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.