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Wednesday 15 January 2014

Terror rising

I got a nice surprise coming into the office this morning... my rather densely packed  Achtung! Cthulhu kickstarter parcel has arrived. How exciting!


 Just under the yellow bags were the floor tiles created by Henning Ludvigsen, the guy who created all the tiles for Descent 2nd Edition and Mansions of Madness... both of which are stunning and should be compatible with these in terms of scale (at least Mansion of Madness will be, not sure about Descent yet).

The tiles cover a number of locations from the forthcoming Assault on the Mountains of Madness campaign, so cover a Nazi underground base, snow covered outpost, Elder City ruins and more. Apparently there will be more sets coming in the future that cover other parts of the campaign as well as other locations. Looking at these tiles makes me wonder if it would be possible to create new stories and plots for Mansion of Madness using these. Each board is double sided and mounted on very thick boardgame style card and are either 10x10 or 5x10. Some of my favourites are the dockside tiles that combine to create a 10x20 square dock with boat.



I've not had time for more than a cursory glance at the figures yet, but the quality is outstanding. The detail and casting quality is flawless, with no visible cleanup needed on the parts, other than clipping any small bits from their sprues. Scale wise they should be perfect sat next to Bolt Action troops. Once I have some stuck together I will get a nice scale photo up. The one downside (if you see it as that) are the sheer number of small parts for some of the models and how delicate they are; we could also do with a parts list for each set as each set of 6 figures lumps all the bits into one bag. I fear for the lives of some of these as time goes on, especially the tentacles on the Cthonian or the rocket being carried by the Nachtwolf Stalker. I've included some examples below with a USB stick as scale guide to how small some of those bits are!

Some of the heroic characters come with some deep, dark secrets. One of them has a small dragon/imp thing sat on her shoulder and Natalya (below) has some sort of spirit riding inside her that comes out and protects her every now and then. The nice thing about both of the models is that neither has to have the mythos element attached as there are no visible markers on the model for where you stick them. This means that it would be possible to get two of each and have one version that is usable in normal pulp games and one for mythos/horror games.


Just look at the size of the sword in the second image... then realise that it is about a third as thick... I really don't know how it survived the post as some of the thicker pieces didn't.  

  

We've even got separate horns for the Night Gaunts!

  

And a mass of limbs to attach via very small ball joints... these are going to be as delicate as some of the worst infinity models and probably as nightmarish to glue together. Hopefully these delicate multi-part models will be the first to get the plastic treatment we were promised in the kickstarter.

 

 The only disappointment so far though is the huge scale difference between the two deep ones! There are three different sculpts (not including the special in the bulk box). The left hand model is miles bigger than the other two as you can see from the photo below. Thankfully I've only currently got one of each so he can be an older Deep One, but it would have been nice if they were all the same scale.


The rest will make an appearance as they get constructed and painted. I can safely say that I'm over the moon with them all and will be buying lots more as they get released for the skirmish game if the quiality remains at this level. The renders of the current range can be seen on http://www.modiphius.com/miniatures-range.html

Now to see if I can get replacements for the bits that didn't make it in the post!

I also suspect that this has just derailed my Vehicle entry for the sub-challenge this week as I really want to see them all constructed :)

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