Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (undead warband for Mordheim)

[Hobgoblin]

The paintjob on the warg is amazing! Love the shaman as well (and everything else!), he's always been a favourite fig of mine as well.

Cheers! The warg was ludicrously easy to paint: just pre-shaded with a brown wash over a white undercoat, drybrushed white and then tinted with washes appropriate colours while looking at a picture of a real wolf for guidance. Then a light drybrush with an off-white (Citadel's witch-elf flesh or whatever it's called - probably the paint I use more than any other). And that, barring the eyes and mouth, was that. If it took an hour from the start of the tinting, that was all it took.

[Hobgoblin]

Nicely painted oldhammer miniatures  Long live GREEN bases 

Thanks!

Yes, indeed! I always agreed with that Aly Morrison line on keeping bases as simple as possible.

I fully realise that my bases don't always look great in close-up photos. But they do give the vaguely organic but unobtrusive look I'm after on the tabletop.

While there are many people (especially on this site) who can handle static grass, etc., very well, I've seen a lot of miniatures with over-elaborate and fussy bases that actually detract from the figures.

That said, I have been playing about with the idea of adding patches of bare dirt to some of these (though I'll probably never get round to it ...). Above all, what I like is the contrast between a gloss-varnished miniature and a matt, roughly textured base. It seems to be a specialist taste these days, but it was once the glorious norm ...

[Hobgoblin]

In an idle moment, I totted up the number of miniatures I've painted this year. It seems to be resting around 205. I wonder if I can push it to 250 before year-end, given the hordes of the half-finished on my painting table.

Here's one candidate - an old Tom Meier dragon. He's not finished; quite apart from the base, I need to add a few more highlights and whatnot. But he's getting there, I think.

[Severian]

Splendid stuff - certainly worth taking over the final furlong!

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks - he'll get there!

Today, we had a last-minute post-school Christmas party for some friends and their children. My wife, organising the event last night, announced that I would be supervising "board games" for the kids. So I put together a game of Tales of Blades and Heroes. The PCs were sent by their communities to purge a goblin nest in Shadow Valley. After a protracted above-ground encounter with an evil, anthropophagous giant pumpkin who was meant to be keeping watch for the goblins but was open to being bribed with their corpses, they descended into the underworld to hunt down the rest of the goblins and their sorcerous master.

I made some character sheets with photographs of the relevant miniatures. To do that, I finished a couple of Reaper Bones lizardmen that had been on the go for about two years. That took my total for the year to 207 - and then I remembered the mouslings I'd painted for my daughter, two of which were in today's lineup. So I'm on around 215 or so, I think.

The lizardmen suffered from all the usual Bones problems - especially soft detail around the mouths and teeth. But at least they're usable now.

The game was a big hit. We had four or five hours of solid play, with a couple of first-time gamers thoroughly enthused. And they got to complete the "dungeon", which always helps.

[Argonor]

Absolutely spiffy! 

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

Here are three HotT elements: a dragon, a magician and ... something else. I got them finished off in spurts before the Great Wrapping Exertions of Christmas Eve and during the Great Lego Excitements of Christmas Day.

The beholder makes a pretty versatile HotT element. It could be a god, a magician, an aerial hero, a flyer, a behemoth, a magician or even artillery.

It took a fraction of the time of the others to paint. I was slightly dreading it, given its Bones nature and its complexity, but those fears proved misplaced.

[beefcake]

Brilliant additions there.

[Severian]

Great work all round!

And good to hear that the beholder is easier than he looks (I've had one hanging about unpainted for a while too).

Well done on fitting in some hobby time, too: I've got half a dozen goblins and a full battalion of peninsular war British infantry 90-95% done, but have hardly picked up a paint brush for five days, what with wrappings and unwrappings and cookings and eatings and endless Lego and family visits...

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

My holiday geekery has been helped by the commandeering of a kitchen table as the "messy table" by everyone else in the house. So, while Chinese brush painting, Fimo sculpting and balloon-animal making are going on apace, no one can reasonably object to a few paints and miniatures ...

I played a couple of games of HotT last night with an old friend who was my first HotT opponent. That was in 1991, when the rules first came out: we mistakenly thought they were long established then, given the low production values of the first-edition book. We each won one game last night. My friend had the dragon on both occasions; these were the first HotT games we'd played with such a beast. The dragon arrived on the table quite early in both games, but was also driven off fairly sharpish. (In HotT, dragons require a PIP roll of six to be deployed. They're formidable but flighty: their longevity means that they take being shoved around in combat very badly and tend to flee the table).

