Picked up a cheap towel to use as thatching. Here it is in a quickie late-night photograph, glue still wet on the roof of the half-timber barn.
Towel strips as thatch on the half-timber barn. As usual, click for full size.
The roof has a base of sheet styrene. I used white glue to stick the towel strips down, then more thinned white glue to soak the towel, which (when it eventually dries!) should solidify it nicely.
The barn has also been given a base of mattboard and mostly primed. My usual scenery primer is a 1:1 mix of white glue and black paint, mixed right on the model. It seals and protects the scenery surface nicely, even fairly fragile stuff like styrofoam toughens up a bit!
The main arched doors are also in progress, but I forgot to get a photo of them.
Still to-do for the roof, trim the edges and glue them under the eves for a more finished look, then paint and more paint. I also need to do basswood rafters under the roof, both for looks and for actual structural support, as the roof will still be removable when this building is finished.
The roof still looks a bit too towel-like right now, hopefully finishing the edges and painting will sort that!
Something for the English Civil War/Thirty Years War table, as well as for pulp games set in the quainter parts of the UK or Europe! All those crops gathered from my fields have to be stored somewhere, after all.
A stone-and-halftimber barn, work in progress. Click, as usual, for larger.
The whole thing is highly inspired by Warlord Game’s rather nice 16th Century Barn. Actually, scrub “highly inspired”, I’m outright copying the building, as a learning piece! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?
The basic structure is foamcore. The stonework is soft foam salvaged from a takeout food container; I’m going to have to swing by our local (awesome) plastic supplier to see if they have something similar in sheets, as one takeout container at a time is a rather slow way to accumulate building materials! I scribed/carved the stones with a sharp pencil, and quite like how they’ve turned out.
The timbering is 1/8th x 1/16th inch balsa strip from the Stockpile’o’Doom. I have about six lengths of it, and it is entirely possible it’s leftovers from our family model railroading setup in the early/mid-1990s when I was in junior high. I think I’ve carried that balsa around long enough — time to put it to use, right?
Doors, additional timbering at the corners of the building, and a base are still to do. The inside will get a bit of plastering just for texture, and probably a lot of straw strewn around and such — details to add interest without getting much in the way, ideally.
The roof will be towel thatching over a styrene base.
I’ve heard the suggestion that you try one new-to-you technique per project; I’m afraid this simple-looking building breaks that “rule” good and proper! Foam stonework is new to me; likewise half-timbered building construction, and I’ve never actually used the towel-as-thatch technique before either! Wish me luck!
The final round of LAF’s Lead Painters League 5 was another bonus round, this one “A Scene From The Movies”, with bonus points for two teams and a vehicle or scenery piece representing a scene from a well-known movie.
I thought about doing The Sand Pebbles with American sailors and Chinese mobs, but didn’t get around to ordering Chinese figures in time (I already have appropriate American sailors in the lead mountain), then Bob Murch of Pulp Figures showed up at Trumpeter Salute back at the beginning of April with some unreleased Thugee strangler figures, and I knew I had to do Gunga Din, an old black and white movie I’ve see a few times and enjoyed!
Even better, I planned on painting up another few WW1/Interwar British riflemen and running them as opponents; the actual movie is set in the late 1800s but I figured I could get away with using slightly later pulp-era Brits!
In the event, both the opponents and the new bonus scenery piece never got done, but I did get the very nice Thugee stranglers painted and shown, and they quite handily won their Round 10 outing against some Roman gladiators inspired by the movie Maximus.
My Lead Painters League 5 Round 10 entry, inspired by the 1939 movie Gunga Din. Figures by Pulp Figures. As always, click for full size.
I have to wonder how much sheer novelty factor added to my vote count — there are a grand total, to my knowledge, of perhaps 4 packs of these Thugee stranglers out in the wild, and Pulp Figures is a well-known enough company that most of the time Mr. Murch’s figures are ubiquitous. Being able to show off brand-new figures that have literally never been seen elsewhere (not even the Pulp Figures website has the full set of 5!) has to have been worth a few votes!
The original Gunga Din theatrical trailer from 1939 is up on Youtube:
Round 10 brings LPL5 to an end! I managed 8 new teams over 10 rounds, 3 wins, and a final placing of 55th out of 72nd, which is roughly where I figured I’d end up and roughly where I placed compared to the overall field back in LPL3 last time I entered. More importantly, I have a whole bunch of freshly painted figures crowding the edges of my painting desk now, quite a few more than I’d have had without the prodding of LPL5 driving my brush!
I’ll do a proper LPL5 wrapup gallery post later this week.
There’s zeppelin on the curent banner for this site, and we’re notorious pulp gamers, so it should come as no surprise that zeppelins are amongst our favourite things here on The Warbard. Sure, they’re often explosive, prone to crashing in a stiff wind and all the rest, but let’s face it, zeppelins are just cool.
In A World More Pulpish (which is a much cooler place than reality) there’d be zeppelins everywhere. One glimpse of how A World More Pulpish might have looked, with zepps overhead, is found in this Feb. 2010 post over on Propnomicon, Zeppelin Goldmine. Continue reading Zeppelins. We like Zeppelins.→
Another review of .45 Adventures 2nd Edition has come out, this one in The Ancible #9, a free-to-download PDF magazine.
