Managed to get 4 of these buggers done so far today and I havent even finished yet.

Step 1: Undercoated Black,

Step 2: Mithril Silver on armour.

Step 3: Badab Black wash over the silver.

Step 4: Regal Blue to cloth areas.

Step 5: Asumen Blue wash over the Regal Blue. Base and boots painted with Calthan Brown.

Step 6: Devlan Mud on the boots. Flesh painted with Tallern Flesh then P3 Ryn Flesh.

Step 7: Ogryn Flesh wash over the flesh.

Step 8: Gems painted Mechrite Red then Blood Red. Difficult to see in this photo but the shoulders have several coats of Gryphonne Sepia applied over the Mithril to make nice gold effect.

Step 9: Based with white pitch markings and on the edge of the base to add the player number.

Hope you enjoyed that! I’ll get a picture of the whole team up when I am done.

Take care!
xBevisx

As I’m having a cack-handed day (they happen now and then, and when they do its best to just step away from the painting table) I thought I’d do something else constructive and post some photos of current work. Please enjoy!

Yesterday we ran a 9000pt-a-side Storm of Magic Warhammer game at the shop. For this we required a number of magical fulcrums. These are conduits of magical power that have a very big impact upon Storm of Magic games, and also work as the objectives. With limited time until the event and not wanting to shell out for the official Games Workshop fulcrums (I do own one already) I decided to make my own.

I used my phone camera to take a lot of these pictures so sorry if some of them are a tad blurry.

Started off with a big block of foam.

Cut down into the basic size/shape needed.

Hot wire cutter. One of the best and most helpful tools GW ever made. They don’t make them anymore unfortunately, and my one is pretty old now. I’m hoping it won’t die on me anytime soon.

Using the hot wire cutter, I carved the foam into shape. I’ve mounted it on a pencil here ready for the gluing stage to cut down a bit on the mess.

I coated the foam in a generous helping of PVA glue and dunked it in some sand. When they were all done I left them over night to dry.

When they were dry I gave them a good solid coat of dark purple paint, then drybrushed with Lilac. Here’s the finished result! Pretty happy with them for 2 days work. I’ll add a post soon of them in the battle itself.

xBevisx

Lets jump straight in with the pictures.

Step1: Undercoated black and then Adeptus Battlegrey.

Step2: Drybrushed all over with Codex Grey. Hair painted with Ice Blue.

Step3: Drybrushed all over with Fortress Grey.

Step4: Drybrushed all over with Astronomican Grey.

Step5: Inside of mouth painted with Mechrite Red. Little “rocky” bits painted Regal Blue. Wash of Asurmen Blue then Ogryn Flesh all over.

Step6: “rocky” bits highlighted with Enchanted Blue and washed with Asurmen Blue. Hair highlighted with white.

Step7: Teeth and nails painted with Deneb Stone. Loincloth painted with Khemri Brown and Calthan Brown then washed with Delvan Mud. Base painted and flocked.

Quite a simple model to paint, and mostly hassle free!

Yet more apologies for the massive gap from my last post. Lately my life has been controlled by zombies. Either planning and running my Inquisitor story based campaign or killing hundreds of the undead bastards in Dead Island, which I am really enjoying. Besides 1 potentially bugged mission I have nothing bad to say about that game at all. Other than that there’s been a lot of painting and band/work related stuff.

Amongst all this I have returned to the world of  the Privateer Press games, Warmachine and Hordes. Well I say returned, I got out of Warmachine before Hordes was released I believe, so learning that has been interesting.

Really quick summary for you. Warmachine/Hordes are set in the same fantasy steampunk world where there are many factions vying for power with their own motives. The games are quite small skirmish scale, and forces generally revolve around one warcaster/warlock, who is your leader, and a number of Warjacks (Warmachine: Big steam-powered, heavily armoured robots) or Warbeasts (Hordes: Pretty self-explanatory. Big monstrous thingies with teeth and claws) and any number of other units. The warcaster/warlock controls the Warjacks/Warbeasts and once he/she is defeated it’s usually game over.

