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.
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.
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.
LPL5 Round 6 launched Sunday, go check out all the great entries!
With getting ready for Trumpeter Salute taking up almost all of my gaming time the week before the convention, I didn’t manage to get a new entry finished for Round 4 of the Lead Painters League.
I re-ran Lord M Hosts A Weekend instead, and watched my fancy toffs perish under relentless Imperial bombardment – they got paired up with a rather nice (and new!) entry featuring Star Wars Imperial spaceships, including the Death Star itself, and a great disturbance in the Force was felt.
I’ve got a new entry in Round 5, live this week, though, and Rounds 6 & 7 already finished, photographed & submitted, so I have a bit of breathing room for the last three rounds, including the blowout Round 10 Movie scene bonus round!
My Round Three entry for LAF’s Lead Painters League, more Pulp Figures sculpts. This time it’s the upper classes, with the PGJ-14 Upper Crust Swells pack providing five of the figures, and the PHP-18 Rugged Sons of Empire pack providing the Scotsman with shotgun and bald officer in mess uniform.
Yes, that’s tartan on the Scotsman’s kilt. Yes, I’m mad.
As a bonus, they’ve won their round, against a rather nice flotilla of Ground Zero Games’s FSE starships! As I’ve said before, I don’t take part in LPL with any serious expection of winning, just to get stuff painted and photographed and to force me to push myself as a painter. Winning is just gravy. Tasty, tasty gravy, though.
Took a fair number of photos while having a great time attending Trumpeter Salute 2011 this last weekend, and a surprising number of them actually turned out good!
Here’s a narrated photo tour of Trumpeter Salute from my point of view.
“Zombies vs Ninjas vs Robots vs Pirates” — what’s not to love? I have to admit I missed this one, but just the title alone is a hoot. The Lego Wars guys are awesome.
Darkest Africa, in a very pulpish scenario: Col. Kurtz of the Belgian Force Publique has gone insane and is attempting, with some allied/coerced native tribal allies, to invade the rest of Africa. The British with Zanzibari & Masai allies move in to attempt to put him down. I played one of the Belgian tribal allies – the one who survived the game, as the allied tribe on the Belgian’s other flank got shot to pieces by the Brits then chopped up by the Masai before the Belgians broke the British and Masai with rifle fire. The Zanzibari spent most of the game hacking through the jungle on a long flank march, and arrived just in time to let the Belgians and my tribe march off in exchange for being allowed to loot the battlefield!
The climax of the Darkest Africa game – the outnumbered Belgians, one flanking allied tribe destroyed, form “knot” (like a square, but tiny) to fend off a whole heap of swarming Masai. It’s touch and go for two turns of desperate combat as the Masai swarm the knot, but they’re fended off long enough for the Belgian unit to re-form a firing line and blow the Masai back into the jungle with rifle fire…
This awesome harbour was part of a WW2 15mm game that I didn’t play, but it was too good not to get photos of. The flaklighter ship was out cruising up and down the beach during the game, too, attempting to fend off the Allied attack coming from the land side.
Another eye-catching game I didn’t play, just got this nice shot of. It’s Uncle Mike’s Strange Aeons horror/pulp/Cthulhu adventure skirmish game, on his very nice (and double-sided!) portable 2’x3′ gaming board.
Finally, one last shot of my own Amulet of Fire game! This is the river end of the 2’x4′ jungle board for Chapter One of Amulet, with Corey’s steamship alongside my dock, and jungle tracks leading off to the mission station and further into the jungle! The Amulet game went well, despite not having the time to get over to Chapter Two on the mesa itself. The 2nd Edition of .45 Adventures is a good bit faster and more streamlined than 1st Edition was, especially with things like vehicles on the table.
All of my Trumpeter Salute 2011 photos, lots more than I posted here, are over on Flickr for your viewing enjoyment!
