Fallout 3

 General  5 Responses »
Dec 132008
 

Fallout 3
Fallout 3 on the PC from Bethesda is the sole reason there’s been no blog updates here recently. It’s been years since I’ve played a game so damned enjoyable and downright addictive. I highly recommend it. It’s based on the Oblivion engine, which I played only briefly, finding it to be rather dull fantasy fare. The Fallout 3 post apocalyptic setting, 50′s swing band soundtrack and the addition of lots of awesome firepower makes for a game that’s streets ahead of Oblivion in my humble opinion.

However after playing at least 6-8 hours a week for the last couple of weeks I’ve maxed out my character and am plan to finish the main story line before Xmas. So hopefully normal programming will resume in the New Year. I’ve certainly got a slew of hobby projects backed up that I really want to knock off – mainly because some require almost minimal effort to complete.

 Posted by at 11:13 am

Tutorial: Cheap Flexible 15mm Roads

 Flames Of War, Tutorials  4 Responses »
Nov 232008
 

Cheap flexible 15mm road My gaming group has got back into Flames of War recently and I thought it was time to spruce up my North African gaming table a little more. I’ve noticed we tend to make a few little villages on my textured table with a set of 15mm Crescent Root buildings and my own homemade stone walls. So I thought it was probably time I got down to creating some roads through this rather barren desert.

A while back Jonathan mentioned he’d had some success using strips of weed mat and brown builder’s caulk to create flexible 15mm roads. I didn’t have any caulk handy but I did have half a tube of Selley’s Liquid Nails in the garage so tried it out myself. My test road features in the above photo. It’s nicely textured and takes paint well and is easily flexible enough to mold to the contours of my modular table set up. It worked so well I’ve put together this brief tutorial on how to create as much road strip as you need for negligble cost.

Cheap flexible 15mm road 1. Assemble the materials. Like Jonathan I used a cheap, porous, textured weed mat for the base of my roads. It’s thin and sturdy with a low cost of around $8nz for a 5m roll of the stuff. Cut it into strips, arcs and other shapes as you need for your table. For this tutorial I’ve glued a couple of scraps together to create a ‘T’ junction piece.

You also need something to texture your road. Jonathan used a brown builder’s caulk, however I opted for Selley’s Liquid Nails. This DIY product dries to a water-proof flexible rubber consistency and I suspect it’s simply an industrial strength PVA. The advantage of using porous textured weed matting as the base is that the Liquid Nails will have no problem adhering to the matting, and dries into a fairly robust piece of terrain.

To detail the roads I used a mixture of cheap kitty litter and mixture of Woodland Scenics model railway ballasts (that is what’s in the plastic container in this photo). Three bags of varying grades of model railway ballast mixed together with some kitty litter for larger boulders and you’ve got yourself and endless supply of texturing gravel. I’ve been using this same plastic container of gravel for seven years to detail my Mordheim table and buildings, my 15mm North African terrain, other random scenery pieces and various figure bases.

The roads were textured with a set of cheap Chinese hog bristle art brushes, which were also used to paint the roads with a mixture of several interior acrylic house paint test pots from a local paint manufacturer.
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 Posted by at 2:30 pm

Necromunda Scavvies

 Necromunda  No Responses »
Oct 282008
 

Necromunda Scavvies Recently my gaming group has been playing a few games of Necromunda which we’ve all been enjoying. After borrowing a Cawdor gang I scavenged some figures from Daniel for a Scavvie gang, which seems appropriate. I believe he picked these figures up as a bulk lot from TradeMe, which turned out to include at least a couple of gangs worth of old Necromunda figures. Most of them were half painted by what looked like a 12-14 year old hand I suspect. However a bit of methylated spirits and some scrubbing got rid of most of that. I still owe you something for these figures too by the way Daniel!

The Scavvies Daniel was kind enough to part with are original Necromunda scavvie figures – evidently Games Workshop have re-sculpted the gang, judging from what they’re selling now. I have to say I think I prefer the older figures, however while these are out-of-production classic high-lead GW Scavvie figures I felt no compulsion not to butcher them!

Necromunda Scavvies Since there were a couple of repeated of figures the first thing I did was a few head swaps using my 28mm Pig Iron Rebel heads. The head swaps are pretty obvious in the photos because Pig Iron uses a lighter, low lead pewter and the older GW figures have defining experienced some oxidation. At the moment the heads have simply been pinned onto the bodies and I need to do some basic sculpting to build up some rags around their necks.

