The Death Knight Poses an Important Question, while his Mooks Look On

When I posted my fantasy Star Wars entries a few weeks ago I didn't have the files for the not-Stormtroopers, so I just ran with what I had ready at the time. Nevertheless, it somehow just felt wrong, not having the classic White Bucketheads mucking in with their nasty overlords, so when I managed to chase down the STL files, I quickly got them printed and painted-up to add to my collection of villains.

These are the crossbow-armed versions of the Troopers. For additional variation, the talented folks over at One Gold Piece also offer a sword and shield set, along with a polearm-equipped squad. As we're now on the clock for the end of the Challenge, I decided to stick to the missile armed flunkies as they seem to have that iconic, hapless mook-with-a-blaster look about them (yes, they will be re-rolling any hits in our future games).

I primed the Troopers black and then oversprayed them using Krylon Ivory, which I think gives the armour a nice, smooth, satin finish. I then used an assortment of Contrast paints to pick out their gear and weapons. I wanted to keep them fairly high-contrast, to trace back to the iconic source material, so I kept it all very stripped-down and simple. 

As to the Death Knight, again, I didn't see any reason to overthink him too much. I kept his paintjob fairly minimalist, just using some colourshift colours on his spooky enchanted blade and working up some contrasting highlights for his gloss black armour.

It was fun going back to painting renaissance style 'puff & slash' for the Rebel prisoner's uniform. Funny, working on him made me a little nostalgic for my Italian Wars stuff - I may need to do-up a few more Landsknechts to quash those silly romantic notions. :)

These guys being so high-contrast, photographing them was a bit of a nightmare (one of the inherent limitations of my older iPhone camera). Anyway, I hope you can get a sense of what they look like.

Thanks for dropping in for a look!

- Curt

'A long time ago in a dungeon far, far away...'

Hi All,

I've been a big Star Wars nerd ever since seeing the first movie as a kid in '77.  So when I discovered that my friend Kawe over at Westfalia Miniatures/One Gold Piece had done a brilliant range of fantasy not-Star Wars minis I knew I had to give them a go.

First up are our doughty heroes. These seven adventurers will be very recognizable as: The Apprentice, The Princess, The Old Master, The Smuggler, The Bugbear, The Butler Construct and the Trashcan Construct. 

Then we have our iconic arch villains, with The Liche Lord and his Honour Guard, and the terrifying Death Knight.

I actually had a print fail on the Death Knight where his sword didn't properly resolve. So I replaced it with some plasticard, doing a sort of anime thing with the shape of the blade. It's a bit of a bodge but I actually don't mind it.

The other fun thing about these being 3d prints is that it allowed me to scale up the Death Knight to be a little more imposing.  David Prowse would be pleased, I think.

Thanks for dropping in for a look. Have a great day!

- Curt

A Trio of Heroes from Star Wars Imperial Assault

For a bit of pulp summer reading, I picked up 'Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View'. 

Wow, what a page turner!  I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying it. The book is comprised of 40 short stories, all centred on the original 1977 film. Sure, some of the stories are a bit hackneyed, but most are quite inspired and a few are absolute genius. All of them do a great job in making readers of <ahem> a certain vintage very nostalgic for that innocent, bright-eyed, thrilling tale which came from 'a more civilized age'.

So, with all these wonderful stories percolating in my mind, I thought it a perfect excuse to get a few more figures painted for my Imperial Assault collection.

Here are three intrepid Rebels, eager to take the good fight to the Empire.

Saska Teft is from the 'Twin Shadows' expansion. She's a tech type of character, being very handy at hacking into Imperial systems while providing support for the rest of the party.

Fenn Signis is from the core boxed set, a weapon's expert, being specially good at laying down heaps of suppressive fire and causing mayhem amongst any close-clustered Imperial targets. 

I've run out of clear acrylic bases so I just went with gloss black for this group. I actually quite like nice, clean, minimalist look so I might just run with it in the future.

Gaarkhan is also from the core set, he's a Wookie warrior (yeah, obviously) who, not surprisingly, deals out loads of pain in close combat. 

The plastic used for these figures is quite crisp on the whole, and reasonably hard, but some of the longer weapons still suffer from being somewhat al dente in their aspirations of being straight and true, so I try to replace these bits with brass rod to give them a bit of rigidity. 

