Wolsung Indiegogo Campaign

I have been following this Cloud-funding Campaign for a couple of weeks.



If you are interested in Steampunk and some really interesting figures and laser cut scenics I would highly recommend it!

Compared to some recent cloud funding campaigns, this one seems to be developing quite slowly. I really hope that it manages to reach it's goal!

I haven't backed this one yet, but I am planning on doing so in the next few days!

It's official, I'm actually a wargamer again!

I played my first wargame, in several years, last week!

I never really stooped wargaming, and I have had a strong need to wargame for quite some time. However, my gaming group has gone through quite a few changes over the last few years and we ended up being more of a board game group (who talked about wargaming a lot), than anything else.

I considered going along to my local wargames club (Aberdeen Wargames Club), but as my spare time is pretty much limited to one evening a week that would have meant loosing touch with the friends I game with at the moment. Anyway, we finally got our act together and settled on a system that was familiar to all of us, that we already had armies for and wouldn't tax us too hard to get back into, Warhammer 40K. Del had been playing regularly with another friend and Jeff and I both played it a lot a few years back.

So, we had decided on 40K, Del has been playing 5th edition recently, but on checking my much used rulebook it turned out to be 3rd edition. I also found a mint copy of 4th ed. ( I must have bought it about the time we stopped playing, probably read it once and then put it aside until the next game). Jeff was in a similar position, he also had a 4th edition copy. Fortunately, Ebay is your friend when it comes to older versions of 40K. Both Jeff and I managed to pick up the the smaller version (from the starter box) of the 5th edition rule book. I got mine, including the scenario book, a new set of dice, those horrid plastic rulers and the new (day-glow) templates, all for around £5!

As Jeff and I hadn't played for a long time Del offered to referee the first game and introduce us to the "new" 5th edition rules. We decided to start small and work up to some larger games. So initially we will be playing 400 point games. I fielded my Tau and Jeff brought along his Necrons.

I like my games to have a bit of narrative to them and know the terrain I planned to use I came up with the following:-

Early in the game things look quite positive for the tau!

Planet QV973alpha (Imperial Designation): Located in the quarantine zone that exists between Imperial Space and the Tau Empire. The planet was surveyed and found to be barren and uninhabited, although it was also discovered that certain geological features (crystal spires) displayed fairly severe effects on the warp around the planet! A team of scientists led by the Inquisition was despatched to investigate the nature of these "Crystal Spires". It was found that too much work around the geological formations caused heretical mutations and the research base was soon abandoned. The planet received the"Restricted" designation and was scheduled for a planet wide bombardment to erase all taint from it. However, the Imperial fleet has been busy elsewhere, and as such QV973alpha has been forgotten.

The incursion by the Imperial force did not go unnoticed!

1. The planet may be barren, but it is far from uninhabited! Hidden by thousands of years of harsh weather, a Necron tomb (Jeff's Necrons) is located on the far side of the planet and the arrival of the Imperial teams roused a small force to investigate the unwelcome intrusion...
2. An Eldar Craftworld (Del's Eldar) was not far from the planet while the Inquisition was conducting it's experiments. The Eldar felt the disturbances in the warp and sent a scouting force to investigate...
3. The Tau (my Tau) had been watching the Imperial ships as the came and went from the planet. Fairly sure that all the humans had left, the Tau sent a small ship with an advanced scouting party to see what the humans had been up to and to see if there was anything of the humans primitive technology left that could be of use for the Greater Good...

With some decent shooting the Kroot could easily take out those metal aberrations...

You'd think the Kroot had the upper hand here wouldn't you...

The idea was to have two games over the evening. The first would have two opposing forces rushing to take and hold the base. The second game would have the winner of the first game trying to hold the base while Del's Eldar tried to take it from them...

Who is that coming through between the buildings?

We can take them! Not with shooting like that you can't...

Jeff contemplates a rules question...

As it turned out we didn't get enough time to play the second game, but the first helped us all get back into the rules without too much mishap. The game went fairly well (at least from Jeff's point of view). I made a couple of serious tactical errors early in the game and then suffered some appallingly bad dice rolling, which led to my small Tau recon force being completely wiped out.  As it turned out, sending the Tau up against another shooty army that was in many ways more resilient than them, and also putting quite a lot of cover on the table definitely went against me...

We haven't got another game for a couple of weeks, but we will be returning to 40K. I imagine the Necrons will be squaring up against the Eldar next time. We will possibly increase the army size to 600point as well, so that we may get some vehicles on the table.

Warhammer 40K: Time to Revisit an Old Friend!

I used to play 40K on a regular basis for a good few years, both with my gaming group and also at the local GW shop (Aberdeen UK). I even entered a couple of the Games Day tournaments that were held in Edinburgh although I am not really that competitive, I just did it for the fun of meeting other gamers.  However, when my sons came along my gaming time was reduced and our gaming group moved on to other games and genres etc. so I haven’t really looked at the game since then. We are talking 4th edition here, by the way.

