Pendraken 10mm FPW Bavarians

A couple months ago I finally bit the bullet and sent out orders for two 10mm Arab Revolt armies to be painted. Shortly after that, I realised that I should have ordered some German Asian Corps figures too, but by then the figures had been sent to the painter. I decided I want them bad enough to buy a pack of the figures and paint them myself (30 figures - how hard can it be?), and since I was paying postage, I decided to get a pack of the Bavarians to add to my FPW army - ironically, when I bit the bullet and had my FPW armies painted years ago, I left the Bavarians out too.

The Germans were a breeze to paint - I will show them once I have done their bases - and I was beginning to think that 10mm wasn't really that difficult to paint... then I started on the Bavarians.

Compared to the relatively sparse WW1 figures, FPW figures had a lot of details on them. A lot of *fine* details. I mean, the figures had facial hair, and there were cockades on the helmets, and straps on the canteens on the backpacks!

I painted 18 of the figures as line infantry, and the remaining 12 as jaegers - this gives me a battalion of each under the rules. Ideally I should have an entire division of them, but I don't think I can summon up the energy to paint all those figures myself.

More Mad Robot Miniatures figures

While I await the delivery of the Imperium Immortalis kickstarter, I worked on increasing the types of troops I can field with my Warzone Imperial figures under the Trench Hammer rules.

The Trench Hammer rules recommend six figures to a squad, but based on what I have, I decided that I will field five-figure squads. The photo above shows the dismounted version of the cavalry squad I put together. 

The second photos show three "specialist" figures. Now under Trench Hammer, infantry squads come in different flavours, such as MG squad, Assault squad, Rifle-grenade squad, and Flamer squad. Since Trench Hammer does not use figure removal to mark casualty, I realised I could indicate which type a squad is by having four "standard" figures, plus one "specialist" figure. The three figures will therefore mark a squad as either a Flamer squad, an Assault squad, or a Rifle-grenade squad.

Minairons Miniatures 20mm Spanish Civil War Militia

The Minairons figures that Martin ordered finally arrived after being stuck at Spanish customs for weeks, and I managed to paint up my half of the militia last week.

The figures above comprise of a box of the militiamen (more or less - there is a missing MG gunner and a duplicate figure), and half box of the militiawomen. The figures have an AB aesthetics, and the women are even slimmer. I really enjoyed painting them, especially the more "civilian" looking ones.

I've kept to a limited palette, but there is still a rag-tag appearance to the force; this is something we predicted, and so we have decided to let Martin do all the basing work so the figures can have a coherent look. Hopefully I can post photos of these guys with their bases done soon.

Mid-week Kings of War 3rd Edition Game

Adrian, FG, and I managed to get a weekday evening game of KOW 3 in.

We played a 1750-points game: Adrian's dwarves versus my night goblins.

My army consists of mainly spears and archers, and no monsters or warmachines, and so I had 14 units versus Adrian's 7 units and 3 cannons; the goblins battleline stretched from one end of the table to the other.

Despite their numerical advantage, the goblins were no match against the dwarves once in melee, and at the end of Turn 6 every single unit had been routed.

I had a lot of fun nonetheless. I understand the list is basically a dud list, but I think I will continue with it and improve my goblin-wave strategy until I can beat the dwarves one day. Someday.

Modiphius The Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms Terrain

What's the next best thing to having an airbrush? Having a friend who has an airbrush.

Remember the dungeon tiles that I made earlier for my planned megadungeon campaign? Well, when I saw the photos of the Modiphius The Elder Scrolls resin terrain pieces, I thought they would be a perfect match for the tiles.

The pieces were beautiful, but giving them the paint job that they deserved was going to be difficult. Fortunately for me, FG had recently purchased a whole airbrush set-up, and kindly agreed to painting them for me. As you can see in these photos, he did a great job of matching the hue and the "lighting" of the pieces.

Here is a close-up of one of the wall tiles. There are actually wall niches for bodies, which are also a feature of the megadungeon I am planning to use! 

Here is another photo of the walls. I love the pre-historic-looking whirls pattern on the walls; in my fluff the megadungeon had its beginnings as an underground burial complex for successive cultures, from the neolithic age, through to the bronze age (yes, the bronze age is a thing for my setting - see the ancient magical bronze sword the fighter is holding in the photo), and into the early iron age.

There are four wall sections and six junction/end pieces in the set I bought - not enough to wall up every room that the PCs will go through, but my intention is more to use them for backdrops during combat.

