Saxons finished

Completed in between various interesting bits of bug investigation for work.

Hair by Citadel Contrast (mostly Skeleton Horde), shield backs with Contrast Cygor Brown, fronts with various AP colours, weapons with AP metallics.

Basing: WarWorld Scenics basing grit, Vallejo Sepia Tone, my standard grass basing mix.

New warriors at the back. Need to tart up the movement bases a bit :D

Panting some more Saxons

My Saxon warriors for Dux are.... scratty, as my wife would say - shields falling off, paint chipping etc. So I've assembled some more out of the GB Dark Ages warriors box and started on them with the Contrast paints...

Leatherwork in Snakebite Leather, faces in Fireslayer Flesh, clothing in assorted Nazdreg Yellow, Agaros Dunes, Millitarum Green, Arkhelian Green and Flesh Tearer Red. Saving Skeleton Horde, Gore Grunta Fur and a couple of other shades for hair.

Should get these finished and maybe even based tomorrow.

Another somewhat fragmented day...

...improved greatly by discovering I have a new boss at work (ok, discovering I don't have my old boss. The jury's out on the new one, as we haven't spoken yet).

That aside:

• sorted through some more bookshelves, added some more D&D books to the for sale post from a couple of days ago;
• worked out a better process for applying my decals to shields (leaving them on sprue and actually using AP sprays and gloss varnish, which I should have done sooner, having mentioned it in a previous post);
• painted 4 more Shieldwolf minis (it's very therapeutic, and I reckon it takes about 30 mins with a mix of Contrast and AP paints once they're primed), one of which for fun has a pair of Fireforge Templar arms as well as the shield;
• looked at domain names for another project;
• did some prep for Monday's Dux Compendium playtest. 

Still a Star Wars spoiler free zone (till Monday afternoon)

Laser waterslide decals, Contrast paints for hair

Slightly the worse for wear today, so after a day at work having to use my brain, I decided to have an evening doing non-brain-strainy stuff.

I have (as commented on Twitter yesterday) some laser decal paper. This has the advantage over inkjet that laser printer ink is waterproof, so you don't have to spray the printed decals with acrylic spray before you apply them. Also, I happen to be the happy owner of an A3 colour laser printer, - a parting gift from IT at my last job - it had been sat in a pallet outside the tech office for 3 years unopened, and we were shutting the company down… The downside is the colours are a little less vibrant than with an inkjet, but that's a small price to pay for a heck of a lot less faff.

They're a little more fragile than ... Actually, thinking about it? I strongly suspect the custom decal folks in our hobby use laser-printed paper, so that may not be the case :D I am aware that (after some playing) you need to make sure the surface you're applying is smooth (ideally spray gloss varnished) and dry (patience!), and also not to remove the decal from the water too early, in case not all of it lifts.

You are also going to have to cut around your design fairly carefully, and you need to re-gloss varnish afterwards before you apply your final sealant coat. I haven't tried using MicroSol and MicroSet, but I suspect these or Humbrol DecalFix would also help.

Either way, these have come out pretty well....

I've now got 8 of the Shieldwolf Shieldmaidens done with Fireforge Templar shields. Another useful discover - Citadel Contrast paints are GREAT for hair. Snakebite Leather, Aggaros Dunes and Skeleton Horde make great shades of blonde over a white undercoat, Gore Grunta Fur does a great redhead, and Cygor Brown does a good mid-brown/chestnut.

More of a tidy results in more stuff for sale, some painting....

I've had a quick sort through the RPG shelves, and the following are available for sale (and will be going on eBay on Sunday if unsold):

• Serenity the Roleplaying Game (hardback): £15
• Serenity the RPG: Out In The Black (softcover): £10
• Middle Earth Roleplaying: Empire of the Witch King (softcover, some creasing in one corner, still has original fold out map which has been unfolded precisely once): £40 ono (OOP: apparently goes for stupid money on eBay, make me a sensible offer)
• AD&D 2E Tome of Magic: £15
• AD&D 2E Book of Artefacts: £20
• AD&D 2E Forgotten Realms Adventures: £10
• AD&D Al Qadim sourcebook: £10
• WOTC The Primal Order: £20

Been stuffed on a bookshelf
unread a couple of times and
got creased, sadly. 

