Interbellum - What are they doing up there? 13.01.2015

[Daeothar]

Well, in the ongoing quest to bling out my roleplaying campaign, currently set in 1932, I've finally finished enough miniatures, to start posting them. I have 6 players in my group, and their characters are:

- A dandyish English squire, who has free reign on his father's estate, since the old man is off shooting big game in Africa. He's a former Air Force pilot.
- His Spanish noble friend, who is unsucessfully attempting to become a novelist. He ís rather knowledgeable in all matters occult though and is a decent fencer.
- The pudgy, sceptical village doctor, who finds everything 'preposterous', and would rather enjoy the comfortable country life, than go off adventuring.
- The Chinese chauffeur and allround handyman of the squire. They go way back, but he has a mottled past (at best). He's well versed in Kung Fu.
- An English reporter, originally at work taking pictures of tourist attractions, but now out to get that one scoop of a story, that would establish him as a serious crime reporter.
- An American ex-cop, now working as a private investigator. In England on some off the record job for the FBI, which has escalated into one big mess.

That's them, in no particular order. I've had to look hard to find just the right miniatures for each of them, but I finally managed to get the whole lot together. And then it took months for me to actually paint them, but I'm on a roll now. So, to keep the momentum, I'm posting the progress here, maybe feeling some peer pressure along the way to speed me along...

Here are the first four:



Can you guess who's who?

Most of them have had some change to the sculpt to better match them with the character they're representing. The Squire for instance was a not-Clark Gable (I suppose). I removed his right hand, which held a gun, removed the gun, and reattached the hand at a different angle, and added a cigaret pipe.

The doctor just had his doctor's bag added to his right hand.

The Spanish Peacock is based on a Dr. Who mini, and I cut off his left arm, and resculpted it, including the hand, to rest on his sword cane. The cane is a bit of old Rhino antenna and the cut down handle of a Space Marine combat knife.

Finally, the American. He had the most work done to him. I cut off his right arm (which also had the hand in a coat pocket) and replaced it with the right arm of another trenchcoat detective miniature, I originally had bought, but which turned out to be 1) to small, and 2) fugly. But the arm was good, so sculpted that into the new figure. I also repaired the coat and added a coat pocket. But then, it turned out that this guy now was too tall. I'm not kidding; he originally was almost a head taller than the rest of my collection, and there's mostly Pulp and Copplestone in there! So I cut off his legs, shortened them and pinned them back. That did the trick, and he does no longer look like an ogre compared to his compatriots.

Remaining are the reporter and the not-oddjob, which I will hopefully be finishing this week.

Here is a picture of the bases I prepared beforehand, and onto which each character will be placed:



These were all made by hand with plasticard, slottabases (scribed with paving stones) and some ProCreate. They're not quite period, or even the correct area, but they colsely match Dutch streets and sidewalks, and since that's the baseline for all my players, they should work...

For the first group of opponents, I've gone for Bob Murch's awesome Cultists. Every game needs cultists after all. I'm in the proces of also batch painting the entire group of ten at once. So far so good.

But I've finished half of their bases, and the other half is undercoated. I've divided the bases in two groups of 5, to tell a story. I thought that by lining them up in a specific way, and supported by the right bases, these minis could tell a story of their own. In this case, half of the cultists are inside a mansion of sorts, whilst the other half has already descended into the mansion's dungeons. Hence the floorboards and carpets in the first half, and damp, course stones, complete with a narrow spiral staircase in the second. Again, there's only plasticard in there, some slottabases for the stairs, as well as some plastic tubing and some small bits off a blister package for the carpets:





As far as the bases are concerned, I'm most happy with the PC base with the storm drain, and the two cultist inside bases with the Persian carpets. And building the staircase was also pretty fun to do...

So; I'll sign off this first post with a gratuitous sepia'd picture of those fine first four fearless fighters for freedom (brough to you by the Alliteration Alliance ):

[FramFramson]

To be honest, I actually thought the Dr. Who was the Squire and the dapper fellow in evening dress was the Spaniard!

