December Painting... round 1

It's not quite the end of the month but here's the progress so far for December.

First up, the Carnosaur! I had promised my son I'd get this guy done in time for our Christmas game of WHFB. I had to keep the paint job simple and run him "sans rider," but he got done in time for the game.










Also painted a couple of models as gifts for my nieces. I was tempted to run this pair as an Elementalist and Apprentice in Frostgrave! But that's not why I ordered them hehe.

D'oh! Apparently I forgot to take pictures of these before I gave them away. It was the North Star "not" Frozen models, painted up as Anna and Elsa.



More to come before December 31st, hopefully!

Christmas Haul

Got a lot of fun goodies for Christmas this year!

All the new AoS terrain I wanted...

No interest in the game but the terrain pieces look they would fit right in if I did a Frostgrave board... lots of weird arcane looking ruins. And I DO want to do a Frostgrave table build in the new year!

Also got all the GW shades in their new larger sized bottles. I had been holding off on buying these for a while since the Army Painter shades are great and I have a set of those, but they were getting low and the GW ones come in more colors... so I replenished my AP set, and asked for the GW ones for Christmas.

My local gaming buddies are all interested in Kings of War ever since WHFB perished, so I got that for Christmas too, along with the first expansion (which I needed, since Lizardmen are one of my biggest armies!).

I also bought myself wait too much stuff this holiday season while I was busy doing online shopping for everyone else (one for them, one for me, one for them....)

Placed a large order with Stronghold Terrain ( www.http://stronghold-terrain.de ) and got most of the terrain that I've been drooling over at their site for a while. German efficiency: The big box showed up inside 2 weeks and was well packed, double thick cardboard, with individual cardboard boxes inside, and inside those boxes the resin parts were individually wrapped in foam sheets. Awesome.

By contrast, I also placed orders from other parts of Europe.

Poland: I ordered a Cathedral from http://www.puppetswar.eu/

It showed up a month later in a torn up box with loose broken resin inside.

Great. Fortunately, it was a "ruined" version of the Cathedral anyway, and nothing was missing. On the bright side, the detail on these pieces is amazing. It's the only resin terrain I've seen from anywhere that matches Tabletop World in detail.

Spain: I found this "damaged village" set from a company called Escenorama,

( http://www.escenorama.com/ ) which would be awesome for Mordheim.

However, I ordered it almost two months ago. I got a confirmation right away. After 4 weeks, I received an e-mail that the order was "processing." I recently got an e-mail that it had shipped. Still haven't received anything. The Spanish are in no hurries!

Croatia: I also asked for the Guard Tower from Tabletop World for Christmas.

http://www.tabletop-world.com/guardTower.php

I was assured that it had been ordered 4 weeks ago, but still nothing!

Oh well... looks like my European terrain tour has a clear winner. That settles it, more orders to Germany! Perfect, there are a bunch of things I want from Thomarillion and Ziterdes... :)

Last but not least... got the limited edition Gen Con tavern that I've been seeing on eBay for quite a while. This bad boy is HEAVY! Not a light resin like the other terrain pieces I've got, it's almost a ceramic material. Nice detail though.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.743671415655390.1073741876.475726182449916&type=3

November gaming

I also spent some time gaming this weekend, which is always a good excuse to not have gotten any painting done :)

Showed a few of my local friends Frostgrave after playtesting it with some buddies out in Arizona and with my son for the past couple of months, and also got to try Kings of War.

Everyone enjoyed Frostgrave and they've all gone out and bought the book, so I'd say it was a success! Hopefully we can get a campaign in soon.

As far as Kings of War... Yeay! I do not have to throw away all of my WHFB armies! This game looks like it will fit the bill nicely whenever I get the urge to deploy a whole army instead of playing a skirmish game... and more importantly, now I still have a reason to paint up all of the armies I never got to before GW killed WHFB!

Here are some in game shots from our games:

It may look like Empire vs. Bretonnians... but it's not! Everyone broke out their WHFB models to try out the game, and this was an Enchanter vs. an Elementalist. This game did not have much spellcasting, but a lot of bloody combat.

The Elementalist gets his bonus 100XP by drinking from the Well of Dreams and Sorrows.. Woo Hoo!

The game on the other side of the table had more action in terms of spellcasting, but both players took a while to get stuck in with each other. There were walls of fog and fire all over the place!

Finally, some Kings of War... Flank charges, what fun!

November month end... painting

The first two weeks of this month I painted 21 models! That's the good news. Got in my 10 models for November early, and also got caught up on my deficit from September/October.