Warzone Bauhaus Ducal Militia

I got the Warzone 2nd Edition box set more than three years ago, painted up the Imperial half of the figures, and then left the Bauhaus figures in the box. Then two months ago, I backed the Imperium Immortalis kickstarter, more or less purely on the fact that they were sci-fi figures in pickelhauben, and decided that it was time to get the Bauhaus figures painted.

Easier said than done though.

Two months ago we were still in lockdown, so even getting paints were an issue. When lockdown lifted, FG and I made a trip to the local art supplies store to get the paints I needed, and Martin helped me to get the Tamiya spray paint that I needed for the base coat.

As I did with the Imperials, I chose to stick to the original WW1 colour scheme, except that I did not use brown for the pickelhauben.

Once assembled and sprayed in their base coat, it took me three evenings to finish painting 40 figures, and then as many to apply the number decals to their shoulder pads.

The uniform looks pretty drab, even with the gold buttons I gave them. Fortunately, the Germans used red numerals for the regimental numbers, which gives a bit of a highlight to the figures. It was a chore cutting and applying 80 numerals to the shoulder pads - in addition, I applied several coats of Citadel Lamian Medium to dull the shine of the decals afterwards - but I think the result was worth it.

The Imperium Immortalis kickstarter is scheduled to deliver in December 2020, so it will be months before I receive them. As a precaution I have taken a photo of the paints I used for these figures to make sure that I can remember the exact colours I used.

In the meantime, I have ordered a few more figures from Mad Robot Miniatures to supplement the Imperial side, so look out for them in the coming weeks!

Gaslands Game 2

FG, Martin, and I met up for another game of Gaslands and to pass stuff to each other today.

Since our last meeting, Martin has put together a post-apocalyptic self-propelled gun, while I have bought three more Hot Wheels cars; the local mall was having a 3 for 2 sale, and after spending way too long at the rack at the store, I decided on the three following vehicles:

I picked the Warthog because I had an idea that I wanted to field a buggy for the game, but then I saw the Jet Z, which I thought looked the part. I got the El Camino to make up the numbers - fortunately Martin liked the way it looked, so it's with him now.

I still stripped the paint off the Jet Z, and primed some of the engine parts black, but I haven't quite decided how to paint it. I kind of like the bare metal look, but as it is now there is nothing particularly 'Gaslands' about it.

Anyway, for the game I set up a scenario where FG and I had to drive around the course and run over some objectives (boxes), while Martin tried to stop us, which he did.

It was a short game, but fun nonetheless. I think we are all still driving too carefully and not taking our chances with the Handling dice... perhaps having more vehicles on the table will encourage a more reckless attitude in the future.

Gaz Truck and barricades for Spanish Civil War

So a few weeks ago Martin decided to paint a T-26 model he had in his collection in Spanish Civil War Nationalist colours, and then one thing led to another, and before long the group had committed to doing the SCW in 20mm, using Osprey's A World Aflame.

Martin is doing the lion's share of the work, and for my part I am painting up thirty-plus Republican militia, a truck, and a few barricades.

Now one thing that struck me when I looked at photos and videos from the SCW is jst how many sandbags were used. Streets, walkways, and windows were all blocked by walls of sandbags. There were also many photos and footage of road barricades made from stone or concrete blocks.

We realised that to reproduce the battelfields of the SCW, we would need lots of sandbags and barricades.

I managed to find some 1/72 scale sandbags I had from a WW2 model kit, but I quickly found that stacking sandbags to even chest height required a large number of them. To maiximise the number of barricades I could produce, I decided to make some of the stone/concrete barricades by chopping up some plastic sprues I had and then stacking and gluing them together, before topping them with my remaining sandbags. The whole process takes too long to be efficient, so I will have to relook at my options.

Also as part of my contribution to the project, I wanted to paint up a truck. The A World Aflame rules have an interesting rule where your units may run out of ammunition and will need to replenish them from a cache. A truck would make a suitable representation of the cache, and can of course be used as transport, or just as scatter terrain or table dressing.

Minairons Miniatures, which we are getting our figures from, produce a couple of truck models, but these are made of resin and quite costly. I decided instead of get the cheapest Soviet Gaz truck I could find off ebay, and ended up with a Military Wheels model. Unfortunately, the quality of the kit was quite disappointing. The plastic was brittle, and there was a lot of flash on the parts. I assembled the bare minimum parts to get the basic shape of the vehicle up, leaving out much of the undercarriage.

