N:AW Escher Gang

On Necromunda, the industry and population of the planet is divided up by noble and minor houses that rule under the Imperial house.  One of the minor houses is the Escher, or the House of Blades, a house with a gene curse to produce vanishingly few healthy males, and so consequently the majority of Escher house is female.  

All of this background story stuff is fun and all, but the important thing is that the Escher are cool miniatures.  Supported by four plastic kits and a dozen or so resin figures, the Escher are popular, and have also featured in the main starter boxes for the 2017 version of Necromunda. Being in starter boxes means that the main gang miniatures are cheap... which is the real reason I got them.  A very cheap eBay buy (watch for those Buy it nows!), an added box, the house book, some bitz and scratch building and I built a 1400 credit Ash Waste gang, complete with a vehicle and two bikes.  Painting took a while because the Escher have a lot of fine detail and I wanted to them to stand out. 

Since these figures are as near to finished as they are likely to get for a while, here are some pictures. 

Full Escher gang for Necromunda Ash Wastes

This is a 1400 cred gang, with six foot gangers, two on bikes, a car, and then some characters to lead them (and actually get the kills), as well as one hanger-on. 

Regular Escher gangers

These gangers are nearly out of the box.  From the left we have a ganger with a converted shotgun, normal ganger with laspistol and sword, juve with club and auto pistol, ganger using the Wyld maiden body, ganger with auto gun, and a specialist that I could not afford to give a special weapon to... 

Toxicologist, Death Maiden, Queen, and Matriarch with grenade launcher

These are all conversions.  The Toxicologist (chemist) is from the Rogue Trader set, with added Escher head, and the "poof" of skull smoke is from the Empire Wizards kit.  The Death Maiden (she has returned from the dead via chemistry) has bits from the official Death maiden kit, a body from the Warhammer Underworlds Dread Pageant, and a head from a banshee, plus some clumsy putty work.  The gang Queen (leader) is also from the Dread Pageant, with added chainsword, bolter, head, and various Escher bitz.  She is a beatstick who has killed a lot of Orlocks in our games.  The final figure is the matriarch (champion), who is made from the official matriarch/death maiden miniature, and has an added grenade launcher. 

Escher bikers

Part of the difficulty of playing Necromunda outside, is that you have to be able to zip around the ash wastes.  All of the gangs can add a "ash waster dirtbike" which is a catch all for a piece of wargear that increases movement at the expense of weapons.  I converted these two from Witch Elves, and again some clumsy putty work.  Their jetbikes are 3d prints that I designed and printed.  Unfortunately, they are sort of crude, and hard to take pictures of, as their original poses made it a bit tough to integrate with the jet bikes.  In the distant campaign future, I will probably get more jetbikes for the other gangers but just as sabot bases for the regular figures... learned my lesson with these two! 

Now if you are looking at these figures and thinking "those poses are a bit wonky"... well SOMEONE had the bright idea to magnetize the bases so they could have "outside" and "inside" bases, basically allowing for the figures to be used either in regular Necromunda or in the Ash Wastes version... which was not as successful as you might hope. Some of the figures worked out just fine, but several of them are wonky on one or the other of the bases, or both... and a single small magnet means that any sort of shear force causes the poor miniature to fall right off.  So not sure I would recommend this, although it does look cool on the ones where it does work. 

Clown car

Drive-bys required

Chariot rear in use! 

The final member of the gang is in fact a car.  In N:AW, vehicles generally are generic, driven by generic scum, not full gang members, but that is lame, so I painted the driver as if she were an Escher.  This one is converted from a Tamiya 1/48 Beatle that I had in my stash, a ton of 3d printing, and a driver that used the original plastic sentinel driver body (somehow there have been FIVE more plastic sentinels since this one!).  The conversions jacked up the suspension, added the huge engine, This conversion actually took the most time, both in terms of the 3d design, and the actual assembly.   I think there is more superglue than plastic in some parts.  Super crap in game since anything stronger than a pistol can kill it in one shot, but I love it, and love the image of the gang Queen riding her chariot. 

Plenty more Necromunda to come, just need to finish painting it.  (or blog about it)

N:AW Octarius Ork Scap Piles for Necromunda

 Back in August, I revealed that the kid and I had been working on Necromunda: Ash Wastes (N:AW from here on), both as a modeling project, and for gaming.  To recap, N:AW is the "outside" version of Necromunda, with vehicles, and the namesake ash wastes.  An ash waste game mat was built next.  The kid handled the terrain from the box, plus more buildings, plus made a bunch of rocky outcroppings from card and spackle.  

