Warlord Games Mystery Box

 Once again, I have given into the power of a dark bargain.

This time it was the Warlord Games Mystery Box which enticed me. Though not normally a gambling man, I decided upon the Black Powder era box in the hopes of getting a wide range of figures and oddities to use for pirate games and Turnips and colonials alike. The Black Powder name does cover everything from the early 18th century to the early 20th, after all.

In hindsight, I probably should have expected this. Napoleonics all the way down. Due to the way that Warlord lays out their sprues I do not think using them for Turnip28 would be a good idea, except perhaps for some of the horsemen. I suppose this means that at some point I will be getting into Napoleonics proper. I could resell the kits, and very well might, but the idea of doing some Russian-styled winter bases on the French infantry is growing on me by the day. In terms of value this is pretty incredible, since the starter box already has a unit discount on top of the box discount. This more than halves what I would consider the average price of a historical figure when looked at as a whole. The caveat here is that, unlike the Perry Brothers or Victrix, Warlord Games has their Napoleonic figures as monopose. But for doing rank and file instead of Silver Bayonet Skirmishing or relatively low-count Turnipbashing this is probably reasonable choice.

The company did send me one additional sprue of Peninsular British which I will find a use for someway or another. You can see the monopose nature of Warlord Sprues on display here. I do feel somewhat ungrateful for wanting boxes from completely random and potentially incompatible figure lines instead of the curated and thought-out starter experience I received, but I doubt Warlord was planning for a customer with my extremely eclectic tastes in era. The next time a mystery box is on sale I will try to restrain the bargain hunter in my soul, not due to price or value but simply because I really should try to paint these figures first. All 249 of them, give or take.

This may take some time.

How I Detail Hexmaps

 Innovation from Inspiration, or something along those lines.

Before Kill Team devoured my free hours I had been spending some time on and off with a new style of hexmap creation. Broadly, it follows my previous method, but with layers. Doing this lets me change the map scale in fun ways, like here where I am able to move it from 1-mile hexes to purely 6-mile:

Of course, I did forget to make two separate layers for settlements, so the 1-mile villages are visible on the same scale as the 6-mile towns and cities which does somewhat clutter the intended effect. Experimentation tends to have a few hiccups in the name of progress.

This is what it looks like in GIMP, I really appreciate how easy it is to toggle different layers on and off. The paint bucket is somewhat more finnicky to use however, which is why colour shades vary less or more than what I really wanted. Now, do you see the option for "6mileColor"?

This is a political map! I have moved beyond simply making terrain and into the realm of intrigue and backstabbing. The process to make this level was taken from Skerples' OSR fast mapping technique, but I did not stick too closely since I am working at a different map scale and with some preexisting terrain ideas. The light/heavy forests, medium green and dark green respectively, did come out in interesting shapes as a result of this system. The political scale is smaller than Skerples' version, but I take this to be the result of a more Italy-like fragmentation of city states than a discrepancy. Compared to just working out the borders by feel I think I did enjoy this more, as unexpected results open pathways for fun. It is the sort of thing I would want to run once or twice more on different maps before committing though, to get a feel for any quirks or ways to make it produce consistently interesting results.

The reason that villages and 1-mile detail only dot a small part of the map is because I decided to only detail what I would consider the starting 7 hexes, with the idea that I could expand quickly outwards using the same generation method between sessions. This is not something I have tried before, but the concept does interest me. For that to happen I would first need to wrangle a group, but since I already have an in-person Pathfinder game where I play and am not in the mood to deal with Online gaming that will have to wait for some time. Time which I should use to practice this even more. For one, a river layer would definitely help. And what about a topography viewer like in Dwarf Fortress? Imagine the implications for sightline gameplay! And it certainly would have no effect on my sanity, to detail 1-mile topography across thousands of hexes. None whatsoever.

My First Game: Week of Kill Team

 My first in-person game with real models, to be precise.

Here you can see the hated foe has been spotted. I was quite pleased to be assigned the table with fully painted and custom terrain, since some of the others were unprimed grey plastic. From what I overheard, painting the Gallowdark set is a rather daunting proposition. I certainly would be wary to try. It is not impossible that my opponent and I were given the table because both of our teams were painted while the loaned teams for newcomers were not. Imagining that to be so somewhat justifies the obscene hours put into getting my team readied.

Being severely tired and also focused on not taking too long with my activations, I only took a few pictures. None of them were of pivotal events in the game, save the last. I tried initially to deploy behind cover, but quickly ran several units out to be unceremoniously shot down. In my rush to paint the team I had not actually read the rules aside from those for team composition, but Kill Team proved about the same complexity as Firelock 198X. Granted, that is the only other wargame I have played, but both do rely more heavily on keywords and a quick time-to-kill compared with battle reports and rulebooks from other games I have looked at.

My opponent was playing his second-ever game and had also almost-but-not-quite finished painting his team. He used the popular "slapchop" method, which I think worked quite well for his figures even if I personally prefer to avoid contrast paints. I wish I could have captured some of the melee bouts, as my Sicarians and his Necrons made quite a dynamic scene with their poses amidst the terrain.

