Viking Tent

A handy little piece of terrain for SAGA or other games, this viking tent comes from Warbases. It's an MDF kit, but I added a layer of cloth to pretty it up; I don't think the straight MDF surface really looks right for a cloth object. I also replaced the end pieces with cloth; same reason. Sadly, the glue stained a little.

The lovely thing about this model is the ends of the frame, which are based on parts of the tent found with the Gokstad ship burial; you can now see these at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. 

This type of ornate wood-carving is absolutely typical of the Viking era -- although of course preservation is a problem -- and something that laser-cutting is very good at. The only note of warning I'll sound is that these delicate pieces are, well, delicate; I knocked mine off a shelf and snapped off the top of the frame on one side. I had to buy another one at Salute this year to replace it. Still, it looks great and I am happy I got it. And since they're only £3.50, it's not exactly a huge hardship!

Post-apocalyptic Technical!

So, as you might expect, on Friday I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road. Then on Saturday I dug out an old Grenadier resin post-apocalyptic truck that I painted back in high school and made a total mess of. I cleaned it up, gave it a primer coat and bashed on a quick weathering job.

I cut down a spare heavy weapon from em-4 miniatures and then built a little handle rig for it. I then added a shield from Scotia Grendel (it's from the old Void second edition boxed set) as a shield for the gunner. The paint job is very simple -- basic black and a load of weathering. I painted the skull-and-swords logo on the hood; it's a little off-centre, but whatever. The design is inspired by the flag of golden age pirate Calico Jack Rackham. The hourglass symbol in the shield is another pirate flag/gravestone motif. 

As you can see, a gunner fits neatly on the step, although it might be hard to fit another model in there. I don't know if this miniature is widely available, but technicals are super-easy conversions. 

Simple terrain: Brick walls

Over the long weekend I have been doing some catch-up painting, much of it just to take care of some simple terrain and other needs. My first post is about some brick walls I picked up back when Modelzone was shutting down. These are Tamiya 1/35 brick walls, I believe. I don't think they're 1/72.

 

 Anyway, this is not all of them -- I think there's another piece in the box which I painted earlier and may have mislaid (or it may be in my terrain box where it belongs).

You can stick the various bits together in different configurations. Mine look like this:

The stepped ends line up so that you can flip them over and link them together: 

I primed them by spraying them grey -- with a brick wall the gaps are actually lighter than the bricks, which is not normally how things with gaps work. I then used torn-up blister pack foam to sponge them with Homebase "bitter chocolate" masonry paint, then again irregularly with cheap "rust red" craft paint, then again with Vallejo something-or-other; some orangey-brown. 

I then went pack and picked out a few individual bricks with the orange and the dark brown. The result was to give the wall a nicely mottled appearance. 

As you can see, the walls go well with these 28mm figures, even though they're nominally 1/35 scale (I think -- unless there's a 1/48 version? I am pretty sure it's the 1/35). I think the blotchiness of the bricks is just right.

So yeah, I bought the thing for like £2 or £3 and now I have a few walls that I can use for Strange Aeons or other modern-ish games.

Quick-and-dirty NPC miniatures.

I needed some minis for NPCs for Wednesday night D&D. Well, I didn't need them. I felt like having some. So I dug through the pile of Bones looking for models that fit. The PCs were going to steal a valuable artefact from a crime syndicate, and I wanted some elite-type guards who felt like "named" characters. When you have a group of NPCs, they need some kind of identifying theme, so I settled on giving them hooded cloaks. And lo, there were four models with appropriate cloaks.

Pylea (L) and Azlea (R)

Verthik (L) and Robur (R)

That Robur's actually not a bad model, although his sword is, of course, gargantuan. 

Anyway, I have them all a basic coat of black and a series of highlights, starting with Vallejo German Grey. I decided that each would have a different-coloured cloak lining. I then gave them names that distinguished them based on the colour. 

I couldn't bring myself to give a ninja a bright accent colour, so I decided it was grey and that his name was Goemon. The summoning circle is also new; the ghost is old. I thought I'd try a green wash on the translucent figure to give it more definition, but it didn't come out very well. I have seen it work in the past, so maybe I just didn't thin the wash enough? 

In the end I didn't wind up using the minis this session, but hey, I got five models painted quickly and the guy with the robe will definitely come in handy at the very least. 

I also very much let their figures determine their personalities, which is something I do a lot but seldom see mentioned. Pylea became the leader because she was pointing, Robur was rather gruff and serious, etc. 

