The warband starts with four Heroes and two Followers.  There are tables that let you randomly select your heroes, but I chose them based on my figures.  Each hero gets rolls on several tables based on their background to determine initial skills, stat bonuses, and available equipment.  I won’t go into detail on the character creation rolls.  

After creating my warband, I need to make a map of the campaign region.  There is a set of tables to roll on (or pick from) to populate the map.

Villages

From the village tables, I learn the region has 5 villages:

• Evantun, a major trading post. 
• Doerbryc, a minor manor.
• Montfeld, a tiny tribal camp. 
• Lafstow, a tiny monastery. 
• And Penceg, a minor farming community. 

Threats

I chose three major threats, based on the miniatures I have:

• Bandits, in The Ruin Within. 
• Ratmen, in The Gnawling Tribes. 
• An invading army, in The Faceless Kingdom. 

Each of these threats has a Camp shown on the map, and a Hideout that is hidden until I spend Adventure points to find it. 

In addition, there is a Delve (ruined keep, mine, dungeon, or similar) and an Unknown Location that I place on the map. 

It isn’t necessary to put all this on an actual map; you can use a simple list to keep track of the locations. But since that’s no fun, I took one of Dyson Logos’ maps and marked my locations on it, as you can see below. 

 With the third edition of Five Leagues from the Borderlands on its way, I thought it was a good time to start working on some fantasy minis.  I have a copy of the pre-layout rules (I lent a hand with development) and the green light from Ivan and Modiphius to post about it as I play through a campaign.  There’s a lot of work still to be done, so things can change between now and the game’s release.  

First up is my warband:

Warbands start with 6 people: 4 heroes and 2 followers.  In my warband I have:

Gabriel Hill, a human noble, hero, and the band’s leader and the Avatar.

Saba Anum, a Preen hero.

Uzgash, a Feral hero.

Eorthhed, a human mystic hero.

Lavan, a follower

Gorvin, a follower

Test paint scheme for some more GZG. It’s much brighter in person, I’ll have to try a different background in the light box next time.

I think I need a lighter blue-grey for the uniform under the armor to get more contrast there.

Thu, 24 May 2018 21:05:03 +0000Uncategorized

After much too long, we've gotten Velocibaby (and myself) onto a schedule where I have 30 minutes to an hour a night where I can paint. The fruit of that labor so far has been these seven crew from GZG. Not my best work but they do well enough at tabletop distance.

I need to redo the redhead’s face, she came out much too pale, without enough room for highlighting.

The answer is, not much of anything. Various things have kept me from the painting table, and so I haven't had much of anything to say here. But now I've made some progress on some projects, so here we go again.

Here I have a test paint of a Dwarven ironclad for Uncharted Seas, which Ed got me interested in recently. Behind it are the other two cruisers from the Dwarf starter set, waiting for drybrushing and detail work. Once they're clearcoated I plan to use dot filters on the metal armor panels to make them subtly different. I expect it to work, but we'll see. I have some destroyers and a battleship (the rest of the starter box) to follow these, and an Imperial starter box to paint up as well. I want to make sculpted water bases for the ships, which will be a new thing for me.

Next up are Rebel Minis' Earth Force Marines, done up in a desert/scrubland scheme. The four sticks in front are done, the fifth stick needs a wash, and the heavy weapons and sniper teams in back are just basecoated. This is about half the pack, I have eight more sticks that aren't in the picture. Four (including the ones pictured) are basecoated, two just need washes, so I should be done with these pretty soon.

I finally figured out how I will base my 6mm Seven Years War figures: 20mm x 25mm bases from Litko, with figures based three ranks deep on a stand. I plan to use these with the Batailles de l'Ancien Régime rules, to see how the table looks with something closer to a 1:1 figure scale. This will actually come out to 1:4, at 1:1 a battalion would be unmanageably big in 6mm, stretching four feet across the table. Doesn't someone make 2mm 7 Years War figures? :)

One regiment; I've got notes around here somewhere saying who these guys are supposed to be, but I don't remember off the top of my head, other than Prussian. I'll find them again when I don't need them, or the painting notes that are with it. Each of these stands will count as three figures in BAR, and casualty rings or markers of some sort will mark stands with partial casualties.

