Tidying up

      I'm back from a nice week off in Norfolk with the family, but before you all start to worry, I took my painting desk with me . . . This is the first of, maybe, three posts of what I managed to get finished while I was away.

First up a random cowboy I had sitting on my painting desk for the last few months. Got a lot more western stuff in the pipeline but this guy was annoying me, sitting there half started.

Next up my second unit of biddowers for Lion's Rampant. Again these have been sitting on my desk with the first base layers done since I got my first 6 done months ago.

Lastly, a couple of random figures. The warrior priest is another figure for my Open Combat warband, while the elf mage is for one of the guys I have started playing D&D with as he is not a wargamer or modeller at all and wanted the sort of figures a few of the guys are now turning up with.

As I mentioned at the start this is a quick post of the odds and sods I got finished, the real projects are going to get their own posts. Most importantly is my first week's entry for:

Thanks for reading.

A confession of weakness

      This is going to be a quick post to show what I have been up to recently and be a bit of a taster of a project I hoping to finish over the next month or so. 

       This building is the first bit of scenery for (and I particularly blame Sir Awdry for this) the Batman Miniatures Game, that I have got to a sensible point. I have a few more details to add to it, but I want to add them once I have a few under my belt so I can spread them out a bit better.

      The building is a small block from the Sarissa Precision city block range, with a couple of extra floors to give the board a bit of height. The gargoyles are from the Knight Miniatures range just to make it look a bit more 'Gotham-y'.

    Lastly is the Frank Miller Batman that I painted a year or so ago. Weirdly, he isn't in either crew(?) that I have planned to play with my mate, but I thought he looked a bit more natural outside this building than in the terrible photo I gave him last time.

Rapid deployment strategy

     A few years back while I was getting back into wargaming properly after finishing uni, I found myself building a space marine army and wanting a fleet to go with it. Instead, I got distracted, joined a gaming club and left most of my GW stuff in the rear view mirror, as new projects were so much more interesting. Then I decided at the start of this year to pick up the idea again to make a properly slow burn project out of it, buying a ship every month of so whenever I saw one cheap enough, putting them into storage until I had enough to get going with. 

    So here is my space marine battlefleet gothic fleet for the Aurora Knights chapter. A Battlebarge, three Strike Cruisers, a squadron of Firestorm Frigates and a squadron of Cobra Destroyers. That should keep me going for a while. . . .

 The battlebarge, the big beast of the fleet. As it's the only one the chapter has (I have fluff and everything for this chaper) I figured it would be best to upgun it with extra turrets from a sprue I'd picked up somewhere or other.

  One of the Strike Cruisers. The work horses of the fleet

The Firestorm frigates. I'm really hoping these ae going to have a real pumch.

Now to get a game in. Thanks for reading.

Church. Part 3?

      As the title suggests this is another post on a model church, but unlike parts 1&2, I thought I would try something completely different, I wanted the quint essential English village medieval church;

    First thing first, it turned out slightly more fortified than I had planned. I had this idea in my head (which it largely kept to) and it wasn't quite this fortified, but I have been reading the Anarchy series of books by Griff Hoskin and quite enjoying them, and for all the faults the books have (don't make me start listing them) the one idea that really stuck in my head was the idea of the lord making sure the church was more than just a religious site, it was a military refuge for the villagers. You make it strong enough to hold out until relief and this one is very much looking like it could do that.

     The model is made up of two main parts; The tower was a plastic kit that I picked up the year I first got into the hobby and I'm not even going to try and work out how old that makes it and as such I have no idea about the company. The chapel itself is from the Tabletop Workshop range and is a much more recent addition and was a monster to try any sort of conversion work on.

     The gargoyle on the back is from an old GW kit, I've got a bits box* that would make a grown man cry and this was one of the gems it spat out at me this time.

* Box is a loose term for what it actually is . . .

      While the gargoyle? on the front is probably my first attempt at doing any modelling with greenstuff and has been on the tower since I first made it and I just couldn't bring myself to change it. Who knows what sort of evil spirit that face is keeping away, personally I think it is doing a good job.

     So in conclusion; While the building does look exactly as it is, a tower and a chapel, that isn't uncommon for this period in history, towers are expensive afterall. Overall I am really pleased with how this turned out, it has been sitting in the corner of my mind demanding to be built for quite some time and now it is out there and the lift music can start again.

Thanks for reading

Lion's rampant bombard - It seemed like a good idea . . .

