Random Shots

 As we ease into the weekend, let's take a look at a couple of preview shots of battles coming up on The Joy of Wargaming.  First up a look at Osprey's "Black Ops" which features a surveillance fight gone wrong when competing espionage agencies arrive to gather blackmail from the same luddite professor's backwoods cabin.

And here's what a game of Patrick Todoroff's "Nightwatch" looks like when dwarves encounter undead in a high, rocky desert.

Both of these are parts of on-going campaigns featured on the channel.  They are great examples of the rich experience this hobby has to offer when you embrace long-term play with steady advancements and long-term injuries.

fun this weekend, guys.

Finished Figs

 Just a couple quick shots of some quick paint jobs today.  My 15mm fantasy adventures needed some Bowman at home in the woods.  These DemonWorld figures have amazing detail for the scale. Best of all, you can order them individually.

And what the heck the XCOM fan in me has wanted snake man like this for a long time. No real plans for these figures, but they are fun to paint and make a useful addition to any sci-fi collection.  One squad of Critical Mass Astagar figures makes a good faction or good unit to add to any kind of xenos Empire faction.

Nightwatch: The Airom Reconquista

Oh, those lovable, roly-poly weirdo beardo dwarves.  Always delving too deep.  That's what the ladies say about them, anyway.  Over on The Channel we kicked off a second campaign of Patrick Todoroff's "Nightwatch" with an easy mission to cleanse the desert of the plague of nasties that have been, er plaguing it.

Our four heroes have sworn a vow to retake the homeland or die trying, and even pledged the first 60 sp worth of loot to finance the economic rebuilding of the old place once they clear out the squatters.  The names of our heroes (Jonal, Gav, Arthru, and Bob) were swiped from the commentors, and all fit the theme of slow and steady.  They are heavily armored, but a bit plodding as they trudge their way to glory. 

Yeah, we use dollar store plastics for monsters in our games.  We are old-school, and tend to sneer at those who think spending money is the same thing as playing the game. There are more people out there with that mentality than you think.

Two bucks for fifteen miniatures that work great in scale isn't just frugal, it's smart.  Bright and cheery, these reptiles are still fearsome and menacing once you put them into the proper context.

In "Nightwatch" your AI-driven enemies spawn every turn from one of four randomly chosen points.  In my first campaign, I struggled to remember which point was which, so for this go-round, I made it easy.  I whipped up some quick stone circles with ruined tiles that have the spawn number right there on the board.  When you're running solo, every little reminder like this frees up processing power for the rules of the game, and I think the little tiles look smashing on the table, too.

 

Shots From the Long Hunt

Four heroes wade into the stinking mire of the great swamp.

Follow the full action here.  This was the fourth mission in a "Nightwatch" campaign, a solo wargame that uses tower-defense style design to keep the player on his toes.  Waves of enemies every round force some difficult choices as each mission requires the player to accomplish a few tasks.  In this case three relics must be destroyed, but in others the characters must search four points for an item and escape, or even defend three points from the hordes.  It makes for a complex tangle of challenges.

With two new hirelings manning the oars, our dauntless heroes venture to find and destroy the remains of three unholy abominations whose power lingers over this dank land.  Here, our intrepid wizard takes a moment to scatter the bones of one of the dead nightmares.

Jumped by two giant frog men - literally - the wizard skeedaddles, leaving the hired help to clean up the frog mess.  

In this scenario, the terrain items are the only dry ground.  Movement between them requires pushing through the shallows at half speed for our heroes.  Not so for the frog men, who leap across the gaps, nor for the tentacled thing which pursues them through the mire.  They never got a clear look at the watcher in the muck, but they did get an all too close look at the thing's giant pseudopods.

They also got a first look at the most dangerous of the Crimson Wyrm's minions - scaly lizard men toting assault rifles who loved to hang back and unload from a distance.  Here, our brave wizard cuts them off with a wall of fire that obscures line of sight, and forces the lizards to take the long way around.  That detour means wading through the waters, and buys our heroes time to deal with the hordes of smaller and weaker lizard men that have them surrounded.

Fantasy Campaigning Dun Rite

Using a Reaper Bones wood sprite figure as an evil personification of the deep woods and wilds are inimical to human life?  That's unpossible!

That's what happens in this latest episode of "The Joy of Wargaming" wherein four intrepid heroes wade into the wilds to put paid to a bunch of forces of night.  Including the little bugger shown above.  This is the second in a series of seven games of Nightwatch, a great little solo game that smacks of 'tower defense' style video games.  It works well, and the complexity and challenge really ramp up with each successive game.  Highly recommended.