My opponent's observation was that it's best to deploy dragons against low-quality or isolated troops. In the first game, my blades general attacked him with support from another blades unit and a flanking horde; in the second, his rolls went badly against a warband element with rear support from another.

The most effective troop types in the first game were riders (the spider-elf "drider" hybrids in the photo), which harassed my warbands to great effect as they crossed the river, breaking up their formation and slowing them down. In the second game, the orc warbands came into their own, bursting out of woods to mess up opposing blades and behemoths.

These were both conventional 24-AP games; I'm keen to try a 36-pointer with 1D6+1 PIPs a turn.

[Hobgoblin]

These were our rider elements last night. I've had these models on the painting table since mid-2014, when I got back into gaming. They're Reaper Bones, with fairly soft "paint your own" facial detail. I was still messing about with painting techniques then and used black undercoats. I'd do them very differently now. But the impending games spurred me to get them more or less done yesterday. Serendipitously, I'd based them on Fireforge group bases that turn out to be the perfect size for HotT riders.

[Hummster]

Which HotT base widths were you using 60mm or 40mm?

Going to have to get my old 15mm armies for it out sometime and get gaming with them and DBA 3.0

[Hobgoblin]

Which HotT base widths were you using 60mm or 40mm?

These are 60mm - the standard for 28/25mm figures. The width works fine for 28mm, I think, especially as you can just use fewer models per base if need be (perfectly legal under the rules, if one cared about such things). The recommended depths are far too small for most cavalry models, though. These driders fit perfectly onto 60 x 40, but they're hardly typical cavalry. My 1991-era cavalry are based 60 x 50, I think, and I'll probably use that or 60 x 60 for any other cavalry I base up for HotT. Again, it's entirely permissible under the rules, which explicitly allow for deeper bases to accommodate whatever figures are being used.

Going to have to get my old 15mm armies for it out sometime and get gaming with them and DBA 3.0

Yes, it's a cracking game. It's been around for 25 years, is still popular and has, in that time, had but a single significant rule change (warbands and shooters swapping movement rates). Very few other popular fantasy wargaming systems can boast that level of stability (Warhammer, I believe, has been through six editions over the same period ...).

The reason for HotT's stability, I think, is that its rules are pretty much watertight. That's great, because it puts the focus on modelling and painting rather than list-building.

[Hobgoblin]

Here are some WIP Mantic marauders for a friend's sons (I gave them copies of Mutants and Death Ray Guns and Rogue Stars, so these are to accompany the rules). Besides their bases, they still need a bit of neatening up.

I've got loads of these models kicking about, having acquired loads for free from a local games shop when I first got back into gaming. Some have been turned into the "orcs of the White Serpent":



Others became an SoBH warband along with some Reaper Bones chaps:



Some more often features in our sci-fi games:



And others still became 15mm giants:



But working on the latest batch, it struck me that they'd make excellent HotT shooters. I don't have many suitable elements at the moment; while I have a couple of orc crossbow bases, most of my old shooters were GW savage orcs. Those, with their bows and loincloths, suited the initial HotT rules, in which shooters were fast. But now that the warband and shooter profiles have swapped movement rates, they're much better as the former than the latter.

The Mantic "orx", on the other hand, are perfect for HotT shooters, which are acknowledged in the rules as overpowered for historical archers and the like. They're bulky, so will go two to a base. I found eight of them still on the sprues last night, and I suspect there are several more sprues kicking about. The ones with power claws and power swords could go two to a base as blades, perhaps, while the heavy-weapon guy could be based as artillery. I'm beginning to see an entire HotT army here ...

[Hobgoblin]

A quick audit revealed c. 40 of the fiends. With two to a base, that's more than enough for even an oversized (36AP) HotT army with a few to spare for casualty removal when used in Dragon Rampant (or for skirmish games).

I think these figures have been discontinued, but I far prefer them to the other, goofier space orcs that Mantic do. These at least have a gothic, steampunky vibe. I see the army as the horde of an evil wizard, perhaps with a Howl's Moving Castle-style stronghold. So the army will be primarily shooters, with artillery and/or magicians (high-tech heavy weaponry could be either) and perhaps some blades.

To begin with, of course, the first elements will be auxiliaries for our existing HotT forces. I'm keen to expand those: we played a great 36AP game yesterday (below is its end). I can see a multi-player 94-point game on the cards in the near future.