All posts by Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.
Misc

13 Years of This Nonsense!

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Sometime in November 1998 I sat down in the computer lab at the college I was going to at the time, signed up to Geocities (remember them?), and got busy creating what is now, 13 years later, this website.

The glory years of that first version of the website were roughly 1998-2003, with content for most of the Ground Zero Games science fiction rules as well as 15mm fantasy gaming. I still own all those figures and rules, although some of them haven’t had an outing in longer than I care to think about…

I did very, very little gaming from about 2003/2004 to 2008, although I did maintain the site, and moved it to the current warbard.ca URL in August 2004. I knew people were using the site, I’d get a couple of emails a month about it, so it wasn’t going anywhere, but I wasn’t adding to it.

In 2008 I got myself over to Trumpeter Salute 2008 in Vancouver, discovered 28mm pulp adventure gaming, and was back into gaming with a bang! The site had to wait a bit longer for a proper revival, though, being rebuilt in the fall of 2010 in it’s current WordPress-based form, and “officially” reopened in January 2011.

(More about the site can, if you really want to read it, be found over on our About page.)

So, here’s to many more years of this nonsense, in whatever form it takes!

Pulp

Hairy Apemen!

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Missing Links? Yeti? Sasquatch? Some other sort of yet-undiscovered ape-man? The result of Mad Science? Any or all of the above?

Sasquatch/Yeti/Etc!
Hairy Apemen from Pulp Figures & Uncle Mike

The two big guys are from Pulp Figures, PLT-7 Hairy Hominids, the two smaller figures are from Uncle Mike’s Strange Aeons line, the Missing Links. They’re all on bases I constructed of pennies and milliput, as usual.

Left to right, we have Momma (holding a skull), Pops, Junior (in the background, mugging for the camera) and finally Uncle Fred. I might yet do one last round of highlighting on their hair, and the bases do need a bit more work, but they’re playable as is. Not sure when they’ll get their first outing to terrify explorers or hapless cavemen, but hopefully soon!

Links, Painting

A Few Painting Tutorials

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Just a pair of painting tutorials today, linked to mostly so I can find them again when I need to refer to them!

Coll Mini Or Not (CMON) has a huge list of tutorials, contributed by users so they’re of variable quality and usefulness. One of the best is this well-illustrated look at ethnic skintones. Painting skin is something I’ve never found easy to do well, and even those I don’t use the Vallejo paints referred to in this article I still found it valuable. The index to their Articles section is here, a whole mix of stuff well worth checking out.

Games Workshop have a great horse painting tutorial, with a good primer on horse anatomy and colours as well as painting tips. I’m no fan of GW’s business practices, nor of most of their sculpts, but their technique has always been top-notch and they write a good tutorial, so credit where due. They also completely rebuild their own website every year or so, so this link might not be as stable as it ought to be…

Historicals, Painting

The Reds Are Coming!

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There’s 43 Bolsheviks off my painting table and ready for action, finally! One Maxim MG crew, some officers and NCOs and a whole lot of ragged, barely uniformed riflemen. Almost entirely Copplestone figures, and I mixed freely from the regular rifles, greatcoated rifles and the partisan packs to get a suitable ragged look. I had just started painting (and thinking about organization) when this marvelous Lead Adventure thread opened, with all sorts of great contemporary photographs of both Red and White uniforms.

Red Horde!
A Russian Civil War Bolshevik infantry force, finally marching off the painting table

24 more Bolshies to finish basing and then paint, at which point it’s on to the 60-some White Russians that are in the mail to me as I write this. All that painting will give me the core of two good-sized RCW infantry forces, nominally configured as platoon-sized forces for Through the Mud and the Blood but obviously configurable for other games as needed.

The Russian Civil War has well and truly taken over my painting schedule, and starting in November I should even be able to get some games in again, as a screwy work schedule settles somewhat and once again frees up my Sundays for gaming, which is of course the best possible use of that day. I’ll probably try to push hard to get enough Whites finished for a first Mud & Blood RCW outing by the last Sunday in November… we shall see!

(More photos of the Reds in the next few days, as daylight and weather allows…)

Historicals, Links, Pulp

Pulpish Links of Interest, 13 October 2011

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A miscelania of links, just so I get back into the habit of posting here!

Adventures of the 19XX is a pulptastic webcomic, full of zeppelins, giant airplanes, mystical oddness and villainy. Good fun, great art, and quite likely to inspire pulp gaming scenarios! (Warning: autoplaying music when the site loads…)

Need a World War One or Russian Civil War force? For the next 24hrs or so from the time I write this, Brigade Games has a great bulk deal, 7 packs for the price of 6, which works out amazingly cheap per figure. Nice figures, too — check out my White Russian riflemen from earlier this year.

If you’re looking for inspiration for Great War/WW1 terrain, check this amazing Lead Adventure Forum thread out – thejammedgatling’s First World War Terrain Boards – it’s a long thread of a project that’s been a year+ in the running so far, but well worth it.

Also via LAF, these amazing fake fur grasslands by Elledan. He’s got more on his blog, and also a small tutorial on his fake fur terrain. I badly want to do more fake fur terrain, done well it looks great!

I’ve finally got my painting bench set up again after moving at the end of September, so more original content should be landing on the Warbard shortly!

Pulp

Unofficial .45 Adventure 2nd Edition Character Sheets

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These are my unofficial draft versions of character sheets for Rattrap’s .45 Adventure 2nd Edition; they use a vaguely period typewriter font for a somewhat pulpish look, and while the layout is still a work in progress they take up less space than the 1st Edition sheets.

.452e sheets thumb
Part of the Grade One character sheet.

The PDF is 3 pages; there’s two Grade 3 & 2 characters per page and six Grade 1 spots.
Download the PDF right here (73Kb).

Feedback, suggestions or comments below in the comments area, as always!

(Legal Garble: .45 Adventures is copyright Rattrap Productions. These sheets are copyright Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design, permission granted to copy for personal use only.)

Pulp

Jurassic Pulp II: Rex Stomps Back!

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Back in October 2009, near the beginning of this pulp craze of ours, I ran a game I called “Jurassic Pulp”, inspired by that T Rex vs SUV chase scene in the original Jurassic Park movie. We used Model Ts instead of SUVs, though, and they’re just a bit more fragile than a modern SUV. T Rex hasn’t changed, though!

A fairly complete report on that first game can be found over on Lead Adventure, including some post-game ideas from both Corey and I.

When we were kicking ideas around for a new .45 Adventure convention game, the idea of reviving Jurassic Pulp came up. I’ve started to run with it, Continue reading Jurassic Pulp II: Rex Stomps Back! →

Historicals, Inspiration, Misc

Messrs. Clarke & von Clausewitz

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“Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.” — Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies has written a fascinating post over on his Lard Island blog about friction in games and in reality. Short version: real war is full of things going pear shaped; most gaming systems aren’t. Go read the full article, I’m doing it a terrible disservice with my one-line smartass summary!

Should you want to read old von Clausewitz yourself, Project Gutenburg has an English translation of On War, Vol. One free to download. The short chapter Richard refers to in his post is Chapter VII. Friction In War — even for those of us with short attention spans, well worth a read!

This counts as another prod to get more figures painted for Through the Mud and the Blood, too!