Wednesday Night Musings VII

Victorian Science Fiction: Colonial Japanese Ninjas
As I mentioned last week, I am gearing up to play in a local Victorian Science Fiction/Colonial campaign. The group that does it has written a pretty extensive background to include Martians, Venusians, and all the Great Powers in the middle of the Northwest Frontier.

I have started to assemble and paint all the lovely models my wonderful and amazing wife gave me for Christmas, and I have completed my first section, composed of five Ninjas. They were made from Wargames Factory plastic Samurai and Ashigaru, with guns "donated" from my Tamiya 1/48 WW2 Russian Infantry (they also donated two Maxim machineguns as well.) I have had that kit floating around forever, I am clearly not going to ever build them, so I may as well start cannibalizing it for parts!

Ninjas with guns... almost as much fun as Nuns with guns

Quack!
Also something I mentioned last week, I am in the process of converting my Duck Wizard's Apprentice for Frostgrave. I have been actively participating in WizarDecember, but the Week 4 deadline was extended until the end of the month due to holiday craziness. And then it occurred to me: WizarDecember is running through the end of December. I am in the fifth week of December. I am working on a Duck Apprentice. If I can get the little guy done before the new year, I can actually have five entries for the WizarDecember painting challenge. Assuming I can step away from my Colonial Japanese and Boxer Rebellion miniatures, of course.


The Week
There is still holiday craziness happening. I am trying to make some evening time to do some online gaming with Bashytubits and Mike. I am really going to try to run a Frostgrave game with the kids before they go back to school. I am assembling and painting my Japanese Colonials, Boxers, and Frostgrave checklist. Maybe a trip to California for the New Year if we can hitch a ride (running out of time fast on that one!) Next week life returns to what passes as normal for us, so hopefully we will settle down and make some better progress instead of running around in circles.

Death Cult of Hueymakt, Part 1

This was going to be a post back in May 2015 on my El Principado de la Comadreja blog. I did all this writing and didn't want to just abandon it, so it is an extra here on Tumbahelada De Punkrabbitt.

Once upon a time, I thought I was going to be playing Brink of Battle, and wanted a new Warband. I was also pursuing a solitaire Glorantha/Runequest project. I decided to combine the two and start a Duck Warband. There are a few figure manufacturers out there that make anthropomorphic ducks, but they are mostly very comical. Not so from Rebel Miniatures, who produces some wickedly mean looking ducks.

So, I ordered the ducks from Rebel during their Spring Sale. The box contained ten of them, broken down as a wizard, two archers, two with clubs, two with spears, and three with sword and shield. They were very clearly meant to be Adventurer ducks and not soldier ducks, as they mostly had backpacks, pouches, and even unlit torches with their gear as well. But I wanted some kick-ass Bronze Age Soldier Durulz to fulfil the visions in my head about Glorantha. Clearly, this was going to take some work.

I have been saving spare parts from my various hobby endeavours for years, and a quick check showed that I had quite a few leftover parts from my plastic Amazons and Persians. In particular, I had hoplite helmets, swords, hoods, spears, and some nice crescent shields. So I attacked my fledgling Durulz with clippers and putty, then attaching all of the necessary pieces to realize my vision of Warrior Ducks.

Now, when it came to painting these guys, I did not want typical duck colors. No white with orange bills, no black with orange bills, no green heads with yellow bills... I wanted duck colors that challenged the stereotypes. So I Googled "duck head" and went through several pages of images. The most unusual that would translate well to my tiny models was brown feathers and a blue-grey bill. A similar search for duck feet revealed that mostly, ducks have orange or yellow feet. How boring! And so, armed with this zoological knowledge, I set out to paint my feathered pinions. Minions. I meant feathered minions.

The three archer ducks (yes, three, Rebel Mike was good to me) got basic green clothing because they are hunters for their village. The warriors I tried to tie together thematically with black greaves, bracers, and shoulder wraps, but I wanted them to have individual colors for the rest of their outfits. The leader was assigned yellow, which is sadly a pain in the ass to paint, but when paired with black is associated with suicide in Freudian psychology. So, he is wearing suicide colors and has a glowing Death rune on his shield (interesting thing about Gloranthan runes, the Death rune is a cross.)

