The Ongoing Adventures of Mi57 (SA WW2) - Villains! [29/1/17]

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It's a bank holiday, Claire is hiding under a duvet, ill, and I have a clear dining table. What could be a better opportunity to give Strange Aeons it's first spin? As I'm still terrain-less I decided to give the Achtung! Cthulhu tiles a spin instead.

The mission...
For a while there have been strange rumours floating around of a Russian complex, codenamed Альфа, or Alpha.What is happening in here is anyone's guess, but locals and prisoners of war have been seen going in, but never coming out. The Russians may currently be allies, but our mystics tell us that there is definitely something powerful happening within the underground bunker and it cannot be good for anyone. Captain Harris and his small team have been dropped up the coastline a bit and are tasked with getting into the complex and stopping whatever is happening in there.

In order to get some equipment for my commandos I had to go up to 16 points, which still ony gives me three soldiers to send on their daring raid...

Additional mission rules:
Guard patrol. Guards on patrol do not get to be moved via any specific orders, but will remain on watch throughout their turn. IF they are alerted to the enemy's presence they will open fire and raise the alarm. Each turn, roll a scatter dice to determine their facing. Each turn the guards may attempt to notice a sneaking enemy by rolling above the distance to the enemy on a D6 if they are within their side arcs; if in the rear arc there is a -1 penalty to the check. IF they are facing an enemy who is either in the open, or less than 10" away, they will automatically spot them.

Sneaking. Threshold team members may attempt to sneak. By sneaking they halve their movement rate, but gain +2 to distance checks to be discovered (e.g. if they are 2" from a guard, they would count as 4" away; 3" = 5" etc. If they manage to make base contact with a guard undetected then they cound as charging and gain a bonus of +1CC for the first round. IF this succeeds, the enemy doesn't get to fight back this turn as they have been surprised. IF the attack fails, the defender has noticed them out of the corner of their eye and raises the alarm, releasing everyone from their Patrol state.


MI57 Forces:
Captain Harris (9 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Thompson, Armoured vest
M    Dex    Con    A    W    Res    Skills
5/4    3+    6/7    3    2    3+    Command

Sergeant Jones (3 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Bolt action rifle
M    Dex    Con    A    W    Res    Skills
5    4+    6    2    1    4+    

Sergeant Smith (3 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Bolt action rifle
M    Dex    Con    A    W    Res    Skills
5    5+    6    2    1    4+    Accurate

Lurker forces:
The Russian guard detail is led by Serzhánt Anatol (cult leader with Thompson) and 6 soldiers with bolt action rifles. They seriously outnumber the commandos (and slightly out-point them), but they are on guard duty so cannot move to attack yet.


Setting up.
Anatol starts in his command tent with two guards outside. One guard is on the boat, two guard the bunker entrance and one guards the weapon stores. The remaining two are asleep in the bunk house



Harris and his team manage to scale the side of the boat and now need to work out the best way of approaching the bunker...

In typical sneaky commando fashion, they opt to try and sneak along the side of the boat to take out the guard on watch from the raised deck. Smith decides to duck through the wheel house as the guard is looking int he wrong direction. He has to hope that the guard doesn't turn in the wrong direction and spot him... After some careful maneuvering, Smith managed to get behind the guard and successfully took him out without a sound. 1 Guard down.



One of the guards on Anatol's tent seemed to have some inbuilt compass as to where the team was on the ship as he was staring straight at them for quite a while. If it wasn't for the fact that they were sneaking and on the ship, they would have been scuppered. Quietly they dropped from the side of the ship as soon as his back was turned and prayed that he wouldn't turn back and spot them now they were in the open.

Luck was with them and they made it to behind the command tent without being detected. They still needed to sneak down here though as Anatol was asleep on just the other side of the thin canvas wall... just as they duck into cover behind the barrels next to the text, something must have awakened Anatol as he spotted them; maybe something brushed against the wall or a twig snapped... who knows, but he is now awake and aware that something is wrong. He rushes out of the tent and alerts his guards... the game is afoot!

