Friend Computer Is Your Friend

And you can trust friends! This evening P and I went down to meet up with the local RPG nerds in Llangefni again, and this time instead of playing Dungeons and Dragons, I ran a one-shot game of PARANOIA: Red Clearance Edition. Troubleshooters PIP-R-1, MAR-R-1, REB-R-1, TIN-R-1, ARI-R-1, and SON-R-1 were tasked with a serious and urgent mission to defend Alpha Complex from terrorism! By taking a malfunctioning scrub-bot to a Technical Service Centre.

In the course of this mission, four clones of ARI-R died, two clones of REB-R, one of MAR-R, and one of TIN-R. This meant the casualty rate was 133% amongst the Troubleshooting Team. Additionally, an unknown number of Infrared clearance clones were eliminated (they were probably traitors anyway. Or communists. Or mutants. Or maybe even communist mutant traitors), the Technical Service Centre was set on fire, the scrub-bot was exploded, and several items of mission-critical equipment such as the megaphone and three fragmentation grenades were lost, damaged, destroyed, or - worse - utilised inappropriately.

Following the debriefing, the Combat Officer was both eliminated and promoted, the ARI- line of clones was deleted from the clone genetic database, MAR-R-2 was demoted to MAR-I-2, and TIN-R-2 was promoted to TIN-O-2 and made permanent voluntary mandatory bonus duty Combat Officer. 

Final mission status: [error: please report all errors to the <filenotfound> Department]

Everyone seemed to enjoy it which was gratifying and they may even want to play more in the wonderful world of Alpha Complex, where a request for Pom-Poms is met with a robot giving you 27 copies of page 1 of 3 of the Pom-Pom Request Form which must be filled in in triplicate using only blue ink. You still don't have any Pom-Poms. And why haven't you completed the form? Wasting forms is suspicious behaviour, citizen.

My view - the GM screen is actually from the 40K TTRPG Dark Heresy 1st Edition

In other news, today the Handmaiden of the Everqueen model I'd ordered from Games Workshop at the beginning of the week arrived. I was busily putting her together when I realised I had a spare left arm from one of the 3D prints that might work really well for a new pose...

It's not the best angle, but the way she's posed now is as if she's beckoning her troops forwards, swishing her cape aside contemptuously to expose her sheathed sword, filled with haughty grandeur and the knowledge of her own skill and power - she makes a much better army commander than my poor kitbashed and converted model on the left

Of course this led to some decisions. I had originally intended her to be used as "just" a Handmaiden of the Everqueen character in larger games, but the new pose is so cool, and so commanding, that I decided she will replace my existing Aeilliniarie model, who will become the champion of the next unit of Handmaidens that I make. Which of course now means I need to decide how to represent Aeilliniarie's shield without ruining the pose and lines of the new model... and I also need to paint the new version before this coming Tuesday... and I need to rejig my larger lists because I'll be short a Handmaiden (who, regardless, can't sit with the "Lothern Sea Guard" without removing their cool Sea Guard ability to reform before receiving a charge or be able to stand and shoot while doing it). Ah well.

And, as a final note, I realised that the bases I'd put my Azebs and Sultante Sapper on were too big. They're supposed to go on 25mm diameter round bases, not the 32mm rounds I actually used. Guess I'll fix those tomorrow.

300!

Oops, 11 days since I last posted. In my defence it has been so stiflingly hot that I have spent most of the time in a dark room with a fan pointed at my face, trying not to succumb to heat exhaustion. I have, however, with a concerted effort of will, maanged to actually complete my goal of painting 300 models from my  before the 17th of July! Neither I nor my partner P thought I'd manage it. Without further ado, here are the four models that got me to the finish line:

Three medieval ladies from an unknown manufacturer. I think Ral Partha but also I'm not sure. Anyway I did them in fairly block colours for ease of tabletop identification

I like the poses and the sculpts, and I think the flow of the dresses really adds a lot of movement to them

There are some surprisingly subtle details on the woman in the middle's belt and hair

The little wicker basket was a lot of fun to paint

So those three got me up to 299 models painted since the beginning of the year from my pile of opportunity, and then I spent a couple of days not doing anything - including updating this blog! - because it was just too damn hot. The deadline, however, was looming, and after P picked which of the minis I had on my table I should use to hit it, I spent a few days painting her up. I finished her off tonight:

 

This is an official Dungeons and Dragons miniature, painted in the style of a traditional Romani dancer with the skin tone of a Sri Lankan person

I really love the gold and purple combinations

Despite the relative crudeness of the sculpt, she painted up really nicely and easily

I love her pose and the flow and sense of motion she has

 

And so, with her complete, I have worked my way through 300 models from my Pile of Opportunity! I started the year with 1,596 models unpainted, and now, in 195 days, I have painted 300 models, which averages out at about 1 and a half minis a day. I don't know if I can keep that pace up for the rest of the year, but I am going to try. I certainly want to try and paint more minis than I get hold of going fowards.

