I’m really digging this color scheme: I kind of want to see what it’ll look like on a mech or something.
Maybe I’ll pick up a Merc TAG or something and try to do it up enough for Historicon/NOVA.
It’s my not-grey grey that I use on A7Vs, Averland Sunset, and Ushabti Bone.
(Also, I’m posting through the WordPress app for the second time. Hoping that gets me posting here more.)
Three day weekend I hadn’t been expecting, so I’m painting. This is what I’m working on at the moment:
A bunch of Warsenal Taugak bases for my Combined Army minis, as well as some Jaguars and Intruders.
Infinity, in other words.
Just a quick note because this is something I talk about occasionally, but have a hard time putting good words around. This morning, I saw this photo from Breakthrough Assault’s post about Corrivalry:
This: this is what I’m talking about. I really like the WWI version of Flames of War. When I flip through the FoW rulebook, the stuff I see looks cool. I like the idea of playing WWII Flames of War.
But then, at the game store, I look over at people playing it, and I see the above. That’s a parking lot of a dozen tanks, just parked like they’re at the mall, arm-in- arm, stopped inches away from as many or more artillery pieces, just hangin’ out. This doesn’t look like fun to me, and it doesn’t look historical.
Anyway, not trying to shit on the game; just pointing to what, exactly, sticks it for me.
I’ve been pretty self-satisfied about my faces lately, so I figured I’d knock out a quick walkthrough of how I paint Caucasian faces while wrapping up my Blood & Plunder minis over the weekend.
I did have a couple of issues putting this together:
It’s kinda hard to tell the difference with some of these steps (which is why I accidentally deleted some of them), which is why I’ve supplemented the mini photos with a photoshopped face (source for the original image). I’ve kept the strokes rough because I’m just paintin’ with a mouse, but also because frankly on a 28mm figure, that’s what brushstrokes are actually going to look like.
I normally basecoat grey or, more recently, black with white zenithal highlights. This was a spur of the moment thing, so I ended up just basecoating white. Won’t matter much.
Paint everything GW Bugman’s Glow.
When dry, paint everything GW Cadian Fleshtone.
The goal is Cadian Fleshtone, but the coverage with it is poor enough that it’s just simpler to basecoat with the base paint.
Block in shapes with GW Kislev Flesh. Get the nose, eyebrows, cheeks, chin and jawline, lips, forehead, ears.
Wash the whole thing with GW Reikland Fleshshade.
Now’s the time to be precise. Pick out details with a fine-tipped brush and GW Kislev Flesh. Target the nose, chin, eyebrows, lower lip, ear tops and lobes, and the tops of the cheekbones.
(Of course I kept all of these.)
With as fine a brush as you can manage, fill in the eyes with GW Rhinox Hide. I’ve seen other people do this with black, but I think it’s too strong: you want to draw attention to the eyes, but you don’t want your figure wearing mascara (unless you do).
Go over the brown ovals with P3 Menoth White Highlight. I prefer this because it’s a bright ivory… but it’s not actually white. Leave some brown around the edges, though, to help the eye stand out.
If you screw up: just go back and touch up with more Rhinox Hide.
Take a pointed toothpick. Sharpen the point. Dab it into the GW Rhinox Hide you used above. Wipe off the excess. Pick a direction and poke it into the eyes. I used to do straight-ahead, but it’s just easier to do the eyes looking off to the side and maybe more dynamic? I’m using brown here because, again, I think black is too strong.
I did blue on the Frostgrave Barbarians last month, and thought it was really effective. I might pursue this: do color, do the dot larger, and then maybe go in with a black dot as a pupile.
Mix about 50:50 GW Wazdaka Red : GW Emperor’s Children: looking for a nice rose color here.
UPDATE: GW Volupous Pink is the way to go here!
Then thin that sucker out with a lot of water and a drop or two of matte medium, until it’s at about this level of transparency:
Better to be too thin and require multiple passes than not thin enough and ruin everything. If you need to do multiple passes: just make sure it’s dry before the next one.
Carefully apply it to the cheeks and tip of the nose. Maybe the ears if you feel like it.
