Saturday, 26 August 2017

Green Hivers

   Before I went to University I was exclusively GW when it came to table top gaming, I tried all of their games, bar Inquisitor, at some point or another (although, I do own the rulebook and have figures for it stashed away somewhere), but the games that really took hold and I found myself playing more than any others were 40k, Necromunda and LotR. When I left to go to uni, my gaming group also disbanded with my normal three moving to Wales, Spain and Nottingham between them, which is what lead to my years of minimal gaming while I found a new group to play with.
   Since then, every couple of months or so, I stumble upon my two Necromunda gangs, which leads me to having a nostalgic reminisce where I decide that one of my gangs will get bumped ahead in my painting queue before something else distracts me again and the figures are left in my case for next time. But we have now had the news that Necromunda is the next specialist game getting released and this has put a deadline on getting my gangs fighting fit so I can try the new rules on release.


    While I strip the old paint off my gangs and work out what colours to paint them in, I figured that getting some work done on some other Necromunda related models would keep the bug going, so out of one of my cases came the Ratskin Scout and out of my lead pile came a giant scorpion.
   The Ratskin scout was a must hire for the first 2-3 games in the current* rules and as the colour scheme was obvious** he jumped the queue.

* Replace with old if reading
this later than September 2017.
** Brown, brown, a little bit skin 
tone and a touch more brown.

necromunda rat skin scout painted

When we used to play the game, we used to mix up scenarios quite a lot, either adding a raid on an arbite head quarters to get a lot of cool gear really quickly or monsters attacking us when someone's gang was getting too strong too quickly. We always used to use whatever big based model we had to hand to represent the monster as our funds never went far enough to finding anything better, and it was something that I wanted to change but didn't know where to look, when I saw Heresy Miniature's giant scorpion model I knew I had my answer.

necromunda giant spider scorpion encounter monster

Thanks for reading

Wednesday, 23 August 2017

The Free Fobbing Yeomen

   On the whole, I use hobby based Facebook groups (like the blogs I follow) to keep me inspired and make sure my hobby motivation never runs out, sometimes, however, it gets expensive as links or ideas are posted that I just know I can't resist, this post is about one such link. The VBCW Facebook group posted a link a couple of weeks back about a sale on WW1 cavalry at North Star, so I followed the link planning to talk myself out of it and instead bought 3 packs.
   I knew I wanted to paint them up as a militia group of some sort and not a proper military unit, but it took a week of them sitting on my desk for me to get a colour scheme in my head. In he end I settled for a mix of the current military uniform (as I have painted the rest of my military) and more formal trousers.
   Mr Wilcox, a man of modest fortune and distantly related to nobility, saw it as his civil duty as an Englishman to raise a militia, but associating with the working class just would not do for someone of his rank. So he raised the Free Fobbing Yeomen at his own expense, formed, exclusively of those with degrees from reputable universities.



Thanks to Neil for the 'how to paint horses' guide and thanks for reading.

Monday, 21 August 2017

Women's Federation Toxophilite Club

   Two of my last three posts have both been something that someone else has done for me, so I figured I had better do some real modelling for this one.
   Warlord Game's Bolt Action supplement Operation Sea Lion is a strange old read, with some bits being really good fun to think about ideas for, while others are just downright implausible, but it has given me a wealth of ideas for VBCW, first amougst these was the Toxophilite club. In the book it claims that women were encouraged to join the armed forces but should be pushed towards their more 'traditional roles', some, however, have found a loophole in this rule as archery clubs are about as traditional in rural areas as anything else.
   So the hunt for appropriate female models began at the only place that made any sense, Bad Squiddo Games. I picked up their Mrs June model and a pack of the Copplestone female archaeologists as I like the mix of practical ladies and those who still want to be seen in the latest fashion (helping to keep the late 1930's theme). Luckily, I already had a big bag of Gripping Beast bows from another project, in my bits box, so assembly was just drilling holes in clenched hands and a couple of hand swaps with plastic Saxon Thegns.


All in all, I am pretty pleased with the outcome.

Thanks for reading

Friday, 18 August 2017

Pining for the fjords

   The weekend just gone saw me go somewhere I have wanted to go to for years, the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and it did not disappoint. Considering how small the museum is, we were there for getting near to 2 hours, with a vast chunk of it consisting of my wife and me sitting on the floor staring down the length of one of the 2 mostly intact ships.


