I've got a short post-christmas blog post today. I figure lousy of you are off enjoying family and presents and too busy to read my boring blog!

So I've managed to avoid having to buy to many models for Frostgrave, and that is one of the things I like about the game--I already have everything I need. But when the Forgotten Pacts Nickstarter was started I couldn't help but sign up for the Plastic Barbarians. At this point, anyone who's interested in them has seen the sprues already, so I won't bore people with pictures of that.

My verdict is that these models are great. The scale is perfect, they aren't mammoth like GW stuff, but they have enough exaggeration that they are easy to paint in a way that true 25mm models can lack. This is especially true with the eyes; I find true 25mm models have impossible to paint eyes!

I've also read a lot of people that say that the official Frostgrave models don't scale well with heroic scale models. But, at least with the barbarians, I don't find this to be true at all. I thought they fit in quite well. A tad bit smaller, but nothing that makes them stick out. I think the aforementioned exaggerations help a lot with that.

The aesthetics of the barbarians are one of my favorite part of the models, they look like barbarians, but not like cartoons. That's the problem I have with the plastic Chaos Marauders, they look like professional wrestler characters, not actual barbarians. Sure, these models probably would be out of place in a historical game as they don't appear to be patterned after any particular historical peoples. But whomever they're modeled after, these guys look weathered and hard lived. I was pretty amazed at how much character and expression they have in their faces. You can tell they've lived hard lives and those hardships have etched their faces.

It's not just their faces that are well sculpted, most everything is. These models look like they're wearing clothes that have been repaired, scavenged, and make-shift. The weapons are menacing. The posing of the bodies is excellent. There is only one problem I found with the sculpting: the fur. The fur is very shallow. And that made it difficult to paint. But now that I know to expect that, I can compensate when I paint more.

As far as the sprues are concerned, these are great too. They come with tons of options including missle weapons, two-handed weapons, hand weapons, shields, and more heads than you can ever use. The only downside is that you get 4 of the same sprue of five bodies. But with all the options previously mentioned, that's not a bid deal. They also come off their integral bases really, really easily. I think it took less than a minute with my razor saw to remove them and with no damage to the shoes. However, I did find one problem with the sprue as well. As can be seen in the picture below, the weapons that require both hands were very difficult to line up right. I've gotten used to the recent Games Workshop plastics, where many of these types of arms are a single piece with both arms attached to the weapon and they slide perfectly on. As you can see below, the bottom of the axe haft isn't really in his left hand--it just kind of sits below his hand.

That said, those were the only two things I didn't like about these models. They are excellent. I know if I wanted to do an Oldhammer Norse army, I would uses these as my basis.

But enough rambling, It's time for a quick picture. I do want to apologize for the paint job below, I'm not particularly proud of it, or even happy with it. I was trying to get the model done quickly and it was time to replace my brush but I wanted to get just a little more out of it. As such, the tip wasn't as fine as it should have been and a lot of the model looks spotchy and dirty almost as if parts had been drybrushed.



And now for the Zombie I mentioned in the title. Way back on my old warseer thread, I posted a picture of my Frostgrave warband with a zombie that had no snow on its base as I had forgotten to base him with the rest of the warband. Well no longer! He is now fully based!

Back in November, I pledged for the Rogue Stars Nickstarter. It seemed like a game I'd enjoy; it's a Science Fiction skirmish games, about 5 models per side, and it's largely setting agnostic. Plus, Mark Copplestone sculpted the models (or at least most of them). Why not try it?



My thought was I could apply a reasonably light weight set of rules to the Warhammer 40k background and play small games with my kids. The author, Andrea Sfiligoi, is known for doing some good rulesets.

The Nickstarter closed on December 4, 2016. But since I live on another continent, I wasn't expecting it right away. In fact, I sort of forgot about it. Then, while riding the train home on Monday the 19th, I saw Whiskey Priest's review. It is not kind. I was scared. Did I waste my money? And as I arrived home, there was a box in my mailbox from Northstar. So I would have a chance to check it out for myself almost immediately after reading some negative things about it.

So here are my thoughts.

To me, this seems like a roleplaying game, disguised as a skirmish game, but without any roleplaying. Make sense? Of course not. Let me try to explain.

Rogue Stars is, ostensibly, a skirmish game for two players of up to 5 models each. Everything is based on a D20. Roll higher than a difficulty and you pass an action, roll lower and you fail the action. Pretty simple in concept.