With the alarm raised, the commandos opened fire on the guards by the bunker door. In their haste and darkness, failed to do anything.

The Russian guards rounded the edge of the tent and opened up on the commandos, taking Sergeant Jones out of the mission with a lucky burst from the thompson. The return fire from the remaining commandos took out two of the guards.




Ducking behind cover, Anatol opened fire again with his thompson and dropped Captain Harris, leaving  Smith all on his own ineffectively firing from behind a barrel. Unfortunately barrels aren't all that great at stopping automatic fire, so he wasn't too far behind Captain Harris in meeting his doom...

It looks like the Russians get to keep their secrets for another day and the valiant agents of MI57 slowly bleed out in the snow...
 
After game actions

Captain Harris now has Teratophobia (fear of all Lurkers!)
Sergeant Smith makes a full recovery
Sergeant Jones is now Hemaphobic

This isnt going well for their first outing!

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That was Really Tense^TM while the commandos were sneaking around... and then the firefight began and everyone died... very quickly! I suspect that I need to try that again with a monster or two instead of a mob of angry Russian guards

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Ouch. I can't believe it's been so long since I painted something for Mi57 to counter. It seems some of the small English village covens have taken to raising straw golem-like beings to act as local defence in case of an invasion. Unfortunately not all of the covens are raising friendly spirits to place into the scarecrows... there have been reports of groups going on a killing spree. One Welsh village was found empty, except for bags of straw and some old clothes that look like they were intended to make some more scarecrows...

[Mason]

Brilliant!
Love those eyes.
 

I have been considering expanding my own Scarecrow forces in future using some of my Cultists with their sack-covered heads.
Hmmmm.....
 

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I thought about doing some glow from other parts, like deep in the stuffing... but that would probably have just looked *really* odd

[Elk101]

The scarecrows look great and using some of the Blind Beggar hooded cultists with them sounds like it will work really well.

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I can see these scarecrows and some hooded cultists going up against the Home Guard if they are being used as failed summonings, or going up against some invading German paratroopers if they are being used for benevolent summonings in a Threshold force.

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Some more painting took place this weekend, in the form of one T.E. Lawrence. He'll be great for pulp and mythos adventures in the desert.



I can't believe I missed the black smudge on the bottom of his robe though. I only just noticed it when posting the photo! :/

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Just to make it even more fitting, I painted this beat up while watching Cowboys Vs Aliens just to get the creative juices flowing. The model is from the long awaited Shadows of Brimstone kickstarter which, for those of you that havn't been paying attention, is a weird wild west dungeon crawler, similar to Warhammer quest. Your party of cowboys venture into some mines in search of mystical Darkstone crystals and gateways to other worlds, while fending off large, lovecraftian beasts such as the Night Terror. He's going to work just as well for something to be mauled by in Strange Aeons too

The model has lots of lumps and bumps all over it's shoulders and looks mightily annoyed... so I wondered if those lumps are actually chunks of darkstone that have become welded to some poor beast's back somehow; driving it insane with pain.

It doesn't take a microscope to see the joins in this model. I didn't really have time to sit and carefully sculpt over all of them as this was for a painting competition; though I did manage to at least lessen the impact of them with some liquid greenstuff before undercoating. The next two, along with all the other multi-part SoB models will probably be left until after the challenge is over, so I can spend time properly filling in and hiding all the joints. I hope the rest of the models aren't this gappy, though I'm not holding my breath as whoever did the sprue layout or QA on these wasn't paying much attention.



Just to give some semblance of scale to this thing, here he is next to a WIP King Richard III. I'll bet that fight didn't happen in the film, or the book!

[Mason]

 

That is one big beastie!
Nice work.
It will make a great alternate Missing Link.
 

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I'm just annoyed that I didn't have the time to greenstuff the gaps properly :/

Still. There are 5 more to do

[diehard]

I actually backed Shadows of Brimstone with the express intention of drafting some of the beasties into my SA Lurker roster. There is some potential for some, and who doesn't need more tentacles? Nice take on the Night strangler, I really like the Darkstone idea and execution also. And thanks for sharing.

