March painting, finally.

     After a productive first two months, I have started to slow down on the painting it seems. Not because I don't have stuff to paint, but I am a bit directionless as I don't have any specific wargame that I am currently playing. This blog entry is well overdue, as a lot of the miniatures have been finished in March and it's apparently mostly thought April now!?

    First up, a triple threat of metal harpies from Gamesworkshop. I bought these when Thunder games and gifts closed in January. Frostgrave has peaked my interest recently, so now I wish I had painted them in cooler colours. Doesn't matter, still enjoyed painting them, pick out more metal minis to paint soon.

S'Kara, female Skoli (reaper miniatures) was painted up to about 90% last year, adding I couple more colours has now taken her off my painting desk. Was going to be part of the Paint an Adventuring Party Challenge for last year, but didn't get much finished for it.

Obligatory battle scene

    Mech Attack! is a skirmish game that simplifies the rules to Battletech for those that don't want to read through all the crunchy rules. (though I might dip into the lore a bit more). I have Alpha Strike on PDF, a simplified version of Battletech and it is 250 pages? That doesn't sound very streamlined to me. I first heard about Mech Attack from the Chicago Skirmish Wargames blog. They take the game to a whole new scale, a scale I'd love to build for but for now, I'll repaint my heroclix.

Slattern and Coyote Tango rebase and repaint

Scunner and Gipsy Danger WIP

        A friendly local game store one town over called Dragon's Den has had a couple Resident Evil 2 board game expansions on their sale rack for over a year now. I offered to buy both for an additional discount on one expansion. This was my second big purchase of miniatures this year. B-Files came with 8 zombies, 2 Lickors and 2 forms of Mr. X, the stalker type nemesis that hunts you throughout the game. Survival Horror adds a PVP mode adding 7 survivors to play as in the main game, as well as 2 Ivy plants, 2 Giant Spiders and 2 zombie survivors. A grand total of 25 miniatures to paint up. I also traded away a box Kabalite warriors for 3 Space wolf Thunderwolf cavalry as well as 2 Space Marine Captains and 1 Dark Eldar Incubi and wytch. Broke even on the trade as it would be 10 points total for both. 
    

Hunk and Tofu, yes, a walking piece of Tofu

    In the Resident Evil game, when tofu gets damaged, he turns pink and has chunks bitten off of him. Hence the pink colour scheme.

Painted: 8 points

Purchased: -38 points

Total: -30 points

Next on the Hobby Desk

    Birds! Well actually mice and rats. I have been working away on Tail Feathers and have finished up all the infantry in the box. I just need to get some pictures taken.

To me my X-MEN!

    This is my latest project for Super Mission Force, the key players in the X-men Animated series (also costumed as such too.) The whole gangs is here, bad eyes, blue fur ball, poor anger management man, bamph guy and sparks teen.  After painting these up, I noticed that I have been focusing mostly on super heroes, and don't have all that many villains. In SMF, it's up to you to create your heroes, picking out abilities and backgrounds. Archetypes can be standard or special. Four standard heroes on each side would be balanced. Specials are Paragon, which is equal to 2.5 standard archetypes. Powerhouse which is 2 standard archetypes and Super which is 1.5 standard archetypes. There is also Street-Level, two of these equaling a standard archetype. 

    

    With this customization, I could have multiple levels for each hero. Jean grey is a powerful psychic as a standard Archetype, but when she transforms into the Phoenix her powers are godly, making her into a Paragon Archetype, usually this means, mashing of the standard archetypes together.

Main cast of the Animated Series

Carnage jumping out of the bushes

Full Marvel Repainted Heroclix

DC repainted Heroclix (also foot soldier)

Stan Lee makes a cameo as a civilian

    Stan Lee was prolific for his cameos in his own universe, appearing in the animated series, LEGO games, the comics, movies, everywhere. So why not have him in my SFM game as a civilian to be rescued? It's basically cannon!

 

March Wrap Up

    Some projects are quick, and some take a lot of time. My Corpse Wrack Mausoleum was a long project it was such a beautiful piece of terrain, do I make it old? New? both? What colours do I use? I started out by spray priming all of the terrain blue. Then I wanted to get it on the table for a Warcry campaign Rachel and I started two years ago. I had jumped ahead in how I normally paint, highlighting the base colour on terrain before going into more finer details (skulls, so many skulls!). 

