Pro Gloria Miniatures

I probably would have noticed these figures earlier if I had been to the Warhammer Empire forum lately, but a new company (to me at least) called Pro Gloria, has just released some lovely HRE civilian figures, sculpted by Paul Hicks!

Very exciting, and not too expensive either, at €5.95 per pack.  There are currently four packs, and hopefully there will be many many more. These figures will be excellent as NPCs for WHFRP, or for Mordheim type skirmish games.  As an aside, the paint job on these is by Andrew Taylor, and just look at that herald... he has a double eagle under his arms... amazing.

Sometime in the future, I need to get these figures.

Miniature Wargames

Miniature Wargames, a magazine "published continuously since 1983" now has an online electronic version, and you can read a free issue of it here.

Content wise, the magazine is quite nice, with several articles that would interest most miniature wargamers, although with a mainly historical bent [appropriate given the assumed audience].  Several articles have sharp maps, which help to explain the battles or terrain discussed in the article.  The article on Pavia is particularly of interest, as it covers the history of the battle, as well as explaining how to refight it in a fairly rules generic way.

The software used to present the magazine is pretty slick, and allows for easy manipulation of the "pages", which can be viewed larger than life size [allowing you to see how dodgy tabletop quality paint jobs are at 500% of life size].  Some of the hyperlinks in the magazine can be clicked, and the overall presentation is quite nice.  There also appears to be an option to download a printable PDF, should you want to take the magazine away with you.

At a cost of £29.5 per annum, it is a substantial savings over the print edition, which is apparently a staggering £75 for rest of the world subscriptions. However, even this price seems a bit much for me, as I am both a Luddite and quite tight when it comes to this sort of thing.  So not for me, but you might find it interesting, and should certainly have a look at the free issues.

Scratch Built Galley

Now, I am no Tony, but I think I had some success with this project.  A bit of background, a while back, I finished reading Empires of the Sea, and got inspired to look into naval gaming with galleys.  Finding that the available options for galleys were rather expensive, I thought I would try my hand at scratch building a galley.  Following some Internet research, I decided to base the scale on the size of a common Popsicle stick, which happens to be 1cm in width.  This translated to a ship of around 8.5cm in length for an approximate scale of 1/510.  This size also fits neatly on a plastic credit card, which I happen to have a ton of from gift cards and hotel room keys.

After a few afternoons and evenings of work, I had the following results:

Needs, paint, but I think it is on the right track.
I think that I can create more of these pretty quickly, which would be good, since there were over 400 ships at Lepanto...

Skaven for sale

Blog follower ZeroTwentyThree is regretfully selling off his Skaven.  Do take a look, he seems be a great painter, and needs the money.

Painting at work

I have a new job (same company), and with that came an office.  Consequently, I have been thinking about painting on my lunch break, now that my geekery would not be on such public display.  Looking through my "in progress" figures (1000s), I have plenty to work on.

Any thoughts on this?  White collar job, so paint spills would be bad.

In other news, I finished Knight and Knave of Swordsby Leiber, which was frankly rather poor.  The amount of on camera sex, and "edgy" sex, was astounding, particularly in comparison to the other books.  The last "adventure" is basically a series of voyeuristic vignettes, in which our heroes are completely passive. Certainly not recommended. Pretend that Faf and the Mouser just rode off into the sunset or something.

I am now reading the first book of the Elric collection (Elric the Stealer of Souls), so we will see how that goes.