'Remember, Remember...' The Fifth Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

V image by GChiny @ Deviantart

Today, November 5th, marks the 410th anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot to destroy the British Houses of Parliament and the subsequent capture of 'the man without a light': Guy Fawkes. 

'Fawkes'

Today, the 5th of November is celebrated in Great Britain as Guy Fawkes Day, Plot Day or Bonfire Night, with Guy Fawkes often being toasted as 'the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.' 

To commemorate the events of 1605 and celebrate the wonderful and complex spirit of dissent, derision and deconstruction, I dedicate this year's Painting Challenge to:

Antiheroes, Rogues & Ruffians

(and all those others of wonderfully shady ilk)

'Carter'

The Rules

The Challenge will extend from 12:01 am December 5th through to the first day of Spring, 12:01 am March 20th Central Standard Time.

Figures can be prepared and primed prior to the start date (Dec 5th), but no colour can be applied until the 5th. In order to be fully scored the figures have to be based and their groundwork completed. The figures have to be painted by you. The honour system will be followed in the completion and entry of figures to the Challenge. Again, great dishonour goes upon anyone who shames themselves in the time-honoured craft of painting toy soldiers!

The subject matter can be in any scale and in any theme, including sci-fi, fantasy.

In order to be scored, photos of all figures/units along with a short descriptive note must be uploaded to the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge blog (more on this later). Up-to-date scoring will be maintained on the blog's main page.   

The Judge (me) will participate, but my score will not have any standing in the Challenge (I usually struggle for a middle of the pack score). 

'Heisenberg'

The Scoring

6mm foot figure = 0.5 point
6mm mounted figure, artillery piece or crew served weapon = 1 pts
6mm vehicle = 2 points

10mm foot figure = 1 point
10mm mounted figure, artillery piece or crew served weapon = 2 points
10mm vehicle = 3 points 

15mm foot figure = 2 pts
15mm mounted figure, artillery piece or crew served weapon = 4 pts
15mm vehicle = 6 pts

20mm foot figure = 4 pts
20mm mounted figure, artillery piece or crew served weapon = 8 pts
20mm vehicle = 12 pts

28mm foot figure = 5 pts
28mm mounted figure, artillery piece or crew served weapon = 10 pts
28mm vehicle = 15 pts

40mm foot figure = 7 pts
40mm mounted figure, artillery piece or crew served weapon = 15 pts
40mm vehicle = 20 pts 

54mm foot figure = 10 pts
54mm mounted figures, artillery piee or crew served weapon = 20 pts
54mm vehicle, limber, etc. = 30 pts 

Other scales, miscellaneous models/figures will be scored on a submission-by-submission basis. 

'Mata Hari'

Challenger Personal Targets and Duels

Same as previous years, I ask that each Challenger declare his/her points target that they hope to achieve by the March 20th deadline. I encourage Challengers to pick a target that is a bit beyond their comfort zone, but still achievable. Many participants have found this a great incentive to help maintain their pace over the three months of the Challenge. Also, last year a few folks had a lot of fun issuing 'duels' to other participants in order to race to meet a declared target, paint the most figures for a specific period, etc. I leave this to the participants to organize, but I'm more than happy to log the duels and keep track of the points.

'Nucky'

Challenger Target Thresholds

New for this year is that there will be six point thresholds set out for the Challenge. Each time a participant reaches a Point Threshold his/her name will be entered for the prize drawn for that level. So, the more points you accumulate the more prizes you will be eligible for. The Threshold prizes will be drawn at the end of the Challenge.

Threshold I: 500 points

Threshold II: 750 points 

Threshold III: 1000 points 

Threshold IV: 1500 points 

Threshold V: 2000 points 

Threshold VI: 2500 points

'Ahab'

The Fortnight Theme Bonus Rounds

Same as last year, we will have a series of 'Fortnight Theme Bonus Rounds'. Each 'Theme Bonus Round' asks Challengers to enter a submission that illustrates a particular theme. The Bonus Rounds are not mandatory, they are just a little bit of fun to pace out the the Challenge and allow people to gain decent number of points through vignettes and single figures.

Those Challengers who manage to submit an entry for a 'Fortnight Theme Bonus Round' will get an extra 50 points on top of the regular entry tally. No scales less than 15mm will be eligible for the Theme Bonus Rounds but they can be of a historical or fictional subject.

The Bonus Themes along with their submission deadlines are:

• December 14: Cold
• December 28: Mount(s) & Rider(s)
• January 11: Victorian
• January 25: Myth
• February 8: Hot
• February 22: Comedic
• March 8: Anti-Hero

The theme submissions are to be sent in by 12:01 am (CST) on the specified date (Sundays for all).

