Secret Santa revealed

I'm sure I'm not supposed to, but what the heck. These got sent out to my recipient in a nice little bundle with a few other bits and bobs to make up a parcel. Hopefully they will make a useful little addition to his pulp adventures

I've also sent one of my mummies as something for them to face off against

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.

Let's clear this desert...

I thought I'd better paint at least 1 WW1 themed model this year, so what is better than T.E. Lawrence. The scheme is based upon the film, rather than real life. The few photos that I've found of the real T.E. Lawrence shows a darker jacket over the robes... but it's not quite so iconic

He'll also do well in pulp games if I ever get around to painting up some other desert-style models.

Baby gargoyle

The Judge Dredd Cultists box set includes a tiny demonic imp that I decided would be better as a tiny little gargoyle with glowing crystals.

He's a really nice little model to paint up and was surprisingly quick to do.

[Analogue] The Christmas wrapping starts here...

The painting challenge started with a bang and 20 points have now been claimed for these 4 mummies. Only another 580 points (or 116 more models this size) to reach my goal. Le sigh. As you probably recognise, these guys are from the original Heroquest box. After a bit of a cleanup and lots of hacking to remove the bases, they painted up very quickly... twice. The first time they got messed up by frosting on the varnish and the usual tricks didn't seem to work on repairing them. Ah well.

These will go nicely in the Warhammer Quest/HeroQuest/Advanced Heroquest rebuild project as well as working well with IHMN, Strange Aeons and Pulp Alley. Hows that for versatility?

The painting process is nice and simple.

They started with an all over coat of something light and creamy. Doesn't really matter what as any variation will work for dirty cotton rags. After that has dried do an all over wash of Devlan mud followed by a targeted wash of a dark brown in the really dark recesses. Once that has dried, go back and pick out some highlights on the rags with the original base coat.

The skin was a mix of flesh and a dark grey to give the desecated, mummified flesh colour as the mummies in the British museum are bordering on black thanks to the mummification process. This is washed with black and then highlighted with the original mix plus a little bit more flesh.

Last finishing touch is a very dark mossy green wash on some parts of the rags to give it that slimy, festering look. I was tempted to do some sandy weatherin powders on them too, but felt that would tie them too closely to a desert environment.

The haunter of the dark

And we return, briefly, to the plots from Lovecraft's tales and how they could be twisted to hooks for other games. When I started this, I was aiming at picking ideas that would be useful for a WW2 Cthulhu rpg setting, but as time goes on it's become obvious that these (and most of the previous ones) would also work well as ideas for other games as well. Anyway...

The Haunter of the dark

In The Haunter of the Dark, a cult based on Rhode Island use an ancient artifact, the "Shining Trapezohedron" to summon a being from the depths of time and space (your usual Lovecraft nasty). The artifact had been discovered in Egypt by Professor Enoch Bowen before his return to the US in 1844. It was used by a cult in Providence who would stare into the glowing crystal and summon an avatar of Nyarlathotep called the Haunter in the Dark. The summoned creature demanded sacrifice in return for granting knowledge of forbidden places and information.

At the end of the story Dr Dexter, our would-be hero, throws the the artifact into Narragansett Bay in the hopes that it would permanently place it into the light of day and the stars, which keeps the Haunter at bay.

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There are a number of ways we could use this, so I'll break it down into some ideas for different eras and games

For systems like In Her Majesty's Name, Pulp Alley and possibly even Dead Man's Hand if you fancied adding some oddness, you could run a number of scenarios surrounding the original story:

• A secret cult has been guarding the trapezohedron, keeping the world safe for millenia, until this group of American archeologists come along and start digging up the burial site. Can the archeologists be stopped, or will the Haunter return from the darkness?
• The artifact is on it's return journey to America, along with a number of other items, but the team need to stop off in London. A rival archeologist, cult or somesuch group decides they want something that is in the shipment and must be fought off
• Upon reaching America, the cult in Providence needs to go and find some poor souls to sacrifice. Can they kidnap enough people from the foggy streets before the police catch up to them?

For a WW2 setting we're on shakier ground with the original story as the object is deep underwater by this time. However, it could have been recovered by divers looking for a shipwreck, or there could be a companion to it that wasn't uncovered by the original excavations. This companion could now be in the hands of Black Sun, a German occult group, and it's up to the investigators to retrieve the object before their plans can be finalised.

Giant animals attack!

It's not a proper pulp style game unless you've got giant creatures attacking the heroes at every turn. While clearing out the attic I came across a bucket full of old bits from Kinder eggs, McDonalds and other unknown sources. Amongst these were to creatures that are just about the right size to use in Strange Aeons and Pulp Alley, so they got a repaint from their original plasticy colours