I originally had a large Eldar army, an Imperial Army (yes pre-IG, still love those figures) army, I also had a Khorne Chaos army for a while, and I have enough Dark Eldar (from the original release) to build a sizable army. My Eldar army faded in my interests and with the launch of the Tau I was really attracted to the Kroot, they looked suitably alien, and savage, without the brute stupidity of the Orks! I built up quite a large Tau army, and was on my way to building a Kroot Mercenary army too. A friend gave me his Tau army as well, so I probably have enough for an Apocalypse game, although it is unlikely I will go down that route. When I stopped playing I stored my Tau and Kroot away and I have occasionally had a look at them just to stir some memories.

One of my gaming group friends has been playing 40K recently (with a guy who is not in our group). His tales of the developing campaign have rekindled my interest to some extent, and now with the arrival of 6th edition that has also attracted me back to the game. Initially I am concentrating on filling out a few missing units from my Tau army, some of the newer models weren't out when I last played with the Tau. I have picked up three Piranha flyers, a couple of units of the XV25 Stealth teams and the Firewarriors with Railguns. I will be tracking down a Sniper Drone team in the near future too.

Digging through my existing collection of Tau I found a scratchbuilt/kit-bashed chariot that I built as a scenic base for my Ethereal. I believe that the new 6th Edition has brought back chariots (as well as some other vehicles) so I might actually be able to find some rules for it now too.

I will be getting back on track with my Kroot Mercenary army. It is unsupported, but it is so much fun converting it and putting it together! At least there is an army list available from the Kompletely Kroot forum, so I should be able to use them at least in my own gaming group! For my Kroot army I have several units of standard Kroot, a couple of Kroot Ox, and all the Shapers that have been released. I have also cast up some wings to convert a unit to flying. I also have a couple of the Forgeworld Knarlox models. The units I will probably work on first though are a couple of units of Kroot Cavalry. I bought the GW conversion kit, to turn Cold Ones into Kroot riding beasts, and have already put those together. However I don’t feel that they look like fast moving cavalry, so I came up with a plan to use the older Chaos Daemonettes steeds with some modification.

I cut the daemonettes off of their steeds, then cut the heads off of the steeds. I replaced their heads with Kroot Hound heads (which turned out to be a perfect size for the steeds) and also added the Kroot Hounds “Dreadlocks” onto the steeds necks. To hide the area where I removed the daemonettes I built up a quilted saddle and then mounted the Kroot rider on top. These conversions work out fairly expensive, when you include the Daemonette on Steed, the Kroot Hound and a basic Kroot figure, but the effect certainly looks sleek and fast, which is what I wanted to achieve. I have only put three together so far, but I have the parts ready for several more so these are going to take priority over the next few weeks…

I am not sure if I will actually pick up W40K 6th Ed. just yet. My friends are still happy using either 4th or 5th Ed. I will have to see how much I get back into it before deciding that one. Also a new Tau Codex would probably help me decide to upgrade to 6th Ed…

History Channel: Where's the history?

Time for a bit of a rant!

I have been a regular viewer of the History Channel (in the UK) for a good few years, but just recently I have noticed I haven't been watching it much recently. I finally realised when I picked up a TV guide last night and had a quick scan of the listings...

Have a quick scan through that and tell me just how many shows actually have anything to do with history? Directly, I can only see one (The Last Days of World War Two at 1pm. I suppose you could class American Pickers (a US version of Cash In The Attic I think) as related to history in some vague way, but everything else is a "fly on the wall" documentary (in other words cheap TV). On top of that, there are only about five distinct shows on, most of the day is taken up with different versions of the same shows. Really has the History Channel got nothing better to do than run the same thing over and over again...

A quick scan through the Discovery History lineup (directly below the HC listing on the same page) shows an interesting mix of historical documentaries.

I get pretty disappointed when Syfy resorts to showing pseudo-documentaries about UFOs and Crypto-zoology (SyFyUK at least doesn't have the wrestling that I have heard the US version does).  At least you can have a laugh at the documentaries on SyFy! I wish they would stop showing cheap horror movies too, it is supposed to be a sci-fi channel not the Horror Channel.

Come on History Channel get your act together and start showing history based programming instead of this cheap fly on the wall rubbish!

Painting Update

I never seem to get enough time to paint figures. This year I have hardly painted any. However, after hearing about the theft (from the back of a van) of most Ainsty Castings stock, which unfortunately also included Rogue Miniatures professionally painted display miniatures, several members of the Frother’s Unite forum got together and offered to paint some new display miniatures for Rogue/Ainsty. As I had bought a few bits and pieces from Ainsty at a show earlier in the year and I have plans to get some more, I felt I wanted to join in.