[OSHIROmodels]

Good realisation on the figures from the characters 

I also like the bases and sepia picture 

Looking forward to another installment.

cheers

James

[Wirelizard]

Very nice, I especially like the cultist bases, with the carpet and other flooring effects!

Very atmospheric B&W photo, too.

[jthomlin]

Great stuff all round.

Love the bases, especially the floor-boarded ones. How did you paint the wood?

Cheers!
Joe Thomlinson

[Grimmnar]

To be honest, I actually thought the Dr. Who was the Squire and the dapper fellow in evening dress was the Spaniard!

Same here actually. :-)

Grimm

[Steve F]

Lovely work. 

I think that the Squire was originally a not-William Powell (in The Thin Man), by the way, rather than a not-Clark Gable.  That means that the dog that comes in the same pack can do double duty as Asta or Snowy/Milou (there's a not-Tintin in the same pack).  Curiously enough, I reworked the same figure into a Dr Who.

[Daeothar]

Thanks for the reactions so far. Looking at the pics, I can see how the two noblemen look to be switched. However; the Spanish Don is a bit of the odd man out, writing mostly pulpish adventure stuff and got his masters degree in Occult Sciences. So he's a bit of an excentric, which I tried to catch with a more daring and colourful outfit, whereas the Esquire has had all the formal upbringing expected of a young man from an old family. He's a bit of a foppish dandy, but a sharp dresser. If there is one true swashbuckler in the group, it'd be him. And in bringing his character to life, a picture was put forward, which was later identified as one of a young Clark Gable. Hence the look.

And you are right Steve F; he comes from that pack you mentioned, but I didn't know the gentleman you mentioned, so I assumed it was old Clark...









@ Wirelizard: I made and painted those the same way I did the floor of my observatory: plastic strips glued in place, then undercoated black. A basecoat of VGC Saddle Brown and Plague Brown (50/50) and then several thinned layers of Vallejo Sepia Shade wash. I let the wash dry till it was sticky, and then, with a brush, I streaked it out, along the floorboards. Doing this several times creates a nice woodgrainy look. To finish it off, I thinned some black into a very watery wash and traced the seams between the boards. Also, with the same thin wash, I picked out some random board pieces, to give them a slightly different colour.

[Heldrak]

Very nice conversions and beautiful basing! 

[timothymayer]

Very nice! Always looking to see what people are doing with ProCreate.

[Daeothar]

Well, the campaign has gone its way further down the road to madness. So far, there have been several more car chases, but I've been putting off any confrontations that would require miniatures, as I'm not ready painting them. But my players are getting antsy; they've been collecting weapons along the way and are just itching to use them on the Bad Guys. So I need to give them a little battle before they omit the 'Bad' and start using them on just 'Guys' instead.

So, I've decided to create a schedule for myself, so that (in theory at least) I should be able to finish everything I need within two weeks. I'm sure reality will slap me round the ears with my schedule within a week, but at least it's a start.

One of the strange twists the campaign has taken means that my players are now in the Scottish Highlands staking out a German secret base in a really remote area. The German camp is being broken up, but the going is slow, as one of their helicopters (yes indeed ) has engine problems. So there are about 15 Germans still up there. Most of them Fallschirmjäger, but also the crew of the FA-223 and maybe some SS bad guy(s), which I might add to the mix to emphasise the Bad Guy-ness of these particular Germans.

The base is basically a side quest, but has taken a life of its own. I hadn't planned on them actually going there, but I've now conveniently meshed their main goal of intercepting a German agent carrying stolen American plans for a Tesla Gun, with them running across the Germans doing something occult up there in the Highlands.

The German camp was an archeological dig, unearting something suitably ghastly and vaguely historical. I've gone the Arthurian route with that, although the Schwarze Sonne will not have unearted Excalibur. At any rate, the cult members, archeologists and most troops have already left. But ghosts have been haunting the camp for weeks and the remaining troops are anxious to leave and quite edgy. The players got a crude patrol map pointing out the sentry posts and approximate layout of the camp from a scared witless Fallschirmjäger deserter. he also had on him an envelope with some pictures. On one of the not printed shots, a ghost can be seen in the background.