I've also acquired (thanks to the club's honorary American and all-round nice guy Shawn), a new magnifying daylight lamp (twin to my current one) and an airbrush compressor, as they're UK-power compatible and he is, sadly, leaving us for the Colonial shores. Now all I need to do is find the blasted airbrush!

Also nipped into a purveyor of figures and paints that do not have anything to do with wargames (it says so on their annual report, guv!) to pick up some more Contrast undercoat and a couple of colours I don't have (as sadly my preferred supplier had run out of what I needed). Pro tip - if like me you have trouble remembering which paints you own? They do actually do an app on both iOS and Android for keeping track of your collection, at least of their stuff: at the price of Contrast paints I'm quite keen to avoid duplicates, too! 

With those in hand, I did grab a bit of time over lunch to paint (this is me, don't expect Golden Demon standard!) one of the Shieldwolf minis... Some experiments with Contrast white, which I find comes out very grey - the cloak I wound up highlighting with AP White on its folds to get it to look right. Mail is Contrast Basillicum Grey, which works ok. The face is AP Barbarian Flesh overbrushed on Contrast Guiliman Flesh, as I do not like how the latter works on its own.  Hair is Contrast Skeleton Horde, her belt is AP Pure Red. The shield is AP White + AP Gloss Varnish, ready for a custom decal off the laser decal paper that should be arriving today.

 Second pro tip for lousy painters. If you're using the Citadel base coat sprays for Contrast, get a pot of the matching Citadel base paint: if you mess up with Contrast paints, you can then let it dry, brush over in the base colour where you goofed, let that dry, and try again.

Customising the Shieldwolf shieldmaidens

Well, only a bit, really. Yesterday I found a box of Fireforge Teutonic Foot left over from the Night's Watch project, with lots of tall shields, perfect for what I wanted. Just had time to affix a few before Anne\s work Xmas do yesterday.

I also got a new toy from Amazon - nice cheap (£6 and small change) AA battery powered display turntable. It's only annoyance is it doesn't have a power switch - it's on as soon as you insert the battery. But it's smooth and slow. And it was very cheap.

And yes, I didn\t use the DSLR on the tripod for this, because I stupidly left its SD card in the Mac in the house, and it was hosing it down when I came to shoot the test shot yesterday.

Shieldwolf Miniatures plastic 28mm Shieldmaiden Infantry/Rangers

Evocative box art...

If you're following my RPG blog, you'll notice I've been running a series on cheap fantasy-usable plastic minis for D&D, and one of the things I spotted were the Shieldwolf Miniatures range. Now - memory serves me that they got a wee bit of stick on an episode of Meeples for the bare midriff look some of their sculpts on their first go at the Kickstarter had, but I'm happy to report that the end results are (barring four bodies that you don't actually have to use) loads better, and not going to freeze in winter. (Note, they actually successfully rebooted the Kickstarter having cancelled the one linked above, earlier this year, which I'm annoyed I missed.)

...but no help for guessing what the
figures will look like.

A clever design, in that the body comes in two parts, with either a plain upper back or one with a cloak, which glue on. The heads are a bit of a tight fit in the resulting small hole, but other than that they go together pretty well, even if the poses can look a bit awkward. You get 24 bodies, but enough arms etc to make 20 figures: there are actually enough to make a complete set with crossbows, which I might buy a second box for at some point. The weapons are a bit more fantasy than some folks might like - I've seen people use sword arms from Perry knights with these, which seem to work quite well, and with a bit of filing there are other heads from other ranges of female plastics that could work, too. That said, the heads are fantastic (in both senses), with some great helmetless windblown looks. Most of the rather nice shields are, annoyingly (but only so to me), round with moulded detail: hence I haven't fitted shields yet, as I need 20 plain plastic heater shields from somewhere for the unit these ladies are intended to be. (I need to go hunt in the leftovers of my Fireforge boxes from making the Night's Watch, I think.)

And here we are. These probably won't
rank up on 20mm bases, given the
amount of 'cloak swirl'!

Anyway - between various other things today I've assembled 4 just to see how they go together. The plastic takes Humbrol 'yellow' Precision Poly Cement very well, but then they're manufactured by Renedra, so I've come to expect that. A teeny bit fiddly to assemble, and the point of contact with the base is literally the feet, so you have to be sure to file them flat - smart move would be not to make the sprue contact point on some of the bodies be the sole of the feet, guys! The plan is to use Contrast paints on them, and see how they come out, so a trip to the Rift is in order if I can get there in time tomorrow, as I need white and one of their metallics and some more undercoat :D One other minor gripe is that it seems to be impossible to get the banner blowing the same way as the bearer's hair! (I may fix this by cutting it (no, the banner!) off and replacing it, especially since I need a specific design on the banner, and it's going to be much easier to print it or produce custom decals, I guess.)