I also added a bit of length to Gaarkhan's halberd as I thought it would better suit his imposing height.

I'm doing up a series of Imperial types which maybe I'll bring out in a future post.

Entry #5 to AHPC VIII: Darth Vader, Kayn Somos and Stormtroopers for 'Imperial Assault'

I know, I know, there's been a bit of a boardgame theme running through my stuff to date. I have no clue whats driving it. I can assure you it's not out of any grand design on my part. As Robbie Robertson once sang, 'I don't know, the wind just sort of pushed me this way.' 

'Imperial Assault' is a newly discovered game for me, so I was pretty stoked to try painting some of the figures. I know the game is old news for many as it's been out for several years, but my interest was piqued when I heard that, like 'Mansions of Madness', an app was being released to run the game's core mechanics allowing it to become fully cooperative. 

The new Imperial Assault app.

The announcement of the app coincided with the news that one of our local game stores was shutting down. The silver lining to this sad news was that in and among all the stock they were blowing out was a heap of 'Imperial Assault' stuff. So being a big Star Wars geek, I jumped in with both feet and snapped it up.

So here are my beginning efforts of the core box.  I thought I'd start with a good big whack of bad guys as, well, you always need lots of bad guys for the heroes to ventilate and/or foil their nefarious plans. 

This is a detachment of nine Stormtroopers, their captain Kayn Somos and my favourite Sith Lord, Darth Vader. 

I thought the Stormtroopers would be an easy win being all white, but of course their armour was quite fiddly to get close to what I was wanting. I'm still not entirely happy with them, but they'll die in droves, just like unpainted ones, so they'll make do.

The plastic on these figures was not too bad to work on, but still a bit too bendy for my tastes. I removed Vader's slightly warped light saber and replaced it with brass rod, and for a bit of fun, I used some thin plastic rod to simulate him deflecting an incoming laser blast.

Photographing these guys was a bit of a challenge as Vader sort of disappears into the black background and I was too lazy to swap it out with something lighter.

Again, I replaced the stock bases with clear acrylic to allow the playing-tile surfaces to show through. Following my standard skirmish trope, I also gave Vader and Somos different shaped bases to aid in their rank identification, though this is pretty silly as it's blazingly obvious when you look at the figures! Apparently it's hard to stop a creature of habit. ;)

Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

The Home of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru

I was flipping through a book on famous movie sets the other day and came across a section on the Tunisian film location for Luke Skywalker's home on Tatooine. I immediately felt nostalgic on seeing the iconic domed habitat, the moisture vapourators and Luke's battered landspeeder. So I thought I'd create a small vignette depicting the home of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, seen during quieter times, before galactic events changed everything.

I found these models as 3D files on Thingiverse and adapted them to my purposes. They were originally much larger designs, but I wanted something compact, so I scaled them down to something approximating a 10mm scale. 

Luke's landspeeder has been fiddled with a bit to make it thinner, elongated and somewhat stylized. I tried to keep to the salmon coloured paint scheme seen in the film.  

A few have asked why I didn't put in Luke or perhaps 3PO and R2D2. To be honest I've always liked set-piece scenes where the characters are not seen. Sometimes the absence of things says more than having them there. It gives the impression that something is happening out of sight, and so your mind naturally starts to question and provide a plausible narrative. Maybe Luke has just come home from checking on the farm's distant moisture condensers? Or maybe he's just said farewell to his friend Biggs and is now home for supper, trying to convince his aunt and uncle to let him join the academy. For me, the absence of characters makes the scene more compelling and interesting.  

 
Thanks for dropping by!

Kablooey! Exploding 'Star Wars' Rebel Starships - 7th Submission to AHPC VII

Ever since seeing 'Rogue One' over the holiday break I've been having a wonderful renaissance delving into all things 'Star Wars'. I feel like I'm eleven all over again (if only my hair follicles would follow suit)!

This resurgent interest made me dig-up my copy of 'Star Wars: Armada' by Fantasy Flight Games. For those who are not familiar with the game, 'Armada' is a fleet-level miniatures game, where players get to control the huge starships and fighter squadrons that are so iconic in the films. Rebel Blockade Runners, Star Destroyers, Mon Calamari 'Pickle Ships', swarms of TIE fighters, you got it, they're all a part of the game. It's super fun.