Take some GW Dark Reaper, and thin it out as much as you did the rose.
UPDATE: GW Gryph-Charger Grey is the way to go now!
Now apply it to the beard area. In this example, I think I went too dark: you can do that, but I’m generally not trying to do stubble, just to give some color to the face.
Finish painting the other details on the head. Teeth, if you can see ’em. I like to draw a little line of GW Agrax Earthshade between the lips (if the mouth is closed) or just in the mouth (if it’s open).
Here are a couple of practice heads I’ve been working with.
And some Frostgrave faces I think came out well and photographed OK. This is where this approach has really clicked for me.
Hopefully this helps someone out.
The confluence of two holidays prompted me to take the days in between off: giving me a staycation and the quiet downtime I’ve needed for months.
Of course, me staying home and barely leaving the house means that this is the real winner:
Down time meant painting time. I’d lost my momentum after burning through getting everything ready for Black Ops. I’ve started a bunch of Pike & Shotte minis… but took on too many at once and stalled out.
A palette cleanser was called for.
First, I finished off some half-done Mantic sci-fi zombies. These are nothing to get excited about. The models are adequate. The paintjob no better.
The right sized project to take on when needing Something Different: a Frostgrave warband. Over the first few days, I built my baseline set of models from the Barbarian kit, then ordered an appropriate Wizard and Apprentice from Red Box Games. I’d forgotten how charming and characterful those models are: I need to order a few more and give them some real attention.
Then, bam: just ground out a Frostgrave warband, like you do.
While I was at it, I knocked out the tokens that came with the Barbarians, as well as some rats (War Dogs) and a Raven) I’d based for my Cultists a while back.
A good use of some much needed quiet time.
I don’t have to tell you that 2016 was, as years go, a murderous sack of crap. I’m trying to focus on the positive, though, and fortunately: there was a fair amount of positive things I can look back on.
2016 wasn’t as stressful as 2015: but there was a moment there in the middle, when I made a major career change. A couple strands of grey in my beard became an inch-thick band of white in my beard while working through whether or not I should make it: not exaggerating at all. I’m still settling in at the new job (ie: hanging on by my fingernails) but so far it feels like the worst is over.
Clearly, I peaked early (with the Flames of War bases), but kept up a solid, excellent pace, and finished 2016 having done more than any previous year.
I also managed to paint more actual models this year than any previous year.
I think I can, unquestionably, thank 15mm and 1/72 models for this.
This is also the first full year I was able track all of my model purchases against my model painting achievements (I’d tried it a few years ago, and failed within weeks). This practice was intended to help me throttle down on buying more crap than I painted by making me aware of how much was coming in vs. going out.
Basically: I’d log how much I’d spend on minis as a positive, then log the MSRP of the minis as a negative (this last part was to cover minis that have been sitting around in my closet, for which I don’t have a record of how much I paid… also to encourage me to get things at less than MSRP). Selling minis (not something I’m especially good at) would also be tracked as a negative. The goal being to get that balance to be zero or even a little negative.
Whoops. Selling my old NIB copy of Mordheim in October and then painting up a metric ton of Deadzone terrain blew my Δ to over a grand ahead of where I wanted to be. That difference is so great as to be unhelpful (by the “keep that number negative” rule I could run out and buy a Forgeworld army and still be good; obviously no good), but the constant awareness of in vs. out was very helpful to me.
Now that I’ve kept it up for a year, I think I’ll be able to persist it into 2017.
Not really sure what else I want to do next year. I’d like to keep up the momentum of tackling small, manageable projects and finishing them. In the immediate term: I’d like to experiment with some other Wrath of Kings forces to see if one better fits my playstyle. I’ve got some friends I don’t really wargame with that like Heroes of Normandie: it’d be nice to play that with them. I’ve got Zombicide: Black Plague sitting in my closet, still unplayed. I’d like to expand my ability to run 40K Black Ops with more diverse forces.
Finally got around to finishing Demogorgon. No, no hyena heads. This is the other one. Nothing amazing, but I like the blunt color scheme.
I also finished a couple final Frostgrave Cultists a while back (back when I finished my first batch of cultists for Black Ops) and neglected to photograph them. I love those grotty Cultist faces.
