Mosey into town...

No Western is complete without a town; Big Whisky, Laramie, Dodge or, of course, the grandaddy of them all, Deadwood.

Of course, funds are always tight; so how is one to establish a townstead? 4Ground is, obviously, the best possible choice but oh, my lord, it surely does cost.

I therefore sent smoke signals to the good folks at Sarissa precision; after all, a frontier town will have small buildings. And the Pony Express was as good as its reputation suggested:

A swift construction - they are very easy to slip together - and we have two false fronted buildings. 

A simple slap of watered down paint gives a look which matches quite closely with the descriptions I've been able to find that give you some idea of the colours you would find in the frontier boomtowns. 

Mr Al Swearingen is looking at opening a new business venture. 

There's a handy lookout point from the roof; just the place in which to keep watch over the showdown on the main street. 

I'm overall rather impressed with these; they're not as good as 4Ground but then they're half the price. For buildings to fill out the town they're prefectly satisfactory.

More importantly, we now have enough scenery to make a proper game of Fistful of Lead a possibility, so watch this space. 

....ah, but we're not done yet, are we? For, most important of all, a town needs a name. So what do we call this newly founded township? Any suggestions gratefully received below...

"..and Hell's comin' with me, ya hear? Hell's comin' with me!"

Continuing my current Wild West phase - and pardner, I gotta tell ya, there ain't nuthin' as restorative as watching Deadwood and paintin' some desperadoes - I've finished off the cacti:

I think they turned out well enough for something that cost me nothing. A useful bit of scatter terrain. 

I also slapped a bit of paint on those fearless lawmen out of Dodge, the Earp brothers.

A lovely set of sculpts from Artizan but with a touch more flash than I'm used to from them. But still an imposing trio I'm sure you'll agree.

Next up I have three more mercenary sonsabitches and some more scenery and this phase of the project is done. 

Posse

Hello to my new followers!

Had a bit of fun finishing off the basing of the last few cowboy miniatures so I now have a complete posse:

Of course, I say complete... I might have wandered on to Artizan Designs to treat myself. After all, there is surely no such thing as too many cowboys...

As it happens, I found one that I had forgotten about, so painted him up as Sy Tolliver from Deadwood.

This is a slightly different style to my usual paintjob, mainly caused by my trying to get a handle on the new brush. I've also noticed that the most recent sculpts I've bought have tended toward much sharper edges, lending themselves more toward the harder edge highlighting you see here. Has anyone else noticed a slight change in sculpting style over the last few years?

I also, heartened by my success with the standing stones, decided to make some scatter terrain. In this case, cacti:

Simple sculptures from super-sculpey (in one case Fimo) and a quick paint job. Quick, simple and fairly effective.

I done nearly lost my nerve, Bill...

Painting mojo is a mysterious thing. One thing I've learned from reading other people's blogs and hanging around on the LA forum is that your drive to actually get stuff painted needs to be nurtured and protected.

So imagine my disquiet when a batch of figures more or less wiped out my mojo at a stroke.

The guilty parties are these Mantic Orcs.

They were cheap enough but when I came to paint them there were some horrific blanks where detail should've been behind the legs and under the arms. Obviously this is the price you pay for cheap, one piece body plastics but dear god it was a struggle to get anything out of them.

So what now? I was disheartened and depressed and really didn't want to pick up the brush again.

A change is as good as a rest. So I did the one thing guaranteed to bring a sense of wellbeing; stuck on a western and painted some cowboys.

In this case it was starting over with the Deadwood series and finishing off the last few Black Scorpion resin miniatures I had left. 

A world of difference; full of character and detail and fun to paint. 

I'll take some proper pictures next week if I can get some decent light. 

This also means that I have more or less enough figures for a decent western skirmish. Although... is more or less actually enough? After all, I get paid tomorrow...

Space Hulk: The First Mission

"They're everywhere... they're coming through the walls..."