Our group is just about to start a campaign using the new 'Corellian Conflict' expansion that came out a few weeks ago. The guys are busy creating their fleets and so I thought I'd add some colour to the tabletop with some bits and bobs. What we have here is a pair of critically damaged ships for set dressing. With these models, victorious admirals will have the satisfaction of seeing their crippled adversaries drift across the table instead of the original models simply being removed from play.

The Rebel frigate is hit amidships and begins to break apart.

These two ships are from the Rebel Alliance. One is the famous Rebel Blockade Runner, or CR90 Corvette, that was seen carrying Princess Leia in 'A New Hope', and the other is a Nebulon-B Escort Frigate which was first glimpsed in 'The Empire Strikes Back'.

Both of these models were downloaded from Thingiverse (thanks Danesgift!), tweaked/re-scaled, printed off on my 3D printer and mercilessly bashed-up for effect. The stands are prints as well.

Below are a couple raw prints, with all the supports still needing to be removed and sanded down. Yes, they are SUPER orange when they first come off the printer.

The explosions are 3D fractal models, designed by Aeron203. 

I re-scaled and sliced the fractal models to make varying sizes and textures of explosions. I added some blown-out debris from thin plasticard, and for the Nebulon-B I gave it a turbo laser hit (with a bit of painted steel rod) for a bit of drama.

The raw 3D models above provides you a hint of the upcoming Imperial ships which will be getting the same treatment - but that will be for another post.

Product Review: Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game by Fantasy Flight Games

'Shrrreeee! Pweww! Pweww, Pweww!!' ...Hey man, you gotta make the noise...

I was a boy when Start Wars was released in 1977 and I, like many young lads around the world, was absolutely crazy about the movie. For several years I lived and breathed for anything that even obliquely mentioned Han, Vader, Stormtroopers, light sabers, etc. My poor mother, bless her soul, had to struggle through heaps of Star Wars paraphernalia to hazard entering my room. Like some hapless adventurer, she navigated through a geologic nerd strata composed of layers of collectible cards, magazines, models, action figures and comic books.

Anyway, with this in mind you can imagine how stoked I was to try out the new 'X-Wing Miniatures Game' which was released this past summer.  So a few weeks ago, Stacy and I picked up a copy of the game, along with a few extra models and, and with Peter serving as an R2 Unit, gave it a whirl.

The game has a passing similarity with 'Wings of War' but I found that I liked the overall mechanics much more. All of the spaceships utilize the same manoeuvre templates, so there is no model-specific decks of movement cards that you have to keep organized, which keeps the game clean and fairly simple to administrate. The movement phase for each spacecraft is pre-plotted using a selector dial, and firing is conducted at the end of the turn through competitive die rolls, which keeps everyone engaged in the action. 

The discs are the the movement orders which are flipped over simultaneously to display everyone's flight plots.

The game is true to the movies in that you typically need more Imperial TIE fighters to face-off with the X-Wings, but each class of ship has its strengths and weaknesses. The Y-Wing (my favourite) is a bit of a pig, but can both soak-up damage and dish it out. If you wish, you can have heroes of the movies serving as your pilots. Luke is definitely powerful, but Vader is particularly brutal, especially if he's matched up with his iconic Advanced TIE fighter. All good fun.

Maneuver dials revealed (along with chits for 'Lock On' and 'Focus')

Gameplay rattles along at a good pace. We managed to get in two good-sized games in about 3 hours with lots of snacking and kibitzing.

A ewok-sized furball.

The models themselves are quite nice. They are single piece, hard plastic and come pre-painted. The paint jobs are actually fairly decent, but if you have the time and inclination I think they'd benefit from a bit of highlighting. I'll probably replace the pegs with magnetic gimbal mounts so the fighters can be positioned to indicate banking, climbing and diving (as if these things really matter in space, but it looks cool).

Its a bit of a hog in the game, but I really have a soft spot for the old Y-Wing.

So there you have it. If this is a game you and a friend may be interested in I'd strongly suggest picking up two of the core boxed sets as they will give you better value than buying the fighters separately. I understand that there is a host of new spacecraft due over the coming months including the Millennium Falcon ('It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs [!?]), an A-Wing and Bobba Fett's 'Slave I'.

But, really, the nagging question I have is this: 

Will they come out with a pilot card for Porkins?

'Stay on target.' (nom, nom, nom...)