Wizard, Kobold, Slime

This summer, Chen and I arranged a fruitful "your junk for my junk" trade and I ended up with a collection of fantasy figures to go with the dungeon tiles I bought off of Terry last year (or two years ago?). 

I decided to go with a bright-and-cheery approach to painting these, since the terrain (grey tiles on black cloth) would be drab, so everybody got a white primering.

The kobolds, meh? They came out more cheeto than expected. But whatever. The slimes were nice figures, cast in a translucent green plastic. These were both from a kick-starter box of fantasy figures Chen had backed.

He also kindly threw in a couple of Reaper figures, including this wizard. I debated trying to add stars and moons and such to his cloak and then figured a low-level wizard wouldn't have the dosh for that kind of embroidery.

I was happy with how his spell book and familiar turned out.

Overall, not a bad start. The dungeon tiles really popped with an additional dry brushing.

Next up: Either more Crimean cavalry or some more fantasy dudes.

Wrath of Khan Klingons

To go with the ST:TMP Federation Crew that I showed last week, I bought a 1982 set of Klingons that FASA released at the same time. 

These were really disappointing figures. Much like last week's set, they are very passively posed. The exceptions include the guy swinging a rifle (below right). His pose is anatomically possible but is extremely difficult to pull off.

The other animated pose (below right) is the fellow who is knocking, or leaning, or maybe dancing? Terrible pose. Like what the hell?

The sculpts have pretty good detail that matches the ST:TMP Klingons from The Search for Spock and they paint up fine enough.

They are, however way under sized for 25mm. Below, I have compared them to the 1970s 25mm Heritage Klingons and modern 28mm (Space Vixens from Mars, I think). Even with the extra height from the slotta base, the FASA figure is shorter and much smaller than the Heritage and looks more 20mm.

Oddly, they are even small compared to the Federation Crew from the same release. They came in a sealed set and included proper markings on the base so I don't think they are recasts (which sometimes shrink). Just a terrible effort by FASA all around.

Up next: Hard to say. Maybe some more Crimean. Maybe some fantasy.

25mm Star Trek Wrath of Khan bridge crew

As a birthday treat, I bought a job lot of 25mm FASA ST:TMP figures from the Wrath of Khan. It looks like I ended up without a Chekov (oh well!). These came with the trousers and tunics blocked in so I just completed the paint job and based them. I decided to go a bit brighter than I usually might.

These are fairly small figures (true 25mm) and have kind of useless poses. Since they were created for the Star Trek RPG, I'm not sure why they are all just standing around the bridge? Kirk even appears to be leaning on his chair. Savik is a nice find though.

I pulled out some of my ST:TOS figures. I'm pretty sure the one on the left is a Heritage figure, so they scale pretty well. Uhura on the right is newer and headed more towards 28mm, but I can't recall from where.

Overall, an interesting look back at the early 1980s. I have the Klingon set as well (although I don't think there were Klingons in the Wrath of Khan?). I will try to finish those in the next few weeks and post them.

28mm British Crimean Lancers

 And back to the Crimea yet again. This time, it is a bunch of British lancers from Foundry.

There were also these guys with swords. I painted them as lancers but they are more likely dragoons, now that I look at them. Oh well!

Up next: Wrath of Khan Trek.

Star Wars Game Tokens

I'm not exactly sure where these four figures came from. I think maybe Star Wars Trivial Pursuit? Anyhow, they are 28mm. Not great sculpts (Luke is very 2-D and Han looks nothing like Harrison Ford) but not terrible. 

Vader aways gives me fits because all black is tricky to paint. I went with washes this time and some manual highlights using silver paint. I'm not sure this is better than layering up with a brown or blue hue.

These don't fit my collection but they will find a new home shortly.

Up next: More Crimea.

28mm British Crimean Dragoons

And back to the Crimean War, I knocked off the a small number of British Dragoons from foundry. Holy hell, are cavalry a lot of painting.

Up next: Some Star Wars game pieces.

Heroscape tiles

Awhile back, I got a pretty good deal on some heroscape interlocking terrain tiles. I've looked at these a couple of times over the years and thought they might be an easy way to add some vertical terrain to my skirmish games. They might also work as a playing surface for micro-tanks (like the 3mm pico armour below). The problem, of course, is that they are in cartoonish colours.

After some hand wringing, I decided I would just spray all of the pieces a single colour (rustoleum camo sage), which matched my gaming mat and also meant that touch-ups would be easy. In a rare feat, I managed to spray everything using only one can of paint! I then used some French blue on the recessed "water" tiles. So far, adhesion has been good and I haven't see any real paint rubbing off.

