Firestorm Armada Terran Fleet

Firestorm Armada Terran Fleet

Pretty much the same theory as last time, but with a few twists.  I tried some pre-shading on these that both worked and didn't work.  The idea is to put down a shading layer by airbrushing thin lines around all of the areas that should be in shade.  Because the airbrush puts paint down so thinly (we're talking nanometers thick) it ends up slightly transparent so the pre-shading layer shows through the basecoats.  At least that's the idea.  It worked ok, but my abilities with the airbrush aren't up to par with the level of detail and accuracy needed to pre-shade well.  More practice is needed

The thin lines are done with masking tape and a lot of patience.  You have to be really careful that the masking tape is flat to the surface, or the paint is just going to run under it (as happened with the yellow, which is notoriously bad for that effect).  Fixing that is just a matter of going back over it with the base gray and trying again (touching up works to an extent, depends on how perfect you want the models really)

Overall i'm happy with the way both fleets have turned out, given the lack of time and effort I put into them.  They were very quick and easy to paint up, and the sculpts are fantastic to work with but could do with a slight sanding on the flat surfaces due to a roughness left by the casting process.

Anyway, on with the goodness.  I've started painting up my Firestorm Armada fleets at last and, being spaceships, I decided that it'd be an ideal time to muck around with the airbrush on something other than German vehicles.  So, here we are.  The preliminary airbrushing is done now, and it's just detailing, pin washing and maybe some go faster stripes if i'm in the mood

Firestorm Armada Sorylian Fleet

Firestorm Armada Sorylian Fleet

Firestorm Armada Sorylian Fleet

The colours used are all Tamiya (and i'd like to take this opportunity to say that there is no better paint to put through your airbrush.  There was a lot of low-pressure, fine details to be done on these and the tamiya didn't block the brush once) and they are XF-8 (Flat Blue) along with XF-2 (Flat White) for the highlighting along the top and on the sharp edges and a bit of XF-1 (Flat Black) on the guns in preparation for some metallics.

There are ten ships all in all, and the whole job took about an hour.  Most of the time was taken with putting the base coats of blue on in the first place and getting them to cover the undercoat i'd used.

Anyway, pleased with the results so far.  Next step I think is the pin wash and we'll see how it looks from there.

The red box adventure is a very "crunchy" adventure with a few chances for roleplaying sprinkled in with it.  What I mean by crunchy is that there's a lot of combat, a lot of rules and a lot of dice-rolling.  In this case, I think that worked pretty well because none of us had played before, a few had never roleplayed before and I was the only one who'd read the rules to any degree so I was explaining as we went along.  Despite that, everyone picked it up pretty swiftly and, although we weren't using all the actions that we could, it was still a good game.

It was interesting as a DM to see what the players focused on and what they thought important.  I changed a few bits and pieces on the fly because only three of the players had been through the solo adventure at the start, so I left out things like the horse in encounter 1 and changed up a few bits and pieces so that it flowed a bit better.

The main changes I made were to make encounter 2 with the dragon much more of a RP event.  As it's written, unless the players are very RP-focused they're going to end up in combat and I wanted to avoid that.  I had the dragon come out of his lair once the party had finished off some of the kobolds and shout at them for waking him up which I think nearly worked.  I couldn't get across quite how scary it was supposed to be so the players weren't particularly intimidated (and I kinda wish i'd just chucked them into combat with it there and then, especially considering how bunched up they were in the corridor!) but they eventually agreed to hunt down the wizard and bring the dragon proof that they'd dealt with him.

The other major change I made was to completely remove the chess room.  I disliked that encounter from the moment I set eyes on it as it just felt artificial in this dungeon full of monsters.  I'm glad I did, but I kinda wish i'd replaced it with something else, like a trap or some other sort of puzzle room.

So, what went right and what went wrong?  Firstly, I think everyone had a really good time of it and enjoyed themselves regardless of any perceived problems so this is going to be more of a "what I need to change for the next game"

What went right

As I said, everyone had fun and the game flowed smoothly.  I think everyone got a fairly good grasp of what was going on and, considering there were seven players, nobody got too bored waiting for their turn to come round in combat.  Everyone got a chance to at least do something during the combat and I don't think anyone felt particularly left out.  There was even a small amount of roleplaying that we managed to inject

Nobody died horrible, painful deaths (which probably means I wasn't doing my job right) but they did come close at one point (and, had the bad guy survived one more round the defender would've been unconscious)

It was definitely a light-hearted game (what with kitten juggling and fireproof silliness going on) with much slaughtering of goblins and kobolds.