Although a bajillion other scenarios have popped off (Stormtroopers assaulting a Kroot encampment! Cultists infiltrating a Militarum base! Goddamn Space Marine! Just one!), my initial plan was to do Stormtroopers vs. Cultists.
I got a bunch of cultists back in the Dark Vengeance box and, even when I traded away the rest of the Chaos models, I hung onto them because they’re cool and they’re the sort of model I’d like to have around painted. Obviously, it took me a bit to get to them.
They’re definitely Chaos-y, but maybe not so specific I can’t use them for whatever.
I was really excited about painting up some Stormtroopers. I’ve been into the models since they came out, but haven’t had an excuse to paint them up. Because they’re supposed to be stealthy, I used the same paint scheme for them that I used on the Deadzone Pathfinders I painted up a few months ago, and I’m nuts for it. It’s black without being black, which is always the problem with painting things black, you know?
I also used some of the Mantic Peacekeeper shields because, well, I thought they deserved some riot shields.
First off: some links:
As I said yesterday, I wanted to be able to run Black Ops-style scenarios (elite specialists assaulting a position held by less elite bad guys via stealth) in the 40K universe. I wanted the attackers to go in ignorant about the force they’d be facing: in both general and particular.
Go ahead and open one of those up and and either read through them or follow along with them as I ramble through my thought processes.
So my goals were to:
The expectation was to run the game as a GM’d, convention-style game. The hope would be that players would address the game creatively and with initiative… and that I wouldn’t have to try to account for every potential scenario in writing. I think it’ll handle random, non-arbitrated play, but it definitely benefits from a GM.
As a baseline, I envisioned an elite squad of Imperial Guard Stormtroopers (yeah, yeah, “Tempestus Scions”) striking against a gaggle of Chaos Cultists. I had 10 of the former and 20 of the latter.
For starters, I’m in love with the Bolt Action activation system. I might hate the second edition of the game, but those dice provide a lot of flexibility, spontaneity, and complexity in a manner that is immediately understandable to a new player. I decided to shamelessly steal an idea that Casey had: each model (not squad) gets an activation die and, to reflect the better training and badassery of special characters, Character models get a number of activation dice equal to their number of wounds. So, a squad of 10 guardsmen would get 11 dice: 1 for each guardsman and 2 for the sergeant. When the sergeant loses a wound, a die’s removed from the bag.
The orders have to change a little bit: Pins and BA-style morale fall apart immediately when you’re looking at a single model. Fortunately, I needed a catch-all order for button pushing, prisoner interrogation, and psychic power use, so “Rally” becomes “Special.” I also wanted more of a 40K-style Overwatch, in which a model can fire repeatedly in a limited arc, than a BA-style Ambush, in which a model gets a single fire response to someone they can draw line of sight to, so “Ambush” becomes “Overwatch.”
The rest of everything comes together pretty quickly: Down is down, Fire, Advance, and Run all remain pretty much the same except an articulation of what sort of weapon can be fired on what order.
I did take the opportunity to change a thing I’ve never liked about 40K Rapid Fire Weapons: instead of this range-based 2 shots at 12″, 1 shot at 24″ business, I’ve always thought Rapid Fire weapons should fire two shots when standing still and one when on the move: so that becomes 2 shots on a Fire order, 1 shot on an Advance.
Nothing here is groundbreaking. I’m sure any number of 40K players who’ve encountered Bolt Action have noodled through something that looks very, very similar to this… but it’s got to be documented, right?
I did want to cover multiple attacks: in 40K, if you shoot a Heavy Bolter at a bunch of guys, you might kill three of them… but that only works because it’s really just one unit of models. I’ve got a rule that says you can “walk” attacks 2 inches: if you had a 2 shot weapon, for example, you could decide to allocate 1 shot at a model and the other shot at a model 2″ away. If you had, say, 3 shots, you could allocate 1 at a model, loose one in the middle, and 1 at a model 4″ inches away…. the same for close combat.
I thought it would be a good bit of spackle. In effect, it didn’t come up once, which means it’s unnecessary complexity.
