Slaughterloo Painting Challenge (0 days remaining) and a Prologue

Hurrah! I finished all my painting in time for the big game tomorrow and also managed to laminate my counters and reference sheets, as well as producing my command decks. I laid out the table as well tonight. Job done!

With that complete, I thought I would present a few pictures and my prologue to the game...

The Todoroni

Mayor Sapo Ranocchio

Sapo Ranocchio was not a happy Todoroni. All he really wanted was to enjoy the life of Mayor of his small town. Then war broke out near the border, which left him no other option than to run away as fast as possible. Of course, he wanted to take the town cannon with him, so 'as fast as possible' didn't amount to very much. Luckily the occupants of the nearby town fled for the hills the week before and he acquired two baby hippos to help pull what was, admittedly, a very tiny cannon.

The Town Cannon

Ranocchio was, however, very proud of his town militia. Their uniforms were sewn using the finest thread and the braiding and buttons shone wonderfully in the sun. They tended to interpret most commands as 'retreat', but that meant they usually went in the direction Ranocchio wanted to go in, so he didn't complain.

The Town Militia

A week or so ago, Ranocchio had a shock. He was advancing in the direction of least threat, when he came across the worst kind of Ferach general. One with something to prove to his fellows... While he feared death, like any self-respecting Todoroni he feared the pain of Ferach torture more and quickly submitted to the command of his 'superior'. He was now marching in the direction he least wanted to go in: toward Catalucia.

The Ferach

Antoine Pas-de-Cheval

Antoine Pas-de Cheval, had a lot to prove. His fear of horses meant he did much of his commanding on foot. His fear of horses also meant that most other Ferach leaders refused to take him seriously and much preferred to mock his attempts to achieve anything remotely like a victory on the field of battle. But although he was hardly a tactical genius, he was persistent. His efforts against the dogmen of Ostaria had done little except reduce his forces to well under a third of their original number. On the plus side, his Commander-In-Chief had been the victim of an 'unfortunate accident', so he was now very much in control.

He had heard much of the glory to be had in Catalucia, so Antoine gathered his army and headed in that general direction. A present his army consisted of a unit of Line Infantry, the remains of a Light Infantry unit and some L'Esprit du Garde Heavy Cavalry, who should really have known better then to follow an Elf who was scared of their preferred means of riding into battle.

Elf Line (I'm subbing in some Lights to make a full unit)

Chassuers a Pied

L'Esprit du Garde

Antoine was nearing Catalucia when he spied some Todoroni going in what was clearly the wrong direction. Plus, it looked like they mostly consisted of militia, which pleased Antoine as he needed some peasants to get shot instead of him and his Elves. It didn't take much persuading to convince them to come with him.

But more good fortune was just round the corner, soon after crossing the border, he made contact with another Ferach force. Not that that was the fortunate part. What was fortunate was that the light infantry orc sniper assumed the Elf on the horse was the commander, and the one talking to him on foot was not. A few seconds later, Antoine was now in command of an additional two units of Line Elves, a unit of Lancers and a proper cannon.

As he marched deeper into Catalucia, he felt there was nothing that could stop him achieving fame and glory...

Slaughterloo Painting Challenge (5 days remaining)

Good grief! 5 days left already. And I can scrap at least one of those due to needing to set up the table in advance.

But fear not, progress is being made and I am able to present some actual photos of completed figures!

First up, 6 Light Elf Infantry. As you can tell from the one in the front left, I have had to adopt a simpler basing strategy to expedite the process. The others were painted before the project started.

 

Here is the Todoroni General. As you may guess by his bemused expression, he doesn't really belong on the field of battle and is classed as 'Inept' under the rules (and no doubt by his Elf allies as well).

 It's fair to say, though, that you probably won't go far in Valon when you are in command of a force consisting mainly of militia. I love these figures! The front two ranks are actual militia, the rear rank is 4 Light Infantry doing militia duty for the game.

This is one of my favourite figures. The Light Infantrytoad  with his tongue sticking out. The Todoroni figures have such character to them.

  

These light Elves will be doing duty as Line Infantry in our game at the weekend. I didn't paint these. A friend spotted them at a show and kindly picked them up for me. They were all mounted on round bases, so I had to rebase and dip them. They come from an earlier Flintloque starter set.

