I’ve been busy trying to get through the remaining miniatures needed for the 100 target I have in the 1 Million Miniatures challenge. I left the last post at 36, and with just over a month left I needed a bit of a speed boost. Luckily for me I found 29 of the most speed paintable miniatures: Ghouls!
So why are they so speed paintable? Well they’re mostly organic materials, which lend themselves really well to airbrushing and washing, which are two elements that help you get far fast. On top of that, they’re mostly one organic material: skin!
To get these done fast, I leveraged my airbrush to get a terracotta colour base coat, followed by a dead flesh zenithal (from above) spray. I then picked out bones, fur, leather, stone, using contrast paints, and painted over the metal areas.
Airbrushed and contrasted!
I then airbrushed some acrylic floor polish all over them (an old military modelling trick – basically a cheap way to get gloss varnish). Once that was dry (helped along with a hair dryer), I did an all over oil wash with a mix of terracotta, magenta, brown, and a blueish grey to get a brownish purple with some red accents. Again I helped it along with a hair dryer before wiping the oil off the raised areas with some makeup sponges. I then applied some texture paste and grass clumps to the bases and left everything to dry/cure overnight.
Washed and Based!
The next morning I did a brown acrylic wash over the bases, painted the base rims, airbrushed on some matt varnish and painted on some blood effects on their mouths and hands. Overall painting time was approximately 4h split over the two sessions ~2.5 hours before the overnight drying session, and an hour or so for the final touches. So nice and quick for 29 models!
I quite like this kind of painting, it’s quite cathartic to just glob oil paint all over your models knowing you can clean them up after. There’s not too many models you can do this to however. I did do something similar in the past with acrylic washes for the Goblin Town models, but I think I like the oil route better, it’s more controllable and the extended drying time is actually really helpful when doing so many models.
I also tried out my new Dark Eldar scheme on some Wyches:
They’re probably a little rough for my liking, so I might take my time a bit more on the next batch, but they still look nice at table level.
Anyway that adds a nice 34 extra miniatures to my tally, taking me up to 70 total which is a much more comfortable place to be with little over a month to go in the challenge. Let’s see what catches my fancy next!
Back in December last year, Games Workshop announced their 1 Million miniatures challenge, which has people pledging in their local Warhammer stores to paint 25, 50, or 100 miniatures between January and early May. I figured that would be a fun thing to do so I duly pledged I’d do 100 miniatures thinking that would be a piece of cake (foolish!). I had this great idea that this would serve as a good excuse to paint my Tomb Kings starter set which has 90+ miniatures in it, and skeletons being relatively easy to paint that would be that.
Trouble was, building 90+ skeletons in one shot is actually quite boring, and I quickly found my enthusiasm dwindled to pretty much nothing. Which left me in early-march with just the last two post’s worth of miniatures done for the challenge: the Flagellants and the Amazon Blood Bowl Team, totalling 20 miniatures. Suddenly to make the 100 by May 9th I needed to paint something like 1.3 models a day.
So I switched tack to the methodology that gets me painting the most: abandon all plans and paint whatever I feel like at the time. Hence this post which shows of the eclectic result of the whatever I feel like strategy, but in so doing adds another 16 models to the tally. I’ll show them off in painting order.
First up we have these wacky Goblin Squid Herders and their charges, three mean-looking Squigs!
These models are very fun, and were great to paint. I really enjoyed doing the patterns on the Squig bellies, and felt they were necessary to break up what would otherwise have just been angry red balls with legs!
Next up we have this unit of Empire Knights converted and painted to be of the order of Knights Panther.
I made the cloaks and other fur applications from greenstuff which was good practice (but also really slow, bad idea when trying to paint 100 miniatures, whatever I feel like isn’t always efficient). The paint job on these was quick, although I spent a bit of time on the furs as the signature element of these models. This mostly involved creating the gradient from yellowy-brown to cream on the furs before painting on the spots using dark brown contrast paint.
Finally we’re staying with animal patterns but in a much more synthetic setting with the last entry in this post: some Dark Eldar warriors with a wild (pun intended) colour scheme. I’ll go more in depth on the influences for this scheme in another post hopefully, but long story short I saw some very cool, extremely 80s, Eldar colour schemes in the 1st edition Warhammer 40,000 rulebook and went from there. Some of the tiger stripes are a bit wonky, but I got better as I went along and learned what worked and what didn’t. The scheme is surprisingly fast to paint, mainly because most of the armour is black and I find I can do that black with blue-ish edge highlight look pretty quickly (don’t look too close at those highlights thanks).