The unit's flagbearer and drummer, or at least one of them. There's one more stand on loan to Jay, who wanted to paint up the French figures I bought along with these. All of these figures are by Baccus 6mm.

A cavalry squadron of 12 stands, each stand counting as a single cavalry figure in BAR. I'm not entirely happy with the horses, the greys and bays may get pulled out and repainted. Basing was simple: I glued the figures to the Litko base, then glued down sand to smooth the bases up to the strips. I painted it all with brown ink, then glued on a mix of Woodland Scenics earth blend and green blend flock. I'll stick some static grass on soon, and hit it all with a thin layer of pva glue to lock the flock down.

The cavalry banner, still awaiting paint. I'll probably find an appropriate banner image somewhere and print it on label paper rather than trying to paint anything that small by hand. Or maybe I'll print it on decal film and basecoat the banner white. I'm not sure yet.

Artillery and crews in progress. I'll base each gun and crew as a single unit, I may have to go up to a 25mm square base to fit them all in place.

So that's where I'm at. I've got some plans for the future, and Jim and I are scheming on a Bayou Wars game that may require me to break out my Hirst Arts block molds in addition to painting up some more figures that have been waiting on the sidelines. And the Martians should see some more time on the workbench soon as well.

The past week I've been building another papercraft model, this time a Hummingbird attack skimmer for one of my 15mm scifi forces.

The model is designed to a 25mm (1/60) scale. To build it in 15mm scale, I simply scaled the print to 60% and printed it on photo paper that I cut down to 5.5" x 8.5". After that, I built it like normal. I found that the existing glue tabs did not work well at this size, but cutting off the existing glue tabs and making new ones from colored paper worked out fine. Some pieces ended up a little fiddly and hard to put together, especially the engine thrusters and intakes and the chin gun and sensor pods.

(Click on the images for larger pictures.)

The model is very lightweight. I was going to glue a washer inside the hull to give it some heft, but I forgot. The file includes patterns to make a flying stand, which I'll put together after I find the necessary transparency sheets. I am planning to glue that washer to the bottom of the model, and stick some magnetic sheet to the top of the stand so the model is easily removable.


No in progress shots, but here are the tools I used to cut out and build the model.

I did my cutting on a glass cutting board. That self-healing mat is under the glass, and I only put it there to give me some contrast for the brown bits of paper I was using for tabs. The white tool is a bone folder, used to crease the cardstock without cutting it. This lets the heavy paper bend much easier and in a more controlled manner; just drag it across a fold line like it is a knife.

The cutting was done with a snap-blade utility knife. Cutting on the glass goes through blades pretty quickly, and these are cheap but still sharp enough to get a good cut. The sculpting tool next to it I used to apply glue, and I used the tweezers to hold fiddly pieces while gluing and to clamp glue joins together until it set. I used the pen (and another brown one) to color exposed paper edges and the backs of pieces so the white bits don't show through.

At the top of the picture you can see leftover paper I used to make glue tabs. I just cut a 1/8" strip of paper, folded it in half lengthwise, and colored one side with a pen. I measured a join edge, cut the paper to length, then cut off the corners as needed so it would fit properly.

I glued it up with regular pva (Elmer's) glue. the blobs at the top right of the cutting board are where I dabbed small drops of glue before using the sculpting tool to apply them to the cardstock.

Well, looks like I failed in that whole "post every month" thing. Based on the idea that "If I can't clear my height, why can't I clear one inch above my own height" (thanks Bill), let's see if I can manage a post every week instead.

I've got a few things in the project queue for this year. As mentioned before, I'm planning to run a pulp game for Bayou Wars this year. For that I need to acquire and paint more figures (I want 15-20 figures per player, divided in 2-3 squads each), and make a lot of terrain.

I'm working on some Ebbles Miniatures vehicles and ground equipment to go with my 15mm sci-fi. The pieces are actually 25mm scale; the miracle of print-your-own lets me rescale it to 60% to match my figures.

I've also got a secret project. I am calling it "Highway Robbery", and I'll let people guess what it might be as progress develops. If it's done in time, I'll run it as a Sunday brain-dead game at Bayou Wars.