Fred's 2016 Painting Diary

[fred.]

No, I just made it up in my own head!

The threads on LAF were about building Heroquest like dungeons, and some Frostgrave stuff. They inspired me with their simplicity and speed, rather than directly giving me a template to follow.

The temple is a 21cm square, on 2-3cm thick blue foam, with a 15cm square on top, and a 9cm one on top of that. The ramps - which will become stairs are 3cm wide.

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Thanks

[jchaos79]

nice nice 2mm.... I like the scale, and those builings are super

[fred.]

They are nice aren't they. They are very crisp castings, and there is loads of variety in the ranges. I won these as a prize from Miniature Wargames - if buying them I'd probably go for more urban houses, rather than so many of the big grand buildings.

[Ithoriel]

I got their Mediterranean pack to use as scenery with my 2mm Renaissance stuff to alongside my Tumbling Dice Armada ships.

The GWSH bases look rather splendid.

[Subedai]

Nice scribing on the Aztec pyramid. 2mm houses look tasty as well.

[fred.]

Thanks - I must get some paint on the 2mm bases. Should be pretty quick too.

The scribing on the Aztec temple has gone very well - I'm pleased both with the ease and speed. I'm trying to put a bit of 3d, to break up the blockiness, so I have pushed in a few 'stones' the black ones and will probably add a little bit of green stuff to a few to raise them slightly - perhaps more on the vertical walls than the floors. What was surprising is how quickly the foam blunts a pencil used to scribe them. I tried a sharpened cocktail stick (and bamboo skewer) but both seemed too sharp and tended to create a rough cut, rather than the pencil which makes a good impression into the foam.

[paulr]

A pencil for scribing, that is a useful tip

It also explains the grey around the stones

[fred.]

It does, and it makes it easy to see what you have done!

Others seem to use biros rather than pencils.

[fred.]

No painting again this week - too busy ferrying children around - what hobby time I have had was spent on rules tweaking following last week's game.

Got a game in last night, using our new rules - quite amazingly we only made one tweak to the rules!! So we might be getting somewhere.

The left flank towards the start of the battle

My pikes and dwarfs face off against rather a lot of goblins and trolls

The right flank - if rather blurry

My knights have been engaged by rather a lot of boar riders - and were soon to be obliterated.
While my shooters struggle to crest the hill. When they finally got into position - they did manage to shoot up a bunch of chariots, who tried to cross in front of them.

It was a good game - it initially was in the goblins favour, but I pulled it back a bit, then the goblins got their cavalry re-grouped and caused lots more damage to me, winning convincingly in the end.

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Looks great!

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hello

The game looks great. Are you you going to do any write-ups on your rules? Being a rules junkie just the mention of new rules can set me off . It looks like your using 40 x 40 base?

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan

[FierceKitty]

Empty howdah?

[fred.]

Thanks chaps

Empty howdah?

Yep, and only 1 tusk! Really could do to get this model finished, its only been some/many years since it was first fielded!

The game looks great. Are you you going to do any write-ups on your rules? Being a rules junkie just the mention of new rules can set me off . It looks like your using 40 x 40 base?

Yes, 40x40mm base is a unit (often made from 2 40x20mm WM bases together). We have been trying to put together some home brew rules for quite a while now, trying to move on from WM which a couple of members of our group love (though in a rather abstract simplified form) and a couple hate, and I'm a bit in both camps. We put a lot of effort last year in trying to build some new rules - but the project ground to a halt under its own weight.  And we rather stopped playing 10mm Fantasy for a while, which was a shame as we all have lots (and lots) of figures.

At the start of this year we started playing Irregular Wars - which is a Renaissance set of rules around the exploration of the New World - this is a really good set of rules, and we tried to scale it up to play big fantasy battles - but its a small battle set of rules, and didn't scale as we wanted it to. This led to a revisiting of of the home brew rules - and over the last couple of weeks we have come up with a hybrid of many things - that seems to work.

We now need to share this with the rest of our gaming group and see if they think it works as a game  

So remind me in a couple of weeks, and I'd be happy to share. Not that they may be written anywhere near well enough to play from just the document!

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hello

So remind me in a couple of weeks, and I'd be happy to share. Not that they may be written anywhere near well enough to play from just the document!

It sounds great. I mean if you've got that amount of 10mm fantasy that is shown in the photographs, it would be a waste not to use them . I can readily understand that it can be hard to scale up a small scale rule set for large battles - different priorities, emphases etc. It's intriguing that the rules have come from a movement away from WM.

I wouldn't worry about the clarity of writing, they can't be worse than some of the commercial sets I've bought .

Cheers

GrumpyOldMan