Distractions, Distractions

 I had planned to get all my Night Goblins out for a few parade photos today, but instead I got distracted by a free (!) game on PC which is also a rank-and-flank fantasy miniatures game that you can play on the tabletop. It's called SOVL (pronounced, of course, "soul") and you can get the PC version here and the tabletop version here. There's a single-player campaign on the PC along with multiplayer options - either against the computer, or against real people in ranked or casual games. 

It's also hard! To beat the campaign you have to win every single game, and so far I have not done that. I've had my best luck with the Elves, who got beaten at the end of Act II by a joint Orc and Human force. The dragon was their trump card. I'm trying again with the Undead and have managed to recruit a forest dragon for my necromancer to ride on, which is proving very useful indeed...

Anyway here are some screenshots:

In-battle shot of my Elves beating the snot out of Abyssal Warriors

Initial deployment for the final battle of Act II - my Elves tried to break the alliance left flank, but they were much more stubborn than I'd hoped and hung around long enough for the right flank and dragon to sweep round and annihilate me!

The campaign map. Each node is either a battle, an event, or somewhere to upgrade your army.

All this has made me even more keen to finally get off my bum and frequent a wargames club again so that I can try and collar people into some kind of Return to Thorskinson's Island style campaign.

Until tomorrow!

Drums In The Deep

 Well, it took bloomin' ages, but I have finally finished my last mob of Night Goblins for my Stillmanite Night Goblin army - the Red Band Stabbas, or Moongit Maglub's Mob.

42 Night Goblins armed with hand weapons and shields, and a full command. The front rank has two netters, who can reduce incoming attacks for a turn.

I'm particularly proud of the musician, who I initially painted a couple of years ago or so and whose hood I updated to fit the mob's colour scheme. The shields all look great en masse too:

 

 

 

 

Angle showing the yellow "Bad Moon" emblem on the shields, with vicious toothed grins and red eyes.

 

Doing this was quite tedious work towards the end - I had to fill all the slots in the slottabases with blu-tac before adding the flock, and that took what seemed like HOURS and HOURS. I took a photo when I was about half-way through...

A shot of my workspace, with about half the Night Goblins still in the process of having their slottas filled before the addition of static grass scatter.

 

However! Now they're done, so I have a couple more Night Goblin characters to do and then it'll be on to Royalist Quar I imagine. So here's to the first block of painting points officially recorded in 2024:

Painting Points:
Today: 42
This Week: 42
2024: 42

(A quick note - one infantry figure = 1 painting point. Cavalry are 2, walkers or monsters are 5, tanks or similar are 10)

 

The Witching Hour Approaches...

 It's nearly midnight where I am and sadly I have not yet finished the Night Goblin mob I'm working on. I have got them to the point where all I need to do is highlight the skin, dot the eyes with red, and paint the teeth on their faces (and shields), plus a few details on the standard bearer - mushrooms, mostly.

Then, of course, base the wee buggers. I've been using third party 20x20mm slottabases bought from the cursed Amazon, as Games Workshop no longer makes the 20mm squares what with The Old World moving to 25mm as its 'standard' base size. The downside of this is that every single base has a bloody great hole in it that needs filling, so at some point tomorrow I'm going to be shoving blu-tac into 40 bases to fill the slotta-bit. Ho hum.

Anyway, once they're done, that's the army complete to a Stillmanite standard of 1,995 points (I can't find anything worth 5 points to add)! which is close enough to 2,000 points for Warhammer work. In theory I could bulk the army up a bit by making some conversions and adding in some war machines and spider riders, but I think I'll leave that madness for another day. 

More likely my next thing will be to finish up my This Quar's War starter set by painting the Royalist squad that comes in the box. I've done the Crusaders - some bad photos follow:

A squad of Crusaders - at rear, the Yawdryl (roughly equivalent to a Sergeant). In front are three three-quar sections, each with two Bogen semi-automatic rifles and one Rhyshi automatic rifle. The Quar on the left is the Milwer (roughly a Corporal), commanding A Section. 

Showing off some details at the rear and sides.

These were quite quickly painted with flat colours, a wash, and a single layer highlight, giving a quite dull and dirty finish - suitable for a more grounded, realistic approach to, er, dieselpunk anteater space soldiers.

