Painting update

Just to prove that some painting has happened recently, here are a few bits for various skirmish games

For Sharpe Practice and other Napoleonic skirmishes (possibly 7TV for the truly pulpy), the British infantry have increased to 5 models. I think the faces still need a bit of work on some of these, but I'm happy with the rest. I really wouldn't want to paint up an entire army in this style though as these 5 total about 6 hours work :/

The original test figure is to the far right.

As I only really want 10-20 British infantry for skirmishing with, that left me with some spares. What better way to use them up than to make some ghosts. I added two plastic vikings as well to add some variation. This seems like a good way to use up random historicals in the figure mountain while creating useful entries for 7TV or Strange Aeons

After that was some absolutely not Cylons for 7TV. Looking at the photo, I still have some work to do on these as it looks like I forgot to highlight the silver and the rifles (despite being black in the tv show) look boring as black. So back to the painting table for you three!

Daemonic infestation

Next up on the painting table is this beastly 4 armed monstrous lump of lead. This daemon is from the Mongoose daemonic cabal set for their Dredd range and stands about 50mm tall. Like most of the Mongoose models, I'm not a massive fan of the sculpts as they are lumpy and uninspiring, but a large daemonic entity is a large daemonic entity.

Spine of the Saracen

Every now and then a book or tv show throws up a neat idea for a weird war artifact. This time it comes courtesy if Warehouse 13. I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet, but here it is...

In series 1 Mica and Pete come across an 11th century Saracen artifact called the Spine of the Saracen. This device attaches itself to a host and feeds off their bio-electricity, amplifying it in the process. The excess electricity is continuously discharged by the Spine and hosts body, which causes anybody that the host touches to be electrocuted. The host's rage is vastly increased and drives them to attack whatever they hate most. Once attached, the only way to remove it is for the host to die, or to seriously overload it with electricity.

So how can we use this neat little device?

For in-game situations this sounds like something that would have been created by the Saracens as a defense against the creeping darkness whenever it broke through; possibly some cult of warriors who could calm the rage.

I can imagine some of these surfacing in an excavation in the Middle East an ending up being harnessed by a Black Sun assault trooper, or a sacrificial experiment. Black Sun (or whoever) would probably want to send an escort with the Spine bearer in order to recover/reuse the device later. These individuals would be faster, stronger and tougher than normal infantry, but limited to close combat only due to the electricity. I can't imagine it working too well with explosives. Weaknesses would have to be overcharging the artifact with electricity.

Alternatively it would work quite well as an artifact bearing cultist for Strange Aeons or Kulten. 

Myths and legends

One of the Analogue sub-challenges was entitled Myth. A lot of my other entries have been a bit unimpressive compared to all the others, so I decided to have a dig through the figure box and see what I had that wasn't a greek warrior. I'd almost given up hope until I came across the Forgeworld Skin Wolf that was only available at events a few years ago.

The myth of werewolves goes back to ancient greek literature and covers most cultures across the world, from American tribes to various Asian cultures where the wolf is replaced with tigers or leopards. The actual transformation process can be triggered by many things and can take many forms.

Some myths tell of the slow transformation of man to beast, with bones reforming and skin stretching... painful to be sure. But not as painful as the beast bloodily ripping itself from within the man, leaving ragged tatters of flesh clinging to his fur. You can see why TV programs shy away from this version of the transformation.

One thing I've decided to do, now that I've got my lightbox setup working more effectively, is to provide extra photos in my posts, so it's not just a repeat of the Challenge blog photos.

The police aren't very lucky at the moment. First they were taken by the weeping angels, now they are about to be savaged by the towering monster...

I feel like I could take on...

This is a bit of a last minute entry this week, after the massive upload of WotR figures earlier, but I couldn't resist trying to squeeze them in as well.

Shadows of Brimstone comes with 6 tentacles in each box and, as I got both boxes, this week I present the first six... carefully themed after one of my favourite games ever. Take a guess ;)

And as there are only so many ways you can take photos of tentacles, here are a couple of shots of them savaging some mythos explorers from last year's entries to the painting challenge. These last two also give you some sense of scale on these things.

