The long cyber-arm of the law

Work continues on my new Enforcer team for Necromunda.  Kind of a strange outcome to my painting for that today though.   I had planned on giving all of my troopers the white helmets I typically reserve for the riot squads in my Arbites army just to brighten up the overall look of the figures and provide more contrast but the figure I painted today is the cyber-mastiff handler and he doesn't wear a helmet, so he looks much darker than I had planned.

The cyber-mastiff handler is a nice addition to the Enforcer/Arbite range because it gives them their first genuinely new looking model in decades.  That being said I have built 3 of these previously and was never happy with how they turned out.  I always found that the weapon hands that were available always ended up making the figure look like a Proctor who had left his coat at home.  This time rather than going for the min-max weapon hand choices I simply gave him a bolt pistol in one hand and a cyber hand snipped from an older heroclix model on his other hand.  Obviously a second weapon or a riot shield would have been far more advantageous but I think this looks alot better and more natural.

-Jay

Have you seen my dog?

 

Fall Of The Necromancer: The second mustering

Back with more elves for scenario 2 of our Fall Of The Necromancer campaign.  This time I've painted a dozen Galadhrim Warriors (armoured wood elves) who will be standing in for the plastic High Elves that are supposed to make up Elrond's forces.

The Galadhrim are really nice armoured elf figures that I was happy to paint and I'm looking forward to adding another 12 a bit later on in the campaign.

We should be playing our second game tomorrow night when either I will continue pushing the forces of evil back or Stan will avenge his earlier loss and prevent more of my elves from living to see the end of their age and the beginning of the age of men.

-Jay

Galadhrim with elven blades

 

Galadhrim with elven spears

 

Galadhrim with elven bows

 

 

 

There's a little Santa in all of us

My buddy Darren's shop Strategies Games & Hobbies www.strategiesgames.ca in Vancouver is currently running an awesome pre-Christmas event; miniature painting secret Santa.

Basically the idea is you sign up, drop off a model to be painted by another participant chosen at random and pick up a model chosen at random to paint for someone else.  It's awesome because it guarantees you will get something that you want for Christmas, but there's still the element of surprise when you get the finished product.  I will be painting a Gun-Mage-Captain-Adept for the Cygnar faction for Warmachine.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to mention that in some upcoming blog posts I will be showcasing some terrific hobby shops and their events in the hope that some of you may check out a deserving store you've never been in before.  Personally I've always felt that brick and mortar retaillers are the lifeblood of our hobby and without them our community would be alot smaller and alot less rewarding.

Tomorrow I'll get back to showing painted models (didn't want to ruin anybody Christmas surprise today)

-Jay

Gun Mage Captain Adept (before)

Come back December 25th for after photo

 

This time a blast from the blast gets new life.

A few months ago I was playing an Arbites officer in a 40K rpg game and decided that even though I had a pretty decent sized collection of Arbites and Enforcer models already painted I would paint up a new figure and put a little extra effort into him.  For the same game I painted up a Cyber-Mastiff that sadly ended up never getting used but was fun to do anyway.

Fast forward to this morning when I somehow talked my way into playing in a Necromunda game I wasn't actually invited to (sorry Chris, in hindsight that seems a bit rude on my part) and again I decided that rather than putting together a selection of my painted models I would use these 2 figures as a jumping-off point to paint up a new Enforcer team for Necromunda.

In addition when I pulled out the figure case I have my Arbites in I also found my Judge model in there which I thought would be cool to showcase because everytime I see Arbites being discussed on various forums people always seem to be looking for good ideas for Judge models.

-Jay

Proctor & Cyber-mastiff

 

The Judge

 

 

The first of many (I hope) civilians

I have always used miniatures in role-playing to help sell each scene a bit more but the one thing that has always been lacking is civilian/bystander models.

When I started playing RPGs many moons ago most encounters happened in dungeons, or tombs, or abandonned space ships and what not so it made perfect sense for there to be no panicky civilians around generally milling about and making "heroes" rethink things like automatic weapons fire and area attacks.  But now that I'm doing some modern gaming as well as some superhero gaming (where saving the innocent is generally the name of the game) I find myself needing an assortment of generic unarmed civilian types to become the crowd that the group needs to be careful not to injure or kill while they're being saved.

This is another area where Heroclix models really came through.  Over the past several years they have begun inserting 'secret identity' figures (like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, etc) in their sets as well as adding in non-powered supporting characters (like Mary Jane Watson, Rick Jones, etc) so they have quite a variety of figures to choose from.

I just finished touching up my my first 3 tonight and I think they're great.  Unless you're a Heroclix collector or die-hard comics fan it's unlikely you would recognize any of these figures for who they were originally supposed to be.  I'm hoping to get atleast a dozen of these types of figures done before Christmas so I have a decent selection by the time my first DC Adventures game hits the table.

-Jay

"Gee, I hope no one throws a bus at us today"

 

More from Mirkwood

Hello again!  It's been a few days since my last post because instead of painting a few figures I've been working on  assembly-lining (sure, that's a word) 12 figures at once.  For my ongoing Fall Of The Necromancer game I'm currently painting 12 Galadhrim Warriors to stand in for the original 2nd age High Elf figures that I've never been a big fan of.  The Galadhrim seem like a reasonable substitute (they're heavily armoured elves in the same colour scheme) and in future gaming they will fit better with my unarmoured Wood Elves as a coherent force.

In the meantime I realized I never showed my last 4 Mirkwood Elves (the bowmen) and I also just finished touching up their new champion Legolas as well.

In the next few days I hope to be showing my completed Galadhrim as well as some of the civilian/bystander models I'm doing up for my DC Adventures game. 

-Jay

With elven archers it's quality over quantity.

 

Final appearance of the Zombie Vixens....for now....

I have finished my first sprue of Zombie Vixens (except the crawlers, more on this later) and I'm very happy with the variety of figures I ended up with.

I'll be re-visiting the crawlers later after I've finished all my Studio Miniatures zombies.  I'm still trying to decide how I want to base my crawlers which I why I skipped them on my first Studio Miniatures box as well.

So for now zombies will move to the back burner as I have impending Pathfinder and LOTR games to get figures ready for.

-Jay

Last 2 Zombie Vixens

 

This is what you can make with one-third of a box.