I did these a while ago, so I'm not going to count them for Painting Points - I'm going to start from 0.

Anyway, tomorrow approaches at speed so I'm off to have a midnight snack and go to bed.

So Many Feet

 Today I have mostly been painting Night Goblins. 42 of them, to be precise, with a Shaman and a Battle Standard Bearer sitting waiting their turn (although really I don't need to paint these as I already have several Shamen and a BSB completed). This meant I needed to paint 84 shoes, 41 weapons, 38 shield rims, and now I'm working through the highlights on the shield designs so that's... oh I don't know how many passes of yellow on the shields.

Anyway, while doing this I have mostly been listening to this really quite excellent little series of videoed Battletech: Alpha Strike battle reports that Wargamer Stories over on the You of Tubes have. My best friend CH put me onto them today and they're really good - a series of linked battles as part of a proper old school map campaign, charting the war for a planet called Blue Hole, between the Alyina Mercantile League and the Vesper Marches' House Kerbyn. 

They've really got me itching to do some more 'mechs, but my main problem there is that the Mercenaries Kickstarter I backed is months away from arriving (damn space travel) and all my existing mechs are painted up anyway. So I guess I'll have to crack on with these cackling green loons, and try to get them done this weekend - if my sanity holds up after painting umpty jillion goblin teeth.

Oh, and so I don't post something without a photo, here's some photos from the Alpha Strike game CH and I played the other week at his parents' house. I took a Star of 'mechs from the Jade Falcon unit Falcon Guards, of the Gamma Galaxy, and CH brought a reinforced lance of his mercs, standing in for the Davion Brigade of Guards.

Deployment - Falcon Guard Alpha Trinary Command Star ambushed by Davion Guards reinforced lance

Initial moves to contact: the Davion Annihilator on the right really struggled to get to the fight.

After the Davion MadCat destroyed the Nova, it became a scrappy knife fight...

...so I pulled back to allow my superior ranged firepower to do its work.

CH's MadCat and my Timber Wolf blew each other to scrap at point blank range while my Turkina and Kingfisher dealt with the Annihilator.

When the dust settled only the Davion Archer remained standing, and CH withdrew having destroyed my Timber Wolf and Nova for the loss of his Blackjack, MadCat, Annihilator and Jagermech.

And, because I'm a fan of the stories that wargames and campaigns generate, that night I wrote a short story - just a thousand words - about the immediate aftermath from the perspective of the Jade Falcon clanners. You can find it here, at Archive Of Our Own.

No painting points today as I haven't finished anything. See you all tomorrow with some more progress (or even photos of the finished gobbos)!

ARISE, YE LEGIONS OF THE DAMNED, ARISE!

 Excuse me while I dust the cobwebs off this space and gaze in horror at the broken image links.

Hello again! It's been, uh, a while since I posted on here. Five years or so, in fact. Since then quite a lot has happened in my life, from moving house to seeing my son move into Secondary School, changing my gender and name, completing some wargaming projects, selling others, buying new ones... you know, the usual I suppose.

Anyway of late I have been wistfully thinking of the old internet, the internet of blogs and forums and the like. Social media has rather brain poisoned a lot of people and almost certainly done far too much psychic damage to me really. So I thought I'd come back to my old blog and get back into the habit of updating it and keeping track of all the things I do wargames wise.

And what am I doing wargames wise?

Well, currently, I'm in the process of painting up a big block of Night Goblins, which, when finished, will give me a 2,000 point 6th Edition Fantasy Battle army. 

Then I've got some Quar to paint up, as well as some bits and bobs - a Dwarf standard bearer, some Tomb Kings pieces, and - really - the pile of opportunity as well.

Here's some of those Night Goblins. This is an old photo - these giggling greenskins have long since been finished.

Speaking of painting, I'll start keeping track of the painting points again too now I'm back updating the ol' blog.

That'll do for now - hopefully next time I'll have some new photos of newly painted things, and perhaps I might put some old photos of stuff I've done over the last few years too. Until then - toodle-oo!

Silver Helms (3)

I went on holiday to North Devon - Porlock and the surrounding area - with my partner, S, and their parents at the end of last week. I took with me the last five Silver Helms and managed to get them finished just in time for the Middlehammer Forum's Tale of X Gamers deadline:

 In the first month I painted:

High Elf Lord on Barded Elven Steed

High Elf Battle Standard Bearer

9 Silver Helms with Full Command

I'm pretty pleased with that. Next up will be 14 High Elf Archers with Full Command, and a Mage.