But, the game is reliant on "themes." When designing your squad, you pick a theme. That theme is very reminiscent of roleplaying. It's not picking an army or a race. If you want to play miners, for example, you can have a space orc, a space elf, a space dwarf, a space rat, and a human all working together. What's important is that they are miners, not who they fight for or what their species is. And this theme is used to help you tell the story of the mission. And the rules contain eight pages on setting up your mission (the book is only 64 pages, so that is one-eighth of the entire book). The rules clearly want you to have a story as those eight pages help you describe every aspect of the mission: what the purpose is, where it occurs, what the weather is like, etc.

This, however, is where it loses the roleplaying. Almost all eight of those pages are charts. And much of the 56 other pages are also charts. And what little text there is is boring. Like really boring. There is no fun in the explanation. It's very clinical and sterile. It feels like you're reading a textbook, not a game that is supposed to be fun.

Now, after complaining about all the charts (so many charts...), I don't think it is as bad as others have made it out. I suspect most of the charts are easily memorized after a few games as they seem largely to be specialized rules. For example, many relate to he effects of weapons or armor. Once you've modeled your squad, you will largely use the same weapons and same armor. I think this will hold true for the special actions as well--most players will likely find they are shooting at the same range most of the time or attempting the same combat moves based on their weapons most of the time.

I also really like it's initiative system. Basically the starting player keeps going until he or she wants to let the other player have a turn. Now, there are plenty of reasons to do this. Each action accumulates stress, which makes it harder to do more actions. And failing an attempt at an action gives the opponent free actions that occur first. But passing the initiative removes all the stress from your models. I think this is an interesting take on the I Go-You Go system.

In addition, I think it was nice that the weapons and armor rules cover almost every thing from classic science fiction games and stories. Except the Space Marine's trusty bolter. I can't figure out what to classify that as. Molecular Slugthrower, maybe?

But, to circle back around, this is where the presentation hurts the game. All those charts I mentioned? They're actually pretty simple. They just list modifiers to your difficulty rolls. And most of them do not stack. For example, a called shot to the head has one difficulty modifier while a rapid fire burst has another. Clearly, you're not doing both at once. The only place where they stack is either range based modifiers or modifiers from different charts. So a long range called shot to the head with a primitive needle gun would have several modifiers from several charts. But those would 1) likely be few and far between and 2) easy to skip while learning the rules. So these charts look far more imposing than they really are.

All this said, there is one thing I really, really, really do not like about Rogue Stars. You have to keep track of hit locations. I hate that in wargames. It adds unnecessary complexity and book keeping. My seven year old isn't going to be able to keep track of which mercenary has lost the use of his right arm and which has lost their left leg. He just wants to know if his guys are dead yet or if they can shoot now.

So I originally wrote this review and finished with a recommendation against picking this game up unless you like lots of bookkeeping. But then I slept on it. After thinking some more about it, I don't know that I still agree with my original conclusion. I don't think this game is any more complicated than, say, (the original) Confrontation...it is just presented in a way that makes it look that way. I think it's not a bad system. And limited to 4-6 models per side, there isn't too much complexity to keep track of. The only house rule I'll add is dealing with hit locations. So all in all, I probably would recommend this game, at least to read.

I painted this cultist at the same time as the other genestealer cultists. But being an oldhammer model, I felt he deserved his own blog post. He's not quite the same as the modern plastics either, since he lacks the jade chest piece, instead having the the segmented armor all over. He also has the oldhammer proportions that make these models so classic (and so  much more fun to paint). Not much else to say, other than enjoy this excellent Jes Goodwin sculpt!

I'll admit I was bitten by the Genestealer cult bug. I've never been a fan of Tyranids and never really cared about purestrain genestealers. I also never really appreciated the old-school genestealer cults because I didn't get into 40k until well into second edition and missed their hay-day.

But when I saw the White Dwarf releasing the new genestealer cults, I was smitten. I was already planning on running out and buying a box of the new plastics, when I remembered I had picked up the Deathwatch Overkill box in a clearance sale a while back. Yay, I could feed my fix without having to spend money!

When I said above that I never really cared about purestrain genestealers, that doesn't mean I don't have any. I have the set from Space Hulk painted (by Darkblade). So I attempted to copy the color schemes used there. The only differences I made is the purple plastic armor (since genestealers don't have armor) and I "humaned" up the flesh tones.

I also began daydreaming about the background of the cult. I decided that they are a more religious based cult than a warrior based cult. I'm also a huge sucker for sea-green type colors right now. Thus, the Cult of the Jade Destroyer was born. I incorporated the jade into the chest armor as well.

I also decided this cult is on a desert world, so the base reflects this, as well as I tired to give a dusty appearance. I don't think I got the dustiness as well as I could have, I think on the next batch, I may apply some Ammo of Mig Rainmarks as well. These giant photos always make you notice all the things you need to improve next time!