I’ll be rewriting Amulet’s characters again, both for slight balance tweaks and because in last week’s hasty pre-con conversion of 1st Ed characters over to 2nd I flat-out copy-n-pasted several characters around, changing only names, and the scenario deserves better than that!
Already looking forward to Trumpeter Salute 2012! Perhaps I’ll do a pulpish end of the world type scenario, to go along with all the 2012 End Times horsecrap?
Just a very short post to say Trumpeter Salute was awesome, lots of fun games and great people. Good to see friends and regulars again, and meet new people.
I ran Amulet for a full group of six players, using the .45 Adventure 2nd Edition demo rules. The game went well but we never actually got near the mesa (Chapter Two) because although 2nd Ed does flow faster than 1st did, I put too many figures on the table.
Sorting photos now, will have a longer post tomorrow probably with lots and lots of photos, a list of my goodie haul (extensive!) and more!
Amulet of Fire characters all converted to .45A 2nd Edition. With a certain amount of cut’n’paste magic in Open Office, but whatever. Grade One mooks & goons are all alike anyway, right?
I usually try not to do this, but lack of time has forced my hand. I’m planning on re-re-building all the cut’n’paste victims at leisure post-Trumpeter, though. Needs must when working seven day weeks, attempting to keep up with LPL, and getting ready for a convention!
Beer. Bed. Work tomorrow, then packing for Trumpeter, then Trumpeter starting Friday afternoon.
Alongside the Lead Painters League over on LAF, the other thing keeping me amused this week is getting ready for Trumpeter Salute 2011 over in Vancouver (well, Burnaby, really, but close enough…) this weekend! Trumpeter is the region’s “big” gaming convention, really, at least on the Canadian side of the border. This will be my third visit in four years, and it’s always a highlight of my gaming year!
I’ll be running Amulet of Fire again, going over with a friend who has space in his car for the mesa and other stuff needed for it.
I’ve (possibly foolishly…) promised to run Amulet in the barely-just-released 2nd Edition of .45 Adventures, so I’m busy tonight rebuilding all 30 or so characters for all six teams of Amulet. I’d say “converting”, but really 45A 2nd Ed has a different enough character & skill system that I’m rebuilding! Some interesting differences between the new and old versions; must do a full review here of 2nd Ed after Trumpeter!
There will be a bit of a Lead Adventure West Coast meet-up, partly over my Amulet game on Saturday. Always nice to see some of the Vancouver-area folks again, throw more money at Bob Murch & Imperial Hobbies, loose at games, and all the other traditional convention activities!
More goodness from the Lead Painters League, this time my Week Two entry, titled Command On The Frontier. The frontier in this case being the interwar Northwest Frontier, nominally. British officers and sargents attempting to control the volatile, dangerous border between what was then British India & Afganistan.
Unlike my winning Round One entry, Command got soundly and deservedly thrashed by a spectacular field hospital entry from Hammers. Entertainingly, both cover the same ground — British interwar army — and even the same theatre (!) so the random match generation had a bit of a sense of humour about the whole thing.
Once again, the figures were all from Pulp Figures, a mix of PTB-1 British Army Tropical Command and a few from PHP-18 Rugged Sons of the Empire.
Anyway, onto Round Three, in which I have a much better set of photos, more colourful figures and (Dog willing…) perhaps a less overachieving opponent!
LPL5 Round 1 is over and Round 2 begun by the time you read this. The LPL format, for those of you not familiar, is ten week-long rounds, with entries paired up so with 70-odd participants there’s 30-some one-on-one entries per round. The league format means no elimination, and every round you’ll be paired up with a different contestant.
The Round 1 bonus theme was “Civilians”; my entry was five Pulp Figures’ Surly Servants, with a RAFM Investigator’s Roadster‘s back corner on the left. All sculpted by Bob Murch, in fact!
As a bonus, I quite handily won my Round One matchup, against some quite nice modern bystanders. (I don’t enter LPL with any particular expectation of winning; there’s too many far better painters active on LAF for that!) On to Round Two and more!