Anyway - despite the odd grumble, I actually really like these.

Bad Squiddo Bofors unboxing

Ok, unbagging, maybe?

This arrived the other day, and I wanted to test the use of my DSLR as a rostrum/video camera, so it seemed like a good idea!

My Night's Watch

Being reminded by a comment on a previous post that my Night's Watch got very little love on this blog, I shall rectify that, having dug out the box and tidied them up, with a couple of photos, since I'm blogging on a related subject for the Sage DM.

The foot. These are a real mix. Essentially, take a box of Frostgrave Soldiers, a box of Frostgrave Barbarians, some Fireforge foot Sergeants and archers, and some Gripping Beast Dark Ages Warrior heads, and throw them all up in the air along with a handful of resin cloaks from somewhere back in the days of early Warhammer. It's made a little complex by the Fireforge heads being different to the Frostgrave and GB ones in terms of how they fit, but otherwise it was a bit of a riot of mix-and-match.  

By comparison, these were relatively sane. Essentially they're Fireforge mounted Sergeants bodies and horses,  Fireforge mediaeval Archer arms, and GB Dark Ages Warrior heads. 

Painting was largely spray AP Matt Black, with very dark colour drybrushes - green on the cloaks, grey or blue on armour. Horses were my standard black undercoat, various shades of brown, white socks, AP Barbarian Flesh noses, AP Red Leather harness, and of course mostly bay.

Sarissa Dark Ages Granary WIP

Managed to find half an hour over lunch to knock this together yesterday. Nice simple kit - everything fits very nicely.

I shall find some spare flannel to thatch it, and am debating whether to add some split coffee-stirrer timbering as well.

Northstar cultists

Needed to throw a few evil cultists together for last night's D&D session, so I grabbed a box of Northstar's Frostgrave cultists (handy Amazon next day, turning up about an hour before my players did!): here's a very quick review.

They're pretty much like their Barbarians and Soldiers, both of which (along with some Fireforge Sergeants and a few GB Dark Ages heads) I cannibalised together for my Night's Watch army (which I probably still owe folks some pictures of!)

Easy to put together - the plastic reacts well with Humbrol's 'yellow' Precision Poly Cement, which makes ensuring things stay stuck much less painful. Essentially there are four identical sprues with five torsos, a gazillion heads with variations on hooded, skeletal and otherwise, and enough arms for both all-skelly and all-normal sets of figures. There's also two sprues with 10 x 25mm round bases on each. Nice clean sculpts, nothing too fragile on the sprue, although I didn't use any of the skeleton arms. Of course, being Frostgrave, you can hack away happily and swap heads and limbs with soldiers, barbarians etc, as well as GB figures which use the same head joint style (and I think Fireforge do too).

Fortunately (as I was in a hurry), all I had to do from there for my purposes was spray the end results black, pick out blades in Warlord's Dark Gunmetal (I love love love this colour for metalwork), woodwork in AP Werewolf Fur, and drybrush a hint of skull masks/faces and the crossbow string in AP Skeleton Bone. Now I have a little more time, I may dry brush some deep blue highlights on their clothing, and maybe do something with the bases.

Simples! One set of death cultists done. The Frostgrave minis are a fabulous resource for D&D minis!

Battle Reports - 23 Nov 2019 - Dux, Steel Lard

Back from Steel Lard sufficiently late and tired having got up at 6am to be on the road for 7 that you weren't getting an update then!

AndyM picked me and a lot of terrain boards up at 7am, in his nice spacious Audi, and we caned it up the A1 and across to Sheffield in plenty of time to set up for Game 1.

First raid scenario - Coastal Raid. This is the third time I've play tested it, and like the other one I ran, I decided not to do random terrain placement so I could get a feel for how a roughly balanced setup plays. I'll probably run it a couple more times with settings at the more extreme end of random to se if they need tweaking.

The table. Longboats are Revell (cut down to a waterline model by Andy, who'll be along later to explain how tricky this is!) and Adrians Walls resin (on loan from Carl at our club)

The British levy, having raised the alarm, do what any sensible shield wall would do, and wait upslope for the Saxon elites.