Space Hulk is, self-evidently, one of the greatest games ever. It's also the closest you can come to living the film Aliens without shipping out to LV-426 and getting eaten. The tension of the timed rounds, the resource management of the limited action points, the suspense of the blips... it's a hectic, adrenaline soaked game for the Marine player. For the Genestealer player, it's a satisfying game of laying traps, of planning ahead and then of launching overwhelming force at the puny humans.

I like it quite a lot.

So having finally assembled the various bits and pieces for the game, I was eager to play. Thankfully, the Good Lady Er Indoors - though generally disparaging of my toy soldiers - likes a bit of boardgaming, so a bit of fast talking got us a game.

I took the marines, and she took the Genestealers. You'll recognise the first mission from the original campaign - all I had to do was fire the flamer into the room at the bottom of the map. How hard could it be?

Pretty ********* hard, it turns out.

It doesn't look that far. This should be easy. 

First Squad, all nicely painted up and ready for deployment

 

But who's this just waiting around the corner....?

She's taking altogether too much pleasure in sliding those blips toward me, in my opinion.

Not what you want to see at the end of the corridor. 

It gets worse. 

"Don't worry, lads, I have a plan!"

...and then dice happened. 

And the 1s just kept on coming...

...until only Sarge and the Flamer dude were left. The flamer guy has three shots left. Can the Sarge keep them off his back long enough for him to complete the mission?

Can he hell as like. 

In fact, the flamer dude makes it right to the door of the final room - with one shot left. He just has to risk taking on one last Stealer in hand to hand. 

And then dice happened.

It was a great game - everything that Space Hulk should be. Fast, brutal and fun. The good news is, she's agreed to play again!

"Gods were worshipped there with savage rites..."

I've finished off the sacrificial altar. Quite happy with the result; I made one slight change to the blood recipe I've been using since the Lord High Awdry gave me it - I've added gloss black instead of matt black.

I also added a touch of gore to one of the standing stones to encourage proper looming and foreboding. Can't have standing stones without some proper foreboding. 

I'm rather happy with what was, after all, a very simple build. While researching it I found again Tacitus' description of the Druidic sacred groves that were burnt by Suetonius on Anglesey.

"Interlacing boughs enclosed a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the sunlight from above. ... Gods were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings, and every tree was sprinkled with human gore. On these boughs ... birds feared to perch; in those coverts wild beasts would not lie down. ... Legend also told that often the subterranean hollows quaked and bellowed, that yew-trees fell down and rose up again, that the glare of conflagration came from trees that were not on fire, and that serpents twined and glided round the stems. The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters, but left the place to the gods. When the sun is in mid-heaven or dark night fills the sky, the priest himself dreads their approach and fears to surprise the lord of the grove."

Rather a fascinating description and certainly one to get the creative juices going. Which is all by way of saying that I think I will be returning to this to build something slightly more elaborate at some point in the future.

Ringstone Round

"Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round,

If you lose your hat it will never be found, 

So pull your britches right up to your chin, 

And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin, 

And when you are ready, then we can begin, 

Huffity, puffity, puff!"

I got hit by a fairly nasty dose of Half-termitis and so, after finishing the Space Hulk miniatures I foudn myself lacking the motivation to launch into the Dragon Rampant stuff.

I am aware that my terrain is quite history based - with some SF thrown in - and what I lack is decent fantasy stuff. You know what I mean - proper forboding, looming stuff. Inspired mainly by insane jealously triggered by Gordon's fabulous battle report I decided to cobble together some simple scenery.

As per usual, the two main divers were cheapness and speed; thus standing stones based on 2p.

Good old blue foam. These were simply offcuts kept from the In The Emperor's Name vignette. 

 Black undercoat and then drybrushings of blended greys up to white:

Giving this final effect:

I also had some leftover slate from a fossil-hunting expedition with the Eldest so I've started to cobble together a sacrificial altar, a la Caesar. 

Not bad for an hour sitting in front of I, Clavdivs.