The figures I chose arrived very promptly and I turned them around in a couple of evenings, definitely faster than my usual painting speed! I am pretty pleased with the result.

I would recommend that everyone checks out both Ainsty Castings and Rogue Miniatures, they produce some excellent and very useful figures and scenic accessories!

Once I had finished and sent them off it got me wondering what I would paint next. This shouldn’t have been much of a problem as I have several half painted projects on the go. I soon settled on painting the next batch of Critical Mass Games ARC Fleet figures and vehicles, more about them as they progress…

Jabbergluck(?) and other stuff…

 

I seem to have been very busy with lots of different things over the past few months but I haven’t actually produced much that I can talk about here on the blog. I have been trying to get my head around some vector graphics design software (Serif DrawPlus X5) for a project that I am working on with Sholto Humphries of Scheltrum Miniatures, however, I can’t really talk about that yet.

My day job is very chaotic, without producing much, as we totally rebuild the workshop. At the moment I am working out of (not much more than) a cupboard. The good news is that once the building work is done the workshop will be a fair bit bigger and that should be completed just in time for the arrival of some new CAD/CAM machinery, a CNC Router, 3D milling machine and a 3D Printer. This means I an presently investigating training for these machines and ,once again, am not getting very much completed work done.

Looking at figure sculpting, I have had a pretty quiet year (to busy in other directions), I completed a commission in early April, more about that further on. Then started work on a personal project that would involve a 54mm figure in modern clothes in a very simple pose. It is a challenge to pull of a simple modern figure and achieve a really satisfactory result. I made up the armature and started bulking out the figure but that is about as far as I got with it. I am hoping to get back to it in the next couple of months. I also decided to take part in the Hasslefree Miniatures Sculpting Competition which is currently running. I have the design pretty much set, but again haven’t progressed very far with the actual sculpting just yet…

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So what can I show you? Oh yes, the commission I completed in April!

I sculpted a convention figure for the KantCon 2012 convention which was held in Kansas City at the beginning of this month (August 2012). KantCon has been using the Jabbergluck as their mascot for a number of years and I was given the job of realising a 3D version based on the drawing by artist Jay Carter. Jay had not designed a miniature before but did an excellent job of developing a figure design that would translate well into 3D and survive the mould-making and casting process. This was the final design that I received for the job:-

The first thing I did was print it out with the sized version in the top corner so I could get a feel for the actual size of the figure. The commission stated that the figure should be approximately 40mm high, now taking this as being the height of the figure if it stood erect (or as it happens the overall height of the sculpt in the pose given in the drawing) this would qualify as a small troll, or very large Orc.

As I say Jay did a great job of designing for the manufacturing process, especially as he had never done so before and he only had an email (a fairly long one admittedly) from me explaining the problems with figure design for manufacture.There were a few things that had to be tweaked, but nothing insurmountable!

I sent regular photos of the progress to the crew at KanCon for approval and the sculpt went very well, with only a few minor revisions along the way.

These photos show the virtually finished figure. The company that was casting the figure for KantCon did ask for a few changes, the removal of the head being the main one. So, the final sculpt that was shipped off to Kansas looked like this:-

I am waiting for some sample casting to arrive at the moment.

Infamy Miniatures

There have been a rash of companies jumping on to the crowd fundraising bandwagon recently. With several wildly successful campaigns, CoolMiniorNot with it’s Zombieside board game, CMON again and Studio McVey with Sedition Wars board game and Mantic with their Kings of War board game, to name a few.

However, I would like to highlight a more humble project that has also reached it’s basic funding threshold and is stretching out into further rewards to subscribers. Infamy Miniatures came to my attention several months back with the release of their steampunk themed twisted visions of Dr Jekyll and Sherlock Holmes. Both of which were immediately added to my want list (although I didn’t buy them straightaway due to other commitments at the time).

I recently discovered that Infamy were expanding their range with a Dr Watson figure, the companion piece for Holmes. This Watson figure would be crowd funded via the Indiegogo site, One of the pledge levels offered both the Watson figure and two other figures from the Infamy range; a perfect time for me to get Holmes and Jekyll then…

The fundraiser has gone from strength to strength, making 3 times the original goal so far, still with 18 days to go.

I would suggest that anyone with a interest in steampunk figures, or simply beautifully sculpted diorama pieces checks it out:-

http://www.indiegogo.com/infamy-watson

As the initial goal has been well and truly passed extra incentives and rewards have been added, the latest being a scenic base for those that contribute $58 or more. Also the next figure in the range (Edwina Hyde, companion piece to Jekyll)  has been considerably accelerated (and I hope it may make it into the rewards scheme as well, in some form).