Year end painting update

My year started off with finishing 14 models in January... I thought I was well on the path to finishing an average of 10 models a month in 2016 - a modest goal!

However the year had some busy and rough patches and there were several months where I got exactly "0" models done.

With that being the case, I was not too confident that I would reach 120 models by year's end. I'm happy to say that I pulled it off, by cheating a bit and painting up some easy models as objectives/scatter terrain. Here they are... Animals!

The scale is a bit wacky on some of them... they are a combination of O scale models by Pegasus Hobbies and Bachmann. The Bachmann ones were a lot larger than the Pegasus ones. The horse in particular seems giant next to some models, but I'm not too hung up over it.

If you compare them to heroic 28mm they look OK. Next to some more "true" 28mms they look too big. One of the comparison shots above shows the Bachmann horse next 28mm horses by Perry and Foundry. And the Foundry horse was sculped by the Perry Brothers! That's a huge size disparity. I guess my new Pict army rides on ponies!

I figure these could be useful for all sorts of things. The deer can be used as hidden movement markers in Muskets & Tomahawks. The livestock can be used as objectives in farm raid scenarios from ancient all the way up to the Revolutionary War (the most "modern" period I collect in 28mm).

One of the new periods that I'm interested in a lot lately is Arthurian / Dark Ages stuff, and I know there is a cattle raiding scenario in the new Saga: Aetius & Arthur book coming out. Also, one of the battles I'd like to try for AWI is "Hog Island," and now I have the hogs for it!

I've been sitting on these for a while and was happy to get them done, even if they are not as satisfying to finish as an actual unit / army of troops! Done is done. And I blew out my goal!

By the end of the year I finished 136 models... phew! The pressure begins again tomorrow, haha!

On top of the animals I also finished a few board game models. Here are some characters from Dungeon Saga and Conan. The Conan game by Monolith Games really impressed me - they are the most awesome board game models I've ever seen! They got me on a board game kick and I've backed Mythic Battles and Massive Darkness on Kickstarter, and just bought into Zombicide: Black Plague in a big way too.

Mordheim Campaign 2016

So the moment of truth has come and gone!

Four months of prep and the big weekend goes by all too quickly, unfortunately...

This weekend we had our annual Mordheim campaign/tournament. I've been doing this for quite a while now, probably about 10 years.

When it first started, I was still doing most of my gaming in a local game store, so me and some of the other customers from the shop would organize a campaign once a year. This was after the game had already gone out of print, so it wasn't too popular at the store - with either the customers, OR the owner! Fortunately he was a nice enough guy and didn't have a problem with us playing there... after all, people could always buy Warhammer miniatures to play Mordheim (when there was still a Warhammer Fantasy Battles).

As my local gaming buddies got older we all started buying houses - which meant we could play at home! At that point we started taking turns going to each others' houses and trying to get games in about once a month. We are lucky enough that a few of us in our group have dedicated game rooms.

There were two problems with this - first, some of my best friends are not local. And second, even the ones that are local have a hard time committing to playing a game once a month! Kids, work, houses, etc.

A few years ago we started doing it as a marathon gaming weekend once a year. Mordheim works best as a campaign game, so you always want to get several games in rather than play it as a one-off. So we pick a long weekend and hole up for a couple of days of non-stop gaming!

This year I tried to run a map-based campaign set in Lustria. It worked OK, but I think we had too many map locations for the number of players in the campaign. This was compounded by a couple of last minute dropouts, and meant that there were more turns than I would have liked where certain warbands had to "sit out" because they did not encounter any enemies on the map.

As usual, I managed to finish the warbands and terrain I'd been working on at the eleventh hour. Here is the spawning pool I used for the "Mirror Pool of Tepok" scenario:





It looks much better (and more like a Mirror Pool) with a coat of gloss varnish on the water! I think it was literally still drying when the first player arrived.

Here are the last few Norse I painted for my warband. They were older painted models that I just had to touch up and add shields to. I painted them about 15 years ago - I am glad the style still fit in with the ones I painted last month, but a little disappointed too actually! I guess I have not improved too much over 15 years, haha...





And the two new warbands for this year, in all their glory.

Norse:



Nurgle:



I really liked the way the Nurgle heroes came out, and their warband leader became the thorn in everyone's side during the campaign!

We ended up with a nice mix of warbands: Amazons, Lizardmen, Norse, Carnival of Chaos (Nurgle), Skaven, 2 different Orc warbands, and Dark Elves.

I used the table and temple buildings I had scratchbuilt (modeled after Tulum in Mexico) that you can see here:







Along with a whole bunch of new Mats and prepainted aquarium terrain for the Temple Cities and various monuments on the map.

Without further ado, here are some pics from the weekend!