Broken Contract.  It went the way of most of my first games of anything where I got a few rules wrong as I learned the game but I can say that by the second turn of the game Ash and I were getting it right and it felt very intuitive.  I'm looking forward to playing through the rest of the missions!

And that was my week of more than the normal amount of gaming.  I don't anticipate another week this game heavy for a while but I should be back to my paint table tonight!

-Jay

First civilian models/counters for Pulp City!

Greetings citizens!

I'm gearing up for my second Pulp City game this weekend with the cold war forces.  I'm looking forward to how a game plays when I've actually read up on what my models can do.

One of the bits of collateral missing from our last game was civilians.  In Pulp City civilians serve a number of purposes and function as objectives in many scenarios.  Pulp Monsters offers silhouette standees for citizens but I always thought proper models would blend better with the scenery and look cooler.

Years ago I bought a ton of Heroclix models with the intention of repainting them and using them for other games.  For more than 5 years that box has been a great source of figures for  a lot of games I've played and once more I'm diving back in for some civies.  Much like Les Impes I've actually already done this project once before on different bases but I enjoy doing them so doing a second batch is no big deal

My first batch of 8 are mostly re-paints although a couple were more touch ups on existing paint jobs.  What's kind of neat about these figures is that Heroclix doesn't actually have a use for "civilians" per se so 5 of these 8 figures are actually meant to be various superheroes in their secret identities.  Feel free to make guesses in the comments below.  I'll honour Silver Age tradition by acknowledging "no-prizes" for successful guesses.

In addition to the 8 above I have 2 more done that I photographed separately because I'm involved in some hobby challenges where I track "painted" figures and it would be a huge stretch  to claim I painted these.  Both were crisp enough out of the packages that I just re-based them and re-did the eyes.

So that means I have 10 civilians done so far for Pulp City.  In a perfect world I'll get 10 more done next week.

-Jay

The Supreme Alliance grows!

Perhaps my New Year's resolution for 2017 should be to spend 5 minutes reading rules and stat cards before speaking about them.  During my first game of the new/current edition of Pulp City I was quickly reminded that this was not one of those read on the fly games and resolved to actually learn my stat cards before my next game.  Other than not optimising my use of my models' abilities it led to a more superficial even more embarrassing realisation, I've been repeatedly referring to my team by the wrong name.  They're NOT Team Breaker (that was their KS pledge name), they're not The Greatest Generation (which is how I referred to them in Ash's 'Learn To Play' video), their actual team name (as clearly stated on ALL their cards) is Supreme Alliance.

With that awkward confession out of the way please meet the newest member of the Supreme Alliance; Coldfire!

Coldfire adds one of the classic elements of superhero comics that has thus far been absent from the Supreme Alliance, a flyer.  In addition Coldfire works a little differently than my other supremes (that reading is paying off already!) but in a way I'm very familiar with from my Cryx forces for Warmachine, he can create/summon a flame fist which he can then use as an origin point for his abilities.  I'm pretty excited about tying this out as it means in theory he can tag objectives and civilians while still being slightly more flexible in terms of where and how he attacks.  

I've got two more 'core' members of the Supreme Alliance to get done (E.C.T.O. and Aquanaut) and then I'll be caught up on Pulp City......for a  while.

-Jay

Team Breaker! Reinforcements have arrived!

Two more supremes done for Team Breaker!  A-Beast and Battlesuit 7.

My first batch of characters really appealed to me as classic archetypes from superhero comics but something about A-Beast and Battlesuit 7 put me in the mind of old superhero RPGs like Villains & Vigilantes and Champions.

I've now got 5 of the 8 main supremes done for Team Breaker as well as the 3 minions.  I've still got a few more I'd like to get done but for now I think I need to get back to Warzone and get my Imperial Doomtroopers done.

-Jay

Team Breaker! Assemble!

I finally circled back to the cold war era Pulp City models I started in the fall.

Spybreaker, Sabotage and Trojan along with the three robo-dogs I had painted represent the start of Team Breaker, one of the two newest teams of Supremes that Pulp Monsters had kickstarted earlier this year.

I've still got 3 more Supremes to finish before I'm ready for my game tomorrow and it looks like about 4 more hours to get them done.

Wish me luck!

-Jay

Cybernetic dogs for America!

A while back I mentioned that without trying to I had collected and painted a lot of female steampunk mechanics without really trying to, apparently the other thing that I have accumulated a lot of over the years is cyber-dogs.  Cyber-dogs are cool but I never set out to have so many of them.

Having said that I'm getting ready to play Pulp City for the first time pretty much since it came out originally and the big push for that has been to play with the recently Kickstarted Cold War forces.  I'll be playing the American forces which include...you guessed it...more cyber-dogs.

One of the things I have to say I really appreciate about these particular models is that they're basically minor minions with identical stats but the folks at Pulp Monsters went to the effort to actually do three completely different sculpts rather than just one or one with minor tweaks to sell the idea that its three different models.

There's more coming for Pulp City over the next couple of weeks, and the colour scheme will be primarily red, white & blue.

-Jay

Androida

Today's addition was a quick repaint.