So that is the story of how I became the proud owner of a 28mm duck warband for fantasy wargaming.

Wizardecember: The Hero

Ooleekoo
This gal (yes, I checked) was originally meant to be my "The Beast" entry for WizarDecember (based on my own brief of The Maiden, The Monster, The Hero, The Beast.) But as Punkrabbitt shaped up to be a villain rather than a hero, and "The Monster" entry was already filled with goblins, that only left "The Hero" role to be filled. She is the Wizard of my Glorantha-themed Morokanth Warband.

Ooleekoo is a Morokanth shaman, essentially a sentient tapir native to Glorantha specializing in spellcasting. The Morokanth herd semi-intelligent humans called gern (also called "herdmen) in the same way that humans herd cattle. While this practice puts the Morokanth in general at odds with humanity, Oleekoo and her Apprentice (no name yet, I haven't even started modelling her) are noble of spirit and are trying to recover dangerous artifacts from the city of Frostgrave to protect others, who might harm themselves trying to operate them. The two of them keep a group of trained gern to fight for them while they loot, er, explore the ruins.

This is how Ooleekoo started out. I know, right? Totally time for a makeover!

From a modelling perspective, this is one of the most complicated conversions I have undertaken in a long time. I have used techniques and materials that I haven't tapped into for possibly fifteen or twenty years. I started with a soft plastic tapir from a Safari Toob Rainforest set, and used a variety of materials to dress it up, including scrap fabric, electric wiring, actual model pieces from my bits box, aluminum tubing, modelling putty, and beads.

First, apply a little foundation...

The Morokanth have been described as being black or grey; I decided to go with grey because, honestly, I am getting a bit tired of black (the kids' Elves, the Dwarf Witch-Lord, Punkrabbitt.) I had a vision for the clothes (cloth? back drape? cape?) and accessories, and it turned out almost exactly how I had expected it to.

Ooleekoo, Morokanth Shaman

No black used at all, but some very dark brown.

A face only a mother could love.

I was not sure whether I should go with a 25mm base, which she barely fit on to but would allow more flexibility in the game, or a 40mm base, which was roomier but would be too wide to fit through any of the narrower areas in the terrain. In the end, I went with the 25mm base more because it is the same height as the rest of the bases I am using, while the 40mm base has enough of a height difference to be noticeable. Things like that really bug me.

These are the guys I am going to use for my gern herd.

Warlord games makes a nice unit of Celtic fanatics, suitably nude for gern. I may need to do some head swaps for the guys with helmets, the shields are separate so I can simply not use them, the swords can be replaced by clubs, and those spears will become sharpened sticks. I can also add some beards. When I get around to buying them, that is.

Well, that about wraps up WizarDecember for me. I am not sure what painting challenges will be issued next month that may be relevant to Frostgrave, but if they are, I accept the challenge!

Wednesday Night Musings V

Stupid Wind!
Really, all I wanted was to be able to Dullcote my WizarDecember Week 2 entry... 25 mile per hour winds,with gusts up to 35 mph since last Friday has kept me from being able to do so until this afternoon. I haven't had time to do any pictures yet, but since I finished my Week 3 entry today I expect to be doing pictures tomorrow.

Glorantha Again
Last week, I posted a bit about Glorantha and my Ducks and my plans and all that good jazz. As I was looking through my various Warbands, I noticed that first one I did last month would work well as a Gloranthan Warband. It really does have "Lunar" written all over it, doesn't it? Greek helmets, red shields, spears... and a perfect first opponent for my Ducks. Hmmm... now I need to actually finish my Ducks! Really, only a Wizard and Apprentice, but still...

Also, I have started conversion work on my Morokanth Wizard, for painting next week as my WizarDecember entry.

Scenery
How much scenery is too much? I have enough to cover my 2'x2' board twice over, and still have plenty left over to build. I've been a bit busy this week, so no new terrain this week. But here is what's in the cardstock queue...