Necromunda Scavvies I’ve also filed down all of the round Scavvie ‘angry face’ badges these figures seem to be adorned with. I’ll be blanking those off to flat medals with some green stuff and probably painting them up as simple metal tokens, or maybe some kind of crude rad-dosage badge?

Next I de-tagged all the figures – which is surprisingly easy to do when they’re high-lead – and put together a bunch of simple bases. These bases are textured with a selection of resin scraps from my bits box – including some 28mm scale resin corrugated iron, barrel halves and some cast skid-plates. The idea is to paint the bases up so that the bare base you see will become lurid green toxic sludge of some sort, when and if I get around to painting these figures. At any rate now I have a bunch of based Scavvie figures I can game with, in conjunction with the handful of Warhammer Fantasy zombies I have actually painted.

I’ve played a couple of games with this throw together Scavvie gang and haven’t found them completely worthless. I was wondering if they were overly penalised because of the Outlander rules they have to play which seems like it would severely limit your gang’s income during a campaign. However the flip side of that seems to be that Scavvie gang members are pretty cheap to hire, and even armed with homemade weapons, their numbers can add up during a game. Everybody also seems fairly terrified of the rather erratic Plague Zombies which does add a certain element of fun to playing this gang.

 Posted by at 8:07 am

Dustan: HeroQuest Redux – Part 1

 General, Reviews, Warhammer Fantasy  9 Responses »
Oct 172008
 

Stu: In this post a gaming buddy Dustan, talks about his current project – painting a set of HeroQuest figures for gaming with his young son.

Way back around 1989 Games Workshop and Milton Bradley got together and produced HeroQuest. Set in GW’s Warhammer Fantasy world it recreates the adventures of four Heroes who battle the minions of the evil wizard Morcar (Zargon in America). I decided to paint up this set as something to play with my son who is turning six soon. This is the fourth set I’ve painted, for some reason they always seemed expendable when it came clearing out the cupboards, now it’s out of production I wont let this one escape me!

HeroQuest is a game for 2-5 players and comes with 35 miniatures, 15 pieces of furniture, 20 doors, a large game board and a host of cards, counters and dice. The rules are brief and simple and the quest book contains 14 Adventures. There is no system for creating dungeons as you go however a blank game map was supplied and later an adventure design kit was released.

The board consists of a grid of floor tiles with fixed walls, rubble tokens would block access to some areas to help change the shape of the map. In later expansions overlays were used to radically change the map by adding grassy caves, chasms and other special features.

The Heroes (Barbarian, Wizard, Elf and Dwarf) move around the board with 2d6 movement and are able to search for treasure, traps and secret doors. Combat is resolved using a special set of combat dice, the number of dice thrown in attack or defense was dependent on the combatant’s stat lines.

Searching for treasure allows the players to draw a random treasure card which could be anything from potions, gems, gold, items and even traps or wandering monsters. Each quest has an objective for the Heroes to complete, if they failed either by leaving the dungeon or being killed the Evil Wizard claims victory.

The game is not without its flaws. These issues were addressed by the later GW release of Advanced HeroQuest, which sadly is a little to complicated for casual play. HeroQuest’s flaws are:

  • It’s designed more as a board game rather than an RPG it seems to suggest the Heroes  are competing against each other for treasure, this is of course dependant on your players.
  • The random movement distances can really slow down this game, particularly if you are a low roller.
  • Due to the use of equipment and treasure playing cards expanding the game relied on MB releasing expansions.

Despite this HeroQuest is a good gateway game and I hope it will encourage my son and later my daughter into the hobbies that have permeated my life.

There are many resources out there with new quests, printable tiles and house rules. I have included a few of my favourites to get you started.

In the next post I’ll show you my work on painting the Heroes and furniture.

 Posted by at 12:03 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

Ancients: More Carthaginian Spear

 Ancients  No Responses »
Oct 092008
 

Corvus Belli Carthaginian Spear Painted Once again it’s been a slow month here hobby wise. Largely because we have a teething baby in the house and I’ve been looking for a new job. At any rate, here’s another base of 15mm Spear men for my DBA Carthaginian army.

These chaps have been given red shields to distinguish them from the other base I’ve already painted. Historically Liby-Phonecian Spear men were the ‘citizen soldiers’ of the Carthaginian army, so it’s entirely possible each man had a personal shield decoration. Indeed 28mm Ancients gamers do seem to enjoy painting unique shield patterns on their Carthaginian forces, like this fine example from Lonely Gamers.