I’ve decided that I’d quite like an army for both Warmachine and Hordes, although they are completely compatible.  On the Warmachine side I’ve opted for Khador, Russian type chaps that don’t piddle around with light warjacks, they just build huge ones that want to smash you to pieces quickly. I like this straight forward approach! Hordes side I’ve gone for Trollbloods, mostly because I really like their models, they have a really nice character to the sculpts and they are pretty much the closest things to good guys in this world, as a lot of the time they are merely fighting for survival.

So here are my first few paint jobs:

This is a Khador Juggernaut built from the Khador Heavy Warjack plastic resin kit, which is a truly excellent kit and OTHER COMPANIES could really learn a thing or two about decent plastic resin. I really enjoyed painting this model and luckily I’ve found a paint scheme that doesn’t take too long to finish.

Next up are some Trollblood Fennblades. It took me a couple of attempts to perfect the scheme I wanted to use. I wasn’t happy with these first 2 and I will be stripping them to re-paint.

Below is the scheme I’ve settled on. The others never felt quite right but this one really clicked for me. I can’t believe I even actually painted tartan!

Today I plan on doing a fair bit of painting so hopefully I can get the results on here soon!

Take care, everyone!

xBevisx

Today I would like to talk to you about one of my favourite games that I have come across this year. Thunderstone is a deck-building card game. Unlike Magic: The Gathering, you do not buy blind boosters to build your deck. When you purchase the core Thunderstone box you have every single card you will need.

An explanation on how the game works:
Each player receives the same starting deck of 12 cards: 6 militia, 2 iron rations, 2 torches and 2 daggers. This starting deck never changes from game to game.
There is a “Village” which is created from 12 cards types, 8 or which will be items, weapons, spells etc and 4 sets of heroes.
There is also the “Dungeon” which is made up of 3 sets of 10 monster cards and the Thunderstone card shuffled together. The top 3 monsters from this deck are drawn and set out on the table.

The first player starts by drawing 6 cards from their 12 card deck. They now have 3 options:
1. Go to the dungeon and fight one of the 3 monsters. Monsters have health values, heroes have attack values (which can be boosted by weapons/spells/etc) and you must equal or beat the monster health in order to defeat it. Something very important to consider is light. The deeper in the dungeon the monster dwells the more light you need. Light is generated from certain items, spells and even some heroes themselves! For every point of light you are missing when attacking a monster, their health increases by 2.
2. Go to the village and buy more cards for their deck. Most cards have a gold value in the top left corner. When going to the village you lay all your cards out, add up the total gold value and this is what you have to spend on new things. These get put in your discard pile and when you have no cards left to draw from your deck you shuffle your discard pile and start drawing from that again. As the game progresses you are adding more cards to you deck making you more powerful.
3. The final option is to rest. In this case you merely choose one of your cards to destroy from your hand and discard the rest. Destroying and discarding are 2 very different things. Destroying means this card can not be used again for the rest of the game, discarding merely means it is put in the discard pile and shuffled back into you deck later.

Each monster you defeat in the dungeon is worth a number of victory points, which are calculated when the game ends. The person with the most victory points wins.

These are the basics of the game, the real joy of it is the fact that every game is different. Which monster cards you fight and which village cards you are able to buy are randomised before you start playing. You take a look at the village to see what heroes and items are available and you try to work out good combos you can devise using their individual attributes. One hero has the ability to double any magic attacks you do in the dungeon, while another can wield as many weapons as he pleases. You do have to balance your shopping trips with your dungeon trips however, because it doesnt matter how well you have built your deck over the turns if someone has ended up defeating more monsters than you.

There are about 4 expansions out for Thunderstone currently, each one adding more heroes, monsters and village cards, aswell as things like traps and treasures, which increases the excitement of the game.

I’m sure I will talk more about Thunderstone in a future post so keep your eye peeled!

I thought I’d just share some photos from our first ever Warhammer tournament at our shop. It was a really fun day, lots of excellent battles and everyone had a great time! Just what you want from a tournament.