After two initial losses on my end, we began trading kills. Necrons are able to revive, while Cyborgized Humans are not, so after a few turns I was whittled down to a single Skitarii. Despite this, I had managed to hold the midpoint for a turn while harassing the sidelines with my Sicarians, so I had a one-point lead. Unfortunately for me, Necron revival tokens count for objective control so after sacrificing my last Sicarian to clear off his deployment objective I found that he still held it if just barely. In the last turn he took the midpoint, bringing our points to equal. He graciously offered a tie, even though he had killed more units overall. I accepted.

Here is a picture of the last Skitarii, who was also the first painted, hunkering down by my deployment objective. The game took about two hours, not counting setup and emergency last-minute purity seal painting in the store. Next time I hope to print out relevant rules and perhaps write down some notes, since Skitarii rangers are able to freely move out of cover with a command point during the strategy phase, fire with a bonus for not moving first during their activation, and then dart back out of sight. Tactics like that were lost on my painting-addled mind. Of special interest for the future is the potential of running Kill Team from my own house for friends who are adverse to miniature spending. The size of the board and amount of terrain needed was certainly nothing to laugh at, but also much more achievable in my mind once viewed in-person.

But, that will require another team to be painted. Perhaps even two. The prospect frightens and excites me in equal measure.

Hunter Clade: Week of Kill Team

Somehow, I thought this series was titled "Weeks of Kill Team"

In this case, the singular proves more apt.

What happened was thus: I received an email inviting me to a "learn to play Kill Team" event, having signed up to some sort of Game Store mailing list years prior when I painted at the store more frequently. The email promised the presence of preready teams to borrow, and I knew for a fact greytide was common at the store, but I still decided instead to build and paint my own. The event would be in three weeks, I could certainly handle the challenge!

The first week was spent on other projects. By the second, I was ready to begin. I decided on the Hunter Clade mainly because I did not want to come up with a suitable scheme for the Fellgore Ravagers, and because I already had enough pieces to build an Admech team lying around. Taking the advice of the internet, I decided to try building in assembly. Previously, I would sometimes paint rifle arms separately, but only by holding them in my fingers. Attaching them to bases here was a great help. Initially I taped the paperclips to the stands after drilling into the assemblies but eventually I moved to glue. Legs and heads were done separately for all of the Ranger figures, but arms would be attached if they did not cover a significant area. Backpacks were done separately after the first, and in the case of figures with power cables the backpacks and arms would be part of a single extremely delicate assembly. The lead Ruststalker was also done in assembly, but the other Ruststalkers were done whole.

The Surveyor was the test case, and took the rest of the week to puzzle out. I did not finish, and do not consider any of the figures actually done yet. They require glowing eyes, and glowing weapons in some cases. Some additional cleanup in places, shading in others, and edge highlights on the cloak edges could certainly not hurt either.

His screen was a pleasure, though I do not think I could replicate it as it was a maddened process of correction against correction.

Connecting the arms and packs of the two figures who had connecting cables was a pain. You can see here a stronger glue was required, and it stained the figure somewhat while still keeping the arms awkwardly offset. I did dryfit repeatedly during assembly, but I think that either the cable shifted or the paint changed something. In the future I will connect the cable only during assembly, as a single power link should be easier to repaint than entire shoulder regions.

The recipe thus far is a three-part Zenithal with black-grey-white, then to paint the red areas with Rhinox Hide, highlight them with Doomnbull Brown, Drybrush with Mephiston Red, then Wash with washified Black Templar/Old Nuln Oil, and then Drybrush again with Mephiston. Pants are Corvus Black, Cables Abbadon, and Wood is Mournfang Brown. All Three of those are washed with Black Templar. The metals are Retributor washed Templar and then Reikland Fleshshade for gold, while the iron is Leadbelcher washed Templar, rehiglighted with Leadbelcher, and then half-washed half-layered with thinned Typhus Corrosion. That last step is hard to describe but perhaps similar to an accelerated oil wash. The optics and special weapons are not done yet and so will be covered later. The base is Astrogranite, I had wanted Astrogranite Debris but picked up the wrong pot by mistake, washed with New Nuln Oil and drybrushed with Celestra Grey. The pipes on some of the bases are sprue bits painted Warplock and washed heavily in a random mix, but I do not recommend them as part of the scheme for the moment.

The poses on the Ruststalkers are a personal ideal to live up to. I suspect I will be using figures like this one as models for my own conversions in the future. Absolutely awe-inspiring. Their scheme is the same as the Rangers, but their armour is Vallejo Scarlet layered normally, washed Templar, and rehighlighted with Scarlet. I was missing more parts from this kit than the Rangers, so I had to improvise with poses on several units and sculpt portions for others.

The unit, affectionately known as "Bonehead", was the most dramatic improvisation, since I have fully run out of Ruststalker gas masks. They are simply too good of a part for conversions. The head is made from a random skull, the lower half of a Sicarian Infiltrator's head, and a Skaven tail. 

I layered some blood effects around the join point for grodiness.

The Princeps was done in assembly, combining the techniques from both types of unit. The head is probably my favorite piece of the whole kit, and that is against some stiff competition.

Doing nine figures in a week was a bad idea. It was not the initial idea, but after losing the first week to another project and spending the second week developing the scheme it is what happened. The scheme was intended to be easy to paint, with lots of drybrushing and washes, but even with that advantage I put at least 30 hours into the project in that last week. By my personal standards that was excessive. Instead of painting smarter I ended up just painting harder, finishing at 3:00 am on the Friday night before the event, and not even properly finishing!

But the results, unfinished as they currently stand, are hardly displeasing at least.