Not a big fan of Reaper figures - the Bones were cheap, but the ones I got didn't take paint well, are squishy on the table, and the sculpts are mediocre at best.  Phasing those out when my next Alternative Armies shipment arrives, and replacing them with some proper metal alloy beasts. They look better, feel better, and play better.

Nightwatch - Spawn Matrix

 Nightwatch: Terror and Treasure in the Dark Corners of the World has proven to be a delightful little solo wargame that has kept your host occupied for hours.  Almost four of them so far, and I'm finally starting to get the hang of all the basic rules.  One thing that I have found helps me need to remember less stuff is to prepare a 'reinforcement' table before the game begins.  Rather than refer to the table in the book and have to remember turn number and what my current difficulty rating is, I can just grab the next batch of baddies and go to town.

Take a look:

The numbers at the top are the turn numbers, the letters down the left hand side represent "Terrors", "Hordes", and "Vermin" from top to bottom.  Now, once my little Guildsters have completed their four actions on a turn, I can just reach over and grab the next column of reinforcements.  This also gives me a solid 'turn counter', because I can just look at the blank columns and know where I am at in the current game.

Here is some tabletop eye candy showing a scrum as four heroes defend the bones of a fallen saint against the ravages of lizardmen:

And if you want to get your hands on a copy for yourself:

Nightwatch Roster Sheet

 

My first Nightwatch.

Since nobody else is going to do it, allow me.  If you're ready to play Nightwatch, a solo fantasy skirmish game by Stalker7, then you're going to want to use a more compact and efficient character sheet than those in the book.  They are fine.  They get the job done, but they take a full page to do what could be done in a quarter page.

You can either save that roster above and print four to a page using the "3.5-inch by 5-inch" setting on your printer, or print one to a page four times.

[EDIT: On March 15, 2021, I changed this roster sheet to make it more workable at the table.]

Halfling Upgrade, Livestock, and More

 Just added some odds and ends to the 15mm fantasy toolbox.  These are all from Irregular Miniatures. Let us start with some wildlife and a hapless porter making 1gp a day hauling too much gear down into dank holes filled with monsters.

A bit of food and somebody to enjoy it.

And something for the pot.  Scenics or goals, a bit of livestock will be a nice addition to the table.

And here's a great comparison shot of my old halflings on the right.  Really just 6mm heroes.  The 15mm fat boys on the left are so much more obviously Proudfeet - I mean, what kind of halfling wears boots?

Fastasy Roster

My first playthrough of the one dungeon to rule them all exposed a few holes in the lineup.  The place lacked a decent missile threat and that all important 'ambush factor'.

To beef up the undead ranks, and make parties that lack a clericbreally feel the pain, my necromantic antics now include this squad of standoffish blokes.  Good luck returning fire - arrows only do half-damage thanks to their lack of fleshy tissue.

I want to say these guys are Alternative Army boys, but they have been in my lead pile for so long, I honestly can't remember.

Likewise with these shroomen.

Khurasan maybe?  Whoever made them, these shrieker ranchers a fun addition to the mushroom forest seen here:

Scale Neutral Fantasy Terrain

Nothing helps sell the players on the notion of the dungeon as a place of pure, seething chaos like a good altar of evil, expect maybe TWO altars of evil.

 

Finding fifteens in the local FLGS (that aren't remaindered Flames of War remnants) represents one of those fun challenges that true gamers embrace.  This little altar for instance, allegedly scaled for the big 28mm figures, offers a chance of three different pieces for my preferred fifteens.

Of which I took two.  For permanence, the base and top have been joined permanently, creating a sort of summoning circle.  The round altar pillar has a convenient bit of stone finishing on top, making the pedestal a perfect height and look for a dark altar graven with ghastly visages and pressed with the bones of its victims.  Yeah, the skulls on the dais are a little oversized, but that can be chalked up to either stone carven skulls, or the skulls of giants, depending on the DMs mood and inclination.  The latter - ten giants killed to create the dais - has wide ranging implications perfect for your chief, jarl, or king's local steading, rift, or hall.

The pre-primer on these resin pieces didn't work out so well.  The red basecoat, done to provide a hint of eldritch and bloody mortar joining the stones, took several coats to reslly stick.  Next time I will prime coat Wiz-Kid's 'preprimed' figures for better and more consistent coverage.

