OSR Blog Roll Call

Dyvers, a blog writen by Charles Akins, has an interesting post called The Great Blog Roll Call, which has a listing of OSR and OSR related blogs, and importantly, has a bit that sumerizes each blog with a listing of how frequently it updates.

A "randomly selected" example:

• Lasgunpacker A war gaming blog that focuses mostly on Games Workshop materials. Well written and often filled with valuable advice on painting and game play. Updates: About six times a month

Which reminds me, I really need to post about the Pathfinder game I have been playing in, and about the Roll20 platform we have been using to play it.

Anyway, you should look over this list, and read some new blogs, and recomend those that you like that are not on the list to improve its value as a tool.

Dark Elves III

As you might recall, I have been talking about a Warhammer Dark Elf army, and its costs.  Well, for $170 MSRP and $136 retail, you can now get what appears to be a replacement for the old battalion boxes.


Picture from Games-Workshop.com

The box gives you 20 corsairs, 20 Dark Elf Warriors with swords/spears or repeating crossbows, the new cold one chariot, 5 cold one knights, and a corsair lord that could be decent with some work.  As well as a couple of spare beast masters from the chariot. Individual retail cost of the lot would be $212, so quite a savings when buying this way.  Whether or not this helps you build an army is a different question, as even two of these boxes at a discount would be at least $260 and the army would lack any light cavalry, monsters, or magical support.

On Army Painting

I was supposed to post this after my Tau painting weekend, but time gets away from us all.

Here are my thoughts on painting a large chunk of an army in one go, which in this case was a short platoon, but could also have been a large-ish regiment, or a full skirmish warband (provided that the colors are restricted).

First, better lighting is needed, particularly when removing mold lines.  Failure to remove all the mold lines will be annoying when the project is closer to completion, so better to spend the time up front and do it right, and it will be easier with better lighting.

Second, get some proper seating, and if you are going to be sitting for 7+ hours as I was during the primary painting session, then you need to mix it up a bit. My back was sore afterwards, and I spent part of the time sitting on a yoga ball to help mitigate this.  Proper Posture Prevents Pain!

Third, proper base coat planning will save time.  Had I used the main armor color as the base coat for the whole miniature, it would have saved a couple of hours of time.  I could certainly have found a flat olive green for this project, and at Walmart or similar it would have been pretty cheap too.

Fourth, and this is something I knew but did not take advantage of, spray coats of primer and/or base coats will save time over brushing.  I brushed gesso on the figures, and it took some extra time and is slightly thicker than spray paint would have been.

Fifth, it is faster to paint by part than it is to paint by color.  By this I mean that painting a single color on all left legs and then right legs and so on is faster than painting all of the parts that use a certain color, and helps to prevent forgetting to paint the hoof of the left leg on a certain miniature or something.

No painting progress lately, as we had Thanksgiving/family/illnesses to get in the way, but I did get in a game of 7 Wonders, and spent a happy 20 minutes fitting together another random Inquisitor warband figure.

Tau Weekend

This weekend, the wife and kids were out of town, and other than waste time on the computer and household chores, I also started a new miniatures project as a sort of time constrained challenge.

Now, you might think that it would be sensible to complete an existing project, and you would be correct.  However, this project did use (mostly) existing miniatures.  As I mentioned a while back, I have a "reserve army" of Tau.  I call them a reserve army, because they are in boxes in shrink wrap, completely untouched (much like dwarves, Eldar, DoW, and more other things than I am willing to mention at this time).  Anyway, they are reserve no longer, because I opened up those battleforces this weekend, and built AND painted a nice little force of Firewarriors.  Although I did buy a new box of pathfinders to go with it...

Crummy Phone Pictures:

 

Pile of sprues waiting to be clipped and realized

after 4.75 hours of clipping and gluing

 


Favorite pose, a NCO using Pathfinder arms

Basing in progress

 

Close up of base work

Brush primed with Gesso and paint mixture

 

All base layer paints finished!

Inked and ready for action

I still need to do a few highlights, finish the bases, and then seal them, but 90% of the work is done, and in only 15 hours to boot.  (~36 minutes per figure) I will post later this week some "lessons learned" about army painting, which may be old hat to you, but seem as new realisations to me.

Napoleon's Cavalry

Emir Bukhari

This week I finished reading Napoleon's Cavalry, by Emir Bukhari, illustrated by Angus McBride.  Supplied by my local library system, this book is a single volume compilation of five Osprey Men-At-Arms titles, and was published in 1979.  It covers Napoleon's Cuirassiers and Carabiners, Dragoons/Lancers, Hussars, Line Chasseurs, as well as Guard cavalry units.  I got it as a painting aid for the Perry plastic dragoons on foot that I got a while back.

Considering that Osprey still sells the constituent volumes for £10, this book seems to be an excellent value for anyone who is building more than one sort of regiment, or who just likes to look at colorful illustrations, particularly as it can be had used on Amazon for as little as $15. (or possibly free from your library)

This book does have the usual Osprey "style", where color plates are separated from relevant text, all other images are in black and white, and far too much attention paid to officers and other unusual members of a unit, but this is somehow more excusable in a book published in 1979 than it is in their modern reprints.

As you can see from the scan below, the original artwork is quite excellent, as you might expect from an Angus McBride book. With so many plates, the book is worthwhile to review, even if you do not value the text.

Who else would illustrate a Dragoon officer cleaning his muddy boot?

Speaking of the text, Mr. Bukhari's prose is quite refreshing, particularly after reading the mess that was my last Osprey title...  The text for the more important books covers uniforms, deployments, equipment, saddles, and all sorts of side information that makes it very entertaining.