I sprayed the finished model white, and then before the white paint dried completely, I sprayed on a thick coat of Tamiya Olive Drab. This gave an uneven finish and some pitting, and an interesting results where the colour on each panel faded towards the edge, and as the paint dried there was some sort of discolouration where some parts were more brown than green. This gave the model a sun-bleached appearance which I was quite pleased with.

I then gave the model a black and then brown wash, and brushed on some light brown as mud on the tyres and the lower parts of the chassis.

All in all it is not a model that will stand up to close scrutiny, but for gaming purposes it should suffice. 

Gaslands Game 1

Martin, FG and I got together for our first face-to-face game since... in nine months. The lockdown ended a couple of weeks ago, and there hasn't been a surge in cases, so I figured that it was OK to meet and catch up, pass each other stuff we have ordered for one another, and have a few beers together; in the interest of infection control, we used separate containers for our chips.

The game we have chosen for the session was Gaslands; it looked like a light, fun game, and the guys wouldn't have to bring a lot of figures on top of all the other stuff they were bringing to my place.

I have made some dashboards earlier, and the day before the game I made a few gates with some plastic sci-fi bits I had lying around and some hazard chevrons printed onto paper, laid out a race area, and we were ready to go.

We played the simple Death Race scenario, and it was a close race, with all of us crossing the finishing line in the same phase. We enjoyed it so much we decided to replay the race again. In the second race FG's vehicle got wrecked by Martin's vehicle and screeched to a halt just on the finishing line, allowing Martin to take the victory.

What surprised me about the game was how playable it was. I saw a few videos of the game on youtube and it seemed that most of the time the vehicles got wrecked by combat and collision before they even complete a full circuit. In our games we kept our eyes and the goal and did not deliberately manoeuvre our vehicles to attack - in fact, FG did not even get to use his mortars in either game.

The Performance Car seems to be a good choice for the game, since they received an extra activation every time they were collided into. My choice of a pick-up truck, however, seemed poor, as with its poor Handling I could not even manage to shift gears most turns.

The trick, it seems, is to have a team of at least two vehicles, and that was what we decided to do after the game: buy and build at least another vehicle each. I am keen to buy a buggy on my next trip to the mall, but FG is of the opinion that you don't pick a vehicle: you stand before the Matchbox rack and see which one calls out to you...

Kromlech Giant Mushrooms and GW Night Goblin Fanatics

I got a few packs of giant mushrooms from Kromlech a while back to decorate the bases of my Night Goblin army, but have not done anything with the larger mushrooms until now; Adrian had finished painting his Dwarven army during the lockdown period, and was keen to play a game of Kings of War 3rd edition, so I decided to make some objective markers.

I pinned the mushrooms onto some resin bases I have, slopped some paint on the mushroom caps, and dry-brushed the bases green - the end result looks like aquarium decoration. 

Next, I decided to refurbish a couple of Night Goblin Fanatics figures I bought on eBay. Night Goblin Fanatics are one of the things that made me fall in love with GW (the other thing was when I first found out that in Blood Bowl, you could make a Treeman throw a Halfling - that just blew my teenage mind), but the problem with the older, metal figures was that the chains had a tendency to snap - and that was what happened with these two figures.

The little fellow on the left started life being almost vertical, with his feet pointed straight up to the sky - this was of course an accident waiting to happen, and it did. I glued the chain back onto the ball, but I was certain that if I tried to restore the figure in its original configuration, it would break again. Looking at the shape of its hood, I decided to position it in a more horizontal position and make it look like the ball had pulled him forward in a headlong dive. To achieve a two-point contact, I inserted a pin onto the base, and attached the end of the chain to the pin, and then hid the pin with some tuft. I like how the goblin's right hand just hovers a few millimetres above the ground, giving it a dynamic look.

The need for a two-point contact meant that I had to use a base that was larger than the 25mm round base. (There are no rules for Fanatics in the KOW goblin list, but the goblins do have an "extra attacks on first melee attack of the game" mechanic in the form of Mawpups, which I thought could be proxied by the Fanatics.) A 40mm round base was just a tad too small for the figure, and a 50mm base would have had too big a footprint; a standard rectangular cavalry base would do the trick, but I felt that the right angles did not look right for a figure that was supposed to be in motion. Fortunately, I had a few oval bases from the Fireforge skeleton cavalry box, which was just the right size.