   We were in the ship museum on my birthday (how good is my wife?*) but when we got home and I found out she was waiting on a ship from Adrian's Walls, I knew I was doing really well.
   The ship comes in a few parts that need to be assembled, but it is just the bits that just wouldn't survive the post**, so 10 minutes after opening it, the ship was waiting for a crew to set sail and plunder the known world.
* Check out her version of events,
plus me falling in a fjord in
Things we learnt in: Oslo 
**The only real thing I did do, was spray
 varnish the oars as they are metal casts.




Thanks for reading

Tuesday, 15 August 2017

Darth Vader

   While I am terrible at keeping to a single project I do still feel the need to set myself project targets, that, while, I still mostly ignore them, they are always there buzzing in the back of my head reminding me what I still have to do. So, every now and then I settle down and deal with one of these buzzing noises to give myself a bit more space to go off track again later on. This is one of the buzzing noises I have now swatted.
   The two big projects I have in my head at the moment are painting the British Napoleon infantry so I can get a game of Sharp Practice and finishing the last of the first wave of Imperial Assault so we can play the whole base box campaign with painted figures and with only 3 models left to do, this seemed the easy box to tick off.



   The biggest issue with painting Darth Vader was there actually isn't much to paint. His outfit(?) is just black, gloss or matt, and even the detailing is in black. So the bit that took the longest was applying gloss varnish to the bits that needed to be shiny after I had already varnished him. He looks much better in person than he does in the photos.



    Lastly, there are the two AT-ST's. I hadn't planned on buying a second one as you never need more than a single one in the campaign (not seen a mission where you need two at least) and we had already played a mission that needed the upgraded one, so I was too late for that, but I was in Wayland Games and they had one on the shelf and the collector in me knew what to do.
   When I opened the box I realised that Fantasy Flight Games have been quite clever, you get the parts for both the upgraded one and the basic AT-ST in case you want squadrons of the things for the skirmish variant of the game. So I decided to make use of this and allow my second AT-ST to be both units depending on what I needed it to be, although, I left the General off as the hatch is just going to get damaged if you try to remove it too often.


Thanks for reading

Friday, 4 August 2017

VBCW Albertine Flags

   This is a bit of a supplemental post and it's not really about anything I have done, it is more of a public word of thanks to PanzerKaput and the time he is willing to put into helping out the VBCW community.
   I rather cheekily got in contact with him on Facebook after seeing that he had not only done all the drawings and flags in the VBCW sourcebooks (which I knew he had done) but that he was also doing specially designed flags for individual warbands/causes on request. I got in contact more than expecting a fee or some kind of request to credit him if I used them but instead I got an apology that it might not be quick (it took a week and a half!) and then an apology afterwards that they had taken longer than planned, all without a fee.
   I gave him an image of the flag I had designed when I first created this blog (my second post) and explained what I was trying to achieve with it and a week and a bit later got the below results;


This is the first one I have decided to use, but I have one more bannerbearer that needs painting and I am sure the last will get used in the fullness of time!




Again, I can only thank PanzerKaput and direct anyone that hasn't seen his amazing work to his blog at; http://panzerkaput.blogspot.co.uk/.

Thanks for reading

Wednesday, 2 August 2017

Picnic in the Park

   I recently got talked into a game of Bolt Action's new campaign; Operation Sea Lion, based on what would have happened if the Nazi's had invaded Britain after Dunkirk. While I am not all that enthused with the ruleset at the moment a chance to get my VBCW models onto the table was not a chance to miss, so I duly popped down to Wayland Games and picked up my copy of the campaign book, managing to bag one that had the Winston Churchill figure attached.
   This all lead me to, not only to go through my box to find out what sort of army I could put together, but to also see what I had that still needed painting and this post is about what I found;


   After seeing the Warlord Game's paint job for Winston Churchill, I decided to give it a go myself, then, after getting strangely confident, I decided to copy the pin stripes onto a few other figures, my reasoning being that there is only so many brown or grey suits you can paint in a single militia before it starts to look like a uniform in itself.
   Going left to right we have; Winston Churchill from Warlord Games (I plan on just running him as a militiaman with an smg), the sailor with the lmg is a converted Black Tree Miniatures model (fairly sure he is from their Dr Who range), while the mmg and 3 other guys are from Footsore Miniatures (I plan to use the priest as a secret service agent).


   The bandstand was bought at Salute a good few years ago and sat languishing on a shelf, built and partially painted. Along with the postbox and police box from a while back, the bandstand will be an essential component in making the game feel a bit more like it is taking place in Britain rather than just another nameless field in Europe.


Now Operation Sea Lion has rules for a women's archery club, which feels remarkably VBCW to me, but where to get the figures?

Thanks for reading