More frugal gaming: Poundland terrain!

I was looking for cheap costume accessories in Poundland when I saw this:

This is an "Aliens from the Planet Scardox" toy -- you see them all the time in pound shops, The Works, and so on. This is what you get in it: 

I put the little rockets aside to be used another time -- waste not, etc. -- and gave the plastic insert a bit of a clean. I then took it outside and gave it a couple of coats of good old Halfords car primer, remembering also to spray the inside (the plastic is very thin and a little translucent).

Much more promising. I gave it a few layers of progressively lighter drybrushing, picked out some of the craters with ink (I don't recommend this; the detail is quite shallow and it just looked sloppy) and I was done: 

Not bad for a quid -- heck, if you consider that I'm going to do something with those two little rockets, it was only 33p. It doesn't look perfect, but it looks OK for the price. 

Taking stock

This post is mostly for my own benefit. I find it helpful to break my gaming down into projects. Mostly this helps me determine what miniatures I am and am not "allowed" to buy, but I'm also going to apply it to RPGs here. So here's what I have going at the moment:

• Live games: I'm running one monthly live game and playing in another, plus the occasional special events. This actually involves not as much between-game work as I was expecting it to; my co-GM and I seem to have a pretty efficient system developed. I never feel prepared, but games usually seem to come out OK. Playing in the game I play in involves a bow tie: 

• D&D: My D&D game runs every other week and has been going for, I believe, about a year and a half. I've been streamlining and refining my approach the whole time (while, simultaneously, the setting gets ever more baroque and complex), and I think it's going pretty well. I switched to 5th edition a few months ago and it feels easier-to-use to me, although there are certain parts of the old system I never used, so I don't miss their lack. 
• SAGA: I have pretty much finished my Viking and/or Anglo-Danish armies (I need to do some flocking and I may find out that I need one or two more slingers). I've knocked down a unit or two of Normans, but I'm dragging my feet painting these goddamn knights, because I don't like painting horses. I need to get on that. Once I have done that, I'll do a unit of pilgrims and maybe a new warlord to make a Crusader army out of my Normans, and _then_ I'll do some Seljuqs. 
• Strange Aeons: This project is an excuse to collect cool monster figures and cultists and stuff. I have a pretty good collection so far, and I enjoy this game. This one is just simmering away; I don't feel like I need anything else for it. 
• Warhammer Sorta Thousand: a collection in search of a system. I need to complete my RBT01 Marines, and I've got a little conversion of a walker I need to sort out, and my Chaos Dreadnought, and ... quite a lot, but I don't feel like there's any pressure here. 
• 1/72 historical: I haven't even started here. I'm thinking of doing a couple of test models for the paint scheme and speed-painting, but other than that I have not begun. 
• Dungeon fantasy: I really like using miniatures in my D&D game, but it's not the focus of gameplay. I just like it, and it may be that it's an excuse. 

In fact, I think that you can see that as a trend in my miniatures projects: only SAGA really requires me to paint a lot of the same kind of thing. Modern 40K would require lots of the same damned thing, but Sorta Thousand is a mishmash. Strange Aeons is all individuals, and apart from the odd goblin and/or skeleton horde so is D&D. I like painting quickly and I don't have either a lot of time or a lot of patience, so although these Conquest Games Normans are super cool, painting all of them is a little dull. Still, they will look nice when they are finished. 

So that's what I'm up to at the moment. 

Also I just went to a car boot sale and: 

I never post about my D&D campaign

I mean, I post about campaign setting stuff, and I sometimes post about rules or products I buy. But I seldom post about how the game is going.

Good. It's going good. 

Early in the game, the PCs' strong motivation to get the hell out of an area before their misdeeds caught up with them meant that sandboxy investment seldom paid off, but it's starting to now; they've just been back to the same port for the third time, only to find that they have to deal with the consequences of their previous shenanigans. In this particular case, they need to steal an artefact from the local thieves' guild (or "the mob" as I like to think of it) in order to present the cabal of warlocks the thieves want to sell it to from discovering that it is a forgery, passed off by the PCs months before after they gave the real one to a cackling old hag. This is, by the way, not my idea at all -- they were inspired to do it as a way of getting out of trouble. 

Also, combat continues to have frantic action feeling and I continue to use car-boot-sale toys as representations in addition to lovingly-painted figures. 

Sharks, water elementals, fishmen, pirates, treasure ...
just another day on the high seas.