Lt Tavington's newest recruits for The Silver Bayonet

 Although Archibald Tavington III's men have been tremendously successful through the first seven scenarios of our ten scenario campaign tragedy finally struck in scenario eight.

A couple of the chosen men of the 95th Rifles have given their lives bravely for the cause but it somehow hit harder when Doctor Theopolis was taken from this world in the prime of his life.  Rest in power Doctor, your legacy lives on through your liberal application of questionable period medications and bloodletting.

In the run up to our final two scenarios Lt Tavington has brought in two men from other units to round out his Silver Bayonet force.

First up joining us from the Royal Marines is Trooper Gibbs.

Gibbs adds a character who is steady on his feet but doesn't break the bank budget-wise.

Next is our new Artillerist Sir Simon.

I don't think I'll have a ton of use for an Artillerist in the final two scenarios but I wish I had had one earlier in the campaign as there are a number of swivel guns just laying about on the battlefields of Europe.

I'm actually thinking about doing some slight restructuring, which could lead to dropping another Rifleman and replacing them with another new character type.  Not 100% committed to that yet but between now and Tuesday we'll see what happens.

Thanks for checking in!

-Jay

The Silver Bayonet - British Warband and an assortment of monsters

 I finally got around to playing my first few games of The Silver Bayonet by Osprey Games.  For those not familiar The Silver Bayonet is a skirmish level wargame set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars.

Although the mechanics of the rules are different than Frostgrave the structure of the game and it's scenarios are very similar.  To that end I'm planning on painting all the monsters needed for the 14 scenarios in the game as well as a few odds and ends from the random encounter table.  This will also be the kickoff for my plan to start building a collection of historic based/themed fantasy figures not only for The Silver Bayonet but for an assortment of other games and scenarios I'm planning on playing this year.

First up my Silver Bayonet Warband is led by Lt Archibald Tavington III.  Archie is a proper gentleman on loan from the 95th rifle regiment.

Along with their Lieutenant four rifleman have been seconded to the unit to explore and battle the unknown.  Two of the riflemen are by Warlord Games and two of them are from Perry Miniatures.

Accompanying the chosen men of the 95th is Doctor Theodore Theopolis.  The good doctor is proper soldier and in addition to his medical skills is not afraid to use his pistol to see off any hobgoblins that might be found harassing the countryside.

Lastly Angus McHaggis is a highlander from Scotland.  Angus keeps to the old ways and carries a great claymore to mete out the king's justice to the forces of the unnatural.

For my first batch of baddies I painted a bunch of Dark Wolves.  For these models I used the WizKids wolves.  The thing I like best about these wolves is that they scale properly with 28mm figures as they are the size of a large dog, and not the size of a horse that could be ridden by a man-sized figure.

Next up are the goblins.  I used the Hobbit Escape From Goblintown goblins which are some of my favourite goblin figures EVER.  I have used these for a bunch of other projects and I'm sure I'll continue finding more uses for these excellent figures.

No horror game set in this era would be complete without ghosts.  Again WizKids had the perfect ghosts.  These are great transparent figures that fit the theme of the game perfectly.  I particularly like the ghost lady carrying her severed head and floating through the headstone.

One of the figures I struggled with the most was the Hobgoblin.  The description of the Hobgoblin in The Silver Bayonet doesn't really match the design or aesthetic of any of the hobgoblin miniatures I am aware of.  I decided to ignore the names on packages and actually landed on a Reaper orc that seemed like a perfect fit for the description in the game.  I'm really happy with how this figure turned out and could see adding more of these style orcs down the road.

One of the other models I struggled with was finding an appropriately scaled Scarecrow.  Surprisingly (to me at least) most of the Scarecrow miniatures on the market are surprisingly large and over-scaled compare to man-sized figures.  Once again WizKids had a model that was both a great size and had a nice look to it.

I'm off to a pretty good start.  I have a few more packs/units of monsters to add as well as a bunch more single figure entries to be completely ready for the full campaign.  I'm hoping to get at least another dozen miniatures done this week, and then I might switch gears to scenery next week just to change things up.

And as always remember The Silver Bayonet and all the miniatures I've painted here are available from your friendly local game store.

Thanks for checking in,

-Jay

Is this a new genre or am I just late to the party?