Today I am going to be talking to you about a project I’m working on for a few friends at my games club. Using the Inquisitor game rule book produced by Games Workshop I will be running a short, story driven campaign. The setting I have chosen will be a planet in the 40K universe that I created for use in a previous Necromunda campaign I ran about a year ago. As the blog post title suggests, this campaign will be zombie flavoured. I know a lot of people are burnt out on zombies, with every game ever getting some kind of undead mode or DLC, but for what I require them for they are perfect. I will be taking a lot of influence (read that as ripping off) from video games like Left 4 Dead, Call of Dutys Zombie mode and a few others.

Left 4 Dead in particular has been a massive influence on some of the choices made for the campaign. Primarily I have stolen a lot of the special infected and plonked them straight into my system. Normal shamblers are alright and I have plenty of them in the game chasing the characters around, but the special infected will add a real danger element to the proceedings and make things really interesting.

So how is this going to work from a player’s point of view and how do they end up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse?

Each player will be in control of one character which they will have to provide a suitable model and short background for. Perhaps a paragraphs worth explaining who they are and what they did before the attack.

All stats are based off of percentile dice, 2 D10′s with 1 marked as tens and the second as units. Rolling these gives a result out of 100 and you need to roll underneath your stat score, obviously the better you are at a particular thing the higher your score and the more likely you are to roll below it on a percentile. What actions a player can make during a turn is decided by their speed dice. You declare what you would like your character to do and roll a set amount of dice, 4+ is considered a success and for every success you can accomplish 1 of the things you stated you wished to do. It’s a very easy system to pick up and most of the work is done by the GM (in this case me). The player will simply tell me what they wish to do, roll some dice and I will do all the number crunching and tell them what they require to roll next. This is a great system and allowing the GM to make decisions on the fly with the stats backing him up makes for a really flexible game session with many cinematic possibilities available, which is what you want from a good game. I will give some examples in the course of chronicling my experiences with this campaign.

Story wise, the first game will see each character being summoned to a meeting by a VIP (I’m undecided what to make him yet, a crimeboss, an official, it all depends on what backgrounds the players come up with for their characters). Think about the start of the classic film The Warriors. All the characters get drugged from their drinks, and wake up with who knows how much time passed, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. I’ll admit that it isn’t the cleverest of introductions but it gets everyone in the same place, and more importantly unarmed. Thats right, no-one is having any weapons at the start of this campaign. They are going to have to scavenge to get equipped. Tell this to any miniatures game player, “You are unarmed and surrounded”, and they will shudder with fear. I have a long term plot in mind but unfortunately I don’t know if any of the players have access to this blog, and some of the elements I would really like to keep as a surprise for them.

So far we have had a few playtest games where we are trying to get used to the system again, and get the balance to the sweet spot of taxing but not impossible. The first game I initiated an all versus all game, with players attacking each other and no zombies. One of the major things we learned was that falling damage is incredibly harsh and we have tweaked it around since then to a level that we are happy with.

The second game we pitted the players against a large horde of zombies. Initially, the players were mildly complacent, think they could hold up in one location and simply blow the zombies away as they shambled slowly towards them. Bad luck for the survivors then, as the undead horde kept marching forward, absorbing fair amounts of gunfire. I could see the panic in the players eyes as all hell broke loose and the players scattered. From this game we learned that zombies total hitpoints could probably do with dropping a tad, but otherwise they worked exactly as they should. I decided that zombies in the same area would move and work as a group. This wouldn’t make them anymore intelligent, but it speeds up how long it takes to control them. Another thing that came from this would be whenever our zombies began climbing as a group they would have to pass a collective initiative test of a percentage of that group would fall to the bottom of whatever they are climbing.

The last test session we had, I introduced Left 4 Dead-esque Spitters and Hunters. Hunters turned out to be ultrafast maniacs that get in the survivors face quick and harass them while the regular zombie hordes close in. I am very happy with this, and the player panic levels rise. The spitters are a bit more subtle, using their spit attacks more for area denial, especially if a survivor is in a precarious position already. All player tactics flew out of the window in this game and they purely moved to stay alive. There were a couple of close calls, like one player jumping his character out of a window to escape a group of zombies, only to land awkwardly and fall unconscious anyway.

I shall end today’s post there, but I have plenty more to write about in the future concerning this subject. I amy even get some photos of the characters and write up their backgrounds when they are done.

