Mansions of madness (1st ed)

New endeavour today! I got this game quite a long ago and (to my shame) I've been playing it unpainted. Enough of that!

I haven't tried the new 2nd edition, but this one is absolutely recommendable. Quite replayable, it gives a lot of uncanny fun. Well, fun; you know. I mean creepy, terrifying experience that will drive you crazy and... ehm. Fun, as I was saying.

But I'm not talking about the game today; I've finally painted the minis! Hurrah! So here youhave them. First, the investigators:

Kate Winthop & Michael McGlen

Gloria Goldberg & 'Ashcan' Pete

Jenny Barnes & Harvey Walters

Joe Diamond and Sister Mary

But the monsters are the real deal here. Doing the bases was somehow tricky, buy I finally managed to find an acceptable solution.

So here you have the cultist and the cult leaders:

Generic Yog Sothoth standard cult

The maniacs:

Here's Johnny!

The witches:

The clothes sculpts were difficult for me to understand. I opted for some kind of Manila shawl, which looked exotic and mysterious, I thought it suited them

The zombies:

No budget for trousers, sorry

The Shoggoths:

Tekeli-li!

The Cthonians:

They can't stand water; kind of glorified Gremlins

The Mi-Go:

Hola a-mi-go!

Finally, the Hounds of Tindalos:

Certainly not the Baskerville ones, dear Watson.

The quality of the minis is boardgame standard, which is not bad at all. The investigators are roughly 20 mm scale and the creatures maybe a little bit larger. They all fit in the game box (something I was concerned about once I got all the monsters on their bases), so I'm happy with the whole lot. Now I need to finally have a game with them painted!

Ballads of War 2x14-2x15

It is time for some Space Marine action...

I needed to draw some attention on the Blood Angels, so they would not become a mere ex machina for the previous Volume. The action here is but a mere excuse to let me talk about the Chapter, to let the reader know that something is flawed in them. That's a slow (but effective) way of building the character of Brother Sergeant Cleon (who would have had a more relevant role later on). First time we get to hear about something called the Black Rage or the Red Thirst. Important if we're going to have the reddies with us for a while.

The way the action takes place also serves the purpose of showing some nasty, hard to beat pointy ears, and it's totally reivindicative of 2nd Ed rules, in wich, no matter how tough your armour was, taking cover was always a good idea. Seriously, mere common sense; that was lost on 3rd and subsequent editions.

But... what's happening on the last panel? Oh, man, yet another surprise...

While it is uncovered, HERE you can read how we came all the way to this.

Moisture vaporator... on a budget

New installment in the 'on a budget' series :D

Today I have the invaluable collaboration of the missus, who generously donated this empty can of hairstyling whatever-the-thing-is to the cause.

The other element is a tap of a cologne can. No product placement

Soooo, what can be made out of these? I oddly envisioned some kind of Tatooine-like moisture vaporator... or something like that. Not sure of what would be the result like, but let's add just as many rubbish pieces as I can...

Card, MDF leftovers, whatever

Classy

BTW, classic staples ladder, useful everywhere

 You begin to see what I had in mind? The cologne tap will be the contol console:

General overview of the original idea



Control panel. Looks simple for such a large thing!

Then to the colours! I firstly primed it all white:

We're finally coming to something

 And then I thought it would look nice in some desert colour. I tried the water based Montana sprays with this result:

And suddenly I didn't like it



Right. I didn't like what I saw. The piece in white gave me the vaporator vibe I was looking for, it was more Star Wars -ish to my eye, if that makes any sense. In colour... not that much. I felt I had to paint it white again!

So I did paint it again. Then it was time for weathering and detailing...

Some night shift work

Now some rust over the dirt

Funnily enough, having primed it three times, it now has an interesting texture. It helped weathering to look more natural. Weird.

OK, after final details, this is whay I got:

Daylight!

Still uncertain of its purpose. Let's stick to the moisture vaporator theme

It looks shabby enough to fit on any RT setting

A couple of close-ups:

No, I don't know how to operate that

I was just about to pull that handle and run

Now I have to think about storage issues, ahh.....

 Finally, a magnificent show of my uttermost knowledge of photoshop:

You couldn't say what's a miniature and what's not

Ahem, let's call that a moisture farm and let it be over.

The whole process has taken no more than a few days of actual work, but they were spread along a few weeks. I kind of like the result, I may have to build a full complex in the same fashion...

