New Year, New Project

Time for an annual genre shift.  2017 was a year filled with fantasy.  My fantasy table is as complete as it needs to be and my fantasy figure tackle box is crammed almost to bursting.  The pair of long weekends for the holiday mean that I've had time to start in on a new sci-fi tabletop.  I also had time for a few games - check back here for links to full write-ups on one of the other blogs I contribute to.

I've always wanted to have a decent space station suitable for corridor fights, but never really found a system to my liking.  Rather than constantly wish I had the perfect battleground, I've decided to settle for a good one now rather than the best one ever.  I'll have a few more informative shots up later, but for now, here's a sneak peek at the terrain.

The fantasy figures were close at hand.  I've been toying with making this set-up genre neutral.  By painting it as caves, I think I can use set dressing to swap out between fantasy and sci-fi.  We'll see.  I like the idea of conduits and tubing and control panels affixed to the walls to really make this table shine as a science complex or spaceport.

Either way, 2018 is going to be a great year.  I'm looking forward to getting it started off with a bang!

Happy Boxing Day!

By now the boy has finally unwrapped his Christmas presents, so I can show you what he got without spoiling any surprises.  It's Warhammering Time!  He traded away some terrain a few years back and has been playing with ugly tan vehicles for some time.  He left them here when he went of for some colleging, which gave me the chance to sit down and spiffy them up a bit.  With these new paint jobs, he's going to be the belle of the Only War Ball.  Make sure you scroll to the bottom, that last paint job is complete aces.  Enough to bring a tear to the Emperor's own eye.

That's not great, let's zoom in a bit...

 

If you don't want to click for biggening, the left blade reads, "For Love of Suffer Not", and the right "Sic Semper Hereticus".

Turns out graffiti is half the fun of painting these things.  The Imperial Guard has the best fiction, really, just the best.

 

I actually painted up two troop carriers and two heavy tanks.

 SPOILERS!

We Brake 4 Sororitas

 

 

Oh hell yeah, that turned out better than I anticipated.  Note that the Bloody Rose is one of the Sororitas chapters, specifically the one dedicated to maximum carnage.  I had more fun painting this little gal than should be legal.

Drone Sweet Drones

Two years ago, while travelling through upper Cali, I found these little guys inside the glass case of a comic/gaming/general nerdery shoppe called Bat Comics and Games.  At only a buck each and perfect for drones in 15mm scale, I snatched them up.  They had no identifiers, but that's not a problem for the hivemind over at the Lead Adventure Forum, and within a day they were IDed as Boppers.

 

According to the ancient texts, these little guys go way back to the METAGAMING days.  They were originally designed for use with a game called RIVETS - one I've never played, but one that looks fun nonetheless.  Looks like I got a Jack Bopper, two Rocket Boppers, and a Tiny Bopper.  Cute little guys, and the perfect size for drones or even as parked 'bots usable as cover.

 

These four little guys will probably be pressed into service as some sort of automated security or cleaning drones for use with my next project.  It's a real doozy, and you're going to be suitably impressed.  If the holidays are quiet, I hope to show you a whole new gaming board the first week of January.

 

The lovely spokesmodels shown for scale are Khurasan's Grav Armor crew with the ridiculously long silencers at the end of their barrels snipped down to a more reasonable length.

Bowling Green? #NotAtMyTable

With apologies to the Ohioans out there - it might be a fine university, but a bowling green makes for a bland wargaming table.  With very little room left in my One Fantasy Box to Bind Them All And In the Dark Closet Rule Them, grand topographic chances are off the table (heh).  That doesn't mean we can't spruce things up with some nice terrain blocking templates that also help to funnel figures around and even make for some interesting defensive challenges. 

These three small hillocks were carved out of one plain round piece of Styrofoam picked up for a couple bucks at the craft store.  The slopes are just low enough to allow figures to stand almost anywhere on the terrain piece, and they were painted to match the hill on which the Nameless Tower stands - a small touch that helps unify the table theme.

As you can see, the overall elevation difference is less than 15mm including the terrain base, so they can be treated as a linear obstacle for climbing purposes, or the players can agree that they are not to scale, and that these little cliffs actually block all movement.  In that way you can even have a couple of short canyons to funnel troops through. 

 

Oh man, I'm working on something big right now, but I can't show you what it is.  A huge project compared to my usual, but I don't want to ruin the surprise for my players, so posting might be lighter than usual here despite increased output.  Maybe I'll be able to share the photos with you as a Christmas Surprise.  If you don't already follow this blog, now's a good time to subscribe so you don't miss it.

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!).