I printed that on clear acetate and cut out the negatives to go with the pictures. Together, they give a good impression of the camp, and also hint at the supernatural menace waiting up there. Man, I love photoshop...



So, in a spur of the moment idea, I decided to do up the ghosts. I had done the picture with some internet images, but I then realised I had some minis around that could work just right. Several years ago, I got some Rohirim footsloggers with a bunch of LotR magazines at a flea market. They're slightly smaller than the heroic 28mm scale I use for pretty much everything, so they were collecting dust.

And last evening, I retrieved them, cut off their faces or even their complete heads and substituted the originals with skulls from the bits box. Gotta love GW for being the number one supplier of angry looking skulls in the business...
I then cut off the shields, which were too Celtic/Germanic, and replaced them with some oval ones and some kite shields. Only later did I realise that the kite shields were not consistent with the period I was going for (5th century AD), but hey; along the way, they probably upgraded, being the fashion conscious wraiths they are and all...

The paintjob was fast and furious; an undercoat/basecoat of sprayed on white (with manual corrections of course), and then several washes of a mix of light greens and blues. Then, in about five minutes, I also painted on some Romanesque designs on the shields in the same washed out hues.

A simple paint-wash-drybrush treatment for the base, along with some static grass finished those off in no time as well. But they still looked pretty heavy and corporeal standing in the gravel like that, so I took some very small cotton wool pieces, and teased them on and around their feet, to make them look like rising up from the mist. I think it works. Let's see how the cotton wool holds up against the rigors of play though. Probably the to follow varnish spray will help strengthen the stuff somewhat.



And then the reason for the ghosts and also the Germans to be where they are. I don't know what is/was buried there yet, but I put this picture in the aforementioned package, so it should be the focal point for the archeological dig site. And lo and behold, my old box of Hero Quest had just the piece to use; the tomb of some long dead hero.



I decided to let the Germans dub it King Arthur's tomb (it might actually turn out to be, or not...). I used a bit of cut-off 4mm MDF as the base, and bevelled the sides with a knife. I then sawed off the base of the sarcophagus (where the card base inserts), so I could glue it flush on the base. The cut-offs form the MDF cut-off were then used to integrate the tomb further into the terrain, simply glued into place with wood glue.

Then followed a basecoat of brown on the ground (the stone surface still held a matte coat of grey enamel from back in the day) and after that, I applied loads of static grass. I use a mix of short summer green, with about an equal measure of longer dried grass, as I've found that's the most realistic looking combination (just look at actual summer grass to see what I mean).

A wash of brown over the stone was next, followed by a dark grey wash, and then several drybrushes of tan, grey and some dark green. Also, some foam flock was applied, to match the mosses in the picture. Finally, some foam yellow flock was applied in spots to mimic summer flowers. left to do is applying a healthy dose of varnish for protection.



Not bad for one evening's worth of work really. especially considering my track record when it comes to productivity...

Let's hope I can keep up the momentum. This evening, I plan to tackle either one of the player characters, or the squad of Fallschirmjäger. Both of them are already well underway, so it is a matter of pushing through and finishing them...

[joroas]

What a great idea and a good use of that old Heroquest tomb.  Thanks for sharing. 

[Mason]

 

Those ghosts look great and the overgrown tomb looks just about perfect!
Lovely work, Daeothar, and for just a single, seriously productive.
 

I am really enjoying reading all the background for this campaign and I have to say that you are really spoiling your players with all the handouts etc...

Looking forward, very much, to the next installment.
(As I imagine your players are too!)
 

[uti long smile]

Lovely stuff. Those conversions are great and the bases are superb.

[CyberAlien312]

Very interesting thread. I love the conversions you've made, and the effect of the ghosts rising from the mist looks very nice too.