December Update

A belated Merry Christmas to all.

Things have been quiet here on the old blog, due to being sick and busy all at the same time.  Rest assured that I have been beavering away at my various Deepest Sea items, and more slowly working on getting the figures painted for the game... which happens in three days!

For Christmas this year I got Dreadfleet from my wife and her family, which was an unexpected treat.  I look forward to getting it all off the sprue, and reading through the rulebook. I could not wait to see the contents though, and already had a rummage around inside.  The details on the ships are pretty amazing, in particular the sails struck me as being excellent.  Looks as if it will be a big painting project for 2012.

The second surprise, was the D&D Rules Cyclopedia from my sister. This was a complete shock, because even though it was on my Amazon list, I basically put it there for my own reference.  I have paged through it a bit, and it seems every bit as comprehensive as I expected. In fact, I already got some game ideas from it.

There are a few other minor items that I will talk about in their own posts as I get to them.

And a slightly early Happy New Year... I am sure I will still be busy in the next few days, and probably will not get back to the blog to post again this year.

Quick Update

Yes, I am still alive.  With the Thanksgiving Holiday last week, and a bout of sickness at our house, I have not been online much.  While I did not get as much done hobbywise this weekend as I planned, I did manage to prime all of the D&D figures (with the help of my wife), and started to paint some yesterday.

Now I just need to paint three figures a day for the next month... so we will see how that goes.

As you are probably aware, after Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, we enter into the Holiday Sales season, which would be more tempting if I had not just spend so much on figures.  Nothing that should prevent YOU from buying more figures or rules though Dear Reader, so get to it.

Pavements

Today in my Internet wanderings, I came across this lovely method from the Lazy Forger for making streets and sidewalks, using MDF.

Here are the relevant three parts:
1. Carving the cast lines and cracks
2. Sponge Painting
3. Sidewalks and detailing

I think that this technique could be combined with my eventual plan to make a 6 foot square 28mm City fight board, by having an MDF layer to represent roadways, and indeed it may be adaptable to blue foam as well. Since I own a table saw, making the relevant cuts should be simple.

Something to think about in the future.

Also, a warm welcome to Sean Robson, who like many excellent folks, is a paleontologist.  He also has a great blog mostly aimed at D&D, and has come up with a very handy format to present adventures, which I hope to utilize when I get around to finalizing the one I am working on for New Years.

Words of Wisdom from the Family

My wife is a pretty smart person, as well as being generally tolerant and understanding about the hobby.  This weekend we finished going through the Wargames Illustrated that I got last weekend, and she said "did I remind you to renew your White Dwarf yet?"... not a vote of confidence in WI.  She finds the concept of historical gaming to be a bit more boring in general, and was not impressed with most of the photography in the magazine either. I liked it myself, but it does not seem to scratch the same itch that White Dwarf does.

She also reviewed with dismay the array of figures I got for the D&D game, and said "Isn't one of the nice things about D&D that you don't NEED figures for it?".  She is completely correct of course, and at this point it is obvious that I got a bit carried away, and have bitten off more than I can chew... not enough time to paint what I have in time for the game etc. At this point I think I am going to essentially pre-generate most of the encounters that they may have, and paint to that, rather than painting to the possibility of what could be encountered.  I have based and prepared most of the miniatures, and will prime them sometime this week... then the real adventure begins.

Also, my son, who is now 1.5 years old saw some miniatures out on the table (NPCs for the D&D game), and kept point at them and saying "man!".  He was pretty excited by them, and wanted to play with them... too early to get him a set of green army men or 1/72 figures? I am guessing yes. Maybe next year.

Players guide v0.2

An update to my Deepest Sea Players Guide.  This version has prestige classes, a threat ranking, and some better explanation of how to create a character, amongst other things. The file is located here.

The threat ranking is based on the concept created by Roger here, and is located on page 29.  As always, the various silhouettes are from Telecanter, and they are highly useful.

Please let me know what you think.