Thankfully what you can't seein the photos are some of the overly soft details around the edges, where the poor sprue layout caused some of the suckers to merge into weird blobby messes and for others to become MASSIVE lumps that are easy to mistake for rocks... Like plenty of other people, I took a scalpel to these and tried to clean them up as best I could, but there's only so much you can do to rescue the suckers without cutting them off completely and making new ones... which is probably what I'll do to tentacles 13-24 when they arrive later in the year.

They aren't on bases as they come with them built in and I didn't really see the point in adding clear bases to something that could already stand up!

Baby, it's cold outside...

Despite the painting challenge being on for over week, a bout of generally feeling worn out, or overly busy each night meant that my first submission was actually for the Cold sub-challenge... which given I'd just spent 2 days sitting in a feeeeeeezing cold church hall helping man my wife's stall at a craft fair, seemed entirely appropriate.

Just to make it even more fitting, I painted this beat up while watching Cowboys Vs Aliens just to get the creative juices flowing. The model is from the long awaited Shadows of Brimstone kickstarter which, for those of you that havn't been paying attention, is a weird wild west dungeon crawler, similar to Warhammer quest. Your party of cowboys venture into some mines in search of mystical Darkstone crystals and gateways to other worlds, while fending off large, lovecraftian beasts such as the Night Terror. I can see this being used for all sorts of other games, like Pulp Alley for an abominable snowman, or some weird mythos beast in Strange Aeons...

Inspired by Joakim's snow beasts, I decided to give it a try, but with a slight twist. The model has lots of lumps and bumps all over it's shoulders and looks mightily annoyed... so I wondered if those lumps are actually chunks of darkstone that have become welded to some poor beast's back somehow; driving it insane with pain.

It doesn't take a microscope to see the joins in this model. I didn't really have time to sit and carefully sculpt over all of them; though I did manage to at least lessen the impact of them with some liquid greenstuff before undercoating. The next two, along with all the other multi-part SoB models will probably be left until after the challenge is over, so I can spend time properly filling in and hiding all the joints. I hope the rest of the models aren't this gappy, though I'm not holding my breath as whoever did the sprue layout or QA on these wasn't paying much attention. Just as well the game is looking so good...

Just to give some semblance of scale to this thing, here he is next to a WIP King Richard III. I'll bet that fight didn't happen in the film, or the book!

Now things are starting to roll, let us see how close I can get to last year's score of (I think) 982. This year will be a lot slower as I effectively had a month off for Christmas last year thanks to so much overtime being accrued.

This one is a challenge entry, so should be 55 (ish) points. Only another 928 to go.

Don't go out into the fields...

I don't think my investigators will want to go out into the corn fields any time soon. It looks like the NWO have turned to straw golems to keep the village tidy

These are Crooked Dice's corn dolls. Nice enough models, but not exactly the most inspiring of models to paint as it turns out... brown, brown and more brown. Hence the blue shirt and glowing eyes for a change of pace ;)

Assault on Complex Alpha

It's a bank holiday, Claire is hiding under a duvet, ill, and I have a clear dining table. What could be a better opportunity to give Strange Aeons it's first spin? As I'm still terrain-less I decided to give the Achtung! Cthulhu tiles a spin instead.

The mission...
 For a while there have been strange rumours floating around of a Russian complex, codenamed Альфа, or Alpha.What is happening in here is anyone's guess, but locals and prisoners of war have been seen going in, but never coming out. The Russians may currently be allies, but our mystics tell us that there is definitely something powerful happening within the underground bunker and it cannot be good for anyone. Captain Harris and his small team have been dropped up the coastline a bit and are tasked with getting into the complex and stopping whatever is happening in there.

In order to get some equipment for my commandos I had to go up to 16 points, which still ony gives me three soldiers to send on their daring raid...

Additional mission rules:
Guard patrol. Guards on patrol do not get to be moved via any specific orders, but will remain on watch throughout their turn. IF they are alerted to the enemy's presence they will open fire and raise the alarm. Each turn, roll a scatter dice to determine their facing. Each turn the guards may attempt to notice a sneaking enemy by rolling above the distance to the enemy on a D6 if they are within their side arcs; if in the rear arc there is a -1 penalty to the check. IF they are facing an enemy who is either in the open, or less than 10" away, they will automatically spot them.