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the mix of models that made the cut for things I felt like painting in the last few weeks! This is a bit of a microcosm for how I approach this hobby and why if you’ve followed this blog for a bit you’ll have noticed me jumping from project to project all the time. I value the fun I get out of this hobby more than anything else and that means I’m always trying to paint what inspires me. I like to think of it as striking while the iron is hot on an idea.
That might mean I get excited on a project for a few months then stop when I get excited about something else. This might seem unproductive, but at the end of the day I find even if I park a project for a bit, inspiration will come back at some stage and that is the time to resume it. If I push through when I’m not inspired anymore I’ll a) not enjoy myself and b) get a worse result, both of which are things I like to avoid. Anyway that’s enough yammering, I have 64 more models to paint!
I’ve taken a slight detour through the screaming crowds of Blood Bowl fans over the last couple of weeks, as my gaming group decided to get ready for some games of Blood Bowl after the release of the latest edition of the rules. I’ve always enjoyed Blood Bowl, so I did not take much convincing and found myself assembling a freshly unsealed box of Amazons soon after.
I’d sort of kept an eye on Blood Bowl models over the last few years, and was always pretty impressed with the sculpts. Now I’ve put a modern team together and painted it I can say they stand up to that initial impression. They’re great models, with a nice amount of detail (but not so much they’re tedious to paint, which is a great balance).
The specialist players.The specialist players from the back.
I went for a gold and purple colour scheme for no other reason than I found it pleasing to the eye. The yellow and red feathers were inspired by the artwork for the Magic: The Gathering set Ixalan which has these really cool yellow/red/purple feathered dinosaurs all through it.
The lineswomen.The lineswomen from the back.
The numbers are from the transfer sheet that came with the set. They also had transfers for the base rims to indicate the player positions (e.g. blitzer etc.) which I’m sure is practical but I didn’t really like the look of that so I avoided them.
I look forward to playing some games with them, it’s been ages since I’ve played tabletop Blood Bowl (I’ve played a bit of the video games in the intervening years). Amazons were very fun to play back in the day and I hope that still holds.
I wanted to show a photo of my setup for batch painting after a discussion with Jeff over at https://kuribospainting.com on holders for miniatures in the last post‘s comments.
As you can see I tack on the models to some bits of branch I’ve cut up into ~4cm cylinders. I find these quite comfortable to hold and they have a nice bit of weight to them (they’re eucalyptus, so quite dense) which means the models don’t topple over. I prime the models like this and don’t take them off till I go paint the base rims. Having one per model is quite practical. You can also see some of the markers and the balls which I didn’t paint yet, I’ll get to them at a later date!
For the second instalment of From the shelves I have Fate Core from 2013.
Fate is a really interesting system that has clearly influenced a lot of later roleplaying games. I’ve played a decent amount of it over the years (although mostly an earlier version, which was part of the Dresden Files roleplaying game). As I mentioned earlier this book is from 2013 and represented a refreshed version of Fate. I’d actually never read it, so it’s been sitting on my shelves unread for 10 or so years. One good outcome of this series is that I’ve finally read through it.
The core concept of Fate is the Aspect system. The way that works is characters, antagonists, locations, basically anything in the game works have aspects, which are short descriptive sentences. These sentences can be used in the game to change what is happening by spending a resource called fate points. For example a player with a character with the aspect “Avid wargamer” could spend a fate point to get a bonus to a roll to do with statistics (this is called invoking an aspect), the player justifying this because their character is very familiar with probabilities. This works for locations too, if a location is “dimly lit”, the player could spend a fate point to get a bonus to hiding. The games master can also use these aspects to make the player’s life difficult (called a compel), for example by making the “Avid wargamer” fail to resist going into a games store when they’re meant to be meeting a friend somewhere else. When the GM does this, they offer the player a fate point which they can spend later for a positive bonus. This whole aspect system is very cool and makes the game really character driven.
There are quite a few other systems to the game but I’m focusing on aspects because I think they’re an interesting mechanic that I’d like to leverage in wargames. It would be quite easy to give aspects to units on the battlefield (e.g. “Bodyguard to the King”, “Want to prove themselves”, “Fled in the last battle”) and give players a pool of fate points they can use to invoke the aspects of their own troops for bonuses, or compel their opponent’s troops to do something negative, but passing a fate point to the opposition in so doing. I think it would be great fun for more narrative games.
From a book writing perspective, I think this is a really well laid out book, with an abundance of clarifications for the reader. The pages above are a good representation of the style of the book, with a rules section (left page), a play example (right page, italics), and where appropriate an example of what the rule looks like on the character sheet. You also have these dark tabs on the edges of the pages that make it really easy to find sections by quickly flicking through the book.