For each bonus round I'll post a poll listing all the round's entries so visitors can vote for their favourite. 

'Tank Girl'

Paying the Piper

As in previous Challenges, I ask for a small memento from each Challenger. In keeping with this year's Fawksian theme, the entrance fee' for this year's Challenge will be a single 28mm figure characterised as an antihero, rogue or person of dubious character but undeniable charisma (yes, it can even be a figure of me!). The figure will be supplied and painted by the entrant. This miniature can be submitted any time up until the end of the Challenge. Again, same as previous years, for each figure I receive I will donate $5 to the Saskatchewan branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

'Constantine'

The Call

This year I've changed a few aspects of how the Challenge will be administered. Not to worry, I will still be the master of ceremonies, but I've devised a cunning way to host a generous amount of participants - but more on that later. Nonetheless, I do have my limits, so please don't waffle if you're interested - drop me a note below to get on the roster. I'll place notification in this space when all the participant slots for the Challenge have been filled.

Let the fun begin!

28mm Pulp Character for 'Eldritch Horror': Brother Anastasios Sangarangos - Vrykolakas (Vampire) Hunter

Our gaming group enjoys board games almost as much as pushing miniatures around (Gasp! Sacre bleu!) and one of our current favourites is 'Eldritch Horror' by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). 

'Eldritch Horror' is a cooperative game which is set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos (similar in theme to FFG's 'Arkham Horror' but significantly streamlined). The players work together, investigating exotic locations around the globe, gathering clues and combating monsters all in order to thwart the coming of an ancient evil who is set on the world's destruction. The game is very well designed, giving a brisk-paced and very challenging romp which plays out like a rip-roaring cinematic adventure. 

At the beginning of each game every player needs to select a pre-designed character from the dozen provided (though I understand that there will be more featured in an upcoming expansion). The characters represent a gambit of the great archetypes. Some are cleft-chinned, two-fisted heroes, a few are well connected politicians and debutantes while others are unassuming academic-types who can harness arcane spells of incredible power.  

Example of the stock Character Cards from 'Eldritch Horror'.

We've played the game enough now that we've tried out all the characters numerous times, enjoying each one's strengths and weaknesses. Nevertheless, always liking to tinker, I've decided to make up characters for the game which correspond to each member of our gaming group or are tongue-in-cheek sendups of friends and family. 

Each of these new characters has it's own custom designed card and a corresponding figure to represent them on the game board. Some of these characters I've already shown in a previous post (my apologies for the repetition for some), but as a brief recap they are:

Captain Peter Douglas (retired Royal Navy)

Captain Douglas is a grizzled veteran of the Great War where he made a reputation for himself as a hard-driving commander of a destroyer. He gained both his D.S.C and his prized 'Broomhandle' Mauser from a boarding action where he and his crew captured a light cruiser off the coast of Africa. (The same Mauser shattered his left arm, when he was wounded by the German cruisers captain.)

Major Marty 'Gimme' Mohr (League of Nations League)

Like Douglas, Mohr is also a veteran of the First World War, but that is where the likeness ends. 'Gimme' Mohr ended his Great War as a German Stormtrooper, where he was ultimately captured, severely wounded, entering the outskirts of Paris... by himself. (From this, he has the unique distinction to have personally marked the furthest point the Imperial German army had advanced on the Western Front.) His martial skills were quickly recognized by his captors and he was quietly recruited into the secret 'League of Nations League'.

Lieutenant Jarmilla 'The Hand' Fedorak (League of Nations League)

Jarmila is also a valued member of the elite 'League of Nations League'.  As a teenager she was a member of a Ukrainian nationalist group who fought with the Whites during the Russian Civil War. She attracted attention to herself when it was found that she could, through shear force force of will, throw devastating shock waves from her withered right hand. The League has helped her harness and focus her powers through arcane psychic training and utilizing a unique power gauntlet developed by the renown Nikola Tesla.

The new character I wish to debut today is...

Anastasios Sangarangos, Brother of the Order of Alexander, renown slayer of the undead (Vrykolakas in Greek) and keeper of the Faith.

In fact Anastasios is the real name of our friend Stacy from our gaming group. Stacy is quite proud of his Greek heritage and so I thought for fun I'd make up a character (and select a figure) to reflect this.

For Anastasios' character sheet, I scanned an original card from the game in high-resolution, imported it into Photoshop and then stripped out the contextual information to create one with blank values. Now I can design cards for each member of our gaming group at will. The power is all mine...Mwhahaha!!

This 28mm figure is from the Victorian Steampunk range offered by Brigade Games. Great,  characterful and clean sculpts that I can heartily recommend.