For the other figure, I had to replace the broken chain with a piece of plastic chain I had from my bits box. To secure the figure to the base, I trimmed the tab on its bottom, and cut a rectangular slot on the base to receive the tab. To achieve a two-point contact, I glued the ball to the base. The figure now looked like it was trying to launch the ball off from the ground. To add to that effect, I thinned the PVA in the area of the arc which I imagined the ball would trace before I added the basing material, and painted the area a darker brown to simulate the wet earth that was exposed by the movement of the ball. The oval shape of the base added to the look of the whole thing. In retrospect I should have actually scraped a groove into the base itself, adding more depth to the groove.

I had a lot of fun working on these two figures. Maybe I should look for more old Fanatic figures on eBay to restore...

Getting Ready for Kings of War

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my group is planning to play some Kings of War Third Edition.

There are a total of 12 different scenarios in Third Edition, and many of them require the use of special markers or tokens, namely Objective Markers, Loot Counters, and Bluff Counters.

I plan to use the Kromlech giant mushrooms pieces as the themed Objective Markers for my Night Goblin army, and for Loot Counters I will be using the reproduction ancient coins which we use in our other games; but the Bluff Counters are something which I needed to get my hands on.

Mantic does sell a tokens set, but it is a little pricey, and Litko surprisingly does not make a set. I therefore decided to make a set of my own, using the Renedra 25mm round bases, and some Dark Angels decals I had lying around.

I sprayed both sides of the bases with a dark green spray paint I had. Then I applied the decals onto the smooth side of the bases, and sealed them with a semi-gloss varnish; the rough side of the base was sealed with a matt varnish. Unfortunately, I did not have any decals for zero, so I left the 'zero' counters blank - since these are removed as soon as they are revealed, it was not a real issue.

I also made a few pieces of scatter terrain using the Renedra bases to help break up the flatness of the gaming surface. These are made by just gluing some sand and gravel and some bits of cork on them. The pieces are then sprayed brown and dry-brushed a lighter brown, while the cork pieces are painted black and then dry-brushed grey. The edges of the bases are then stippled with dark and light green paint to help them blend with my wargaming mat. Then bits of foam foliage are hot-glued onto the bases.

Finally, I also decided to texture and paint up the six Renedra movement trays I still have lying around. Again, these are painted to help the trays blend into the pattern on the mat.

Fireforge Necromancer and Crippled God Foundry Skeleton Warriors

Here are some more resin figures from the kickstarters that I backed: the necromancer from Fireforge Games, flanked by two skeleton warriors from Crippled God Foundry.

I painted the necromancer in yellow instead of the "traditional" purple on the advice from FG's , who suggested that I painted it after Zagor, the Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I am quite happy with the effect, and when it came time to paint the skeleton warriors, I thought I would make yellow my new undead colour.

All the three figures are resin, but a view of the rear of the figures reveals the poor resolution of the Fireforge casting compared to that of Crippled God Foundry; it's a shame, as I like the design of the necromancer figure.

For the skeleton swordsman's shield I wanted to give the effect of paint peeling off the wooden shield. I did this by dabbing white paint onto the surface, and then applying a yellow wash to it.

The large surface of the axehead on the skeleton axeman model allowed me to do some heavy weathering on it.

Hopefully these figures will see some action in one of my RPG campaigns in the future.

Spicheren Play-by-WhatsApp Game

Last weekend I decided to umpire a game of To The Last Gaiter Button for FG and Martin via WhatsApp. I used the Battle of Spicheren scenario, and trimmed the order of battle down to two divisions per side, with two battalions per brigade instead of three.

Martin, playing the Prussian, was told to take the road and rail to the west end (near side in our photo - the town of Forbach) to enable the army to pursue the fleeing French. FG, playing the French, was told to hold the Prussians off while the remainder of the French army prepares to fight off a Prussian flanking attack further to the west.

I took photos of the table from both the Prussian view and the French view, and sent them to Martin and FG respectively, and they gave me their orders. Playing in this manner, we were able to play the game over Saturday and Sunday afternoons, between lunch and dinner time.

On his left Martin sent the 27th Brigade on a headlong charge to the French position on the wooded ridge across from them - the result was a bloody repulse. Seeing the Prussians in retreat, the French in turn charged from their position, and were decimated by Prussian artillery, and finished off by the Prussian cavalry.

On the right Martin sent his 28th Brigade up the wooded ridge in an attempt to get close to Forbach, which FG withdrew his French into. Here the Prussians found that their artillery was ineffective against the infantry in the town, or the chasseurs in the woods, and that their rifles were outranged by the French.