Overall I’m impressed with the book, and really like what the game is doing. In practice my group has struggled with Fate, the system as a whole just doesn’t quite work for us and that’s why we stopped playing it. However it is packed with great ideas and I’ve re-used plenty of them throughout the years and plan on doing so plenty more in the future. Fate has also clearly had an impact on many later roleplaying games, and I find Fate mechanics or ideas all the time when reading/playing other roleplaying games.
As I mentioned last post, I hadn’t done too much painting over the Christmas break, but I decided this week to break that negative streak and get back into it! The best way to do that was to pick an easy project and that meant finishing this next batch of Flagellants.
These will fight alongside the last batch, most likely in games of Midgard – hence the two sets of 8 models which make up a base each.
There’s not too much to discuss painting-wise, these are your bog standard doom saying, apocalypse preaching, world is ending types, in their usual accoutrements: brown and black rags! I tried to break up the mass of rags with some different shades of brown (I think I have 3 all up), as well as the aforementioned black sections. The fire was fun to paint, with some wet blended yellows and oranges over an off-white base coat.
If you remember my last post, I discussed creating a space in my posts to talk through books from my gaming bookshelf, partly to remind myself of old favourites, but mostly to motivate me to crack open those that have sat unread for many years. I’m a little bit undecided if these should be standalone posts or be part of “regular” posts (as I’ve done here; open to opinions if you have any!). Anyway, here’s my first shot at a segment I decided to call From the Shelves.
For the inaugural From the Shelves segment, I decided to pick out a book that has some nice thematic parallels to the flagellants above: Mörk Borg. Mörk Borg is a rules-light roleplaying game that sort of blurs the line between art project and game, with some pretty wild graphic design that looks like nothing else I’ve ever read.
I’ve had my eye on this book for quite a while (it was originally released in 2020), but I only picked it up in December last year, as my gaming group started talking about running short games instead of long campaigns as our default way to play RPGs. The book is pretty short (80 something pages, most of which are pretty light on text) and the rules are very simple (~8 pages of the book are the actual rules of the game). There’s a few pages on the setting (the world is about to end, and things are generally pretty grim; maybe the flagellants are right!), then character creation rules which are mostly dice driven (i.e. result in pretty random characters), this is followed by the main game rules, some optional classes, a bestiary, and an introductory adventure. All in all a pretty complete game given the small format.
The game itself is a simplified fantasy adventure system, in the OSR genre (i.e. tries to capture some of the nature of early RPGs), but has its own voice rather than being a classic Dungeons and Dragons reproduction. While the universe at first glance is extremely grim, there is a tongue in cheek feel to the whole book which reminds me of early Warhammer fantasy/40k publications. This in some ways is so over the top it’s impossible to take it too seriously and I’m sure this ridiculousness will lead to some great moments at the gaming table.
One of the more unusual weapons tables I’ve seen!
The crazy graphic design is pretty interesting, on the one hand it does a great job of communicating the feel of the game, but possibly more importantly it does a good job of making different sections easy to find. I read an article on this book that discussed that as each page looks different, you end up using the art/text as a landmark when flicking through the book, and I very much agree with that. The book also has the index on the rear inside cover which is a genius move that makes it very easy to consult at a moment’s notice.
Looking for rules on hit points? Just find the page with the big heart!
Overall the book is a fun read and I really look forward to running games of it. It has a great amount of support out there from 3rd party publishers due to its permissive license model, so it’s hard to run out of pre-prepared content. It even has a in-universe 3rd-party miniature skirmish game called Forbidden Psalm which I’ll have to check out some day!
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this quick look into this book, I’ve definitely enjoyed reading it and now I’m going to go try to convince my friends to play the game.
Over the Christmas break I reconnected with one of my favourite pastimes: reading roleplaying game books (hence me posting something painting-related just once over two weeks of mostly free time!). I have a regular gaming group with which I play roleplaying games (and the occasional wargame!), and we play quite a few different games, but my gaming bookshelf is filled with games I’ve never played (and in some cases never read). I’d like to turn that around to some extent, and use the blog to motivate me to read through these books and write up my thoughts around them (More on that later!).
What I immediately got out of my readings however is a furthering of my appreciation of narrative gaming (as opposed to competitive gaming), and/or rules light games. I’m saying and/or because I see quite a bit of overlap between the two. While narrative games aren’t always rules light, both narrative games and rules light games expect players to come up with rules for their games, which is very different to competitive games where rules are expected to be provided.
This personal shift is something that’s been happening quite a bit over the last year, you’ve seen me take to Midgard over Warhammer and other historical and fantastical rulesets, Chain of Command over Bolt Action, explore narrative solo gaming with The Silver Bayonet and dip my toes into rules writing with my own rules-light skirmish game Masse d’Armes. This was a very wargames focussed transition, but this Christmas reading got me effectively in the same place for roleplaying games.