 Generally speaking if I get interested in a new style or genre or gaming it was an intentional choice.  I don't usually find I'm suddenly playing a genre of game that I hadn't consciously chosen.  Having said that in the midst of playing a bunch of fantasy miniature and role-playing games I realized that without trying or planning I'm suddenly playing and prepping for a bunch of fantasy games with one linking thread; they are all reimaginings of historic periods rather than being entirely fictional constructs.

I started off with my friend Ash getting me to work on a force for Sludge, a full game featured in Blaster Magazine #3.

Sludge is a black powder based fantasy miniature game (somewhat in scale between a battle game and a skirmish game) set in a dark alternate time and place heavily influenced by the art and imagery focussed on the horrors of early modern warfare.  Sludge is great because it pretty much lets any gamer collect and paint a selection of historic miniatures from different periods mixing and matching figures without necessarily having to worry about historic accuracy.

After I'd started building and painting my Sludge models (literally before I'd finished a single figure) two of my friends completely separate from each other started texting me and asked me if I'd heard of Osprey Games upcoming game; The Silver Bayonet.

The Silver Bayonet is set in Europe during the Napoleonic era and features soldiers of the area hunting down and fighting supernatural creatures.  The Silver Bayonet is both a quick simple skirmish game, and a fairly thorough campaign game.  As a role-player one part of the appeal of The Silver Bayonet for me was that in addition to a small warband each player paints and collects a small collection of supernatural creatures.  If that wasn't enough the game also includes a small solo campaign, I haven't traditionally played many solo miniature games but with an increasingly erratic work schedule that makes it hard to get together with friends the solo element really appeals to me.

But this trend didn't stop at miniature games.  I've been playing a lot of D&D over the past few years and when I reached out to some friends for suggestions for cool adventures from publishers my players might be less familiar with one of them suggested the line of adventures published by Lamentations Of The Flame Princess.  I had some exposure to LotFP a few years ago and I had had mixed feelings about what I'd read at the time, but when I picked up No Rest For The Wicked I was super impressed and ready to take another crack at some of their offerings.  I've since ordered England Upturned thinking it looks like it would fit with No Rest For The Wicked and might be a great jumping off point for a new campaign.

While going through the RPG posts floating around Twitter I also stumbled across a really cool looking Indiegogo for an adventure that combined a number of factors that appealed to me; D&D compatible, urban based, undead monsters, and that historic fantasy feel I suddenly seem interested in.  Wightchester Prison City Of The Damned by Postmortem Studios.

Thematically Wightchester looks like a D&D horror version of Escape From New York set in the 1600s.  Sometimes you see an indie project and without knowing a ton about it you still know it speaks to you, this is definitely one of those for me.

So...this means I'm going to need a bunch of historic miniatures, and a bunch of historic miniatures converted into weird fantasy creatures and monsters.  Luckily there is no shortage of great companies making amazing plastic black powder era figures, unluckily I live in Canada and it seems no one domestically is carrying very much of this stuff to there's a lot of international shipping in my near future.

If you also find this genre interesting keep watching this space.  This looks like what I should be working on for most/all of December.

-Jay

Almost ready for my almost first Mutant Crawl Classics funnel!

I wonder how many times during the time I've been writing this blog I've used the expression "best laid plans of mice and men..."?  A small group of friends and I were planning on playing through our first 0-level funnel tomorrow but once again real-life called an audible and the game is off, at least for a change it's not my schedule disrupting things for everyone else :)

So I had today off and rushed through getting 11 of the 12 miniatures done we needed for tomorrow.  Six of them were just re-bases and touch-ups of some older models and I painted five new figures today.  It was a bit of a time crunch so I really just slapped paint on basic models but now that I have time before we're actually going to play I'm going to go back and add some debris and salvage to these guys to make them feel a bit more appropriate to the setting.

Having said all that let me show you what I got done today.

In Mutant Crawl Classics characters at 0 level start off in one of four categories; Humans, Mutants, Manimals or Plantients.  Today I was making due with models I had on hand so although I represented all four groups Plantients got the short end of the stick (pun intended).

First up the humans.

Three of these are re-purposed figures from previous games.  The guy on the left of the picture is my old Dungeon Crawl Classic character Jaqar.  Ironically he's no longer a suitable miniature for the fantasy game I'm playing because he should have more hi-tech gear.  The next figure over in the jeans and leather jacket is new, he's a Cursed Earth Desperado from the Judge Dredd miniature game.  Next in line is the jester I painted for the first round of The Iron Painter three years ago, and finally Bloody Brannigan a pirate model from Warmachine.