Similarly, I wanted to pull a bit from Infinity’s ARO system: I put in rules that allowed models access to a subset of Orders (Fire, Down, Advance) that they could take in response to an activating model (like BA’s ability to go Down in response to being fired at), with a test to continue to be able to accept orders. Again, it never came up at all, was complicated and kind of hard to articulate. So, I’ll keep the list of Reaction orders and dump the test and ability to continue to respond.
That’s about it on how I fiddle with the 40K mechanics to make it work for the this. The rest all speaks to how those mechanics are used: stealth missions
This began as a very clear port of the Black Ops rules, but after some playtesting it became clear that it wasn’t going to work the way I wanted it to.
We’ve done a ton of “hidden model” scenarios in TGS and have seen what works and what doesn’t: even better, having encountered Infinity (but not having played it as much as I’d like) I’m familiar with the idea of silhouette markers. In fact, I love them. So much so that, for this sort of game, I’ve ordered and numbered 32 of them.
Each side gets a DBT tray with an insert that looks like this:
Silhouette Marker 03 corresponds to whatever model’s sitting on 03 in the tray.
10 of the defenders are “Guards” these run on autopilot and respond to noise generated around them. This started as a direct port from Black Ops, where all of the defenders worked off of the table, but that left the defender with too little agency. So, instead it’s just the 10, and then the defenders get to control a handful of models in the same way that the attackers get. Both attackers and (non-Guard) defenders begin as silhouettes.
The Guards are fine on the table, because they’re generic enough: Cultists are Cultists, and I’ll be picking up a handful of Cadians to use as Guards when the baddies are attacking.
The Noise table is what really drew me to BO, but quickly changed enough that I feel comfortable dropping it into the rules doc above: I’d originally planned to just say “Reference the book”. “Noise” was confusing, because so much of it is visible, so I renamed it “Disturbance.” In fact, I broke out the types of disturbance into Visual and Auditory. Different weapons generate different amounts of disturbance and different ways.
For example:
Finally, I was dissatisfied with the reaction table: it was both too forgiving and too punishing. There’s a strong likelihood that I replace this table with a leadership test instead of a single d6 roll and have a few more options, but need to do some math to make that work.
Anyway, that’s all there is to the rules!
A while back, I picked up Osprey Games’ Black Ops. It’s a game that covers games like Zero Dark Thirty and Metal Gear Solid: modern (or five-minutes-in-the-future) skirmishes with a strong emphasis on attacker vs. defender and stealth. Like most Osprey Games it looks like it’s probably perfect for a convention-style game that probably wouldn’t hold up to extended, concentrated play. A solid basis for the sort of game it set out to be.
I really dug the idea of a stealth game, but I’m not interested in trying to recreate contemporary conflicts that are actually getting actual people killed actually right now.
Fortunately, I had a fix for that: I love 40K, of course, but as should be obvious around here I haven’t wanted to play the game in a long time. 40K’s a complex setting, and even though the tabletop game’s become about The Big (sometimes you’d think it was a skirmish game at 5½ ” scale), there’s still a lot of room for the sort of smaller scale engagements that are analogous to the ones Black Ops intends to serve.
Now, I don’t have an opinion about the Black Ops game. I haven’t played it. I could immediately tell that it wasn’t going to work, though: it covers humans fighting humans using modern equipment: not humans fighting orks fighting daemons with microwave and laser guns. In the end, I ended up mashing together a whole mess of rules that I described in the initial game pitch as “It’s like 40K talked Bolt Action into having a three-way with Infinity, but Bolt Action and Infinity are kind of really into each other and neglect the hell out of 40K and now 40K just feels miserable and awkward and alone.”
I noodled on it for a long while, then finally decided: actually execute on the dang game: schedule it, build and paint for it, then run the damned thing. That happened over the past weekend.
This is what’s occupied most of my hobby time over the past two months and, because I wanted things to be a surprise, that’s why I’ve been so quiet around here. I’ve been busy… just not able to post about it.
I’ll break this across a couple of posts: this overview, a link to and a discussion of the rules, the models I painted, and some game photos.