To contribute I got the newish Games Workshop plastic Ork Scrap piles from Ebay, scraped or clipped some of the "Ork" guff off, and daubed some paint on them.  The nice thing about painting scrap heaps is that the paint job does not have to be great because it is garbage, and then you are going to wash and otherwise cover over the paint anyway.  I finished these over the Thanksgiving break, and here they are. 

Overview of the three piles, three barricades

Escher ganger for scale with a barricade

Overhead view of the pieces so you can see how large they are against a 25mm base (center)

Anyway, lovely little project, and perfectly suited for drifting in and out for little bits of painting.

While I was working on the formerly Ork pieces, I also finished these Necromunda plastic barricades, which I had previously sponge painted. Here I just added a ton of washes and some "rust", which is a bit bright. 

Seven smaller barricades with Escher ganger for scale

Pleased about all this terrain, although it might benefit from a light filter and satin sealer. 

Plenty more Necromunda to come, just need to either paint it or blog about it. 

Barrowgate Town Watch

Reaper Miniatures once again lured me in for a holiday sale.  While I got a number of things that you will see in due course (or not, my record on finishing or showing you projects is poor), I wanted to highlight the "Barrowgate Town watch" set I got. 

First off, these are extremely well packed, with a blister pack that has a vacuum molded inner section to hold each figure in the correct orientation. The backing is printed with their name and information, and on the back there are clear pictures of the figures. 

Above are the figures stood between Franz and Jean our regular measuring figures, so you can see they are a bit on the tall side, and probably are in more of the 30mm range.  However, they should fit nicely stylistically with TOW/AOS figures and the new Guards of Traitor's Toll figures. 

Pretty great value for $3.25 a figure. 

Dead Man's Hand

A month ago [how time does fly!], I had the chance to play a game with Stew and P at P's Palace.  As always, P is a splendid host, and provided everything necessary for a gaming afternoon, down to dinner with three choices of meals and even accommodations for those gluten intolerant. 

This time we played a game new to me called Dead Man's Hand, which as most of you know is a Western gunslinger sort of game, which is also how we played it. P and I had four dastardly fellows each, with the aim of preventing a hanging, and Stew had the eight "good guys" who were going to stop us.  Well, they planned to at least.  What was planned as a hanging became a massacre. 

My original setup at the start of the game

Two went left around the yellow house

Beatdown at the gallows

My dastardly crew

The lovely board laid for us

Stew also posted a couple pictures of the game at the end of this post.   Great game, and great fun.  Hopefully Stew finds his terrain and such to expand the options. 

I have dabbled in the Old West before, as documented on this very blog, but not for over a decade.  Cameras have improved tremendously in that time, so here are a few updated photos of my miniatures. 

Otherwise it is all Necromunda around here, several games played, with any bits of hobby time going into various scatter terrain. 

N:AW Ash Wastes Game Mat

So something that you need for a Necromunda Ash Wastes (N:AW) game is in fact "ash wastes", that is a playing surface.  Your usual green felt or shattered future city is not really applicable.  N:AW has effectively two game scales, one which is the usual Necromunda scale skirmish, which you play on a 3x3 foot or 4x4 foot board, and "rolling roads" where there is some sort of vehicular chase/heist/etc. which needs a 6x4 foot or two boards that you switch to represent the road passing by. The boxed set came with a rather nice 3x3 foot printed paper mat, which has a day and night side, but it is glossy and already showing a bit of wear at the folds.  So the idea came to make a new game mat to represent this surface, and more to make it from a new technique. [who would be smart enough to use a tried and true technique?]

Googling around for various ash wastes mats, I somehow came across this video from Black Magic Craft.  He has a few more videos that use this same technique to make roads and rivers, which might have been where I found it the first time. 

I really liked how it seemed heavy and dense compared to caulked canvas, and the idea of using rollers and other things to mark the caulk seemed like a good one.  So after some research, I found a similar runner from Lowes (the same product as the video is not sold at Home Depot in the US), bought some caulk, and got to work.  

So to learn how to make one, continue after the jump. 

Necromunda: Ash Wastes (N:AW)

(Picture from Warhammer Community)

For Christmas this year (which since it is August, I note was now a long time ago), the kid got Necromunda: Ash Wastes (N:AW).  Released in 2022, this was officially an expansion to the main Necromunda game, adding vehicles, Ash waste campaign play, and several new gangs, including the Ash Waste Nomads, present in the box.  However, the hard back book in the box was in fact a complete Necromunda rule book, only missing the dominion campaign and specific underhive locations. In addition to the rules, the box came with two complete gangs, two vehicles, and four giant flea riders.  And a jolly lot of lovely terrain.  (as well as dice, templates, and cards)

This box triggered some what of an arms race in the house, as I bought first a Escher gang (new on sprue from a extremely cheap Ebay lot), then various books were bought, then various conversion projects were undertaken to get us to complete starting gangs of 1400 credits (to allow for vehicles), and after painting and a lot of rule reading, and production of a game mat, games have been played.  More to come on this, but it is pretty exciting.  