Late in the afternoon the Divisional artillery finally arrived, and the Prussians were able to take the woods - but by then it was too late to press the attack into Forbach.

The last time Martin and FG played TTLGB was literally years ago, but since I was making all the moves and resolving all the attacks for them, they did not need to know the rules and could just give their orders. The process did take a lot longer than it would have if the game was played face-to-face, but unusual times call for unusual manner of gaming.

The lockdown will end this weekend, and while the law says that we may now gather in small groups, it does not mean that we *should* do so. I am planning to wait a couple weeks and see how the situation goes before resuming face-to-face gaming again; in the mean time, we can probably try some WhatsApp gaming again.

Big things have small beginnings, sir

Last month I decided to finally get started on an Arab Revolt project, and made a few purchases online. A few of the purchases I made have arrived, and today I took one of them out for a little test drive.

Now while I also own the Strategy & Tactics Arab Revolt game, it is an inelegant game for a more civilised age. I wanted something lighter as a basis for my (eventual) tabletop battles, and I found it in this game from Decision Games.

The game is one in a series of 32 games, with a core rules system (designed by Joseph Miranda, who also wrote the S&T Arab Revolt game), and a set of module-specific rules for the featured conflict. There are modules for conflicts ranging from ancients to sci-fi, and I must say that the Lawrence of Arabia module is based more on the movie of that name than on history. However, this little solo game seems to be just what I am looking for as a basis for my tabletop games.

The game comes with the rules, 40 cardboard counters, an 11" x 17" map, and 18 tiny cards. The game featured hidden opposition strengths - a Turkish garrison counter may contain zero to six units, and the combat strength of each unit is also randomised. Add to this random event cards which are drawn for every stack of your troops every turn, it means luck plays a great part in the game, as we shall soon learn...

The complete campaign comprises four scenarios, the first two of which I tried to play today. Here is the board after the first turn of the first scenario: Lawrence has captured Wehj, and must now take Aqaba.

After traveling to Prince Faisal's camp, Lawrence recruits more Arabs, and travels to Aqaba... which is lightly defended, and taken without a fight!

Lawrence leaves the Arabs in Aqaba, and travels to Cairo to report to British High Command... and find that Allenby has taken command. He requests for aid in the form of intelligence, some demolition charges, and prepares to return to Aqaba to start a new mission: sabotage the Hejaz railway.

Meanwhile, the Turks mount an attack of Aqaba, which the Arabs manage to repel, taking some losses.

Lawrence returns to Aqaba, and find a larger Turkish column on their way to retake Aqaba: this time the Turks come with a full strength battalion, and the German Asien Korp! The Arabs are defeated, and Lawrence is killed.

A failure on my first outing, but the event cards give enough flavour to the whole process and allows some sort of narrative to be formed. As you can see, the battles involve small number of units, which hopefully means they can easily be translated to tabletop battles.

Over the next few weeks I hope to share other components of the project as they arrive. Stay tuned.

Trench Hammer Test Game

Remember how I bought a Warzone 2nd edition boxed set, painted up the 40 Imperial Regulars figures, bought more stuff to round out the army, and then wondered what I should do with the remaining 40 Bauhaus Militia figures?

Well, I came across this kickstarter, thought about getting myself a unit of cavalry and maybe a support weapon with crew... but ended up backing it at the Starter Army level, which will give me a unit of cavalry, a unit of infantry, several specialist figures, and 6 ogryns. Add to these the 40 Bauhaus Militia figures, and I will have a force that matches my Imperial force.

I started looking at WW1 rules - because why use a sci-fi set of rules for WW1-themed sci-fi troops if you can use WW1 rules, right? - and came across Trench Hammer by Nordic Weasel Games. I have bought a few of their rules before and have enjoyed them, and there are a few websites with detailed reviews of the game, as well as fan-made QRS and unit cards.

I got the rules, read them, and liked them enough to also buy the Expansion booklet. I made my own QRS, some unit cards, and played a small solo test game using my Warzone Imperial figures against my Space Marines.

I set up two opposing lines of cover just over 24" apart, with the Imperials holding a position on top of a low rise (in which I placed the heavy machine gun), and two positions at the bottom of the rise.

The Space Marines are the attackers, and start off from cover too.

My initial plan was to silence the MG on the rise, suppress one of the other positions, and then charge it with the Assault Squad. As it turned out, both sides soon shot each other to bits.

