Project Update

G’day,

This is just a very short update today as I’m flat out at the moment. (I thought holidays were meant to be quiet and relaxing! )

Twilight (Dusk now)

I am in the process of organising all the rules that I have for Twilight into a logical order. My plan is to use a standard scenario to test the first two tribes extensively and then add one tribe at a time, making sure they are balanced against each other. Then I will add new Scenarios to the mix to check they remain balanced within the new context.

I need to do some more  initial playtesting on the first two tribes before opening up a more formal playtest arrangement. If you are interested in helping out with Twilight, keep your eyes peeled.

Song of Fur and Buttons*

*Working name

This is another major project I’m working on at the moment. It involves the exploits of three adventurous bears – Sir Maurice Fursworth, Sir William Cuddlesbury and Sir Uppity Paws. This orginated from a scenario that I wrote for .45 adventure, but after writing many stories about these three bears, it developed into something more.

This release will be a sort of campaign book to be used with the Song of Blades and Heroes engine. The inspiration for the stories came from the very characterful Teddy Bear miniatures sculpted by Mike Broadbent and produced by Eureka Miniatures. Each ‘Chapter’ in the campaing will start out with a short narrative which leads into the scenario. It is written to be kid friendly and is a great way to either introduce your kids to gaming or let your inner kid out. Just because it’s kid friendly, doesn’t mean that it is light on gaming wise. The variety of scenarios is vast, with the hope to get 15-20 different scenarios in the end book.

The first five scenarios are written and are being playtested as we speak. Once those five are fully playtested, we’ll move onto the next five and so on.

Below, you can see both my new board and part of the first scenario in action. Sir Uppity Paws needs to be sewn up again after being attacked by a group of Compies with a penchant for honey. But he’ll be back in Scenario 2. You see the bears don’t actually die. They just need to be taken to the bear hospital and sewn back up and be re-stuffed. This just means that they might be a little late to the next scenario, but they will be back.

It also means saying that the bear was stuffed is a good thing! … it’s when he’s NOT stuffed that there is a problem.

Here is a painted Gallimimus from HLBS Co (it’s sad they are closing down their 28mm lines in March – I love their dinosaurs!) You get to race one of these in the book!

Song of Blade Unit Cards

The first 36 card set of these has been completed. Now it’s just the necessary boring stuff holding it up. More news soon.

Anyway, if there’s any questions or comments, feel free to post them here!

- Ben.

Ahhhh… Holidays at Last!

First of all, let me apologise for the lack of updates lately. If any of you guys are teachers out there, you can atest to the craziness that is the last few weeks of school. I’ve had to move classrooms and will be teaching grade 5s instead of 2s next year… so there has been a lot to do.

Well, anyway, here I find myself at the end of another long, but rewarding year. It was sad to have to say goodbye to my grade two-ers as they were a great bunch of kids. But it now means I have plenty of time to concentrate on my projects.

I have been writing like a madman lately and so haven’t got much stuff painted, but it now means that Twilight (Dusk Now) is now very close to being opened up to playtesters. I just need to finish off a scenario or two and clarify some points and then the call will go out. *Cue Kermit the Frog like ‘Yaaaaay!’ with flailing arms*

I have finalised the design for the Song of Blades and Heroes cards, but the release will be put back a bit while I sort some stuff out. It does look like I will be able to get physical cards though which is great news! Here is the final design below.

I have also been working on another project more recently that I’m very excited about. I’m having an absolute blast writing it and hopefully I’ll be able to tell you all more about it soonish.

I have painted a few miniatures, notably some stands of 10mm Night Goblins and two Teddies. One Colonial Teddy Bear – Sir Maurice Fursworth and a native Teddy Bear that looks a lot like a Koala (note the gum leaf shield). I just love these guys. Almost as much as the Frogs… they just have sooo much character. They are made by Eureka Miniatures.

After some discussion the other day, I’ve decided to paint some of the Married Zulu Teddies (natives) as Koalas, with their feather headdresses a Sulphur Yellow colour (like a Cockatoo) – trying to make them distinctly Australian.

Here are some photos of my most recently painted miniatures.

I have also began making a 3 foot square terrain board to play Song of Blades and Heroes on. I know I already have the 2′x3′ one, but because the terrain is fixed, it’s become a bit stock standard to play on. The 3′ square one will feature movable terrain pieces. This way the battlefield is always fresh, and I can use it for SoBH or Twilight, which will cut down on my storage space alot… now to try and offload some of my other boards.

My demo board for Nuthin’ But Net is almost complete, which is great. Then I can get started on converting some minis for a Kermitian team.

I think I’m really going to enjoy these holidays!

Merry Christmas to everyone and their families!

- Ben.