N:AW Teaser

 

For Christmas the kid got a box of Necromunda Ash Wastes, and this weekend with the house to ourselves we finally got a couple of games in with completed gangs and terrain!  Fun stuff, even if the first game did take nearly four hours as we looked stuff up!   Second was much faster, same 1400 cred battles but half the time. 

More to follow. 

Fleshy Tests

 Hello blog reader(s), it has been a while since the last post.  The kids have been busy with water polo, which means I have been busy driving, and with a couple of home projects and the season of birthdays I have had very little time for hobby (or gaming, I missed a lovely Quar game).

I have been working on a project which is inching closer to completion. 

The figures in question have a lot of bare skin, so I thought I would simplify things by using some newfangled Contrast paint.  Since I have not used this paint before, I thought a test would be in order, and this level of work was something I did have time for.

Gulliman Flesh test #1

I had a ton of old Chaos Marauder arms, so I selected a few that were similar, sprayed them white, and then undercoated them with the following colors: Flat white spray, pink as a highlight, all pink, ivory, Bugmans glow (a ruddy skin tone), and splatter paint with Bugmans. 

Here is the result:

Honestly, it was super fast to do the skin this way, but I did not get the look I was after for this project.  I may run another test (after all I have plenty of spare Marauder arms!), or I may just go back to traditional painting. 

What do you think?  Have you used Contrast, or another one coat paint for skin?

Beta Strike

This weekend past, I had the chance to play Alpha strike again with P, this time to celebrate the completion of his new hobby and gaming shed. 

It is hard to do justice to the space with just a few words, but it is pretty much every gamer's dream, storage, hobby space, art and books, and in the middle a nice sized table, ready for gaming. 

Lovely space, and very large! 

We were supposed to play a four person game, but sickness prevented the other two from coming, so we shifted around the game time to be more convenient, and essentially playtested the scenario.  In this game, the evil Clan mechs would come in from one corner of the board, attacking some sort of forward base held by mercenaries, and then later a couple lances of the real heroes from the Inner Sphere would come in to save the day.  The Objectives for the baddies were to destroy the parked leopard dropship and to get infantry into the bunker.

 

Start of the game, with two lances in reserve

This game was a reminder that while the Clan mechs are absurdly fast and well armed, they have effectively the same durability as the Inner Sphere mechs, so concentrating fire eventually can put them down.  Doing that while they blast away at your much weaker mechs is the real trick! 

Still one lance in reserve

As usual, I forgot to take many pictures once the game really got going, but the Clan mechs dumped off elementals at the edge of the complex and then supported them with pretty heavy fire.  The Inner Sphere eeked out a victory mostly due to time. 

Climactic action with the Elementals swarming in

Once again fun to get mechs out on the table, and P is always great to play against.  We had a good chat after about the 101 other games he has, now that they are all unpacked from storage and can be seen... so hopefully we will be back in the shed soon for more games! 

Holidaze 2025

Well hello again. 

Happy New year and Merry Christmas to you my dear reader(s)! 
Hopefully everyone is well, and you got what you wanted from Santa.
As for myself, my family was very generous, and I got a few gaming related items.

Nothing touched yet

The generic black box on the bottom is an Eldar Fire prism, which guarantees that GW will release a new one with the new codex.  I also got a new Kroot kill team, some bones figures, and the sprue is a Stargrave Crew II sprue that Santa put in my stocking. 

Over the holiday we did manage to play a single game of Splendor, a single game of Forbidden Jungle, and got in a good session of the kid D&D game with all the cousins, but little gaming or gaming related work has happened in the last few months.  Between work and driving to school or water polo I seem to have little time or energy.  I am nearly ready to reveal a fall project which should lead to more games, so watch this space. 

Also somewhat exciting is that the kid got the huge Necromunda Ash Wastes box and some additional stuff to go with it, so we have been talking Necromunda and campaigns quite a bit.  

Actual plans for this year look depressingly like plans for last year: Finish the Eldar army (complicated by a new codex and miniatures in March or so), paint something I got as a gift, and work on WWII Normandy. 

What about you, what are you planning on doing this year?