What went wrong

I think there were definitely rules we got wrong (and I have the rulebooks by me here so i'm going to check into everything that felt iffy after i've posted this) for example i'm still not convinced that creatures don't block LoS or LoE (many magic missiles and arrows went winging over peoples heads into their targets with ease, which just feels wrong) and that players can move through each other's squares as if they weren't there.

I definitely wasn't making enough of the cover rules than I should, and i'm pretty sure that ranged firing into combat is more than just a -2 (which was what I ruled it as cos I couldn't find the rule at the table)

I also tended to let the players get away with some stuff that I really shouldn't have, but it was their first game so I just let it slide.  They managed to completely bypass one encounter (the one with the town guards) by intimidating them into running away and leaving the dungeon.  I kinda wish i'd either beefed up that encounter so the guards had a reason not to run, or come up with some reason why the guards wouldn't run because the players missed out on an interesting RP opportunity had they gone into combat.

Conclusion

Overall I think the game went really well considering it was our first go at 4th D&D and my first ever attempt at DMing anything.  Definitely room for improvement, but I think there always should be or it's no fun.

I'm definitely going to majorly crank up the difficulty on further encounters (assuming all the players want to carry on), but for now, they're done with the red box adventure bar some minor clean up so I think when they get back to Fallcrest and hand over the box (believe it or not, they didn't look in it!) i'm going to give them enough XP to level and we'll go through the level up procedure, properly recreate some of the characters that came out of the red box solo adventure and carry on with the next adventure out of the DM kit box.  I might even try my hand at creating my own encounter to play on the way.

Ar-Fienel is giving me fits every time I look at her because, in the space between now and my last posts on her i've managed to accidentally snap her arm off twice and i'm frankly scared to touch her again   I fully intend to pick her up again very soon though.

Today I decided to have a crack at the wire tree project i'd given myself at the 4tk summer open day.  They started stocking a tree-building kit which involves a stack of wire and lots of twisting.  The picture below is the result so far about about 30-45 minutes of bending and twisting.  There's still a very long way to go before i'm happy with the initial branch layout.  I've started on the masking tape to pad out and wrap the wires ready for the "bark" application.  For reference, it's currently about 10" high and a 28mm model will happily fit under the lowest branch.

Wire tree initial stages

The main reason i've stopped for the moment is that my thumb and forefinger have some impressive blisters on them now.  I recommend getting a pair of pliers to do the twisting with, especially on branches with more than 5 wires.

Not sure what season to do the tree in.   I'm thinking autumn at the moment, but that's probably just because of the way i'm painting Ar-fienel...  I'm also thinking of making it a bit spooky-looking so it'll fit in well with Malifaux and the like.

Mantic Undead Army (click to supersize)

So that's 45 Zombies, 40 Ghouls, 60 Skeletons, 40 Revenants and 3 catapults.  All that lot was painted in about two weeks, could've been shorter but I did have other things to do

Anyway, that's it for the moment.  Still to paint are the death king's cabal, the vampire on pegasus, 10 revenant cavalry, 10 ghouls, 20 skeletons, 45 zombies, 1 catapult and 20 revenants.  Probably another two weeks again but i'm not rushing

Let me know what you think.   For a speed-painted army, i'm very pleased with the result and i'll definitely be using the technique again on other tasks.

So, since the last post, i've dipped the minis, based them and matt varnished them.

Finished Skeletons

I'm very pleased with the way these have come out.  The dip has worked a treat, I didn't actually dip them though.  I tried that on one of the miniatures and spent more time brushing off the excess than I did just brushing the stuff on to begin with, so I just brushed it on which also gave me a lot more precision about where and how the dip was placed.

The reason this post took so long was that I got a bit carried away and i've now painted, dipped and based up probably around 80 skeletons and 45 zombies so far.  Just got the 40 ghouls and a few bits and pieces left to do.  Oh, and all the new minis that I won/swapped at the 4TK winter open day yesterday...  Time to spend the day building, spraying, painting and dipping!

One trip to the store later and I had two spray cans, one Skeleton Bone and one Necrotic Flesh and a can of strong coloured dip.  Never used this stuff before so I decided to try it out on five skeletons first to see how it worked.