Reaper Miniatures

This weekend I got my Reaper Miniatures order in the mail.  I ordered the PC figures and a few monster/NPC types from Reaper, and was able to take advantage of both their free shipping, and their special October "Trick-Or-Treat" offer.  Here is what I got in my Trick-or-Treat bag:

We have a bag of candy, the Pink color paint for Breast Cancer awareness, four bottles of paint as samples, a pack of CAV branded playing cards, and my Trick-or-Treat figure.

The real Trick vs. Treat aspect of the bag was the chance to get a "treat", a figure, or a "trick".  I got the trick, which was a packaged rock.  Maybe it will be a future collectible? It is after all a one of a kind figure...

As I have mentioned before I really like Reaper figures, and I like how useful their website's figure finder feature is. (although it would be nice if there were more keywords for each figure). Unfortunately, at least in terms of this project, most Reaper figures are more in the 32mm range than in a 28mm range. Some are even pushing that, since the Dark Heaven range is fairly free form, and different sculptors have different ideas of how large a figure ought to be.

Pictured between "Franz" and "Jean" our comparison figures, we have Red Box Games, Perry Miniatures, Ebob, Reaper elf, and Reaper Gnome.  Sort of a motley crew, but I think basing and paint will draw them together a bit more.

Why only one player wants to be a male character I do not know, but it sure made figure finding more difficult.  More on that later, when I introduce the PC figures.

Now I am just waiting for bases from EM4, and we can start seeing some real progress here, and not just shots of bare metal.

Also, a warm welcome to new follower Bogus Gasman, who has a D&D blog titled "My pants are Haunted".

Perry Miniatures Review

This weekend I got my first order from Perry Miniatures.  While I certainly have more than a few figures sculpted by the Perry Brothers (more like 100s), I had never previously ordered from their own figure company.

I ordered a few figures to use as NPCs in the D&D game that I am running in January, drawing from their First Crusade line. Indeed these are figures that I am using as the benchmark for the project, because they fit the look I want so closely. In this case the figures are sculpted by Michael Perry, although most people would be hard pressed to identify between the work of one or the other of the brothers.

This first picture is our lovely comparison models "Franz" and "Jean", which you may recall are 6th and 5th edition GW figures.  As it happens they were also sculpted by the Perry Brothers (I may have missed a zero on my previous estimate of the number of figures I own that they have sculped.)  As you can see, the figure matches most closely with the 5th edition metal Bretonnian figure, which is to my mind, excellent.
 
One of the things you read about online occasionally, is that Perry figures are "terrible" in terms of flash and other clean up work.  As you can see from the figure below, there is some extraneous metal that needed to be cleaned up, but I think it was nothing out of the ordinary, and it only took a few minutes to work through the set that I got.

This last picture is of CU25, one of the only packs that does not have a picture on their site.  As you can see they are quite dynamic figures, and should look quite nice slaying orcs down in the dungeons.



Perry Miniatures CU25 Mailed Sword and Axemen, advancing/attacking



The figures are packed in little black boxes for each code, and this seems to be good enough for overseas shipment.  Shipping times were perfectly adequate, and the VAT rebate offset the price of postage. In conclusion, these are lovely figures that I am already planning on supplementing sometime in the future.

Red Box Games

This past week I got an order of miniatures from Red Box Games (RBG).  Sculpted by Tré Manor, the Red Box Games figures are much closer to "true" proportionality, which can mean that they look small compared to other figures, and in particular have small heads (or normal sized depending on your POV).  Personally, I find the figures to be lovely, but I can see why some people would say that they do not mix with other figure lines.

In my order was the figure "Nannulf of Arnholt's Hill", a barbarian type with three different arm combination options.  He can have a sword and shield, two handed axe, or javelins and a buckler. The finish of the figure was excellent, with essentially no flash or mold lines. The thinner metal of the sword and javelins was bent, but easily corrected with a bit of gentle pressure.

Here he is shown with my tester figures for this set of reviews "Franz" and "Jean", which are an Empire handgunner from the 6th Edition boxed set, and a 5th Edition Bretonnian Man-At-Arms with Spear Champion, both from Games Workshop.