On another note, while I was on holiday we visited Porlock Weir, and I found some pillboxes:

There was this slightly sunken one, which had been covered in stones taken from the beach as, I think, a form of camouflage. It appeared to be an M.G. bunker but as I couldn't see the front embrasure I'm not sure.

And this more intact one that appeared to have been turned into a storage shed at some point, but it's definitely seen better days - the stove's chimney is broken, the door smashed down.

Exmoor was beautiful. The sea, as always, a wonderful thing to watch.

Painting Points:
Today: 10
This Week: 10
2019: 48

Litus Saxonicum...

...or the Saxon Shore.

In between painting High Elves (those Silver Helms are such a pain in the bum!), I have been helping out my old pater, Al Front, with some of his backlog:

15mm DBA Saxons to fight the Romano-British.

I've really enjoyed painting these little fellows; they're so simple - flat colours, Agrax Earthshade, shields, matt varnish, base, done. I am trying to paint the shields so that everyone has a different design. I don't know how that will end up but it's jolly fun. So far I have finished three stands of 'Warband', one stand of 'Skirmishers' and have eight stands of 'Spearmen' to go.

As well as that, on Tuesday I went to my friend J's flat along with J2, K, Dr D, and A to play some more Starfinder.

The gang. L-R: A (dwarf wizard), Dr D (space lizard medic), J2 (not-a-Jedi), me (Katakayo Face-eater, angry space lizard), K (four-armed mechanic).

The Bandit Queen space bar, owned by some naughty bunch of criminal types. Scenery by K.

"Can we come in?"
"No."
"FIGHTING IT IS THEN" (and, reader, Katakayo killed both and ate their faces)

"And there is a door marked 'NO ENTRY - STAFF ONLY'."
"Can I hack it? Can we bribe the barman? Is there another way in?"
"I try to open the door" says me, "while they are talking."
"It, uh, it opens."

After dispatching the goons playing poker, Katakayo opens the next door, revealing the gang leader and her bodyguard, another angry space lizard.

"A worthy opponent!"
We leveled up, when all was said and done, and Katakayo's personal tally now stands at 6 kills and 4 faces eaten.

This, by the way, is what Katakayo Face-Eater actually looks like, courtesy of my partner S, who takes commissions!

Painting Points:
Today: 7 (2 15mm figs = 1 points)

This Week: 7
2019: 38

Silver Helms (2)

I really dislike painting cavalry. However they are pretty essential to most fantasy armies, which is why my High Elf Army of Tor Sethain has 9 Silver Helms in it (the full unit is brought up to 10 by the inclusion of a High Elf Prince).

Today I finished the front rank with the musician and a basic Silver Helm:

Just another five to go and that's the cavalry element done and I can start on a unit of infantry (probably one of the blocks of archers).

As a side note, I am not impressed with GW's 'Corax White' paint, which isn't really white - it's like a very very pale grey, which you can clearly see on the shield designs. Sadly it is my only white at the moment so I'm going to use it throughout this army for continuity's sake.

Painting Points:
Today: 4
This Week: 7
2019: 31

Into the Shadow Deep... and some Strontium Dogs!

On Tuesday, myself, my long-time gaming partner J, and our club friends K and P assembled at P's house to enter the Shadow Deep together. Here is a short and picture-heavy account of Mission 1, Scenarios 1 and 2:

Rangers and Companions:

Daedalus and Nyx the Recruit - J
Petal and Iorek the bloodhound - me
Vicar and Ingvar the Recruit (scribe) - P
Lorcan and Big Mac the Recruit (I think) - K


Mission 1, Scenario 1: The Deserted Village

The rangers and their companions enter the village looking for their missing fellow Ranger, Aventine, only to be surrounded by shambling corpses!

Setup. Rangers in the centre around the trees. Barn to the north, outhouses to the east, dilapidated shed to the south, big house to the west. Undead at the NE, SE, SW and NW points. Giant rats by the barn and the big house. Clues in white, with extra tokens inside the big house and the outhouses. The clue on top of the big house would be moved closer by Lorcan, K's Ranger, before the start of Turn 1.