Oh, and for proof, here's a screenshot of my Pile of Opportunity spreadsheet totals page:

 

 So there we have it! Next, I'm going back to my commissions...

Painting Points:
Today: 1
This Week: 4
2025: 373

Random Assortment

Today I painted one mini from undercoat to completion, and finished off the bases of some others for some nice quick wins. I also got to the point where I've very nearly counted almost every unpainted miniature I have: I just need to dig out my 15mm AK47 Republic file boxes and see what's left to do there. I know there was a fair chunk of stuff back when I was last working on them some... errr... twenty years ago. 

In the meantime, here's what I did today:

Spiders! These are from the Warcry spider cult warband, but I've repurposed them for random Necromunda critters

A Ral Partha mini, and a companion to the executioner and headsman's block I did the other day. She represents the 15th and last Pain Token for my Dark Eldar

The dark brown highlights on her hair didn't come out in this photo very well, sadly, but hey ho

This is Porcelain, a D&D Warforged character I drew up for a game a while ago. The mini is a 3D print from... somewhere? R, my friend, who currently has my 3D printer, printed her off a while ago

She might be all curves but she's magic-powered metal and deadly with it

I particularly like how the 'skin' came out - I used a lot of different tones and the end result is very nice

Then I actually put some more paint on the Cawdor models! No, really, look:

They're about 2/3 finished now I reckon

That's the metallics all done, and I'm on to the highlighting-post-Agrax Earthshade and details stage. Oh, and the skin, I guess. I should be able to get them finished tomorrow, which cleans my painting desk for something new. Maybe those Royalist Quar at last...?

Painting Points:
Today: 5
This Week: 7
2025: 7

Musings and Meanderings

No club night tonight as my Frostgrave opponent is ill, so Lady Jane's treasure hunters will have to wait to get their time in the limelight. Instead I've been thinking about painting some more Necromunda miniatures - specifically a House Ulanti courtier and her Mirror Mask bodyguard, and a second Rogue Doc. The figures are undercoated, and just need me to actually paint them... so that didn't happen. Instead I spent much of today playing Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries.

Thunderbolt TDR-5S 'Claymore' 65t Battlemech

I am, as usual, commanding the mercenary outfit MacLeod's Light Horse (abbreviated as MLLH) and am currently enjoying stomping around in the above heavy 'mech. It's got as much armour as I can fit onto it, an LRM-20 with three tons of ammo, a Large Laser on the right arm, and three Medium Lasers in the left torso. Two double heat sinks and three single heat sinks keep it nice and cool, and I've given it the jazzy 'loud MacLeod' style parade scheme. The rest of the unit's 'mechs are green with white detailing. I stripped out the MGs and their ammo because they're basically just asking to explode, and the SRM went because I prefer to do my fighting at LRM-range when I can. So far we've spent much of the time wandering around Davion space fighting Kuritans, Capellans, pirates, and various local government forces, usually in the pay of the Davions but not always.

Yesterday I mentioned I'd talk about the Call of Cthulu campaign I'm playing in, run by my long-time big game opponent S who I've been playing games with a couple of times a year since about 2005 - damn near 20 years thinking about it. Anyway, I'm playing this fine gentleman:

This is a real person that I found on the internet when searching for 1920s people

Professor Oliver Wayland MC, veteran of the Sudan and WW1 with the Warwickshire Regiment. Currently running around the marshes of Walberswick on the Suffolk coast tangling with Deep Ones in the company of a few investigators who were curious about a weird bone... matters rather accelerated when, after much pottering around talking to people and being suspicious of oddly piscine featured sorts in the local Post Office, Prof Wayland and friends encountered a Deep One at a farm and, wartime reflexes not dulled by a couple of years in a study, he shot the Deep One with his trusty Webley mk VI revolver. A couple of rounds of .455 Webley sorted that creature's hash!

The only problem is, um, that might not be a crime... but when his chums shot the accompanying fish-featured villager in the leg with a 20-gauge and then set fire to part of the farm, that's definitely going to cause some interesting conversations with the law. The next session or two are going to be quite fraught, I feel.

Tomorrow I'm going to be out all day as I'm going to go and see Cheap Dirty Horse in Birmingham in the evening, so probably no updates again until Wednesday.