HeroQuest is one of my all time favorite games. It's a classic dungeon crawler that puts the players in the shoes of some fairly simple archetypes: wizard, dwarf, elf, and barbarian. No real roleplaying necessary; just the fun of hacking down monsters and looting treasure.

As I tell anyone who will listen, I've been working on painting all the figures from my original set. So far, I've finished all the monsters that would fit on 20mm square bases: goblins, zombies, skeletons, and mummies (but I'm probably going to redo the bases). So when the guys over at Scale Creep asked me to paint a model for their HeroQuest Hero Quest, I obliged and chose an orc as I have eight of them to get painted and I can easily paint four in a batch. Since I was only painting one for Scale Creep, however, I decided to paint four to the same standard and then spend some additional time on one of them. The story of that one can be found here.

The orcs were painted in the standard way I've painted the other few orcs since I started this blog, 50:50 Dark Angels green:Goblin green followed by a shade with Orc Flesh Wash, followed by the base coat, then a layer of Goblin green, and then mixing in Sunburst yellow for highlighting. The clothing was painted with various earthy shades and the leathers with various browns. I also painted the sword blades using pigments and buffable metallic paints. When they were finished, I mounted them on DragonForge Temple bases. For the record, I think these pictures came out better than the ones I used on Scale Creep!

I've been working on a chaos since the release of the Fantasy 7th ed. army book. At the time, I was a much more competitive gamer. I sold most of my previous army to start over as I'd 1) become a much better painter, 2) my previous army was almost entirely cavalry and not really playable under that army book, and 3) preferred the newer models to those that had been out (although the original are still the best!). The 7th ed. list required a lot of infantry, so I based the army around 3 blocks of infantry, 1 undivided, 1 Khorne, and 1 Nurgle. I felt like the army standard bearer of such an army should be on foot as he would provide the most benefit to the rank and file.

However, I wanted something that looked suitably impressive--and the foot chaos hero model fit the bill perfectly. Say what you want about plastic models, but they make conversion so much easier. So I chopped off his spear, replaced it with a pole. Took the banner from the mounted marauder kit, and the head from the Chaos Knights, and voila!

And back with another Orctober entry! Two orcs in one month is pretty unheard of for me. But his orc arrived unexpectedly and I felt that it must be a sign from Gork or Mork that I must paint him for Orctober.

A big thanks to Erny of Erny's Place for the Banner!

Ah, it's autumn, and with that time of year comes all the things we love: pumpkins, pies, pumpkin pies, and Orctober! It's an annual tradition that I've never actually taken part in. But this year I have remedied that.

A big thanks to Erny of Erny's Place for the Banner!

I'm internet famous! I recently recorded a podcast with Jay Arnold of the Veteran Wargamer. In it, we discuss all things Oldhammer, especially about how I created it and how nice it is to own Oldhammer. What? Oh, sorry, my delusions took over!

It's a great podcast, go check it out here. I wanted to make sure to throw out the link to the blog referenced in our in discussion on the Pathetic Aesthetic, which can be found here.

One of my long term projects is to complete the models that go with many of my older GW board games so that I can play them with my children when they're old enough (and they're getting close!) and quite possibly, their friends. For this batch, I painted the Swashbuckler, the Dwarf, and the Knight.

For the Swashbuckler and the Knight I wanted to do something important for teaching my children. Minorities are very underrepresented in Science Fiction and Fantasy, which I find odd because many of us were outcasts ourselves and we should fully understand the value of inclusion. The Swashbuckler was painted with Latino skin tones while the Knight was painted with African skin tones. I chose these two models for this treatment for two reasons.

First, and most importantly, these character classes have very little baggage associated with them. Swashbucklers are known as heroic fighters with defeat their enemies with style, while Knights are generally viewed as virtuous warriors upholding the honorable code of chivalry. I did not want to create any negative implications with the chosen models.

Second, many of the Talisman models are modeled with Anglo features, which would make it difficult to paint them in a manner that would fit the traditional racial features I wanted to portray in a realistic manner.

But anyway, without further ado, here they are:

So one of my favorite games of all time is Epic. I've played most of the editions, starting armies as the game gets popular the selling my army when everyone local quits playing. The last time that happened, I decided to buy up a second army (I now have a third too!). But this post isn't about my second or third armies, it's about my primary army, the Dark Angels.

As I work my way through a second company of Dark Angels, I've now completed a Devastator detachments. Nothing special here, some green space marines and their rhinos.