It will be fun to see how Stacy's character works out in the game. I just need to dream up some stats for that funky automatic crossbow he's toting...

Next up: Hmm, Romans or Gladiators or more Pulp Characters - perhaps all three! We'll see what the week brings.

15mm WWII Tank Battle: Hunting T-34s

Sylvain, in his usual phlegmatic gallic style, tells Jeremy to cheer up - there is always the good wine (or is that whine?)

Sylvain here, reporting from my basement. I hosted a game set on the Eastern Front and the players were provided with the following intelligence:

German Objective: May 1942. The rasputitsa is almost over. In one month, the Heer will launch Fall Blau. High command wants us to test the Soviet defence line and to accomplish our mission, we have been given three band new PzIV equipped with the new long 75mm gun. A recent air reconnaissance patrol reported the presence of a company of T-34s in the village of Karrotgrad. This is where we are going. Our mission is to hunt T-34s.

- The German player gets one victory point per T-34s destroyed and minus one victory point per PzIV F2 destroyed.

Soviet Objective: Kamarads, the Motherland has been invaded by the nazi barbarians and the time for retreat is now over. General Zhukov wants us to protect the village of Karrotgrad and I intend to destroy any enemy coming close. We already have a company of T-34s, the best tank ever designed. We also received 10 new tanks from our Canadian friends. We will see what we can do with them. If we see the enemy coming, we will hunt him with our T-34s!

- The Soviet player gets one victory point per German vehicle destroyed and minus one victory point per T-34 destroyed.

House Rules: The core rules were “Flames of War” with a few significant changes:
1. The turn sequence used cards (inspired by Too Fat Lardies).
2. A spotting rule was added to make reccon units more important (inspired by Firefly).
3. The artillery was off board (inspired by reality).

Jeremy, in the back, confident that the Gods of Dice will be smiling upon him. (They won't!)

My goal was to come up with a somewhat realistic simulation of tank warfare on the Eastern Front with 15mm miniatures. I decided to set-up a table as big as possible. It was 10'x6', and there was barely any room to move around.

Each unit (platoon or company) was represented by a card. There was a deck to set up on the table an another deck to use for orders.

Jeremy commanded the Panzers while Curt and Stacy oversaw the defences of Karrotgrad. The Soviet players hid half of the cards representing their units under terrain features like hills, woods or buildings.

A BA-10M, minding his own business.

I added a rule for spotting. It was to be used by the German to reveal Soviet units in ambush and by the Soviet to accumulate "threat points". These threat points could be used to call reinforcement and stronger units, like a company of T-34s, required more points than a simple platoon of anti-tank rifle.

Some German panzers bogged down in the stream.

Jeremy entered his units on the other side of the river. There was a small platoon of BA-10M in the woods that the panzers quickly dispatched. However, Fortune started to become unfavorable to the German side. You can see in the picture above that some units got bogged down while crossing the river, including the Air Liaison unit in charge of calling in the Stukas.

Lend-Lease Valentine tanks sent from Canada, in neat parade formation, en route to intercept the panzers.

This was a very lucky company of Valentines. They survived a few bomb runs from the Stukas (when the observer was not trying to push his half-track out of stream) and many hits from the German guns.

Realizing that staying too close can be dangerous, the Valentines fan out in the field.

Destruction brings satisfaction to the host.

More reinforcement on the way. This does not look good for the German.

 

The Valentines are standing firm in front of intense German fire.

A company of seven T-34s enters the battlefield. Is there any end to this flow of reinforcement?

In conclusion, the German did not make it very far onto the table. Crossing the river proved difficult, with lots of units bogged down. It took too long for the German to deploy effectively and use their superior gunnery. Basically, the Soviet were able to destroy the German tanks piecemeal as they showed up.

The house rules I prepared for this scenario did not work very well. The spotting rules were not clear enough and the Soviet were able to activate most of their units before the German got too close. The activation sequence needs to be fine-tuned as well. Eventually,  I will come up with a satisfactory set of rules. I just love 15mm scale and I have a few more ideas for scenarios.

Many thanks to the players who showed up. Their patience and good sense of humor made the whole evening enjoyable despite glitches in the rules.

'Fhtagn!!' 'Why, bless you...' 28mm Innsmouth Deep One Hybrids

Since it's Halloween this month I decided to read 'The Book of Cthulhu', an anthology of short stories based on HP Lovecraft's horror mythos. I've been so entertained with it that I decided to get these Deep One hybrids done-up for future Pulp games using Strange Aeons. (And I'll shamelessly give a shout-out for Uncle Mike's 2nd edition of the game which is now up on Kickstarter.)