...who do a lot of screaming, yelling and banging spears on shields before charging up at them. The levy actually survived  two rounds without losing their amphora, took out the Saxon champion but did lose their leader and just barely suffered excess shock.

So the Saxons decided they could safely ignore the levy and headed for the village, where their warriors were already advancing.

The British levy, by dint of a Rally card and some support from their own slingers manage to survive the very annoying Saxon archers without going into excess shock again...

Meanwhile, the Saxon levy decide they're not going to face the British warriors on the upslope, but instead skirt up and round the hill...

Here come the British heartguard, while one of the Saxon leaders decides to do some quick looting....

Saxon archers driven off, the British slingers head inland while the levy hang around by the Saxon longships to provide a roadblock... (still on lots of shock with no leader around...)

The Saxons fall just short in their attach, so the British counter-charge...

...and drive them back..

The British turn to fall just short, before the Saxons  (having rallied off a fair chunk of Shock) manage to use a rather nice hand of cards to make a fair mess...

...while their hearhguard are now upslope of the British warriors.  You will note fleeing British hearthguard in the background!

British warriors driven back, half the force defending the village itself driven off.
Saxon victory.

For game two, I decided to test out the Treasure Hunt raid scenario again. Again I set the table, rather than allowing a random scenery layout, partly for testing balance and partly because it made for a prettier table.

Six 'random' treasure locations: the willow island in the marsh,  the rocky outcrop, the ruined Roman temple, the fallen Roman column in the wood, the barrow and the stone in the woods (that did have a sword stuck in it till it broke off!). 

Early scrap right in front of the barrow (really glad I took the time to finish that on Friday!) 

Battle lines are drawn. The British are consolidating on and around the barrow,. the Saxons have just about fallen over a ruined Roman column in the woods....

The two hearthguard units face off. Meanwhile the  British slingers find a nice vantage point atop the barrow to shoot over people's heads. 

"Olaf? What's that you've found?"
"I... uh. Don't know. Some kind of round thing with ends that unscrew. Has Roman runes on it. Probably not important."
Britons; "It's a SCROLL, YOU IDIOT, Don't trash it!"

There's a bit of a scrap going on beyond the woods that drives away some British levy. Which is just fine by them as they'll go looking for treasure...

The prelude to a perfect piece of card play (and the middle of a rather complex piece of 'ok, just how do we resolve this according to the rules?'). The British hearthguard,  which were forming the front rank of the unit in the centre, have been shocked enough to fall back a couple of inches. Not enough to break the formation, but they are pretty much in contact with the small group of Saxons behind them, which kind of a) makes this a rather confused ongoing combat and b) means that this is, as the saying goes, Going To Hurt. A Lot, as, with a Carpe Diem, if the Saxons warriors activate they get to do the British a lot of damage with a rear attack.

Except that the British Lord activates first, and lo and behold, he has a Disengage, which gets him very very nicely out of what was a pretty sticky predicament.

My memory is sketchy as to what happened next, except that the Saxons took a fair force morale hit somewhere, and we wrapped it up as a British win. 

Note to self: need to think about exactly how the whole business of shieldwalls where the front rank is elites and the rear warriors behaves when the front rank's morale starts breaking. because it can get a bit complex.

So, that was my bit of Steel Lard. Some very pretty tables around,. which I didn't have time to take pictures of - check the hashtag #SteelLard on Twitter for pictures of the games, as well as the alcohol-hazed proceedings both before and after. Thanks to all my players, to Andy for the lift and company, and Tom for organising a fabulous day. We must do it again.

Battle Report - 18 Nov 2918 - "The Second Battle of Newbury" - Pikeman's Lament

Newbury is top right of this board,.

The final game in our club Pikeman's Lament campaign - the Royalists are fleeing towards Oxford and have been caught on the hop by a night march and pincer movement by the forces of Parliament.

Grahame set this up as two battles on back to back 8'x4' tables - on one side 3 Royalist players (Shawn, Tom, Pippa) against 3 Parliament (Colin, Tony, AndyM2), on the other 4 Royalists (me as Maurice, Carl as Goring, Ash, Alan) against two Parliament (AndyM, Grahame), both with double size forces. There was an option for Parliament to cross from one table to the other (across the main road to Oxford) if they broke through the lines.

Donnington (and a regimental gun which must
have taken some effort to get up there)
bottom left.