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I hope you all had a great Christmas. Now the big day has passed, I can show off a couple of figures I painted as part of a secret santa exchange on Blogger this year. Edwin has been piecing together some Egyptian themed characters for pulpy/mythos adventures

[Connectamabob]

Well that was a sad way to end the day... I got home all excited and prepared to demold the wall and cast up the first attempt at the second side... and was met with a sticky gloopy mess rather than some properly set rubber. Not sure what went wrong, but the rubber had turned into glue instead and basically destroyed the clay. Not a happy bunny

Time to start again *sigh*

Still. At least I now know what to do to make the next one.

I know this is a bit old (sorry: didn't spot it when it was topical), but you should check the packaging or manufacturer's website to see if the rubber you're using is platinum cure or tin cure silicone. Platinum cure and tin cure are the two basic formulation options used in silicone mold rubbers (as the terms suggest, it has to do with the chemistry of the curing catalytic reaction). Platinum cure tends to have better properties than tin cure when it comes to the final mold (better detail fidelity, less or more predictable shrink, better archival longevity), but it comes at the cost of chemical sensitivity.

Platinum cure rubbers will be inhibited by a number of common chemicals/elements, causing exactly the experience you describe: mixed rubber never curing, staying liquid/goopy permanently. A really common example is sulfur: sulfur is one of the things that'll kill platinum cure silicone, and it's also a common ingredient in oil clays, so a lot of people's first run in with this problem comes from trying to mold something they sculpted out of ordinary plasticine. When using platinum cure silicone you gotta be knowledgeable about the materials you use for your master, and when doubt, test with a bit of scrap before molding proper.

Many silicones are actually pretty moisture tolerant (sometimes extremely so: I've seen people take molds of raw fish), so I'd suspect this first. The Klean Klay brand is "silicone safe" not because it's low moisture, but because it's specifically designed not to contain any elements (like sulfur) that'll react with platinum cure rubbers.

Incidentally, Klean Klay is actually kind of obsolete now (still sold, but there are better alternatives). For non drying Plasticine-type clays, the best IMO is a brand called "Monster Clay" (originally made for mask makers and FX artists, hence the name). For hardening clays, polymer clays (Sculpy, Fimo, etc) are reliably platinum cure safe.

Air drying clays aren't the best: they can be used, but they have greater shrink, and are porous by nature and thus need to be sealed before molding as an extra step. The type of air-drying clay used by professional sculptors is called "WED clay". It behaves like a fine-grain ceramic clay, but doesn't dry permanently (it's infinitely re-wettable and reusable) and isn't fire-able. It's used mostly for big stuff like statues, where the the ceramic-like ability to regulate hardness via moisture is an asset (lets the clay be self supporting at scales where permanently soft clays would droop or compress under their own weight), or by artists with ceramics backgrounds who don't want to bother re-learning their technique for oil clays/polymer clays/waxes.

[Mason]

That not-Lawrence' is a great figure for Cthulhu in the Sands.
I shall have to get myself one to add to my Middle -Eastern team.
 

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The more I look at Fez-guy, the less I like him. He looks unfinished... sadly I can't get him back to put more detail in though. Thankfully the new owner likes him, so it's all good

Next up on the mythos painting table are some tentacles from Shadows of Brimstone. It comes with 6 tentacles in each box and, as I got both boxes, this week I present the first six... carefully themed after one of my favourite games ever. Take a guess. answer at the end



And as there are only so many ways you can take photos of tentacles, here are a couple of shots of them savaging some Mi57 agents. Poor agents!




Thankfully what you can't see in the photos are some of the overly soft details around the edges, where the poor sprue layout caused some of the suckers to merge into weird blobby messes and for others to become MASSIVE lumps that are easy to mistake for rocks... Like plenty of other people, I took a scalpel to these and tried to clean them up as best I could, but there's only so much you can do to rescue the suckers without cutting them off completely and making new ones... which is probably what I'll do to tentacles 13-24 when they arrive later in the year.

It's time to take over...