  

Talking of which. here are Sharke's Rifles, the other half of the starter. I had to rebase these as well. I also had to repaint their skin as they had been painted in a more traditional orc-like hue! I'm not normally fussy about such things, but I do like my Flintloque orcs to be a fleshy colour.

 

  

I have 10 more Elves left, all painted, just needing basing. The Todoroni cannon is complete, bar basing, and the crew are being painted, along with the remaining Elf cavalry. Plenty left to do, but I am confident of success! 

Slaughterloo Painting Challenge (12 days remaining, ARGH!)

Oh boy! Major panic time. I can't believe that my last post on the subject said I had 65 days left for this. Frequent readers of this blog may be aware that there is quite a bit of important stuff going on at the moment which is taking up my time. I was also on holiday for a week (I heartily recommend a relaxing week in Ludow and the surrounding area to make you forget your wargaming project stresses!). To add to this, my opponent has finished his force!

But I have to view all this as a minor stumble and, for the next 12 days work with increased focus and renewed resolve to complete this project!

Here's a quick glimpse of where I am with things (the more complete figures are on the box file):

Yes, there is some unpainted lead on there! But part of why I haven't been posting too much is I have a tendency to work on everything at the same time. So whereas my mate is able to post completed units, one after the other, I end up painting cuffs on one unit, the rifles on another, harnesses on the hippos etc etc. So not a lot gets actually finished until near the end...

On the plus side I have been working on a few other aspects of the project. To date, all my games at home have been fought out on the kitchen or study table. I've longed to play larger games on a decent sized surface, so after my holiday I popped to B&Q and got some MDF cut to increase my tabletop to 6x4 foot. I can hardly fit it in the room, but I'll just make my buddy crawl under to the other side of the table in order to ruffle his feathers. A sneaky Ferach trick, perhaps, but he would expect no less from me. Mwah ha haaa!

The other thing to take care of is a small pile of paperwork. Counters, reference sheets, army records and the all important command decks. I have to figure out how I want to put it all together. I'd like to mount the counters on very thick card if possible, laminate the reference sheets and mount and sleeve the command cards. But hey, I need a break from the painting at some point, don't I?!

Oh, and as a final note for those all eager for the big battle, while we have organised our own 1000 point armies, my buddy scored some good deals on eBay for painted figures. As such, we are going to end up using 2000 points. No point leaving figures lying around, is there?!

Alcohol related mystery!

No, I do not mean I had to much to drink last night! While on holiday during a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a little tipple for the evening, mainly as I liked the name:

So what is the mystery? Well, I looked up Blooody Furlong on the company website (http://www.celticmarches.com/shop/bloody-furlong/) and read the following:

"Charles 1st led his Cavaliers through Bromyard in 1645 on his way to fight Cromwell's Roundheads. A ferocious battle was fought on 'Bloody Furlong' which is now one of our apple orchards."

Try as I might, I could find no information about its engagement on the internet! I assume it was in the run up to Naseby but this is just a guess!

If anyone out there has any more information, I'd be very interested to hear about it!

ATZ: Hospital 911

A couple of weeks ago, the PDF copy of Hospital 911, the latest expansion for All Things Zombie, arrived in my inbox. Today, the hard copy, including floor plans for the building and also miniatures has arrived. And it is pretty cool!

I've had a quick read and this looks like a great expansion. 15 different scenarios are covered, with connected ones for different characters including patients, hospital staff, police, SWAT, reporters, firemen and gangers. I'm particularly interested in the SWAT team scenario which asks you to clear out the WHOLE hospital and the firemen ones where you have to battle blazes as well as rescuing civilians. 

What I got: The rules, hospital floor plans and a bunch of 15mm figures

The floor plans, of which there are 6, are varied and decent looking. They seems to be scaled more towards 28mm figures, but this isn't really a problem as you only notice it when a 15mm person is standing next to a bed or other large item of furniture. If I was really bothered I could scale them down, but I doubt I will.

But there are two things which I really like about this expansion. The first, is that there now exists a more 'board game' approach to ATZ, which I can use to get people playing who may otherwise not be interested in a miniatures game. I'm also interested in the possibility of using gridded building plans and the rules from H911 for exploring buildings in ATZ. What will also be interesting, is porting these rules into other THW game sets. I may not have the time to play a big game with my Star Wars figures, but now I can break out the old gridded floor plans from the WotC game and have at it. In fact the same might work for Lord of The Rings figures and some of the RPG wilderness tile sets. Basically there are now lots of possibilities for when I don't have the time to set up a full table. Sure, it probably wasn't that hard to do this just by calling 1 square 1 inch, but it is nice to have some of the other tables 'officially reinterpreted' for a gridded layout.