Androida was one of the first Pulp City models I painted as she came in the mixed hero starter box.

She could also make a decent Jocasta stand-in if you were playing a Marvel game of some sort.

Ultimately Androida was a bit of a one-off for me.  As I mentioned the original Pulp City starters were mixed faction boxes with the good guys have 2 "Blood Watch" characters and 2 "Heavy Metal" characters.  Although I liked Androida and Iron Train the rest of the Heavy Metal faction didn't really appeal to me so they've just been hanging out not actually getting used for anything.

Who knows?  With more Pulp City on the Horizon for me maybe Androida can get a second (or would this technically be the first?) renaissance.

-Jay

Happy...I'm going to say...Columbus Day

Here in Canada it's Thanksgiving today, in the U.S. it's Columbus Day.

But even though I'm in Canada I'm going to spend my Columbus Day painting some super-patriots!  Pulp City is a superhero miniature game I first got interested in years ago (7 or 8 years, I can't really remember) when it first came out but it never really gained any traction with my gaming groups so I slowly moved away into other superhero game systems.

A Kickstarter was fairly recently concluded for Pulp City to launch two new Cold-War themed superteams.  My buddy Ash will be working on the Soviet themed team while I will be working on the forces of the good ol' U S of A.  What I really enjoy about this launch is that while many of the figures will seem familiar or may even feel like direct rip-offs of existing characters to casual comic fans the truth is most of them represent tropes or archetypes that have been used by multiple characters in multiple different comic companies over the years.

For example the team leading, shield bearing Spybreaker will immediately put most people in mind of Captain America but he's also reminiscent of Agent Liberty, Spy-Smasher and The Shield.

I just started these figs this morning but I'm hoping to finished at least one or tow of them today.

-Jay

Halloween Hero....sort of

Happy Halloween everybody!

To me Halloween typically means two things; creepy undead, and people dressing up as their favourite characters.  So tonight's entry is a little bit of both.

Supreme Zed is a villainous character from the Pulp City superhero miniature game.  The character is basically a cross between Bizzaro and Frankenstein and he is another member of the Necroplane faction (of which my earlier Sunguine figure is also a member).  By the box art Zed is meant to be a completely different colour scheme but I couldn't resist painting him up in Superman's colours.

I had one other Halloween inspired late addition on my painting table that didn't get done today but I may just roll him out later this weekend.  Even though I wanted him as part of a Halloween post that doesn't change the fact that I don't have enough Judge Dredd bad guys yet, and this one certainly is a bad guy.

-Jay

Super-Vampire!

In my recent digging for figures to use in my Iron Kingdoms/Pathfinder game I've come up with a few perfect fits and a few near misses.

In one of the bridging adventures the players are retained by (and may end up fighting) a character who is attired heavily in black leather and doesn't appear to carry any weapons.  Although Privateer makes a model for the character I figure it's only 50/50 whether or not he ends up being a combat encounter to I figured I'd look in the old backlog to see if I had a reasonable substitute.  It didn't take long for me to find a Pulp City super-villain who looked pretty good for the part but once I started painting him I just felt he was missing 'something' (honestly, I still don't know what) to make him feel like a steampunk-fantasy miniature.  I decided to push ahead and get him done anyway in case I ever circle back around to Pulp-City and he came with a cool zombie-French bulldog.

His name is Sanguine, he's a vampire partnered up with some alien invasion guys in Pulp City so I'm not sure if he'll ever get used but he seems like a handy sort to have around.

-Jay

Pulp City - Deadeye & Vigilantes

Back in Pulp City (which I suddenly realized last night could easily be made out of my Plasticville buildings!) there's a new hero on the street; Deadeye!

In Pulp City there are a number of different hero and villain factions, the heroes from yesterday's post are all members of the team Heavy Metal, in addition there are also freelancers who can fight on their own or join up with other teams.  Today's hero is a freelancer named Deadeye.

I was first drawn to the Deadeye miniature because the short hair and cybernetic arm immediately reminded me of Cable who was one of my favourite comic characters from the 90s but what really sealed the deal was at the time I bought him I was playing in a low powered superhero RPG that made his henchmen ideal player character figures.

I also (finally) finished Solar another hero who was actually in the very first Pulp-City pack I ever bought but I just hadn't gotten around to him until recently.

I'm hoping in the next week or two to vary up the content here on the blog by including a battle report of some sort....keep watching this space!

-Jay

Deadeye & Vigilantes

(insert your own "Batman" joke here)

 

Solar

 

 

Pulp City - Heavy Metal

One of the recent superhero miniature ranges I've been really excited about is the Pulp-City range from Pulp-Monsters.

Pulp City has a range of different models from homages to new and original characters and so far all of the figures I have gotten from them are outstandingly well sculpted and cast.

The 3 characters today are members of a super-team called "Heavy Metal" which relies on alot of technological heroes but also includes some aliens and a few others.

I'm finishing up a few more figures that have been 'mostly' finished over the next few days so you should be seeing a few more superheroes (and villains) around these parts.

-Jay

Nuclear Jones, Iron Train & Androidia