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. 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.)
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.
Here, have a werewolf. This big hairy brute is from the Strange Aeons miniatures of Uncle Mike. He’s a monster in several senses, about 44mm from base to top of his hairy head; the base is just under 40mm across.
I generally do figure prep (taking off moldlines and flash) and basic basing in fairly large batches, prime the whole batch, then tuck most of them away and bring them back out 5-10 at a time for painting.
It’s a good system for me; it gets the gruntwork of cleaning and prepping done efficiently, but avoids the “Primered Legions” paralysis I get from having hordes of unpainted figures staring at me from the corners of my painting bench. Instead they’re out of sight in in a spare figure case, to be brought out in small enough batches to actually paint.
An entire week since my last substantial post! The horror, how will our dedicated readership cope?
I’ve been painting up an English Civil War/Thirty Years War storm this week, filling that inevitable post-Lead Painters League void with 40-odd plastic pike-and-shotte foot and a dozen horse. You all saw 5 of the horse in one of my LPL entries, of course, the rest are taking shape nicely and all of the foot now have most of their basic paint on them. Sunday the 29th we’re running a 1000pt Field of Glory: Renaissance big battle, and I’m breaking one of my long-standing rules by fielding figures that aren’t even anywhere near finished just to get something on the table. At least they’re not straight-up Primered Legions — there are depths to which I will not stoop.
No pictures of my WiP paintjobs, but I’ll take the camera to tomorrow’s big game and try to get some reasonable shots to share here.
The Lead Adventure Forum is, of course, one of the greatest collections of creative wargaming minds I’m aware of. A random sampling of current coolness there that should be more widely known: Chicken Race on the Arumbaya, in which the estimable Hammers plans a pulpish steamboat race with a South American feel and some great-looking boats. Also, Boggler’s converted Improvised Back-of-Beyond Armoured Truck, very nice conversions of diecast toy trucks.
Elsewhere on the web (elseweb?) An Evil Giraffe has done his own versions of my riverbank pieces, and very nice they are too. He used broken cork sheet for his banks, so it has more texture (but also more height) than mine.
Finally, also via LAF but worthy of being mentioned on it’s own, Sarissa Precision have started selling a very, very nice looking line of 28mm laser-cut and -etched urban buildings that are perfect for pulp! Information here on the Sarissa site, and on sale here in their online store. I can’t wait to have some spare money to throw Sarissa’s way, the buildings are a good size (6″x4″ or 8″x6″ footprints and stackable for extra floors) and a fair price with enough detail to be interesting but not too fussy that they’re impractical. Hopefully at some point they offer their windows, doors and other details seperately, or even just the building fronts for those of us comfortable cutting our own side and rear walls.
Photos tomorrow or Monday of the ECW/TYW big-game madness, I promise!
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.→
“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.
