Tag Archives: Deadzone

Green! – Frostgrave Cultists, Veer-myn

I’ve been painting the Deadzone starter Strike Teams; I’m most of the way through the Veer-myn models.

I was very excited when Mantic first announced these things, and ended up getting a box of them around the time the first Deadzone started shipping. Restic, though, so they’ve sat around in the hobby closet ever since, however.

As I’ve noted, a lot of the Mantic hard plastic sprues are enough to make one yearn for the good ol’ days of restic. The Veer-myn sprues are a good example of this: not great contact points, with weirdly balanced models that are kind of a pain to glue to the base, and so-so detail. I haven’t been super-impressed. (I’ll have a couple of them done by the end of the week, I hope.)

The restic Veer-myn, though: swing the other way in terms to detail: a lot, probably too much, detail for what should be a rank-and-file model. Also, the ones with Pistols? Blech. Whoever decided to make the arms metal but the pistol + hand and the arm itself as separate pieces is someone with exceedingly poor judgement: I can’t see how it adds anything beyond a super convenient place to have your model break.

The Broodmother is a sufficiently impressive model. It’s big enough that I ended up screwing around with oils on it a bit. Not very well, mind you, but a bit. I like it… but the detail around the head is not very good

I scheduled a game of Frostgrave for later this week, which is funny because I was just fussing at Shades about how Frostgrave was DOA at Huzzah. Because I’ve been happy painting this green, and because I’ve sort of Needed to shut myself in the basement for a day over the weekend, I went ahead and painted up a bunch of the Frostgrave Cultist models for the game.

I blew through them over the weekend. I’m very happy with them; I’m not sure how well the faces (the few you can see) show up in the photo, but I’m extremely pleased with them.

Deadzone Strike Teams

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Deadzone 2 shipped a little while back, and I’m finally getting around to wanting to play it.

I played the first edition a handful of times, and it was okay. A little baroque in places, a little broke in other places. Ultimately a game that wasn’t great, though, and probably deserved more work before publication. It saw a little action when it shipped and then nothing.

I’m hoping the second edition, which seems less messy, might be better. I won’t know until I actually give it a few spins, though, so I’m seeing if I can find enough interest at Huzzah for some exploratory game.

Sigmar only knows how much of this stuff I have, so it’d be nice if it were worth playing.

In anticipation of this, I hit the different Mantic Blog posts with starting Strike Teams and packed each of the models needed for them (assembling a few where needed). Now, because the idea of painting more 1:72 is killing my soul, I’m painting up those models. As you can imagine, it’s going fast: with a low model count and sculpts that are… serviceable, it’s easy to make speedy headway.

Below are some photos of what I knocked out last week. (Apologies for them: I’m still trying to find a good replacement for the Picasa Desktop app. I clearly over-relied on “I’m Feeling Lucky”. Worse yet, I literally cannot figure out why this next photo insists on being rotated. )

Despite having painted all of the Rebs from the first wave, I still needed one more Yndij to use as a Leader. So: the Yndij Mercenary, Eddak P’mera.

These Steel Militia guys are the most obnoxious, fiddly, stupid goddamn models I’ve put together in a long, long time. I’m all for flexibility, but these models should have had half as many pieces as they did.

That said: I’m pretty pleased with them. I like the way they look once they’re together, and I like the paint scheme I came up with for them.

The Hammerfall guys or whatever they’re called go together more easily than the Militia, but don’t look as good. There are also some weird things to the sculpt. Not thrilled at the idea of painting more of them.

The Brokkr, on the other hand, I really like, but I as nice as the orange jumpsuits look in the studio scheme, I regret imitating them. It’s a pain in the ass to work with those orange paints.

The Enforcer hard plastic kit is utter garbage. The Enforcer Pathfinder kit is… not perfect, but is light years better. They’re really coming a long way. Worth noting: there are clearly (once painted) torsos and arms that are female and torsos and arms that are male. This is expressed by musculature and tone: there are no gigantic armored boobs where, and I applaud that.

You kind of need to be looking for it, though, because otherwise you end up with a female torso and swole as hell Arnold arms (like I did).

I’m very pleased with how the black came out here. It looks black, without being black. Going to have to make sure I hang onto my notes for these.

