"Prepare your troops for a ground assault..."

These were a bit of a challenge. Painting white is always a bit of a chore, and getting the very clean, cold look of Imperial Stormtroopers is quick difficult for someone whose usual painting style is grimy and naturalistic.

I'm happy to admit that I got it wrong first time out and had to repaint. The mistake I made was painting them as people; I started them as grey and started layering up to white like I did with the organic shapes of Gandalf the White. What I should have done was treat them like objects, exactly the same as if I were painting a tank or something else.

In the event, the final process was this:

Spray white.
Paint white.
Gloss coat.
Thinned down black wash as a line wash.
Repaint white.
Black for undersuit.
Gloss coat.

Sprayed White

wash thinned with wash medium and carefully lined/slathered all over

Flat panels repainted white

Bish bash bosh. Pretty quick once I'd cracked the workflow, but two of them ended up loosing a bit of detail due to the number of layers of paint I did while trying to figure it out.

One major thing I did was a bit of cutting and shutting. I am a touch irritated that FFG are shipping a premium priced product with single, duplicate poses. I'll take that for a Blood Bowl team or Necromunda gang, but not in a Big Box game like this. So the trusty jeweler's saw came out and various arms and waists were re-positioned so every member of the squad was unique.

Trying to decide now whether to do the Rebels next or complete the Imperial side by doing the speeder bikes - but before I do that I have something rather big to deal with...

Going Deeper Underground

Last night we played....

Yes, Descent. Also known as Lazy Man's D&D. A good old fashioned Dungeon Bash with no planning or set-up required. 

For those that haven't played it, you create a dungeon for each quest from a series of modular tiles. One player is the Evil Overlord - think Sauron, Randall Flagg or Margret Thatcher - and the other players control heroes. Each hero has a class and career and spends XP to gain new abilities as well as new equipment. For your money you get a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot of stuff. And all very high quality. 

That's about less than a third of the stuff, by the way. 

There are around 25 quests in the base game and last night we played the first two. I was elected as Overlord - fairly predictably - and The Good Lady Er Indoors and a wandering RS teacher (lord, random encounter tables have really gone downhill) as the mighty heroes. 

Look, I'm going to cut to the chase of this little mini-review. Descent is great. It deserves a place on your table. In two hours we had more drama, laughter and stupidity that you normally get in a month's worth of RPG sessions. Including but not limited to:

-The goblin archers being so distracted by the Cleric's manly ass they were unable to shoot him

-The same cleric getting bitten in the same ass by a spider

-A dwarf being thrown across the dungeon by an ettin only to waddle back and smack the ettin into next week

-and, glory of glories - a TPK:

Of course, the joy of Descent: like Jaws in a Roger Moore Bond movie, they pick themselves up and dust themselves off ready for the next adventure. 

We'll be playing some more next week. If there's any interest I'll do a proper write up/review explaining how the game plays and so forth.