Sneaking. Threshold team members may attempt to sneak. By sneaking they halve their movement rate, but gain +2 to distance checks to be discovered (e.g. if they are 2" from a guard, they would count as 4" away; 3" = 5" etc. If they manage to make base contact with a guard undetected then they cound as charging and gain a bonus of +1CC for the first round. IF this succeeds, the enemy doesn't get to fight back this turn as they have been surprised. IF the attack fails, the defender has noticed them out of the corner of their eye and raises the alarm, releasing everyone from their Patrol state.


MI57 Forces:
Captain Harris (9 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Thompson, Armoured vest

M	Dex	Con	A	W	Res	Skills
5/4	3+	6/7	3	2	3+	Command

Sergeant Jones (3 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Bolt action rifle

M	Dex	Con	A	W	Res	Skills
5	4+	6	2	1	4+

Sergeant Smith (3 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Bolt action rifle

M	Dex	Con	A	W	Res	Skills
5	5+	6	2	1	4+	Accurate

Lurker forces:
The Russian guard detail is led by Serzhánt Anatol (cult leader with Thompson) and 6 soldiers with bolt action rifles. They seriously outnumber the commandos (and slightly out-point them), but they are on guard duty so cannot move to attack yet.


Setting up.
Anatol starts in his command tent with two guards outside. One guard is on the boat, two guard the bunker entrance and one guards the weapon stores. The remaining two are asleep in the bunk house

Harris and his team manage to scale the side of the boat and now need to work out the best way of approaching the bunker...

In typical sneaky commando fashion, they opt to try and sneak along the side of the boat to take out the guard on watch from the raised deck. Smith decides to duck through the wheel house as the guard is looking int he wrong direction. He has to hope that the guard doesn't turn in the wrong direction and spot him... After some careful maneuvering, Smith managed to get behind the guard and successfully took him out without a sound. 1 Guard down.


One of the guards on Anatol's tent seemed to have some inbuilt compass as to where the team was on the ship as he was staring straight at them for quite a while. If it wasn't for the fact that they were sneaking and on the ship, they would have been scuppered. Quietly they dropped from the side of the ship as soon as his back was turned and prayed that he wouldn't turn back and spot them now they were in the open.

Luck was with them and they made it to behind the command tent without being detected. They still needed to sneak down here though as Anatol was asleep on just the other side of the thin canvas wall... just as they duck into cover behind the barrels next to the text, something must have awakened Anatol as he spotted them; maybe something brushed against the wall or a twig snapped... who knows, but he is now awake and aware that something is wrong. He rushes out of the tent and alerts his guards... the game is afoot!

With the alarm raised, the commandos opened fire on the guards by the bunker door. In their haste and darkness, failed to do anything.

The Russian guards rounded the edge of the tent and opened up on the commandos, taking Sergeant Jones out of the mission with a lucky burst from the thompson. The return fire from the remaining commandos took out two of the guards.

Ducking behind cover, Anatol opened fire again with his thompson and dropped Captain Harris, leaving  Smith all on his own ineffectively firing from behind a barrel. Unfortunately barrels aren't all that great at stopping automatic fire, so he wasn't too far behind Captain Harris in meeting his doom...

It looks like the Russians get to keep their secrets for another day and the valiant agents of MI57 slowly bleed out in the snow...
 

After game actions

Recorded MI57 Kills:
Harris: 2
Smith: 1

Captain Harris now has Teratophobia (fear of all Lurkers!)
Sergeant Smith makes a full recovery
Sergeant Jones is now Hemaphobic

This isnt going well for their first outing!

---

That was Really Tense^TM while the commandos were sneaking around... and then the firefight began and everyone died... very quickly! I suspect that I need to try that again with a monster or two instead of a mob of angry Russian guards

Servants of Nyarlathotep

I can't believe I forgot to post these guys!

Infections and plagues spread across warzones. Most of the time they are entirely natural in origin, but occasionally it is something else entirely.  Nyarlathotep's servitor infection slowly twists the mind of the victims until they become cold and psychotic, devoid of all humanity. Eventually the Servitor reaches maturity and bursts forth from the body as a twisted conglomerate of claws and weeping wounds. The victim's head also becomes a giant fanged tentacle...

These servitors need to be directed by Overlords to keep them under control. The ranks of the Overlords are those individuals that evolved slightly differently to the Servitors; they retain eyes in their tentacled heads and humanoid hands able to use modern equipment. The Overlords can be seen directing hordes of Servitors across the battlefield

Cold Ones

 

Cold ones are semi-corporial shades composed of snow and ice; found only in areas of the bitterest cold these servitors stalk their prey by appearing near (or around) their chosen target and freeze them to death.