The bad news is that I was unable to keep up that pace... Things got busy in the "real world" over the last couple of weeks and there was not much time to paint. Also, I spent a lot of time gazing off into space whenever I went in to my painting room, agonizing over which projects I should try to still squeeze in before the end of the year!

All I got painted were the following 2 models:

Two more entries off the Frostgrave encounter table done! Of course, just as I am close to completing all of the entries on the standard table, a new table was released in the "Thaw of the Lich Lord" supplement. Oh well, more painting to do!

That's 23 models done this month, which means I need to do 7 more to get to my goal for the year by the end of December.

I know that I have to paint a Carnosaur for my son by Christmas Eve, so there's one accounted for. I think I will be painting 1 or 2 as gifts as well. So all I need to do is squeeze in 4-5 more quick Bones models... gonna be a tight month!

Week 2

Another week of blasting through some easy models! Hehe.

I could get used to painting as many models in a week as I normally struggle to do in a month...

It does feel great to get my production up, but at the same time, I wonder if I will regret doing such a quick job on these guys later on. They DO have to go into my display case with the rest of the troops after all! And they are not exactly works of art :(

Oh well, they'll do the important job of making sure I hit my goal for the year!

As of right now, I have completed my November goal and painted enough to make up for the shortfalls in September and October. So all I need to do is paint 10 more models and I will hit my goal of 10 models each month all year :)

That damn Carnosaur will take a while though so it's still up in the air as to whether this will happen.

In the mean time, here are some closeups of what I got done this week. I chose models from my Bones pile, again with the intention of filling out the entries on the random encounter table in Frostgrave. Of course, that doesn't mean I won't use them in Song of Blades & Heroes too!

I think I've solved my basing dilemma for my Fantasy models in a pretty basic way - any Games Workshop models I originally bought to use for WHFB / Mordheim will get based on square bases. Any other Reaper, Otherworld, or other random Fantasy models I buy (or pick out from the lead pile) will get based on round bases. This way I can still use my Mordheim models in WHFB if I want, but I'll also be slowly building up a collection of Fantasy models on round bases to use in other games.

It's one of my pet peeves that I like to have consistent basing in a game, whether the rules require it or not. Which is why I painted up some Bones skeletons and zombies even though I already have dozens and dozens of WHFB skeletons and zombies painted...

and some more terrain

You can never have enough terrain!

And this weekend I got the happy trifecta: completed some models, got in some gaming, and bought some new stuff :)

The new stuff was terrain that I ordered from Petsmart. I have always had a few aquarium pieces in my terrain collection but the ones that my buddy had out in Arizona really "wowed" me. I had to find them!

None of the stores around here had them but I was able to order from Petsmart online. Here they are:

That's a 28mm Reaper Bones model for scale... these things are huge! And pre-painted... what a score!

Some gaming...

In addition to getting some models painted this week, I also got some gaming in last night, which is always a good thing. We played Song of Blades & Heroes on my buddy's new Secret Weapon Miniatures "Tablescapes" tiles. The table was awesome! I really liked it, and of course it is now just a matter of time until I break down and buy one of my own... although I have stockpiled scratch-building supplies like styrofoam, balsa wood, and foam core for years thinking I would custom build my own table tiles. What's a man to do? This table looks great and is so convenient.... hmm...

Unfortunately I thought we were playing Frostgrave so I had spent time during the day agonizing over a warband roster for that game. I was the last to arrive though, and by the time I got there everyone was in the mood to play Song instead... grr...

So I quickly built a warband for that game using the models I brought and we got stuck in.

We didn't introduce any of the new spells or the funky initiative changes, just stuck with the standard turnover rules from basic SOBH and transfix/magic missile for spells.

We did use some of the traits from the advanced rules, including the weapon and armor rules. Personally, I didn't like them. Maybe I'm just not used to them... I can see why people would want them, but the reason I like SOBH was because of the level of abstraction and how easy the rules were. By adding new nuances to the rules, I think they are losing their niche! Oh well, maybe they'll grow on me.

Anyway, the game was fun and ended up being pretty close, so I guess the points values of the troops/traits from basic and advanced are not too imbalanced.

Here are some in-game shots. They don't really do the table justice, it's a work of art!

One thing I definitely learned is that a 4x4 table is not necessary if you are packing it with terrain. It took forever for us to engage with each other. I think I will try 3x3 or even less and see how those games go.

Looks like we might meet up again in a couple of weeks. November is all about making up for lost time from September and October, woohoo!