I reset the game, and this time I classed all the covers as trenches. This time, I had the opposite problem: shooting was rather ineffective, with the troops simply hunkering down to recover each time they sustained too many hits - in Trench Hammer hits are not permanent, but are more like "shock", which can be recovered; a unit is only removed if it accumulates 7 or more hits.

Eventually the Space Marines rolled well enough to eliminate the machine gun, and the Assault Marines charged out of their trenches... to be cut down before they could make contact.

I decided that what I really needed, just like the combatants in WW1, was some indirect fire.

I switched the positions for both sides, this time deploying two squads of Marines on the side with the low rise, and attacked them with two squads of Imperials, a mortar, and a squad of cavalry kept out of the line of fire.

The mortar was not as effective as I had hoped though, and eventually I decided to take a risk and launch my cavalry against the first trench. Despite the bonus for shooting at troops moving in the open, both Marines units failed to score enough hits to stop the cavalry. On the next turn the Imperials won the initiative, and I rolled 6 on the bonus movement, allowing the cavalry to assault the trench... and drive the Marines back. It was a Light Horsemen moment.

From the short test games, I think I learned some things about the rules.

As with all games, scenario design and terrain placement is very important. Without enough cover, units will be destroyed before they have a chance to come into assault range. On the other hand, with too much cover, troops will just hunker down and not move or attack, so the scenario must force the units to move out of cover, and/or have a time limit.

With just 2 to 4 units per side, one almost always has enough command points to activate all the units; I believe the game will be more interesting if there are 6 or more units per side, which will force the players to prioritise which units they wish to activate or rally.

I enjoyed the rules enough to want to try them in a larger game, so as soon as the art supplies store opens again, I am going to get myself some Feldgrau paint...

Froeschwiller Solo Game

The Prussians enter the table

I decided to play a solo game of To the Last Gaiter Button since I had a few off days, and could afford to let the game sit on my table for a few days while I slowly played it to a conclusion. Instead of randomly generating a battlefield using the rules, I wanted to see how the game would play out with a historical scenario.

I picked the Froeschwiller scenario from 1870. It was of course not possible to play out the entire battle, so I decided to play only the southern end of the battle, pitting the Prussian 22nd Division versus the French 4th Division.

The TTLGB rules work well for an attack-defence game, since it has a 'running clock' mechanism that allowed a player to trade initiative for time. In this scenario the Prussians had superior artillery (don't they always?), and could in theory just sit tight and pound the French into submission - but due to the running clock they could not afford to do that.

The 42nd Brigade attack the French position in Nieder Wald, supported by the Divisional artillery.

In my game the Prussians slowly chipped at the French left, hoping to slowly roll up that flank before launching a two-prong attack on their centre. It worked well too, until I got bored.

As much as I enjoyed the rules, playing without a human opponent just wasn't engaging enough for me to see the whole battle through. It did, however, show me that with some thought about the distances, the rules can be used to replay historical scenarios.

Getting the figures and terrain out also reminded me of how much I enjoy the spectacle of a 10mm game; as a result, I went on a little shopping spree and bought myself enough stuff to start an Arab Revolt project.

The Arab Revolt had been on my wargaming bucket list for a while, but I have been putting it off until now. As the stuff I ordered arrive over the next few weeks, I hope to update the progress of this project on this blog. Stay tuned.

Fireforge Games Living Dead Knights and Renedra Ruins

I painted these multi-part plastic mounted skeletons I got from the Fireforge Games kickstarter several weeks ago, but I only finished the basing after FG passed me the GW stule cavalry bases last week. The leader figure is a resin model that was a poor piece of work, and one of the resons I will never spend any money on Fireforge Games products.

Here is the foot version of the leader figure, again a poor product.

The ruins are of course Renedra's plastic ruins. They are quite basic, and sadly come in too few styles. One of the pieces also suffered from the "impossible physics" problem of stone blocks which would not possibly be staying in place - I solved it by gluing the top part of the arch, which includes the keystone, back to its proper place.

I bought these frames to go with my small collection of ruins from the GW LOTR range. The Renedra ruins come with their own integrated bases, and I have applied the same stippling technique to help make them blend with the game mat I have.

Gaming in the time of Lockdown

Since the pandemic has made face-to-face gaming nonviable, I have been forced to look into other ways to play with my friends.

I managed to borrow a laptop from FG and got a zoom session going with the gang yesterday (more of that in the future), but I've also managed a couple of other virtual games since this whole things started.