Imperial assassins. The shadows that haunt the traitor. Bane of the heretic. Those who truly face the wrath of the Imperium risk facing the execution in the form of the assassin. In the early days of Rogue Trader, the background of assassins had not been fleshed out; they were kind of a mix of the three most famous temples mentioned in 2nd edition but most closely resembled the modern Callidus assassin. They even got polymorphine!

I picked this up at the US Oldhammer Day in 2015 and finally (finally? It was less than a year! I wish all my models got painted that fast) got around to painting him. I wanted to do something different with him though. Every painted example of this classic model was largely a single color and almost all were dark: black, blue, or green mostly. I had seen one in a solid yellow body suit. I decided that I wanted mine to to look as if he was on the hunt for some heretic in a wasteland, but not necessarily through impersonation, plus I wanted to try something desaturated like Asslessman over at Lead Plague does so well. I opted for a desert camo scheme. I also wanted to try some water effects I'd recently picked up so I placed him on top of a broken sewage pipe flooding a drainage ditch of some sort. Overall, I'm pretty happy with him. He didn't turn out exactly how I envisioned, but he looked good enough to place first in the Single Figure category at the USA Oldhammer Day, last weekend!

This past weekend we held the third Oldhammer Day here in the USA. About twenty of us Oldhammerers descended upon Ashburn, Virginia at Huzzah Hobbies for two days of gaming. It was a hell of a time. And they weren't all local. We had attendees from Arizona, Maine, and Ohio. A big thanks to Huzzah for allowing us to use their space!

Unfortunately, I took no pictures because the camera on my phone is, to put it politely, not good. However, many have been posted on the Oldhammer in the New World Facebook page and many more will be posted shortly on Sean's Wargames Corner, Give'em Lead, and Blue's Marauding Miniatures. Probably other places too.

UPDATE: ZeroTwentyThree has posted his coverage here

I wanted to give a big shout out to everyone who came, and especially everyone who ran games: Brian, Lissanne, Dustin, Ben, and especially James--who ran three different events! We also couldn't have done it without Sean and Richard who helped with a ton of the administrative tasks. And I can't forget Fimm McCool at Oakbound Games and Ramshackle Curtis at Ramshackle Games for providing us with limited edition event minis!

I had a blast playing in James' huge Space Hulk game. We had 5 squads of terminators and we almost pulled off the victory! James runs an amazing game. I also busted out the Gunners in a game of Bloodbowl against Lissanne's Chaos Dwarfs. No points were scored in an absolute slug fest between a pair of arch-rivals. Finally, I took a squad of marines into Nu Ork for Dustin's scenario. It was all great fun.

Oh, and I placed second in the Large Model category of the painting contest, and first in the Single Figure category! I'll show off the winning entry in my next post, but my second place entry was a Marauder Giant Ogre I previously showed off in my old Warseer log:

Waking up face down in the dirt, alone and naked, is the first thing Shak'nar the indomitable remembers with any real clarity. There are memories from the before, but they are hazy and dream-like. Memories like chopping wood and putting nails in show soles, but the colors are all wrong and the other people in these memories all speak a language he does not understand anymore.

After waking up, Shak'nar spent several days wandering what he find out to be the Chaos wastes. Eventually, he found a small camp, with several explorers sleeping around a campfire. In his feral state, the animal portion of his brain took control. After sneaking up on the lone guard and strangling him with his bare hands, he murdered the remaining men in their sleep. Afterwards, he feasted--first on the rations, then on the flesh. The next morning, Shak'nar was fully clothed and armed; albeit with weapons that were more laborer tool than fighter's armaments.

But those gave him the base to get better. He used these supplies to defeat others and loot their weapons and armor, slowly building up a better collection. After he killed a chaos champion, the Gods began to take notice. After taking the armor from his vanquished foe, it began to speak to Shak'nar, telling him that he would be special but first he had to wear the armor. After strapping on the armor, his flesh began to burn as it fused to his skin. It began changing color. That night, the Gods spoke to Shak'nar in his dreams and promised him glory if he would kill in their name and sow discord and chaos upon the kingdoms of men.

The next morning, the orcs came. They spoke only in guttural grunts that Shak'nar could not comprehend. But they seemed to recognize him as their leader so he did not kill them. Sometime later, Shak'nar was not sure how long since time does not flow evenly in the chaos wastes, he was joined by Scorpius. At first Shak'nar only saw a cloud of dust on the horizon. He and the orcs readied for battle. When the horseman arrived, he leapt from his steed and scuttled to Shak'nar and swore fealty. While Shak'nar does not trust Scorpius, he has seen his potency in combat and enjoys fighting with him. The hobgoblins were the last arrive. They promised to fight with him if he would protect them from the wolf-riders of the Hobgobla Khan.

The path to glory has begun!