Ballads of War 2x12-2x13

New pages; a little late this week, but I'm behind schedule... on my whole life :D

A little bit of action, a little bit of comic relief. It was important to show that Brent isn't a know-it-all with solutions for everything. It's an easy mistake one can make when building the leading role for any kind of story, and Brent was dangerously coming to that. This time he's outsmarted by El'Kais and we can see some team effort. It is fun to show how different races interact; introducing the Tau factor here allowed me to play a little with different approaches, falling apart from the usual human focus on WH40K.

Art wise, the twilight orange sky was the main challenge here, or the colour gradients, trying to look 'natural'. Not many details on the background on any panel, but tricky anyway!

We have our guys on the run! Most likely High Farseer Ellinderelion won't push the pursuit too hard, but that's still to be seen!

More stuff (hopefully) coming soon. You know, all previous stuff... HERE.

Scenery hotchpotch

I'm mixing stuff from different manufacturers today, but all of it will serve the same purpose, crowding my board! 

The first pieces here are made by Valquiria Studio, a relatively new company specialised in coloured translucent resin pieces (among regular resin scenery elements). They don't have hundreds of references, but everything they have is really sweet. Some time ago I got a few tokens kits, a sci-fi one and a post-apoc one. This is what I've done with them:

Power generator and beacons

Control consoles (not all of them properly working!)

Supplies and land mines

Some really nasty looking alien eggs! Yikes!

Then the post-apoc stuff, again with translucent resin

Objective tokens!

 About the cans, just a couple of close-ups, as I did some freehand work on them. The upper one says 'Prandium', which is just Latin for 'food' (not that creative, I'm afraid, but this way I keep it WH40K friendly). About the other two you can see the ubiquitous Blue Sun logo (dual use material it's also Firefly friendly!!):

 The other one is just a bad pun. 'Bona Mala', which one could say means 'Good/Bad' really translates as 'Nice Apples' in Latin. that's it, end of story, my mind plays like that, I cannot avoid it.

Let's move on. Next thing here is from TTCombat, from their urban ranges. They were a gift from a friend, who split up his kits and allowed me to have these cones, a parking machine, a newspaper dispenser and an ATM:

Really sweet stuff, I didn't expect to have these on my board :)

 Finally, street lamps by Fenris Games. Street lamps is something my board is really in need of. I have a few kits on my radar, but these are the first ones I actually get:

I'm the star of the show!

I of course will need more, many more, and more sci-fi looking, but for the moment these will do their part.

This is it for now! My board keeps on growing slowly (and randomly!). Not even me can tell what will come next, but ahhh, that's the charm of it all :D

Ballads of War 2x10-2x11

Things move forward...

 

Quite a transition scene today. A reminder of what's been of the rest of the group (they are surprisingly unharmed, the High Farseer really kept his word!) and then back to the strange alliance between Brent and El'Kais. Everybody is on the move, will they meet again?

There's not much else to say about the story, just some Tau fluff that will become relevant later on when we delve a little into El'Kais. All the Tau Caste system had to be introduced slowly, so we have a few hints here and there. Trust me, I (think I) know what I'm doing... :P

More stuff coming soon, all previous pages, as usual, HERE.

SheroQuest

For quite some time I've been toying with the idea of adding some more diversity to my games, and specifically to HeroQuest. Well, the thing is, one day, wandering through the Hasslefree web (any sentence starting like that is doomed to end with an empty wallet) I just saw a few minis... and I immedately knew I had a project. It was love at first sight. I was to make female characters so you could choose whatever you wanted. This is what I mean:

The Barbarian

 

 I know it's supposed to depict that girl from the Vikings TV show, but I don't follow the series, so I know nothing of that character. I just saw the mini and loved it. I didn't want a Red Sonja nor a chainmail bikini, this was exactly what I was looking for. In fact I got two minis! The other one will be converted to become a Rogue Trader adventurer, but that will come in time...
Let's go on:

The Dwarf

 

 This one took me some more time to choose, but in the end I think she's up to the duty! Probably the helmet is something I would have liked to convert, but she works good enough as it is, so I finally left her just like that.

The Elf

 

The pose. Oh, it's all about the pose. I love it. A real pleasure to paint. And that goes too for the final one:

The Wizard

 

I thought of doing some more embroidery on the dress, but I think it works fine as it is. Where the Elf's cloak is a travel garment and I painted it like that, here I tried to show a more 'urban' look, something she would wear for her daily palace intrigues and stuff.

Well, not much else to add, I think you get what I was aiming for here. Just a final picture with her counterparts:

The same but not the same

I hope I have more chances of geting Mrs. Suber into gaming with these! :D
No, seriously, the minis were too good, I needed them. But now I'm tempted of doing things like this with basically each game I own. Oh, now I'm doomed...