Fifteen Odds and Sods

Just a couple of quick and dirty terrain pieces completed over the weekend.  The jersey jersey barriers and skull mountian are from Rebel Minis.

The skull painted up nice.  The barriers have a printed plastic feel with a striated look the takes some sanding to get a decent look.  The pieces are really light and don't take plastic well, even with a base coat of primer.  Can't recommend them.

These two wetland/marsh/boggy ground fill a much needed gap in my terrain of "blocks movement but jot LOS".  It doesn't take that much more effort to build two rather than one, so now each of my boxes (fantasy and sci-fi) get one.

End of the Box

To fantasy up the four small wargame boxes, I needed something with a touch of magic.  Hence four wizard towers.  Yeah, they all look a little different.  So do the ponds and the houses and the woods.  And most of the figures.  It's nice - they all have that personal touch that turns this from another boxed game to a personalized gift from a friend.

 

So that's a total of eight terrain items and fifteen inches of hedges.  Not a bad little setup.  The really nice thing about this setup is that the colors are so garish.  That sounds odd until you consider the purpose of the setup.  Visual appeal might be everything, but this set will be shown via lo-res webcam, so to keep things straight, the pieces really need to jump off the battlemat.  For the terrain, the water is bright, the tower has red splashes, the house is a bright yellow, and the forest has that nice dark shadow.  When used for actual play, it will be a lot easier to recognize these pieces that if I had made the usual attempt to closely match ground color to terrain base color.

Of course, now I'm starting to wonder if my figures
are going to show up at all.  Something to consider...

And here it all is boxed up and ready for storage.  The figures are stuffed in a plastic box under the broken ground.  With a drop cloth and a little bit of newspaper, this bad boy should make it half way around the world with no problems.

Deepest, Darkest Elfrica

Who doesn't love a good fight against the dark elves?  Especially when Splintered Light makes such distinct and characterful figures!  The first four figures are the Personality Pack, and give you four unique NPC style bosses.  Rather than the usual purple dress, I went with a fall-time red and orange coloring.

 

I also bought one pack of blade dancers.  These guys come in a pack of twelve with three different sculpts.  You wouldn't know it from looking at these eight figures.  Simple arm bends give each of these eight figures a different look - if you look closely you can see which ones are twins, but they'll still look great on the table.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  A better blog host would have had a nice Solomon Kane figure painted up.  Perhaps a cornucopia of fields and gardens can make up for it?

It's late autumn, just after the crops are in and the table fully dressed.  The crops are just MDF covered in sand.  Took two or three applications to get those furrows looking right, but it paid off.  They demarcate rough ground, but don't hamper figure movement in the least.

 

The rock wall is just fish tank gravel carefully stacked one at a time until it was high enough to represent a decent sized wall.  The giant leafy greens are small plastic flowers painted in bright green.  They transform that slab of terrain from a merely empty field to a corner garden. 

 

Here's another sneak peek at the completed dark elves, too.  Full shots up on Monday.

Bringing Out More Dead

My tombs were heavy on the physical dread and light on the spiritual dread, so I fixed that with a little help from Splintered Light.  Their ghostly packs sell packaged in numbers suitable for big battle games rather than skirmishes.  So I added a chunk of lead to my never-to-be painted mountain.

 

 

Being a rather clever fellow, I also turned a few of these single sculpts into different monsters through the expedient of different paint schemes.  In addition to standard black, I painted a handful up in a LotR ghastly greenish glow.

 

Here's a slightly better side by side comparison.  The contrast is even more stark in person.  So the black robes can serve as more skeletons or wraiths, and the green guys can be ghosts or shadows or something equally impervious to less than silver or magic weapons.

I also found this towering skeleton giant in a bag of twelve plastic toys for sixty cents the day after Halloween.  I picked the best looking figure and simply mounted and painted him - didn't even need to trim any flash - and look how he towers over that dark elf (spoilers for my next post!).

A Giant Update

Light on the texts, but heavy on the heavies, here's how Splintered Light's hill giants stack up against a typical (Ral Partha Europe) figure.

I like this size.  Big enough to be a threat, but not comically so.  And the animal skin and skull necklace, and the weird proportionality of their limbs, make these two a much better representation of the fantastic than just using a 28mm figure.  (Which I've done, but never really liked the look of.)

No idea the size difference between these and the other giant-kin on offer, though.  I never really liked the breakdown in giants in traditional D&D.  It always felt a little artificial to me.