Busy, busy, busy!

As usual I have been very busy…

The life sucking force that is “School Reports” has been quelled for another semester, leaving me tired, yet relieved.

So, I hear you asking what have you been doing gaming wise Ben? The answer my friends… is alot. Not so much in the painting department though, as all I’ve been capable of painting was some Dragon Lord ships from Uncharted Seas… three Cruisers and their capital ship. I haven’t had a chance to grab photos yet, so expect them soon.

The gaming related work I’ve been burying myself in has been on ‘Twilight’ and another project which I’ve had on hiatus for many a moon… Song of Blades and Heroes Unit Cards.

Twilight (Now called Dusk)

Twilight is a small objective based game that I’ve been working on recently that is set on an imaginery world called ‘Crepusculum’. I have been writing and playtesting madly the last few weeks and now have a fairly good set of rules down. Many thanks to Greg Hallam and Nic Robinson for looking over the rules that I’ve written so far and making some sound suggestions.

The game revolves around competing tribes of ‘Occulites’ that are trying to gather ‘Sungems’. They need to do this to keep their caves warm during the long dark, that envelopes the world for weeks at a time. The only problem is, sungems are much sort after by not only Occulites, but by all other life forms on Crepusculum as well.

I’m really enjoying writing the rules to ‘Twilight’ and am eager to see them grow and transform into what I hope will be something special.

If you were ever wondering what an Occulite is…

…wonder no longer. Above is a rough concept sketch of what an Occulite looks like. This is a member of the ‘Palaudis’ tribe. Look for more information on Twilight in the near future, including a call for playtesters.

Song of Blades and Heroes Unit Cards

The other major project I have going on at the moment is this one. Creating sets of Unit Cards for Ganesha Games’ Song of Blades and Heroes. These unit cards will help you to recruit your warband, randomise encounters by drawing cards and provide quick reference to their stats and abilities.

The first few sets of cards are figures by One Monk Miniatures who make high quality 30mm paper miniatures. Future sets will include more One Monk figures and figures from metal miniature lines as well. The cards will hopefully eventually cover all the profiles from the Song of Blades series in addition to new profiles.

It has been a massive undertaking, but an enjoyable one that has seen the card design take on a life of it’s own. Below you can see an example of what the cards look like so far.

Additional card sets are planned which include special ability cards to match the abilities that appear in the Song of Blades books.

These cards will have the full rule text of the ability for easy reference during the game and can be used to create figures of your own. More information on them in the near future.

Well, as usual, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment!

So until next update, take care!

- Ben.

Mid-November Update

I’ve been sitting in front of my computer doing reports all morning, and I need a break. My eyes hurt because my cold spread to my eyes (giving my conjunctivitis! – Yay!) and I’m tired. Sure lots of people have it worse, and thousands of teachers are writing reports at the moment, so I don’t really have cause to complain.

But it does give me an excuse to update my blog. It’s funny, whenever reports come around, I always seem to get a lot done miniatures wise. Perhaps I work faster, better, stronger… or perhaps I just delay the inevitable dreary-ness of writing reports by sneaking into my games room and painting.

So what have I been up to? Well, quite a bit actually. I’ve been writing scenarios and tweaking rules for my new game ‘Dusk’ and it’s coming along pretty well actually. I’m really getting excited about it now. I’ve been playing Rock Band 2 (imported from US – wow that was a hassle!) and loving it!

But enough chit-chat. You probably don’t come here to listen to me rattle on. So this is what I’ve done. I’ve got some stats for using Turtles and Terrapins in Song of Blades and Heroes. You can find them in the SoBH page on this site, or just check them out below!

Song of Blades and Heroes

The Turtle Terrapin army is built with the philosophy of Slow but Steady wins the race. They will activate fairly easily, but are hampered by their either Slow or Short Move specials. The leader was inspired by the greatest TMNT – Leonardo (aka the Fearless and Leader specials) I hope you find them enjoyable to use.
I recommend the Eureka line of Turtles/Terrapins for these guys with the Reaper Tortoise monster model for the Giant Monster Turtle.