I hadn’t actually grabbed a copy of The Ancible before, I have to admit. It started as a “real” paper magazine, I’m pretty sure, and when it switched to free PDFs I missed the memo! It bills itself as “a full colour digital magazine that specilises in the field of Science Fiction and fantasy wargaming” and it delivers — besides the 45A2e review in this edition there’s a long review & painting article on some giant Warmachine war wagon, a review of the new Battletech box set, another review of Heavy Gear: Arena, some interviews (great conversions in the interview with the Frenchwoman!) and a lot of advertising for all sorts of conventions, companies and such. Well worth checking out, I shall have to start grabbing the back issues and seeing what I missed.
The 45A2e review is longer than mine, with a nice introduction to the pulp gaming genre and more detail on specific game mechanics and such than mine. Go check it out, and the rest of The Ancible. Well worth it.
These guys started out as a Lead Painters League entry, but didn’t get finished in time, and besides, I’d already run too many groups of riflemen in khaki to want to run another in LPL5!
They’re a mix of Brigade and Copplestone Red Russians and Red Partisans; I’m not actually sure which figure is from which company as I bought them in a mixed batch from a fellow Lead Adventure Forum member who lives over in Vancouver. There’s a standard bearer and another dozen riflemen still to be painted, making these the nucleus of a decent little Red Russian skirmish unit.
Red Russian riflemen with an officer and Commisar. 28mm figures by Brigade and Copplestone.
In website news, you might have noticed the black menu bar along the top here changing a bit. Always a challenge trying to fit everything in, make it findable and sensible without being too complex!
“Whatever happens, we have got/the Lewis gun, and they do not”
— with apologies to Mr. Kipling, of course.
My LPL5 Week 7 entry was more Brigade 28mm British, this time a Lewis gun team and supporting riflemen. The Lewis gun team are very nice sculpts, slightly more detailed than the riflemen from the same range. They got matched up with a rather nice set of pirates, including a great pirate ghost, and defeated, though.
The Lewis Gun, my Round 7 LPL5 entry. As always, click for full size.
No, not the (very tasty!) drink, but White Russian Rifles from sometime in the Russian Civil War; the figures are 28mm from Brigade Games and very nice.
White Russian Rifles, my Round 6 entry for LPL5. As always, click for full size.
My Whites will, by the time you read this, have been fairly comprehensively beaten by an Irish medieval/Dark Ages warband with very, very nicely painted freehand shield designs, and Round Seven will be underway!
Week Five of the LAF’s Lead Painters League having just ended, here’s my entry. This was one of the bonus theme weeks; the bonus theme this time was “Africa”, with extra bonus points for producing an opposing team as well as your basic 5-figure entry.
I completely forgot about the extra bonus points for an opposing team, but that wouldn’t have mattered as I’ve no suitable figures anyway. I did manage to shoehorn the tropical British I’ve been painting in, as British and British Empire troops spent the entire length of the Great War chasing Paul von Lettow-Vorbek around various East African territories. They never caught him, he surrended shortly after the November 11 Armistice undefeated in the field.
Hunting von Lettow-Vorbek, Tanganika 1917 (Click for a full-size version, as always)
Unfortunately my British riflemen got done for by a group of zombie nomads on zombie camels, but I’m still pleased with the paintjob on them and the photograph.
The larger base they’re on, incidentially, is a CD covered in sand and fine gravel, then painted to mostly match the bases of the British and some of the other figures I’ve been doing lately.
Rattrap Productions released the much-anticipated 2nd Edition of their .45 Adventures pulp adventure rules a few weeks ago, I received my copy of the full rules last week, and I’ve already run one convention game and several small private test games with the demo rules before even getting the full rules.
The PDF version should be out shortly too, as Rattrap generally releases the PDF version about a month after the initial print release. (Edit to add: the PDF version is out today.)
This review is mostly aimed at folks who have some familiarity with the 1st Edition of 45A, but it should be general enough to give those of you with no experience at all with the system an idea of how it works. Note that throughout this review I’ve used “45A1e” and “45A2e” for 1st & 2nd Edition respectively; this is a bit of a D&D-ism but useful shorthand!
So What’s Changed?
The most obvious change from 45A1e to 45A2e is the “fistfuls of d10” change. Instead of the previous version’s “1d10 + Stat +/- modifiers”, 2e is almost always “1d10 + stat +/- extra d10s depending on skills or circumstance”. You pick the best of the rolls if you’re rolling multiple d10. In practice, this seems to work out at around 3d10 per attack roll and 1d10 or 2d10 for the defender most of the time, so while you might need a few extra d10 for larger games, just to keep things moving, it’s not a really serious “fistfuls of dice” game the way Full Thrust or some of the GW games are!