For a "nothing" project (10 minutes and 2 cans of spray), I'd call this a success. I'm hopeful to adapt Xenos Rampant to superheroes this fall and will use the hills to create some elevation challenges in an outdoors scenario. They are too small for use with Rommel (need bigger hexes) but I have 4" hex terrain for that so no worries.

Xenos Rampant Tiny Trek

Over the past few months, Bruce and I have been fine-tuning Xenos Rampant to give a good fleet-level spaceship game. The link above gives you the basic rules. A few weeks back, we played a three-player, 50-point ST:DS9 Federation versus Klingon.

The Klingons had to attack and destroy a space station with two separate commands. The Federation had to defend the station and had a relief force in addition to the station itself (which we played as a single command). 

he unit stats and orbat are all at the bottom of this post. The hexes on the mat have no game meaning. The Klingons come on from the right side in the picture above. The Federation relief force comes on from an adjacent edge (as shown above), which creates an interesting tactical situation.

I've played the scenario twice and it is very tight. Bruce and Nathan drew the two Klingon commands and their strategy was to rush the big ships at the station while using the smaller Klingon ships to tie up the relief force. An alternative strategy is to beat the hell out of the relief force and then go after the station. We passed a pewter Sisko back and forth to track who had initiative ("who has the Sisko?").

The battle basically had three components In the middle, the USSs Janet Jackson, Tiffany, and Robin Sparkles tangled with the KSSs Megadeath, Motley Crue, and Queensryche. This was mostly a drawn. The Robin Sparkles got beat up pretty bad but the Motley Crue and Queeenryche were run off.

On the left, the KSS Scorpion focused its attack on Deep Space 3 (oddly, I have no pictures). Eventually, the Scorpion was able to cause enough damage that the Space Station started failing courage checks. Thus led to run-away systems failures, and it eventually bit it just a turn before the Federation was likely to break the Klingons

Meanwhile, on the right, the USSs Debbie Gibbon and Alanis closed with the KSSs Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Korn. The Korn was eventually able to slip past and attack the Federation heavies from behind but the Slayer and Iron Maiden got the crap beat out of them in close combat.

Overall a fun game and the rules adaptation seems to work fine. We experimented with allowing ships to slip up to 45 degrees off centre for free in this game. That worked fine and (or but, depending on your tastes) it made movement very fluid (versus only straight forward flight with a penalty for turning). Meh, either way was fine.

The Klingons had three fighter units and the Federation space stations had five fighters. I had to proxy in some vipers and raiders (hoots of derision) since I haven't based the ST:DS9 fighter tokens.

28mm Scots Greys

Alright, some more progress on the Crimean project, with some Scots Greys painted and based. 

These were nice figures in two parts (horse and legs cast separately from rider torso).

I have a bunch more British cavalry underway (lancers and dragoons).

Up next: Who knows?

Cheap-o space terrain

A few weeks back, I was doing some outer-space gaming and realized my printed planets looked a bit lame. Bruce suggested I get some styrofoam balls, cut them in half, and paint them up. 

For a $5 project, I think it turned out pretty good. The scale is a bit wonky and all but that is the nature of space (it is big) and my gaming table (it is small). I have bunch more balls to paint up so I may experiment with painting in a "night" side on the planets. I also needed some asteroids/small moons.

So I took some small balls and applied spray paint to melt them (outdoors, obvs). The resulting crater effect painted up well enough.

I wonder if a bunch of pea gravel laid on the mat in a drift would be more pleasing. Bruce suggested putting a piece of black felt underneath to denote the asteroid field's area.

I also melted a larger ball as a destroyed planet or proto-planet or whatever. Again, a super easy "nothing" project.

Up next: Ideally some Crimean cavalry.

Last of the Gotham buildings

And this is the last of the model train buildings I picked up in April (or March?). It is a small engineering firm with cool elements on the roof.

I spent a fair bit of time adding highlights and details to the buildings, but I'm not sure it really made any difference! I guess it is a bit dirtier and has better shadows and highlights than when it arrived.

Again, I picked this one up mainly because of the roof details adding visual interest (you spend a lot of time looking down on building roofs when gaming). 

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if this was small HO-scale or, indeed, was N-scale. In the end, I think it is HO (based on the doors), but is is small building and maybe is slightly under-scale. 

More Gotham buildings

I finished off another of the buildings I got at the model train swap. 

This is some kind of power station, I think. It came sans paint and with a bit of damage.

I primed and painted it in a drab scheme that fit the rest of the buildings I have.

Nothing fancy, but for $5 or $10, it was a good priced piece of terrain.