The second thing is that this looks like be a very interesting way to set up an ATZ campaign. Play through the scenarios as patients, police and firemen. Survivors of the ordeal in the hospital are then all set to go out as a group in the wider, zombie infested world and have a ready made shared background explaining why they are together. 

Here a a few shots of the figures received as part of the project:

4 Police (sorry, I don't know why Blogger insists on having this sideways).

4 firemen, a reporter & cameraman and 2 "characters" for the scenarios

4 gang members

4 SWAT (sorry, sideways again)

12 terrified civilians.  Their poses will add some variety to the games, for sure!

Technically these are zombified hospital staff and patients, but I will probably paint them up as humans as I don't have any doctors etc at the moment.

Zombies. I love the crawling ones. These are all newer poses, so a great addition.

The figures are available from Rebel Minis.

You can read about Hospital 911 on the THW website and also their blog. The PDF is available for $15, including the floorplans to print. I'd say it is worth a look just to add a different dimension to your zombie games. I hope to get painting some of these figures and reporting on a game or two as soon as my current painting project is finished.

Impending stork

Well, it has been more than a little while since my last project update, or post about anything really! Thank goodness for the Blogger app which, although not perfect, at least allows me to type up draft ideas on the go before finishing them off properly on the computer. 

But what I wanted to do is give you an explanation about why I've been a little absent recently (Hint: The picture and post title were not chosen at random). The reason is that my  wife and I are expecting our first child in September! As a result, life at the moment is a bit hectic in terms of making preparations for this arrival! (Although I understand from those in the know that life is going to be 'a bit hectic' for the next few years!)

So while I am still working on the Slaughterloo project and have plans to post about various other things as well, I'm suffering from a little lack of time. What I think I really need is to get a bit more organised. After all, that will be something of a necessity soon!

Thanks for your patience in the meantime! And I hope to get some of those draft posts I mentioned at the start in a publishable form soon(ish...). 

Slaughterloo Painting Challenge (65 days remaining)

Alas, progress has been slow! I blame this mostly on the weather. It has been pretty bad this week, to the extent that it rained on most of the times I could have gone outside to spray undercoat my figures. Annoying. Yesterday was a bit brighter though, so I was able to sort out the Todoroni Militia and the Elf Line which needed doing. On the other hand, I was only able to do a little more in the evening. And tonight I thought I'd update my bog instead!

On the plus side I took advantage of the poor weather to think about my force organisation. The 'first draft' did not take into account the C-in-C and General, so these have now been added and the rest of the force resized accordingly. The upshot of this is that it is now starting to resemble a force I feel happy with, rather than a hodgepodge of any figures I had in my collection. 

Todoroni

I have lost two crew from the cannon and also got rid of the Light Infantry. Using four of the Lights, I increased the Militia to a unit of 12, hopefully making them slightly more robust. The General in my army is a Todoroni ranked as 'inept' (what else?!), the figure comes from the Goyah set (review pending!) and looks suitably pompus/unable to command!

Ferach

 

The Ferach saw some alteration as well. One of the Line units lost two figures and I halved the figures in the Light Infantry. One thing I was not prepared to lose was the cavalry and you can see they have now been joined by command figures which arrived today. The general is a free Elf officer. Yes, that's right, free! Alternative Armies will give you two free figures if you request the free version of Flintloque and place an order using the code contained therein. Nice!

So a fair few changes to the army, but it has eliminated some of the painting and made it feel like a more coherent force than just all the figures I have thrown together!

On the other side of things I have developed a long list of secondary tasks which I have to complete by the deadline. I need to make counters for the game, as well as print the command decks and reference sheets. I also need to buy some boards to lay on top of the table in the study, as it is only really the right size for skirmish games and will not do Slaughterloo justice!

I also took the opportunity to change the lighting! This has been a long time coming and much needed. Oh the responsibilities of hosting this event!

Before (not so bright)

After (much better!)

Anyway, that's it for now, but I assure you that the next update will include much more painting and fewer pictures of illumination!