Next up, I’m wrapping up some Veer-myn (about which I have Thoughts), and then I’ll probably stop procrastinating and work on something useful. With the Veer-myn done, I’ll have all the starting strike teams painted save for the dumb-looking Enforcers, Marauders, and Asterians.

A very specific form of not particularly famous

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The photo of my Plague I posted back in January is the thumbnail on a Mantic Blog post.

Very cool.

(The image isn’t on the post, and either they filter comments or their comment system is busted ’cause I don’t seem able to post there to give them permission to use it.)

Deadzone Terrain

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Most of this terrain showed up in December of 2013, I think.

I’d dry fitted some of it together to get a feel for it… and left it there. It’s meant to be modular, but the idea of painting the individual pieces and then snapping them together at game-time just isn’t practical at all. On top of that, I was shorted connectors in the initial shipment: more showed up with the Wave 1 Mitigation shipment, but by that time I’d been distracted and was working on something else. When Wave 2 showed up, it renewed my motivation.

It’s actually a little disappointing: if I’d filled that Wave 3 survey out now, after having really assembled and painted this stuff, instead of before, I’d have bought a lot more. Like a lot. Like definitely enough that it’d get me in trouble with Mrs. Rushputin.

Anyway: everything’s painted and gloss varnished. I need to weather it (some stains, some rust) before another coat, but the involved part’s done.

This is the full table (same configuration from four directions):

I shot for a board configuration that was crowded and busy… but left a lot open. This is a lot more terrain than it looks like Mantic normally puts on their tables: I’ve got two mats (plus the paper one), so I think I could safely smear this across two mats and it’d still be dense enough to play with.

If I’d had more tiles, I’d have tried to get some interleaved walkways. A walkway at Level 2 going East/West and one at Level 3 going North/South immediately above it is the sort of thing I’d really like to have, but it wasn’t in the cards.

I also tried to make sure that most of the pieces would work for 40K.

These pieces are the components of the building above: I tried to keep things so they could break down into multiple pieces.

I also tried to keep the terrain practical. While I loved the idea of a cargo-crate structure up on scaffolding, it wouldn’t be very playable. So, I kept it so every square’s accessible.

I’m nuts about these towers. I’d have made more if I had more of those bare frame tiles.

I thought the Landing Pad would be impractical: the Skyshield Landing Pad kind of is. I’ve got one in tub around here someone and never use it. This is a little bit to pack away, but by keeping the little cubicle detached, it’s not that big of a problem.

Deadzone – Rebs Booster

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I wrapped up the Rebs booster at the same time as the Starter (the last two models I painted were the Teraton and Kraaw).

As I said earlier, I’m pretty ignorant of what these aliens are supposed to look like, but that didn’t stop me.

I’m pretty happy with the Judawan. It looks like a Tau, so it got painted like one. I kinda wish I could pain my Tau with skin like this, but since their armor’s already turquoise, it’d be a mess.

I’m very unhappy with the way the Kraaw came out. For some reason, I decided, “I’m going to paint this like a blue jay!” No idea why: it’s clearly a more reptilian sort of thing than a bird sort of thing. And, even then, I didn’t really commit to it: just giving it white under its eyes and white under its wings.

This is a bad paintjob, but I wanted to be done with the project and the mini.

I’m half and half on this one. Hell if I can remember what the sharkperson’s species is, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. The human didn’t turn out quite as well, and I had to reach to get the spot of red on her (it’s a panel on the other side of her missile launcher).

This is a really fun unit in the game, though, for sure.

The Zee turned out okay.

And that’s a second Deadzone faction painted and done. The first one to be fully painted (starter & booster).

I passed on the Plague booster during Wave 1 (which I’m correcting in Wave 2), my Enforcers are in a state (Booster got delayed, and the starter didn’t ship! All I have are the shoddy Warpath ones), and the Marauders are leaving me cold (why, when I love GW Ork sculpts so much, would I used these guys?). I think I’m going to try to wrap up the Mercenaries at some point near-term, and then be done with Deadzone until after Wave 2 turns up. (Though I probably need to figure out what I’m doing with, and then paint, the terrain.)

Deadzone – Rebs

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Deadzone! Rebs! Fully painted! (Part I.)