Corvus Belli Carthaginian Spear Painted However I have neither the time nor the patience to come up with twelve uniquely painted shield patterns. Instead I’m going to do each base with a different set of shields as it’s easier and presents a less busy looking army when they’re finally all ranked up. Although of course I could always purchase some 15mm decals and apply them to the flat coloured shields at a later date.

Speaking of ranks, after painting this base I’m left with three more bases to go to complete this DBA army. Another base of Spear men, and two Cavalry bases, one of which is the command group for the army. The two Cavalry bases will be the most fun to paint, so I’ll probably do one of them next. With a little luck I may have at least one DBA army finished by the end of this year!

Corvus Belli Carthaginian Spear Painted Here are the two bases of Spear men next to each other and it seems the chaps with the red shields are a little better drilled than the first base I painted. Ranking them up like this does make me wonder if the figures should be presented facing front, with their shields to their right side, but by the gods if I was a soldier on an ancient battlefield I’d certainly be facing shield forward!

 Posted by at 8:14 pm

Poll Roundup: Economic Downturn Reducing Your Hobby Spending?

 Polls  10 Responses »
Sep 192008
 

* 28% (99) – No.
* 23% (81) – Yes, a little.
* 21% (74) – Yes, moderately.
* 27% (96) – Yes, a lot.

Total Votes: 350

I left this poll running for quite some time, because the global situation just seems to have been getting constantly worse this year. Here in New Zealand we’re partially insulated from the sub-prime meltdown by having a simpler banking system, different legislation around mortgages and a high interest rate – which gives our Reserve Bank a fair amount of room to cut rates in an attempt to stimulate our flagging economy.

However trust me it’s still looking pretty grim on our little island in the Pacific so my hobby spending this year has been almost nil as we struggle to pay the mortgage, the other bills, and keep our two boys in daycare/school etc. It seems I’m not alone judging from the results of the poll with less than a third of you stating your hobby spending hasn’t changed at all, while the rest of the voters have reduced their spending by some amount, almost a third of you by a lot.

The game company and figure manufacturers out there must really be feeling the pinch I imagine. Particularly since prices for casting metals have been increasing at the same time. Putting your prices up while your customers are already reducing their hobby spend is a pretty bad place to be in for niche businesses. Tabletop Gaming News regularly features price increase notices from various quarters, and I wonder if we’ll start seeing indie manufacturers closing their doors. I certainly hope not since indie figures really inject a lot of life into this hobby.

Continuing with the doom and gloom, I suffer from mild depression and have noticed that periodically it effects my enjoyment of gaming. Normally I’m a pretty relaxed gamer, having fun in a game as long as it’s close thing regardless of the outcome. However I find if I’m down I seem to devolve into more a win-at-all costs power gamer with a side order of rules lawyer. I dislike gaming at all when I’m in this state of mind, simply because I don’t extract any pleasure from the game itself and usually just end up offending my opponents by being a ‘whiny little bitch’ (their words). In fact I’ve started making a conscious choice not to game when I’m feeling like this because it’s just easier on everybody.

So this next poll we’re running is to do with power gaming – are you a win-at-all-costs kinda gamer or not? Come on fess up!

 Posted by at 10:52 am

Hirst Arts Cathedral Update VII

 Mordheim, Warhammer Fantasy  8 Responses »
Sep 122008
 

Hirst Arts Cathedral Progess As it’s been over six months since I last did any work on the Hirst Arts Cathedral, it’s probably time for an update. Particularly since I’m supposed to be finishing this project!

If you’re a regular visitor you may have noticed I haven’t got a lot of hobby work done this year for a variety of reasons and the same is true of this project unfortunately. I’ve done some minor work around the doors of the left bell tower and finished off the front-piece of the central hall as well as building the back-piece too.

I need to do some more casting of those cursed 1″ x 1/2″ flat gothic tiles to have enough pieces to build the next set of long inside and outside walls. I suspect may also be short of a few other pieces too so hopefully I can dredge up enough Ultracal 30 dust to finish casting.

I’ve given up using those gothic flats for the interior doorways and instead am using the joined gothic square pieces as I have an excess of them cast. I believe they’re meant to be used to build up the double floors needed for the left and right bell towers. However I’ll use painted balsa wood for these square floors as I’d like to make them removable so you can get figures into the towers during play.

The Cathedral is really starting to shape up and I’m considering painting some of the large pieces to keep me motivated. All I need is one big push and I’m confident I’ll be able to finish the major construction work before starting on detailing and finishing off bit and pieces like the flying buttresses etc.

Once that’s done we’ll have to play about 50 games over Mordheim to justify the effort in building this thing!

 Posted by at 8:48 am
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