The models are from Modiphius' Acthung! Cthulhu range (again).

Cultists of the Old Gods

The next batch of Achtung! Cthulhu models to get completed are the cultists of the Old Gods

Bringing down the house

In the run up to this year's Salute, I thought I should probably build the 4Ground house I bought last year and start that terrain collection I've been promising myself for years!

It's a nice kit, I was convinced when building it that it was too small, but scaling up the measurements are about right for a small terrace house, so I stand corrected. It does need dirtying up a lot though. I mean.. look at those clean walls! There are some parts that I wish I'd painted before sticking it all together, or things I'd quite like to be built differently, but it will suffice for now. At least Qu-Sh-Ug seems to be having fun rampaging through the building.

Qu-Sh-Ug

Here we have a great big beastie from PureEvilMinuatures, a Qu-Sh-Ug. This was funded through their kickstarter last year and is not yet available through their website, sadly, as it's an awesome miniature and I want another one apparently available from the PureEvil ebay store (http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/pureevilminiatures)! You can see some great versions over on their Kickstarter page.

The kit consists of three major parts, the body and both front legs. In addition to this you get a plethora of different tentacles to customise your nasty however you wish. All of the examples had different numbers of tentacles coming out of the mouth, but I decided to be different and turned one into a tail instead as it seemed to balance out the reaching paw.

 

 

He's not a small creature either. To give you a sense of scale, here's a shot of him towering over poor Sergeant Hopkins

I havn't forgotten the snow article, it's just taking longer than expected to put together. snow bases are hard to photograph in a way you can see them clearly!

Movement on the Eastern front...

 

I've seen a number of people over on the Lead Adventure forums moaning about the Bolt Action plastics... after working on these russians and the commandos from a few weeks ago I can only assume that these gentlemen are used to one piece metals as the kits are fantastic. Ok, so some of the faces are on the podgy side and some of the detail isn't quite as sharp as the recent GW plastics in some places, but I'm very happy with their quality. 

The Russian box comes with enough parts to make 40 models. You read that right.. 40 models for less than the price of a Space Marine tactical squad. That's enough to make a 500 point Russian army list with a few figures to spare!

Speaking of GW and their plastics... I wanted to add a bit more character to this mob of Russia's finest raw recruits and make them stand out a little bit more. What could be more characterful than someone waving a big ol' banner? This flag is from the Empire State Trooper's box and I appear to have loads of them for some reason. My only regret is not taking the time to cut off the Empire arm and use a Bolt Action one instead as the scale is *slightly* off, but not noticeably so.

 

The one down side to the box is that you get quite a few soldiers laying down on the job and in an infantry platoon this just doesn't cut it, so they will have to become snipers and spotters. Originally this guy was part of a sniper team, but it soon became clear that fitting two people on one of these bases wasn't an option and one person on a transparent cavalry base just looks stupid!

Cthonian

Flowing tentacles and pulpy gray-black, elongated sack of a body...no distinguishing features at all other than the reaching, groping tentacles. Or was there—yes—a lump in the upper body of the thing...a container of sorts for the brain, basal ganglia, or whichever diseased organ governed this horror's loathsome life!
—Brian Lumley, The Burrowers Beneath

I decided I wanted my Cthonian to be a bit brighter than the pulpy grey and black of Brian Lumley's burrowing horror, but it has come out a bit more rainbow than I originally envisaged... For now it's fine, but it's a prime candidate for a repaint in the future

Hound of Tindalos

"They are lean and athirst!" he shrieked... "All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment, I cannot be certain."
— Frank Belknap Long, "The Hounds of Tindalos"
 

Over the years there have been loads of different takes on the Hounds of Tindalos. Some look like normal dogs, others skeletal, rotting dogs... others are just completely weird (which is appropriate I guess), but the Modiphius design for the hounds are, in my opinion, one of the nicest around with their angular representation. It also helps that the detail is really crisp on the models and really, really delicate. To put it into perspective, the ankles on that hound are pin thin. I was a little scared of breaking him when gluing it all together, but now he's based he seems fairly solid.