Next up the mutants.

Starting again on the left is a Reaper Tiefling Wizard.  Next in line is Junior Angel from Wargames Foundry's Judge Dredd line and finally is a nameless Reaper mutant who looks very Incredible Hulk to me.

Next up the manimals.
(these guys are my favourites)

One the far left we start with some sort of Reaper Lizardman (I lost the package).  Then in the center we have one of my Rangifers from Frostgrave touched up and slightly re-based.  And finally....why not Zoidberg? from Armorcast.

Last up my lone plantient.

This guy is a Games Workshop Dryad which I seem to be using for a lot of games lately.

I'm probably going to phase a bunch of these out and do some conversions that have some suitable looking scrap on them before we reschedule our game so keep an eye out for those.

-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

Female Judges!

I took a break from stuff I'm currently gaming with or planning to game with to go back and do some stuff I just plain want.

At some point when I actually play a game of Judge Dredd I'm going to have a pretty good sized Justice Department.  Tonight I finished up the three named female Judges I have figures for.

Judge Dekker is a relatively minor character in the Dredd mythos.  She did appear in multiple issues over a number of years so I found it really odd I don't have a single comic with her in it.  She basically fills the same role in the comics as Judge Giant being a Judge Dredd trained and then appeared later on in the series as a full Street Judge.  Unfortunately her career also ended the same way as Judge Giant....

Galen DeMarco appears typically in the comics as a former Street Judge turned Private Investigator.  She's a neat character because she feels like the audience-eye-view of what's going on in Mega-City One.  She's a great miniature because outside of a Judge Dredd game she would make a great sci-fi heroine; cool uniform and armour, techie-looking gun, and looks like she's ready for action, not some pin-up girl.

Judge Anderson is probably the best known of these three characters.  She's had her own lengthy series, appeared in a lot of big Dredd stories and appeared in the latest film adaption.  Unfortunately she's also probably the most poorly executed figure of the three.  Her face is blocky,  her hair is a bit over the top, she looks out of place compared the other two Judges.

I've got a lot of odds and ends on my painting desk so next update might be a random fig or it might be back to the Blood Angels.

-Jay

No no no Fishy, I am the law!

What have I said in the past about me having hobby A.D.D.?  After spending some time trying to decide if my 28mm sci-fi focus this year will be on Warzone or 40K I've finally settled on Judge Dredd.....

When I decided to play Judge Dredd I ran up against a principle in war gaming that is in some circles referred to as "the Zulu problem".  The origin of the name is centered on the idea that tons of war gamers like to plan and play the Battle Of Rourke's Drift (as seen in the movie Zulu), the 'problem' part of the name is based on the idea that EVERYONE wants to play the British and no one wants to play the Zulus.  There are a ton of different forces you can play in Judge Dredd but EVERYONE wants to play the judges, how do we solve this problem?  The good folks at Mongoose and/or Warlord have thought ahead and built their own practical and thematically appropriate solution into the game.  Ladies and gentlemen please allow me to introduce Chief Judge Cal!

Judge Cal was the villain in a story line way back when where he rose to the position of Chief Judge, then promptly went insane (naming his fish Fishy Deputy Chief Judge just in-case you couldn't tell he was insane before) and brain-washed most of the Judges of Mega-City One into following his edicts.

By choosing to play a Judge Cal force I will be able to use most of the Judge figures I have already painted while talking in a voice like Hedonism-bot from Futurama while gaming.

Thankfully now that I've made that decision I can put away my Warzone and 40K figures for now......say, did the Imperial Knight just go up for pre-order?

-Jay

Walter The Wobot

One of the things I've recently been finding funny about both pop-culture fandom and the rise of nerd-culture in popularity is how some of us see (or remember) things we really liked in our youth.

The best example I can give from my younger days is when the first 'modern' Batman movie came out staring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson there were loads of people who were suddenly comic fans talking about how Tim Burton had finally given Batman the dark presentation the comics had always had, which was really ONLY true if your entire exposure to Batman at the time was the comics Frank Miller had written.  Fast forward a few years and I see the same thing applied all over the place, my personal favourite example being the unfortunately bad reception the movie Punisher: Warzone received.  That movie was very true to the tone of Punisher comics in the 80s and early 90s, the Punisher himself was incredibly violent and dark but almost everything that happened around him was pretty ridiculous.

But what does this have to do with miniatures I've been painting?