These dudes have actually been done for about a month; most of the ones pictured here have been done even longer. Wrapping up the last few models had been tough due to being way, way too busy and then finding time to actually photograph them was even tougher.

I hadn’t even planned on painting them; or at least not hot on the heels of the Plague models. I wanted to assemble them and play with them, but the “flight stands” that accompanied the Drones and that weird floating sphere thing that comes with N32-19 are garbage, so I wanted to use GW flight stands and bases for them. With priming and varnishing and such complicating any plans to assemble them now, paint them later, I just decided heck with it: paint them now. Once they were done, pushing on seemed the most natural thing to do.

For the most part, I’m quite pleased with them. The brown and grey is a neutral base that’ll go with anything, allowing me to do each alien species differently while maintaining a unified, coherent look. The red spot color also pulls everything together.

Unusual, for me: the grey is all craft-store paint. I used it on the Drones because I felt like it, was happy with the results, and after the black-armored studio scheme felt like a disaster, I switched back to the Charcoal -> Rain Grey -> Quaker Grey scheme I normally use on terrain.

I did the humans first. For the most part, I’m very pleased with them, but something about the way the Commander’s face came together doesn’t sit well with me. It’s actually one of the better minis to come out of the Kickstarter, so that’s a bit of a shame.

Given that I have less than no interest in Dreadball, I’m pretty uninformed about all of these different Mantic Warpath/Dreadball alien species. Unhelpfully, where GW drowns you in potential color schemes, it can be really, really difficult to find studio paint schemes for some of these guys.

I think the Yndij are supposed to be orange? Well, I decided they were feline enough and would look painted like lions. I think I was right.

The Grogan are kind of forgettable, but they’re not bad. I think the orange here photographed better than it looks in person.

Fuck the Teraton. This would be a great, distinctive mini, except some jackhole decided it needed stupid looking and, even worse, ultra-fragile blades coming off of its arms. Three of those four blades have broken off, and one of them has broken off more times than I can count.

All of my hate.

The Sorak’s characterful. I like him. I put another one in the Second Wave survey.

Drones. Nothing special, but it’s their fault I painted the rest of the Rebs.

I’ve also finished the Booster, as well as a couple of Mercs. Since this post is pic-heavy enough, I’ll be splitting up the photodump across a couple of posts.

Deadzone – Plague

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Deadzone showed up last month; on-time for a Kickstarter, which I think entitles them to a medal. A gold-star, at least. (Let’s not beat the dead horse about how I’d have been happy to wait a few more weeks to let them do some QC.)

I probably should wrap some words around how feel about the game. Short version is: so far, I like it. Kind of a lot.

Anyway, out the gate, I decided to paint up the Plague starter first. At the time of the KS, I wasn’t interested in them at all: they’re the one starting faction for which I didn’t get the booster. Also, I figured they’d paint up the easiest; I expect that’s held up.

I speed-painted them over two weeks (hey, for me, that’s speed-painting; and those two weeks had Christmas and New Years squatting in the middle of them). They’re far, far from perfect but, let’s face it, these are not amazing miniatures. I don’t know that they deserve a better paint job.

The Gen 1 is actually a pretty great mini. It’s one of the standouts, I think. There are some weird casting issues with it, but they’re minor. Nothing a little green stuff couldn’t fix without the tiniest amount of effort.

The Gen 2s, on the other hand, are godawful. Creepy baby heads. Weird poses. Kinda sketchy detail. These are bad. But they’re done.

Gen 3s are okay. They’re not great… but not bad, and they get a bit of a pass because they’re mutant zombies.

Plague Hounds look like the worst minis of the bunch unpainted, but I guess they turned out okay.

Like I said: with the exception of the Gen 1, none of these are good minis… but they’re better than the Mantic Kings of War Orcs I’ve saddled myself with, and they paint up easily. That I like the game a lot helps, too.

Deadzone – Arrived

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Deadzone showed up today! It made shockingly good time: the tracking number was generated last week, hung around Nottingham until yesterday afternoon and then, bam, across the Atlantic and in Manassas this morning!

It’s an enormous box; over 22 lbs. Mrs. Rush gave me a bit of the stinkeye when she saw it, along with an (entirely fair) admonishment about the lack of room in the hobby junk closet.

