Holiday Game Preparations Continue

Somehow, despite starting earlier than in years past, it is still coming down to the wire to get everything ready for the Christmas game.

First up, here are the finished captives and the last of the colonist militia types for this game (you can see their in-progress pictures on an earlier post)

The prisoners came out quite a bit better than I anticipated. The scout guy was harder to paint than the others since his pose blocked easy access to his clothing.

 Once those were finished, I started in on the monsters.

I had thought about building armatures entirely from wire, but then I thought, "Why not shortcut the process and start from a figure?"

 I have a pile of 54mm-ish blue Marx-style knights and this seemed like a good a use as any for them.

For the first creature I was going to make, i lopped of the arms and legs. Then I thought,"Why waste the legs?" Two monsters for the price of one!

It's just a flesh wound.

Here is the second one, with wire looped to form a claw and a start like hand, slathered in air-dry clay:

He's kind of cute. And kind of grotesque. Exactly the kind of thing that I find most disturbing.

Here both are, awaiting priming:

In their natural air-dried state.

Using more knights from the same pile, I lopped off bits - faces, arms, a head, and covered in strips of Mod-Podge soaked tissue to look like rags (you can see them to the left below)

Black, followed by a white dry brush (and for the clay guys, I added some glowing dots and some frosty blue dry brushing on the the hands) and voila:

Are the dots eyes? The actual monster? A lure? A magic missile weapon?

Here's a close-up of the headless guy to show off his head:

You can tell he has a helmet on, but my players won't notice.

Yesterday, a bag of 100 2" tall skeleton warriors arrived:

Bag O' Bones

And I promptly set about hacking a bunch of them to pieces. These will be used to make some scatter terrain for the final game board:

It's like watching a Law & Order episode.

100 is far more than I need for this project, and I will have enough left over to fill out a 750 point Age of Fantasy Vampiric Undead army (they have skeletons, zombies, and werewolves in addition to vampires). 

I might even replace the clay monsters in this scenario with some skeletons strategically covered with rags(tissue to hide the "ancient armor" bits). Since I think the bogey men (or whatever they are) kind of deserve their own scenario.

Still lots to do. So many more hack apart

I really want to make a cave lair to put at the Big Bad's board edge, but we'll see what happens. The Big Bad itself is far more important to the game than the cave.

Christmas Game Prep Update

I've made a fair bit of progress on the painting for my Christmas Day game. 

First up, our heroes!

LOD/Barszo Colonial Militia and Pioneer Women

Note that, I am painting the bases white for this game, but I will probably paint them brown/beige to look more like dirt and mud afterwards, for more general use.

Players will be able to choose the figure they want to use, and then choose a pre-gen character card. Perilous Tales (the rules I'll be using - I have the free version but I see they have recently had their official release, so I will buy them!) really only has one stat (called Skill), and then hero types get special abilities, which can't be duplicated among the party. In a co-op game this gives everyone some spotlight time and for the RPGers, it gives them something to hang a personality on.

The game, as planned, will actually consist of three games of Perilous Tales, each set on a different layout, with different opposition. Think of each table as a scene/room and it makes a little more sense. I will allow the players to heal somewhat between scenes, and there will be some light role-play between them - remember, my group is really an RP group, not wargamers.

I may reduce this to two layouts but time is running out to decide!

In any case, the first table will feature a pack of ravenously hungry wolves OR depending upon my overall villain story, possessed wolves.

SCS Direct wolves (they used to be easy to find on Amazon, in their Fantasy Creatures II set, but I can't find that for sale anymore)

 On the paint table now are the captives awaiting saving and another militia member.

Women from LOD/Barszo Huron Captives set with another colonial militia figure.

The women figures are resin and have a fair number of divots and other odd artifacts of their creation. The pioneer women were most troublesome and the standing/shooting figure especially so. I covered her skirt multiple times with coats of Mod Podge to to fill in the pores (for lack of a better term). It worked well enough for my low standards, but those who care more about such things would do well to pick up some green stuff if they want to paint these figures.

Next up, finish painting those figures, possibly paint up some of the other pioneer women (to function as a witches coven, if I go that route), and some DIY figure making with wire and clay.

A Bit of a Mish Mash

Contrary to my usual tendency to wait until the last minute, I've begun working on my Christmas day game. For a change of pace, it will have nothing to do with Christmas itself, and everything to do with the harsh reality of winter (with a heaping scoop of supernatural activity added) on the American frontier in the early 1770s.

Inspired by The Silver Bayonet, at least in concept, I'm preparing a colonial America horror game - my take on the British tradition of Christmas season ghost stories. For rules, I have settled on a free set that so far in my tests seems well suited to the genre. They do require some effort to grok, since they are a beta version: Perilous Tales. That said, they seem easily teachable to my players who have little experience with wargames (other than my previous holiday games).

Figures have been acquired - here are the photos from the eBay seller:

Technically they are AWI militia from Barzso/LOD, but they will do for settlers.

 

Frontier women from Barzso/LOD

 

I may have anywhere from 3 - 8 players so those two lots will cover my bases. 

 

What I am undecided about is painting. I know a lot of people clutch their pearls at the idea of unpainted figures, or horror or horrors, mixing painted and unpainted, but I grew up with unpainted plastic soldiers - as is often discussed, this is the typical route in the US, green (and later, tan) plastic "army men", not painted figures. 

 

So, I prefer it for 54mm figures for the pure nostalgia of it. Which is why my 54mm WWII collection has been cleared of almost all the painted figures. But I digress.

If I do paint them I will go for a more "grimdark" approach than "toy soldier", since I want to convey the game's atmosphere through the physical components.

 

And speaking of grimdark, my Sisters of Battle / Blessed Sisters have been started.

For the Emperor.

This represents half (in terms of model count) of my starter 300 point Grimdark Future: Firefight team. It is clearly a WiP shot - there's quite a few more steps in the process to go. 

I'm following Sonic Sledgehammer's tutorial for Our Martyred Lady, in large part. He is by far my favorite painting tutorial creator on YouTube - he sounds very friendly and is very encouraging,  his painting steps are accessible to us mere mortals, and he's not afraid to make a painting error on camera.

Yesterday, our family and friends D&D group started in on act three of a campaign set in Ravenloft (I play a "business man" who is really a thief specializing in the liberation of rare books from private collections). 

It had been so long since the end of act two that most of us had forgotten nearly everything. Our DM did an admirable job at summarizing it all. There was no combat in the session - just role play - which I thought would irritate my son, but he dove into his character head first and provided the most enjoyable moments during the negotiations with Baba Yaga.

Finally, tonight I will be playing game three in the 2024 Blitz Bowl season. 

We've Got a Red Sleigh Down. We've Got a Red Sleigh Down.

A hush settles over the village.  

Is that ...?

Already Berlin has ordered it safeguarded back to Germany.

As it turns out, the North Pole has their own idea about what to do.

Merry Christmas to All!