End Turn 1 - Iorek has eaten his first giant rat and Farmer Fred, found by Petal, has scythed down one of the shambling dead. Vicar and Big Mac are struggling with one of the ex-villagers, while Daedalus and Nyx have their hands full with a giant rat and one of the undead.

End Turn 2 - Nyx has been knocked out by a heavy blow from the undead, Daedalus has been injured by the rat. Fred fails to open the door to the big house (he's lost his keys), while Big Mac has put down two of the walking corpses. The barn has collapsed, and Lorcan has narrowly avoided injury! Ingvar continues to note everything down. Petal and Iorek raced to the aid of Daedalus, with Iorek tearing apart the zombie that took out Nyx.

End Turn 3 - More shamblers have appeared, and Farmer Fred has uncovered a corpse with tracks he recognises inside the big house. Petal casts heal on Daedalus. Vicar is attempting to get into the outhouse to check the clue there, while Daedalus has uncovered the body of Aventine and helped himself to his magic sword...

End Turn 4 - The clue that Big Mac checked turned out to be a corpse that wasn't quite dead yet, and he is badly injured by its surprise attack. More of the villagers stagger, blindly, towards the Rangers. Petal has dispatched one with her bow and arrow, while Lorcan struggles with another.

End Turn 5 - all seems quiet, now, with no more foes (or clues!) on the field (Petal having shot a zombie) - but wait! from the pigsty comes another ex-villager! And from the same directions as before stagger yet more! And a giant rat ambushes Lorcan! (we decided to pull all three remaining events at once to give us more to do)

End Turn 6 - Iorek bounds over to the nearest villager's rotting body and savages it, while Petal adds another zombie to her tally with the bow. Daedalus's magic sword saves his life in combat while Lorcan and Vicar hack the giant rat and a zombie apart.

End Turn 7 - The last zombie villager on the field is beaten back by Daedalus, but he can't quite get the killing blow in...

End Turn 8, End Scenario - ...so Petal races back and finishes it off for him.

Final tally: 3 dead giant rats, 14 dead zombies, Nyx made a full recovery, all six clues uncovered (including Aventine and his sword), and all signs pointed to some deadly creatures in the nearby woods.


Mission 1, Scenario 2: The Infected Woods

Setup - the nesting trees on the north-eastern side of the board, running from north to east. The Rangers and their companions line up from west to south. In front of them are scattered cocoons and the chittering and rustling of giant spiders.

End Turn 1 - A general advance. A zombie lurches out of one web cocoon and attacks Nyx and Daedalus, and another tears and bites at Big Mac and Lorcan. Two giant spiders race towards Vicar.
A survivor, however, is saved from the encasing cocoon by Petal - Wendy the washerwoman.

End Turn 2 - the zombies are put down easily, and Iorek gets a nasty surprise when a giant spider bites him, the venom running through him causing the stout hound some pain.  Vicar and Ingvar finish off the giant spiders in the middle. Petal finds a dead body in the second cocoon she searches.

End Turn 3 - Petal casts heal on Iorek, who finishes off the spider. Wendy moves up to the hound, and ruffles his fur. More spider nests are identified, and Nyx stumbles into a web!

End Turn 4 - Three of the nests are torched, and some treasure is found. The spiders are conspicuous by their absence.Petal finds another corpse.

(No photo!)
End Turn 5, End Scenario - the remaining nests were easily torched and the wood cleansed of the spiders that had caused such devastation to the little village nearby.

Final tally - Iorek ate a giant spider, and the others did for two zombies and four more giant spiders.


Overall jolly fun game. We burned through the two scenarios pretty quick, starting at around 7ish and finishing about 9:30pm. There were a couple of dicey moments but by and large the four rangers and their companions were on top of things throughout, which led us to have a quick discussion about there not being enough enemies. However we agreed to try out the next Mission with no tweaks to the number of enemies as if the dice had come up a bit different we could all have been killed quite quickly indeed.

In painting land, I've been procrastinating on my High Elves by painting some more of the figures from The Good, The Bad, And The Mutie set:

 It's Wulf Sternhammer and the Gronk!

I really like these figures, and am super pleased with how the Gronk turned out.

Painting Points:
Today (well, Tuesday actually): 2
This Week: 3
2019: 27