Overall, the sculpts look alright. Better than the Kings of War disappointments by far, Some of the Plague guys are a mite dodgy, but that’s not entirely inappropriate. The Marauders actually pretty solid, as are the Enforcers.

(In fact, I’m about halfway through Enforcer, and the idea of doing Arbites with the Enforcers is something that’d occurred to me.)

They’re in restic, which makes me want to pants the chucklehead who put “DEADZONE CONTAINS ALL THESE STUNNING PLASTIC MODELS” along the side of the box along the side of the box. Restic ain’t plastic, it’s garbage. I’d like to say that if I’d known Deadzone was going to be in restic and not hard plastic I wouldn’t have backed it… but I don’t remember if I’d pledged Deadzone before Sedition Wars delivered. (Sedition Wars is the font of all of my restic hate.) Jake Thornton asserts that it’s not all that bad; Casey‘s already fiddled with some and says that it’s not great, but is better than the Sedition Wars trash, so I’m hopeful.

Certainly, I’m not feeling a lot of Kickstarter remorse over Deadzone yet.

That said: the box was a mess. Terrain sprues and model bags were tossed into the packing peanuts, which meant that fishing stuff out was non-trivial. All of one of the terrain sprues (Scenery 5.1) had stuff broken off of them (not catastrophically, but broken sprues < unbroken sprues). Then, I got to the packing slip.

I have to admit that I had a bit of a freakout: what I selected in the survey doesn’t look anything like what’s on the packing slip, and what was on the packing slip didn’t look anything like what was in the box. Although they’ve got a helpful “Here’s what should be in each bag” post, when it’s completely unclear what bags you’re supposed to have it’s not as helpful as it could be. Fortunately: if you end up in the same boat, I’ve got your back at the end of this post.

Here are some examples (this is not all of the inconsistencies):

The packing slip says I’m supposed to get the Rebs Faction Deck and the Marauders Faction Deck. I’m supposed to get the Enforcer and Plague Faction Deck also, but they’re not on the packing slip. All four were in the box.
It lists out all of the Rebs and Marauder bags I’m supposed to have. It also calls out one (just one) Plague bag, and none of the Enforcer bags. I got the Rebs and Marauders I’m supposed to have, all of the Plague Bags (and an extra of the one they listed), and the Warpath Enforcer bag (and not the Deadzone specific bag).
Not everything’s supposed to be in this shipment. Some of those things (like the Forge Fathers Starter) are listed. Others (like the Forge Fathers Booster, or the Enforcers Booster) are not.
Bonus Accessory sprues (from the extra Battlezones) are on the packing slip… but it’s been crossed out and “- Dwill ship 2014” is hand written next to it. They’re in the box, though.

You can see how confusing it was. Are Wave 2 contents listed? Or not? Are things baked into the Strike Team level listed? Or not? What about the add-ons I pledged for that should be in this shipment that aren’t listed? Or in the box?

I had to put together a freaking spreadsheet to get my bearings.

In the end, I’m missing a good couple of things.

DZ Enforcers bag – missing entirely
Hardcover rulebook – missing entirely
Connector sprues – I’ve got 6 of the 14 I should have (57% missing)
AI Deck – This might be for Wave 2
Printed Compendium – Probably for Wave 2
Resin Rebs Commander – I assume Wave 2
Enforcers Booster – Wave 2
Forge Fathers Starter & Booster – Wave 2

Some of these things I’m probably not supposed to have yet, sure. The flat-out missing stuff cheeses me: of all the minis, the Enforcers are the most interesting to me, I’d rather have the hardback, and I’ve got a lot of terrain that I can’t assemble ’cause I don’t have the connectors for it! Also, the stuff that I’m not supposed to have that isn’t on the packing slip makes me antsy.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to working through the rulebook tonight.

After the break, I break out my best reckoning of what bags constitute what starters / boosters. It might seem self-evident, but while I was trying to work through what I had and what I was supposed to have I really could have used this. Hopefully someone else will get some use out of it.

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Tag Archives: Deadzone

Green! – Frostgrave Cultists, Veer-myn

Deadzone Strike Teams

A very specific form of not particularly famous

Deadzone Terrain

Deadzone – Rebs Booster

Deadzone – Rebs

Deadzone – Plague

Deadzone – Arrived

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