Turtle Rifleman Points 28 Quality 3+ Combat 2 Special Rules Heavy Armor, Shooter: Medium, Slow

Terrapin Spearman Points 26 Quality 3+ Combat 2 Special Rules Amphibious, Gregarious, Short Move

Turtle Bowman Points 28 Quality 3+ Combat 2 Special Rules Heavy Armor, Shooter: Short, Short Move

Turtle/Terrapin Sniper Team Points 44 Quality 3+ Combat 3 Special Rules Heavy Armor, Sharpshooter, Slow, Stealth

Turtle Standard Bearer Points 36 Quality 3+ Combat 2 Special Rules Fearless, Heavy Armor, Standard Bearer

Turtle War Drummer – Personality Points 50 Quality 3+ Combat 2 Special Rules Heavy Armor, Slow, Terror

Turtle Commander – Personality Points 76 Quality 3+ Combat 3 Special Rules Fearless, Heavy Armor, Leader

Giant Monster Turtle – Personality Points 65 Quality 4+ Combat 4 Special Rules Greedy, Group Fighter, Heavy Armor, Huge, Short Move, Tough

I plan to go back to the Song of Blades and Heroes page and update the listing for the Frogfolk, to bring it in line with the Turtles/Terrapins and Sock Puppets, but that might not be until next week.

Mighty Armies

I’ve been painting up lots for Mighty Armies this week including some Rangers of Gondor, Lurtz and some Orcs – all in 10mm. You can find these on my Might Armies page.

I also have been working on stats to play a War of the Worlds style matchup using the Might Armies rules which are under playtest at the moment (the Ancient ones are now out and are awesome). Here are the models I have painted for this project so far. It is in 6mm. The Tripods are all GZG bought from Eureka, and the Infantry/General/Artilery is Irregular bought from Eureka.

I plan on updating the Mighty Armies page soon to separate armies onto different pages to make them easier to browse. But this might not happen for a few weeks.

Avatars of War

I have also been painting some more Skinks for my Avatar of War warbands. Here is the newest addition:

I realise the highlights are too harsh on the animal skull on his waist and on some of the teeth of the blade, but overall I’m really happy with him.

Oh well, back to reports! As always, comments, suggestions and feedback always welcome!

- Ben.

What to do when you have the flu…

Well here I am on a Sunday night, blowing my nose with a Cepacol in my mouth… the changing of the weather flu. Just as the days become nicer here in Melbourne and the temperature climbs, the grass grows extremely fast, the flowers in the garden bloom, dragonflies dart through the air… and I get the flu… every year without fail. So between bouts of shivering and sweating, I had a bit of spare time to do some painting and some writing.

Avatars of War

I have recently come across a real little gem of a game that many of you may not have heard of. It is a small scale game called “Avatars of War”. Think fantasy gladiators… interested? So am I! I saw this on Tabletop Gaming News the other day and proceeded to download the rulebook (which was free!) Over the past few days I’ve had a lot of time to read the book over. It is extremely well presented (although the download is in low res due to bandwidth, there is a physical copy available through their website Avatars of War: Arena DeathMatch)

They also have a number of miniatures you can purchase which are very high quality. Their Goblin King miniature is particularly cool. I will most certainly obtain several of these in the coming months, but will space them out due to their high cost and the Aussie dollar. Their rulebook however is very reasonably priced and so on Friday I put in an order for the hardcopy and searched through my minis for stand ins for the interim. In fact, I have been so sucked into this game, that I have already purchased more MDF to create my own Deathmatch Arena. I will be using a 2′ x 3′ board and am eager to get started.

Because each warband only has 3-5 models duking it out in the arena, you can really go to town on each model. The models that I have been painting during the time this blog has been in existance have been painted to what I thought was my best balance of time vs quality. I often painted in three layers (base, wash and highlight), but having a bit of time to myself, I decided to sit down and spend more time investing in addtional layers to see how well I could paint.

I was pleasantly surprised. Although the photos don’t really do them justice, I have included them below. I ended up with around 9 layers on the skink’s skin and 8 layers on the Orc Shaman’s. I know this is still a lot less than others, but this seriously took me ages. But because I’m only painting a couple of minis for Avatars of War, I don’t mind, and in fact I rather enjoyed going a bit slower and taking my time. I would thoroughly reccommend taking a model and just spending two or three times as long as you normally would, just to see how much better you can do.

The Skink will use the Goblin stats until either the Avatar of War team develop a ’skink’ hero or I try my hand at it. The Orc Shaman represents exactly that. Please click on each photo to enlarge them. The lighting certainly didn’t capture all the highlighting unfortunately, but you get the idea.

Completed Swamp Dweller Army

In other news I finally finished my Swamp Dweller army for Might Armies. I have done up a set of profiles for them which we’ve been playtesting using the Mighty Armies Creation rules. I will be very excited to see these in action when Mighty Armies Fantasy gets released. I think they will be very popular.

Dusk teaser…

I have started playtesting on a new game that I have written called ‘Dusk’. I’m very excited about this game as I hope to publish it myself. I have also looked into getting some figures sculpted for it, but more on this at a later date.

I will be trying to keep more regular postings on this blog, but as I have started writing my kids’ reports, it will be whenever I get the time. I will try and use the blog as a time out between report writing.

So until then, have fun!

- Ben.