While I'm sure there are several who'll know what a Deep One hybrid is, I suspect there may be others who won't, so I'll give a little background to help set the stage.

'The shadow over Innsmouth' by Mushstone (deviantART)

In 1936 H.P. Lovecraft published 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', a short novella that tells the story of a young traveller who comes across Innsmouth, a near-derelict fishing town set on the coast of Massachusetts. After several unsettling encounters with the locals, the traveller slowly uncovers the town's horrifying dark secret. The residents of Innsmouth, many years previous, had made a dark pact with a strange aquatic race, known as the 'Deep Ones', where the townspeole would receive gold and great bounties of fish in exchange for providing blood sacrifices to the Deep Ones' gods and to allow themselves to be interbred with the creatures. 

Yeah, sure, seems like a sweet deal, right?  

Yeesh...

Anyway, the progeny of this forced breeding first seemed like relatively normal humans, but as they aged they slowly began to change. By middle age  their eyes became large, bulging and lidless, their skin lost its hair, turning scaly and their hands and feet became clawed and webbed. 

For a bit of fun, I painted one of the figures a bit preppy, with a blue sweater with the Miskatonic University crest. :)

The change concludes near old age when the hybrid creature makes its last transformation into a fully fledged Deep One. All the while this physical transformation is 'percolating', the Deep One hybrid follows a similar change in character, becoming increasingly depraved and evil as time wears on. 

As a final 'gift', the newly transformed creature is taken back by the Deep Ones to their city on the sea floor to serve as immortal stewards to Father Dagon, Mother Hydra and the Great Cthulhu. 

So what you have is one of the first pulp eldritch horror classics and a great, wonderfully creepy little read.

Deep Ones from Strange Aeons

Except for the last trio of figures, which are from Uncle Mike's Strange Aeons' range, the above figures are all from Rattrap Productions, available through Brigade Games. While the castings required a lot of work to clean up properly, they proved to be wonderfully creepy and great fun to work on. They're not my best work, but I'm more than happy to have them as part of my collection (and as I write this I see I still need to go back over them to dirty them up a bit. No rest for the wicked...)

Next up: Some human pulp adventurers to act as counterpoint to these aquatic fiends.

20mm WWII Canadian Infantry from AB Miniatures - The Battle for Ortona, 1943 (Part II)

This post is a continuation of one from a few weeks ago where I showed my first efforts depicting Canadian infantry during their 1943 assault on Ortona, Italy.

As with the original group, this squad is made up of ten 20mm figures from AB Miniatures, which can now be sourced through Eureka Miniatures. 

The Bren team along with the section leader who is armed with a Sten. Interestingly, from what I've gathered, the Canadians seemed to have loathed the Sten and usually swapped them out for Thompsons whenever they had the chance.

I can't recommend this range enough. I would, without hesitation, put them up against the best that 28mm has to offer. They have such wonderful, natural poses and their physiques are slim, almost gaunt, which from looking at contemporary photographs, seems to fit the period very well.

A rare colour print of a Canadian soldier in Med. summer uniform. Wonderfully lean and scruffy. They changed back to their heavier wool gear during December's Moro River campaign which culminated in the Battle for Ortona. 

The current marketplace for WWII gaming seems more or less dominated by either 15mm or 28mm miniatures. I find this interesting as it was only about ten or so years ago that 20mm figures were regarded as the uncontested scale-of-choice in this period. Frankly, to my way of thinking, the dominance of 20mm made perfect sense for wargaming (and still does) as there is an bewildering number of inexpensive plastic kits, die cast toys and railway stuff in 1:76 / 1:72  / 1:87 scale.

A case in point is this 'knocked out' Hetzer that I've included with this group of figures. This is an old 1:72 scale Esci kit (cheap as borscht) which I assembled and painted over an evening about 15 years ago. While a bit long in the tooth, I think it's aged relatively well (like it's owner ;)) and fits in perfectly with 20mm figures.

To me, 20mm is the ideal accommodation between the detail of 28mm and the sense of ground scale that 15mm affords. Don't get me wrong, I like every one of these scales and I collect WWII in all of them, including 6mm (yes, I'm a bit touched), but I have to say that I have a soft spot for 20mm. It gives the painter something large enough to work with, provides a nice sense of scale on the tabletop and it allows a gamer to amass a sizeable collection of miniatures and terrain without having to sell an organ to acquire and store the stuff.

The charming Italian building in the background is by Frederick C, a fellow Conscript from the Fawcett Ave gang.

In a week or so I'll post the last section from this platoon, along with it's HQ and some supports.

Next Up: Gladiators or Pulp Adventurers - not sure which yet...