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!

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.

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.

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.

• Ye Old Inn – Build your own set with complete scans of all the card components and rules
• HeroScribe – Mapping tool for quest building.
• Old Scratch’s HeroQuest Forum – Dedicated forums, some of the 3d dungeons are neat.

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

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.

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!

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!