So in conclusion, I highly recommend this book, and will be buying it for myself sometime in the future.

Evil-bay

I have been on what might be termed "an eBay Binge" lately, which seems more substantial than usual because I have been actually winning auctions.  In any case, the total money spent has gotten to the level where I could have put the money to more productive use, such as buying that Chaos Battalion I was bleating on about, or the bulk of the forces I had planned for Napoleonic skirmish, or a couple of 15mm sci-fi forces, or any other new project really, rather than just odds and ends for existing projects.

I am not sure what it is about eBay that bypasses my planning instinct, but it does... must be the allure of the deal, or in some cases old lead. (I did at least get some nice old figures though)

In painting news, I have nearly completed my Neo-Soviets, and they only need a few more touch ups, sealing, and basing to be "complete".

Basing - Inq

I have been pondering how to base my Inquisitor models lately.  Some of them are getting close to that stage, which I usually do right before priming.  (Although instead of doing the putty work to finish some figures, I used my meager hobby time to start a new batch of figures...)

Like Pulp miniatures, the problem with basing Inquisitor warbands is that they rarely stick to the same sort of terrain.  With pulp games figures move quickly from city to jungle to desert, and back to the city, and likewise in Inquisitor games one could move from Hive to Underhive to a verdant crop world, or an ice world.  Bases can already look a bit strange when they match the terrain, and having the figure drag a circle of city around the desert can look even more odd.

One solution to this problem is to either base in just black, or possibly even with clear bases, the idea being that very little attention is paid to the base, and more to the figure and the game.   This method does pose problems for the other 99% of the time, when your figures are not involved in a game, and are either in a display case or exist merely as pictures online.

So it probably makes sense to just base the best you can, with the most common sort of terrain you plan to play on, and just live with it.  In my case, since I am also (very slowly) working on Necromunda figures, it makes sense to base Inquisitor figures in a like manner, which is to say a modified Underhive sort of look, with broken terrain bits, some sand, and minimal plant life.

Something like this bounty hunter figure (old)

On the theme of basing, here are some useful blog posts about it from BigRedBatCave and Toy Soldiers and Dinning Room Battles.

Basing I
Basing II
Basing III - has a useful method for making multi figure bases.

Bases

And for something completely different, Orlygg has an old-school basing tutorial.

WIP Neo-Soviets

The last couple of weeks, I have been very slowly painting my Copplestone Neo-soviets.  These have been partly painted for something like four years, so it was time to get them done.  I finally decided I would just go with a camo pattern, and not just wonder about what would be best.  Naturally it is completely washed out in the picture, but it is there.  I also tried a stamping technique for the base camo color, but ultimately decided it did not work quite right.

Not very good picture, washed out by full sunlight

I really like these figures, and wish they were not quite so expensive so that I could have a reinforced platoon of them [they currently cost around ~$3 a figure shipped, so not terrible, but costs do mount up when you want to get 40ish figures].

Going forward, I plan to add some snow to the bases, and will be using the new GW flesh wash for the first time, so there are a few learning experiences yet to come.

Armies of the Napoleonic Wars: An Illustrated History

Earlier this week, I finished reading Armies of the Napoleonic Wars: An Illustrated History, an Osprey publication edited by Chris McNab.  As is often the case when I am interested in something historical, I gather up some related books for a read, partly as a way to satisfy my interest without spending much if any money, and partly to refine my thoughts on the period as a game.  In this case, being recently interested in the Napoleonic period again, I turned to this book, which I got as a gift from my sister a few years ago.

When this book was listed by Ospery as forthcoming, there was a great deal of interest on TMP, because it was assumed that this would be a collection of the Men at Arms books from Osprey, with all the text and plates.  While it seems unlikely in retrospect that Osprey would take their money making series and provide it in a more economical package, at the time that was the thought, and operating under that assumption, I put this book "on the list" and got it as a gift.

Unfortunately, as it turns out this book is more like an overview of the various armies involved and it has very few plates from the relevant MAA books.  Most of the text for each country deals with high level organization, which as you might imagine changed quite a bit from 1797 to 1815.  There is little in the way of tactical discussion, uniform discussion, or discussion of flags and banners.  Someone without a prior understanding of the period, major technologies, and battles, would likely be lost.

This book also has all the usual Osprey foibles, such as the reproduction of period color art works in black and white, concentration of strange or unusual uniforms in plates, and deep discussion of rare troop types while the common line infantry are skipped over. Smaller countries get little to no mention in the book, and more discussion of Balkan elements of the French army (and more plates!) than for any of the German states, including the larger ones like Bavaria or Saxony.  There is also a bit of editorial bias in this book verging on jingoism, where somehow the peninsular war is the most important theater of battle, but this is common in British texts.

So to sum it up, this book was pretty disappointing, both from a wargaming point of view, and from a history point of view.  It does have some interesting plates and paintings, and does cover a number of nations, but I think it can only be recommended to those who want an overview of the reorganizations of the various armies, and who do not already own the relevant MAA titles.

Warlord Games Sprue Sale

In the recent Warlord Games newsletter, there was a small item about all individual sprues being 50% off.  Naturally I had a look, and indeed, you can get the various reinforcement sprues for very cheaply, making the price of individual figures less than a dollar each.  The Bolt Action range of weapon sprues are as cheap as $2, which seems like it would be worth it even for a single gun per sprue, at least in comparison to usual GW bitz prices.

Worth $0.82 per figure?

I also noticed that they sell Renedra 25mm round bases, which I have had some interest in recently, after seeing them magnetized by Dave King. I resisted putting together an order this time (having recently been on an Ebay binge), but there certainly are some great deals to be had if you need a few figures to round out a regiment, convert, or to use in skirmish games.