    When I picked it up again in January, I had to highlight over some of the details and such I had previously painted as well as watch to not get any on the roof. This just slowed the painting down, even the fences weren't evenly silvered. The blue spray was a Rustoleum can, painting GW silver over it wasn't the best idea, repriming with a brown solved that, just taking more time then I was hoping. Next time I just need to do it right in the first place. 

    I feel good with the final results, last year I 3D printed some gravestones, these will eventually be added to the crypt or to the nighthaunts that have been tormenting my hobby desk. A couple of the mausoleums don't have bases, this might be a future project, but for now, I am putting this crypt to rest.

    With mausoleum and the Azyrite Townscape, I will have plenty of options for Warcry and at least a table worth of terrain for Age of Sigmar.

    Only painted three heroclix to completion in the month of March, from left to right, Gorilla Grodd, Sabertooth and Giganta. Gorilla Grodd is a super intelligent ape with mind control powers, most of his schemes revolve around turning humans into apes. This particular sculpt has him holding a human skull, fitting for a primate bent on the downfall of the human race. Sabertooth is a mutant with superhuman strength and a healing factor. Unlike Wolverine, Sabertooth embraces his feral side. Giganta I decided I would start using different colours for the different comic universes, Marvel - red, DC - blue. Works for now, might be changed into different factions, Legion of Doom or Brotherhood of Mutants down the road. Using 32mm bases for the super heroes, debated on using 25s for civilians and heroes that didn't have super powers, but that seems a bit much. If you are giant, you get a bigger base. 

    As a distraction while painting up the mausoleum, I made a small camp for Don't Look Back using a CD and some terrain I bought with the Reaper Bones Kickstarter. Most of the scenarios use a camp as the starting area for players. I originally planned to do urban terrain for Super Mission Force, but I could make forest type terrain that would work for SMF, Don't Look Back AND PrimEVO.

    I have a couple more scatter from the Reaper Bone miniatures, but they are more urban, could make for good objectives, like getting to a pay phone to call for help.

I finished my Character of the Month for March as well, post to come for backstory.

Character of the Month for March

 

 I also picked up the Lord of the Ring's Fellowship, off eBay as well, no pictures due to laziness. Reading on Cheaphammer about his Quest of the Ringbearer got me interested in the game.

    I found someone selling some Warcry Cypher Lords and Iron Golems, enough to field both in Warcry but what made it really worth it was these two. A character and a cultist from Blackstone Fortress. The Darkoath Warqueen would have went for more then half of what I payed for the lot, if I bought her individually.

Darkoath Warqueen and Cultist (BSF)

Iron Golems 

Cypher Lords

Some were broken, nothing that the bit box can't fix.

    Every other weekend, I would bring some board games to my work to play them with the guys I care for. We played Scooby Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion, a coded Chronicles game, read a story and solve puzzles. Each character had one verb attached to them, Shaggy was eat, I tried to eat everything needless to say.

    Rachel and I played another game of Targi, I had to convince her that it was still a new game, instead of hopping to brand new games, we can really learn one for a bit so it sticks. Not much different then our last game, it ended with 5 points between us 39 for Rachel and 34 for me. 

 The other game in the "Old Pile" was Lords of Waterdeep. Nathan came over to play with us. We had to reread the rules, but it came back pretty quickly. Rachel destroyed us, being a nurse, she is used to multitasking. She had 152 points, I came in second with 123pts and Nathan with 118 pts. I went online to check what a high score would be on this game. Some forum posts mentioned the app and that they wouldn't play mandatory quests on one another, both which would muddy the numbers. 

Rachel's winning grin

    Rosalind had her first birthday on the 25th of March! Can you believe it? One year?! How fast as that! As a birthday treat, we went to the library to play with toys and pick up books to read on the potty. The central library kid's area was all ours, but it would have been nice for Rosalind to play with kids her age, maybe figure out this walking thing that humans do. 

Rosalind's favourite toy/walking aid

    Rachel made a cake for Rosalind on the day after her birthday (she worked on her birthday) and we had the family over to celebrate. Jon is bad at taking pictures, good thing Rachel is here to save the day!

Uncle Shawn and proud chin Rosalind

A boot is my very favourite gift

Grandpa and Grandma with the birthday girl

The girls dressed up, papa did not

First tastes of real SUGAR

Rosalind in a dress for her birthday party

Next on the Hobby Desk

    I am almost finished off some X-men heroclix repaints, just putting the finishing touches on the bases. Once this batch of clix are done, will transition to creating hero sheets and terrain for Super Mission Force. I will write up a story for the Character of the Month of March.