The first is The Somme Campaign 1916, which my friend Steve and I set up. Since we live in different time zones, a game that required a quick response was not possible. Fortunately, by trawling through Wargames Vault, we found an operational level game that had a theme we enjoyed (as much as anyone can enjoy trench warfare), and which played at a pace that suited the limitations we faced.

I downloaded the game, printed out the board and chart (which you can see below), and instead of using counters I used the coloured pins I had and made counters out of them using a sharpie. I set everything up on a cork board, which made it easier to keep all the pieces in place, and to take photos of the board. I originally planned to play out all the moves and send them to Steve by email, but he was so inspired by my set-up he went ahead and built something similar on his end, so we traded photos each turn, with me playing out the orders and rolling all the dice. 

The second game was a game of Kings of War 3rd Edition with FG. I had spent a bit of time doing the movement trays for the two armies I own, and was really looking forward to some play with them this year... so why not now?

We played the game over a weekend afternoon. I prepared the army lists, set up the board, and sent FG a photo of the battlefield and my deployment via Whatsapp. He relayed his deployment, and once I sent him a photo of that too, he gave his orders by drawing arrows on the photos I sent him and returning them to me.

Granted the game lacked the social element of face-to-face gaming, but it was a good way to try the rules out at a leisurely pace, and give the figures some sunlight.

In the coming weeks my friend Dave will be GMing a Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing Game campaign for us via zoom, which I am really looking forward to.

I hope you are getting some gaming done in this difficult time too. Stay safe.

Some Fantasy figures I painted

My self-imposed social isolation has given me time to do some painting, and here are some figures that I painted up over the past couple of weekends.

From left to right, we have:

A Northstar Frostgrave female wizard. I have given her a 'peasant' look instead of a 'wizard' look as I wanted to use her as the default Mama Clay figure - it's now a running gag that all old-woman-NPCs in my campaigns are called Mama Clay and they all have the same voice and may in fact be related to each other.

The 'Expedition Pack Mule' from an old Citadel starter set. My brothers and I have owned this figure for literally decades, but have never actually painted it. With an old school dungeoncrawl campaign in the plans, I decided to finally get it painted.

A lantern-bearer/porter, made from Northstar Frostgrave soldiers set. When you run an old school dungeoncrawl, you need some henchmen: someone to hold the lantern while your party fights the monsters, and to help you haul all that gold (read XPs) back to town. I made this figure using parts from the Frostgrave Soldiers set, loading him with a large backpack, rope, extra arrows, and added a bamboo toothpick cut to 10' length in scale.

A generic swordsman from the Northstar Frostgrave soldiers set. The head may have come from a different (Gripping Beast?) set, but I made this figure for a PC I was planning to play. I wanted to name him Bojack Horseman and paint his clothes in the same colour scheme, but did not see it through. Now clad in green and holding a green shield with a white horse motif, he can be a Kai Lord, a Rohirrim foot soldier, or a mercenary/caravan guard type.

An undead dog from Fireforge Games' Living Dead Knights set in their Forgotten World range. I backed their Kickstarter, and was very disappointed by the quality of their resin pieces, and their so-called customer service. Suffice to say that I will never buy anything from them ever again.

The reverse view to show the amount of gear that the henchman and mule are packing. The 'floor' in the photos is a page from Loke BattleMats' The Dungeon Battle Mat Book Set - it blends nicely with the backdrop.

Heroic Maps Ancient Dungeon tiles

With no games scheduled, I decided to use the time I have to prepare for future campaigns.

One of the planned campaign is a megadungeon using Five Torches Deep rules.

Now I have a few map books in my collection, but while they provide a lot of variety, most of the pages tend to be 'packed' with no dead spaces, making them resemble more indoor floorplans than your old-fashioned dungeons, which sometimes have inexplicable-long corridors between rooms, when it would have made more sense to have shorter ones which would have reduce the labour required...

Anyway, the solution to this was the equally old-fashioned modular dungeon tile.

To make a set of dungeon tiles, I turned to my favourite 2D maps people, Heroic Maps. After looking through their catalogue, I decided that the sets that fit my requirements were the Ancient Dungeon Rooms and the Ancient Dungeon Corridors sets. The dungeon depicted in the sets look suitably old (as befits their name), and fit the theme of the megadungeon I am planning to run. As I already own both sets (and have used the Rooms maps previously), all I had to do was to get the material components.

Heroic Maps also have modular dungeon tiles in several other themes, including a cleaner-looking dungeon, frozen dungeon, mossy dungeon, abandoned dwarf dungeon... If you are looking to run a megadungeon and planning to make your own set of modular dungeon tiles, you should definitely check them out.