Almost all the rules from 45A1e now in the one new 45A2e book. Basic gangsters, cops, crime-fighters, military, super science & robots, safari characters, all in one cover, along with all the skills. This alone makes character creation much easier, as the archetypes, skills and special rules aren’t spread over half a dozen books anymore! The campaign rules and New Commerce City background material have been rolled into the main rulebook as well.
Character creation is also massively streamlined. Rather than lists of specific skills available to specific archetypes, the archetypes have different numbers of skills they can take per skill category, and all the skills are now slotted into one of these 11 categories. This will also make integrating future supplements and releases easier!
Weapons are no longer purchased as part of a character’s basic build. Instead, they’re purchased per-scenario using Equipment Points. This means, among other things, that Grade 1 & 2 characters can often take more Special Abilities than before, as they’re not having a significant part of their available Special Ability count taken up with weaponry. (Giving a Grade 1 flunky a tommy gun used to soak up 3 of their 4 available Ability slots in 45A1e, now a Grade 1 can actually have four skills and the gun!)
What’s Brand New?
The whole Occult section is new, with rules for various Cthulhu-esque creatures, cultists and goings on, spells, artifacts and such. I haven’t had a chance to use these in play yet, but they look entertaining.
The entire Special Abilities/Skills list has been rewritten and consolidated. There’s a bunch of new or replacement skills, some duplicated stuff removed, and a rather elegant hierarchy of skills has been implemented for a few areas.
A couple of my favourite archetypes from 45A1e didn’t make it into 45A2e, namely the Foreign Agent & Professor archetypes. On the other tentacle, the G-Man archetype should encompass the old Foreign Agent one quite well, and there is now an archetype creation formula so you can roll your own if you really want to.
The archetype creation rules were much requested for 45A1e, so it’s great to see them included with 2e. I haven’t really played with them yet, but a read-through and examination of how the included archetypes are assembled lead me to think the creation rules should work just fine. (the stock archetypes included in the rules appear to have been built using the actual archetype creation rules as presented, which is always a good sign!)
Weaponry, as mentioned above, is no longer bought as part of a character’s build process, but instead it’s done using Equipment Points which can change on a per-scenario basis. This gives players and GMs greater flexibility – you can restrict weapons in a scenario without players feeling like they’ve “wasted” a lot of a character’s build options, control the amount of firepower on the table, etc. The Equipment List also encompasses a lot of non-weaponry equipment, too, things that might be useful in certain scenarios like flashlights, ropes or even multi-language translating dictionaries.
The Super Science & Occult equipment is controlled the same way, with seperate Super Science & Occult Equipment Points. Certain archetypes give bonuses to various of these Equipment Points totals – the Military Officer gets +10 Equipment Points, the Witch Doctor +10 Occult Points, for example.
A Few Issues
Typos and grammar errors! There’s a typo in the Table of Contents (“Resaerch” instead of “Research”) that should have been caught by a simple spellchecker (not the only time I noticed this in the book) and a few grammar glitches (its/it’s, that sort of thing) recurring. None of them that I’ve noticed so far occur where they’d cause rules ambiguity or misinterpretation, at least.
(Corey’s interjection: Amongst the many jobs I do, I am a part-time writer and copy-editor, so the mistakes in the book, especially with regards to the lack of a style guide, really bug me, to the point where I had to put down the book and walk away at one point. Sorry Rich. )(Brian’s re-interjection: Unless you’re a hardass about editing, the concerns I noted in the previous paragraph really aren’t showstoppers…)
There are a number of layout glitches that make some things hard to read than they should be, especially when searching quickly for a specific rule or skill. One example is the lack of differentiation between sub-section headings (just made using bold text) and some lists, some of which use bold to make their titles stand out and some of which don’t. The Special Abilities Lists are easy to read, but the similar Robot Upgrades List re-uses bold text for two different things (sub-section headers and upgrade titles). A second style for those sub-section headers would make some sections of the book much easier to scan, especially in mid-game when you’ve had to pause the action to clarify a rule.
Beyond layout and grammar, as I said above, some of the old 45A1e archetypes haven’t made the cut. There’s also a few toys and weapons missing, but for ordinary games that’s not going to be a huge concern, as the most notable missing weapons are the Light & Medium Machine Guns from the Amazing War Stories military supplement, hardly common weapons in typical 45A games!
The Verdict
These are all very minor issues, though. The new character stat/wound boxes are far more compact than the old ones, so it should be possible to get more characters onto less paper now – and less paper in front of players during a game is rarely a bad thing!
The new “fistfuls of d10” combat/skills system runs faster on the table. Characters move faster, Grade Ones (the mooks, thugs, extras, Privates and redshirts of the factions) die quicker while Grade Threes (the Stars!) are a bit tougher but not hugely so. It’s entirely in keeping with the heroic/cinematic traditions of pulp that major characters should be able to plow through crowds of extras, anyway!
So, the final verdict? .45 Adventures 2nd Edition is just as detailed, playable and flavourful as the old, but the new system is faster, leaner and pulpier.
Streamlined, in fact. Very pulp-era thing to do, actually!
Pulp-era Streamlining. Not just for trains anymore! (Image is CC-BY-NC from Carlos62 on Flickr)