Well, here's the thing, earlier this year Judge Dredd fans like myself got to enjoy the awesome Dredd 3D (by the way you should all go out and buy a copy of Dredd 3D) and almost immediately everyone began spitting on the grave of the 90s Stallone Judge Dredd movie.  First up, let me be perfectly honest as a movie goer and a Judge Dredd fan I did (and still do) think that movie was (and still is) awful, but having said that it gets beat up a lot for things that really weren't wrong.  Case in point; Rob Schneider.  A lot of things in that movie just didn't belong (romantic side-story, ABC Warriors, Dredd not wearing his helmet, etc) but as an ACTUAL fan of Judge Dredd and 2000AD comics I thought Rob Schneider was great.  Most people forget that Judge Dredd is not a dark, gritty view into the future...it's a satire of those exact things, and as such it has certain characters who highlight the ridiculousness of the setting as a whole.

Enter Walter The Wobot.
Walter The Wobot is a robot with a speech impediment that functions as Judge Dredd's valet and provides some comic relief.  Walter frequently tries to do the right thing but it turns out wrong due to either his own ineptitude or the unfairness of the world in which he operates (sound like any movie character we were just talking about?)   I don't know how necessary a miniature of Walter is for gaming Judge Dredd but he's an awesome character and a great fig so I had to paint him up.

Also, it means I didn't technically break my own rule about skipping ahead on new Judge Dredd models.

-Jay

Hobby Grab Bag - Painting Contest & Another Blood Angel!

Hi all,

I've been a bit scatter shot hobby-wise again but I'm doing 2 (maybe 3) projects with a hard deadline of October 1st.

I've decided to participate in the Immortal Brush Competition at Strategies Games & Hobbies in Vancouver BC.  I'll be entering 2 categories for sure (5 man squad sci-fi/modern and 5 man squad fantasy/historical) and hopefully a 3rd (one of the large model categories time permitting).

For my sci-fi/modern entry I've decided to go a slightly different route than usual.  I'm going to take some figs that I speed painted awhile back and fix them up to a higher standard of painting.  I'll be starting with 5 of my space fascists from Wargames Factory's Greatcoat Troopers box.  I've been planning on these multi-use figures standing in for Bauhaus in Warzone and Viridians in VOID/Urban War, they could also work as Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40,000.
The picture below is how they looked when I pulled them out of my figure case this morning...not bad but definitely not paint contest worthy.  They'll probably get finished first because they represent the least amount of work.

Next up are 5 Celt Warriors from Warlord Games Celts box.  I've wanted to do historical gaming of this era forever but the amount of stuff I would have to paint has always seemed quite daunting.  Lately a few of my friends have discovered some skirmish level games that might work so and old idea has become new again!  These will get done second because I do want to get them finished and I think my best shot in a paint competition will always be "unit" categories because that doesn't seem to be where the elite painters enter.

And last up I am 90% done my next Blood Angel, the Librarian from Space Hulk.  This is just a continuation of my ongoing effort to get an actual Blood Angels army done in 2013.  I might actually also use the large model category in the painting competition to get a larger Blood Angels model done (like a dreadnought) but if that's the case I'll definitely have to run out and buy one this week.

There you have it, bit of a mess but I'm enjoying it!

-Jay

Back to the drawing board......

In my experience 99% of the time someone refers to a model they are painting as a "test model" what they really mean is they're going to hammer out their paint scheme on that model and then apply it across a squad/gang/unit/army/etc.  I think for the first time in my time in the hobby one of my figures just failed the 'test'.

As I mentionned and showed in an earlier post I'm going to be painting up some mercs for a Fallout game with my friend Stan.  I assembled, primed and starting painting my first 3 models as 'test' models and realized pretty early on that as much as I like the body armour the guns and helmets are completely worng for the setting.  Unfortunately as cool as the figures are (UAMC Infantry from Defiance Games) they are not very conversion friendly in the arms/guns area and none of the head options worked for what I wanted...enter Warlord Games and their Bolt Action range.  I've created 2 new test models which still use the great UAMC legs and bodies but are now sporting Bolt Action british heads and in one case the arms and Thompson sub-machine gun as well.  Once I get some paint on these I should be able to figure out how everything blends together and hopefully be able to drive the New California Republic out of my territory!

Thanks for visiting

-Jay

Cool figures, but not the right ones for the job.

 

These boys look like they know a thing or two about the wasteland.