Mantic Skeletons pre-spray

So here are the skeletons pre-spray in their naked plastic glory.  Next stage was to spray them Skeleton Bone.  It's pretty cold outside right now so this was going to be a real test of the spray.  I've had one of the Army Painter sprays before, a red one (can't remember the name) and I didn't think much of it as the finish was too smooth to take paint well and I ended up re-undercoating them with Citadel black spray.  Anyway, here are the post-spray skeletons

Skeletons post-spray

So now they're looking all lovely and bone-coloured.  Next step is to put the remaining basecoats on.  Having absolutely no imagination I decided to stick with the generic colour scheme of red and blue.  I also decided to break out the Citadel Foundation paints as I didn't want to have to go over the basecoats more than once.  I used Mechrite Red and Mordian Blue for the main colours with Calthan Brown for the wooden bits.  The metallic is Chainmail Silver from the Vallejo Game Colour range with a black to finish off the raven and feather.

Skeletons with basecoat on

As you can see I haven't been too careful with the paint but the point of this isn't to have competition-worthy figures, but simply a good-looking painted army.  Next step is going to be to leave them to dry for about an hour just to make absolutely sure they're nice and dry, then use the dip.  Given what i've read about the stuff, I think i'm going to go down the painting it on route rather than actually dipping them.

Check back tomorrow to see the final result

Two friends and myself played a few games of Kings of War last night.  We were playing with the stock armies out of the starter set (Mhorgoth's Revenge).  This consists of a regiment of Ironclad, a troop of Ironwatch with crossbows, a troop of Ironwatch with rifles and a cannon/organ gun for the Dwarfs.  The Undead get a regiment of Skeletons, a regiment of Revenants, a troop of Ghouls, a half-regiment of Zombies and a balefire skullthrower.  All in all, this amounts to about 400 points per side, with a good amount of figures on each side.

I'm happy to report that both sides managed to lose spectacularly which indicates that they're pretty balanced considering one side is quite shooty and the other is very melee-oriented.  The rules themselves are incredibly simple, with most "interesting" things being covered in the special rules for each unit.  The games were incredibly fast considering none of us had played the game before, and i'd never really even played WFB.  The first game took around 45 minutes to play out and the second game took around half an hour.  This is a good indication that the game is fast, easy to understand and get the hang of but still provides some good tactical decisions.  Expansions and new units in the future can introduce new special rules, or different combinations of special rules on units.

So, what did I like about the game?  It's fast, easy to play and a lot of fun.  The opportunity to throw down huge numbers of figures on the table is there as well (our 400-points-a-side game had just north of 100 figures on the table, so larger games are going to have several hundred per side, which will look incredible fully painted)

What about the downsides?  Well, i'm concerned that the special rules are going to get out of hand, harking back to the old days of Mk I Warmachine.  I'm also concerned that after a few plays, that there isn't going to be that much depth to the game beyond maneuvering units as WFB-style magic seems to be completely absent from the game but time will tell on both of those.

Overall, i'm extremely pleased with the game, and I can foresee many more plays in my future (and maybe even some painting if I can find a can of spray the right colour!)

Painting-wise the figures are fantastic and will paint up very nicely.  I have bought the Undead Army box set and was pleasantly surprised to see that they have stickers for the shields and banners in the box, which the Mhorgoth's Revenge box didn't.  Also, the "not removing figures from the units" means that there are a lot of modelling opportunities for making each unit a complete diorama so I look forward to modelling up the units.

There's still a way to go with the blending and suchlike, but I want to get the preliminary coats down first before I dive into tidying the blends up.  It's very patchy at the moment and i'm hoping that I can tidy that up once i've settled on the colours.  Still umming and aaahing about using metallics on the filigree on her dress and quiver or whether to go for some NMM on it.  They're fine enough that I reckon I can get away with NMM and still make it look good.

Also not sure how to approach the hair.  Do I make it look like they're actually vines in her hair, or do I treat them as a "metal" headdress?

Ar-Fienel undercoated and zenithal highlighted

So far, i've undercoated and done a zenithal highlighting job on her.  I've concentrated the highlighting around the face and upper body because I want to try and emphasize that area by making it brighter than the rest of the figure.

The highlighting itself was done by first coating the mini with black and then building up several shades of gray until finally a gentle white layer was applied.  All these layers were applied with the airbrush to provide a very thin and finely gradated layer.

I haven't decided on a colour scheme for her yet, but I suspect it'll be something very close to the studio paintjob.  I'll be posting again later when i've finalised the colour scheme and started laying down the base colours.