Neither is rules-light as such, but they are lighter rules than many other similar wargames, and both have a definite narrative bent.
I’m enjoying lighter rules in games for a few reasons. First of all, my time is more limited now than when I was younger, therefore my ability to a) play games, and b) read a massive rulebook front to back is much more limited than it used to be. I also more importantly have had a bit of an attitude shift to gaming itself, moving from a mindset of doing well in a game, playing to win etc. to enjoying the stories that emerge from these games. Looking back on 20+ years of wargaming, I don’t remember many of my victories (maybe not many to remember hah!), but I do remember plenty of fun moments in games where a lone soldier took down some chaos monstrosity, or when a unit of puny Skaven clan rats routed a mighty dragon.
The Silver Bayonet’s light rules had a lot of influence on my own attempt at writing rules.
More competitive play-styles tend to rely on tight rulesets, which cater to (or try to) all situations that can arise in games – and therefore lead to big rulebooks. This style of game aims for game balance and fairness. In wargames of this style this means that players can assemble their armies and expect a game where in theory the best general can walk away with the victory. In roleplaying games, while not competitive as such, this tendency to aim for game balance as well as fairness is also present, with games trying to make sure all players are roughly the same power level and therefore able to have the same amount of fun. Games in this vein tend to have rules covering all kinds of situations so that the game master needs to make as few rulings as possible during games – keeping things fair.
This competitive play style is very common in wargames because it means you can build your army to a common ruleset and play games against anyone else that has also followed those rules. It allows tournaments to be played, but also allows for random pickup games at clubs. This shared rules phenomena is also present in roleplaying games, with games organised at stores and conventions following rules familiar to players that may not know each other before the game. This is the style of games I played for most of my gaming life, whether it be Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons. If a query came up, I expected to be able to pick up a rulebook and find out how to resolve it (or failing that go look at FAQs online).
Mythic Bastionland’s main rules fit on a handful of pages, so do Mörk Borg’s.
Rules-light games on the other hand expect that situations will arise that will not be covered by the rules and therefore need some adjudicating during play. This is not a bug, it’s a feature. There is a movement in the roleplaying space called the OSR (Old School Renaissance/Revolution) which calls back to some glorious past vision of roleplaying in the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure things were that rosy, but I have to say the ethos that’s come out of that movement definitely resonates with me. One of the mantras I hear in this space is “Rulings not rules” which touches on that exact point: the rules provide a framework, the players (the game master mostly) are expected to fill in the gaps as they arise.
CBR+PNK’s rules are literally a pamphlet, and Mothership fits in a few zine-style booklets.
This sounds like more work, but in practice I really like it – I would much rather make a call on rules in the moment than try to find the relevant rule in a book. It’s probably not any faster, but it creates a shift in focus: instead of thinking about how to play the rules, you start thinking about how to play the situation in the game. For example, say a unit retreats into a dangerous magical swamp. A comprehensive set of rules might say they take d6 hits and how to resolve them. A more rules-light game might not, and the players will have to decide what this swamp does. Maybe this is a necromantic swamp filled with the dead dragging the living down and therefore some agility or initiative test might be in order to avoid being drowned. Perhaps the players land on the same rules they would have been given by a more comprehensive ruleset, but at least they’ve thought about what is happening in the imagined world.
Clearly I’m enjoying this shift, so what took me so long? Well I was always worried about this game balance and fairness aspect. For me, house rules were never going to be as tested as “proper” rules, and therefore would lead to unfair and consequently unfun games. I’ve now come to the decision that fairness is overrated in these games we play, and we’re much more likely to have a good time if we don’t worry so much about what is fair, and rather focus on what is unfolding in the game. The price of this is that it might be hard for me to find people that want to play games the way I do at a club or store. Luckily for me I have some friends that enjoy this play style, and we’re having a great time. This right there might be the reason you prefer one style of game over another, and that’s just fine – do what works for you!
To get back to that sentence right at the top on how I want to use the blog to motivate me to read through my book pile of shame, I’ve decided to try something along the lines of a series of posts dedicated to books. For these I would pick a book off my bookshelf, read through it and write down my thoughts. Not really as a review, more like reading notes. It would likely be a mix of wargames books and roleplaying books, which given this blog is 99% about wargaming might be a bit of a change but hopefully those of you that aren’t into roleplaying might find the posts interesting if only from your familiarity with rulebooks!
Anyway I hope my digression into games rules was interesting to read, let me know in the comments what you think about all this!
Lair of the Lagomorph 