The other figures that I got were equally well cast, and I would certainly buy from  RBG again.

Hobby Weekend

This weekend was great for hobby activities.

First, I got my Red box, Reaper, and Perry Miniature orders, which gave me plenty of figures to play around with.  I will be using these for my NPCs, PCs, and Monsters in the Deepest Sea D&D game I am running in January.  I have a order coming in from EM4, which has my bases, and then we are off to the races. Reviews of the figures I got are coming up this week.

Second, we went to the new Hobby Lobby store in our area.  This was the first time I had ever been, and now I understand why the folks on TMP are always talking about it. It is possibly the largest "hobby" store I have ever been to, with everything from knitting to stain glass, beads to fabric.  It has a much larger modeling section than other craft stores (including military models and Tamiya), and also has doll house, terrain, and rocket items. Since they have a weekly 40% coupon, it could be a great place to pick up tools, paint  and the occasional kit.  Unfortunately the store is a bit far from my house, so I will not be going there frequently, but it is good to know that there are options. (and they are going to open more stores in the area)

Third, I got a call from my FLGS, Great Escape Games, and they let me know that my Wargames Illustrated is in.  I had to order a copy since they did not have any in stock when I was there last weekend, but this way I can read it and decide if I want to replace my White Dwarf subscription with something a bit more historic.  I did not pick it up yet, but something to look forward to.

I am also looking forward to the long Veteran's day weekend, when aside from digging a drainage trench and putting in a french drain, I hope to get a ton of hobby work done.

Eureka Miniatures

As part of my D&D project, I needed to get some dogs to serve as retainers for the PC party.  (or as wild dogs to slay the PC party)  Looking around the various dog options from the myriad of sources on the Internet, I fixed on the Eureka Conquistador dog handler and dogs set as being the best bargain, and bought it from Eureka USA (for somewhat less than from Eureka AU).  Since they have flat rate shipping, I tossed in a few other useful figures for monsters and the like, which I will not talk about now. (I was also very tempted to get a squadron of Saxon horse for my 1809 project, but fortunately sanity prevailed)

My order came very quickly, and was packed quite well. I was really quite pleased with the service that I got from Eureka USA.

The dogs from the set are great, perfect for what I want to use them for, and while they have a little bit of flash between their legs, they are cast well, and should clean up nicely. 

Not necessary for this current project, but also interesting is the dog handler himself. I had always thought that Eureka figures would be too small for use with GW figures, but as you can see from the picture below, that is not the case at all. I am quite pleased with its size and heft as compared to the smaller Bretonnian figure on the left, and the larger Empire figure on the right.  Consequently, I think it should be possible to make a small Estalian or Dogs of War force using Eureka figures, and they would not look out of place with GW figures at all. Unfortunately, I have not opened my pack of Foundry El Dorado adventurers, so I was not able to compare with those, but I think they should match up fairly well.

With my Eureka purchase, I also threw in a Venturan trooper with SAW 15mm figure for comparison purposes.  Since these are relatively new, this may be of use to someone who is interested in getting these figures.

Left to right we have a Resistant Roosters US soldier in Greatcoat, the Venturan, a late war German  Grenadier from BattleFront (Flames of War GE722), and a German anti-tank gun crew man from Command Decision (Old Glory).  As you can see the picture they are all close enough for use on the same battlefield, although, possibly not in the same squad.  

The Venturan was well cast and quite proportional, although a bit thin legged considering he has body armor on. The integral base was quite thin, and would be easy to blend in. The SAW, as you may be able to tell from the picture, is pretty clearly a SF BAR, which I found amusing. At $0.67 a figure, they are quite reasonable, and a full platoon would not break the bank.

As a concluding cautionary note, the Eureka figures do contain lead, so be sure to handle them appropriately, if like I do, you have small children.

Soon, I hope to discuss the other figures I am getting from Perry miniatures, Red box games, and Ebob.