      It's always that point in a long term army build where you have the basics sorted, you even have a tangent of an idea started, and everything feels like it is ticking along nicely, but then something happens in your head and you start to think thoughts that may not be entirely lucid, and this happens:

     You end up buying a medieval bombard from the nice people at Crusader Miniatures. I genuinely have no idea if there are any extra rules on-line for these things, I am working on pure hope and a story I heard down my club of someone that had used one in a game once. Have to say, useful or not, I am extremely pleased with this little project.

      This second bit is far more logical. My normal tactic in Lion's Rampant is; foot men at arms charge, foot serjeants charge forward but then slow down and try to encourage the enemy to charge them* and the crossbows, either, just annoy your opponent or wipe unit after unit off the table depending on whether they packed any bolts this time. Simple but it suits me.

      Then I read an entry that read something along the lines of 'hairy men who throw caution into the wind and who's only tactic is charge', I may have paraphrased slightly, but I felt a bond with this unit and knew I had to have one, but I came unstuck on what models to use. My army was really unified looking at this point, and while it is no bad thing to lob something new into the mix every now and again, I felt this army would look worse if there was a unit out of place. So I came up with an idea, simply use the same figures I used for the foot serjeants and change their weapons. Foot serjeants with spears and shields made sense with their stats, give them hand weapons and shields and they look much more unwieldy - although now I have read their stats properly I reckon I should have left the shields off to show their lower armour value, but hey. I now have a unit of fierce foot.

* They are much more dangerous when charged than if they charge

     So the fierce foot themselves are Fireforge serjeants just like the rest of the infantry in my army, but the 'champion' at the front of the unit is the archer figure you got free with your entry bag at Salute. This guy has been trying to get into this army since April and I finally let him join up as he just looked so right standing at the front of this unit.

Thanks for reading

Larch Tanner

      Here follows an admission that will severely damage my geek cred for all that end up reading this, but here we go; I had only ever played 1 game of D&D before this summer and I hated it. 

     If anyone is still reading; I can now say that 9 years later, I have played a second game with a completely different group of guys and I am completely hooked. The first game I had ever played was with a mix of LARPers, wargamers and general nerds and it was one of the most frustrating couple of hours of my life, with bickering, arguing and sulking going on around the table and it completely turned me off of the whole idea, but the second group is almost entirely non-gamers, made up of 3 guys who had never even heard of Warhammer when it came up in conversation, my normal LotR opponent (the only other wargamer of the group) and me, invited because I was a known nerd.

    

     The character I ended up playing was Larch 'The Hound of Wheathold' Tanner; a serf, turned folk hero, turned exiled ranger. The GM decided to create our characters himself to make sure we had diversity in our backgrounds and of all the backgrounds mine has to be my favourite, the guy is just great; chaotic good - my ideal alignment - and with loads of secrets, basically one hell of a backstory. Larch is a classic leather armoured ranger, who is more archer than front line fighter, although he does carry two swords to hold his own if he needs to jump in. But he needed a figure.. .

        The figure itself was an eBay buy and I am sure someone out there will identify it, but I think it might be Ral Partha (?), but as ever, there has been a lot of conversion work done to make the model fit the image I was given by my GM. There is a second sword at his waist from the Fireforge foot serjeants plastic box, a backpack, rope and quiver from the Frostgrave plastic box and a metal bow from gripping beast. 

      I'm really excited about using this guy in the next part of the campaign at the weekend, which is something I really never saw myself saying.

Thanks for reading

The old west watering hole

     "When you begin a cattle drive, you can't expect to say you are finished until you have visited a fancy woman and played some games of chance".

                                                                                         - Wild Bill Hickok

     Like I said in my last Dead Man's Hand post, I had planned a few more buildings at least, and a saloon had to be on that list. This is another 4ground kit in the form of Rogan's Bar - renamed to the mended drum - and it's friendly barkeep. 

    This was the most involved kit from this range that I have had to build, most of them can be built without instructions once you have a couple under your belt, but I wouldn't advice that with this one, but having actual window is a really nice addition.

The barkeep is from Brigade Games - one of their hired help pack. Something about him just screamed barman to me. Maybe it's the shotgun?

It's images like this that make me think I need to work out how to make some tumble weed.

       The more I look at these images while I write this the more it is being cemented into my head that I need to buy the second-floor addition to this kit. That bar just isn't imposing enough yet.

Thanks for reading.