Not only a LOT of cardstock projects, but arranged in an attractive pattern.

Best Wife Ever
A few years back, I painted up a semi-historical New Kingdom Egyptian warband statted for Song of Blades and Heroes as a gift to my wife, with the cunning plan that she would actually play the game with me. As it turned out, she wanted to put them on display with the rest of her Egyptian display items, and forbade them from being used for gaming. Since we have moved to our smaller home, these miniatures have been living in a box in the closet due to lack of shelf space. In any event, I recently pulled them out and asked her if she would like to try playing a game of Frostgrave with them. She quickly agreed, but did not want me to touch up any of the chipped paint nor re-base the one model that had been for D&D. I want her to have a little more in the way of Warband options than is currently finished, so I have a few more models to finish for her and we will be playing a game!

She and I also  recently did some re-arranging of furniture and re-organizing of the bedroom. In her infinite wisdom and general goodness, she designated a shelving unit to be solely for my hobby stuff. I don't have too many finished miniatures here at the house, so the top shelf is currently DBA and Frostgrave forces, the next two shelves are scenery (at least until I need the shelf space for finished miniatures,) and finally books on the bottom shelf. You can also see some of my model airplanes hanging from the ceiling (another one of her suggestions.)

Best. Wife. Ever.

Future Plans
I've got four Warbands for Frostgrave finished, four more in the works, and I am still rolling hot on wanting to get them done. But I know I am going to want a change of pace soon. I have been feeling the urge to start painting my DBA Persians again, and a local gaming group has invited me to play VSF Colonials with them. So, while this blog will remain Tumbhelada de Punkrabbitt, in January I will be posting occasional forays into other genres. You have been warned!

Wednesday Night Musings IV

Glorantha!

Back in the day, I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons because that is what my friends played. There were some other games out there, but we had all invested in AD&D so that is what we played. I was the only one looking at the other options, and that was more curiosity than any real urge to try a different system. There was this one game called Runequest, which had a weird fantasy setting called Glorantha, a Bronze Age world where elves were actually mobile plants and the closest thing to hobbits were anthropomorphic ducks. I was okay with cat people and centaurs in my fantasy games, but duck men? I passed on Runequest.

Not a duck to be taken seriously.

As it turns out, with 35 years of hindsight, I had passed on a good thing. I have lately looked back into Runequest, its various editions and improvements over the years, and oddly enough, at those very ducks that turned me off from it in the first place. See, the ducks seemed like Donald-Daffy-Howard analogues when I first looked at it. As it turned out, the ducks of Glorantha called themselves Durulz and were portrayed in the setting as grim, fatalistic warriors stuck living next to the Zombie Swamp, with a mystical connection to the Death God. These were ducks who wanted very badly to kick serious ass against the undead that regularly invaded their home and also the Lunar Empire who had offered bounties for duck kills.

Ducks that will kill your sorry ass and eat your innards for a snack.

The only problem being, by the time I realized that Runequest was a great set of rules, with a great setting in Glorantha, and that ducks are not what I had expected, my RPG days had passed me by. I pretty much only do tabletop miniature gaming these days (also computer gaming,  but that doesn't count for the purpose of this.) So, I was looking for some duck miniatures that I could build a small army from, and also a fantasy rule set that would allow the creation of a custom force so I could field those ducks.Rebel Miniatures produce a set of wicked looking ducks, not cartoony at all, and I was hooked. So I ordered some during their Spring Sale, did some amazing conversion work on them, and was set to play.

Slightly out of focus, but we can deal with that, right? Right?

After an abortive attempt at using my ducks for Brink Of Battle (my gaming group disintegrated before I ever had a chance to seriously play,) I boxed them up and took them to Storage. But recently, when I looked at Frostgrave, I realized two very important things: 1) my Durulz warband would be perfect for Frostgrave, and 2) Frostgrave is the perfect rules set to play some Glorantha skirmish games. So, my various plans for all sorts of Glorantha-themed Warbands has a chance to see the light of day once again!

An entire duck village... dedication, I tell you.