Each named commander had chits they could cash in for an activation re-roll: our cause wasn't helped by Goring (and his supply of re-rolls) getting killed in an early cavalry fight on the left wing, resulting in me having to bail out Carl's terrible dice rolling in order not to have AndyM (as Cromwell) simply roll up that flank.

I held on reasonably well in the centre - Grahame played his usual cagey waiting game which meant we were both dying the proverbial death of a thousand cuts from long range musketry. A fight I always seem to lose in the long run. Ash and Alan between them held off Parliament around Donnington keep....

Over on the other table, Shawn did a superb job of keeping Colin out of Newbury, but unfortunately, AndyM2 (we have too many AndyM's, never mind Andy's, at the club) managed to break through the Royalist left with a sizeable force, and at the point we called it was sitting astride the road to Oxford and threatening Ash's rear and the Royalist baggage train.

So - a win for Parliament, much like in history :D

Add another to our long list of ECW battles the club has refought! (Edgehill, Marston Moor, First Newbury, Bridlington, Stilton, Cropredy Bridge (twice)...)

Onward with the barrow...

Not much done tonight - just cut a top for the barrow and liberally spread some filler about. Leaving that to set for now, will probably apply some more later :D

Also blogged on my RPG blog which I'm going to try and do a bit more now I'm getting my campaign(s) going.

Saturday we're running Bloody Omaha at the studio for a few folks who've missed out on playing it - there will be photos. Sunday I'm hoping to get a good hard stint on the Dux Brit compendium in.

Barrows and bunkers

Anne's out at the dog track, so I've started in on two projects, in the absence of AndyM (so no work on our Salute game).

One is to write the promised article for Nick for this year's Lard magazine - you'll have to wait to read it, but let's just say it involves bunkers :D

The other is to make a barrow for the Dux Brit scenery collection.

Some stones from the car park outside the studio... 

...and some left over blue foam from the Omaha build.
Don't know how much more I'll get done tonight as I'm waiting on the glue drying. Next step is filler, then Sandtex Bitter Chocolate.

More flannel thatch....

That's the Warbases hut done, barring a slight haircut and maybe a touch of glue, for today's hobby streak. (Interesting question: does writing a battle report count separately from fighting the battle? :D)

It appears you can get two roofs that size (buildings about 3' x '5') out of one cheap Morrisons flannel (£1), and some spray cans and a tube of UHU/Bostik general purpose glue. I'm quite happy with that. I will be interested to try a similar approach but spraying teddybear fur dark brown and then desert yellow. Except I'm all but out of PVA spray :D

Towelling thatch part 2

Well, that was easy. :D Although I was confused, and it was actually the roof to the Blotz building. 

Spray with AP Desert Yellow a couple of times. Doesn't seem to get into the lower layers of the fabric, which is rather handy, so.... job done, I'd say. 

Also updated the studio website with more of my cartography stuff. And for those who haven't seen it, here's my D&D campaign map, drawn with Wonderdraft, exported to 16K px square PNG (all 300MB of it!) and shipped to TinyWargames for printing - it's about 54" square.

Towelling thatch part 1

Picked up a cheap face flannel from Morrisons today, to use to make thatch (once I'd finally found my modelling scissors).

Stage 1: cut into strips, lay on the roof, fix with general purpose clear glue. Trim edges.

Stage 2: spray with brown paint

Stage 3: several layers of this, which is essentially spray PVA. It should dry fairly hard, I hope.

Stage 4: leave to dry overnight. More tomorrow, I guess, but it's looking promising.

Even more on the Warbases hut..,

Decided it needed some timbers, as it looked a bit bare without. Raided the collection of odd leftover bit of MDF sprue and coffee stirrers... (The end timbers are attached to the roof, in case you're wondering.)

I'm actually in the middle of doing the thatched roof for this building, but waiting for paint to dry, so thought I'd do the catchup post. Would have blogged this yesterday, but got waylaid by a blonde and a box of Hotel Chocolat, yer honour :D

Also, a fun toy arrived from Amazon, of which more later...

More on the huts...

A couple of cans of cheap and cheerful acrylic spray paint (brown and cream) turned up from Amazon today, so I managed to do the next stage of the Blotz and Warbases huts. 

All done bar the roof tops, some touch up on the wood framing, and the door on the Warbases one. For the roofs I'm considering trying the towel approach.