Thanks for reading!

xBevisx

The old posts have dropped off a lot lately. Here comes the tidal wave of excuses. Work, painting, gigs, movies, bowling and various other activities have distracted me as of late. But I do have a few things to talk about now in no particular.

Foo Fighters at Milton Keynes Bowl. Flipping heck! The only way to describe this show was SPECTACULAR!!! Yes in CAPS and triple exclamations.  Hot Rats, Jimmy Eat World and Biffy Clyro all rocked their support slots hard but the Foos ripped the lid off of it (if the bowl had a lid that is). Seasick Steve, John Paul Jones and a few others join them on stage, and they finish their 3 hour set with Everlong as fireworks explode over head.  I would’ve happily paid double for my ticket and still considered it value for money.

I’ve discovered a new game called Thunderstone from AEG. It is possibly one of my favourite new games (its been out for a while, but its new to me). I’ll review this in more detail another time.

Ross Noble at the West End Centre, Aldershot. Well, I never thought I’d get to see Mr Noble in my humble (read vile) hometown. We snapped up tickets as soon as I saw it posted on the Facebook group, and we got in early enough to get front row seats. In typical Ross fashion his introduction of the first act which was supposed to be 10 minutes long, drew out to 40 minutes. But the whole night was fantastic and I was even lucky enough to get a photo with him! Nice.

I am in the process of trying something interesting at my games club. I’ve dug out my Inquisitor rulebook with the intentions of running a story driven campaign. The Inquisitor rule set is actually a really nicely done book, even though it does require a few tweaks to make sense in places.

I won’t be running in its normal setting, I plan on using some of the character templates for players to make their own heroes. Instead of a couple of players using a few models, each player will have one character to control, with their own goals. Again, I’ll elaborate on this a lot more in future posts.

My band, Victorian Whore Dogs, finally got into the studio and we’ve got some recording done! This was quite a task, and excruciatingly hot weather did not help. Hopefully the fruits of our labour will be available for your delectation soon!

Enough prittling and prattling for now.

Hugs and Kisses

xBevisx

Lets start with the physical product. Everything seems to be made to a very high standard. All the map pieces, tokens and cards are printed clearly and the cards themselves display high quality photos of grizzly zombie action, nothing too graphic though. The miniatures are sculpted to a great standard and have a good amount of character in them. This quality makes the box price seem pretty reasonable.

Now onto the game itself. During the evening myself and my 3 friends played the ”Die, Zombie, Die!!” scenario (kill 15 zombies in 15 turns before sunrise) a number of times switching teams/sides after each game. We used the basic rules although advanced rules are available in the main box. We started by setting up the map, 1 center piece that never changes and 4 randomly selected corner pieces, then the 2 players on the survivor team randomly selected the heros they would be playing. 

Survivors can choose to move or search the building they are currently in. Searching a building lets you draw a card which could provide anything from a weapon or other useful item, to a special event or stranger that hinders the zombie players. After moving or searching they can commence with their ranged attacks then close combat. Close combat is a dice off versus the zombies, and although the survivors have a slight advantage, actually killing zombie rather than just fending them off is tricky unless properly armed.

On the zombies turn, the players controlling them can draw cards that assist in their munching of the survivors. Zombies can only move one square per turn but can ignore barriers that survivors cannot pass through. More zombies can spawn each turn until you run out of models for them.

I feel the game is pretty balanced. It’s no walk in the park for the survivors unless they play clever, but that’s how it should be. The peril adds a real level of excitement to the proceedings. Sometimes the special play cards can have a massive impact on each game. One game when I was on the zombie team our cards allowed us to kill one of the survivors before they even got a turn.

If you have a bit of imagination the game can produce some hilarious cinematic plays. Such as in one playthrough one of the survivor team was controlling the Preacher character… who was wielding a chainsaw. He storms into a hospital with the intentions of hacking down the cursed undead, fails his first attack, the chainsaw runs out of petrol and he gets dragged down and eaten in seconds.

All the artwork, flavour text and characters give the overall atmosphere of a cheesy B-movie and this really adds to the whole experience.

I would definitely advise people to buy this game if they are looking for a really fun, action boardgame that doesn’t require too long to play.