I then went through the various maps to decide how many of each type of tile I would likely need. Now this requires some planning as the sets had rooms with doorways/archways which are one, two, or three squares wide, and there were corridors which are one, two, or three squares wide, and 'adaptor' tiles which allow you to transition from one width to another. I decided on a two-wide system, but included a single two-to-three adaptor tile so I could use a room tile with a three-wide entrance.

Once I have decided on that I made a rough estimate of how many straight, corners, and junctions sections I would likely need. I also printed out the 'pre-made' rooms that looked interesting/useful, as well as enough pieces of the 'make-your-own' modular room (room corner, wall on one side, plain floor tile, wall with entrance) tiles to give me the capacity to make any odd-sized room the module required, and a very large room if I needed one.

I printed out the selected pages using my home laser printer, at the recommended 91% size for 1" grids.

For the board I got some A3 size black mounting board. These were sturdy enough for my purpose, and more importantly were black throughout their thickness (instead of being black on the outside but white on the inside), which meant they would blend in better to my usual black tablecloth.

I cut out the tiles and test-fitted them on each sheet of board to best utilise the surface area, placing long edges against the edges of the board to save on cutting.

Once the shapes had been cut out I turned them on their backs and used Elmer's spray adhesive on them. The spray gave an even coat, and had just about the right amount of time to made adjustments once you put the paper to the board. It does leave a sticky residue on the surface you work on, so I recommend you use some sort of a tarp (or a large trash bag as I did) to cover the surface you are working on.

Then came the laborious task of cutting each and every piece out. Once that was done, I went over the edge of each side of the tile with a black marker to cover the white edge of the paper.

Here you can see them in action. The set contains enough tiles to make an interesting layout, including alcove pieces and round shaped rooms.

After I was done with the set, I realised that there was a lot of unused surface on the reverse sides of the tile. I went back and started looking through the Heroic Maps catalogue again to see if I should maybe glue a different-themed set of tiles on the reverse side, but decided that they were all too specific for my current plans (although the dwarven one was tempting).

Then I saw that they have a couple of sci-fi sets too, and that their Industrial Spacecraft sets (which I also already owned) have tiles in the exactly configurations as those of the Ancient Dungeon ones, just with a different skin! OK, they didn't have the make-your-own room modular pieces, but those aside this meant that I could essentially duplicate the Ancient Dungeon set in Industrial Spacecraft by gluing the exact counterpart on the back of each tile!

The problem with the Industrial Spacecraft Corridors set, however, was that while the Ancient Dungeon set had multiple identical tiles on a page (say three identical straight corridors on a single page), the Industrial Spacecraft set had different tiles on a single page, say the straight corridor with a corner and a two-to-one adaptor. This meant that to get say three straight corridors, I would need to print three of the pages - not the most economical on paper and toner.

To overcome this, I cut-and-pasted the required tiles to a Word document and resized them to the correct dimensions. The fit were mostly good, and if they were a little larger I just trimmed the excess with an Exacto knife.

And what do you do when you have a set of modular sci-fi corridor tiles? Well, play Space Hulk, of course!

Of course the configuration of the tiles (two-wide instead of one-wide) meant that some tweaks have to be made. I am still in the process of doing that, so hopefully I can write a post on that too once I have found something that works.

If you have any question about making a set of dungeon tiles, or some cool hacks or ideas I might have missed, so let me know in the comments section.

Thank you.

Games, Interrupted

On 03 Feb my RPG group got back together after a two-month year-end break to begin the next arc of our Terrinoth A Team campaign. It was a little hard getting back my GM legs after the long hiatus, but we had an OK session, and I was looking forward to the following session.

Then we went DORSCON Orange on 08 Feb.

I work in healthcare, in a front-line role, so we made the decision to stop our regular sessions until the epidemic is over.

Fortunately, I had stocked up on food and supplies over the preceding weeks, and on most days now I don't leave home except to go to work, and I come back home right away after. On weekends, I can go for more than 48 hours without leaving home.

Unfortunately, the dozen or so miniatures I was hoping would deliver in January did not arrive, and I am left with few things to paint. After bumming around for a couple of weekends, I decided to make a set of modular dungeon tiles using the Heroic Maps pdfs I already own, since I am planning to run a megadungeon campaign in the future.

I hope to post photos of how I made the tile set, as well as the projects that sprang from it over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.